by Tracy Clark
Glad for the privacy, I used my phone to scroll through media newsfeeds. To add to my worries, I saw that Chile had suffered a major earthquake and a series of devastating aftershocks. All I could do was hope that Cora’s grandmother was unaffected. What was happening to the world? Weather was freaky. Disasters were rampant. It felt like the world was crumbling around my ears.
The news of the quake was eclipsed by the media storm surrounding the “Miracle at the Vatican!” My body iced over; worry and dread were a thick elixir pushing their way through my veins. The connection had already been made between the Dublin Airport video and the Vatican videos, and a tearful family appeared on television and wanted to know why Cora didn’t save their loved ones who’d died at her feet in Dublin. I wanted to chuck my phone at the wall when the word “lawsuit” was mentioned. People could be such opportunistic arses.
Even those who now crammed St. Peter’s Square were hoping to benefit by their proximity to the miracle, like if they stood downwind of one, holiness would stick to their skin. Bounty hunters were offering their services in the “hunt” for the new savior. Churches around the globe were reporting record numbers at impromptu services and record contributions to the church in the mere hours since.
Cora’s offering of herself to those children was the best thing that happened to the business of religion.
She’d tithed her soul, and the world wanted more.
Did the church, to which Ultana pointed, and whose garish robes Cora had trampled, know what she was? I could only pray not. Ironic that we’d pray to the same God for different outcomes, as if God cared a whit who won football games and got certain jobs, or which breed of human annihilated another. Humans had been annihilating each other since we could grunt.
Segue from grunt; Lorcan burst through the door, made a barely audible sound as he passed, and shoved his way outside. It wasn’t grief I saw on his face. He was pissed off. Saoirse and the woman with the briefcase followed his exit a few minutes later. The woman whispered something in Saoirse’s ear before leaving.
“Are you okay?” I asked, rising to stand. “Lorcan looked sorta distraught when he left.”
“He’s distraught, but not for the obvious reason. He’s fit to be tied because our mother bucked tradition in a way he can’t stomach.” Saoirse made eyes indicating that was nothing new, then said, “My mother left control of everything to me.”
Everything.
Without further explanation, Saoirse started for the door. It begged so many questions, but asking them would be insensitive and intrusive. She let me drive her home, saying I could use her car to go home, and we’d figure out the logistics of getting it back to her tomorrow. The radio blasted nothing but the news in Rome, and I could feel the weight of both our unasked questions in the air between us.
“Thank you for your friendship today,” Saoirse said when we arrived at her house. She leaned in and gave my cheek a peck. Her body inclined against my arm, and her mouth lingered over my skin as she whispered, “I intend to do things differently than my mother did.” Hope lit in me that my need for an Arrazi ally might be realized. “It’s a new era. I hope that answers your earlier question, Finn. The Two of Cups,” she said against my cheek, reminding me of the tarot reading she once gave me and the card that spoke of union, before pulling my chin to face her. “I think that card was about us. I think it was about this moment.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Giovanni
No war should commence without an accounting of the assets. With the mention of Maya’s sortilege to kill with a touch, it was all I could think about aside from the ever-present concern about Cora. Right away, I’d compile a list of everyone in the village and their abilities. Gráinne had mentioned a clairvoyant in her journal. That could obviously come in handy. Was the woman still around after seventeen years? I couldn’t wait to find out what the people here were capable of.
I rolled up and put my feet to the floor, expecting the cold linoleum, but instead I felt a lump of a girl under my toes. Claire had apparently crept into my room during the night and decided to camp out on the floor next to my bed. The tremors had her very nervous, and more than once she’d asked to return to Ireland where the ground didn’t shake and the air didn’t buzz.
We hadn’t heard from Cora in a couple of days. This had both Mami Tulke and me on edge. She called on her way from Florence to Rome. The impression was that it was a less than revelatory trip so far.
Mami Tulke served breakfast in a sullen mood, barely speaking with me. Only Claire could produce a smile from her. Her chatter fluctuated between eerily intelligent savant to girlish ramblings about how she would like to decorate her room in “bohemian colors” and twinkle lights like the ones in the garden at Dr. M’s.
Only then did her blue eyes turn sad and her aura wilted.
Lured with promises of learning Qigong—which was my way of introducing Claire to the skill of controlling her energy—Claire, Mami Tulke, and I set out to Rancho Estrella. Mami Tulke said she had ranch business to attend to, and we walked with her to the “main lobby,” which was just a large building with a front desk and seating area and a big, spa-like vat of cucumber water and soft, chiming music playing. “Run along,” Mami Tulke said. “They’ll be starting soon.”
Claire skipped ahead, her blond curls bouncing in the sunlight. Mami Tulke told me to contact someone named Monica about getting Claire back into her schooling. I hadn’t even thought of that, my own life being devoid of traditional education. My cheeks flushed at having to be told what a parent should do. Here I was, in charge of a little human, and I was clueless. A virgin. Having a child without the bonus of sex was a complete shaft. Not the way it’s supposed to go.
Claire’s incredible IQ meant that she’d likely learn with much older children than herself. Though, I’d only seen the teenage twins so far, Mami Tulke told me there were about ten Scintilla children on the grounds.
It only took sideways glances from a couple of the adults on the grass field where they practiced their martial arts to remind me that the kids were likely to be hard on Claire. Kids were brutal. Everyone was going to have to get over the subtle undercurrent of bias. So she had really strange eyes…so she was unschooled in how to control her reaching energy…those things didn’t make her scary—just different.
I told Claire to go ahead and practice with the group. I intended to hang back and watch, curious to see if there was a collective change in their energy since that was their intention in practicing the ancient art. Their movements were slow, rhythmic, and I had to admit that with each passing moment, the more they worked together in unison, the larger the field of silver grew around them and above them until finally their auras all joined in a bubble of intense energy that I could see and feel from the sidelines.
Claire’s was the only rainbow-hued aura on the field. From what Mami Tulke told me, the most fundamental difference between Scintilla and Arrazi was that we were born seeing auras while they can only feel them, sense them. Scintilla are born with our silver auras, and it’s only our sortilege that comes when we’re older. Cora told me on the day we met that she remembered seeing auras as a child. Since Claire never spoke about seeing colors and since the only silver that showed in her aura were quick flashes, it was unlikely she was Scintilla, despite my hope. That must have been why Dr. M called her—his experiment—his “great failure.” I wondered what he was really trying to achieve.
The bubble of silver from the people rippled toward me, hitting me in the chest. My own aura surged like I had been plugged in. The few times in my life I’d allowed myself to open up to a performance—usually singing and always in a crowd—I found that emotion became so intense that tears would easily come. It unnerved me to the point that I stopped going to concerts until I learned to better ground myself and not let the crowd’s energy in. This swelling of Scintilla energy was a million times more potent and felt just like—love.
The group stopped moving, and Clair
e suddenly flopped to the grass like a snow angel. I ran to her, my heart careening with both good energy and fear that something was wrong. But when I reached her, her arms were outstretched, her eyes were closed, and her face tilted up to the sun and the cloud of energy. “It just feels so good.” She sighed.
“I know it does, sweetheart,” I said, looking down on her. “I’m going to start teaching you to better feel the energy around you and to control your own.” I kept my voice light, made it sound gamelike and fun, but it was essential she learn. Regular humans were capable of being aware of energy. Claire was already aware of it, so much so that she was currently ecstatically bathing in it. It was subtle or nonexistent only to those who sleepwalked through their lives.
“Yes, please,” Claire squealed, sitting upright. “Can we start now?”
I laughed and pulled her up by her hand. “How about we let this good burst of energy fade so you’ll be as close to normal as possible, okay? Like a baseline.”
“Okay,” she said with a down-note of disappointment. I squeezed her hand, and we walked to a bench in the shade under the portico of the large common room.
“I bet they’d love a helper in the kitchen,” I said to Claire. “Everyone’s supposed to lend a hand around here.”
“How are you lending a hand?” she asked.
“I’m going to meet with people and ask them if they have any special abilities.”
“Like how you can move things?” she asked, her eerie eyes lighting up.
“Exactly like that,” I said, floating a leaf up in front of her to land on her head.
Claire giggled and skipped off toward the kitchen, and I pulled out a pen and paper, ready to chronicle the abilities of the people at the ranch. I figured going door to door was too forceful, but if it came to that, I would. No ability was inconsequential, and if we were smart, we’d devise a plan of defense that took advantage of every supernatural ability in the compound.
After two hours I’d compiled quite a list. The sortileges were as varied as the countries from which the people came:
Maya – kill by touch
Ehsan – shadow manipulation
Will – telekinesis
Sydney – morph to look like someone she’s met
Cooper – elemental (water)
Gavin – elemental (fire)
Samantha – telepathic cozening
Sierra – shape-shifting “mimicry”
Sage – telekinesis
Hannah – the power to control or morph an aura
Suey — resident computer expert/ sortilege: telepathy
When more people passed me by than stopped, I stood to leave and stuffed the notepad in my pocket.
“Buon pomeriggio.” The greeting of “good afternoon” in my home language was enough to halt me and besides, the rotund man in suspenders was already sitting and looking up at me expectantly.
“Come sta?” I asked, but he waved me off.
“English is fine. When you move around as much as I have, you learn many tongues.”
“How did you know I am Italian?” I asked, sitting across from him. Most people took my fair looks for the Nordic in my lineage, as my mother was Danish, though Cora insisted my Italian accent was fairly pronounced.
“Come, how many of us are there? The world is a small place for our band of misfits, and you look very much like your father,” he said.
Nothing could have prepared me for that statement or for the rush of blood to my face when he said it. My family was a deserted island. My family was a bomb that went off and nobody noticed. “You—you knew my parents?”
“Si, I often wondered what happened. The rumors were gruesome. The truth worse, I’m afraid. You and your parents were assumed dead these many years. How did you escape? Where are they now?”
I was utterly confused. Dumbfounded to the point of mute. “I—they—I wasn’t taken. They hid me, and I’ve been alone.” Tears choked me. How readily my heart wrung out when someone who actually knew my family sat himself across from me. I cleared my throat, looked anywhere but at his penetrating eyes.
“Extraordinary,” he said, nodding at a distant memory that shone in his eyes. “I warned them, you know? I am a seer. I told them I saw two men and white, all white, and them falling to the ground.”
“Yes,” I whispered, seeing the scene fresh in my mind. The only person I’d ever revealed the story to was Cora until I told the abbreviated version to Will and Maya, and here this man knew. He’d warned them. He’d warned them and what did they do about it? “How much time did they have?”
The man leaned back in his chair and rested his arms on his ample belly. “Does it matter, son?”
“Hell yes, it matters! Why didn’t they prepare?” My hand stung from slapping it on the table. Passersby stopped and stared. “Why didn’t they ru—” I snapped my mouth shut. How could I even ask that when I was asking these people not to run? One side of the man’s lip curved up in a half smile, and I knew he was thinking the same thing. I felt tricked.
He just chewed on the inside of his lip and studied me before answering. “I can see why you’re so motivated to be ready. You were young, caught off guard. You think you might have done differently, changed things?”
My throat tightened with emotion.
“Warnings are what you’re giving these people, and you don’t have the gift of sight, do you, boy? Yet you see how you’re disregarded? Dismissed?” A tinge of anger flooded his voice. “Lead the horses to water… I know these feelings well.”
Stunned, stinging, I tried to wall myself off, focus on the task at hand. “So, you’re clairvoyant?”
“Yes. But sometimes things don’t go exactly as I see them. You were supposed to die, yet you did not. Many will die here.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “I see it.”
Claire ran up and threw herself on my lap. The man, whose name I still didn’t know, scrunched his eyes at her. His chest lifted and fell with a heavy sigh. His expression was troubled in a way that made me wonder if he was seeing something right then.
“You could be wrong again,” I said, hearing the truculent tone in my voice.
“Every sortilege has its weak spot. Anything can happen.” With effort, he hefted himself from his seat and shuffled a few steps before turning to look at me again. “After all, you’re alive when you should not be.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Cora
“I’m already a target,” I told Edmund as he jerked the steering wheel to the side and careened around another corner, barely missing a street lamp.
“If they bust out helicopters, we’re screwed,” Dun said from the back.
That comment caused both Edmund and me to simultaneously peer up through the windshield at the sky. The streaks of clouds had morphed from white to deep rose with the setting sun. None of us were sure where to go. We seemed to have lost the trail of pursuers, but for how long? How many traps were being set? I had the sensation of being a Godzilla-like giant, plodding over the earth and unable to hide or rest because everyone’s eyes were on me. I was too big. The more I relived the last hour, the more I knew Edmund Nustber was right; I had to stay off every grid known to man ’cause my face was about to become fully recognizable.
I turned on the radio to see if the news was out but soon realized that finding an English-speaking radio station was a challenge. “You can use my phone to check the major news sites,” Edmund said, fishing it out of his pocket. “Bet you a tank of gas that you’re already on there. You’ll be bigger news than that massive earthquake in Chile.”
“What?” I shrieked. “How bad was it? Where?” That had to be why I couldn’t get through on the phone. I tried again and got the same busy signal. My stomach was sick with nerves.
Edmund eyed me curiously. “Near Santiago, I think. A ton of structural damage, and the death toll is nearing eighteen hundred. It was bad.”
“How am I ever going to get out of this country?” I said, thinking of Chile and the peo
ple I loved. I looked back at Dun. “I should be there with them.”
Edmund loosened his tie with a tug. “I have some thoughts on getting you hidden, but I have conditions, too.”
“Dude…” Dun’s voice was a warning.
“Look, this is what I do. This is what I’m about—chasing down the supernatural and separating wheat from chaff, so to speak. You recognized me,” he said, motioning to me, “so you know who I am. There’s obviously something supernatural about what occurred back there, and you said I wouldn’t believe you if you told me. Try me. I have some contacts, and if we act fast and keep out of sight, I think I can get you away from here until you’re ready.”
“Ready for what?” I asked. I needed help, obviously, but I wasn’t sure what he wanted from me or supposed I was ready for. Who could ever be ready for the things that had happened to me since I started seeing auras?
“Ready to tell the truth about who or what you are. Give me an exclusive interview.”
Dun actually laughed. “I don’t know whether you are the most opportunistic bastard ever or—”
“Your new best friend?” Edmund said. “I know an opportunity when I see one, yes. That doesn’t make me a bastard. I consider myself a seeker of truth, and I’m not afraid of what others might see as terrifying. I imagine that you terrify some select people, Cora Sandoval. You’re a threat to the system.”
It made sense. Why else would the Scintilla be a target if they weren’t a threat? My throat tightened so that my words came out low and angry. “I terrify them enough to hunt me down and kill me—and everyone like me.”
Edmund’s eyes rounded. “There’s more like you?”