The suspense intensifies in
“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 cornered 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!”