by Tracy Clark
“And you found nothing.”
It wasn’t a question in her voice but a surety. “Right. The place was completely cleaned out. It had to have been done very recently.”
“Yes. I had the place cleaned yesterday. For obvious reasons. I had sensitive information there.”
“You did?”
She smiled. “You know what I mean. My mother’s sensitive information is now mine to contain. I had no idea that’s what they were researching. If they were close,”—her eyes lit with excitement—“it could change our lives. I’ll look at the records and let you know what I find.”
Saoirse flattered me with appraising eyes. “Speaking of killing, you look strong.”
Her comment reminded me of Cora’s when we ran into each other at the masked ball in the crypt. It was slightly accusatory, but the truth was, Saoirse looked very well, also. “Yes, well, the opportunity presented itself.”
“For me, as well. I think it’s better,” she said with a shy smile. “I’d rather we not think of each other that way.”
There was a message in her tone that I couldn’t be sure I was reading right. “How would you like us to think of each other?” I asked it because of her lingering stares, the way she touched her lips when looking at mine, and in the lean of her body when I was close.
Time had come to admit that Saoirse Lennon was “after me.”
Her mother would be so pleased.
“Finn, I spent my life obeying my mother’s dominating will.” Saoirse’s eyes darkened as she looked at me, or rather, through me at her memories. “You have no idea how dominating,” she said through a tightened jaw. Her eyes flicked back to mine. “She used to make us kill things, small things, animals and such, when we were children. Can you imagine? She wanted to harden us to what we’d become.”
I shuddered. “Bloody hell.”
“She used to tie us to chairs and plant herself against a wall and try, over and over, to be able to take from us without blowback. It never worked, but we felt it, physically and emotionally. It hurts to be attacked by your own mother.”
“How do you feel about her death?” I tentatively asked, hoping to get an explanation for my mother’s warning that Saoirse felt responsible for Ultana’s death.
“I hated my mother. I guess—I guess I feel guilty because I wanted her to die, and I’m glad she did. She was wretched. My life with her was hell.”
“Jaysus,” I said, moving close and laying my hand atop hers. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“I was afraid of her. I had no choice but to play my part to appease her. Yet inside I seethed and resisted everything she wanted. She wanted you—for me—no… Let’s be honest… I think she wanted you for her own reasons. Naturally, whatever my mother wanted, I resisted.”
Her ginger brows curved over her fine nose as she struggled for words, fighting the truth that was pouring from her against her will. “Going to your house that first night was pure torment. To fight my mother, I had to fight my own initial response to you.” Her voice shook. “I’ll be God damned if you weren’t the most intense and charismatic—this isn’t coming out right.” She looked so helpless it melted something in me. Her voice was soft, her eyes earnest and sweet, when she looked up at me. “I kissed you, Finn. Didn’t that tell you everything you need to know about how I would like us to think of each other?”
She crushed her rose lips on mine before I could speak. This wasn’t a girl who was having an internal battle or denying what she wanted. Confession had come hard, but now that it was said, she was free. It was in her unquenchable kisses, her soft hands against my face, the adoring and heated way she looked at me when I opened my eyes.
Her lips grazed my ear. “I accept you, Finn. For who you are. What you are. You never have to hide with me, or fight yourself.” Her hands ran up my thighs as she kissed my neck. “Stop…fighting…yourself.”
I held her by her upper arms and reluctantly, I admit, pulled away from her sweet mouth and her body, which curved into mine so delicately. “You’ve been so honest with me. You deserve honesty in return,” I said, hoping she’d listen. “I will compare everyone on this earth…” Saoirse’s eyes pleaded with me not to finish my sentence before she turned her cheek. “…to her.”
Her seafoam eyes were bright with challenge and intensity. “I accept that. I do. Compare us, until you can’t. Compare us, until you forget. We’re the same. Meant to be together.”
“If this is about that tarot card—”
Saoirse pressed my hand to her chest. “This is about my heart. Yours, too. I can feel it. Your heart wants something it can’t have. But I offer something you haven’t let yourself dream of because you’re too busy wishing for things to be different.”
Someday is a wish your heart makes when it wants things to be different than they are.
“Damn,” I whispered. Cora’s words. She was right. Both girls were right.
“I offer you what she can’t: total acceptance. I’m offering you my heart even though I know you might grasp it with only one hand while the other reaches for the past.”
She was offering what everyone on this planet wants most: to be loved for exactly who and what they are. Why was my soul fighting it? Because it knew its place. “You’re killing me, Saoirse,” I whispered against the silk of her red hair.
“No, luv,” she said. “Your memories are killing you. I can make you forget them.”
If kisses were promises, then I’d made dozens to Saoirse Lennon before I inwardly cursed myself for being weak and wrong.
My excuse: I’d faced death and my future was grim as hell. What I hadn’t imagined, ever, was the possibility of accepting what I was and trying to live a life in that paradigm. Saoirse offered me a glimpse of something that resembled normalcy. But to accept it would be wrong. I didn’t want normal if it wasn’t with Cora.
I stepped away from Saoirse, and the physical distance gave me clarity. I also owed it to Saoirse to tell her what I’d done. “I have to see my actions through. You want someone who’s a condemned man?” I turned to face her. “I am condemned, Saoirse. The world just doesn’t know it yet.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The one thing your mother wanted—for the Arrazi to come out of the shadows, to be exalted, to finally have a seat at the table…I’ve done something to take that possibility away.”
“What have you done, Finn?” She looked stricken, and I understood it. I threatened all Arrazi, of which she was one.
“I found a way to show how we kill.” I pulled out my phone and showed her the video in all its disgusting glory.
“Good God, why?” she asked after it was over. Her face said it all: fear, disbelief, betrayal. She felt threatened.
“If the Arrazi don’t abandon the genocide of the Scintilla, I will show the world what we are.”
Saoirse slumped back in her chair, pale and shocked. Then she abruptly stood and went to the sidebar to pour a very liberal glass of whiskey. “Uisca Beatha,” she murmured in Irish and downed a huge gulp. Water of life.
I was immediately reminded of the alchemical symbol for water of life, strikingly in between the Xepa symbol and the hexagram—shatkona—Seal of Solomon—whatever it was, whatever it meant, the triangles were everywhere. Tri—three—ever present in the mystery.
The alchemical symbol for water of life was two triangles pointing in opposite directions, just like the Xepa symbol; however, in the alchemical symbol, the tips were meshed together just enough to be called joined.
“What do you know about the Xepa symbol?” I asked.
“Nothing, really. Why?”
“What you just said reminded me of something, and I’d meant to ask you about the symbol anyway. The tarot card, the Two of Cups, has two people pouring water from their jugs into a single jug. See, it led me to do some research, and I think the term ‘Water of Life’ is referring to energy. Not actual water, not blood, but our life energy.”
“I don’
t see how the Xepa symbol has anything to do with that. I don’t see how it matters,” she said, tipping her glass up again. She was angry with me. Clearly, I’d shaken her up with my admission, and for that, I felt bad. She promised we’d be allies, yet I’d gone rogue and done something she would never sign off on. That, more than my admission about Cora, probably told Saoirse where I stood and with whom I’d always side.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” I conceded. “They’re just symbols, right?” And I was just a boy whose every hope depended on it mattering.
Chapter Forty-Five
Giovanni
From another continent, Finn still managed to rattle Cora and insert himself between us.
If he was gone, she’d finally be free to love with her whole heart. Guilt pricked at my gut. He’d helped us, was still trying to help us, and having an Arrazi ally was potentially vital to our survival. So I swallowed down my pride and watched her leave. She said she wanted to “sleep on it”, and while I was sure she meant his damning video, I couldn’t help but wonder if she also meant us.
She stayed away most of the next day, killing me with her close distance. In the late afternoon she finally returned to me. She’d stayed up all night, she said, thinking about what to do about the video.
Cora texted Edmund, who was busy wiring the common room for cameras to capture “a day in the life of the Scintilla,” and told him to stay there; she had something to show him. She asked Mami Tulke to meet us at the common room, as well. Together, we walked over to Dun’s hut.
“What, another Jesus painting?” Dun joked when we showed up and asked him to walk with us to meet up with Edmund. He’d kept to himself for the most part. Cora suggested that he probably just needed time alone to process—to grieve Mari and to grieve the life he’d once had. Everything had changed for all of us.
Edmund vibrated with anticipation, turquoise infusing his aura, as he climbed down from the ladder he was using to mount a camera from the corner of the ceiling. Mami Tulke had already shown up with Claire, Faye, and Janelle. A dozen or so Scintilla milled about or sat together, eating. “Should I ask the others to leave?” I asked Cora.
She stared at the Scintilla as she considered my question. “No. This affects them. For those who’ve never met an Arrazi in person, for those who still don’t understand the threat, it will be very educational. Might convince any remaining dissenters. The more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. In fact, can we get a runner to ask all adults to be here in ten minutes?”
“I’ll do it.” I ran from the room and went from hut to lodge asking everyone to please attend a meeting. The twins offered to split up and tell the rest, so I hurried back to stand beside Cora.
She was speaking with Edmund when I walked in. “My Arrazi friend sent me something,” and then, meeting the eyes of everyone who’d gathered in the room, she said, “Something that proves the Arrazi’s existence.” She swallowed hard. “And proof of how they kill. I think he wants to use it to disarm the Arrazi, to strike them before they strike us. What I’m about to show you is graphic but might be something we can use, and it could take them off guard. It may be enough to send them into hiding.”
The room snapped with anticipatory current. I gave Claire a kiss on the top of her head and sent her with a mom and a young toddler to watch a movie in the adjacent rec room. I had to protect her.
Edmund used a cord to connect Cora’s phone to his laptop so we could all watch it more easily, though I noticed that she paced restlessly in the back once it started playing and didn’t look at the video at all. It was all the more stunning on a larger screen, and when I looked at Edmund, he had an expression that was both fascinated and appalled, but he tapped a finger on his lips in a repetitive motion that told me he was thinking very hard about this as a journalist and how he was going to present it to the world. His aura showed ambition, but it was about knowledge and sharing it.
After watching Finn kill that man, the room was a vault of stunned silence. At first. With the first utterance of shock and horror, the room exploded into fearful chatter.
“This won’t help anyone identify Arrazi on the street,” Edmund said, quieting everyone down. “You’d have to reconstruct the whole world with walls like that.”
“Right,” I said, agreeing. “We could see auras and not be able to identify by sight an Arrazi who hasn’t recently killed. But now the world will know the technology exists, and if the world knows about the Arrazi, it might scare them enough to lay low and abandon their mission to kill us and countless others.”
Finn’s action was brilliant, I had to concede that.
Cora unplugged her cell from the computer and started swiping at it. “I’m texting it to you, Edmund. There should be more than one copy, just in case.”
“I can’t wait to show this to the world,” Edmund said. “It’s big.”
Cora’s eyes were molten green fire, and her aura ticked with irritation. She spoke a muted but powerful warning, “You make a move without my approval and I will not cooperate with you any further.”
Edmund fiddled with his phone to make sure the text came through and didn’t meet her eyes. “I wasn’t suggesting—”
“Sounded like you were,” Dun said to him. “Cora didn’t have to share this with any of us and, if you want to know the truth, I could live my whole life without seeing another murder,” he said. I wondered if, when he watched Finn Doyle kill that man, he was thinking of how Mari had died so similarly. “Go off half-cocked with that video and I’ll kick your ass.”
Edmund laughed, but his nerves showed in his colors. “So now we’re threatening each other? I’m merely saying that this is proof that someone’s been party to the biggest conspiracy in history. The Arrazi and whoever is directing them might back down initially, but do you really think they’re going to stop?”
Cora looked at me with her teeth pressing into her full bottom lip. Her eyes said what I was thinking. They’ll never stop… They’ll never stop hunting you…
“My ears hurt,” Claire said, running in from the other room with her hands clasped over them and her eyes a mask of pain.
“I can do ear candling,” Faye offered. “It helps earaches and congestion. I saw that they have the supplies in the medical room.”
“You are actually offering to stick flaming candles in her ears?” Dun said, and Faye laughed. “And you’re okay with this?” he asked me.
Faye said, “It’s quite safe. I promise. I can do yours, too.”
Dun waved her off. “I’m hot enough without fire shooting from my ears, thanks. I don’t know if the ladies could handle that level of hot.” It was the first genuine smile I’d seen on Cora’s face in too long. I tried to remember the last time she smiled like that. “This, I want to see, though,” he said, standing.
“Good with you, Claire?” I asked. She nodded, and the three of them left. Maybe Faye could get to the bottom of Claire’s strange symptoms.
Raimondo grunted and tilted his head back. I thought he’d fallen asleep, because his mouth hung open. Then he said, “We’re too late. No home. There is no home for the hunted.”
Cora’s eyes rounded in shock. “What did you—?”
Raimondo’s head snapped up. He gasped. “We’re found.”
“What do you mean ‘we’re found’?” she asked, but he seemed to have slipped into a trancelike state, and she threw up her hands. “I know we’ll be found. That’s the worst part. Ugh, why can’t people just live and let live,” Cora said quietly. “We’re not the ones hurting people, killing people. But we finally have something that might make our enemies submit.”
The hairs on my arms stood on end. I met Cora’s eyes, and they squinted into a question. Something had our hackles up. There was a sudden banging sound as a band of people, six or seven, stormed through the door into the common room. Four had guns. Most had regular auras, but two were deathly white and their energy filled the room like poisonous smoke.
As my heart pulse
d wildly, I cursed myself for not already retrieving the weapons from the cave. We’d have them outnumbered if we had them, but we were too late. I prayed that Claire and the others wouldn’t be found. With hope, Dun would have seen or heard something to alert him.
My arms and legs turned icy cold with fear. Whoever these people were, they’d found us, all of us, and they’d found Cora. Clearly that’s who they were after, as more than one gun was trained on her alone.
A man in a tidy black suit strode in, his face plastered with an infuriating smirk, his focus on Cora. “Miss Sandoval, we do not submit. To man or”—he chuckled—“to girl. Only to God’s will.”
“Oh, okay, Cardinal Báthory,” she said sarcastically, emphasizing his name. She knew who he was, and she wanted to make sure we did as well. “And I suppose it’s God’s will for you to come here and stick guns in the faces of innocent people?” Cora snipped at him with disgust in her words and in the look on her face.
This was the cardinal she’d met at the Vatican, the one with a Xepa ring, and presumably the one who gave orders to Ultana Lennon. The cardinal’s gaze skimmed the rest of us, and recognition pinched his face as if he’d eaten spoiled food. “Mr. Nustber, I’m not surprised to find you here. Uncover a rat’s nest and there’s always more rats.” He inclined his head to Cora. “I’d be more selective about whom you befriend, my dear.”
Cora thrust her chin up, and I cringed for what might come out of her mouth. “We were just debating who the big daddy rat was,” she said with a jeering ring to her voice. “Then you come in here and confirm it. You threaten us, but I’ve got something on you. The world will know the truth about what the church has done, and it’s about damn time.”
The look he gave her was pure condescension. “You are too simple, child. Don’t presume that my presence here implicates the holy Roman church.”