“I don’t have any identification. No passport. Nothing. I don’t exist. I don’t exist. They erased me. They erased me, Benito.”
I kneeled down and hugged her. She was so broken. I wondered if she’d ever be normal again.
“Damn. My passport. Those bastards took everything from me, too.” Giovanni cursed in Italian, patting down his pants pockets. “My wallet, my cell phone. But I have a copy of all of my identification hidden in a locker at the airport. You don’t travel as much as I have without learning how to protect yourself.”
“I have no idea where my stuff is.”
“We gave Clancy your things when he left with you,” Fergus said as he went to the door.
My heart constricted painfully. “The journal.” I needed a passport, yes, and cash, and clothes. But the journal was the biggest loss. The thought of that evil man with my mother’s writing sent fresh hate through me.
“I’m sorry,” Fergus said, seeing my distress. “We thought he would get you to the airport. Try to get comfortable in here for a bit. Rest if you can. I will hurry up to the house and get the car. When I come back, I will tap three times, like this. Then pause. And once again.” He knocked the code softly on the wood.
“Why are you helping us?” Giovanni asked him, not trying at all to conceal his distrust.
“I suppose it’s the drops of humanity in my blood,” Fergus answered with a smirk. “Like any Arrazi, I’ve always been curious as hell about what my sortilege would be if I—” He looked at his feet. “But Ina feels like hers is a curse, so maybe I can live the rest of my life not knowing.”
“We appreciate your help,” I told him sincerely, even though his presence scared me. I could tell he didn’t much like being under the weight of our suspicion, and Giovanni wasn’t exactly diplomatic about it.
Fergus looked at us, one by one. “You’re welcome. But don’t go thinking too highly of me. It’s not as though I’m not tempted. I may be human, but I’m still Arrazi.”
And with that, he left.
My dad paced. A few steps, then around for a few more. “It could take weeks to get passports. Even fake ones. We need to get to Chile,” he said with conviction, mostly to himself.
“You think we can hide away at Mami Tulke’s?” I asked, and then suddenly remembered. “That conversation with Mami Tulke,” I blurted, ignoring his startled look. “I tried to ask you about it the night we fought. You said she needed to help me again, Dad. How could she help me if I’ve never met her?”
A resigned sigh puffed out of him. “Until recently, she’d been able to block it.”
“It? You mean stop me from seeing auras?”
My dad nodded. “That. But more importantly, to block others from sensing yours.” He rubbed his hands through his graying hair. “Until you got sick.”
The air rushed out of me. “You knew what I was. You knew all this time. How does Mami Tulke know about all of this?”
“Because, sweetheart, she’s one of you. Scintilla. We were trying to keep you safe. Protect you. Look what happened to your mother.”
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t squabble anymore about his protecting me. “So that’s why you were suddenly willing for me to go to Chile?” I asked, daring to hope there was a way she could help.
“I keep thinking if we can get to her, she can help all three of you. Maybe she could block it again if you were actually with her.”
“How did Mami Tulke do it? I know she’s some kind of medicine woman but—” I imagined potions, incense, chicken feathers…
“That’s her sortilege,” he said. “To cast a veil over a Scintilla. It’s called shielding. But she was suddenly unable to do it. Something’s changed.”
“With her or with me?”
“With the whole damn world.” Dad ran his hands through his mussed hair. He looked like he’d been through hell.
“What do you mean?”
“The world is undergoing a major, major shift. The discoveries of dark energy and then the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe were monumental. Science has focused its attention on the outer space of dark energy. I knew, because of my mother, your mother, you…that energy is much more personal—it affects us all—and so I began to study how dark energy might be impacting our planet and the people on it. Energy is not just something that is out there,” Dad said, pointing toward the sky. “It’s everywhere.”
“We’re made of it,” my mother mumbled. “Star stuff.”
I couldn’t help thinking of Finn’s starry tattoo; a family crest of sorts, he had said. Giovanni shuffled behind me. I looked over my shoulder. He tried to keep his expression neutral, but I could see his high interest in the conversation by the way his silver aura arched over my body toward my father.
My dad continued. “The increase in natural disasters was a sign that there is a serious crisis or imbalance going on in our world, but the more critical sign now is the people who are mysteriously dying.”
“Please slow down,” Giovanni requested. “I’m trying to understand what you are saying and what this has to do with us.”
My father held up his hands. “Sorry. I’m studying the incidents of people who are dying, just…dying from no known cause, all over the world.”
“It’s Arrazi,” I said, sure of it. “It happened right in front of our eyes at the airport in Dublin.”
“That was you?” Dad gasped.
“Yes. And there was a man with a white aura across the street—Arrazi.”
“No, no, no,” my dad interrupted. “The blood of the people who are dying shows a cellular abnormality. Violent expansions, if you will. Cellular activity is accelerating and expanding at such a rate that, well, I believe that dark energy is killing them, not the Arrazi.”
“And?” I asked. “What if you’re wrong?” If it wasn’t the Arrazi killing those people, then I didn’t see what this had to do with Scintilla and Arrazi at all. How could he possibly connect ancient breeds of humans to this theory about dark energy?
I still believed it was the desperate Arrazi doing what they were born to do, but I was trying to be open. I had a new respect for my father. His interest wasn’t just in trying to save the Scintilla he loved. He wanted to save the world.
“And your blood, Cora, it has the same abnormality. Only—”
“When those people died of our sickness, I lived.”
My father smiled as he did when I was little and had finally grasped a complex math problem he’d been trying to explain. “I know I sound crazy. But somehow, I think you, the Scintilla, are the key to the energetic imbalance. You lived! It somehow has to do with your life-giving, positive energy. I believe that. I proved it in the lab when I combined your cells with the cells of one of the victims. The expansion slowed, was brought back into balance.”
“You’re trying to tell me a few Scintilla are supposed to save the world? Oh, a simple little thing like that?” My voice sounded shrill, near panic at the enormity of what my father proposed.
“We can hardly save ourselves,” Giovanni pointed out rather unhelpfully. He reminded me of Mari that way.
“In so many cases, simple doesn’t mean easy, sweetheart.” He stepped close and put his arm around my shoulders. “People are going to keep dying. Catastrophes are going to keep occurring. The Arrazi are going to keep killing innocent humans. And if they find you, they’ll kill you, too.”
“Or enslave us,” I said with a nod to my mother.
Giovanni placed a hand on my shoulder. “Unless we correct the imbalance by killing all the Arrazi.”
My father and I both flicked our gazes to Giovanni. To kill for our own survival was as callous as what the Arrazi had been doing all along. Could I kill Finn, or his parents, who appeared decent at heart despite what they were? There had to be another way.