The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1) (21 page)

Of course, the Hydravirus would not mean death to absolutely everyone. Those who could afford to live would live. His mother’s genius was that the cure was addictive to humans and the virus addictive to the Divine. No one would be wealthy anymore after they unleashed Hydra. No one would have power.

No one, that is, except his family.

Fynn would need him so badly. Saliva filled his mouth at the thought. It was just a matter of time until she was his forever. He would be good to her. He would never make her wait for a dose. She would get whatever she needed whenever she needed it and in return she would be his forever. They would live like gods in their island palace.

He would dress her in silks and diamonds. Or maybe just diamonds. Maybe he wouldn’t dress her at all. He would never mind the scars she would have after the doctors operated. Even her scars would be beautiful because they would be the chains that kept her bound to him.

“Why are you smiling?”

Cain startled. His mother had ghosted in and stood beside him. He clenched his jaw. She scratched his back lightly through his shirt. He shuddered involuntarily. She walked her fingers up his spine and across his shoulder. Then her fingers jumped to his ear. She jabbed one finger into the ear canal and grabbed onto the outside of the lobe like a handle and wrenched.

Before she let go he huddled on his hands and knees with his nose pressed against the industrial gray carpet, hot blood pouring out of his ear. His mother chuckled from the back of her throat. She moved across the floor to the window of the other side of the factory.

“Get up,” she said.

He obeyed her, gaining one foot and then the other. He fumbled in the front pocket of his suit jacket for a cloth handkerchief to hold to his ear. The joy created by his plans for Fynn Kildare was killed for the moment.

“The mother bitch is dead,” she said. “I got the call five minutes ago.”

And just like that, she brought his happiness back. With one dead, the other two would be greatly weakened. Amon and Eligos would be able to kill Liadan with little trouble. His heart surged despite the stabbing pain in his ear.

She stood with her back to him. She hooked one sharply-manicured finger, beckoning him to come look out the observation window with her. His stomach lurched, but again he obeyed.

“Deliver Fynn to me tonight,” he said. He heard his own voice against his ruined ear drum as though his head were packed with stones. “Amon and Eligos will take care of Liadan. It’s time.”

She crossed her arms and wouldn’t say yes or no. Her cropped blonde hair waved perfectly on her head. She pursed her shiny lips. How he would love to see her scream in pain.

There were four in the coven, including Cain and his mother. One had been planted with Mother Brigid. Cara was meant to keep Fynn safe for him. Cain took the handkerchief from his ear and folded it over before applying it again. He tried not to think about being a kid in the Keep. They left when he was thirteen, after Eligos turned four. They had loved the green meadows and the heavy vanilla smell of the sugar pine trees. The coastal mountains were like fortresses of a mighty God. The ocean like God’s beautiful mother.

Fynn was so much younger than Cain, only a child when he left. At the University party she said she didn’t remember him. It hurt him worse than anything his mother administered. He was just one of many who followed Fynn around.

Cain went to the meeting room the day they left the Keep and prayed at the altar of Brigid. He begged the Goddess to make his mother leave without her sons. If only she would just go and never return so that Cain and his brothers could be free of her. He never prayed for anything so hard in his life.

That day Fynn came in and found him there. She didn’t ask him why he was crying, but she held his hand and brought it to her heart. He could feel it beating. She lifted his hand to her lips and kissed his knuckles. She patted his face and gave him a knowing smile. Cain had stared after her as she walked away, forgetting his pain and humiliation and fear. He stared after her, forgetting everything.

But it hadn’t worked. His prayers meant nothing. That day his mother packed them up and they left the Keep forever. They didn’t say goodbye to anyone. They drove past Keep children playing in the field outside the wall. He pictured the entire place closing over as though he were a small pebble thrown into the ocean. No one would ever remember him.

“You’re thinking of her right now,” his mother said, her voice a velvet purring. “I don’t understand the fixation. There will be hundreds of girls crawling on their knees for you in a couple of days, son. You’ll have your pick.”

“I already know who I want,” he said. Once this was over, he would walk out of the glass doors of Cain Pharmaceuticals and never look back. His mother could have the company. She could have the world. He didn’t want it. He didn’t want the hundreds of women she promised. He only wanted Fynn.

He and Fynn would live like the last two people on the planet. They would live like the new Adam and Eve only this time without offspring to get in the way and ruin things. After his brothers killed her sister, he would make absolute sure that Fynn would never have children. If one of the goddesses had two children and formed another Three, she would be all-powerful again. She would be a goddess again and he would have nothing again.

He could never allow that.

Cain held the cloth to his ear. The bleeding slowed though he could hear nothing from that side. He wondered idly if he would ever hear from it again. Although he usually healed from his mother’s little games, he was never sure he would.

On this side of the observation tower they looked over the white warehouse. Four rows of gurneys lined up in the middle of the floor, one hundred in each row. Nurses in white scrubs walked up and down, checking the machines connected by masses of wires and tubes to the sleeping body on each gurney. There were hundreds of nurses, one for each slumbering patient. It was lots of work keeping one person in deep coma from dying. Keeping alive four hundred whose souls would by this time be desperate for the relief of death was a huge undertaking. The young faces of the sleepers looked peaceful and quiet. The nurses kept their bodies fed, hydrated, eliminated and warm. Yet somewhere far away the souls and psyches of those bodies were lost.

“My new army,” Cain’s mother said. She leaned forward and pressed her head against the glass. Cain watched her in profile, her cropped hair exposing the back of her neck. She looked almost vulnerable for a moment. Her eyes glistened with pure happiness as she gazed over the four hundred demons in the making.

“Expensive work, army building,” Cain said. “This better be worth it.” His mother grinned. Sometimes she punished him less if he was snide. He felt a heaviness on his shoulders. He was tired of trying to read her moods. He was tired of the painful punishments. His fingers itched for a knife that he could drag across that elegant neck.

“This is the Awakening. You won’t have to worry about paying anybody but the janitors.”

Of course money wasn’t an issue anyway. Cain Pharmaceuticals had billions at their disposal. They had the cash to pay as many mercenaries as they needed to comb the streets of every major city in the country for young street thugs and gang members. He had to admire her efficiency. She had four hundred young murderers drugged, incanted over, and in a shallow death within two weeks. All while organizing a rock show to end all rock shows. She was a great CEO.

Her fingers looked like claws on the window ledge. One of the boys on a gurney twitched. His mother pressed a button to a loudspeaker.

“Go to number twenty-four,” she said. One of the nurses nodded but she hesitated before moving. The boy tore the wires and tubes away from his face and body. Blood ran down his arm from where he pulled out his I.V. The nurse was a young woman, maybe twenty-three years old. She was pretty, her hair in a swishy ponytail. She glanced up at the window.

Cate pressed the loudspeaker button again. “Go,” she said.

The nurse moved toward what she thought was the lesser evil. Cain had to pay exorbitant salaries to keep employees who would withstand visits from his mother. She kept her finger on the button so they could hear. The nurse spoke in a hushed tone to the twenty-fourth newly minted demon. She was telling him that he was all right now. She was telling him that there was nothing to fear.

But there was plenty to fear. The young man grabbed the nurse and sank his teeth into her neck. She fought but he was stronger than she was, stronger than before he fell asleep that morning. He had not been gone long enough to be able to shape shift like Cain’s brothers, but there was little humanity left in him now. And he was strong. Freakishly, hellishly strong. He flipped her over on her back on the gurney and he fed on her until her blood flowed over the sheet and blanket and floor.

Cain hated the waste of beauty. All of the nurses and assistants his mother hired were good-looking, strong, healthy people. The chaos at the awakenings was more delicious to her when the victims were beautiful. The demon opened his mouth smeared with the nurse’s blood and yowled.

The other nurses ran straight for the doors. Cain’s mother giggled at the metallic thunks of the locked knobs not turning. It was like watching people trying to escape a burning building. Up and down the rows, others were stirring. The gurney wheels squeaked as their occupants opened their eyes to their new, post-Hell selves.

“It’s the fresh blood on white that I love,” Cain’s mother said, her voice a prayerful whisper. “It’s just gorgeous.”

Cain’s throat filled with bile. He was a witch like his mother, yes. She had indoctrinated him into that life. He had claimed to forsake his soul when he entered the coven of four. She had promised him Fynn if he did. She would be kept alive after they killed the other two. The Three would be broken and he would have his prize.

He turned away from the scene. His mother’s obsession with death made him sick.

“You are weak,” she said. She kept watching the floor and he wasn’t sure if she was even talking to him. He returned to the window over the factory and watched the doomed pair at the conveyer, sorting Armageddon in a party drug that came in pretty metal boxes.

Cain’s ear throbbed until he couldn’t hear anything anymore except the beating and rushing of his own blood. He was grateful after all that his mother had ruined his ear and damaged his hearing.

He didn’t want to hear the Awakening.

Fynn sat in the armor-plated vehicle in the silence after turning off the engine. Dr. Sullivan texted good news. Her mother’s vital signs were improving. She’d be awake by the time Fynn got home.

Windflower. She wondered what other tricks her father was hiding. She couldn’t stop herself from smiling. She was so relieved. Now to help Komo.

Fynn opened the car door and was hit by a wild urge to get back in and drive away as fast as she could.
Unhuman.
Mother Brigid’s voice sounded close, as though she were in the passenger seat. Fynn raised her shoulder to rub it against her ear.
Unhuman.
Her mother’s voice again.

“I can take care of this,” she said aloud. “Focus on getting better.”

Her mother went silent. It wasn’t what Fynn expected, but she’d take the gift.

Fynn got out of the car. She couldn’t wait to make up to her family all that she had brought on by being an addict. Once back at the Keep, she would do anything she could to help her mother’s recovery. Then the Three of them, Brigid, Lia and Fynn, would sit down and have a long talk about their next move. They had to do something about Hydravirus, they had to shore up the family and the Keep from any future demon attack.

They had to stick together.

She rubbed her arms against a prickling dread as she walked up the front porch steps. She paused before opening the door, resting her hand on the stained redwood.

“Courage,” she whispered.

Suddenly the door opened. It was Cara, worry lines between her eyes. “Fynn,” she said. “Thank God.”

She pulled her into the house, the whole place booming with party noise. “He keeps calling your name. He won’t let me call the doctor. You’ve got to convince him to go to the hospital. He won’t listen to me.”

Fynn moved through the rooms. She’d never seen it so crammed with people. Discordant guitar music twanged through the walls. A shifting curtain of smoke hung in the air. Girls were everywhere, hanging off the shoulders of entourage boys she barely remembered. She passed through the great room and one of Cate’s guards lounged on the couch flanked by two naked women.

Fynn clomped up the stairs in her best pair of heavy steel-toed lace-ups. She had dressed for battle, but no one in that house was sober enough to give her a hard time.

“Where is Cate?” Fynn asked. The house had gotten seriously out of control.

“She’s not here, Fynnie. I was hoping she was with you.” Cara followed behind her heels. Fynn turned in the hallway at the bottom of the stairwell to Komo’s tower room. Her room, too. She was so innocent the first time she slept there with Komo. It was only two months before that she’d become addicted to Nine, before demons were real, before she was a goddess again, with the full responsibility that came with the title.

The truth was, no one could handle Komo, but Fynn. She felt a surge of pride. After two days without her, everything in Komo’s house had fallen apart.

“Help him,” Cara begged. “Nobody else can.”

“Stay here,” Fynn said. “I’m going to see him alone. Try to get a hold of Cate.”

Cara whispered thanks. In the octagon room, Komo sprawled on the bed. A sheet twisted around his long body, his chest rising and falling with each tortured breath. Sweat covered his sallowed skin in a veil. His eyes were clouded, half closed. He didn’t see her. He didn’t even recognize her.

She tried to feel his forehead. He smacked her across the face with a flailing hand. A star exploded under her eye. Her mouth filled with blood.

She climbed on to him and clamped her knees around his sides. He bucked beneath her. She muttered in Gaelic, old St. Brigid prayers.