The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1) (25 page)

“Do the math.” Every word sounded like choking.

“C is the third letter of the alphabet, S the nineteenth. 3 plus 19 is 22. 2 plus 2 is four. A coven.”

The monster smiled a little but there was no joy in it. He broke free and trotted to the gate. Smoke started pouring from the top of his head as he stepped over the threshold.

William lunged for him. He grabbed the demon in a bear hug and threw him to the ground. They rolled away from the gate. William’s old bones creaked and popped until they landed at the bottom of a ditch. The boy lay beside him smelling like burning flesh and farts. William groaned and struggled to his feet. Old Brigid had a certain sense of humor sometimes. Recruiting a Mayhem demon into the fold had a grand enough flair for a final act.

He reached out a hand to the boy, who lay on the ground looking at the sky with a stunned look on his ruined face. “You aren’t crossing back today,” William said. “There are other plans for you.”

Headlights swept the trees down the road. William trudged up the embankment. He waved down Lia’s car.

Lia threw open the door. “Dad! What are you doing out here? I’ve got Fynn with me.”

Fynn poked her head around her sister and gave a sheepish wave. The demon pushed past him to get to Fynn. Lia’s eyes widened. She stepped on the gas, door swinging and car swerving. Then she stopped, her head turned to listen to Fynn’s frantic explanation.

William waited with the demon on the side of the road as Lia reversed and met them.

“Get in,” she said, her voice hard as granite. He turned to the demon and gave him instructions. The cabin would be safe for him to hide for the night.

“Dad,” Lia said. “Hurry up. I want to see Mom.”

William patted the demon boy on the back and pointed him towards the right path. He wasn’t in a big hurry to get in the car with his oldest daughter. She kind of scared him, even when he didn’t have the worst possible news to deliver. And he would have to be the one to deliver it. If they thought they were going to see their mother it meant that neither of them knew she was dead. They were blissfully ignorant of what had happened to their mother. It was curious. It could only mean one thing.

He slid into the back seat. A quiver full of arrows and a bow rattled on the floor.

Fynn looked over her shoulder at the demon as they drove into the Keep. “Is he okay?” she asked. William turned too. He looked human from that distance as he lumbered into the darkness, his hands stuck in his pockets.

“He’ll be all right,” William said. “He’s a little mixed up is all.”

“Can someone tell me just what the hell is going on right now?” Liadan asked. She drove too fast. Her hair floated around her head as though electrified with static. William steeled his courage.

“You can stop speeding, Lia. Mother is already gone.”

Fynn’s head whipped around. “No!” she yelled.

William didn’t know if Fynn was yelling at him for what he had said, or yelling at him to stop giving bad news while Lia was driving. It was too late anyway. The car doors blew off the sides and his daughter drove even faster towards the main building where Brigid lay.

“Don’t kill the storyteller for telling the story,” William said. They spun to a stop. The girls ran toward the building, leaving him alone in the backseat.

He stepped out of the car, and raised his eyes to the night sky.

“Ah, Brigid,” he said aloud. “You left me to two crazy baby goddesses.”

The stars twinkled as cold and remote as ever. He shoved his hands in his pockets and followed his daughters inside. He envied the boy the cozy cabin away from the scene inside the Keep. It might not be so bad to have a fellow around, even if he was just a sad human Mayhem demon.

Life was only going to get crazier. He was an old man. He knew the only constant was change. The reason why his daughters hadn’t felt the destruction of the Three was because the Three was intact. It was the only possible explanation.

One of his daughters was pregnant.

Fynn ran after her sister through the long hallway of the hospital wing. This was the last place their mother would want to die. Someone was wringing her heart between two fists. Brigid deserved better. After everything she had done for everyone in the Keep, they let her die in a sterile hospital. After the thousands of babies she’d birthed and the thousands of people she’d healed in warm and loving rooms, she’d been left to die in a sterile space alone. This was the place where they brought people suffering from diseases to quarantine them. This was the part of the hospital for people who had been brought to Brigid’s Keep as a desperate last chance to stave off death. They came here and most of the time her mother healed them. She healed everyone.

They rushed into the room at the end of the hall. She could not run as fast as her sister. She came in behind Lia and stopped at the foot of their mother’s bed. Brigid lay still and silent, the sheet drawn tight. Her face sank below her cheekbones. Her hair looked like straw on the white pillowcase. The room was quiet as a tomb.

Then it wasn’t quiet at all. Lia clawed at her own face, wailing. Fynn clamped her hands over her ears. She bent over her mother’s legs.

Fynn had spent so much of the past seven years trying to break free from her mother. Now that she was dead, she felt amputated of every limb, of her own heart. She gasped for air as though she were missing her lungs.

William shuffled in, carrying a full quiver and bow on each shoulder. He dropped them with a groan by the door. He went to Fynn and wrapped his arms around her.

“You said the serum would work,” she said.

“It would have if she got it.”

“I gave it to her,” Fynn said. Lia rocked back and forth on her heels, moaning.

“You gave it to Colm Sullivan,” William said. Fynn shook her head, uncomprehending. “Cate Soren and Cain Sandlin. Cara Santos. Colm Sullivan is the fourth witch.”

“Cara had said there were four who had made the deal with darkness,” Fynn said. “But she was the leader. It wasn’t Cate. It couldn’t be Dr. Sullivan. He loves Mother. He loved her.” Her own voice sounded like burning paper. The edges of her entire world collapsed and burned. Of course William was right. She fell down to a hard sit on the chair near her mother’s bed.

Every single friend outside the Keep betrayed her. She needed a minute while she watched the life she’d so meticulously built on her own implode like a demolishing building.

“Tell me this isn’t one of those cheap witch carnival tricks,” Lia said. Her eyes were dancing fire. “All the same initials. Something stupid with numbers, right?”

William motioned to the bows and arrows by the door. “The scorpion is scuttling away, daughters. He hasn’t left the Keep yet.”

Lia darted, grabbing a quiver and bow at a dead run. Fynn shouldered her own. No time to wrap her brain around the story. It was unfolding at that moment. She flew down the stairwell, no patience for elevators. There was a scorpion in their home. That it was sweet Dr. Sullivan, her friend and teacher was more than she could stand.

She ran into the gusty night. Lia was already barking instructions to disciples to lock the gates. Guards dashed through the parking lot, waving their flashlights between the cars. Lia’s hair flew about her head like a fire. As she yelled orders a gale force bent the tops of the trees.

Fynn turned and jogged back into the building. She didn’t want Lia to follow. It had occurred to her where Dr. Sullivan was.

The stairway down to the basement smelled musty, the walls moist rock. When Fynn was small she was afraid that the sea itself would break through and drown her if she got caught down there. Fynn drew a bow out of the quiver on her back and held it perched on the bowstring. It was silent down the long corridor of rooms. Fynn’s skin rippled across the back of her neck. She couldn’t have imagined Dr. Sullivan was one of the four witches set upon destroying her family, but of course it made sense. Cara was her best friend, and Dr. Sullivan her mentor and teacher. They were the people closest to her. They knew everything about her. They knew her every strength and weakness.

Fynn crept on each closed door, her ears pricked for noise. She pulled the bow taut, pointed the arrow down.

She stepped towards the last room where the door was cracked open. Dr. Sullivan stood at the cage cradling Artemis. The monkey’s body was limp. Dr. Sullivan raised his head with a mask of sadness. As soon as he saw her face, saw her bow at the ready, the expression fell away. He dropped Artemis’ body in her cage.

“I broke her neck,” he said. “I always thought it would be easy to do and it was.”

Fynn blinked back tears. “Evil,” she whispered.

“Is there any such thing as evil, really?” he said, in his usual sardonic way. Then he raised his eyebrows. “You are supposed to be dead,” he said.

“Yeah. Well,” Fynn said. “I’m not.” She lifted the bow and aimed for his chest.

“You will be,” he said. “There is one hell of a demon after you.”

Fynn raised a shoulder as if to shake off a fly. Even though he was wrong about the demon, listening to him threaten her was worse than hearing Cara talk about how she wanted Komo. It was her dear familiar Sully, with his wry voice, his intellectual calm. But the hate in his eyes was so vicious that she wondered how he had ever hid it from them.

“Why are you doing this?” Fynn asked.

“The witch mother will rule now that Brigid is dead,” he said. Fynn pulled the bowstring taut. “The Triple Goddess is broken. You know the story as well as I do.”

“But why?” Her fingers burned under the sinew string.

“It’s about power, Kildare. We’re entering a new world order. I’m going to be a god. Not you.”

“I never wanted that. I just wanted to do the work.” Fynn said.

“And I appreciate that. I am going to be a god among very sick men because of
your
work.” He smiled as though he had said something funny. He took a step. Fynn held her ground between Sullivan and the door. “Now Fynn,” he said. “You are going to let me pass. We both know you aren’t going to let that fly at me.”

Fynn felt paralyzed, horrified at what was happening. He walked straight toward the door. He would escape. She couldn’t kill her teacher.

A breeze whistled by her ear and before she knew what was happening Dr. Sullivan flew backwards, an arrow sticking straight out of his chest. Fynn lowered her bow, her fingers slipping along the shaft of the arrow. Dr. Sullivan slumped against the far wall. “Cain is going to scrape you out, you stupid bitch. The Three is already dead.” Blood gurgled in his throat, bubbled at his mouth. He grinned like a lipsticked clown.

Lia pushed Fynn out of the way. She smacked Dr. Sullivan across the face. She pulled another arrow out of her quiver. Fynn lurched out of the room but didn’t miss hearing the thunk of Lia’s second arrow hitting its mark.

“Tell the guards we need clean up down here,” Lia called. “See if you can find Jana and meet me at the kitchen hearth.”

Fynn ran up the moldy stairwell. She had been trained all her life to fight their enemies, but for nothing. Shame pressed on her head as heavy as a boulder from the Keep’s walls. Fynn had never felt more useless in her entire life. She stumbled into the night. Disciples and guards darted around, nobody knowing what to do.

From outside the walls her father’s voice rose in lamentation.

Desert sage hung in bunches from the rafters of William’s cabin. Fynn brushed against the silvery green leaves with her fingers to release the scent. She ground a dried leaf between her finger and thumb. The astringent smell brought her back to car camping trips she took with William, watching the moonrise over the high Sierra. When he built the cabin, cars weren’t invented yet. She was so used to the fact of her parents’ great age that she rarely thought on how strange that was or what it might be like to lose them.

Brigid may have been an ancient woman, but for Fynn twenty-three was young to lose a mother. Her hand fluttered over her midsection and she thought fleetingly of Komo. She wondered if he was thinking of her. With a sinking heart, she recalled the Ritual Madness girls and the heart-shaped Nine pills, and knew that he was not.

She had devoted her life to Komo while witches circled around her family. Although if she wanted to be honest with herself she would have to admit that she had only devoted her life to Komo for eight weeks. Their whole big love story amounted to two months of magic, kisses like wine, sex and music and friends. Meanwhile every single one of those so-called friends had been lying in wait to take her down. Including Sully. And she couldn’t take care of business when he tried to escape. She had thought Lia was weak. Well, she was wrong about that too.

A shadow in the corner shifted its weight. Fynn startled, then fell into a chair.

“You should have killed me when you had the chance,” she said. “I’m useless to everybody.”

The man in the corner rubbed the stubble growing on his chin, his blue green eyes steadily watching her. Fynn broke the stare by throwing a log into the woodstove. “Is it cold in here or are you making it that way?” she asked. The demon called Eli didn’t answer. The stove roared when she pulled out the handle for the flue. She waited a moment then pushed it back in.

She pried off her boots. “Well, first you tried to kill me,” she said. “More than once. Then you saved my life for some reason.”

He nodded.

“And I guess talking is a problem for you.”

“I hate...” he started. Then he swallowed. “I hate my voice,” he said. “I hate what I’ve done and I hate who I am.” He pounded his fists on his own head like a crazy person.

Fynn went to him. He blocked her with his forearm.

“Don’t be nice to me,” he said. “Don’t you be nice to me. I killed your mother.” He sounded like he was choking on his own sorrow.

“What do you mean?” she asked. She tried again to touch him but he turned his back so that his face was in the corner.

“I killed Mother Brigid. I did it.”

Fynn shimmied her way in front of him, more forceful this time. She rested her hands on his face. He held on to her wrists but did not push her away.