The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1) (16 page)

She moaned as the drug moved through her blood. The girl with the raven hair moved beside her and kissed her with lips that tasted like salted caramel. Her fingertips raked the insides of Fynn’s thighs.

“Is that enough?” one of them said.

It is not enough. It will never be enough.

Fynn cried out in pleasure.

***

Pain. A searing gash on her neck.

Fynn gasped for breath in the middle of the living room floor. She looked up at the high, white ceiling. She could smell him before she could see him. The one-handed Mayhem demon from the woods entered into her vision from above her head.

“Eligos didn’t want me to come in,” he said. “So I killed him.” He nudged Fynn’s shoulder with his boot.

She tried to turn her head to find the Ritual Madness girls, but she couldn’t move. She could only open and close her eyes. She listened for signs of Cate or Komo. The demon man frowned and cocked his head. He kicked her by the ear. Her head wobbled back and forth as though her neck were made of rubber.

He crouched closer and his face flattened into a demon’s mask. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t even talk. Her neck burned, but she couldn’t see or feel why. The demon picked up a long knife with a point dulled by the passing of centuries, smeared with his brother’s blood. It emanated a toxic heat.

Fynn’s breathing reduced to shallow gasps. It was a daemonium blade.

There was a crunching sound and his face flattened further, his mouth stretching into a razor-lined oval. His lips disappeared over a double row of short pointy teeth. His eyes bulged out of their sockets and turned as hollow as glass.

She unlocked her jaw to scream, but what came out was a high-pitched whisper. He looked into her eyes as though watching a movie that enraptured him. Burning sulphur singed her nose.

He held the blade against her collarbone and his mouth grew wider as her skin sizzled and popped under the metal. She smelled her blistering flesh as a trace of thin smoke rose off its surface. In the first second, she didn’t feel it, but then she did. She could not cry out for help. Her jaw was locked and she sucked in air through her teeth.

“Goddess of three,” the demon sang in a voice like a rusty nail. “Come to meeeee.”

He crouched over her chest, his knees on her shoulders. He dug the dull blade into the soft flesh of her throat.

She had nothing. She lost everything. She had no movement in her limbs, she could not speak. She lost everything, but pain and blinding fear as blood poured down the side of her neck and pooled under her shoulder.

Mother
.
Forgive me.

Tears flowed down the sides of her face and the demon squealed. He licked them with his dry tongue. He thought they were for him.

But she wasn’t crying for the pain. Her human form would suffer and die, and that was her fault in the end. Her heart keened for her family. She would die and there would be a breaking of the Three. Without the Three, the remaining two would lose power. Where the Triple Goddess was rent, all manner of demons and whatever witch rustled them from Hell could move in and destroy the Keep. They could destroy the world.

Fynn closed her eyes. She tried to conjure the comfort of the scent of drying sagebrush in William’s cabin. She tried to remember the strong arms of her mother, and the way Lia’s comb and sure fingers could put order to her wild hair. She tried to be a child running across the meadow with her small hands clasped in her sister’s and mother’s, laughing in the sunshine, knowing that they would always be safe within the walls.

The demon gurgled in his throat. “Open your eyes,” he said, and slashed at her chest with the blade.

Fynn’s eyes slammed open. She would have no comfort in the past. There was only this one long, terrible moment when she would die.

Mother Brigid,
she prayed in silence, the only prayer she had left.
Mother Brigid forgive me.

The window darkened behind the monster.

A terrible figure loomed and blocked the hazy sun. Fynn glimpsed skirts waving in the sea breeze and then the image shattered through the window. The demon leapt from Fynn’s chest and rested on thick bent legs. Brigid swooped in and stood between the demon and her daughter. The demon jumped again and bounced off the wall from the balls of his feet. He vaulted through the broken window.

“Daughter,” Brigid said. She gathered Fynn in her arms and carried her out of the wicked house.

The daemonium venom polluted Fynn’s bloodstream like nuclear waste. Phantom insects chewed the edges of her skin. Hallucination spiders crawled from her eyes, their legs puncturing her pupils. She would go mad with terror.

“Kill me,” she said through clenched teeth. She tried to unlock her brain, untangle its knots so she could talk with her mother the way they did in the old days with no voices, no words. The barrier was impermeable as lead. There was no getting through.

Let me die.

Brigid held her in the back seat as William drove. “Don’t cleanse her addiction, Bridey,” he said. He sat ramrod straight as though he considered driving a novelty, his midnight hair shot with silver. His purity of heart made it worse for Fynn. She ground her teeth in pain.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, spit foaming at the sides of her mouth.

Mother Brigid did not answer.

“Don’t do it,” William said from the front seat.

“Quiet now,” Mother Brigid said. Fynn did not know whether she was talking to her or to William. She rested her face against her mother’s shoulder. Her mother held her like a baby and Fynn felt the poison leave her system as if it were air escaping a punctured tire.

“Praise the Goddess,” Fynn said, as fervent and full of love as a convert.

***

Fynn and her mother lay in beds in front of a roaring fireplace in one of the Keep’s healing rooms. Her mother lay quiet. Fynn tried to touch her back but her reach fell short.

A young disciple came by and felt Fynn’s forehead.

“Who are you?” Fynn asked.

“Jana. I’m your nurse tonight.”

“What is wrong with us?” Fynn asked.

“Mother Brigid healed you of addiction,” she said. “Now you both need to recover.”

“Is she sick?”

“She is. It was a bad idea. She should have let you gut it out.”

“I’m sorry,” Fynn said.

“You know addictions are bad healings. They take forever to get over.”

“I know.” She’d be apologizing forever.

“You shouldn’t have let her do it,” the girl said. She felt under Fynn’s jaw and then took her pulse. Her hair was woven in a pattern of intricate braids, her arms laced with dark blue tattoos. Her mother surrounded herself with these acolytes, trained them to be nurses and doctors and midwives. They never talked back and they never ran away. They were perfect daughters.

“I am sorry,” Fynn said again, full of regret though she knew she didn’t have the strength to stop her mother from anything she wanted to do.

“Can you try to sleep?” the disciple asked.

Fynn closed her eyes, but it was a long time before she could.

***

Fynn rested in the healing room after laying hands on the woman infected with demon virus. It felt like she had cold iron rods wedged into her spine, between her collarbones, in the spaces between her ribs. They were tearing her apart. She had to remain on her stomach because the skin on her back tore away from itself as the flesh-eating demon virus ravaged her body.

Fynn wished for death.

“Let me die,” she said as the doctors tried injecting her with interferon. Death was there, crouching in the shadows beside the hearth. Its eyes glowed in the reflection of the fire.

Her mother and sister chanted in Gaelic. Mother Brigid enveloped Fynn in her arms so that Fynn had felt that her mother was the whole earth expanded and wrapping itself around her, a treasured daughter. The healing light flowed through her mother’s hands until the pain disappeared.

Fynn’s ears filled with the shrieking of demons as they disappeared, too, down a long and faraway tunnel.

***

The dreams and memories dissipated. An overwhelming love and tenderness for her mother flowed from Fynn’s brittle heart.

“I love you, Mom.”

Mother Brigid nodded, her eyes at half-mast.

“I know you do, Fynn,” she said. She had new lines around her eyes that deepened when she smiled.

“Is it the daemonium that has made you tired?” Fynn asked. They never needed recovery after healing human illnesses no matter how terrible. Only addictions and demon sicknesses required recovery.

Brigid shrugged one shoulder under the quilt. “Those wounds healed swiftly. I didn’t start feeling sick until I soaked up your addiction.”

The Nine. “I’m free?”

“You are free.”

Fynn never remembered seeing so much white in her mother’s hair.

“I won’t leave again, Mom,” she said.

Mother Brigid patted Fynn’s thin back. “Please remember this, daughter. The time is coming very near when our power will be revealed and the people will need us.”

“Mom. Can’t we just talk?” Fynn took a lock of her mother’s hair and twisted it around her finger. She wanted to share what she had been through. She wanted her mother to understand about her life. She thought of Komo, and burned to tell her mother how it felt to stand on the stage and listen to him sing. She wanted her to know how he could move an audience of ten thousand people with the plucking of a single string on his guitar.

Her mother pulled Fynn close. “You think you are in love.”

“I am in love,” Fynn said.

“Promise me you won’t cleanse him of his addiction,” Mother said. “Healing addictions weakens us. Especially of this Nine. This is a demon drug, Fynn. It isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen.”

“I am sorry,” Fynn said. Her mother pushed her hair from her face and kissed her forehead.

“Komo needs to get well on his own. The world can’t afford to have weak gods now.”

“I’ll bring Komo to The Keep,” Fynn said. She yawned and found a cool place on her pillow to rest her cheek.

“You stay. We’ll send for him. He’ll know he’s welcome. If he comes on his own, we can help him.”

Fynn basked in the glow of the fire. She played her fingers across the place on her neck where she should have been mortally wounded by the daemonium blade. The skin was tight with scar tissue.

“Go to sleep, Fynn,” her mother whispered. She began to sing in her native language, a Gaelic lullaby that Fynn had not heard since she was a child.

Lia came in while Fynn dozed in a half sleep. She sat on the foot of the bed and Fynn felt as though she had never left home. Komo would be able to rest here. Komo
would
come to the Keep. He had to. Mother Brigid and Lia were right. Fynn needed to stay with her mother and sister, because together they were the Three, stronger than any force from earth or Hell. They were stronger than human vice, stronger than evil and selfishness and fear. Together they were elemental. Together they were life itself.

***

Fynn woke to a hard rapping on the door. Brigid stirred beside her on the bed. Lia stood at the door, letting in Jana and Dr. Sullivan in his white lab coat and scrubs.

“There is a crisis in the Oaks Center,” Dr. Sullivan said. Mother Brigid sat up. She winced as she rubbed at her lower back.

“What is it?” Lia asked.

“An outbreak in the infant ward,” he said. He ran a hand over his face as though to stave off panic. “It looks...dammit. I don’t know how to even say this.”

“Colm,” Mother Brigid said. Her voice gathered storm clouds. “Speak.”

“Yes, of course. It looks demon in nature to me, Brigid. It looks like Hydravirus.”

Mother Brigid threw off the covers. She stood, tottered, and held out her arm for Lia to balance her.

“Mom. Don’t go,” Lia said. Her command was so strong that Fynn expected their mother to turn around and get back into the bed. But she only paused for a second. Sadness blew through Fynn like a cold wind. Lia grabbed Fynn’s hand and she knew that she had felt it, too.

Fynn clutched her mother’s sleeve with both fists. “Stay here,” she said.

“Listen to your daughters,” Dr. Sullivan said. “There would be nothing you could do short of a hands-on Healing, and that would be risky for you right now. You probably couldn’t get there in time anyway.” He shook his head. “The damned thing is so fast moving.”

Mother Brigid gestured for Jana to help her. She gave orders to have her clothes brought and a car and driver prepared.

“I’m coming, too,” Lia said.

“No,” Mother Brigid replied. She pushed Lia down so hard on the bed that her teeth clacked together.

She ran from the room with Jana in tow and Dr. Sullivan filling her in with details from behind. Mother Brigid was like a freight train. She was unstoppable. She was stronger than a freight train.

“She’s like a tornado,” Lia said.

“An earthquake,” Fynn replied.

“A tsunami.”

“Everything we are naming is destructive,” Lia said quietly. She moved to the fireplace. “That isn’t fair.”

Fynn shed her nightdress and pulled on the linen pants and cotton tunic Jana had left for her by the bed. “Dr. Sullivan wanted her to go,” she said. “You could tell.”

“She shouldn’t have,” Lia said. “She forgets sometimes that she isn’t invincible.”

“How human are we?” Fynn asked. She felt under the bed for boots, hoped Jana knew her size.

“We are human enough,” Lia said. She wasn’t in the same hurry. She poked at the fire with a stick from the hearth. “We can get hurt. We can die - and so can she.”

“We’re going with her,” Fynn said. “Come on.”

“Try the door and see what happens,” Lia said. She didn’t move from the fireside. Her face was impassive though her eyes were sad.

“You’re kidding me. You won’t come with me? You’re so afraid to leave the Keep that you won’t go out even to protect our mother?”

“Try the door,” Lia said.

Fynn touched the doorknob and it burned her like a hot iron. She pulled her sleeve over her hand and tried to turn it but it would not move. Then the door threw out a hard wave of energy like a thunderclap. Fynn covered her ears.