My mother reached out. “Sit with me, Benito.” It hurt the most when she sounded normal because I knew it wouldn’t last. He looked at her like she was new. Again.
My heart broke for the sorrow in their faces. Lost years. Promises broken in order to keep promises. Sorry was greenish-yellow, cloudy fingers grasping from Dad’s heart outward. I peered at my mother’s silver aura and could swear the silver softened, liquefied, in front of her heart as if her aura was fractured there.
My dad kneeled down next to her and placed his hands on both sides of her face. “I want to get you out of here, Grace. Make sure you’re safe. I used to look for you. I used to go with Cora to the redwoods, hoping you’d come.” He hung his head. “Eventually, I gave up hope.”
Then my dad cried, openly and without shame. He let go of her and buried his face in his hands. A big, sucking sob came out of him. She pulled his hands from his face. He looked at my mother with such regret. “I’m so, so sorry.”
I covered my heart. Tears streamed down my face to see my father’s sorrow. He hadn’t wanted to leave her. He was lashing himself with blame.
A bit of clarity surfaced in my mother’s eyes. “I was stubborn,” she whispered. “I wanted to know the truth so badly.” She looked at me from across the shack and pressed her lips together. “I thought I could find a way to end the danger somehow. That I could keep her safe. All of us safe. Oh, my love,” she touched his face. Then she looked back to me. “My little dark Daisy.”
All three of us were sobbing then. This tempestuous ocean of life tumbled us around and around and spit us back on shore together, forever changed. I backed away from my parents’ embrace. They deserved their time together.
Giovanni pulled down a horse blanket from a high shelf and spread it on the floor. He motioned for me to sit down next to him. I did. Mostly because I wanted to be next to someone but felt selfish to intrude on the intimate whisperings of my parents’ reunion. I was cold, too. Probably in shock. I wiped my tears and leaned into him.
“You did something to me,” Giovanni said low. “I am altered, not entirely myself.”
“I gave you some of my energy. You were nearly dead. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“It’s a fairy tale, no? Being brought back to life by a kiss? You’ve done it for two men now.”
I set him straight. “I didn’t bring you to life with a kiss. You revived and”—I blushed deeply with the memory—“you kissed me.” I avoided his stare. “You were pretty out of it. I didn’t think you’d even remember.”
He looked at me for a long moment and said, “I’ll not forget.”
When I didn’t answer, he added, “And I didn’t like to see you kiss that Arrazi boy.”
“Finn,” I said, irritated. Though I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to elevate him from “that boy.” I didn’t simply kiss a boy. I kissed my boy. I kissed my boy good-bye.
A spike wedged deeper in the middle of my chest. Not only was Finn a danger to me physically, he was dangerous to my heart. And now I had a new worry: how many innocent people did I condemn to death because I saved his life? Or did he really mean what he said?
Had I only prolonged his life until he died by his choice?
“What’s this?” Giovanni asked, tracing the inky swirls above my wrist and opening my palm where the moon blazed. “I didn’t notice you had a tattoo on your hand before.”
I yanked my hand from his, leaned away from his warm body, and curled on my side on the smelly horse blanket. I watched dust motes bounce on the shafts of light from the lone bulb overhead. A few moments later I shoved myself up to my knees. My hands on my hips. “Tell me the secret Ina mentioned. I can’t have any more secrets. What’s the darkest hole in your heart?”
Giovanni stared into my eyes. For the first time, I saw uncertainty there.
Outside, I heard the low purr of a car engine approaching. My parents must have heard it, too, because the low murmur of their conversation fell silent. We all looked at one another. My mother’s and Giovanni’s silver auras pulsed in frightened unison with mine. The vehicle stopped right outside the shed. We listened as the car door opened and closed. Footsteps.
A hand rapped three times on the door. A pause. Then once more.
“Fergus,” I said with a sigh and stood.
My father stepped forward and unlocked the door.
Clancy and Griffin blocked the open doorway.
Fifty
Griffin’s knife glinted in his hand. Clancy wasn’t holding a weapon, but then he didn’t need one. Neither of them did.
Giovanni struggled to his feet and gripped my arm.
“Who are you?” my father demanded.
Gráinne whimpered, crawling away to the corner of the shed. Her fingers clutched at the wooden slats as if she could tear them away and run. My dad’s eyes followed her, and then he looked at me. I nodded slightly, and I knew he knew. I saw pure fear and rage in my father’s eyes and in his aura. And I saw the moment a decision clicked in place for him.
The whole world suspended, hung in its big black night, and waited.
Dad rushed Griffin, whose knife was held ready. Their bodies clashed for the briefest moment, no more than the time it takes for a bird to land on a branch and then flit away. In the space between breaths, their movement stopped. Then Dad’s hands grasped at Griffin’s arms and slipped down them as he fell to his knees. Blood dripped from the tip of the knife.
“No!” I screamed. The spark of Giovanni’s hand fell from my arm as I ran toward my father, but before I reached him, Clancy swung full out, his fist slamming straight into the side of my temple. The pocked wood of the ceiling rafters slid around dizzily, and I dropped to the rough floor of the shed. My vision blurred.
“Sometimes I think you possess no sense of self-preservation at all, girl,” Clancy spat.
Griffin’s knife was at my throat before I could move again. My father’s blood trickled across my neck. Or was it my own? Instinctively, I reached up to push the knife away, but the second my hand landed on the woven leather handle, visions bombarded my mind.
Clancy and Giovanni speeding through Dublin in a car. Giovanni lying unconscious, bloody, and beaten in the backseat. Griffin caressed the knife, unsheathed on his thigh. Clancy’s resonant voice:
He’d better live, Griffin. There’s an army of people who would kill for just one. But three…it changes everything. I can’t believe our fortune. The Society can’t know about this.
He’s nearly dead. We should finish him. How long since someone claimed to have taken a Scintilla to death? Don’t you want to know what will happen?
No, idiot. You’re shortsighted. Too many impatient people have done that, killed when they could have collected. You went too far with the boy. I said to bring him in no matter what, not kill him. Daft bastard. We need him. The only thing we can do now is put him in with the women and see if they can save him.
But, Mulcarr, keep three together? Isn’t that dangerous?
Trust me. It’s more dangerous to let him die.
I screamed when a sharp, searing pain burned between my shoulder blades, bringing me back to the present. My hand was still on the knife at my throat so it couldn’t be that. I arched my back and cried out again as a hot iron branded my skin. That was a familiar pain.
Giovanni ran forward but stopped short when Clancy yelled, “Don’t be a fool. Do you want her to die right here, right now?”
My father coughed and clutched his side. I pulled my gaze from Giovanni’s extreme blue stare and silver energy reaching for me like arms and shifted my head slightly to look at my dad. The blade bit into my neck as I turned. Dad’s hands were bright red. He hadn’t moved from his knees. But he hadn’t fallen, either. That was good, right? There was a lot of blood, though, dampening his shirt. Gráinne sucked in her breath and began to cry.