The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1) (8 page)

She tilted her head toward the room filled with people, laughter, and music. Komo. The idea of Komo keeping chaste for want of her was delicious. It was a crystal pool on a hot day. She wished she could trust that it was more than a mirage. No women in three years? The very idea defied belief. Fynn took another long drag of Cate’s strange cigarette. Maybe she would try to believe it. She would try talking to Komo. She wouldn’t be stupid this time. Or maybe she would. Someone played hand drums and the beat thumped in time with her heart. With Cate at her back, she walked into the room, ready to fling herself into the fire for Komo’s love.

Komo sat on a wide stone hearth. Girls danced in wild bids for his attention, their arms over their heads and their mouths soft with pleasure. Between the swaying bodies, Fynn caught glimpses of Komo’s legs, his hands, and his long hair over his face as he bent over his guitar. A party girl sat behind him with her legs wrapped around his waist, her naked back pink from the fire’s heat.

Jealousy was a gray, heavy thing, crouching on Fynn’s heart, sucking out any hope of happiness. She moved to leave, but met a wall of smoke and moving bodies. Dizziness knocked her to the side and she grabbed someone’s arm to keep from falling.

“Fynnie?” A familiar voice made her look up. She was leaning on Randy, the surfer she knew from her mornings riding the Alley. Several others of the Alley crew waved at her, dancing as they were, amid the Komo girls. Randy held a glass of wine in one hand and a rolled smoke in the other. He hugged her, the salty ends of his hair tickling her cheek.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, glad to have a reason to turn away from the scene around Komo.

“These guys brought us,” he said, motioning to three big guys leaning against the far wall. They nodded to Randy as he raised his glass. They were the uncanny surfer boys, looking just as out of place at the party as they had at the beach. The one with the light hair leaned in to say something to the others. She thought she heard the sound of insects chewing inside the walls as they ducked out of the room.

“I’m going crazy,” she said.

“We all are, sweetheart,” Randy said.

Komo’s head snapped up and his eyes met hers across the room. He broke into a smile that cut through the fog in her brain. The dancing girls turned, their eyes clouded. Cara was among them. A flash of anger crossed her face, but then disappeared so quickly that Fynn thought it must have been a trick of the flickering firelight. Then Cara was calling for her to join the dancing, beckoning her with her arms.

“
I need you more than you need me.”
Komo’s face cocked in a wise-ass half smile. Komo always sang when other people would have said hello. His singing warmed the centers of her bones and she wanted nothing, but to hear more of it.

“
Goddess of the Three, come to me
,” he sang.

Fynn ignored the dancers and the surfers and the strange boys. She sank to Komo’s feet. Cara’s sequins caught the firelight and threw it around the room in tiny golden reflections. Komo watched the dancing girls with a satisfied smile. Fynn had seen the look on his face when they were at the Athenian school and his playing put the entire commons hall full of students and teachers in a trance.

There were tables laden with fresh food and drink. Beautiful girls poured ruby-colored wine for themselves and each other. Warm, baked bread, fruit, and fine cheeses filled gold platters, and servants from the kitchen kept bringing more.

“How can you sit still while he plays?” Cara asked. “How can you resist him?” She laughed and spun away.

Beautiful women outnumbered the equally beautiful men, but everyone laughed, danced, and kissed one another in the large room with the nighttime ocean spread out before tall windows. Listening to Komo play guitar and sing was like being in a drop of amber. Komo sealed them outside of real time and the concerns of the real world. Nothing mattered, but feeling good and he made them feel so good.

Fynn understood the smooth seduction of Komo’s presence and voice. She felt it herself. She craved it in his absence. Yet she never succumbed to the wild laughter that most women fell victim to when they got too close to Komo for too long. Cara was right. As much as she secretly yearned for Komo, Fynn could resist him. She loved his music, but she never lost control.

It would be such a relief for once to lose control.

“Is there somewhere we can go to talk?” she asked him. A pair of girls writhing in front of them cut her with their eyes.

“I thought you said no,” he said over fingerpicking the beginning of a new song.

“Komo, you need help,” she said.

“I’m aware of that.” His eyes moved over the burgeoning crowd. “I told you I needed help.”

“So let’s go somewhere and talk.” She could feel so small around Komo. He eclipsed her. She was sure that the people here looked at her and wondered what someone as plain as Fynn was doing with someone like Komo. Anyone could see that Cate was wrong. Komo saw Fynn as a bodyguard. A hired hand. A little sister. What else would he see her as with someone as gorgeous as Cara around anyway?

“
We were born of the stars and the sea. . . . .”
Komo sang and sighs of appreciation rose to the high ceiling. Now she remembered. She had come prepared to fight demons, but, of course, everyone in the house was human, filled with human need that Komo both whet and satisfied. She’d seen it at Athenian before he was famous. Everyone would dance until they fell in exhaustion and he would never stop playing unless someone convinced him that he needed to rest.

“Komo, please,” she said. “Make this the last song. I want to talk to you.”

He strummed louder and pretended to ignore her. The two dancers moved closer, opening one another’s mouths with a long kiss. The girl behind him tightened her legs around his waist and moaned.

Cara offered a glass of red wine so dark it looked like blood. “Drink up,” she said.

Fynn took the glass, but had no intention of drinking it. The music stopped with a twang of lost notes. The clinging girl yelped as Komo stood and shed her as though he had never realized she was there. He moved behind Fynn and took the glass out of her hand. He reached around her so that she could feel his heart beat at her back and the heat of his breath on her neck. He lifted the wine to her chin.

“Drink,” he said. His mouth brushed against her ear. She closed her eyes as he pressed the rim of the glass against her lips. She took a long swallow and the warmth from the wine bloomed inside of her in a soft detonation.

He kissed her cheek. Electricity sparked on the place where his lips touched her skin. She took another sip of wine and turned around to face him. He straightened to his full height. The space between their bodies charged with a current almost too intense to survive. His eyes were golden and sleepy.

“What’s going on here?” she asked. “How do you see me?” She wasn’t a shy teenager anymore. She ignored the racing terror in her heart and lifted her eyes, daring him to answer.

“
I see you as my fire arrow.”
He sang under his breath so that only she could hear. “
I see you as my lovely one.”

“For the love of God, Komo,” Fynn said. She struggled to breathe. A smile danced on his full lips. “Talk like a normal human being.”

“Nothing normal about either of us,” Komo said. “And very little human. But so much love, and so much of the gods.” The space between them closed even further.

“Talk straight with me.” She pushed against him and it was like resisting the ocean. “I’m here, aren’t I? I stayed like you wanted me to. Who am I to you?”

“You are everything to me,” he said.

Cara wedged her way between them. She opened her palm and lay within it a tiny silver box with a four-point star engraved on top. She flipped it open to reveal two red tablets. She lifted one out to Komo. She placed it between his lips, her finger lingering for just a second inside his mouth. Fynn bit the inside of her cheek in agony, her mouth filling with the taste of metal. Komo leaned his head back and exposed his throat.

Cara pushed the silver box under Fynn’s nose.

“What is that?” Fynn asked.

“It’s a nice little something called Nine,” Cara said.

“What does it do to you?” Her own voice was lost in a tunnel. She held an empty glass, having drunk the entire thing without realizing it. Fragrant smoke curled in ribbons from the small rolled cigarettes. Half the room smoked them. Randy, the surfers, many of the girls. Fynn’s arms and legs were loose as a dancer’s. She placed her hand flat against Komo’s chest to keep her balance.

“Take it,” Cara whispered in her ear. “You deserve it, Fynn. All you do is work to help other people. All you ever do is think of the people you might save. You put everyone before yourself.”

Komo nodded in agreement, his strange-colored eyes reflecting the fire. He wasn’t thinking of demons as he faced her in the firelight consumed by whatever Nine was.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” he said. “We deserve this one night to get lost.” He squeezed her hips, burying his face in her shoulder so that his lips moved against her throat as he spoke. “Do Nine with me,” he said. “When I’m with you, I’m not afraid.”

Fynn moved to take the pill out of the silver box, but then stopped. “Answer me, Komo,” she said, grasping at her question before it slipped away. “I’m not one of your groupies. Who am I to you?”

“You are my goddess.” She winced, as an almost-painful charge of desire moved down her body. He squeezed her hips harder, pulling her close. “You are my queen,” he said. He bent to brush his lips against hers, teasing her with the promise of a kiss. “My love.”

She let him hold her up with one arm. “Is that true?” she whispered.

“It’s only ever been you,” he said. He pressed his finger against the red tablet and lifted it to Fynn’s lips. She darted out her tongue and let it dissolve in her mouth. He chased it with a real kiss, tasting of wine and smoke. She let go into a freefall under the gentle pressure of Komo’s mouth. She fell backward, caught in the arms of the beautiful laughing girls wearing bracelets and rings and gauzy dresses with the smell of incense on their skin.

She let herself be lost. Lost in the depths of Komo’s voice and the laughing of girls and wine spilling down her throat and the feeling that she was deeply and truly wanted by someone who would never ever hurt her again.

***

Fynn ran through a forest on four graceful legs and hooves painted in gold. Komo hunted her from behind the trees and she was going to let him catch her, after a chase.

She shifted shape and time. Fynn and Komo lay together in the meadow within the walls of the Keep. They were children again, holding hands and lying on their backs watching clouds drift by in an impossibly blue sky. His father had brought him there for a visit once when Komo was little and left without him. He’d promised to return, but he never did and Mother Brigid explained to Komo that he was going to be her child now. The Keep would be his family forever. Fynn was happy, as though she had just woken from a long, deep sleep. She turned to stare into his eyes and saw in them pure youth. Then they shifted and reflected age that reached deep into the far reaches of human memory.

“How long have we been here?”
she asked.

“I have been here as long as there have been people on earth. You have been here as long as there has been earth.”

They watched as blossoms shook free from the cherry trees in early spring bloom and drifted over their faces.

***

Fynn danced while Komo played guitar and sang. The drummer from Ritual Madness sat by the fire with a bongo drum between his legs. He shut his eyes in trance, a smoldering cigarette balanced on his lower lip. She and the other girls followed Komo around the room in time with the music, driven by the beat pounding out of the drummer’s hands. Komo was the guitar player, but he was the drummer, too; he was the dancers. He was inside the drummer and inside himself. Fynn led the line of dancers winding through the house like a snake.

***

Fynn
was
a snake, nosing through grasses growing out of rich peat soil. Dancers circled a bonfire so high, it licked the lower branches of the trees as grand as cathedral walls. She slithered through the dancers’ feet without fear and when they saw her, they were not afraid. A priestess lifted the snake above her crown of fiery braids.

She was there as a symbol of all good things, of the power of creation. She was there to bring them prosperity, fertility, and love. They passed her around in their gentle hands and danced with her. She loved them and she loved all creation. The people worshipped her. They conjured her. She was their reason for dancing. Her scales flashed as she moved in their hands, her tongue flickering, tasting the smoke.

***

“Fynn. My daughter. Where are you?”
Her mother’s voice shattered the illusions of the Nine tablet dissolving in her bloodstream. Fynn pushed the voice away. Her mother had put her in danger. A pebble of anger grew to a stone lodged in her throat. She tried to cough it up, but the more she fought against it, the larger it grew.

***

Fynn was back at the Keep, awake in an old photo of herself as a baby resting on her father’s shoulders. People from the commune tugged at the hem of her dress and she smiled down at them. She wore a wreath of purple windflowers around her head, like a crown. Her mother walked beside them. Her sister on the other side. They were friends with everybody. Her father held her ankles fast. She was safe and secure. She could never imagine falling.

Then she blinked and she was fifteen. She rested her hands on a filthy woman’s back. The woman was homeless and stank of urine, but Fynn loved her because she loved everyone. She was filled with the love of the Triple Goddess toward all creation, but it didn’t mean anything. She wasn’t protected from the demon virus that crawled up her forearms in hungry vines that yanked her away from everything she loved. She screamed in darkness, hung upside down at the maw of hell.

***