The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1) (11 page)

“It’s Artemis,” Dr. Sullivan said, leading Fynn into the quarantine area.

Two cages sat behind the quarantine Plexiglas. In them were the Goddess Strain’s last lab monkeys Artemis and Io. In the cage next to Artemis, Io was asleep. Her snores rose from the cage like a baby’s breathing.

“We injected both of them with Goddess Strain right after a shot of Hydravirus,” Dr. Sullivan said. “Not that Artemis would need it. With your DNA, she was born immunized.”

Fynn knew all about the procedures, the tests, the controls. She’d co-authored the experiment reports. Hydravirus was new, but nothing Goddess Strain could not handle. The antidote mutated faster than any virus. The Goddess Strain was a living organism with DNA that had the ability to change its own code in order to destroy its prey faster than the virus itself could mutate to avoid annihilation. They mutated Artemis’ DNA when she was a zygote in a Petri dish, infusing her with Fynn’s cells. They shared so much DNA that in some ways, Artemis was more her sister than Lia was. It was a secret part of the project that only Fynn and Dr. Sullivan knew about. Sully had been a Keep disciple. He knew Fynn as a child. They needed to know the Strain’s effect on Divine DNA. Less than one percent of the world’s population was Divine, but it was a large enough group to require a control. Dr. Sullivan insisted on it.

“Io looks fine,” Fynn said.

Dr. Sullivan directed her attention to Artemis. Fynn had injected the monkey with Hydravirus. She had steeled herself against a wave of sadness, as the animal let her fill her vein with the viral infection that had destroyed its teenage human host. Fynn had confidence that their shared DNA would protect Artemis, but it still hurt to knowingly infect another living thing with a killer virus.

Fynn peered into Artemis’ cage. The monkey’s eyes were glazed over. When Fynn approached, she stuck her thin arm out between the metal bars.

“She wants more,” Dr. Sullivan said.

“More what?” Fynn asked.

For an answer, he stuck his hands through the silicone gloves attached to the cage. He injected the monkey before carefully pushing the needle into a special biohazard bin. He pulled his hands out of the gloves and watched as Artemis weaved. She fell into her bedding.

“I don’t get it. She’s acting stoned. What did you just give her?” Fynn asked. “Morphine?”

Dr. Sullivan shook his head. “That was the Hydravirus,” he said. “It’s the only thing that calms her. Otherwise she starts chewing on her own fingers. In another few hours, she’ll want more.”

Fynn stared at the blissed-out monkey. This could not be happening. It did not make any sense.

“We need to get the others on the team,” Fynn said. “I’ll call Cara. We need to let them know. We need to start over. We need--”

Dr. Sullivan raised his hand for quiet. “We need to talk, Fynn,” he said. “There is something you should see.”

He led her to the electron microscope. “Artemis since the Hydra mutation,” he said. In the sample, the blood cells moved at unnatural speed. Virus clung to the cells as they slammed into one another. The entire slide looked like a crowded mosh pit at a wild punk rock show.

“But the Strain is working in Io,” Fynn said.

“Yes. Io is totally asymptomatic at this point,” Dr. Sullivan said. He fingered the pack of cigarettes in his front pocket.

“As long as Io remains healthy, we can control the problem,” Fynn said. Her chest physically hurt with sympathy for Artemis. They had to fix this. “We’ve gotten this far. We’ll just have to go a little farther and figure it out.”

“We’ll go to Brigid’s Keep and talk with your mother. See what she says.”

“No,” Fynn said. “This is our project, Doc.
My
project. This has nothing to do with her.” Fynn punched in the code to the quarantine chamber.

Fynn didn’t bother with the silicone gloves. She lifted Artemis out of the cage, her little body radiating the baked heat of a dying mammal.

“Damn, girl,” Fynn whispered. She told Dr. Sullivan to unwrap a syringe for her. He did so, his mouth clamped into a disapproving line. She stuck it into Artemis’ arm.

“This is the last time, little sister,” she said, withdrawing a vial of blood. The monkey’s head nestled against her arm. Fynn rested her hand over Artemis’ chest and belly. She took a deep breath in. The healing power was sluggish after whatever it was that had happened with Eligos. She muttered a Gaelic prayer to Brigid and felt it stirring faster.

“Fynn, we need her addicted,” Sullivan said. “We need her sick so we can find the cure.”

“We have the vial of infected blood to work with. It will have to do,” Fynn said.

“You’re setting us back,” Dr. Sullivan said.

“I don’t care.”

The University swells drank cheap wine upstairs, jostling one another for a chance to stand next to the Chancellor. They were as irrelevant as paper dolls. Fynn’s work had brought prestige to St. Cocha University, but the animal in her arms had given everything she had to cure disease in a species not even her own.

Fynn bent her head. She held her hand over the monkey’s belly and lowered herself to kneeling. A sledgehammer slammed against the inside of her eardrums beneath the humming of a million angry bees. This was worse than the meningitis in the dorm. It was like the demon virus that almost killed her when she was too young to know what was happening. In the hammer’s wake, screams approached, as if from down a long road, getting closer and closer.

She focused on love. She loved Artemis. The gentle, generous animal had endured so many needles just so humans who would never know her could someday have a cure they needed. Fynn focused love through her hands until the only thing she knew was love flowing through her veins, through her hands, filling the small animal with light.

In she didn’t know how much time, she became aware of Dr. Sullivan crouching next to her. The screaming in her head faded. Fynn waited for the nausea to fade, as well. It didn’t, but Artemis shifted from diseased semi-consciousness to peaceful sleep. Dr. Sullivan lifted her to her feet. She leaned against him to keep from falling over. Her throat stung with dryness, but she felt her mouth forming a word in her mother’s voice.

“Unhuman,” she said.

“What did you say?” Dr. Sullivan’s eyes widened.

A great smashing shook the walls. The last thing she saw before the lights went out was the steel reinforced door to the hall flying across the lab.

Auxiliary fluorescents flashed on over the animal cages. Artemis raised a groggy head to see what was going on. Mother Brigid roared in Fynn’s ears.
The Unhuman!

Fynn dropped to the floor, pulling Dr. Sullivan under the counter with her. She passed Artemis to his trembling hands. Strange footsteps passed down the rows. It was not the sound of feet in shoes. It was the padding of leathery paws along with the ticking of claws.

Fynn held her breath. Her fingers itched for a bow and arrow.

They were close. There was a shuffle, a brush, and click. One of the intruders let out a low laugh.

“
Goddess of the Three, come to me,”
a voice gurgled in mockery. Something metal tinked against a steel counter. She only had to peer down the row to see what it was. A knife?

Stand.
Her mother’s voice was loving, but firm.
Face them. You are a goddess.
She froze. She didn’t want to be a goddess.

You know what you are, daughter. Stand.

Fear jumbled her memory. Face. Attack. Evade. Avoid daemonium weapons. Her parents had forced her to spend so many hours of her life on demon-fighting lessons, yet now that she faced the monsters of their collective nightmares, she could not move.

An overwhelming smell of sulphur burned the inside of her nose, as though someone lit a thousand matches. Sulphur indicated mayhem demons. If they were truly the mayhem demons of the Story Keeper’s prophecies, then that meant---

Her breath clouded in the suddenly frigid lab.

One of the long metal counters bent back like a stick of gum. A microscope exploded against the wall. Dr. Sullivan covered his ears. A hailstorm of broken glass bounced off the floor as more equipment flew through the air.

They had to get out, but not without the means to make more cure. She reached up to where she had left the syringe of Artemis’ infected blood. Her hand knocked it and it clattered to the floor.

The smashing in the lab stopped. She breathed in low, short gasps, as she pocketed the bloody syringe. A face rounded the edge of the doorway.

Not a human face. Flattened. Gnarled. Molded by pure hate. Its cracked lips rolled back over its misshapen hole of a mouth, stuffed with jagged teeth two rows deep.

Fynn pointed Sully toward the door to the hallway. “Run,” she whispered.

With the howls of the clawed ones behind them, they ran.

***

Fynn left Dr. Sullivan huddled with Artemis under a stairwell. It was Fynn the demons wanted. Mayhem demons were the only kind with the strength to kill a goddess. It was the sole reason they were bred and made. Her father the Story Keeper had schooled her well.

She lured them out from the building by running down the path she walked every day between classes. It led straight to the campus square, where students lingered. Branches snapped behind her. She headed off trail toward an ancient redwood hollowed out by a centuries-old fire. Its blackened core offered shelter.

The moonlight waned. On the path, three men crashed through the trees. They were the three guys from the Alley, Komo’s party, and the University reception:
Eligos, Amon,
and
Samael.
They were hungry, led by the one with eyes like water. They circled the path, their heads jerking from side to side. Fynn swallowed despite a dry throat while the men smelled the air. Eligos turned in her direction. The two others followed his gaze. Their eyes were glowing hollow orbs in the darkness. In their demon incarnation, she recognized them from the hardbound books her father drew by hand. They were three human brothers who emerged from three years in Hell. Their only purpose was to kill the Divine. Mayhem demons.

“There will be nothing human left in the three brothers,” the Story Keeper had said.

They stepped off the path toward her burned tree. With every step, they became less like men. Their bodies thickened, their faces flattened, and their mouths opened to reveal double rows of teeth. Eligos hissed. His enlarged, soulless eyes glowed from inside like Jerusalem candles.

Fynn ducked from the tree’s shelter to face the nightmare men.

They crept with bent knees, as though they had the powerful legs of enormous wolves. Her whole world shifted in one seismic moment, while the Three Brothers of her father’s most terrifying story sniffed the air one last time. Then they charged. She wished for three well-aimed arrows, but her weapons were stored at the Keep. Well, not all of her weapons. Fynn shook out her hands. She was a goddess who had spent the first fifteen years of her life training to fight the monsters of an entire world’s worst fears.

The demons’ massive shoulders hunched forward. They communicated to one another through clicking sounds that sounded like the language of insects. They circled and converged on her, a shock of sun-streaked hair falling across Eligos’ grossly misshapen forehead. He leapt over a sapling as though from a trampoline. A yellow fire burst alive in Fynn’s core. Heat coursed through her arms and legs.

“Get what you came for,” she said, her hair lifting from her scalp in a fiery halo. “I’ll give you your fight.”

Eligos’ pointed teeth gleamed in the dim moonlight. A shadow flickered across his glowing eyes. He made a deep, animal noise, but he did not move any closer. His brother rushed her neck with an open mouth. She knocked him away. He leapt for her throat again. She grabbed his arm and pulled him close.

Fynn hugged the demon she had caught as though they were long lost friends. He still had the tag on his shirt.
Samael.
He squirmed in her embrace like a bulbous insect, but through force of will, she stood. She squeezed tighter. The golden light pulsed deep inside her from a source that had no end. The light flowed through her hands like molten lava. The demon cried in agony while his flesh bubbled. It stank as it burned. She gagged in revulsion, but still she held.

Amon scrambled behind her to reach over and claw at her head and face. Eligos hung back, circling them. With blood dripping into her eyes, she grabbed the clawing one by the wrist while still holding his brother in a crushing embrace with one arm.

The forest echoed with demon howling. Golden beams of light filled her eyes, ears, and mouth. She did not feel the ground beneath her feet, nor the sting from the gashes in her skin. The power flowed through her in a blinding force that destroyed the demon in her embrace to a pile of bone and ash. She fell to the ground, still grasping a demon wrist, still awash in light, still fighting against her family’s nightmares come to life.

***

Dr. Sullivan called her name.

“Fynn? Can you hear me?” Her cheek rested on wet leaves. Flashes of light popped in her vision as she pushed herself up. Her fingers ached. She held tight to Amon’s hand by the wrist above where he’d chewed it off in raggedy strips of flesh and splintered bone.

She dropped it. “Gross,” she said. “I hate demons.”

“This has happened to you before?” Dr. Sullivan asked.

“No. But I was prepared for the eventuality.”

“Yes,” he said. “Extraordinary.”

Fynn smoothed her hair with the hand that hadn’t been gripping the claw. Static electricity crackled against her palm. “Artemis okay?” she asked. Dr. Sullivan held open his jacket to reveal her tucked under his arm, snoozing.

“To the Keep?” He helped her to her feet. They hustled in the direction of the parking lot. There were two demons left. They were out there. Her ears were primed for their unearthly howling.

She felt under the frame of the Chevy for the spare key. She usually loved her truck, but at that moment, she really wished that she’d accepted her mother’s offer of an armor-plated SUV. It was a waste of money, Fynn had said the last time her mother had made the offer. SUVs were bad for the environment. They used too much gas. Besides, she preferred old things.