The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1) (30 page)

He unlocked a utility closet that hid a roof access. The hatch at the top of the ladder opened next to an electrical fuse center large enough to hide behind, across the roof from the helicopter landing pad. Eligos and Fynn would come out at the top of the stairwell twenty feet away. He had the perfect spot to aim and fire. She would be dead before she knew he had shot her.

He’d have a bullet left for his brother. Then he’d complete the leap he’d begun that morning. If he couldn’t control Fynn then he couldn’t have her. And he couldn’t control her. He saw that now. It didn’t mean he wanted to live without her.

The pilot sat in his kiosk, oblivious, looking at his phone. The heavy stairwell door opened and Eligos ran out with Fynn over his shoulder. The screams of the demon horde rose behind them. The pilot ventured out of the kiosk. He’d been expecting Cain and Fynn, not a Mayhem brother.

The demons poured out of the stairwell. One leapt on the pilot’s back and tore at his jugular with its teeth. Eligos pulled on the door to the helicopter but it was locked. Only the pilot had the key and the pilot was buried in a feeding frenzy. A growing circle of demons closed in on Eligos as more sniffed their way into the night air. Fynn stood behind him as they backed up to the edge of the roof.

Cain held his breath as they stepped closer to his hiding place. He could almost touch her. Eligos was in full demon form, teeth razored in a wide mouth, crouched on reptilian legs. He swiped at a bold demon with one claw, slicing him open. One after the other fell to the concrete as he threw them off, shredded them with his claws, and tore their throats out with his teeth. Fynn shot off arrows, killing a few as they advanced, but her quiver grew thin.

More demons approached. They overran the roof. Fynn and Eligos couldn’t fight them all. Cain watched through the space under the heavy trapdoor, his heart quickening.

“I’m going for the door,” Eligos said. “I’ve got to bolt it.” Fynn protested, but this time, he did not heed her. He charged through the demons like abattering ram. They leapt on his back until no part of him was visible. He was just a knot of insanity moving to the door. There was the slide of the bolt. Then the knot fell in a mass of gleeful snarling.

Dirt blew into Cain’s eyes. Fynn seemed caught in the middle of a tornado. In the floodlights on the roof, a cold blast plastered her hospital gown to her legs. She climbed onto the wall, her heels hanging over the edge. She would fall backward in the same death Cain had courted. Cain yearned to leap from his hiding place and join her in the fall, but his cowardice was an iron curtain he could not pass. Tears streamed down his cheeks as she teetered into the nothingness.

There was the sound of a jet engine motor as a black shape dove through the air and into the face of an approaching demon. Then another and another. Over the mad noise of the demons, a massive engine sound roared above their heads. Cain dared to open the trap door further, expecting Keep helicopters, paratroopers, lobbed grenades.

What he saw turned his blood to ice. The flapping wings of countless birds blanketed the night sky. There were eagles, hawks, falcons, seagulls, ravens. They were millions, as deep as the sky itself, spiraling down in a cyclone of feathers, beaks and claws. The sound grew deafening, the wings’ percussion like heavy artillery. They descended on the roof with the force of Divine wrath.

Cain longed to drop down the ladder and run for cover, but he couldn’t look away. The demons tried to cover themselves as the birds attacked their heads, swooping in to tear out the soft places with hooked beaks and talons. Eligos covered his head with his hands, but they did not touch him. As for Fynn, Cain watched as she stepped back one last time in her bare feet and blood-caked hospital gown, off the wall and into the air.

Cain shouted her name despite himself, expecting her to fall into the empty space. But she did not. She stood suspended as though held by strings. Her hair lifted off her head as she outstretched her arms. She was so beautiful.

She floated in air, ten stories up. She commanded the birds to attack her enemies, who were defenseless against the carnage of a whole sky’s worth of talons. Demons jumped over the ledge in panic while more birds dove on them until the entire roof was a shrieking, feathery, bloody mess.

A tiny corner of Cain’s heart stood up to see such strength and magic. Yet his soul was a worm dying in the rays of the sun. Nobody should have that kind of power. All he could think over and over again was that no god nor devil should ever have that kind of power.

The birds parted as Fynn descended on the massacre. She landed and hefted Eligos’ beaten form over her shoulders just as he had carried her. She stepped over the bodies of her enemies with Cain’s brother across her back.

“Move,” Fynn said. Cain’s eyes were level with her feet. He dropped to the floor of the utility closet and backed into the corner. She climbed down with Eligos a limp weight that she carried like it was nothing. The last Mayhem brother was dead. Cain chewed on that small piece of bitter satisfaction even as he cowered in terror of the Goddess.

Feathers floated over her shoulders as she set his brother down. Eligos’ face was swollen beyond recognition, his corn silk hair torn out in tufts. Cain wanted to dance on the hulk of his body but he did not dare move except to draw his gun from its holster.

Fynn did not even lift her eyes to look at him. She held her ear to Eligos’ chest, her mouth a grim line. She sat down beside him with her legs folded and drew him to her like a gigantic doll. She wrapped her arms around him, rocked him to her chest and sang a song in a strange language that Cain did not know. Her body vibrated and warm light shone from under her hands. Cain reddened. He did not belong there. He was witnessing something beautiful and divine that had nothing to do with him. She exhaled a deep mournful breath and the sound of it crippled Cain with desire.

Then Eligos stirred. He whimpered like a child waking from sleep. She pushed him to standing before getting up herself and leading him out of the tiny room. She did not look at Cain. He had to bring his hand to his own face to tell himself he still existed. He was under no veiling spell. He was of too little consequence for her to see.

Cain stood with his gun hanging at his side. All was quiet except for the muffled flapping of wings, the muted cries of blinded and dying demons, and the whispered keening of his own breathless sobs.

Everything William did was slow, deliberate, the old-fashioned way. He would call the way he did things the right way. He made cocoa with real chocolate and cream, no powdered stuff.

Within the Keep, Liadan sat in long meetings with Guardian leadership. They were preparing for the coming storm, talking strategy, taking stock of supplies. More families were moving in and people needed to make room. Fynn knew that she should be there at her sister’s side, but they’d been in meetings since morning. She’d excused herself from the group during the dinner break and shared a meal with William and Eli in the cabin. The meeting had surely resumed by now but she just couldn’t seem to make herself leave.

Eli stood watch outside. William wiped down the table crumbs and shook out the washcloth in his small sink. The portable television in the corner flashed blue light. Just a new kind of story fire, William called it. One he didn’t like much. Moved too fast, he said. They never took the proper amount of time to tell a thing right. They never got the full story.

Fynn watched the screen and sipped cocoa. Her stomach was queasy. The withdrawals had been a week through Hell, but they were over now. This was something else.

She knew what it was. She knew since the night Cain had tried to have her sterilized and a source of energy killed the doctor who cut into her. She knew since the wound he made healed on its own by the time she put the final arrow through Cate’s cold heart.

She knew since she commanded the birds to fly at the demons’ eyes. She knew since she could fly.

At first, the grief for the loss of Komo’s love hurt. But it healed nearly as quickly as her scalpel wound. The love-sodden groupie she’d been for Komo seemed to her another person altogether.

She thought of the baby Goddess growing inside of her, the daughter of either a demon of mayhem or a god of madness.

William settled in next to her on the couch. “It’s Komo’s,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me,” her father said.

“You knew?”

“I know everything. You’ve been pregnant since before our friend came to throw himself at the mercy of the Keep. This child is double Divine. Goddess help us.”

Fynn let that information settle for a minute. This child did complete the Three. That was not a question. The calling of the birds on the roof of Cain Pharmaceuticals proved that the Triple Goddess power had never been greater. Only Mother Brigid had ever been able to call the animals like that and even so only in legend. No one had actually seen her do it.

“Any sense of the effect on the baby of being formed in a stew of Nine?” Fynn asked. She kept her eyes on the screen and pretended she wasn’t mortified to have to ask.

“That’s cloudy,” he said. “I don’t really know everything. I just like to say I do.” He turned the volume up by twisting the knob on the ancient television.

Investigators continue to puzzle over the origin of the explosion that ripped through the Cain Pharmaceuticals industrial complex last week. . . .

William opened a window to let in the night air. When he returned to her side, his shoulders slumped as though he carried a load of sadness on his back. He laid his wrinkled brown hand on top of hers.

On screen, black smoke billowed from the roof of Cain Pharmaceuticals. Even through the fuzzy picture the destruction was impressive.

“Eli’s work, I suppose,” he said.

“Mother told him where we keep the explosives,” Fynn said. “In a dream.”

William looked out the window. Fynn pretended not to notice but she knew he wished Eli would finish his rounds and come in with them. William loved talking with him. She knew he was out there, beyond the clearing where the moon lit up the meadow, keeping watch for Cain.

A previously unrecognized severe virus has been traced to homeless teenagers in the San Francisco metropolitan area. Local medical authorities assure us that there is no immediate cause for alarm as new infections seem limited and controllable by quarantine.

“Well,” William said. “So it begins.”

“So much for saving the world.”

“You bought time. Not that it was for sale.”

Fynn shook her head. In the Keep labs the techs were working in shifts, making as much pure Goddess Strain as they could with the remaining windflower extract and as much blood as Lia and Fynn could spare and remain upright. Still, Fynn worried that it would not be enough. There were about to be a lot of very sick people.

Fynn was under no illusion that they had succeeded in eradicating all of the demons any more than she had gotten rid of all the Nine. They reduced the supply - bought time, like William said. A little bit of time.

William squeezed her hand. “So, I’m thinking of training a new storyteller,” he said, switching off the television. “Tired of doing everything myself. I need an apprenctice.”

“Ha, ha, Dad.”

“I can’t live forever, Daughter.”

“Well don’t look at me. I’m not doing it.”

“I wasn’t looking at you.” William turned back to the window.

“Who are you thinking then?”

“Not ready to say yet.” William’s lips quivered in what looked like the hint of a smile, then disappeared. Fynn drained her cup. Her stomach quieted.

“It’s weird to think of someone else being in charge of the Stories,” Fynn said. “Maybe you could wait. Just for a while.” She didn’t think she could stand any more changes right then.

“These things take time anyway,” William said.

Fynn got up and helped him with his denim and sheepskin jacket. They walked together on the path to the high stone walls of Brigid’s Keep. Fynn thought she heard an animal moving in the woods, but when she stopped walking to listen there was no sound.

“He’s got an eye on us,” William said. Eli. The demon.

“Will the community accept him?” Fynn asked.

“Cloudy,” William said. Just like everything else these days.

“See you at the funeral,” she said and kissed her father on the cheek. He left her at the front door of the main building. Lights blazed despite the late hour. Every doctor, nurse, researcher and technician they had would be working long hours for weeks to come. They had to arrange systems to deal with what was coming. They wouldn’t only need a cure if what the witches had sown came to its ripest fruit. They would need food, clean water, ammunition.

Fynn watched her father disappear through the gate. Between the trees she thought she’d caught a glimpse of blue light like a flash of a gas flame. Then it was gone.

***

Lia held Fynn’s hand and it was strong as iron. Fynn’s fingers hurt, but she was grateful for her sister’s grip. Jana stood across the fire, her face still glowing from Lia’s hands-on healing of the gunshot wound. The chaos on the roof felt like years in the past though it had only been just over a week.

The rest of the community stood with the Kildare family. It was a much larger crowd than when Fynn first left the Keep at seventeen. They bloomed from the pyre at the center, stretching their numbers to the outer walls. Fynn could not see to the end of the crowd. Lia said there were nearly a thousand residents. Some were people who wanted communal living for their families. Others were doctors Brigid had recruited for fellowships, and their families. They needed to knock down more walls and rebuild in a wider berth. They needed more space to grow food.

There was a mountain of work ahead of them.

William’s song rose as the flames engulfed Mother Brigid’s body. The fire blazed as though consuming a piece of dry tinder, nothing but a three hundred year-old shell of fragile skin and bones once her soul left it. The sparks flew into the purpling evening sky.