Scintillate (13 page)

Twenty-Five

T

he afternoon sun played peekaboo behind threatening clouds. Trinity College library hadn’t opened until after lunchtime, and so I’d had to impatiently postpone my investigation with a lunch of bangers and mash at a small local pub.

The Book of Kells: Turning Darkness Into Light

The sign outside of the library actually said those words. The same words I’d seen in the vision when I’d unearthed the key in the redwoods. My body hummed with excited energy, and I wished for a fleeting, sad moment that Finn were here with me to share my excitement.

I fingered the key, rotated the small red crystal, and slipped it back inside my shirt. Would I need this key today? Did it unlock something that housed my mother’s research? Would it lead me to her?

Giovanni waited in the long line with me, the strap of his messenger bag slung diagonally over his broad chest. He towered over the heads of everyone like a general surveying his troops. I had to smile. His attention was focused on something up ahead. With us, people-watching was a different sport entirely.

His gaze, which could be called cold but wasn’t if you looked deep enough, flickered to me. He’d caught me staring. I blushed, and a knowing half smile turned up his lips. It was maddening because blushing was totally redundant. Apparently, he could read into the silver in my aura. I wanted to learn to read the subtleties of silver, too. I wanted to know what he was thinking, feeling.

“Any idea where we might find this journal of your mother’s in a security-tight library with over 200,000 volumes that we are not permitted to touch?”

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t answer questions that aren’t questions.” I knew the odds were against me, but I’d gambled on this trip for a reason. My mother had hidden something here. I knew it. The sign outside proved it.

The line of tourists shuffled into the Long Room of the library. I gasped as soon as I entered. My hand flew to my heart, pressing the key against my skin. The long, narrow room stretched out before us with two stories of books housed in dark wooden shelves soaring up to the barrel-vaulted ceiling like a huge, elegant ship turned upside down. Dozens of alcoves, sections upon sections of books, lined the length of the room. Ornate spiral staircases wound upward in some of the alcoves, while others employed tall, narrow ladders. The alphabet was etched in gold letters up the sides of each row of thick shelves. The brochure said there were over 200,000 volumes in this room alone. It made my book-loving heart race.

In between each recess stood a marble bust upon a wooden pedestal, over forty of them, giving the impression of a fleet of ghostly sentries guarding the ancient volumes—guarding my mother’s treasure. But how on earth was I supposed to find anything here? I didn’t voice this thought, not wanting to see any trace of smugness on Giovanni’s face.

I walked slowly, looking for a box or something in which the key might fit, despairing more with each step. It wasn’t likely that anything was going to jump out at me. I was surrounded by a vast sea of leather tomes with no idea how to find the one precious volume I needed.

Waist-high shelves stood in the middle of each alcove. I stopped abruptly. The warm air of Giovanni’s breath and the flare of his energy rippled over my neck and shoulder. “What is it?” he asked.

“That carving there, the spiral.” It was the one I’d seen in the memory bound to the key. I walked to the next alcove and then the next, past the busts of Jonathan Swift, Sir Isaac Newton, Socrates, Shakespeare. Beneath the stern faces of the world’s great writers and thinkers, every single pew of books had this same scrollwork carved into the end pieces of the shelves: a winding spiral with a flower in the middle. I rubbed my temples as I racked my brain for ideas. Where would my mother hide her journal in a place like this? If she and my father and I had anything in common, she’d have hidden it in plain sight
.

I walked down the length of the enormous room a second time, hoping against hope that if her journal
was
here, she hadn’t tucked it away on the second floor with no public access. As it was, double ropes cordoned off parts of the floor, keeping the public from handling the valuable books. Even if I found something, I wasn’t sure how I’d get my hands on it. My eyes scanned for anything with a lock in which the key might fit. The faces of each marble bust mocked me with blank, staring eyes. One bust in particular ridiculed me more than any other: Cicero. My father kept a handwritten quote of Cicero’s under the glass on top of his desk at home. It said:

Are you not ashamed as a scientist, as an observer, and investigator of nature, to seek your criterion of truth from minds steeped in conventional beliefs? -Cicero

I’d had to stare at that quote a million times as I sat at his desk during the years I was homeschooled. I retrieved my mom’s letter from my pocket and examined her neat, slanted script. Yes. It was the same as the script in my memory. I looked again into the colorless eyes of my messenger. When you have nothing to go on, you’ll go on anything. I tilted my head to look at the books on the shelves in the alcove next to Cicero.

“What would it be titled?” Giovanni asked.

I gave him a tired look. “I’m guessing it will be titled
X Marks the Spot: The Musings of a Missing Scintilla
.” Giovanni’s eyebrows shot up and he walked past me. I scanned the rows and rows of books all in shades of mud brown, faded blue, and maroon. I was about to move on when a red book caught my eye. One word was written in silver script where all the other books had gold:
Grace
.

“Giovanni,” I hissed. With long strides, he stood back at my side. I pointed at the book. “That one. That’s it, I know it.” I was so desperate to touch it that my fingers tingled. I hopped up and down on my toes. I leaned against the teal ropes keeping me from the book I was sure was my mother’s. Her name, Cicero’s bust, even the color of the shiny foil lettering. “I have to have that book.” My voice was a desperate plea, and my stomach knotted like cable.

Giovanni pointed at the security personnel in the room. “Go ask him what is required to gain access to the upstairs section.”

His command stymied me, but I trusted he had a reason, and I believed he wanted to help. I walked along the glossy planked floor toward the man he’d pointed at, willing myself not to look back at the book.

Before I’d even gotten my whole question out, Giovanni was next to me. “We’re running late,” he said with a curt nod to the security guard. “Maybe next time?” He took my elbow and led me out of the library.

“Listen, I—you can’t just—”

“Don’t worry about it, Cora.”

“How can you tell me not to worry? We need to go back in there!” I tugged on his arm, but he held it firm against his waist. Giovanni stopped outside the gate to the college and opened his jacket a fraction. The silver lettering inside gleamed at me. I stared openmouthed. He winked.

I held out my hand. “Let me see.”

He began walking again. “Not here. Let’s find a coffee shop where we can sit in the privacy of a crowd.”

We walked without speaking for a couple of blocks. I didn’t ask how he got the book. Honestly, I didn’t care. I’d have snatched the book if I could have, and I supposed he probably didn’t survive his entire childhood on his own without using some sleight of hand once in a while.

The coffee shop was warm, and I was grateful for the respite from the chilly breeze. Giovanni and I scooted into a café table in the back corner. He slipped the book from his jacket and held it out to me. I thought about my apparent new affliction: psychometry—the ability to pick up information from an object. As best I could tell from the Internet, that’s what had happened to me with the phone and the key. As if seeing auras wasn’t crazy enough, I got to add another extrasensory ability to my repertoire. Not surprisingly, my search didn’t yield anything on “spontaneous tattoos.”

I took the journal and inwardly winced, expecting a rush of object-memory to overtake me, but nothing happened.

Nothing.

“Why do you wait?” Giovanni asked. Then his large palm covered mine. “Your hands are shaking.”

Despite just meeting him, I was thankful to have him with me. “This might not be it,” I said. I had been so sure my mother’s journal would be infused with memories accessible with a touch, its silence crushed me.

He ran his fingers soothingly over the tops of my hands, then removed them, leaving a cloud of energy over my skin. “Open it.”

I did.

The first thing I saw was the quote by Cicero in the same familiar script as my father’s note. My head bowed and a sob-laced breath fell from my lips. I let the book fall open, deciding it would tell me what it wanted to tell me.

The pages were covered in scribbles, the first one a sketch of the pyramids tip to tip, like in the key. She seemed particularly interested in
Brú na Bóinne
, the Irish name for Newgrange, as there were pages of notes and drawings of that one place alone. It was majorly important to the Irish, who could boast in a superior “Our megalithic temple is one thousand years older than your Stonehenge” kind of way. It was important enough that even Finn had the triple spiral tattooed on his chest. Talk about pride of place. But why was Newgrange so important to my mother?

There were also newspaper clippings, quotes, pictures of religious icons and saints, many of which I’d seen when I held the key for the first time. This was my mother’s journal, a piece of her in my hands. I couldn’t wait to devour every word. “If—if we could walk back now, I’d like to go to my room and read a while.”

Giovanni nodded. “If you don’t mind, I’d very much like to know anything that might pertain to us.”

“You got this for me, and no one has told me more about myself than you have, Giovanni.” I took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you. I promise.”

Twenty-Six

T

he book weighed down my purse, but it wasn’t a burdensome weight. It was heavy with my mother’s history. I was going to catch hell for it, but coming to Ireland hadn’t been a mistake.

We crossed a busy street in front of a large park called St. Stephen’s Green. The sun fell behind the buildings, casting intermittent shadows on the edge of the park. Giovanni and I walked through the shadows, heading toward the Temple Bar district and my hostel. My mind was on one thing: to get back and immerse myself in my mother’s world. It was like she was waiting for me to get to know her.

I barely registered Giovanni, and finally realized how much we had walked today. “This is totally the opposite direction from your hotel,” I said. “You don’t have to walk me.”

“I’ll not leave you until you are there safely, Cora. You must realize what constant danger you are in.” He gave me a wry and bitter look. “Scintilla have a way of vanishing with no trace.”

Giovanni scanned the crowds filing into the park. “God, but it’s busy here tonight. I’m going to the toilet right there.” He pointed at a row of portable toilets. I grinned, thinking how it must confuse the rest of the world when Americans ask for the “restroom.”

“Looks like you’re gonna have to leave me alone,” I joked.

“Be right back,” he said and jogged away.

Applause rolled out from the center of the park. The sound of a guitar vibrated across the air. Then singing. I stood on my tiptoes but couldn’t see over the heads of the vast crowd filling St. Stephen’s Green. The colored lights of the stage mimicked the auras in the audience, so all I saw was a lake of outlined bodies and a raging storm of color rising into the twilight above the trees like the aurora borealis.

The singing continued, dreamlike. The sensation of irresistible magnetism was strikingly familiar. The last time I felt so overwhelmingly compelled to move toward a song was…oh. I could barely breathe. I left my spot and pushed through the crowd toward the stage. If I didn’t confirm who my heart believed was up there singing, I’d always wonder why it took my breath from me. I looked back, but I couldn’t see if Giovanni had returned. The place I’d been standing was lost in the undertow of people swaying to the music, so I returned my attention to the soulful voice singing of a girl and how he wished he’d never left her.

“
Her love, her pain, were my own. Flowers of the seeds I’d sown. Watered by her cry, the day I said good-bye.”

Just hearing it made my heart hurt.

The stage lights cast millions of colored gems on our heads, sparkling on our skin, swirling through the tinted auras of the crowd like we were the center of a vast galaxy in motion. I shoved through the rows of spectators and stumbled forward, stopping at the base of the stage. But my heart continued to stumble.

It fell at Finn’s feet.

I looked up and watched him sing, perfectly curved lips barely opening as though the lyrics hurt coming out of him. The blue stage light shone down on his jet-black hair and bathed his golden aura so that he looked like a candle burning on stage. His eyes were closed as he sang.

See me,
I thought, willing him to open his eyes.
Look at me
. Just once again so I could see if he would feel as stunned and shaken as I did. If he felt anything, anything at all. Perhaps he’d left it all behind in America when he decided to leave.

His long fingers plucked the guitar strings, and I instantly remembered how they felt behind my ears and on my jaw as he kissed me. I closed my eyes and listened to his tender voice. It was almost enough, having had this last glance at the boy I loved. A moment with him I thought I’d never have. I understood then why they called them stolen moments.

Once Finn’s image on the stage was forever burned in my heart, I forced my chin up and turned away. I needed to be as strong as he was the day he let me go. The singing stopped. I faltered but kept pushing sideways, swimming across a riptide of auric energy.

At first I had wanted Finn to see me but now…now I wanted not to endure this fierce, pulsing ache in the center of my chest. I had enough pride to walk away without him seeing me.

“Cora!” My name echoed across the crowd like a slow-moving wind.

I kept moving to the right of the crowd, but it parted in a wide circle around me. Except for one person who stood in my way. He must’ve run the length of the stage to intercept me.

Wordlessly, Finn cupped the back of my neck with his hand and clutched me against his chest. A tiny gasp escaped me, but I could form no words. He spoke for both of us, his words coming out in a reverential murmur, his warm lips against the hollow of my cheek. “You’re here. Jaysus, you’re here.”

I was a million miles away from everything familiar—but in his arms, I was home. Why did Finn have to feel like home?

“How is it that in all the faces in this crowd, I opened my eyes and saw the one that was in my mind?” His lips moved softly against my skin. We both turned our heads so slightly, our lips only meeting at the sacred corner of our mouths where smiles and secrets hide.

I became aware of applause all around us. Finn must have, too, because he broke contact and peeked at me with a wide smile that soon faded. “You’re crying, luv?” He swiped my cheek with the back of his fingers, then brought them to his lips. “Why are you crying?”

I sniffled. I hadn’t realized I was. “Because you’re here.”

Finn led me to an open spot of grass. “Are ya letting on, Cora? I live here. You might be a wee bit far from home,” he pointed out, enunciating his T’s in his charming Irish way. “You said you’d find a way and you found a way. I never doubted you would.” With a laugh, he swept me into his chest once more. “Christ, it’s good to hold you again.” My breath came in short puffs against his collarbone. “It’s the sun on my back after days in the rain.”

I reveled in the nearness of him, the delicious pleasure of his hands on me. He smelled so good, so familiar. The cloves and soap, the…

“So,” said a woman’s cold voice from behind me. “This is Cora.”

Finn held on to my hand. “Mother, Cora Sandoval. Cora, this is my mother, Ina Doyle.”

“I see it’s too late.” Mrs. Doyle regarded me with icy blue eyes, bordering on resentful.

“Too late for what?” I asked, unable to ignore the bait. Finn squeezed my fingers.

She smoothed her tightly drawn hair against her scalp. “I had hoped Finn was simply being melodramatic about his affections toward you. I had hoped it was merely a crush, as he is too young for any serious involvement. But I see it’s too late.” I’d never before heard someone use the word “hope” like a spear.

“Can we not go into this now? You’re being rude,” Finn told her, his voice sharp. His aura jabbed at her in angry spikes. Her aura responded like a Death Star force field, deflecting his blows. Amazing.

Ina’s eyes flicked to mine. I tried not to look away but failed, my gaze landing somewhere near her impeccable shoes. “Am I?” she asked. “I do apologize for being rude. I’m a mother. We tend to want to protect our children.”

That’s when I lifted my gaze to meet hers. “From me?” I asked, barely able to mask my astonished laughter. I didn’t want Finn’s mother to hate me, but clearly she had already made that decision before we’d met. And if she really wanted to split hairs, he was the one who broke
my
heart when he left so abruptly.

Someone in a suit tapped Finn’s shoulder. “One moment,” Finn said to us. “My set was over, but I don’t think they expected me to go darting off the stage.”

Although their color was different, Mrs. Doyle’s eyes and Finn’s were identically almond-shaped. Hers would be beautiful if they held any of the warmth her son’s eyes did. She leaned in close and whispered, “You’ve changed him. He wasn’t ready.”

“Ready? Pardon me for saying so, but I certainly didn’t expect to feel like this. It just happened.”

Ina clucked her tongue. “Oh,” she said, “you thought I meant
love.
” Her gaze raked my body. “Love is like smoke, dear. Sneaks in under locked doors. There’s something about you, I’ll give him that. What you bring is another matter. He can’t handle it.”

Finn sprinted back to us and grabbed my hand. “Enough.” His steely words matched the hard, razing stare he gave his mother. “I’ll decide what I can handle.” Ina turned on her high heel and strode away.

“Sorry about her,” he whispered. “It’s not you she’s cross with.”

I was too stunned to react. I’d received an auric bitch-slap. Apparently, I didn’t have the ability to deflect bad vibes as well as she did because my body was like an empty balloon after the encounter. “I’m so sorry to cause you trouble. I had no idea I’d see you.”

“You mean you didn’t come here for me?” he asked, sticking his bottom lip out in a very appealing, ripe fruit kind of way.

I bit my own lip. “No.” When Finn gave me the truth serum look, I said, “Honestly. I came because of my mother. I never got to fill you in on everything—I never had time. I didn’t expect to run into you. That’s why I tried to leave. I wanted to respect your wishes not to see me.” I couldn’t look at him then. He’d see my pain.

“You know nothing of wishes,” Finn said.

“But—”

“No, Cora. I’m awed that you’re here,” he said, his voice sure and strong. “I thought it would take a miracle to ever see you again. Now that you’re here, I feel whole again. I may never let you leave.” He kissed the top of my hand. “Will you stay with me awhile?”

“I can’t. I—” Again, I looked around for Giovanni or the blaze of his distinctive aura. I didn’t want to worry him.

“Please, luv. I’ll take you to Mulcarr’s Pub for some traditional Irish music. My uncle Clancy owns it. I just want to look at you. Christ, Cora, the reality of you is so much better than I’ve been dreaming.”

Finn jogged over to the stage and had a quick exchange with someone before returning to my side. I had Giovanni’s number and asked Finn if I could use his cell phone to make a quick call. He answered, reasonably frantic. I muttered a hushed apology, told him I’d run into someone I knew, and that I’d call him later. I could tell Finn was curious but he didn’t inquire.

Finn
.

This was surreal. He wanted to spend time with me, time I thought we’d never have again. I wanted that also, but I was torn in two. I had my mother’s journal—and I really wanted to be alone to read it. But this unexpected time with Finn was something I couldn’t make myself throw away. It would only be for a little while, I reasoned. The truth was, I believed in fate. And obviously our story wasn’t over.