The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1) (22 page)

Her palms burned. Komo’s body went stiff. He arched, the veins of his neck and forehead popping like cables. He bucked again, but she squeezed tighter. The poisonous force of the Nine rose in a tide. The energy flow had to remain one-sided. She fought the addiction worming its way through the connection she had opened between them.

Komo’s addiction pushed. Images flashed in her brain. A crying child. A young man bloodied by a trip mine. A needle inserted into an addict’s arm.

“Get back,” she said through gritted teeth. She wasn’t a kid anymore. She was more powerful than any virus, no matter where it came from.

Fynn pressed her hands into Komo’s bare chest. She would heal him. She would heal him and he would be strong again, and they would stay clean forever. She shook off an image of a child shrinking from a pounding fist. If she ever doubted Nine was demon in origin, she never would again. This was a rollercoaster ride through Hell. She gasped for breath. Her palms melted into his bare skin. She looked away from his hate-filled eyes.

“Get off of me, you bitch,” he snarled.

It was the Nine talking. She told herself this because if her heart broke now, they would be lost. She reached into him, a deep dive into his Divine being.

The Hell images vanished.

A vast expanse of midnight sky opened above their heads. Under the sky the earth formed, seas roiling. Daylight spread over a world where vines curled from the dirt and fat grapes ripened under a hot sun. Casks passed hand to hand, then horn cups, then crystal, then glass. Beautiful women laughed over goblets of burgundy wine. The Nine burned off in the sun’s heat. Music flowed from plucked sinews stretched over gourds, from polished lyres, from metal strings of electric guitars. She rode the waves of sound as Komo’s music vibrated in her bones.

Komo lowered his hands down her hips. He tugged at her jeans until she shed them. He pulled her on top of him again. A dream world bloomed of sweet ferment, satyr hooves flashing in the moonlight, driving rhythms on skin drums. Drumbeats carried them through the eons. She desired Komo past reason. Together they were the only ones left in an entire world of music and drumming and fire.

***

A familiar ceiling. Komo’s room. Fynn’s leaden arms and legs weighted her to the bed. The power that flowed through her while she and Komo made love had seeped away. She willed her arm to move, but could barely wriggle her fingers. Nine pooled in her spinal cord. Its venom coursed through her veins like quicksilver, heavier than blood. She was as paralyzed as she had been after the overdose of Nine she’d taken the last time she was in Komo’s house.

Not again.

She mouthed Komo’s name. Her stomach heaved, but she forced herself not to throw up. She didn’t have the strength to roll over. God damn if she was going to die there choking on her own vomit.

Komo was clean, wherever he was, but the addiction healing had worn her down like a dead battery. No wonder her father didn’t want her mother to do this, not even for Fynn. Just like when she overdosed with the Ritual Madness girls, she couldn’t move. Her heart felt as heavy as her limbs. Her mother’s sacrifice was for nothing. She had spiraled back to the same trouble as before.

Downstairs the party thumped against the walls like a wild beast caught inside the house. The party had a mind of its own, or a mindlessness of its own. The son of Dionysus knew how to cause a ruckus. She tried to make a fist to bang on the bed, but her fingers wouldn’t curl.

Heavy steps echoed on the stairwell. The two remaining grad student surfer boys from St. Cocha came in, talking and laughing like this was just another party for them. Mayhem demons in their human forms. Her stomach heaved again. The room stank of sulphur.

Amon tugged on her arm and she flopped like a rag doll as she puked all over Komo’s bed. They didn’t need to worry about touching her now. She was so weak from the addiction healing that she would not be able throw a punch, let alone a ray of divine destruction.

Her heart was made of feathers, her blood of down. Her skin sizzled as the one-handed demon held a daemonium blade to her throat, but his brother held back his hand. The light-haired one muttered, his voice the sound of a thousand insects crawling across stone.

Not yet,
he said
.
Then he punched her in the face.

So this was how she was going to die.

***

Eli forced himself to stay in human form with a teeth-grinding force of will. He could sense the suspicion within his brother’s dried jerky of a heart. Amon’s head bobbed like a hyena’s, his eyes glowing blue.

Eli struck Fynn with the back of his hand. Her head lolled around on her neck like she was already dead. He was horrified but nothing less would convince his brother. Amon relaxed enough that Eli could carry Fynn down the stairs relatively unharmed. He watched that her head did not hit the railing.

The demon brothers carried the goddess through the great room. Several sets of eyes glowed pale blue like dozens of blinking pilot lights in the dark. They were lesser sorts than he and his brother, humans carrying demon spirits they’d developed in short sojourns in Hell. These demons would be sniveling, jumpy. His mother liked to keep this type around. They tended to do what they were told.

All of the demons had hurt an innocent in order to get their pass to Hell once they’d gone under the drug-induced comas at his brother’s warehouse. They thought it would make them all-powerful. His mother never told them it would drive them insane.

Mother Brigid had returned Eli’s sanity along with his soul. In this chaotic place, he knew what to do. She had whispered to him in his dreams: Protect Fynn.

His skin stretched in thin patches over his bulging muscles. His fingernails cracked through the tips of his fingers. He tried to force them not to turn to claws, but there was only so much will to go around. He shifted his grip so that he didn’t cut into Fynn’s arms. He passed the roaring fireplace and it lit his face. A barely demon girl screamed when she saw him. He guessed the change was already underway. Since Mother Brigid healed him, he couldn’t control his shape shifting the way he once could.

Fynn moaned. Eli turned to follow her gaze. Komo lay on the floor, the idiot, an empty silver box of Nine in his open hand. Ritual Madness girls covered him, kissing his neck, running their hands over his body. His eyes drifted at a drugged half-mast, watching with no interest as the two Mayhem demons carried Fynn away. One of the girls looked at Fynn with a wicked grin, her hands sliding down the front of Komo’s jeans.

“No,” Fynn said. Eli yearned to comfort her, but all he could do was heft her over his shoulder in a way he hoped would be more comfortable.

Cara stopped them at the door. “Cate says to take her into the woods,” she said. “Cut out her heart and bring it back.” She pushed a large silver box engraved with a four-point star into his hands.

“Let’s have some fun,” Amon said. A string of drool dripped from the side of his mouth. He wiped it with his sleeve. He grabbed Cara by the arm.

“Get away from me.” Cara yanked her arm back. “I’m not in this for you.”

“Come with us,” Eli said. “You’ll enjoy the show.”

Cara stood for a moment and thought about it. “You’re right,” she said, nodding. “I really will. It will be good for me to see her die.”

The air outside the smoky, sweaty house was painfully fresh. They went down the porch steps, Eli leading with Fynn over his shoulder. They stopped at the top of the driveway.
She
stood in front of Fynn’s van. Eli’s mother.

“Good job, boys,” she said. He snarled at her, wanted in equal parts to weep at her feet and tear her apart.

“Is it okay if I go with them, Cate? I thought I could, you know, be helpful.” Cara flipped her hair behind her shoulder. False bravado, Eli thought. Her anxiety smelled sour.

Cate’s high heeled shoes clacked against the cobblestones. She ran a finger under Cara’s jawline. “I don’t give a fuck what you do,” she said.

Cara smiled with the uncertainty of a child afraid of being hit, knowing it’s coming, just not sure of when. Cate palmed her face and pushed her away. She sauntered behind Eli and kissed Fynn on the cheek where her head hung down his back.

Fynn’s body tensed in Eli’s hold. He had to get the Goddess away from the Witch Mother before she changed her mind, fetched the daemonium blade, and did it herself.

Eli put Fynn in the front with him and let Amon and Cara take the back. He turned the ignition with a misshapen hand. His mind raced with panicked thoughts. He ached to see the Great Mother again. She was still alive, which he knew because he felt her livingness through a connection that tied him to her. He would do anything for her. Her kindness was as necessary to him as water and air. He had to save Fynn.

Eli gunned the SUV down the highway towards the trailheads into the redwood forest. He turned the radio to full blast heavy metal that drowned out Amon’s ragged breathing behind him. Fynn groaned as the SUV hit a pothole. He put his arm around her to buffer her from hitting the window along the rough road.

In the rearview mirror he watched Amon force a kiss on Cara. She tried to push him off but he was very strong. His young man’s handsome face was a façade. There was nothing left human in him any more. Amon was a living tornado of chaos. There would be no managing him when they got to the isolated place in the forest where their mother directed them to kill Fynn.

Eli focused on the road. If he could get them into the wilds fast enough, he could save his mother’s witch girl from the affections of his demon brother. Amon was a lunatic, but he wasn’t stupid. It would not be long even with Cara there as a distraction that he would realize that Eli wasn’t going to let him kill Fynn.

A piece of Fynn’s bronze-colored hair blew against the side of Eli’s face. She smelled like caramel and vanilla sugar. She smelled like a dream of uncorrupted humanity and he loved her so much with his sore and battered heart.

Eli wished he dared to slow down, to give himself more time to think of what to do, but that would only draw suspicion from his brother. Eli was stronger, but Amon was fast. He had brought Eli down before, delayed him enough that he would have killed Fynn with the blade if Mother Brigid hadn’t known to come. Anxiety shortened his breath. Amon slapped his shoulders, taking his panic for enthusiasm.

“We’re going to tear the bitch apart,” Amon said.

Eli turned off the highway. Drove toward the trees.

Sparks flew, breaking for freedom only to die in the cold night air. William stood close enough for the heat to singe his eyebrows. They were getting too shaggy anyway, yet another side effect of getting old. He hated thinking about just how old he was. He may have been the Story Keeper in spirit, but he was still the man William Pulakatu in body. The skin and bone shell he was in this time around wasn’t going to hold up forever. He’d never been alive in a human form this long. He wasn’t sure what to expect.

He stared at the dancing purple ephemera and waited for a vision to make sense of what was happening to his family. Dreams of scorpions in his bed plagued his dreams in the past month. He was uneasy about getting under the covers at night. One of the many prices of being human was having to wait for the other side to tell him what was what.

His palms whispered like fine sandpaper as he rubbed them together. The fingers on his left hand bent over the shape of a phantom pen. He was always writing. He had been the Story Keeper for two hundred years. It would be hard to straighten his fingers now even if he wanted to. If anyone besides their daughters knew William and Brigid’s real ages they would
freak out
as the young people in the Keep liked to say. Of course everyone was young to him now.

Liadan patted his back. She knew not to talk when he was waiting for a trance. She’d known that since before she could form words in her baby mouth. The story spirits weren’t on speed dial. He couldn’t conjure them out of nowhere.

He smiled into the fire but his eyes weren’t in it. He waited for the vision like he was supposed to but his patience was growing thin. Lia was certain that Fynn was in trouble again. Fynn had fled the Keep and she wasn’t responding to phone calls, not that Lia needed the phone to know that something had gone terribly wrong with her sister.

The ways the stories and prophecies played themselves out was almost always surprising and usually tragic. Lia’s unhappiness stirred a cold wind and the fire cracked. William pulled his wool shirt closed. He wished that whatever demon storm was brewing would break already. He and Brigid were getting tired. The windflower extract would work mixed with Fynn’s blood. He kept the extract fresh in vials. No telling when a demon might pop up with a Hell-honed blade for his goddess wife and two goddess daughters. He would have to extract more to make up for what was used, but the windflower would work. Nothing else would. Without it, she would have died, but with it Brigid would probably be rocking in her hearthside chair by dinnertime.

This addiction healing business was no good. It would have been better for Fynn to go through it by herself. At least then she would still be in the Keep and Brigid wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to the Mayhem demon.

What-ifs and demons would be the end of him. Both of them were terrible things.

William poked the logs around with a stick and sent a burst of newly aired flames high into the sky until they touched the tips of the branches of a pine.

“Careful, Dad,” Lia said, always the cautious one.

The bonfire quieted. William sat on the wooden chair carved out of an old Sequoia stump. It was a place of honor and while people liked him to sit there while he told the stories, it was dangerously close to a throne. Now he just felt silly, sitting above everybody like a forest troll in one of Brigid’s Celtic fairy tales.

Lia pulled a blanket around her shoulders. It was a cool evening. She looked like her mother with her unkempt hair falling in faery tangles. Liadan and Brigid were not of the world the way Fynn and William were. In Fynn, William saw his own grandmother’s face. She had the same wide forehead, coppery skin and serious eyes. She was so beautiful, his youngest daughter. He wondered if she knew how stunning she was.