The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1) (20 page)

“Yes. I fought the Three Brothers. They came alive from Dad’s stories, but look what happened. I fought them and survived. You and Mom were miles away at the Keep. I didn’t need either of you. I killed one by myself and it wasn’t even that hard. All of that time we spent doing archery and combat training to fight them was a waste.”

A great wind rattled the lead crystal panes behind the altar and clouds swirled in the darkening sky.

“Yesterday Mom saved you from a demon who was in the middle of killing you,” Lia said.

“Because I was addicted to Nine and strung out,” Fynn said. “She was weakened because she sucked up my addiction along with the daemonium infection. That
is
my fault.” She would have to live with the guilt for the rest of her life. Nothing Lia could say could make her feel any worse than she already did about the Nine healing. “The Triple Goddess was laid waste because I was stupid enough to get addicted to a fucking party drug. It’s that simple.”

“The end times will come and it will be just us two,” Lia said. “We are weak and we will die.”

“The end time is just one more fairy tale,” Fynn said. “It isn’t true.”

Lia moved her head back and forth, as if trying to shake her sister’s words out of her ears. “I’ve lived out there for seven years,” Fynn said, persisting. “It isn’t ending. The world is messed up and full of wars and suffering, just like it always has been, and always will be, but it isn’t ending.”

She went to her sister. She held Lia’s shoulders and forced her to stay there while she told her this. Her sister was sweaty and tired, just as Fynn herself was, but she had to hear the truth.

“We need the Three,” Lia said. Fynn patted her sister on the back while she sobbed. Lia’s belief was sturdier than the stone walls around the Keep. It would take a long time and more than a few talks to break it down. Perhaps Lia would never be able to live in the real world. She was twenty-six years old and had very rarely ever been outside Brigid’s Keep, and never without her mother and bodyguards.

Fynn wondered if she had gotten out just in time in order to be able to live any kind of normal life. She thought of Komo’s house full of rock stars and groupies. She couldn’t call the life she led outside the Keep normal, exactly. But she would return to it as soon as her mother was well. She would stay away from Nine, but she yearned for Komo. He needed her more than ever, she knew it.

“You’re thinking of Komo right now,” Lia said. “Unbelievable.”

“Sorry,” Fynn said.

“We need to think, Fynn. Why can’t we heal her?” Lia asked, looking up at the ceiling. “I don’t understand why it isn’t working. It’s never not worked.”

The whistling wind died down and only then did Fynn realize that it had been howling through the eaves. She looked out the window.

“A storm kicked up because we were fighting.” Lia dried her eyes with the end of her tunic.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “We didn’t make a windstorm,” Sure they broke some windows in their time, but generating weather out of anger was just another crazy story.

“Is that so?” Lia said. She stood, her hands raised above her head. In one breath, her hair whipped her face as though in the middle of a great wind. She was a giant, rising to the ceiling. The wind so violently roared outside the windows that the heavy leaded glass curved to the interior. People yelled in the gardens and the trees bent under the force of the gale.

“Stop,” Fynn said. She cowered under the altar.

But Lia did not stop. Fynn felt something run over her foot. Rats darted along the wood floor, their tiny claws scraping and losing purchase in the wind. From the corners, centipedes wriggled as though squeezed out of the walls. Insects ran along the crossbeams and wainscoting. A spider fell on a silken thread and landed in Fynn’s hair. She swiped at it as bees swarmed outside the windows, blacking out the panes in an undulating mass.

Lia said something that Fynn recognized as their mother’s old Gaelic tongue. Her voice was the sound of an earthquake in the moment before it rises to the surface of the ground.
Filleann an feall ar an bhteallair.
Evil returns to the evil-doer.

This was the true end of the world.

The power emanating from her sister was the drumbeat of scalding air before a pyroclastic flow. It was the roar of a tornado bearing down on an oak tree too young to have roots far enough into the earth to keep it in place. Fynn would be torn asunder and blown to pieces by a natural force beyond any story’s ability to explain.

But then, with a great roar, the wind circled to the ceiling and disappeared. The bees peeled off the windowpanes in clumps. A few disoriented mice and a rat darted through the door to the meadow. The spiders and bugs sank into their corners and dark, hidden places.

“You don’t know everything,” Lia said, as still as the surface of a lake with depths impossible to measure. “You think you do, but you don’t. There are things about the world - about yourself, my sister - that you do not yet understand.”

Fynn was afraid to move.

“You’re both idiots.” In the doorway stood William with a beer cooler in his hands. “Your mother is lying in bed dying and you two are bickering over tricks and truth.” He shook his head, shambling to the altar like he was on the way to a picnic.

“You scared the children with that,” he said to Lia. “And you ripped off the heads of my roses. Shame on you.” He shoved the cooler into Fynn’s hands. “Take this to the lab. I’ve got a feeling about it.”

“What is it?” Fynn asked.

“Essence of the star anemone blossom. Windflower - you know what that is. Vials of it.” He shuffled away, still barking orders. “Mix it with the Goddess Strain. If your mother can hold on, it might cure the daemonium poisoning.”

Fynn called to him. “The original Goddess Strain was destroyed at the lab in St. Cocha.” She was still stuck in the world’s way of thinking, of double blind studies and control groups. She wasn’t sure the Strain made from the blood of her mother and sister would work the same.

“It’s running through your bloodstream as you’re standing there talking to me,” William said. “It’s no big fancy science. The thing that works in the Goddess Strain is your blood, pure and simple. It’s a stupid fire story, as you would say, but it’s the truth. But do what you have to do...just stop wasting time.” He waved with one hand, as though he were tired of the both of them.

Inside the cooler there were rows of small vials of golden liquid. Lia held one to the light. It was filled with the essence of the red and purple altar flowers the color of bruises and blood.

“Hurry up,” William yelled from outside.

Fynn headed for the lab in the east wing of the building. It was good to feel useful after the failed hands-on healing. If keeping away from her sister kept Lia from doing the awful thing with the weather again, that would be cool, too.

***

“Can it be true?” Dr. Sullivan asked as Fynn handed him the syringe dripping with her father’s hope for her mother’s healing. “Will it work?”

“William says it might,” she said. The cure was nothing more than her own blood mixed with the windflower, prayed over by both sisters. It was magic, the stuff of fairy tales. There was no science to it. No experiment to back it up. But it had to work. Her mother’s skin was whiter than ever, her face more wrinkled. Her chest was barely rising with each breath.

She and Lia stood to the side as Dr. Sullivan lifted the tubing connected to their mother’s hand.

Fynn’s phone buzzed in her pocket. Komo’s number.

“Komo needs you, Fynn.” Cara’s voice was hushed as though she were hiding.

“Is he hurt?” Lia flashed her a look that would bring the rats out of the walls again. Fynn went into the hall and Lia followed.

“No, he’s sick,” Cara said. “Really sick. He’s calling for you. He won’t let anyone else near him. Please hurry. We’re at the house. I’m scared.”

“What kind of sick?” Fynn asked. Her words were senseless kites in a high wind. She knew what kind of sick. Cara fumbled with the phone.

“Fynn. Please. Get over here.” A dead line.

“No,” Lia said. “Don’t.”

Dr. Sullivan joined them in the hall. “It’s done,” he said. “Now we wait.”

Fynn was already moving through the modern hospital they built in the Keep in her absence. She wanted more than anything to talk to her mother again but seeing her revived would have to wait. She would have to have faith.

There would be time for a reunion when she returned. And this time she would return. Komo was coming back with her that night, and by that time Mother Brigid would be cured. The family could sit down and figure out what to do next. Everything would be as it should.

“Where are you going?” Dr. Sullivan asked, running beside her. His eyes were full of concern. She loved Sully’s kind face and his salt and pepper beard. He was the one person who respected who she was both inside and outside the Keep. She would find some way to thank him when this was over.

“I’m going to fetch Komo,” she said.

His smile was crooked, but he nodded like he understood. He held up two fingers in a peace sign. The old hippie.

Fynn stopped in the basement for a quiver and a long bow. The arrows clacked together when she threw them the back seat of one of the Keep’s SUV’s. Fynn barreled down the road towards the gate. Her mother and Komo would be cured. That was what was important in this moment. She stepped on the gas.

After their healings, she would get to the bottom of this war against her family. With Komo by her side, she would take her place at Brigid’s Keep and fight with her family against whatever storm dared to stand against them.

***

This close to the wall of Brigid’s Keep, the hairs on Eli’s arms curled and smoked. Like a magnet crossed with the opposite charge, the wall repelled him. Yet he forced himself to hide as close as possible to the gate. He tucked his motorcycle into the forest off the road. He crouched in the high grass to wait.

The cries of birds pierced the mountain air. He studied the tanned backs of his hands as though he had never seen them before. When he was a kid he loved to draw. It was one of many things his mother and brothers beat out of him. He touched a boulder wedged in among the others in the wall. He swore with pain, his fingertips smoking.

He slapped his own face to stay focused. Despair threatened to wash him away completely. He would go mad. He would go fucking insane and then he would not be able to do the one thing that he was still alive to do.

He had to protect Fynn.

With Mother Brigid’s touch, his human soul emerged from the shadows. It had taken hours for his demon form to go back to human after he jumped from the hospital window. He hid in an abandoned house down a side road and waited for his limbs to shorten and his claws to turn back to hands.

The return of his soul did not mean amnesia. There was no such blessing. He remembered every second of the time he spent in Hell. He remembered what he had done to get there, too. The memories and shame went along with the physical strength of a demon nature. Mother Brigid needed him very, very strong.

There was the sound of a car’s engine. Her. She was coming out of the Keep.

She stopped at the gate and spoke in a friendly tone with the guard. Eli resisted the urge to jump on his bike. It was important that she not see him, not yet. He didn’t have a plan except to protect her. He would never be able to follow her inside. It was inside that he had been born. All of his brothers had been born there, when his mother had pretended to be a follower of Mother Brigid.

Now Brigid’s Keep was the only place that the Goddesses would ever be safe from the witch’s demon sons. Eli had a perverted urge to touch the wall again, just to feel the heat. He did and left a layer of skin steaming on the rocks. He deserved to burn. He crouched low as she drove past.

He rolled his bike to the pavement and jumped on the throttle, relieved to ride again. When he rode he felt the pain of what he was a little less. The Harley he stole from Cain’s garage made too much noise to allow him space to think too much.

The yellow lines on the road remained constant. He didn’t slow until the Keep SUV loomed in the visible distance. He would let her remain far enough ahead so that she would not suspect a follower. He knew where she was heading.

He had been born and bred to destroy Mother Brigid and her daughters. Now he had only one purpose for drawing breath and not turning around and gunning through the Keep’s gate to burn: He had to protect Fynn.

The pistons chugged the apocalypse along in doses of two hundred milligrams each. Red tablets poured from the long tongue of the conveyer belt like valentine candy. Each tiny heart bore the stamp of CS and would bring the human who popped it an evening of pure ecstasy before the virus it contained within bloomed in the bloodstream. The next morning’s high would give way to headaches, nausea, and then death if untreated by a special cure, which only Cain Pharmaceuticals produced.

The Divine would have another experience altogether. Nine caused the Divine to become profoundly addicted and beholden to whoever could keep them supplied.

Two workers in sterile white suits fixed with oxygen tubes snaking out of their sealed hoods scooped handfuls of Nine into bottles and packed them into boxes. Cain watched from his office. Most of the rest of the operation was closed for the entire week to concentrate on Nine production.

This was the final day. After this, they would need a hundred workers to sterilize the facility and begin manufacturing the Cain Pharmaceuticals cure. The two on the floor now were already doomed, despite their oxygen and hazardous material suits. Nine was pure Hydravirus. Even with the sugar coating, virus in the loose particles would have their way with the workers. Demon viruses didn’t care about sterile barriers any more than his demon brothers cared about human decency.

Komo’s show at the Vine tomorrow night would get the plan in motion. The concert would be the tipping over of the first tile in a complex domino design. The pieces would fall in a giant chain reaction, and before the final end, his real life would begin. Fynn would be his within the week.