The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1) (17 page)

Lia watched, shook her head. Looked back into the fire. “When she’s too far away to catch up with we’ll be able to leave the room,” she said.

“What the hell?”

“Lately she doesn’t have time to explain the things she does.” Lia shrugged. She looked like another disciple with her braids and her tattoos. “Sometimes she does goddess tricks to get her way.”

Fynn looked around for something to break down the door. “She needs us. She needs
me
. There are demons out there. It’s worse than you know.”

“The mother love is wearing off in you already, little sister. She has good reason for wanting us to stay. She’ll be back tonight and perhaps she’ll explain then.”

“This is bullshit,” Fynn said.” I don’t know how you take it.”

“I take it,” Lia said. “And so should you. She wanted us to stay behind for a reason, Fynn. I would have obeyed and stayed behind. Obviously, you wouldn’t have or she wouldn’t have locked us in.”

“Hell no I wouldn’t have stayed,” Fynn said. “It’s crazy out there and I should know. I’ve been living in the world for seven years while you’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons behind the walls.”

“Dungeons and what?”

Fynn felt like screaming. “She can get hurt out there,” she said. She tried to sneak up on the door but an invisible force pushed her back with a percussive shove. “This isn’t a game, Lia.”

“I know this isn’t a game. You’re the one playing around with your Ph.D. in immunology, acting like it’s some big honor to be Komo’s girlfriend.”

“I’m his bodyguard,” Fynn said. It only seemed silly when she talked about it. What she and Komo had was real. They understood each other. They needed each other.

“Well, turns out the bodyguard needed a bodyguard,” Lia said. She dragged another chair to the hearth. “Come on, Sister. Let’s not fight. We’re stuck here anyway. Let’s talk and pass the time. Then we will both feel better.”

Fynn shook her head. She had lived too long on her own to be bossed around about which doors she could and could not go through. She didn’t want to sit and talk like nothing was happening. She tried the door again and it opened as though nothing was ever wrong. The doorknob was cool and smooth.

“That would not have been necessary if she thought you would have obeyed,” Lia said.

“How can you constantly obey?” Fynn said. “Isn’t there anything you would rather be doing than following Mom’s orders?”

Lia tilted her head. “But it’s not about me,” she said.

A disciple rushed in, impervious to anything but the work of the Keep. “A new birthing, Lia,” she said. “We need you.” Lia brushed off her hands and followed the disciple out.

Despite the danger on the outside, someone new was being born. Fynn had heard that there were many new births in the Keep these days. So many new families. They’d knocked down a wall and built a new one to widen the compound and accommodate rows of new dwellings. They were small cottages like houses out of a storybook filled with people who had come to Mother Brigid’s commune begging for the chance to obey her.

Fynn went out of the healing room. She would walk around, survey the grounds. Wait for her Mother to come home as though she weren’t terrified that she would not. Fynn shivered, despite the warmth in the main house. The demon that had nearly killed her at Komo’s house was still loose. He said he’d killed the one called Eligos. She hoped he had been telling the truth.

As for her mother, there was no use going after her. With magic that strong, she’d never get out of the gate. She would try to start a car and the engine would seize. Trees would fell themselves on the road to block her path.

She walked to the eastern wall. It was made of thick adobe, cool and smooth under her fingers. She craned her neck to see the top, fifty feet above her head. Her mother wasn’t safe on the other side of it. She shouldn’t have been out there alone.

A group of children ran to say hello. They encircled her like a ring of fresh-faced daisies. She touched a little girl’s cheek. People in the Keep thought she was royalty. In fact, she was a wild and exotic bird trapped inside the walls, already thinking of how she could fly over them and be free.

He sensed her coming long before she arrived. His ears were raw as if subjected to the wail of a thousand alarm sirens at their loudest pitch, yet the only noise was the respirator hooked up to the small child on the bed. The daemonium blade he carried in his pocket weighed heavy.

Eligos had tried to keep Amon from going after Fynn, but his brother was tired of excuses. Amon turned on him with the dull blade, sinking it into Eligos’ side. Blood poured from the wound like a spigot. He had lost consciousness for a few hours. When he came to, his wound had regenerated and his brother crouched beside him.

“The Mother came for her,” Amon growled.

Eligos had pretended to rage, but inside he felt something close to a memory of joy. Fynn was safe. His own witch mother was stupid, a fact he realized since his Return. He had already known that she was narcissistic and cruel, but her stupidity was news to him. He had always seen her as more than human. She could conjure spells and make people do what she wanted. She was beautiful as a classic movie actress and could appear kind when she wanted something.

As her child, he would have died for her. And then he did.

First, however, he killed for her. He killed an innocent young girl dressed in pink organza for her fifteenth birthday. Her family had thrown a big party in a hotel in a poor Central Valley town along the highway. Eligos snatched her in the hall and dragged her into one of the rooms. He made it quick that she did not suffer. His brothers had demon fathers. Before he was a demon, Eligos’ pure human genetics had made him the softest in the family. He wept as she bled into her pink dress.

Since his return, his broken humanity made him the strongest. At least, he had been the strongest before the youngest goddess caught his hand and made him into something else.

In the hospital room, the child’s hands rested on the blankets. They were like fat blind starfish, the fingers tucked in and pink. Those little hands gripped crayons and made drawings for her mother and drew hearts and picked flowers. His chest burned, a literal pain that he suffered constantly since Fynn had touched him at the university donor party. Since touching Fynn just that once his human soul and demon nature had been tearing apart the muscle and tissue that was his heart. He did not know how long he could hold on before he found a way to kill himself and end it forever.

The Mother Goddess approached. She was in a moving vehicle, getting close. He felt her like an animal feels the far off rumble of a tsunami long before it hits the beach. His thighs twitched with the impulse to run to high ground. His weakness was not lifting as he had hoped. It was getting worse. It was a cancer.

Eligos and his brothers were supposed to defeat the Triple Goddess. Their mother had told them it was a certainty, prophesied over millennia. This was to mark the beginning of their family’s rule. Without the Triple Goddess, no one could stop Cain Pharmaceuticals from unleashing Hydravirus and then selling the only cure for an exceedingly high price. A select wealthy few would survive and remain beholden to Cain Pharmaceuticals. As for those of divine origin, they would be nothing but addicted slaves.

Eligos and his family would rise to great power.

But Eligos was unraveling. His mother had warned them not to let her touch them, but not even she could know the extent that her work was undone. A simple handshake with the youngest of the Triple Goddess was all it took to begin the erosion of the evil inside him.

Even after two decades of his mother conspiring against the Kildares, the Goddesses were unbeaten. Fynn was clean of Nine and both she and her sister were behind the walls of Brigid’s Keep, the one place any of the Kildares were safe. The brothers were born in the commune. Since they had been to Hell, one step within the place of their births would cause them to burst into flames.

At least Fynn is safe.
A voice in his head assured him. It was his human voice, the one that was his before his internal descent to Hell.

He would focus his hate on his mother. He saw now that the great witch was nothing but a two-bit hustler. She was a magician, and a bad one.

He let his claws come out. Then he retracted them with the force of his will. He stood by the window in a perfect stance of a concerned parent. The kid belonged to one of Cain’s employees. They took her out of the company day care and injected her with Hydravirus to spring a trap for Brigid. Eligos was pretending to be her father, bringing her to the medical center for treatment.

The sick girl looked dead already. She didn’t move or sigh. It was just like his mother to pick on a poor defenseless child to do her dirty work.

It was easy enough to lure Dr. Kildare away from safety with the promise of a dying child to cure. The witch said that healing a demon virus would weaken the Goddess. She’d be easy for him to slay after the healing. That was what his mother expected him to do.

Eligos ran his tongue over the ridges of his teeth. He moved to the window.

She approached closer. He had to run.

Mother Brigid burst into the room. Eligos lost his balance and he was gripped by the longing to skitter into a crack in the wall. Her presence in the small space was too much for him. He clamped his mouth against an uprising of vomit.

Everyone ignored him. The doctors talked all at once, telling Mother Brigid vital signs, white blood cell levels, stats. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, then he couldn’t hear them. The buzzing of five million bees rose in pitch as if they clustered around his ears. Brigid hushed the doctors. They stood in obedient silence as Brigid unhooked the monitors and tubes and gathered the child in her arms. The tiny body almost disappeared in the folds of the Goddess’ dress. The doctors bowed their heads in hushed reverence. Eligos sidled to the door.

“Be still,” Brigid said. He froze, terrified. A wind blew through, smelling of orange flowers and honeysuckle. The bees thrummed inside of Eligos’ head.

A wave of healing power hit him like a bomb blast. He made a croaking sound as he fell to his knees. He needed to get out of that room or he would die. He tried to look away from Brigid but it was like his head was caught in an iron vise.

“Stay,” she said. Her voice ricocheted like the ringing of a heavy bell. He whimpered in the corner, his legs no longer able to hold him. Pure fear ran through his veins and turned his bones to jelly. A light as dangerous to look at as the noontime sun pulsed under Brigid’s hands over the girl’s body.

The child called out. The screaming bees waned and the pressure against Eligos’ body lessened. He curled into a ball on the floor.

The little girl wanted her mother. The doctors looked at Eligos with questions in their eyes. They had thought that he was the girl’s father. But she wasn’t looking at him, the quivering stranger in the corner.

Brigid lie slumped on the bed. “Take the child outside,” she said. “Leave us.” Even in weakness, her voice commanded respect. The doctors paused just a second and then one of them took the girl in his arms and motioned for the others to follow him out.

“I know what you are,” Brigid said as soon as the door clicked shut. Her face was white and her skin plastered against her skull like an ancient woman’s. The beautiful, if tired, lady who first entered was gone. This woman could have been a hundred years old. She could have been a thousand.

Eligos’ spine hunched. He gnashed his teeth, expecting double rows of points, but they were still flat as a cow’s molars. Her skirts rustled. She was coming for him. She would turn him to ashes. Blind with terror, Eligos fumbled in his pocket for the blade and tossed it with a flick of his wrist. The blade thunked into her belly.

She bent forward at the waist. Her hands curled around the handle, but she did not try to pull it out. Despair overwhelmed him at what he had done. He reached for the blade handle, careful to avoid touching her. She folded over the blood rose blooming through her white tunic, just like the petals of blood falling on the pink dress of the quinceanera girl of his first kill. Her shoulders shook as though she were weeping.

But then she raised her eyes. They were dry. She wasn’t crying. She was laughing.

She straightened herself. Someone knocked on the door, calling her name.

“Stay away,” she said.

The voices on the other side quieted. There was no more knocking.

“Oh, your witches and their daemonium blades,” Brigid said. She looked ancient but she sounded like a very young woman. “They have the one trick and that’s it. You would think after centuries of battle that they would think of something new.”

“You’ll die.” Eligos choked. He bounced on the balls of his reptilian feet. His teeth were sharpening now. He was trapped, confused.

She stretched out her arms. “Then do it already,” she said. “Get it over with. I’m tired.” Her voice was husky and mocking. He hesitated.

“You know the difference between your mother and me?” She coughed and the blood gushed around the blade. The poison of the metal would be corrosive within her. It would feel like acid pouring into her bloodstream yet she smiled like she felt no pain.

“The difference between your mother and me is that if we were both tied to stakes and put in fire, she would burn up and I wouldn’t. She’s not real magic.”

He grabbed the handle. He could save her. Maybe it would not be too late to undo the terrible thing he had done.

She snapped her hand around his forearm. Her fingers were bony, but they held him like a handcuff made of granite. Her other hand held the back of his head at the nape of his neck. She pulled him to her face and opened her mouth over his as though he were a drowning man.

He jerked but she held him fast. He curled like a slug under a salt pour until he was as small as a child. He was himself at three years old holding out a daisy for his mother. And then he
was
the daisy crushed in her fist.

His throat burned, his nose burned, he couldn’t breathe as she exhaled into him. Sadness flooded Eligos’ whole being. He collapsed to his knees.
He
was the girl he killed in the hotel, the girl whose death damned him. His victim’s grief washed through him, the feelings she’d had while she was dying. She would never see her mother again. It was her last thought and now Eligos felt every bit of her loneliness.