Scintillate

by Tracy Clark

  I leaned my head into the cold glass of the window and glanced over my shoulder at Gráinne, who had curled into a fetal position in the backseat. It wasn’t going to be easy to be covert with her, and we needed to find a place to regroup. To recover our stolen strength. To mourn. To figure out where we could possibly go from here.

  Giovanni placed his hand tenderly on my leg. “I’m so sorry, Cora.”

  I bit my lip and turned my head away. But something niggled at my brain. “The knife,” I said. “I don’t know how, but it looked like you took it from Griffin. Did he throw it at you?”

  “No. He didn’t throw it.” I glanced at Giovanni and could see by his eyes and the way he worked his mouth that he struggled with his words. “I didn’t tell you everything. It’s like with the book at the library… I pulled it to me.” When he saw me trying to understand, he added, “The Arrazi are not the only ones with special abilities. I’ve used mine to steal. Many times. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

  “It’s okay,” I whispered, glancing at the tattoo on my hand, reliving the memories that had assaulted me when I touched certain objects. I hadn’t been able to look, but I knew there was a knife etched on my back. How poetic. I didn’t understand why I had to be marked by the objects, but for once I was glad I had the ability to retrieve memories. That, and being able to detect the lie in Clancy’s aura. It had saved our lives. This time.

  “Take me home,” Gráinne moaned from the back. For a second, I wondered if she meant the home she’d had for the last thirteen years or our home, the one that lived on in her mind all the time she’d been a prisoner. Did she imagine in her wrecked head that we could stroll through its daisy gate and red door once again? Live happily ever after?

  How I wished to be home, too. Sitting on my bed, with Mari, with Dun, spread out on the floor, all of us listening to music, trashing the VIPs, complaining about Dad’s strict ways. Dad…

  That was another life.

  This new life demanded more, so much more. If my father was right, it demanded we somehow find a way to stop the Arrazi and balance the energy in the world. Do that, all while staying out of the Arrazi’s clutches and avoiding a hidden Society that even Clancy had feared. I nearly laughed to myself. One girl, one boy, and a crazy woman were supposed to fix the universe’s energy? We either attempt the impossible or we spend our lives running. Hiding. More people die. And the world goes down with our cowardice.

  Rain pelted the windows as we bumped down the narrow drive toward the iron gate.

  “Home,” Gráinne moaned again.

  I swiped at a tear snaking down my face, and a new determination etched into my soul. “We don’t have a home,” I said. “Until this is over, there is no home for us. There is no home for the hunted.”

  I looked back at my mother mumbling in the backseat.

  No wondrous thing was ever discovered were it not for someone brave enough to seek it.

  Those words weren’t just Mom’s legacy. They were my father’s as well. And now, mine. I wasn’t done seeking answers. I refused to live my whole life running. I would not let my father die in vain. Scintilla were something beautiful in a sometimes ugly world. We were givers of light in the darkness.

  I would not let the light go out on my watch.

  Did you love this Entangled Teen novel? Check out more of our young adult titles here!

  And for exclusive sneak peeks at our upcoming books, excerpts, contests, chats with our authors and editors, and more…

  Be sure to like us on Facebook

  The suspense intensifies in

  Deviate…

  “Home,” Gráinne moaned again from the backseat, this time more emphatically.

  Giovanni and I glanced at each other. My mother had been like this from the minute we escaped the shack, mumbling about home and repeating my father’s name over and over again. Benito. Benito.

  Every utterance of his name drove a spike into my chest.

  I had to find a way to stop the Arrazi. I had to find a way to keep us safe.

  “Benito…”

  Daddy.

  “I like to think a part of your father lives on,” Giovanni said softly. He didn’t look at me when he said it, just stared ahead into the headlights piercing the mist.

  “In Clancy?” I spat, sickened by the thought.

  “Still.”

  We were forced to drive frustratingly slow due to the heavy haze and curved roads. Consumed with the need to go faster, I realized my foot was pressing hard against the floorboard. Clancy could be following us in a car. Using his sortilege of astral projection, he could be hovering in the car with us like a ghost. Where could we possibly hide from his power?

  “Go to Trim, Cora,” my mother said, sounding surer than I’d ever heard her.

  “What’s there?” Giovanni asked.

  “The house we lived in when I was little.” I turned back toward my mother and reached over the seat to touch her leg. “Why? There’s nothing for us there. It’s not our home anymore.”

  Gráinne’s wild eyes hardened into stubborn glass beads. “It will always be our home.”

  “It can’t be safe to stay anywhere they’d associate with her.” Giovanni spoke my thoughts exactly.

  “I know. I’m trying to find out—”

  Suddenly she leaned forward and clasped the antique silver key dangling from my neck. Her fingers spun the red pyramid-shaped crystals, which met at their tips like an hourglass within the top of the key. “This,” she said. “You found this. You weren’t supposed to. Not you. Everything went wrong after I was given this key. That’s when I knew…”

  “Knew?”

  “Someone out there would do anything to keep the truth buried.” She smiled like a madwoman. “Well, I have something of theirs. I can bury truths, too. We have to go home and go digging.” Gráinne’s words flowed out in a torrent of intense anxiety.

  I pulled the key from her grasp and tucked it back inside my shirt. “What does this key open?” I asked. It had obviously meant something to Clancy. It was important enough that my father buried it under the albino redwood tree in Santa Cruz at my mother’s request so that no one would ever find it.

  But I found it.

  Gráinne’s flecked green eyes turned skyward and then snapped back to mine. The barest hint of a wry smile curved her thin lips. “Heaven?”

  Just when I thought she was thinking more clearly, she lapsed into nonsense. I turned away from her and stared out the window at the lace of fog and fences. My entire body was taut with anxiety.

  Giovanni startled me when he reached over and shuffled through the glove compartment. “Cristo,” he said. “Nobody carries maps anymore. We’ll have to stop for one.” Soon, he pulled over at a gas station.

  “You go in. What if someone recognizes me?” I said, thinking of the airport video of two innocent people falling dead at my feet. My father spoke passionately about the mysterious deaths around the world and his theory about dark energy before he died. I remembered his impassioned words: The increase in natural disasters is a sign that there is a serious crisis or imbalance in our world…but the more critical sign now is the people who are mysteriously dying. My father thought the Scintilla were somehow a key to solving the imbalance. But Giovanni and I know what we saw that day the deaths occurred—the back of an Arrazi, walking away. The Arrazi’s aura was white from a fresh kill.

  I shielded my face from passersby and practically held my breath until Giovanni returned, map in hand. Danger stalked us from all directions. Hunted by Arrazi, valued more than gold on the black market, and, according to Clancy Mulcarr, we had enemies who wanted us dead more than he wanted to possess us. This mysterious Society he was involved with?

  I glanced around, watchful. The whole world was full of enemies whose faces we didn’t know. We needed to fade into the fog until we could figure out what to do.

  Once we were on the right highway to Trim, my mother’s whole demeanor shifted from a shaking rabbit c
ornered by a cat to a child with her nose and hands pressed to the cold window. What must it be like for her after all that time, to be free?

  She was a fool if she felt free.

  “Turn right,” she instructed Giovanni, who had the map spread open on his lap as he drove.

  The rain stopped but the roads were still wet and speckled with reflections. Streetlamps cast discs of yellow light on the slick pavement below. I tried to calm my beating heart as we slowed to a stop in front of my childhood home. When Finn had brought me here before, it was sweet and magical. The whole scene was lit in my memory by the light of love and discovery. Returning was like walking from a dreamscape into a nightmare.

  Surprisingly, Gráinne didn’t jump out when we stopped. She sat, wide-eyed and stunned, as she stared at the cottage—white with ivy curtaining the red trim windows and bright red door as I remembered—the home she and my father and I had shared so many years ago, before she disappeared.

  Deep worry lines etched the bridge of her nose. We were all afraid. My stomach settled somewhere near my ankles and Giovanni’s eyes darted, both of us looking for someone to dash out and cripple us with their ability to wrench our auras from our bodies. He clutched the black hilt of the knife he’d used against Griffin in the shack.

  I couldn’t bear to look at that knife. Griffin wasn’t the only person who had felt its bite. My neck throbbed where it had sliced into my skin, leaving a line of puckered dried blood. I bit back a sob, thinking of my father on his knees with a scarlet bloom unfurling on his stomach after Griffin stabbed him. His expression had been so disbelieving. I was the last person he had fixed his gaze upon before the life left his eyes.

  Was it love I saw in their depths? Or blame?

  “What about the people who live here now?” Giovanni whispered as he opened the door for my mother and helped her out.

  “No, no,” she muttered. “No one should live here. Benito told me he would never let it go.” As we walked through the red gate, her slender fingers brushed the metal daisy. “Cora, your da gave me that daisy the day you were born.”

  “Is it strange to call me Cora?” I’d been born Daisy, my name changed when my dad fled with me to the States.

  Gráinne’s straight black hair hung limp over the hanger of her shoulders. So much about her was lifeless, including her eyes when she looked at me and softly said, “None of us are who we were then.”

  “I don’t feel safe here,” Giovanni said, surveying the property.

  “I could be in another time zone and not feel safe. Another planet, even,” I said.

  He nodded his agreement. “Is there a key, Mother?”

  “Mother?” I mouthed.

  He shrugged, a blond curl draping over one stormy blue eye, which was ringed with bruises from the beating he’d gotten when he was captured. “Somebody should call her that,” he said in his bullish way.

  I was about to fire off that he could go get his own mother and quit trying to lay claim to the one I’d just found, but I stopped myself. He couldn’t do that. He never could. Though I didn’t know the whole story, I knew he’d lost his parents when he was little like my mother had lost hers, and for the first time in his life, he had found two other Scintilla. He was no longer alone. Would it be such a bad thing to let him borrow “mother”?

  I thought she’d go to the door, take us inside, and shield us from the enormous sky of stars and the world of shadows. But Gráinne, Mother, immediately strode past the house toward the backyard and the wild patch of daisies whose black faces beamed at the moon. I remembered my vision from my first visit here, of her in this yard, planting. But as I watched her drop to her knees now, her long hair curtaining off both sides of her face as she dug with bare hands, it hit me; I hadn’t seen her planting in that vision.

  I’d seen her burying.

  My mother’s hands ripped furiously at the stalks of flowers, flinging them aside like a god throwing bolts of lightning. I wondered if I’d looked that possessed the day I unearthed the key from under the albino redwood. It hurt to watch.

  “Mom,” I said, trying out the foreign word. “Please let one of us dig for a while. We need to hurry and get out of here.”

  Her arms shook like little stems of wheat trembling in a breeze. Giovanni reached under her arms and lifted her to standing, then dropped to his knees next to me, both of us moving the years of dirt covering my mother’s secret.

  I flinched when Giovanni used the knife to hack at the dirt, remembering the feel of it nicking my neck and the burn of its mark on my back. I hadn’t had time to look at how the knife had marked me, but I knew it had. I had no idea why it sometimes happened when I retrieved memories, but I wore the evidence as a series of tattoos on my skin; strange proof of my power—psychometry—my sortilege as a Scintilla.

  That knife held a memory that had gotten us out of the shack when I used the information to bluff Clancy Mulcarr. Three. What was the mystical significance of three Scintilla? Clancy was so triumphant to have captured us. But he was scared, too. He desperately didn’t want someone or something known as the Society informed of what he possessed. I needed to find out who or what they were, and I needed to know why Clancy’s prize was three.

  With both of us digging, we made better progress. The blue-black sky turned milky. A glow of light flared from the horizon. “Your first sunrise out of that place,” I said to my mother, thinking of the thousands of moons she’d carved in the wooden floor, one for each day of her captivity. I’d also been branded on the palm of my hand by her moon. The clover ring, the key on my shoulder, the moon on my palm, and whatever was on my back, not to mention the cut across my neck. These were the outward scars of my new life.

  I was dizzy with fatigue, struggling to continue digging, to even keep my eyes open, when Giovanni said, “Hey! I think I feel something.” We both scraped faster, peering into the dirt. We spotted something like gleaming white stone, then dug faster to uncover it.

  I sat back on my heels. “Is that what I think it is?”

  My mother, who’d been half dozing against the side of the house as we dug, startled and her eyes flew open. Giovanni flicked the knife underneath the object and used it like a lever to push it up from under the last inch of dirt, then pulled gently.

  “What the hell?” he yelled, dropping the thing. We both scuttled back onto the grass.

  “Oh my God.” I turned to my mother. “You buried a freaking body!”

  Acknowledgments

  This dream would not have come true were it not for my brilliant and colorful children who made me promise to never give up. They motivate me every day to prove by example that anything is possible if you know who you are, know your truth, and dedicate yourself entirely. Sydney and Cooper, I love you. Promise me you’ll do the same.

  Dear Patrick, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Our paths will always run parallel. I love you and am grateful for all you’ve given.

  My mother, Yvon, who always encouraged me to be colorful and strong, and to use my voice. This business requires all three, and I’m so appreciative.

  The Tribe—Monica (Jo) Bogue, Mary Claire Bouchér, and Lucy Hunter. In one form or another, you three are in all my pages. I love you, sisters of my heart. And to my dear Tribettes—Samantha, Sierra, Makenzie, Sydney, Sage, and wee one—you are who I write for. I hope you feel understood.

  My wise and wonderful agent, Michael Bourret, who believed even before I truly did. And my editor, Karen Grove, whose words “This book haunts me” will go down as one of my all-time favorite compliments. Huge thanks to the entire Entangled team for bringing my books to life.

  Deep, everlasting gratitude to Ellen Hopkins and Susan Hart Lindquist, who’ve been unwavering mentors and friends, for believing in me, pushing me, and guiding me. Thank you for always saying, “Not if, but when.” You’ve helped me grow in so many ways. I adore you.

  I received invaluable editorial insight from dear colleagues and friends, Lorin Oberweger, Jackie Garli
ck, Eric Elfman, and Lia Keyes. Each of you, in your own ways, helped me to see a better way to tell a story and that knowledge will carry forward forever. Thank you.

  I owe so much to SCBWI and to my Nevada SCBWI family. I’m certain this would have taken years longer without your support and friendship. The Criterati emerged from this clan! For years of critiques, beta reads, and sanity maintenance, my sincere thanks to Heather Petty, Chris Ledbetter, and Julie Dillard. You’ve taught me so much. I am indebted to so many people who’ve read my words and have shared their words with me over the years. Too many to name, but each written on my heart.

  A special thanks to Tony Bates who handed me the right books at the right time.

  Jason Roer, my cohort and conspirator. Thank you for your boundless enthusiasm for my work and for your constant love and support. You see, really see, my true colors. And I see yours. It’s beautiful. 333.

  Finally, to the writers, published and unpublished, who inspire me with their creativity and passion. You light my way.

  About the Author

  Tracy Clark grew up a “valley girl” in Southern California but now resides in her home state of Nevada with her daughter and son. She’s an unapologetic dog person who is currently owned by a cat. She is the recipient of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Work in Progress Grant and a two-time participant in the prestigious Nevada SCBWI Mentor Program. Her debut novel was inspired by her enchantment with metaphysics as a teen, seeing it as the real magic in life. Tracy is a part-time college student, a private pilot, and an irredeemable dreamer.

  www.tracyclark.org

  Salt

  by Danielle Ellison

  Never leave home without salt…

  Penelope is a witch, part of a secret society protecting humans from demon attack. But when she was a child, a demon killed her parents – and stole her magic. Since then, she’s been pretending to be something she’s not, using her sister’s magic to hide her own loss, to prevent being sent away.