Illuminate

by Tracy Clark

  “No. But I won’t stop trying.”

  “Thank you, Finn. I’m worried.”

  “You’re welcome.” His voice softened. I felt like he was whispering in my ear. I could feel the memory of his breath on my skin. “Every time I talk to you I’m afraid—”

  “It’ll be the last time.”

  “Aye. You must know that I love you. No matter what.”

  My ragged breathing made my words rickety and weak. “‘No matter what’ is something people say before they know what.”

  “I’ll poke around and see if I can verify if our theory is right. What we do with that theory is another mystery.”

  “Someone is helping us,” I said, knowing Edmund was listening intently. “His name is Edmund Nustber.”

  “The author?” Finn’s voice was surprised, but I was just as surprised that he immediately knew the name.

  “The very one.”

  “I hope he’s trustworthy.”

  “Well, if he’s not, you know his name.”

  I hung up.

  “Who was that?” Edmund asked.

  “An Arrazi.”

  I hoped Edmund understood the implied threat. If he hurt me, if he threw me to the wolves, there was one Arrazi on this planet who I knew would eat his soul for it.

  Familiar conflicted feelings came like a tidal wave. Love for Finn. Abhorrence for what he was, though I knew that wasn’t his fault. Still, I hated what he’d done. I couldn’t imagine ever truly believing he didn’t have a choice but to kill Mari. Whether it was the most merciful thing to do, or the most evil, I wasn’t able to decide. I only knew that the reason my heart felt so fractured was that he was the first boy I’d given my heart to before I took it back so I could move on. Giovanni also had a piece. I loved his mind and his loyalty but suspected he was loyal to himself above all. Multiple fragments of my heart had dissolved like ice in red wine with the deaths of my father, mother, and Mari. The only time that pain went away was when I gave my light to those children.

  I’d felt whole in those moments in a way I never had before.

  Each one of us was a disaster in crumpled clothing, yawning and drifting into moody silences as we drove through the Italian countryside. We needed somewhere to stop for the night. A sign on the side of the road said we were in Chianti, and we soon found an old cluster of farmhouses from as far back as 1497 turned hotel. Edmund went in to reserve a room while we waited. A bed. A bed and a shower. My needs were pretty basic at that point. Survival came down to what was next. Immediate needs.

  Luckily, procuring a room turned out to be no problem. He drove around one of the old stone buildings and parked in front of our door. We entered as fast as we could and fell into beds. I could hear Edmund on his laptop, typing away, but even that faded to nothing as I slipped under.

  Sounds of near-rabid television newscasters woke me in the morning. Edmund and Dun were watching the news on the hotel’s TV.

  Couldn’t reality wait?

  I rolled over and pulled the pillow over my head.

  “Hey, sleeping beauty.” I glanced out the window. The sun was definitely screaming midmorning. Edmund stood in my doorway. “I have a plan in place. It’s not foolproof, but it’s the best I’ve got. Come on out here so we can talk about it.”

  I scratched my nails through my tangled hair and brushed my teeth, then went to the main room and sat on an ottoman, putting my back to the TV and the news that proclaimed to the world that I’d worked a miracle. Astutely, Dun turned off the volume, but his eyes kept roving back to the coverage.

  Edmund handed me a cup of bitter coffee. “My man, Rodney, is on crew for a movie being shot on location in Venice right now. They are due to fly to Costa Rica. He thinks he can help us get on one of the chartered private jets. Cora, you’ll have to act as flight crew. Dun, whip that long hair in a ponytail and act like film crew. Because Cora has already been identified by name—” I gasped but Dun just raised his brows and confirmed with a slow nod. “I will use my production company to pay off a female crew member to use her ID under the auspices that she’s a confidential source for a story I’m doing. Cora will have to impersonate her and hope we get to Costa Rica, and from there, south to Chile, without anyone recognizing her or worse, organizing a media ambush when we land.

  It sucked, but it was better odds than any plan I could have devised. “I was about to dye my hair blond or pay Italian godfathers to get me fake papers. I like your plan better,” I told him. “So tell me without the infomercial voice. What’s the news saying? What’s going on out there?”

  Edmund and Dun cast sideways glances at each other. “What?” I asked.

  Dun propped his feet on my lap. “Okay, like, imagine if Jesus, Jimmy Hoffa, Elvis, Amelia Earhart, and JFK announced they were actually alive and having a dinner party for the press to answer all their questions—”

  “All right, all right,” I said, closing my eyes as if that would turn off my ears. “I get it.”

  “That’s how bad they want you,” Edmund said. His face blushed scarlet, as did his aura. “Holy shit, the ratings I’m going to have. I will be forever thankful to you, Cora.”

  “I’ll take your thanks. And seventy percent of all advertising, sponsors, and distribution monies received.”

  Dun grinned at me.

  “If I manage to live through this,” I said, all business, “I’m not going to end up with nothing while you traipse off into super-stardom off my story.”

  “You’re changing our deal,” Edmund pouted. “You have no idea the money that’s exchanging hands just to pull this off. Even Rod is being paid off.”

  “No. I’m not changing the deal. It’s the fine print,” I said with a smile and stood to go to the shower. “And I want it in writing.” What was he going to say? No? Edmund “Nutball” as my stepmom, Janelle, used to call him, was salivating to get me on camera. His life was about to be made even if my life was over.

  “This is totally unfair!” he yelled at my back.

  “We need each other, Eddie. This is business.”

  “Only my brother calls me Eddie!” he yelled as I shut the bathroom door.

  I actually thought of cutting my hair as I looked at myself in the mirror. I was unrecognizable to myself anyway. A shadow girl. I hoped the attendant on the private jet wasn’t some 4’1” blonde. I saw Mari in my mind and said to my reflection, “She’d better have dark hair and a fully realized butt.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Finn

  Cora’s second call came while I was in my room putting another shirt over my T-shirt and hoping the chill I felt was from the rain rather than hunger. I’d know soon enough if the cold on the surface of my skin burrowed underneath to my blood and then wormed into a vague feeling of doom, followed by pure need. It was coming. My last kill was the man at Newgrange.

  Her call invigorated me. She saw the same thing I did when she looked at the triangles, and she hadn’t even seen the Book of Kells cover and pages with the triple spiral and the hexagram. She had to touch the remnant. How would I possibly get it to her? I didn’t want to ship it and risk it being stolen or lost. I couldn’t fathom carrying it through security at the airport in Ireland. It was the equivalent of an American trying to fly out of New York concealing the stolen Declaration of Independence!

  Saoirse texted me and asked me to drive her car back and have lunch at her house, promising that she’d make sure I made it home. She lured me with an “idea” she wanted to discuss. I was eager to hear it but sensed I was stepping into muddy territory.

  I thought of our good-bye yesterday. Her lips against my ear had been unsettling, but her whispered words lit a small victory fire within me. It was the promise of everything I was after. It could get very complicated if she wanted more than my friendship. The kiss in her house the day of her first kill told me how she really felt despite her declarations when we first met that she wanted nothing to do with me romantically. She’d been resisting her mother’s machin
ations to get us together because she hadn’t wanted to turn. I had to admit the possibility that her feelings for me might have instigated her transformation.

  Her take on the tarot card reading was entirely different than mine, but that could work to my advantage. I didn’t want to deceive her or use her. We’d formed an exploratory friendship and it was that friendship I hoped would make us great allies.

  The cards couldn’t have meant Saoirse and I, though I had to admit that with her mother’s death came a new opportunity to work together. But Cora and I hit on something with the triangles. The Two of Cups had more meaning to me since discovering the ancient shatkona within the Book of Kells pages. It symbolized the joining of opposites and made me surer than ever that Cora and I were those opposites.

  For the first time in weeks, I experienced a hope so foreign it felt forbidden. Hope was a tightrope, and I was teetering in the middle. No going back, only forward, unable to see what waited for me on the other side. Surely, my sins could not be forgiven so that Cora could ever love me again. The most I could hope for was that maybe, like the picture of the tarot card, we’d pour our opposite realities together and make a new reality. Together, we’d find a way to end this and bring peace.

  Peace between Arrazi and Scintilla was a delicate golden chain. Whether Saoirse wanted to be a vital link was up to her.

  If the two races were united, could we stop the person directing the Arrazi toward genocide? In our hasty conversations, I’d neglected to ask Cora what she’d found out in Rome, if anything. I hoped her trip yielded more than pulling to herself the hugest spotlight in recent news history. Even a tornado the size of Nevada, which dragged its nail across the southwest hours ago and killed hundreds, couldn’t unseat the miracle she’d performed. The upsurge in natural disasters, the increasing mysterious deaths, and now Cora’s “resurrection” of those children was adding fuel to the apocalyptic fire.

  Her home in Santa Cruz had a legion of news crews around it. I wondered how Cora’s stepmother, Janelle, was faring. It was only a matter of time before they discovered who Dun was and stalked his family, too. Jaysus, I realized with a start, it was only a matter of time before they traced the family tree and found Mami Tulke.

  My hope was a shrinking balloon when I let myself wonder how the world would respond to knowing the truth about the different races of man. Humans didn’t seem to excel at different. We categorized, labeled, and tribalized: us and them, the other.

  “Other” was too often another name for “enemy.”

  It was the Arrazi lawyer who opened the door to the Lennon home.

  “Makenzie,” she said, holding out her hand, though I wasn’t sure if that was her first name or her last. We shook, and she let me inside.

  Saoirse met us in the hall, wearing more formal clothes than I’d seen on her before. “Makenzie is here to reset the security pads for my mother’s office so I can familiarize myself with, well, with everything.” Her shoulders slumped faintly. “It’s a lot to take in.”

  I put my hand on her arm. “I reckon it is. I’m sorry.”

  “Lorcan still hasn’t come home,” she said, turning and leading us toward the dining room where lunch was already set out. Makenzie disappeared to another room. “I don’t know if he’ll ever accept our mother’s decision.”

  “So it surprised him?” I asked, waiting for Saoirse to sit before I did. If Lorcan was so put out, I worried that he’d rebel against any change for good that Saoirse might attempt.

  “It shouldn’t have. My mother was a consummate feminist.”

  “Oh? Like how she tried to arrange your romantic life for you rather than letting you choose for yourself?” I teased.

  Saoirse gave a smirk full of challenge. “You were the pawn on that move. Not me.” She picked up her fork and pushed food around but didn’t take a bite. “My mother was patently against patriarchal dominance in society. I assume that to have a man—even her own son—take over her affairs went against her beliefs. Wonder if she’d have made the same decision if she knew that I didn’t agree with her politics.” Waving one hand dismissively in the air, she added, “Well, it’s mine now to do with what I will.”

  Her statement fed my avidity for an Arrazi cease-fire. The Lorcan name and the influence that came with it would be a major coup. “What will you do with it?” I asked with an excited but tremulous snag to my voice.

  “Run a benevolent empire, of course.” Her face broke into a sly smile, and she tilted her head coyly. “I told you yesterday, Finn, my choice would be to do things differently than my mother. Now I have the chance to do something really important,” she said, her voice rising. “To be important.” I had no idea Saoirse had ambition in her but understood it when she added, “I grew up feeling insignificant in my mother’s world and consequently my own life.”

  “Your mother took up a lot of room.”

  “She did, yes.” There was a pause that was heavy with the words, “not any more,” but I couldn’t be sure if it was just I who was thinking it. “I have an idea that kept me up all last night, and you’re a vital part of it. You’re the only Arrazi I know who is connected with any Scintilla. You’re a link between us and them.”

  Mention of my connection with Scintilla sat wrong with me. I gritted my teeth. “I don’t know where they are.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that girl all over every news outlet in the world isn’t a Scintilla? The Scintilla? Or do we believe in angels now?”

  I returned her cunning smile. “I already believe in angels—and demons.”

  “My mother was in charge of Xepa,” she continued. “What I don’t know, yet, is who my mother took orders from. It has been extremely quiet since her death. No more visitors. No calls. Little to go on. But once I have access to everything, I will find out who we’re up against and why we need to be following anyone’s orders. We’re Arrazi, after all.”

  That messed with my mind. It sounded a little too much like something Clancy or Ultana would say. “That first night at dinner with my family, your mother said the Arrazi were promised ‘a seat at the table.’ I assume that someone dangled a shite-ton of power, something huge, or she wouldn’t have threatened fellow Arrazi lives for it.”

  “She’s gone now.” Impatience flared in her words. She looked down and softened. “We can do everything our way. I can make the Arrazi believe that I wield the same power my mother did. I don’t think it’s wise to do too abrupt of an about-face. At first, we’ll have to act like nothing’s changed so they don’t turn from us. It’ll be an uphill battle anyway, because I’m so young and a woman and the world is still filled with Neanderthals. My hope is that, over time, if they followed my mother into war, perhaps they’ll follow us into peace.”

  “We don’t have time.”

  “We have position. Think of it, Finn… The Scintilla and the Arrazi can help each other. We can work to convince the Arrazi that it would be folly to let the Scintilla die out. And I’ve thought of a way to negate any threat we might face. My idea is that if we meet peaceably with the remaining Scintilla, and the Scintilla let us take from them—”

  My fist hit the table. “Absolutely not!”

  “Hear me out,” she urged, leaning forward with sincerity emanating from her eyes. “My mother was already a very powerful woman. Someone with a scary amount of influence motivated her to do what she did. You? Me? The ragtag bunch of Arrazi around here have nothing, are nothing against influence like that. We have to be able to offer them something better.”

  “We’re killers,” I said.

  “They knew that, and yet, according to my mother, they still threatened us.”

  “Maybe no one is threatening us. What if your mother was acting alone? What if there is no one holding a knife to our throats?” I cringed for mentioning a knife in light of her mother’s death. “She could have been lying to create fear and make us do what she wanted.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “If I am, what if we
refuse to do their dirty work? What can they possibly do to us? We’ll turn the tables on them, expose them. Or kill them,” I said, knowing I’d not hesitate if it would eliminate the threat to Cora.

  “Expose them? C’mon. Look at what’s happening to that poor girl—and she saved lives! Imagine what people will do if they expose us. Killers. Murderers. Soul stealers. They’ve got their angel. How will the world see us? The biggest threat against the Arrazi is the truth, and if there’s someone out there who knows the truth, then they are a threat to us.”

  Rain pattered against the windows as we lost ourselves in braided thoughts. I couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d just said. She just handed me the bullet against the Arrazi. How could I expose us?

  “We need sortileges. We need to be as strong as we can be and also as unpredictable. We need our enemies to be terrified of our powers and how we might use them. It’s a good idea. You know it is,” she said.

  I looked deep into her eyes, using the full strength of my own sortilege on her. I had nothing else up my sleeve but the hope that Saoirse and I could yank the Arrazi collar and pull them off the Scintilla’s throats. “Saoirse, can I trust you?”

  Her hand reached across the table and rested softly atop mine. “Trust me. Believe what I say.”

  I felt myself soften, and strangely, I was suddenly pondering her idea. If the Arrazi all had sortileges, we would be more formidable to anyone who tried to control us. Our inherent ability was a weapon. But supernatural abilities—that was another level of lethal. There was a war inside of me: remove the threat over the Arrazi heads while not posing a threat to Cora. “We’re already dangerous,” I murmured, desperate for any solution that wouldn’t endanger Cora further.

  Saoirse squeezed my hand. “Not. Dangerous. Enough.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Giovanni

  The men and Maya all gawked at me after I told them who the girl was on the T-shirts.