by Tracy Clark
“Your mom and I disagree on that,” I said, swallowing hard. It was difficult to use the present tense when speaking of Ultana.
“I still haven’t heard from her…”
“Hmm.”
Her brows cinched over her tiny, lightly freckled nose. “Is it a bad time?”
“No. No, sorry. It’s fine,” I said, wishing I were still tucked away in that burrow of a room, investigating. I wanted so badly to be able to talk to Saoirse about it. She might know something that could glue the fragments together, but I couldn’t fully trust her. Not yet. “You’re worried about your mom. Understandable after what’s gone on.”
She wearily rubbed the back of her neck. “People keep coming ’round looking for her. All they want is to talk about the deaths at Newgrange. My thick-headed brother could tell them more than I, as could you. But like my mother, he’s never home. Everyone else who was there is inconveniently dead. What am I supposed to tell the Arrazi? I wasn’t even there and my mother’s missing. What if something awful happened to her?”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” I said, wishing for the thousandth time that her body would never be found. “You said yourself that while she was very open about her views on being an Arrazi, that her business dealings weren’t as transparent. She’s likely in the middle of something very important, especially after what’s gone on, and as you and Lorcan are old enough, she’s trusting you to handle yourselves until she returns.”
Her head dropped forward like a prayer. “I have a bad feeling.”
My pulse was hammering so hard at my throat I was sure she’d see my obvious nervousness. I spun away from her and walked to the window where Cora and I once stood, looking out at the full moon and talking about her favorite author who curtseyed to it. I’d started doing that, in Cora’s honor. It felt like a secret pact between the moon and me.
“It’s no secret that your mother wants all Scintilla dead,” I found myself saying. “She said it at dinner the night I first met you.” I turned to look in Saoirse’s eyes, tried to focus my sortilege on her. She’d never see her mother again, and I had to know if I had a true ally. Maybe together we could influence the Arrazi her mother once controlled. My parents would help, as well. “I’m sorry, but I have to ask… If anything has happened, where will you and your brother stand?”
Her chin trembled. “Why are you asking me this?”
“Because I—I think it’s time to pick sides.”
Her blue-green eyes did not waver. She crossed the room, took my hand, and squeezed it. “On the side of right, of course, Finn. It’s bad enough we have to do what we have to do in order to survive. The Arrazi don’t need to make sport of it.” She waved her hand. “I can’t speak for my beast of a brother, though. He’s always bowed to our mum.”
“And you haven’t?” I asked, thinking of every time she jumped when Ultana said jump, thinking of how readily she killed Teruko that first time, and the submissive fear I saw in her eyes whenever her mother looked at her.
Saoirse knocked me with her elbow. “Hey. That’s rude.” Her eyes squinted apprehensively.
“Sorry.”
“My mom is frightening, yes.” Her smile faded and her eyes darkened. “You have no idea. But I’ve disagreed with her on many things. It was just easier to make her believe what she wanted to believe.”
It was hard to imagine anyone making Ultana believe something. Our hands remained clasped as we stared at each other. “I’m damn relieved to hear you say that,” I said. “After what I saw at Newgrange, after what I was forced to do—to have to kill my own uncle—my focus is and will always be the search for the truth about our races, why we were created the way we are.”
“What if there is no why?”
“You sound like my mother.”
Saoirse let go of my hand and raised it to my cheek. “You have a good heart, Finn.”
“I just want to end this. Can you help me put out a call to the Arrazi, schedule a gathering?”
A burst of scandalized laughter came from her. “What? Usurp my mother’s authority while she’s MIA and call a town-hall meeting of all Arrazi we know? You’ve lost it, Finn. She’ll kill me.”
I gritted my teeth and looked back out the window. I’d have to be patient and wait for her and Lorcan to realize that their mother was never coming home. Or…
“What’s to stop my family from calling a meeting?”
“Simple—you’d be an immediate enemy.”
My head jerked to look at her.
“I don’t make the rules, Finn. My mother does. She and whoever is powerful enough to give her orders. They threaten to kill all Arrazi who don’t fall in line, and you want to draw a new line? Just because you want to end it doesn’t mean you can end it. You’re powerless, Finn.” She almost sounded smug.
Burning anger ripped through my limbs. I turned away from Saoirse so she wouldn’t see the intensity of the fire. I needed her, with her Lennon name, to help me shift the tide. Otherwise, what was I doing in Ireland? I could be on my way to Chile with the long-lost cover to the Book of Kells. Maybe I should be, regardless. Maybe standing alongside the Scintilla was a better gamble than trying to change the fixed minds of their enemies.
Saoirse placed her hand on my back. “You okay?”
“Grand, yeah. Just a lot on my mind.”
“The girl.”
“Of course.”
“Do you know where she is? How she’s doing?”
Saoirse’s phone rang, and she crossed the room to get it from her bag. While I was busy thinking of ways to cut our visit short, she startled me with a gasp. Her hand covered her heart, and a stricken expression twisted her fine features. “Impossible,” she said into the phone. “There must be some mistake.” Then she looked to me and muttered, “My mother has been found. She’s…dead.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Giovanni
The ground shook beneath us so hard it seemed as though the stars might fall from the sky and drop around us like bombs. Another aftershock.
Some people scattered, some clutched the nearest person with their eyes squeezed shut. Will and I both leaped for Maya, a primal instinct to protect mother and child. She cowered beneath us, our arms wrapped over and around her like a human shield. As we clutched each other’s shoulders over Maya’s bowed head, Will’s fearful eyes met mine, but I saw something else in them, too—gratitude. He nodded. A silent pact made in a moment of fear. He would stand with me.
When the shaking stopped and everyone was accounted for and safe, Will and two other men pulled me aside. A black-haired burly man introduced himself as Ehsan. His hands were as rough as his voice, but he had kind eyes and a temperate aura. “You don’t have to tell me twice. I’ve known this day was coming. I nearly died in Kabul when a white-one attacked me at mosque. It was because of a nearby bomb detonating that I got away. Many died from the explosion, and yet I was spared. I’ll never understand…”
The other man, young, pale, as tall as me but wiry, had an aura that drew close around him and was as slivered as he was skinny. He pounded on his chest with one tattoo-covered hand. “I will fight with you,” he said. “My family is these people. I will fight anyone.”
His accent had a similar twang as Will’s but with a Latin overtone. His name was Adrian. I smiled at his bravado and was glad for it, but felt a pinch of apprehension. I hated to think of his boldness snuffed out by the ruthlessness I’d encountered in the likes of Clancy Mulcarr and Ultana Lennon. Did he have any idea, did any of them really comprehend what we were up against?
Will, Ehsan, and Adrian led me inside one of the octagonal huts.
Being inside was altogether different than I imagined. The huts were small and reminded me a little too much of the cavern in which Gráinne was killed. This was Ehsan’s home, I guessed, by the way he began rummaging through the small fridge on the kitchen floor. The fabric had been pulled back from a round section in the ceiling to expose the sky over two reclined chairs. I
stared up and marveled at the stars. The chairs were covered with shards of glass that had fallen from the shelf behind them.
“Here,” I said to Ehsan, stooping to pick up a framed photograph that had tumbled to the floor. It was a group photo of a bunch of browned young people, my age I’d guess, standing next to a river. Men wearing shalwar kameez and wide smiles. Ehsan shook the frame against his jeans, causing the broken glass to fall to the floor in tiny pieces. He blew on the photo. “Good times,” he said, looking at the picture with softness.
In the light of the room I got a better look at Adrian, though he was too skittish to look me in the eyes. He bounced from window to window as if the Arrazi were outside in the trees at that very moment, watching us, ready to strike. Bumps rose on my arms.
“Gang?” I asked, noting the various tattoos on his neck, arms, and hands.
“So?” His chin tilted up defiantly.
“Va bene. I don’t care,” I said with a smile, and I honestly didn’t. “You’ll be a scrapper.”
“Fighting with guns and knives is one thing; people sucking your soul out of you is another, man.” His aura shuddered with the memory.
“So you’ve seen it?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it. First started seein’ auras one night after me and my boys jumped a dude who stole from us.” He snickered. “Thought it was a bad trip, you know, laced drugs or something. But yo, this was a trip that never ended. After a few months, I spotted a girl in my town, silver like me, and we started hanging.” His eyes took on a faraway look.
“She introduced me to her grandmother, who was Scintilla, too. We were thick as thieves, the three of us, but I had to keep it from my boys. The girl and her grandmother, well, we didn’t run in the same circles. The three of us were out together one day, at the fair where her grandma made bank running an aura-reading booth. Two women came in together—a mother and a daughter—and killed her grandma, right there. Never even touched her. Scariest shit I ever seen, bro.”
“How’d you get away?” Ehsan asked.
Adrian shook his hands like he was flicking water off them—a nervous habit, I guessed. By doing that, he was dispelling more energy than he kept, and I wondered if he knew that. I wondered if that’s why his aura was so drawn in—that, and his barely masked insecurity.
“We’d been watching her do readings from behind the curtain. When Grams slumped over and one woman’s aura exploded in white, my friend and I ran out, but they turned on us. I choked the older one. The younger woman ran, but not without killing my girl first. I threw my knife at her,” he said, laying his hand on the hilt of a knife sheathed at his waist. His eyes turned prideful. “She made the mistake of looking back. Stuck her right in her eye.” We all absorbed that story, seeing the horror in our minds. “Brown,” he added.
“Pardon?”
“Her eyes were brown. Anyway, the cops, they thought I killed them all. There was a manhunt. I went to Mexico, and then someone helped me get here.”
“How’d you know about this place?” I asked.
“A dude in Mexico City, one of us, said he’d heard there was an old woman hiding people in South America. I wandered around Santiago for almost a year before someone spotted me.”
“You mean spotted your aura,” Ehsan said.
“Shut up, Ehsan. Literal bastard.”
“One thing I do know,” Adrian said, his voice lowering conspiratorially, “is that there’s a woman in Santiago who sells a helluva lot more than empanadas, if you catch me.”
“Weapons? Guns?”
For the first time since we’d begun talking, Adrian lit up. “Everything we need, man.”
I shook hands with Ehsan and Adrian and Will, and I went to the door. “Can we go see her?” I asked.
Everyone nodded, but it was Adrian who answered. “The roads are nasty ’cause of the quakes. We’ll give it a couple of days and go. Good?”
“Good,” Will said, looking at his watch. “I gotta run ’n’ check on Maya.”
Outside, I inhaled the fresh air. Will started to walk away, but I stopped him. “I know Maya disagrees with the idea of fighting. What made you decide to join me?” I asked.
“I figure if your first instinct was to protect my pregnant wife when the earthquake struck, then your genuine aim is to protect us all.” He kicked a rock with his boot. “My job is to protect her and my baby, even if she disagrees with my methods. My pop taught me never to back down from what I think is right, even in the face of opposition, especially then, I s’pose. I’ve gotta follow my gut on this.” He smiled. “Since when do women think we know what we’re doing, anyway?”
“Thank you, Will. Perhaps more will follow after your lead.”
“I do hope Maya comes around. She’s got a deadly sortilege. My woman can kill with a touch.” When I opened my mouth to ask about it, he added, “Don’t mention it to her, though. It’s a really sensitive topic.”
“Why?” My mind was already forming battle plans. If we could just get Maya close enough… “We could really use a power like that against the Arrazi.” I made a mental note to take stock of each Scintilla’s sortilege, excited about the idea that some of us might just be a weapon against the Arrazi. I’d certainly used mine to help when those men attacked from under Gráinne’s cottage. That was before the damned geis was put upon me. My fingers twitched with the desire to use my sortilege to throw Lorcan Lennon’s head against the nearest rock. Let him come for me now.
Will looked up into the star-strewn sky before his gaze landed on me. “Maya will never use her sortilege. Never. When she was a teenager, she accidentally killed her mother with it.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Cora
Again, I felt the presence of someone behind me as I ran toward St. Peter’s Basilica. This time, I heard footsteps padding along in cadence with mine. I abruptly stopped and spun around.
“No freaking way!” I yelled at a very hangdog, flush-faced Dun staring at me with eyes that morphed quickly from guilty to daring me to challenge him.
“I had to,” he said, tossing up his arms. “I tried to stay out of the way, just keep an eye on you, but you’re running like a damn bat out of hell and I thought someone was after you.” He approached until he stood before me, close enough for me to feel the aura I could recognize blindfolded. “I thought you were in trouble, girl.”
“I am in trouble! You should be in California, a million miles away from me. You should be safe. Not here. Not here with me. I came alone because I can’t watch anyone else die, don’t you get that? You have no idea what—”
Dun gripped my shoulders and pulled me into a tight hug. “Shut up.”
I breathed him in, reveled in his hug. Surrendered. “Shutting up.” After I allowed myself a moment to soak up the love and surprising relief at seeing my best friend, I told Dun why I was running. “We have to get to St. Peter’s. There’s a man there, a professor who guided me through the Basilica today. I have to show him a picture of something I just found. Come on!” I dragged his hand, and we ran toward St. Peter’s Square and then the entrance gates.
“What’d you find that you’re in such a big-ass hurry to show this professor?”
Our feet plodded on the sidewalk. “I found what this key opens.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I think Jesus was a Scintilla.”
His steps stuttered, but we kept running. His response was a gasped, “Holy. Shit.”
“Right?” Pigeons took flight as we crashed through their cliques and sprinted through the square. All senses were on high alert. My brain registered the streaked clouds behind the dome, the laughter of children, the splash of the fountains, the din of conversations in many languages, and the anguished screams of panic.
Panic?
“What the…?” Dun said, grabbing my arm. I looked to where he was looking, at the pack of schoolchildren I’d seen earlier. Two had fallen to the ground in messy tangles of arms and legs. Their hands were still clasped, but the
ir auras were as colorless as the majestic statues that looked down on them from the colonnade.
Their lights were out.
The adults with them were kneeling down, frantically feeling their necks for pulses, crying out.
I ran toward them and watched in horror as two more fell, and another pair after that. The teachers were screaming for someone to call an ambulance, that the children had no pulses, no life. The other children were backing away or frozen in terror at the open but sightless eyes of their classmates. Rather than rush forward to help, many adults backed away as well.
The kids had dropped dead.
“No!” Not the children. Not those innocent, beautiful kids. I scanned the crowd for white auras but saw none at all. An Arrazi hadn’t done this.
The crowd was a swirling mass of outcry and horror and people dropped to their knees in droves to pray. Dun shouted my name as I left his side, ran across the cobblestones, and slid down next to the nearest child.
A boy, blue-black hair as curled as a cherub’s. Lashes just as dark as his hair. I touched his pale skin below his eyes. He had one freckle on his lower lip. The sticker nametag on his shirt said “Caleb Matan.” “Caleb,” I cried, slipping my hand under his collar, feeling the cool dampness of kid sweat against my palm and curls brushing my wrist. “Sweetie?”
There was no response to his name, or any responses at all from the small bodies lying around me. “Why?” I cried. All of the drop-dead deaths were a tragedy, but these children, these beautiful beings… Why was this happening? My soul cracked under the heavy unfairness of it.
I bent over Caleb, stared into his sweet, innocent face, and did the only resuscitation I could think to do. I poured myself over him. I marshaled every bit of love I had for my father, my mother, Mari, Dun, Finn, and Giovanni. Panoramic visions of the beauty of the earth scrolled through my mind: sunsets, mountains, sprays of wildflowers, water in all its incarnations. I was transported to another place, as though my body were just a small vessel for the vastness that was the universe, that was the vastness of me, love, pouring through it.