by Tracy Clark
I eyed her warily but took the cup and ventured a sip. The tea was no longer hot, just tepid and bitter. I was so thirsty I slammed the liquid down too fast, bursting into a sputtery cough. Nothing special happened after I drank it, though. I watched the woman as she scuttled from place to place, picking up the broken glass, arranging the pieces in a pattern in the corner of the wood floor in an adjacent room. She ran to the wood-burning stove, scooped up some cold charcoal, and rushed back to her little art project. There had to be a way out of this. “What’s your name?” I called to her over the clink and scrape of glass against the floor.
“Gráinne,” she answered. It sounded like grawn-ya. After more soft clattering of glass, she came out of the other room and looked at me expectantly, wringing her bloody hands in front of her. I winced.
“What is your name, child?”
“Cora.”
“Cora.” She said my name slowly, tasting it in her mouth like it was a foreign flavor. Then she nodded and turned back to her project. I took a couple of shaky steps after her, but stopped when I saw her huddled on the floor, rocking back and forth, bloody hands around the knees of her white skirt.
I felt so sorry for her. She was a fragile stalk, blowing in an invisible wind.
“I’m going to try to get us out of here,” I said. “I won’t stay in here and wait to die.”
She looked up at me sadly through a curtain of dark, grimy hair. “I’ve died a thousand deaths in here. You will, too.”
I backed away, leaving her to her rocking and her ghosts. The bed was the only refuge I had. I still wasn’t myself. I could tell by the heft of my limbs, by the sweat on my upper lip from moving around the room. I needed to sleep. I needed to eat something, if only to get strong enough to escape.
A hand caressed my cheek. Softly. Appreciatively. I leaned into it. “Finn,” I moaned. I would open my eyes and be in my lavender room atop the lighthouse. Finn would be there to chase away my bad dreams. He’d call me his heart again.
“I’m sure you’ll see him soon,” a deep, melodic voice answered. My eyes flew open. “When he needs more of what you have to offer.” Clancy Mulcarr stood over me. His hand grazed the outer curve of my breast. “I’m quite proud of him for luring you here.”
I slapped his filthy hand away. “Don’t touch me!” I screamed, scrambling off the other side of the bed. His aura wasn’t white, had never been white since we had met. I didn’t understand it. It looked normal. Peaceful, actually. Only a monster could radiate peace after what he’d done.
“Don’t be thick, girl. I can take what I want without touching you. You know that.”
My heart beat ebony with the poison of betrayal. My breaths came in short, strained bursts. There was not enough air in the room. Not enough space in the universe to get away from what Clancy had said. “You said Finn lured me here?” I asked, too aware of the weakness that made my voice quiver.
“Not everything went as planned in America, I must admit. Your coming to Ireland was brilliantly cooperative. Bloody unexpected, but cooperative. We’d been watching you for so long. I feel quite vindicated to know I was right about what you are. And how could Finn not lure you? It’s astonishing how little you know about yourself. About Finn, for that matter. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, if you had any sense at all, you’d never have let him near you.”
The room closed in on me as Clancy and I stood there staring at each other.
“I know what you are, too, Arrazi,” I spat. A flicker of amused astonishment showed in his face. “I have sense enough to know you’re nothing but a parasite. That people like you take and kill just to make yourselves feel good!”
“Oh, pet.” Clancy laughed. “It’s not for pleasure. Though I admit, it’s good all right, and Scintilla are especially intoxicating. If the world knew what I possessed…” His eyes narrowed. He placed his thick hands on the bed and leaned toward me. “It’s a bit more serious than pleasure. We must feed off auras. To survive.”
“As in, you’ll die if you don’t?”
He waved his hand in the air like my question bored him. “Yes. Arrazi require the energy of others to live. All of a regular human’s life energy. A human soul is a spark from the divine fire and it feeds us. There are givers and there are takers. This is true in all of nature, Cora. The sunlight gives, the trees take, they in turn give us oxygen—”
“Thanks for the biology lesson, but what do you give?”
“Ah, see, the Arrazi are at the top of the human food chain. And you,” he said, pointing at me, “you are our sun.”
I’m sure I looked as shocked as I felt. If this was the trail of truth my mother had been following, she was right. Giovanni was right. There were different breeds of human. Mankind always had its share of predators and prey, but this was literal. This leech stood there telling me that his kind, the Arrazi, lived off other people. “You kill people! You’re nothing but murderers!”
Clancy worked his way slowly around the bed as I backed into the corner. His voice was a low, menacing rumble. “Do you fault the lion for killing the gazelle?”
I didn’t want to play his game. We were humans. We were equals. He had no right to kill another. And yet I knew he would if it meant his survival. “Then why haven’t you killed me yet? Why am I here? Why is that poor woman here?”
“The Arrazi weren’t always murderers, but our source of life has been all but depleted. Every time I take from you, you save a multitude of people I’d otherwise have to kill. The energy of a Scintilla is the most powerful on earth. My choice to enslave one saves many.”
“How completely benevolent of you.” I trembled with rage and pure fear. Both emotions gusted like the same hot wind rattling my bones.
Clancy moved closer, irritation glinting in his beady dark eyes. “If I didn’t do this, I’d have to employ tacky techniques like my sister and her husband, working knee-deep around death so they can benefit from it.”
Doctors. That’s how they did it without being caught. No wonder they were so insistent on Finn becoming one. And I’d first met him in the hospital. Where I’d also seen Griffin for the first time. The bitter trace of tea rose up in my throat. My God, it was true, they’d been after me all along.
“Sortilege! Powers! Tell her! His soul’s on a chain, it is. That is also why they covet the Scintilla,” Gráinne shouted from her doorway. Now I saw her aura. The gleaming, sparkling silver of it.
He had two of us.
“Out, woman!” Clancy shouted. Gráinne jumped and shut her door. He straightened his wool sweater over his generous belly and smoothed back his hair. “She forgets herself.” He took another step toward me. Then another. “She is correct, though. Another undeniable allure of a Scintilla,” he said, drawing the word out in a hiss, “is that your energy awakens and fuels our powers, our sortilege. We all have latent abilities that are waiting for the spark to ignite them. Extrasensory abilities are our birthright. Through the years it’s been diluted and bastardized so that some regular humans possess our gifts. But it’s very real. Scintilla give us the only thing humans truly lust after. Real power. Real magic. Naturally, the Arrazi who controls you, controls the power.”
I swallowed hard. “Biology lesson for you,” I whispered. “If you stopped killing us, there’d be more of us.”
“The Arrazi are not the only ones killing Scintilla, lass. You have great enemies in places you can’t even imagine.” He smiled. “Enemies who will do anything to keep the truth a secret.”
“So they’re your enemies, too,” I ventured.
“Not quite.” He looked into his palm. I saw a quick flash of a gold ring with the emblem worn on the underside of his finger rather than on top. He closed his hand around it. “I have something of an arrangement with them. You’re a fighter. I like it,” Clancy said. “I can’t wait to taste your strength when your energy mixes with mine.” His dark eyes roiled with hunger. His aura pushed against mine in the space between us. Insistent. Voracious.
“
Please don’t kill me,” I whispered.
“I have no intention of killing you right now. There are far too few of you left. It’s a crisis, really. I fear there may be a war for possession of the remaining Scintilla. Hell, the price for you on the black market is astounding. Having two of you makes me a very powerful man. And your friend, I’ll find him, too. Three Scintilla would be the ultimate prize. I’ll be unstoppable then.”
Three.
Giovanni. I hoped desperately that he was far away and safe.
Clancy cornered me. I was surrounded by the bed, the wall, and the rough edge of the bedside table that dug into my thighs. His eyes bore into mine. I flinched, waiting to feel the agonizing tug on my chest. The pain of my body flying apart.
“Think of it this way. You need me to keep you safe from those who would have you dead for what you know and for what you are. And I need you.” His whisper was hot on my face. “It’s the only reason you’re still alive.”
Every hair on my body stood on end. My energy swirled and built in the middle of my chest. My fingers and feet grew numb. It was starting. “No, no, please don’t,” I pleaded, pushing ineffectively against Clancy Mulcarr’s barrel chest. Already, my solar plexus burned where his energy concentrated. I was sliced open. “I can’t handle it.”
He touched my face, and the corona of his light burned brighter. I turned my head away and focused on the grain of the wood paneling on the wall. My fingers fumbled on the table next to me for anything to use against him. “Embrace your nature, Cora. This is what you were meant for. You weren’t strong enough when I brought you here last night. Finn and Griffin nearly finished you off.”
My hand closed around one of the small silver serving pieces from the tea set. I grasped it firmly and swung with every ounce of energy he hadn’t yet taken. Sugar cubes went flying in all directions, bouncing off us. Clancy’s head swung to the side, and when he looked back at me with a crescent of blood at his temple and bloodlust in his eyes, I knew I’d made it worse on myself. But there was no way I was going down without a fight.
He continued to drain me unrelentingly. I flinched when he pressed his body against mine, but I was trapped and already feeling so feathery I thought I’d lose my ability to stand at any moment. I closed my eyes as he whispered in my ear. “I have much more finesse than they do, pet, and I need you now. Though after that stunt, I’m not inclined toward finesse.”
Forty-Four
I
blinked against the onslaught of a new day, not knowing how I wound up in bed. The last thing I remembered was having my aura raped by Clancy Mulcarr. There was a protesting grumble from my belly. I’d never been so hungry in my entire life. Yet despite my intense hunger, I didn’t want to eat. I wanted to curl up and go to sleep forever. The needs of my body overruled the slaughter of my soul. I’d eat. Then maybe I could curl around myself and keep the world out.
It took everything I had to scoot up against the headboard. Gráinne sat in a chair next to the bed, eating from a plate perched on her lap. She watched me with intense and curious eyes. Nothing creepy about that. “How long have you been watching me sleep?” I asked, reaching for my plate and fork. I registered the ever-present teapot next to my bed and a generous carafe of ice water.
“You clutch your hands like you’re hiding a secret in them. What are you hiding in your hands?” she asked.
I held up my hands. “A fork?” That actually brought a smile to her face. Gráinne had a pretty smile. It made her look less disturbed. It made me want to coax another out of her.
Suddenly, the smile slid off her face. “You’ve been deeply hurt,” she said. “I can see it.”
“How can you see it?” I asked, stuffing three bites of syrup-laden pancake into my mouth. “I’m silver, like you. No colors to read.”
“Your sadness rolls off of you like storms. You’ll learn to read silver. It’s diamonds of many facets.”
I hadn’t learned how to read the subtleties of silver, but I was sure she was right about my stormy sadness. Just the smell of the maple syrup had driven a spike into my heart. It was too painful to think about our first date in the forest when I was foolish and giddy and dabbing syrup behind my ears to be more irresistible to Finn. I was irresistible to him, but only because he was Arrazi and needed my Scintilla spark to live.
Finn had said, “I never believed someone like you existed.” I remembered how his aura had looked like a live thing when he played music at the coffee shop, how it blasted white before I fainted. Griffin had been there. Not a coincidence. I recalled Clancy congratulating Finn on luring me here while we ate beef stew. My mind flashed to Finn saying, “I want to possess you. I’m with you, and everything in me wants to take.”
To think I’d tried to protect him from the truth. He knew. He knew more about me than I did. “My heart hurts.”
“As does mine.”
It was the most coherent conversation we’d had yet. Would I end up like her from the constant near-death they’d inflict on me? Each minute there chafing at my sanity?
“How long have you been here?” I asked. My question shimmered like a delicate bubble in the palm of my hand. The wrong answer would pop it.
Gráinne pointed to the floor. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny moons were carved into the floorboards up and down the length of the room. So many. All the breath whooshed out of me. The bubble shattered. “Have you tried to get out?” I whispered.
“Everything. Running. Begging. Promises. Bribery. I’ve even tried to love him.”
“How could you—”
“This…him…it’s all I’ve had for so long. I lost everything.” She picked at her food. “A heart desperately searches for something to love—”
“Mine won’t.” It was a stubborn vow. But I meant it. With all of my broken heart.
Gráinne shook her head emphatically. A strand of her long hair brushed through her syrup. “No, no. If you’re too good at blocking the bad, then the good is sure to get caught in that net.”
“Why can’t we block them from taking from us? Can’t we escape?”
Her eyes went up to the skylight. “I don’t have the keys to the kingdom.” She smacked herself in the head. Hard. “I was close.” And then again. I put my plate on the table and grabbed her hands.
“Don’t.”
She looked up at me, startled, like she was surprised I was still in the room, surprised I had my fingers curled around her brittle wrists. “I buried everything. Stop with your questions. You tap tap in my head. The answers are gone.”
I dropped her hands. Panic rose up in me. I had so much to say, so much to rail against, that I was speechless. My head shook back and forth, but I couldn’t rattle the words loose.
I couldn’t think of a worse fate than to be locked up forever.
I thought youth was the shackle. Now every freedom I would’ve inherited with age had been snatched from me. Look how much of Gráinne’s life had been stolen. I’d end up like her, mumbling nonsense to myself, sucking maple syrup from my frayed hair, making pictures of flowers with shards of glass and blood. My life was a broken cup. From this moment on, it would hold nothing else.
I ran to the wooden door and threw my fists into it. I kicked. I screamed at the top of my lungs. Flung my body against the wood so hard my teeth rattled. I couldn’t be trapped here forever. I couldn’t. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I sobbed in great gasping chokes as if fingers clutched around my neck, and I slid to the floor, my hands clawing the wood on my way down, leaving a trail of tiny splinters in my stinging palms and beneath my nails.
Suddenly, a soothing cocoon of arms wrapped around me as I sat in a spent heap on the floor. Gráinne put her hand gently on my forehead and pulled my head back to rest on her shoulder. Her legs curved with surprising strength around my thighs, supporting me. Her hand rested over my heart as her body rocked me slowly forward and back. “Shhhh, child. Shhhh. Quiet now.”
I cried until I was a wrung out, a limp doll in her ar
ms. We sat together on the floor, rocking while she hummed a quiet, soothing tune. I melted against her, giving myself over to someone who, for the moment, was stronger than me. My ragged breathing eventually became more even. My anger dissolved in a fusion of our melted silver auras. Gráinne was so brave, in her own fragile state, to run into the hurricane and hold it tight.
I looked down at her hand, warm against my heart, holding me to hers. The daintiest slice of a wedding ring shone on her ring finger. It was worn nearly smooth from being rubbed over many years. The design was still visible though: a simple and delicate silver band of clover encircling her finger. Exactly like the marking on my finger.
A wisp of breath escaped me. Every breath beyond that was painful.
I turned slowly to look at her, taking in the heart shape of her small face, the thin mouth that turned up at the corners even when she wasn’t smiling. The broken windows of her eyes. Her hands smoothed my hair back from my damp skin and wiped my tears tenderly.
Motherly.
Oh God.
Please, be her. Please, do not.
He had two of us, but I didn’t realize until now, he had my mother. He’d had her all this time.
My heart thrashed on the ground like an injured bird. For the second time in that place, I wanted two opposite things to be true at once. Elation and despair crowded for space in me. I’d succeeded beyond hope. I’d found my mother. Alive, but not all the way through. Something inside her had died so long ago. I saw myself in her face. It didn’t comfort me. It caved me in.
She was me, in captivity, years from now.
I curled into her chest and found more tears—old tears and new. Each one a blade.
“Ah, now, dear. Hush.” She lifted my face and smiled broadly. “Today we get to see the sun.”
Forty-Five
I
wasn’t sure why I didn’t tell her who I was—who she was to me. Something to do with a heavy secret being on the shoulders of the one who’s strong enough to carry it. Finn had said that to me. Yeah, he’d know something about secrets.