Deviate

by Tracy Clark

  I stripped off my filthy clothes. One step out of the puddle of cloth, one pivot, a look over my shoulder; that’s all it would take to see how my back had been marked when I’d touched Griffin’s knife. I closed my eyes and hung my head back, building my nerve brick by brick into a wall that I could hide behind once I finally dared to look.

  I turned.

  Opened my eyes.

  Down the center of my back was the black mark of a severe, deadly blade.

  My fingers dug into the bare skin of my stomach. Wasn’t it enough to always have the gruesome memory of my father being stabbed? I had to forever carry the evidence of the knife on my body? I wanted to step out of this hideous shell. I wanted to scratch and claw it off my skin.

  The hot shower was a coating of static noise and warm comfort. I sank to the floor of the tub with the water cascading over my back and cried into my knees, letting the torrent wash away my tears. I don’t know how long I sat like that, but the water eventually ran cold and chased me out. I pulled back the shower curtain and shrieked. Mari was sitting on the toilet, holding a towel out. I grabbed it and stepped from the shower, feeling sheepish and wondering how long she’d been there. Had she heard me sobbing? Had she heard me cry “Daddy”?

  “Sorry I scared you,” she said. “You’ve lost weight.”

  I knew I had. I didn’t feel like myself. I felt weak, brittle. “It’s a new weight-loss plan. It’s called the fear, suffering, and misery diet.” We half smiled at each other.

  “Food’s here.” I couldn’t remember Mari’s voice ever sounding so gentle. “I’m sorry about your dad. I’m not sure how to take care of you…”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Oh yeah? Why don’t I? Because the big Roman Romeo out there is going to? What happened with Finn?”

  “It’s beyond complicated.”

  Her foot bounced over her crossed leg. “Waiting.”

  “The first thing you should know is that you guys can’t stay in Ireland. You’re in danger as long as you’re with the three of us.”

  “Where do you think we’re going to go? We’re stuck here anyway until the ash blows over. Besides, I’m not leaving your ass. People are worried about you. We need to get a hold of Mami Tulke and tell her where we all are so we can go home.”

  “We can’t tell anyone where we are.” I turned to hang the towel and put on the robe that hung from the back of the door. “Not even Mami Tulke.”

  “Jesus! You have a knife tattoo on your back? What’s next? Leather pants and a shag haircut? You don’t even wear makeup. I mean, it’s moody and rockin’, don’t get me wrong—”

  “I didn’t do this.” There was a long pause with me trying to decide whether everything was too much for Mari to know. “The knife did,” I finally said. I swallowed my embarrassment, dropped the robe, and stood naked before Mari, literally baring all of my new markings.

  “Oh my God! Did you join a cult?”

  “I—I have an ability to pull memories from objects. But when I touch them, I’m marked by them. Well, not all of them… I don’t understand it, really. Seems to have something to do with the intensity of the memory.” I turned my back toward the mirror and gaped at the image of a knife, the knife, slashing down the middle of my back. How could I touch anything if I was going to wear history like that? I didn’t want to think what I’d someday look like, chaotically scarred by random memories, the past written on my skin.

  I pulled the robe over my shoulders. “The things I’m about to tell you are going to be so hard for you to believe. Keep an open mind.”

  Mari held up her hand. “Girl, I spent almost two weeks in a freaking new-agey commune in the hills of Chile with our shaman of a grandmother. You’d be surprised at what I’d believe.”

  Ten

  Cora

  My mom had fallen asleep on the couch, curled on her side like a teardrop with her bony knees pulled up to her chest and her head bowed to them. I covered her with a blanket and joined Mari, Dun, and Giovanni to eat and update them on everything that had gone down. To their credit, they listened with rapt attention and without interruption. Neither one questioned the validity of what we were telling them. Neither one made me and Giovanni feel like mutant freaks.

  Mostly, they looked properly scared.

  After the telling was done, I excused myself to go in the other room. Something impossible needed doing. Something unavoidable. It would gnaw on me until it was done. I had to call my father’s wife and tell her he was dead.

  A long, cold finger of dread swirled my stomach. I’d never had to deliver news of this magnitude in my life. The reality was so fresh for me that it still didn’t seem real. My dad would never be here again. How was that possible? There was an irreparable hole ripped in the fabric of my life. I wanted to reach into the hole and pull him back through.

  I sat on the bed with the phone in my hand for a good five minutes before I dialed. Janelle answered immediately. My voice croaked. “Hi, it’s Cora.”

  “Cora! Honey, how are you? What in the world is going on? Your father flew off to find you. You never should have run off like that, you know. I trusted you. I thought we had a deal. And now I haven’t heard a word from him. I’ve been worried sick!”

  “I’m—” Shattered. That was the only answer to her question. “I’m not so good. Dad found me…”

  “Good.” She sighed, relieved.

  I forged ahead. “And we found my mother.”

  Janelle sucked in her breath. Her silence was enormously loud. “He’s found Grace? Oh…God. He’s not coming back to me, is he?” Her voice fractured. I don’t think she meant for me to answer that question. Her fears were bubbling out. She thought he’d stay because he’d recovered his long-lost love, and maybe he would have. We’d never know.

  “No, he’s not coming back.” How could I say it? Her muffled cries filled my ears. Finally I forced myself to utter a harder truth than the one she’d imagined. “Janelle, he’s dead.”

  After telling her through both of our sobs that I couldn’t give details just yet but would call again soon to explain, I asked her to try to reach Mami Tulke. I hung up the phone and curled in on myself.

  I wanted to dream my dad, to see his face and hear his deep voice. But over and over again all I saw was him on his knees, a scarlet rose of blood blooming on his white shirt, my mother begging Clancy to kill her instead. Then, my father’s beautiful aura snapping from his body into Clancy’s.

  Dad falling. Falling.

  My consciousness blew like a restless storm from asleep to awake. The next time I opened my eyes, it was in the black of night. I sat upright in a daze, fists clenched in front of my chest, heart pounding. The soft snoring of multiple people reminded me where I was. I wasn’t under attack. I squinted into the darkness.

  My mother was still asleep on the couch across the small room where she’d collapsed hours before. I could tell from the calm vibration of energy that the body next to me was Giovanni’s.

  I lay back down, unable to tame my erratic pulse. Images of the deaths I’d witnessed superimposed over my vision, nightmares awake and asleep that tortured me. I vowed these things:

  I won’t hide the rest of my life. I will find a way to stop the Arrazi.

  I will keep my loved ones safe.

  I will make Clancy beg me for his life.

  I will deny him.

  My Scintilla aura flared with pure hate. It radiated above my body, over my heart, the epicenter of my pain. Resentment for what I’d lost and for what my life was now rose up in my body, cresting over any shame I might have felt about wishing someone dead. The girl I was two months ago would never have had thoughts of death and survival and revenge. There was no damage done that I couldn’t pin directly on the race known as Arrazi.

  Giovanni rolled over with the slackness of sleep. His eyes were still closed but his hand reached out, suspended over me, and rested gently on my stomach, beneath my heart. My breath caught. He still breathe
d with the heavy timbre of deep sleep. Could he subconsciously feel my deep distress? Did he know that with the press of his hand, my fiery rage would reduce to a simmer?

  I had so much to learn about being a Scintilla. I’d have to begin immediately.

  It was the only way to become strong enough to keep my vow. There had to be an ability we could use against our enemies. I pressed my hand over the top of Giovanni’s and silently thanked him. As maddening as he could be—his boulder of a personality required everyone to be water that moved around him—I was grateful to have found someone I could trust.

  He’d already taught me so much about what made us different. I had to believe there was a reason we were created this way, and it couldn’t simply be as Clancy had said: that we were lower on the food chain.

  Giovanni woke when I gently lifted his hand so I could roll onto my side. A slice of early-morning light shone from between the curtains, brightening his eyes. We faced each other, quietly studying. His brows creased together like he was trying to understand something.

  “Why did you save my life?” he whispered.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “In my experience, nobody does something for nothing.”

  I sighed. Had his hard life made him so jaded, so unable to believe that good people did things because they were the right things to do? “Is everything you do for personal gain?”

  Giovanni blinked as if he couldn’t believe I had asked such a question, bit his lip, and said a yes that I could barely hear. “Mostly.”

  When I began to turn away from him, he stopped me with his hand on my upper arm, over the mark of the key. Small beats of electricity pulsed from the tips of his fingers into my skin. “Please understand, it’s how I survived as an orphaned Scintilla.”

  The door creaked open. Mari poked her head through. “Breakfast.”

  The four of us sat in a circle on Dun’s bed with a mound of steaming muffins, scones, fruit, and cheeses in the middle, talking softly so as not to wake my mother, who was still sound asleep in the next room. I made a plate for her and set it aside.

  “I give you guys the prize for weirdness,” Mari said, popping a grape into her mouth. “And you can keep it. These people who are after you, they sound like something out of a nightmare. They’re like freaking vampires.”

  Giovanni uncrossed his legs and leaned forward intensely with his elbows on his knees and fingers clasped. He wore nothing but a pair of jeans that Dun had graciously offered him until we could get some clothes. “Where do you think those stories come from?” he replied to Mari. “Vampires are a fairy tale adapted from an uglier truth.”

  “Dissing the vampire legend?” Dun said with a smile. “Is nothing sacred?”

  Mari’s eyes found mine and held. “I can’t believe Finn’s one of them.”

  I could only nod. Every thought of Finn was a fresh reminder of what could never be. Another rip in my fabric. You can’t be with someone and call it love when every quickening of their pulse around you is only because your aura is nectar to them. I couldn’t help but wonder what he’d do when his need for the souls of others became too great. Would he choose to die rather than kill? Or would he reluctantly surrender to what he was? I pressed my palms to my churning stomach. It was impossible imagining the sweet boy I knew murdering again and again for the rest of his life.

  Dun rolled on his side, resting his head on a crooked arm, his long black hair spilling over the pillow. “Why are the Arrazi being so stupid as to kill their best source of life force and powers?”

  “Clancy could have killed us,” I said. “All three of us. But he didn’t.”

  My mom startled me with a touch on my shoulder. I hadn’t heard her get up. Her face was pressed with lines from the couch. Her hair reached out like the tangled bare stalks of a winter shrub. She reached past me and grabbed a scone. “Aye, instead of killing, he collected,” she said in her soft, lilting brogue.

  “Do you know why?” I asked her, hoping to see more of the lucidity that leaked out from her once in a while now that she was away from her prison.

  She shook her head, her eyes going to a faraway place before she said, “He nearly did kill me, many times. But he always stopped short.”

  I reached to touch her arm. I knew the pain of my aura being ripped from my body against my will. I couldn’t imagine how many times she’d felt that pain over thirteen years.

  “He shared me with people,” she said, voice small. “I presume so that they could get their sortilege. They’d take from me while I was blindfolded.”

  Sickening. It had been even worse than I’d imagined.

  “You don’t know who they were?” Giovanni asked. “Men? Women?”

  “Both,” she answered. “One young woman used me repeatedly. She was especially cruel about it. There’s a legend about killing Scintilla,” my mother said, and my mind skimmed back to when she yelled for Clancy to kill her instead of my father.

  Take me to the death. You know what could happen…

  Rumors, he’d responded.

  “He told me once that when an Arrazi takes a Scintilla to the death, they never have to kill again. Our death is their cure.”

  “I hate to ask this, but why wouldn’t he want a cure if he could have it?” Dun asked.

  Giovanni stood and paced the floor. “There are very few Scintilla left, so it’s likely that he doesn’t want to kill something so valuable when the legend might not be true. And possibly, Clancy wants something more than to be cured.”

  “He wants something he believes having three of us will give him.” I reached for my mom’s hand. “Do you know what that is?”

  She slipped from my grasp and walked to the window. “Three…” she repeated. We hung on what she might say next, but the silence stretched out. Finally she turned toward me with a bit of sparkle in her eyes. “Three is a magic number in this world, did you know that?”

  Giovanni exhaled in frustration. His pacing was beginning to agitate me. We were all caged, and his restless prowling reminded me of that fact. My mother crossed the room, stopping in front of him. He rested his hands on his hips and looked down into her childlike face.

  “Three is the mystery come from the great one. Hear, and light on thee will dawn,” she said to him.

  “That’s written in your journal,” I said.

  “Bible quote?” Mari asked.

  “No.” My mom’s head turned to me. “Do you still have my journal?”

  “Clancy has it now,” I said, a barb of regret piercing me. “I’m sorry. What does that quote mean?”

  “It’s from an ancient text called the Emerald Tablets. I found it while trying to find information about the triple spiral at Newgrange. I was grasping for anything back then. My whole world was a search for answers, and I’d focused for a time on threes—triunes.” She had said all this as she came to kneel on the floor in front of me, eyes wet with tears. “I was so obsessed. It caused them to find me. I hurt everyone so much. That’s not what I wanted.”

  She was beseeching me to understand her long-ago choices. I did understand. I’d had the same obsessive drive when I sneaked off to Ireland to find out what had happened to her. We both had regrets. Neither of us would ever recover what was lost in our searching.

  “Newgrange seemed very important to you. You wrote ‘origin story’ on one of the pages. Why? Did you think that’s where our”—I searched for the right word—“species originated?”

  My mother’s eyes were so penetrating; she was looking at me as if I had the answer to my own questions. “Yes, I believed strongly that our kind had once populated that place. Then we disappeared without a trace.”

  “Yes, the tour guides told us that the inhabitants vanished.”

  “We always disappear,” Mom said.

  “Did you find proof that it was an important place in the history of Scintilla? Evidence of any kind?”

  “No,” she answered sadly. “But that’s where I was abandoned as a baby. It h
ad to mean something, I reckon.”

  “Maybe it just means that your parents wanted to leave you someplace with lots of tourists, someplace you’d easily be found,” Mari suggested. “So that you’d be okay.”

  Gráinne gave one nod, considering. “Indeed not. It wasn’t yet the attraction it is now. I was found on an early morning by workers excavating the site. A note left with me said only that I was home.”

  Eleven

  Cora

  Mami Tulke was still not answering her phone, but a young woman finally did and told me in her broken English that she thought Mami Tulke might have hiked to the temple in the mountains to grieve her son. So, she hadn’t come to Ireland? How my grandmother knew of Dad’s death was beyond me. We’d speak eventually. Maybe that was better, anyway. She couldn’t help me from Chile.

  There were a few shops along the waterfront, so Mari had accepted more money from Giovanni and left with Dun to go buy clothes for him, my mother, and me. They’d been gone for a few hours already. I’d maintain a state of mild anxiety until their safe return. God only knew what Mari would choose for me clothes-wise, but I had one edict: no sequins. The more drab and inconspicuous, the better. I was sparkly enough even if she couldn’t see it.

  “I hate to be nosy,” I said to Giovanni, “but since we’re running for our lives together, do you mind telling me how it is you have so much cash to throw around?”

  Giovanni didn’t look away from the television news to answer me. “Odd jobs. I save most everything when I do make money. I can live cheaply.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t.”

  That earned me an annoyed look. “A simple thank you would do.”

  The key swipe on the door beeped and Mari and Dun rushed in, breathless, tossing bags on the bed. “Get dressed,” Mari ordered. “We need to get out of here.”

  “Why?” Giovanni asked. His hand rested protectively on my shoulder. My mother dug through the shopping bags with the same childlike excitement I’d seen when Clancy brought her new things. She scurried off to put something new on.