I recalled that night. I remembered sending him love, intentionally giving him my energy because he was everything in the universe at that moment. He had looked so dazed and love-stoned afterward, I’d thought he’d been drinking.
His voice was soft. “I was overwhelmed by it. I was being flooded with love…with you. You were everything in the universe at that moment.”
I gasped at his choice of words.
“You were everything he needed to stay alive,” Giovanni slurred from behind me. I turned to see him sitting on the bed. His eyes were half-open. His arms shook to hold himself up. “He needs you like he needs air to breathe. Food to eat. Don’t confuse that with love, Cora.”
Giovanni’s words stung, and I hated him for saying them, even if they were the truth.
“I knew you were dangerous,” Giovanni said to Finn in his thick Italian accent. “Your aura was normal, but I tuned in to energy from you that I’ve only felt once before.” He gestured to me. “From the killer in the pub. The man with the white aura. I tried to warn you. I told you that you were not safe with him.”
“You did,” I whispered, looking at the floor. “I didn’t want to hear.”
“Don’t listen to him, Cora. He can’t say I’m incapable of love. You’re still everything, and I will never hurt you again. I swear it.” A tear dropped onto his cheek.
My own tears fell as well. “Giovanni’s right. If you didn’t want to hurt me, you’d have watched me walk away from the stage the other day. You couldn’t help but want to be near me.” I searched for the precise way to say it and found the only words that rang true. “It wasn’t love.”
“Of course I want to be near you, but because I love you, not because you’re Scintilla. Fate put you back in my path, and I was foolish enough to believe that there was a reason for that, that it meant we were supposed to be together.”
We stared at each other, broken. I’d believed that, too.
Ina’s voice slipped into the room from the dark hallway. “I never should have let Finn go to America. He was too close to converting, but my brother convinced me he would be okay. Now I know he used Finn to get to you. They’d been watching you to see if you could possibly be Scintilla.”
This was more smoke and mirrors. I wouldn’t be played. “Your uncle said he was proud of you for luring me, Finn. Are you proud, Mrs. Doyle?”
“There’s no choice for us. We were born like this. It’s take from another or die,” Ina answered in a weary voice. “But we’re not all like my brother. I hate what we are forced to do. I didn’t want Finn to change. I forbade him to date so he’d not form a strong emotional connection to someone, which often incites the change. I made him wear the crystal bracelet to block people’s energy, hoping against hope to stall the inevitable. I was trying to protect him. But he met you. He fell in love with a damned Scintilla of all things! His love for you changed him.”
Giovanni sighed in disgust. “Now you blame Cora for making him into the monster he was born to be? It’s like blaming the sun for shining. Why have children at all if you are so concerned about what you are? Arrazi do not love Scintilla. You use them up. Destroy them.”
“We didn’t believe any more of you existed.”
“Shut up,” I said to her. “We’re locked up in this prison like pets so you people can live off us. You get to keep me here forever, and I’m supposed to care that Finn’s life was changed? My life is over!” I cried. Just seeing Finn had released a flood of emotions. I couldn’t take being on the opposite side of this locked door, knowing he was free and I wasn’t. I sat down on the bed next to Giovanni and sobbed. His arm curled around my shoulder.
The other door opened, and Gráinne peeked out cautiously like a little girl. Ina and Gráinne stared at each other a moment. Something flickered in Ina’s sharp eyes. “Your biggest secret is your child,” Ina whispered. I understood. Gráinne hadn’t wanted them to find me. Ever. But how on earth could Ina know that?
“I have no child,” Gráinne said, robotically.
Then Ina turned to Giovanni. They stared boldly at each other. She smiled with an edge to it. “And you have the nerve to accuse me of using the Scintilla,” she said to him after a moment. “When are you going to tell Cora the truth?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I looked from Ina to Giovanni, but they were locked in a silent, epic battle.
Ina’s mouth opened to speak, but Finn interrupted. “I’m getting you out of here,” he said with determined eyes.
It took all my courage to believe he told the truth. “What? If you can get me out of here, why the hell have we been standing here talking?”
“I needed you to hear the truth from me.” A sheen of sweat covered his brow. He touched his chest over his heart. “If you leave here with that, then maybe I can forgive myself.”
“How do you know the code?” I asked. “If you didn’t know I was being held prisoner, how’d you get in here?”
Finn swallowed hard before he spoke. “My ability to help you came from you. The Arrazi get their sortilege, their abilities, from Scintilla. It started with you.”
“I know that,” I snapped, remembering what Clancy had told me. “So what, now you’re going to tell me you have some super-special ESP power?”
“My sortilege is…truth,” Finn said. “People can’t help but reveal the truth to me.”
“Truth?” I asked, my voice spiked with incredulity. “That’s a power?”
It wasn’t leaping tall buildings, stopping bullets with bare hands, or even reading minds like I once thought he could do. I had once thought a force outside of myself was compelling me to act boldly in Finn’s presence, to grab his shirt or pin him against a tree when we kissed. But it was my own force. My truth. And now I knew why. Every hit of energy I willingly gave him, or that he took, provided him the ability to coax the truth from me.
“You were able to keep one secret, though,” Finn said, his tone laced with irony. “I didn’t tell you the truth about me, but you didn’t tell the truth about yourself, either. My da told me that you knew you were a Scintilla and kept it from me.”
“I didn’t know what I was until I came here, until I met Giovanni.”
But Finn was right, I didn’t tell him about seeing auras or about Griffin killing by taking auras. I’d fought hard to keep my biggest secret. “I guess neither of us trusted the other with the truth.”
I said it to hurt him. I said it because it hurt that he didn’t trust me. I kept my secrets to protect Finn. But I was also scared of what he’d think. Maybe I kept my secrets to protect myself, too.
Finn continued. “Clancy carried you out of the room, and when I came to my senses I wanted to talk to you, to try to explain, but you never answered your cell. I redialed Mari and Dun, and they hadn’t heard from you, either. That’s when we realized he never took you to the airport. We couldn’t find Clancy at all, and when my uncle finally came to the house earlier tonight, I confronted him, asked him where he took you. He confessed.” Finn gulped a breath, like the effort to explain had been too much for him. “My father drugged him. He’s out cold right now in our wine cellar.”
“What about Griffin?” I asked. “Does anyone know where he is? He could show up here any second.”
Finn looked astonished. “Griffin’s in on this, too?”
“Hell yes, he is. And you?” I pointed to Ina. “You took from me in my sleep. Exactly what power did you get out of it?”
Finn’s head whipped around to face his mother. “You didn’t!” he snarled.