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I reached behind me and clasped the hilt of Ultana’s dagger, which was stashed under my sodden T-shirt. I thrust the blade toward my uncle Clancy, as well as two other Arrazi I didn’t recognize, a woman and a man. They also had two common men with them—non-Arrazi. Amazing how the sight of new, unfamiliar faces heightened my fear. At least with my uncle, I knew what to expect—pure sadistic treachery.

  “What’ll you do with that toy, lad?” Clancy taunted.

  Surely he knew that he couldn’t attack my energy without being blown back by it. An Arrazi could never attack another Arrazi. But a knife…a knife didn’t play by our rules. I wished Cora had one. From the looks of her and the acrid feel of her aura hitting me like a draft, she’d gut Clancy like a slimy fish.

  “What’ll you do, uncle? Fight me? Try to kill me? No doubt you would. Nothing means more to you than the power of possessing these Scintilla, right? Even at the risk of your own family.” I pointed the dagger at each Arrazi, one by one. “I swear on my life, I will kill you if you so much as breathe unnaturally in their direction. I have no devotion now but to morality and the truth. What the Arrazi are doing is wrong.”

  Clancy stepped forward and pointed a fat finger at me. “Ignorant, disloyal muzzie! Your devotion to save the Scintilla from the natural course of things is as resolute as my devotion to seeing them dead. Your family is the Arrazi.”

  “I think I liked him better when he was only trying to hold us prisoner,” Cora said from behind me.

  “Give it up and let’s be done with this,” Clancy said. “What you see here”—he gestured to the other Arrazi who looked like tigers about to pounce—“are but a fraction of an army bent on destroying the Scintilla for good.”

  “Whose good, you gluttonous lump of a man?” Giovanni shouted.

  I couldn’t see the attack, but I could feel the cold wind of my uncle’s energy whoosh past me. Giovanni made a grunting sound and lurched into my back. Cora screamed.

  Her scared cry was the starting gun I needed, and I leaped forward toward Clancy, whose eyes widened at me and the oncoming blade. I couldn’t take them all at once, and they could kill Cora and Giovanni both before the dagger struck. But I had an idea…

  I darted past my uncle, who spun to track me, momentarily interrupting his attack. I looked back at Cora trying to help Giovanni up from one bent knee. His hand covered his chest. I threw my energy out toward my uncle. When it collided with his body I was instantly thrown backward into the Arrazi woman and one of my uncle’s human thugs—the non-Arrazi with the harelip, Ultana’s driver and my uncle’s lackey, whom we’d drugged and left in the tomb as well. The force knocked all three of us to the ground.

  I bashed the hilt of the dagger into the woman’s temple, knocking her unconscious, then pulled the aura from the man until he passed out. The other common man we’d left at the tomb earlier ran to me and reached for the dagger. I yanked at his soul until I was dizzy with the cementing of his foul spirit into mine. My energy surged with the kill. Clancy took but a moment to narrow his eyes at me before he turned around and committed himself to killing Cora and Giovanni. Her black curls flew forward as she stooped, crossing her arms over her chest. Her mouth was frozen in a delicate O as not only her breath rushed out of her but her life.

  I had no choice.

  I leaped up and ran. There was only a moment before the knife drove into my uncle’s back, severing the pull of Cora’s aura. She gasped and looked up, eyes widening in shock when she saw my uncle fall forward with the hilt sticking from his back.

  The world must have momentarily stopped spinning. Everything slowed, and I could only hear my own heartbeat and register the grateful yet condemning look in Cora’s green eyes that seemed to say, “Thank you, but this doesn’t make up for Mari.”

  She pulled a weakened Giovanni to his feet, and they began to stumble away around the dome of the tomb. The last Arrazi ran after them. I pulled the bloody dagger from Clancy’s back and pitched it at the man. It struck, but not deeply and not in the right place. It bounced grossly in his hamstring as he twisted to grab it.

  In one sickening instant, he ignored the knife and pulled at Cora’s aura so hard it flung her off of her feet. She landed in the dirt with a thud, writhing in pain. I ran and threw myself onto his wide back. He swung a meaty arm at me, grazing my cheek. I clamped my arms around his neck, but he was much stronger than me. He reached his arm over his head and pulled me forward over his shoulder. The impact rattled the breath from me even as he squeezed my neck to pinch it closed.

  He gave a high-pitched yelp and released my neck, twisting to look behind him. Cora’s bottom lip was sucked into a grim line. She had apparently swiped the blade from his leg. With two hands clasping the hilt, she skipped forward like a fencer and plunged the knife deep into his side. The bloke immediately fell next to me, sending comets of gravel flying around him when he hit. I jumped to stand in front of Cora.

  She shuddered. It wasn’t the cool rain coating her skin; it was pure shock and adrenaline. She’d just killed a man to save my life. Her hands flew up to her mouth. She couldn’t speak, just shook her head over and over, tears mixing with the rain coating her face. I’d never seen someone so tortured.

  My hands instinctively reached to draw her in. I pulled her against my chest. Images of holding her in California bombarded me: carrying her after she fainted in the coffeehouse. Embracing her as she cried against the rec center wall when she’d found out her mother hadn’t abandoned her but had been missing for over a decade. Every memory of holding her against me as we kissed…

  Crunches of steps approached, startling us from our embrace. Over her shoulder, I saw Lorcan Lennon—Ultana’s gobshite son—walking toward us, staring with eyes slashed to thin, speculative slits. What was he doing here? Had Clancy told him of his mother’s death?

  I gave her a push away from me. “Run! Take my car to the house. My mother and father will keep you safe until I arrive.”

  “Finn,” she said, tugging at the back of my shirt. “Come on!”

  As Lorcan drew closer, I heard but mostly felt her retreat. He could have attacked her from where he stood but strangely, he didn’t. Why? I bent for the blade. “Don’t even think about it,” I warned him.

  He held his hands up in a gesture of surrender as his chest heaved with fast breaths, but he didn’t move forward or even look in Cora’s direction.

  “Why are you here? You don’t want any part of this,” I said.

  “Saoirse caught wind of something about to happen here…” His voice trailed off as he looked around at the heaps of fallen bodies.

  Aye, a desperate shite thing had definitely happened here.

  Lorcan looked down at the fallen man and his brow bent with a question. “That’s my mother’s dagger. How the hell did you get it?”

  Chapter Three

  Giovanni

  Rain dripped from the black coils of Cora’s hair, her feet assumed a fighting stance, and for one moment she looked like an otherworldly warrior, shimmering and fierce. The Arrazi was deservedly, blessedly dead. His aura blinked out like a broken bulb.

  I could breathe again.

  “To Finn’s,” she gasped, grabbing my hand. We dodged and swerved around the saturated minefield of dead bodies, still and dark as the stones they came to see.

  Cora’s silver aura drew in tightly and pointed out in sharp-tipped spikes. Defenses up. Guarded. She dripped adrenaline. She’d been in battle. Seemed an inevitable progression. After she’d left Clancy drugged but alive in that tomb, I figured she’d never kill. But she’d driven the blade so hard into the Arrazi man’s side it looked like she’d reached inside him to snap a rib bone as a trophy.

  I gripped her hand tighter as we made our escape. “We must leave all these Arrazi stronzi behind. It’s out of the question for you to go to Italy alone. Doesn’t this attack prove it? We will find our way to safety. Together.”

  It was difficult for us to run, our legs dragging as though we ran through sludg
e. I tried to infuse her with strength, but after being attacked my energy was as depleted as hers. She pierced me with a cautionary look when she felt my efforts. Her green eyes were wide with fear and something else I’d never seen in them—something reckless and deadly. It made my gut drop uneasily.

  “Don’t do that. Save your energy,” she gasped. “We’re both weakened.”

  “I can help you. I’m not damned helpless.” I broke the lie off like a twig tossed at her feet.

  Helpless was not something I’d felt in many, many years, but that’s exactly what I felt.

  I’d been helpless as I watched Cora get brutally attacked and could do nothing to help because I had a geis put on me by Lorcan to prevent me from saving her life; the cruelest curse to inflict when every instinct in my body was to defend the girl who was singularly one of my own. She was more than that. She had become a part of me.

  With every step closer to the car, my hope grew that we’d live another day. Fight another day. Love…someday.

  We dove into Finn’s car, and I started it up. “Are we to wait for him?” I asked, already putting the car in gear, my foot lifting from the brake.

  Cora looked through the fencing at Finn and Lorcan talking. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice as faded as distant wind. “I don’t know…” Then her eyes drifted upward, and she pointed to a security camera on the fence’s perimeter. “We’d better get away from here, go to his house. This is his territory. He’ll find his way back to us, I hope.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. None of my hopes included the Arrazi, Finn Doyle.

  Dun paced on the front steps of Finn’s manor like a wild horse with his long black mane stuck to his body. He was as soaked as we were and as indifferent to it. He pulled Cora into a tight hug. My gut squeezed. I’d never had friendship like that.

  “Mami Tulke already has plane tickets booked,” Dun said. “My Spanish is no bueno, but she’s mumbling about keys and treasures, and I think she’s been out-of-her-mind worried about you. Are you okay? Where’s Finn?”

  “He’ll be coming,” Cora said, worrying her bottom lip.

  “Where’s Claire?” I asked him. Claire’s little face—a rounder less-edged version of my mother’s—flashed in my mind. Claire was the only thing that stopped me from chasing after Cora when she ran into battle against that man. It was no contest to be willing to die in Cora’s place. None. But to choose death and leave a little girl, my little girl alone, was something I couldn’t do. It was characteristically selfless of Cora to remind me of that fact. How was I possibly going to be a good father when I’d been orphaned and didn’t really know what a father should do?

  “Claire’s hanging out in the Doyles’ library, reading books I can’t even wrap my brain around,” Dun answered. “Smart kid, man.”

  Even if it had only been some of my DNA that contributed to her intelligence, I felt a burst of pride. I wondered who Claire’s biological mother was. What the mother was… Claire was Dr. M’s experiment and obviously not full-blooded Scintilla. Though I noticed something different about her aura right away; it was broad, expansive, like an explosion in slow motion. People were wary of her, could sense the bomb in her energy.

  Though I knew from experience that her mind alone could intimidate. People feared those who roam many rooms of the mind when most are wedged into just one. Cora thought I survived by manipulating with my Scintilla energy and that had been partly true in my life, but most of the time I manipulated with intellect. People are easy to manage.

  A spotlight of guilt flashed on my handling of Dr. M. I hadn’t been up front with Cora that I was paid by him to find and bring in other Scintilla. But it wasn’t a damn bounty. It wasn’t price-per-head as she’d accused. Dr. M’s company funded my life under the auspices that I was out looking for others like me. He didn’t need to know I was already doing it for free as best I could with limited cash.

  I’d spent my whole life searching for a blaze of silver.

  I accepted his offer because I desperately wanted to find others like me, and I needed the money. I thought he was going to help my kind. That was his promise to me. But I put Cora and everyone else at great risk. There was never any indication that Dr. M was a lunatic when I made my deal with him years ago. How was I to know the Arrazi, by way of Xepa, were involved with his facility and his research? Dr. M didn’t even seem to know. Now I knew how wrong I was, and the price for my mistake was too high—Cora’s trust, and maybe her hard-won love.

  As I stared at Cora, this new warrior—wet from rain and weary from battle—I wondered if she would ever forgive me. If she didn’t, I wondered if I could ever forgive myself.

  Chapter Four

  Cora

  “What have you been doing?” I asked Dun, suddenly noticing the mud that caked the bottom of his jeans and covered his shoes. The mud and the look in his eyes was all it took for me to understand. “But you didn’t finish…” I couldn’t make myself say it. They wouldn’t have buried my mother without me?

  “No, girl. No. And it was raining so hard, the hole was filling in faster than I could dig it. Freaky weather.”

  The three of us looked to the sky. The sudden downpour that had started while we fought the Arrazi had been weird. The sky was now the slate of so many Irish days, but no rain.

  “It was almost as though it had something to do with us,” Giovanni said.

  “Mmmm…” I mumbled, thinking again of my father’s theory that natural disasters were increasing because of an energy imbalance in the world. I yawned. Exhaustion weighed me down, but the need to lay my mom to rest next to my dad was too strong. I couldn’t be at rest until it was done. The sooner I finished it, the sooner I could leave Ireland for Italy.

  Not caring whether anyone followed, I walked across the drive to the spot where my mother’s body lay on the damp ground. Someone had placed a red and green plaid cloth with thin stripes of gold over her, but the rain had soaked it so that her gentle profile showed clearly under the fabric. I sunk to my knees next to her and pulled the cloth from her face. I traced my finger lightly over her nose, coming to rest on her mouth. Pulsing with grief, I kissed my fingers and placed them back on her slightly parted lips.

  Of all moments when I most wanted to cry, needed to cry, I couldn’t. Resentment dripped steadily into my bloodstream as I looked from her still body to the half-dug hole. The Arrazi had made me an orphan. Xepa conspired to exterminate my race. If Ultana’s words meant anything, there was a conspiracy somewhere within the most powerful church in the world to sweep us into a hole and bury the truth.

  Bury… I’d always thought it was strange to put bodies in the ground. I pictured the round earth with one entire layer of its crust populated with skeletons. A landfill of the dead. I never understood it. But in the short time I’d known her, Mom was happiest with her hands in the dirt. It made sense to bury her—to ground her. She and my father would bloom in some new way, together forever.

  If I stared long enough at the watery layer at the base of the hole, I could imagine it was bottomless and she’d sink to the center of the earth and float away on a red river of lava. Was it any better to be cremated and scattered with the winds? Either way, form becomes formless and transmutes into something new.

  Nothing ever felt so wrong than to see a Scintilla’s spark stolen and her body ground into the earth like ash under the Arrazi’s boot. We were givers of light. There had to be a purpose for us. Fresh rage heated my blood. This was so wrong. Not just that my mother was murdered but that her purpose was unknown yet so feared. Those more powerful had killed her.

  I clenched my fists into the mud at my sides. They would know fear. Their actions inspired a dark drive within me. I wanted to know my purpose and make the fearful quake by bringing the truth to the world.

  Hell-bent, I hoisted myself up and jumped with the shovel into the hole that was only as deep as my knees and began digging. I dug until my shoulders ached and my hands were scraped pink.


  I dug until I could finally cry.

  “There now, luv.” Finn’s Irish brogue lilted down to me. “Let me,” he said, gently pulling the shovel from my hands. I tried to keep him from taking it but barely had the strength to stand, let alone shovel another mound-full. Finn clucked his tongue and fixed sad eyes on me. “I tried doing what you’re doing. Turned out I couldn’t bury my sadness and anger. I could only find a use for it. I suspect that’s what you’re after with Italy?”

  I nodded. He always seemed to instinctively know what was going on inside me. I once loved that. Now, its futility aggravated me. I brushed my forearm across my tears. “You said you have something you found at Ultana’s that might interest me? I’d like to see it before I leave for good.”

  “Of course.” His jaw muscles clenched. “I’ll help you…finish…” he said, looking briefly at my mother then back down to the spade. His legs and arms moved in fluid unison to dig, and I thought, of course, he’s done this before, for my father.

  “Shall I get the others?” he asked after the grave had been dug.

  It was ready.

  “Just my grandmother.” Finn gave me a questioning look. “The Maiden and the Crone will bury the Mother,” I said. I couldn’t explain it. It just seemed right. We were a broken circle now, but burying her together might forge a stronger connection between my grandmother and I. Clancy’s crazy notions about sacrificing us aside, I did feel there was something sacred about the feminine triple we had comprised. “We were her family,” I added, as if that fully explained the deeply personal and inexplicable reasons I wanted to do it my way.

  I climbed down into the grave, and Finn nodded. With our arms laced together underneath her, we lowered my mother into the too-willing ground. The mud displaced around her, taking her in. She belonged to the earth now.

  Finn bent over my mom. “Ta sé in ait na fhirinne anois.” He had said those words before, after he realized my father had died. His gold-flecked sorrowful eyes met mine. “She is in a place of truth now.” Something fluttered in his hand when he stood. He passed me a small scrap of the fabric covering my mother’s body. “It’s the Doyle family tartan,” he explained. I held out my hand, and Finn tied the scrap around my wrist, the one with the marking of my mother’s moon.