The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1) (3 page)

Then a door closed between them and everything was shut from Fynn’s view. She shivered, despite the warm room. Her mother’s voice became less like the falling of a brook over river stones and more like the croaking of a raven. “What happened in the Keep the day you fell from us was no accident, my daughter. I meant for you to get the demon virus,” she said, while Lia hid her face in her hands. “I didn’t plant that sick woman in our midst. A witch did that. But once I sensed her presence, I did not stop you from healing her, even though I knew that the demon virus would crawl into you.”

“No,” Fynn said.

“I speak the truth, young one,” her mother said. “I didn’t protect you. I saw it as the will of the universe.”

Fynn stood and threw her chair against the wall. Lia cried out and covered her head with her arms. Her mother continued, undaunted. “Your father and I saw the demon war coming sooner than we expected. Our daughters were powerful beyond imagining, but you were both so soft, so pure of heart. We needed an Arrow and a Healer - one of you to be our defender and the other to hold the aspect of healing.”

“I
was
the Healer. I did everything you asked,” Fynn said. None of it had done her any good. It was inconceivable to Fynn that they expected blind obedience from her now.

“Yes, but as powerful as you were at the healings, you were even more so at the fighting. You were like Artemis with the bow, my daughter. You know the story of the moon goddess slaying an entire city of unjust men with one arrow. We saw that same ability in you.”

“But why try to kill me?” She bit back her tears. She wasn’t weak like her sister, crying like an idiot.

“It would take more than a demon virus to kill you. I knew you would not die. When I sensed demon infection in that woman, I let you touch her, knowing it would change you.”

“I did everything you asked,” Fynn repeated. “I was in so much pain, for weeks. I was just a kid.” She felt like someone had punched her in the stomach, forcing the air from her lungs. It was difficult to breathe, let alone speak.

“You were so pure of heart, my love. Your father and I are too much divine, not enough human, to sire a killer. We had to do something or you would not be mean enough to...”

Fynn bit the insides of her mouth so hard, she tasted blood, and through the pain, retained her strength. “So you thought you’d give me a dose of demon to carry with me for the rest of my life. Fear, anger, jealousy, shame,” she said. “A real fall from grace.”

“You are stronger now than either of us ever were,” her mother said, gesturing to Lia. Fynn looked at her sister, so complacent at their mother’s side, and hated her.

“I was happy before I became infected,” Fynn said. “You destroyed my life.”

She remembered an entire childhood of afternoons spent on that damn cushion indoors, while everyone else had fun, only to burn for weeks in a nightmare fever that made her wish for death. Fynn far preferred not caring. The injustice of her mother’s revelation was more than she could bear. Her heart felt like it was splitting down a ripping fault line.

Her mother’s sad smile held the power of a storm cloud. “Your life was changed, not destroyed. Now it is time for you to come home.”

“I am home. I have a life here in St. Cocha,” Fynn said. “With people who don’t betray me.”

“You’ve been a big fish in a small pond. You let them give you a Ph.D. in life sciences and call you a prodigy. Of course, you know how nature works. The invention of nature is in your DNA. You
are
nature,” Mother Brigid said.

“Please come home with us,” Lia pleaded. “The war is coming and we need you to lead our armies. We need you to defend us.”

Fynn’s temper flared and she did not hold it back. The guards outside ducked, as the windowpanes exploded with the concussive power of Fynn’s rage. The glass fell in shards onto the deck of the balcony, clattered down the bluff below.

“Get out of my house,” Fynn said. “Or you will see exactly how mean you’ve made me.”

Brigid stood slowly enough to show that she was not afraid. Electricity shot from the ends of Fynn’s hair. Lia reached, as though to touch her, but their mother stopped her hand.

“The Triple Goddess is who you are,” Brigid said. “You must come back to us, my daughter. The demons are already here among us. It isn’t just us who need you. You need us, as well.”

Fynn threw open the front door, though she stood nowhere near it. The guards called for them from the porch, too afraid to step inside. Her mother and sister went out, her mother’s head regal, her sister’s bowed and weeping.

She listened to the SUV start and drive away. She slumped to the floor and pushed her face into the couch. It still smelled of sage and fire. She yelled curses until her anger shook the walls and rattled the hanging crystals against the empty window frames.

Cain waited in the cold room. He shot the right sleeve of his Armani suit to see his watch. Everyone else in his company used their phones for the time. When he wasn’t sitting on a beach in the dark, he was an old-fashioned man. He liked an analog watch with a leather band.

His mother was nine hours late. She called him to the office and then wasn’t there when he arrived. It didn’t surprise him, but still, he didn’t dare stay away when she called. She demanded strict obedience. If she had been there and he kept
her
waiting...he shuddered. How she would make him pay.

He hated the office, with its industrial blue carpet and soundproof walls. There were no windows to the outside. Sometimes he would endure entire days without once seeing the sun. Picture windows lined two of the facing walls, but they only opened to two gymnasium-sized rooms below.

The west side looked down at the pharmaceutical factory floor, where a handful of techs worked an assembly line. Each pill that poured out of the finishers represented money on top of money. Cain Pharmaceuticals generated pills to take for pep, pills to mellow out, and pills to treat symptoms of asthma, symptoms of high blood pressure, and symptoms of cancer. They didn’t develop cures at Cain Pharmaceuticals. Cures would put them out of business. The money was in relief of symptoms.

Cain Pharmaceuticals was in its seventh year of relief peddling. The family business was thriving. Cain’s mother had been right about getting into drugs. His mother was always right when it came to money.

The east-side floor told a different story. The space was empty as a cavern, except for three gurneys holding three young men in comas, attached to machines and tubes. They were in the deepest of unconscious sleeps and had been for three years. They were barely alive, his brothers.

Three women attended them twenty-four hours a day. They wore pure white scrubs. It was an aesthetic issue for Cain’s mother. She needed everything in that room to be white. The floors and walls were painted the same blinding white as the nurses’ uniforms and the sheets over his brothers’ bodies. Cain would never let
her
know it, but he hated looking into that room. When she wasn’t around, he pretended it didn’t exist.

He poked his head into the hall to make sure she wasn’t coming. When he was certain he was alone, he opened a computer file marked
Real Estate.
Adding to this file inspired him. A good fifteen minutes poring through the pictures kept him motivated to stay the course with his crazy family.

Without his private dream, he would have tried to run. His mother would have caught him eventually, but he would have run anyway. Without the dream he kept in that file, he would have welcomed death.

Except that his mother would make his death slow and unbelievably painful. She would get much more pleasure from his agony than his death. Cain shuddered again. If he thought too much on reality, he lost his nerve. It was time to think about his dream, instead.

He opened a photo of a long beach with sands as fine and sparkling as snow. He’d already bought an estate in the Maldives beside pristine turquoise waters.

He knew the coordinates to the estate. When the time came, he would fly them there himself in one of his planes. He would need to remember to reserve a couple of employees from getting sick when the time came. They would need servants. Fynn wouldn’t have to do any work. Once she was Cain’s wife, her life would be pure paradise.

When he could stand the waiting no longer, he opened the final image. It was from a recent news article. It came from a photo of Fynn with Mother Brigid and her sister Liadan accepting an award for some kind of breakthrough in infant medicine. Cain had never read the article. He knew that Brigid’s Keep was a world-renowned birthing center, among other things. Cain and his three brothers had all been born there, but he didn’t care about that.

He had cropped the photo to cut Mother Brigid out. He didn’t care about what happened to Fynn’s sister or her mother. Mother Brigid, Liadan, and Fynn together possessed an unimaginable power. Cain’s mother was a witch and their coven of four was strong, but they were only human at their core. The kind of power that he witnessed in Fynn’s family while growing up in Brigid’s Keep was horrifying. Fynn’s healing touch was only part of the story. She could send an arrow to its mark from a quarter mile away. As for Lia, she cried so hard when her pet wolf died, that the skies above the Keep darkened with a thunderstorm and funnel cloud. He ran to the cellars below the fort in terror. No one should have that kind of strength.

Destroying the power of the Three was the right thing to do.

Fynn’s face took up the entire screen. He had to be content to just watch for now. Soon he would get to touch her in person every single moment of every single day.

It could never be soon enough.

He studied Fynn’s profile. A messy ponytail pulled her strange metallic-colored hair off her face. He would never let her wear a ponytail. He would always make her wear it down over her shoulders. At the beach, he got full few of the cabled muscles of her arms, legs, back, and stomach. Those would soften once she belonged to him. She would have no interest in surfing, swimming, or archery then.

It was her smile that made her so special, he realized. It was the smile of someone who had no need to be afraid. Then he
was
touching the screen, his fingertips tracing the pixels of light. She was so unchanged. She was a grown woman now, but he could see the young girl in that smile.

When he closed his eyes, he could still see her unkempt metallic auburn hair, her skin the same brown as her father’s, her eyes the improbable dark green of her mother’s. What fascinated him most was her slow way of moving, as though the tides of the sea would wait for her word. He could not imagine Fynn ever being afraid.

Even when they were children together at that commune in the mountains, he felt her quiet power. She was kind to him.

Mother took them from the Keep when they were kids, but Cain never forgot Fynn. His love for her had only grown over the years. He’d seen her since, but only from a distance. Cain wondered if she would recognize him when they met again.

He watched her whenever he could steal a chance. He loved driving out to St. Cocha and following her around town and on campus, lying in wait for the hope of even just one glimpse of her.

He had a sweet memory of Fynn running while he chased her through a meadow outside Brigid’s Keep. He was fifteen and she was eight. He had escaped from his mother long enough to find Fynn with the other kids, playing tag in the high grass and wildflowers. She looked over her shoulder at Cain. The sun lit her hair in a halo. Her eyes were filled with kindness and play, and he knew in that moment that she loved him. She loved him and he loved her. He never touched her, but, in that moment, he knew that he would wait until she was old enough and he would make her his forever.

“Is this your idea of internet porn? It’s rather dreary.” His mother stood behind him. He rushed to close the file. She clamped her iron fingers around his wrist. “Don’t try to pretend you weren’t looking,” she said. “I want to see, too.”

“Just doing research.” Cain’s neck burned. “Keeping on top of the Kildare situation.”

“I’ll bet,” his mother said. Her Chanel perfume coated the back of his throat. Long red fingernails clicked along the keyboard like insect legs. He forced himself to be still, even while recoiling shivers rolled up and down his back.

“Where have you been?” he asked. “I’ve been here since last night.” A casual conversation might take her mind off his business.

“Working,” she said.

Her breath puffed against his cheek. He glanced at her face. He hated to see Fynn’s image reflected in her eyes. “You pine for this girl,” she said. “When you could have any woman you wanted.”

“I don’t think it’s for you to worry about, Mother.”

“A man like you. So rich, so hot.” She walked her fingers along his shoulders and began kneading the back of his neck. Cain swallowed a flume of rising bile. “Once she has babies, it’s over, you know. Her mother and sister will be dead, but as long as one lives, there can always be the Triple Goddess again. Then she will be too powerful for you to control.”

“I thought of that. I’m not stupid,” he said. Resentment tingled in his jaw. He bit it back. He had to keep calm. This was an old conversation. They always had the same one, hashing over the same details of their compromise. She liked to make him feel every inch of her generosity.

“So what are you going to do before you run off to play castaway? Make a hysterectomy stop and drop her uterus off on the way?”

Cain shut the screen to blackness. When his mother laughed, it sounded like it came from the throat of a dead woman. “You are! How perfect,” she said. “You truly have thought of everything. She’ll hate you, of course, but that won’t matter so much. The world will be over beyond your bug-bitten island, anyway. Maybe by the time she’s ninety, she’ll forgive you enough to let you touch her.”

She bore down on the loose spot in his shoulder. When he was a child, she had dislocated the bone from the ligament there. She dug in where she knew it still hurt the most. Cain opened his mouth to speak, but his voice was sucked into pain.