The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1) (18 page)

Eligos’ eyes rolled back in his head. He descended through three years of open consciousness in the deepest recesses of Hell. He swam through the betrayal of children as abused as he was, the horror of murdered innocents, the despair of lost souls. There were goose-stepping, black-booted soldiers, all in line, their hands up in razor sharp salute. Slave masters holding whips. Scientists building bombs. Every atrocity of human history flowed through him like a river of sludge.

Time coiled like the tail of a pig. He was both participant and observer, caught in a nightmare from which he could not wake. In an ancient time, a soldier impaled his head on a stick to warn others not to pass. In a modern city under a freeway overpass, he was a young boy offering himself to a stranger, his body sick for the drugs he would get in exchange. Then he was a young Miwok Indian woman in that exact place, but a time two hundred years in the past, chased by a man on horseback.

In Hell, he had soaked in the hatred and soul-dead selfishness of the killers and rapists and hunters of the innocent. Now it felt like Mother Brigid was pulling him through it again from the other side, from the side of the fear and sadness of the innocent themselves. Remorse pushed against his throat, forced its own way down into his lungs and pressed at them until they felt that they would burst.

Then it was gone. He lay at Brigid’s feet, panting for breath. She bent over him and stroked his hair. Her fingers traced over his bumpy, misshapen head. He saw he was wrong. She wasn’t pulling him through Hell again. She was finishing the work her daughter had started. She was pulling the Hell right out of him and now she was done. The tide of pain ebbed. What he was left with was the aftermath of deep shame.

He wanted to die.

“Take out the blade,” she whispered. With bleary eyes he groped for the handle. “Hurry,” she said.

He pulled. The blade dripped with her blood. She moved his hand so that he dropped it on the tray by the bed. She lowered herself to rest on the hospital pillow. He looked at where she still held him by the wrist. His skin wasn’t burning like his brother’s did when Fynn grabbed him in the woods.

“I should be dead,” he said. His voice was fully human, but his arms were still long and his fingers clawed. His feet were still animal and strange.

“Well,” she said with a wry smile. “The Lady taketh away and then she giveth back.”

Voices collected on the other side of the door. His hand remained a claw. They would see him. They would know what he was. He tried to turn back into a man.

“Not so fast,” she said. Her voice was reed thin. She nodded to the window. “I won’t be able to hold the door much longer.”

She closed her eyes and winced. Her pain made the shame in his belly grow spines.

“Eligos is no more,” she said. “You are Eli now. I need you to protect my daughter. You will regain your power and it will be your job to protect Fynn.”

She took his cheeks in her hands and pressed her forehead to his. She was so beautiful and he was so ugly. But then his vision became white and he saw her. Fynn Kildare, her hair a wave of silken fire.

He loved Fynn. He would protect her. He would do anything for her.

The doorknob rattled again. There was the jangling of keys. “Go,” she said, pushing him away. Her hands fell like dead lilies on the bed.

“My Lady,” he said. He was bereft without her touch. He didn’t want to leave her there, dying. He wanted to save her.

“Go,” she mumbled into the sheet. “Obey what I say.”

There was the grinding of a key thrust into a lock. The metal doorknob turning. Eligos growled and leapt to the ground. He threw open the window, dropped silently onto the roof. He moved with the lightness of a butterfly on new wings. He dropped again from the roof to the ground below. Eli ran through the parking lot toward the hills dotted by oak trees that welcomed him with branches outstretched like the arms of the Goddess, open and beckoning.

In the kitchen of the Keep, Fynn sat by the lamp with the eternal flame and watched disciples chop potatoes and herbs for the evening meal. Dark blue windings of snakes and dragons writhed across the young men and women’s arms. The tattoos of committed Brigidine disciples brought her childhood to life. She’d almost forgotten that people did this. They found Brigid’s Keep and made it the center of their lives.

The smells of the Keep tugged memories to the surface as well. The Keep was a mix of sugar pine, sage smudges, and mint tea steeping next to baked bread steaming on the board. It was the smell of always finding something good to eat, someone to play with, and somewhere to go to feel welcomed. It was the smell of her family.

She scowled at her own sentimentality. No need to get soft. She ran away at seventeen and had not returned to visit for a reason. It was easy for Dr. Sullivan to praise the Goddess and for these disciples to mark their arms with snakes. None of them was made to stand as a child in the line of fire. Fynn’s head pounded. Since leaving home she lived in the gap between the past and the future. Resentment had carved such a well-worn groove in her heart that it had become a habit.

She texted Komo.
I’m coming for you today.
She would find William and say hello before taking off to find Komo. They would have to cancel the Vine appearance, or at least postpone it. Until the Mayhem demons were destroyed, they needed to hang out in the Keep for a while.

A heavily inked disciple poured her tea.

“I’ve never seen you before,” Fynn said, pocketing her cell phone.

“I moved in three years ago,” she said. “Praise the Goddess.”

“You’re a true believer,” Fynn said. “Mother must love you.” Fynn heard the ugly resentment in her own voice, but was too tired, too stressed to stop herself.

She sat for a time watching the the lamp on the mantle. Scented oil held the flame that never died out, not once in all of Fynn’s life. For nineteen days, nineteen different followers kept it burning. On the twentieth night, the spirit of the original Goddess Brigid Herself came from Heaven to tend the sacred fire. Or so her father the Story Keeper always said.

Men and women Fynn had never met filled her mother’s kitchen, the large room ringing with vegetable chopping and kettle whistling. One of the cooks filled an enormous stockpot from a hose that hung from the ceiling. They’d done over the kitchen since she left. It was big enough to feed more people than she ever remembered living within the walls.

Fynn felt awkward. She didn’t know anybody. The perpetual flame flickered as someone opened the door to the garden.

“Fynn? Is that you?”

William the Story Keeper stood at the threshold. Fynn ran to him like a child. She pressed her face into his soft chambray shirt. He always wore plaid shirts and cowboy boots. She felt like crying over the fact that whatever else had changed, her father remained the same.

“You look wonderful,” William said as he let go. He held her at arm’s length, rubbed the tear on his cheek with his shoulder. “Different.”

The kitchen workers lowered their eyes. They scooted to the other side of the room to do their work. Fynn had almost forgotten about how everyone at the Keep deferred to her family.

“Did you notice your sister’s tattoos?” he asked. He moved to the stove, his work boots shuffling against the earthen floor.

“She was wearing long sleeves.”

“They are on her face,” he said. He chuckled. “Ah, you three. Always the same. You look inside of each other, but forget to really look at each other.”

Fynn puzzled over that. He was right. She hadn’t noticed Lia had tattoos. If they were on her face that meant that she had settled on her Aspect.

“Midwifery?” Fynn asked. She didn’t have a right to feel left out, but she did. She would have liked to know that her sister had decided on which Aspect of the goddess would be her own, if only because Fynn would be left with what her sister did not choose.

“Midwifery and Healing. Yes,” William said. He chose a couple of potatoes from a box on the floor.

The Triple Goddess in full power was a Circle of three women, each imbued with a universe’s worth of strengths and powers. There was Brigid the Mother, and now Liadan the Healer. When she was young, Fynn was supposed to be the Healer. They were both trained in medicine, as well as fighting, but it was always in Fynn that the healing power flowed strongest.

“That leaves me with the Arrow,” Fynn said. The fighter. The protector.

“Which you already knew.” William’s matter-of-fact truth withered any indignation or complaint. He motioned for her to sit while he cooked.

Fynn placed her phone on the table in case Komo called. Her dad was full of gossip. Some of the kids she’d grown up with were married now. She tried to imagine never leaving, never going to Athenian with Komo. Never enrolling at St. Cocha.

“You ever talk to Komo?” he asked. He broke an egg over a popping hot skillet.

“Just the other night,” Fynn said, her heart fluttering.

“Really? And how is he?” She stared at the back of her father’s head. He was acting casual, but the man wanted more information. He wanted nothing less than every single fact of the whole story between her and Komo.

“Fine, Dad,” she said. She hoped he was fine. Surely if he was not, Cate or Cara would have called. Someone would have let her know.

“Well, I hear his father is a mess,” he said. “Dionysus with the drink, you know. Nobody has seen him in years.”

He lowered two plates overloaded with fresh skillet potatoes, red onions and bacon smothered with eggs and cheese. It was always their favorite. Peasant food for the two of them. It was the way they liked to eat. He grabbed a ketchup bottle and sat beside his daughter. She patted the papery skin on his forearm as he bowed his head over a prayer of thanks.

“Blessed be this meal from the gifts of earth, air, water and fire. Blessed be our hearts in empathy for all.” His voice was as deep as an ocean wave. She had missed him. They ignored the kitchen workers and ate with the same bad manners they shared when she was a kid. They shoveled in food without talking and knew when to pass the ketchup without asking.

“I’ve got to get going soon,” she said when she was done. “Last night was rough. I’ve got to find Komo, actually. Make sure he’s safe.” She watched her father to see a sign of what he thought about that, but his face revealed nothing.

“You see your mom yet?” He dabbed his mouth with a napkin but missed a gob of ketchup on his chin. She wiped it off as though he were the child.

“She left,” Fynn said. “You didn’t hear? Something about a healing at the Oaks Healing Center.”

“Shouldn’ta gone,” he said. “Old Brigid is tired lately. So am I.”

Old Brigid.
Her mother had the appearance a woman in her forties at the most. Her father had aged more.

“I wanted to go with her,” Fynn said. “She wouldn’t let me.” She looked at her hands to avoid his eyes. She knew he had been against her mother healing her of her Nine addiction. She wouldn’t blame him for being pissed.

“Let’s talk before you go.” William pushed back his chair. She followed him out to the garden. They walked through the rows of tomatoes, careful not to step on crawling vines of pumpkin. Mother Brigid’s garden was always an explosion of herbs, vegetables and fruit trees no matter the time of year.

She bent to pinch an aphid off of a windflower stem. “I’d been doubting the whole demon idea,” Fynn said. She flicked away the insect. “I was trying to make a life on the outside.”

“Doubt all you want, daughter. Those are the Mayhem brothers that are after you.”

“I know, Dad.” Fynn gazed past the gate, hoping William would get the hint that she didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t have time for one of his long stories.

“I saw it in the fire,” he said. “There are three brothers who have been dipped into Hell for longer than any humans in history. It’s rare for anyone to survive three hours, but these survived three years.”

“Uh-huh.” She realized she’d left her phone in the kitchen. She considered going back to get it.

“In their returned form, they are barely human. Shape shifters, Fynnie. Bad mother fuckers. Worse than anything the modern age could dream.”

“Okay, Dad.” She let the phone stay in the kitchen or else risk a lecture about the evils of modern technology.

“You should stay in the Keep. You’ll be safe here.”

“How is that?” Her voice was sharper than she wanted it to be. The one time in her life she was ever truly hurt was within the Keep’s walls.

“Because the brothers were all born in the Keep.”

“That’s absurd,” Fynn said.

“Their mother is a crafty witch. She was a follower once. Pretended to be, anyway.”

“You knew her?”

He didn’t answer the question. “After any time in Hell, no one can return to the place he was born. If the brothers enter through the gate they will burn.” His fingers splayed to show the explosion.

“Of course they will,” she said. Her father always had to add a bizarre twist. No wonder she spent so much time in the scientific method. She never wanted to be in an ordered laboratory more than she did at that moment.

“They’ve been bred for one purpose. Three demons to destroy the Triple Goddess.” The Story Keeper patted her shoulder and chuckled. “Of course, after getting a load of you, there’s only two of them left.”

“Yeah,” Fynn said. “And one of those is permanently left-handed now.”

William nodded. “Still, you’d be safer staying in the Keep.”

“I’ll come back tonight. Komo’s out there unprotected.” He needed detox as badly as she had. She could heal him and then they would both be safe in the day or two she would take to recuperate to full strength.

“We’ve got some real enemies, daughter. You should know more than anyone.”

“Bad mother fuckers. Yes. You said.” Fynn pressed a rose thorn deep into her finger until it popped a bead of blood. “Who is the demon hustler? Who is the witch mother?”

William frowned. “That’s in the dark,” he said. “I’m working on it. She lived here right under our noses and I never saw it. Whoever it is she’s a good hider, I’ll tell you that.”