by Tracy Clark
Death was the only door to that domain.
My parents had both walked through it. Mari, too.
But I learned that souls don’t bleed warm and sticky. The bleed of a soul is stinging ice.
I bet it doesn’t feel that way when you die naturally. I bet a natural death is like warm steam rising from a bath, languid and ambitious as it stretches its wings and sails upward.
Both my father and my mother died the cold way. Surely I’d be killed likewise. I intimately knew the icy bleed because I’d already been attacked numerous times by the Arrazi, and every time it felt like the frozen blade of an ice axe stabbing into my chest and splitting me open for my silver aura to spill out.
Pain battered my temples and tension gripped my muscles until they felt bloodless and limp. Soul so angry. Body so damned tired. I’d have to climb the steep stairs out of my weariness to find the truth and use it to stop the slaughter of Scintilla, and innocent humans as well. My circle was shrinking. I had so few people left.
The two boys in the car with me had my love, but my love for them was a receding wave that had swept my heart out to sea.
One was a liar. One was a killer.
The car rolled to a stop in front of the Visitor’s Center where Finn ran in for admission tickets. We were uncomfortably close to the tomb where just hours ago, we’d left Clancy Mulcarr unconscious on the floor next to Ultana Lennon’s dead body, but I had to shove that fact in a corner of my mind in order to do what I had come here to do.
Tickets in hand, we entered the ancient ruins and ran up the path that led to the megalithic tomb. Each of us climbed the ladder leading over the large curbstone in front of the tomb’s entrance. Finn and Giovanni stayed close to me. Together, we stepped inside the dark, cool monument and stared at the giant stone bearing the marking that seemed to connect the Arrazi and the Scintilla through history.
I reached out with shaking fingers to touch the triple spiral. Would the stone itself tell me the truth?
The energy that swirled from the triple spiral was palpable and robust, tingling my fingertips before I even made contact with the stone. I placed my palm flat on the engraving and closed my eyes, waiting to feel my mind spin into a vortex of memory. But I didn’t spin. Visions didn’t form a tempest in my mind. I remained stubbornly rooted in the present, where all my questions stacked like bricks on top of me. There was energy in the rock, yes, but it was a scratched record. Like reaching my arm into a swirling hum of white noise. Indistinct residue. So many hands had touched this stone over the years that I could pull nothing clear from the static but a faint image of breathtaking spirals of light.
The grooves of cold stone pressed against my head as I leaned forward in frustration. This damn monument had lured me since I was a child, and now it taunted me by holding tight to its secrets.
Ultana Lennon had convinced Clancy that the spirals represented the maiden, mother, and crone, and that if he killed me, my mother, and grandmother, he’d become immortal. She’d tricked him. It was a false trinity used by Ultana’s twisted mind to ensnare and kill the remaining few Scintilla. She used Clancy to find us, and in the end, she murdered a most precious Scintilla—my mother.
I stared hard at the trinity of interlaced spirals. My mind stretched for connections, fought to understand a mystery that had been around since before the time of Christ. Thousands of years before. After a few moments of staring and thinking, an astonished breath puffed out. “A false trinity…”
“What?” Finn asked.
A glimpse of his triple spiral tattoo could be seen just at his neck where his pulse fired rapid and steady. When I first saw Finn’s tattoo in the hospital, I’d recalled that the true meaning of the triple spiral was unknown and that people of various beliefs had hijacked the symbol to suit their own philosophies.
“No one knows what this design really means,” I ventured. “But some mistakenly think it symbolizes the holy trinity. The trinity isn’t an original idea, though. It’s an evolution of ideas from many belief systems, some older than Christianity,” I whispered, recalling my mother’s writings in her journal and the research we’d done. “If Ultana had been telling the truth that someone won’t stop hunting us as long as there’s a God on their altar, then all the memories I pulled from the key make more sense. Why would the spiral be in those religious images if it weren’t connected? Why would my grandmother steal the key from the church in the first place?”
I grew more excited as I slowly pieced things together. “The religious symbols, the persecution and death of those who dared to believe differently… Those were deeds of the most dominant religion in the world over many centuries.”
“Not just one religion,” Giovanni said. “Many have killed and still kill for their own special brand of God. I can’t see that God would want a thug kingdom populated by murderers, but then I’m just being logical,” he added with a cynical tone.
Finn wiped his forearm across his lip, still bloody from when Dun beat him after he confessed to killing Mari, though he described it as a mercy killing. I swallowed hard. That reality was a coarse lump of salt in my throat, in my heart.
“According to Ultana,” Finn said, “a religious organization—possibly at the Vatican, as that’s where your key is from—has targeted the Scintilla and hired the Arrazi to eradicate them. Why?”
“That’s the question,” I said. “What truth can be so scary to them that they’ll break their own commandments to conceal it?”
Giovanni leaned against the stone with his arms crossed. “I still don’t understand how the spirals play into this…”
“It’s a trinity. Threes… The church has taken many pre-existing ancient symbols and made them their own.”
Finn’s hand rested over the spirals on his chest. “I’m Catholic,” Finn said. “Born and raised. But I know from history that many of the church’s symbols were adapted from earlier pagan symbols. It’s a brilliant conversion tactic, really. Take something people already believe in and alter it just enough to make it their own. It’s how beliefs are stolen.” His brown eyes pierced mine. “It’s how followers are created.”
“Okay,” I said. “Confirmation that I’m headed to the right place.”
“If Ultana was telling the truth,” Finn said, eyebrows arched skeptically. “It might have been a deviation from the truth. You could be going to Italy for nothing.”
I ignored his comment. They’d already tried to convince me I shouldn’t go. I’d lost my father, my mother, and my best friend. I no longer cared about “shoulds”. “Finn, keep tabs on the Arrazi here so we know what they’re up to. Giovanni, you have to go with my grandmother to Chile. Keep her and Claire safe. See that Dun makes it home to California. As for me…I’ll find out if we’re finally on the right trail and, if so, why they want to bury the keys to heaven.”
We emerged from the chill of the tomb into the morning sunlight, blinking to adjust our eyes. I squinted at the dark outline of a group of people standing directly in front of us, blocking our path out of the ruins. A familiar energy sent a blast of terror through my body, and I clasped both Finn and Giovanni’s arms.
As my eyes found focus, the Arrazi came into view. Before I could utter a word or move, their knifelike energy reached out and plunged icy hands into me and just as quickly pulled back. A chilling greeting.
The gravel crunched under my feet as I skidded to a stop and stared in shock at the Arrazi who blocked our escape from Newgrange. I cringed, bracing myself for the strike of the axe.
Giovanni and Finn both thrust a protective arm in front of me. Pure fear swelled through my palms as I clasped each boy’s arm. Dread rippled off them and buffeted my sides. I forced myself to breathe.
Beneath a thick layer of fear, bubbled molten hate. I stepped forward, shaking with a curious blend of rage and exhaustion that made me feel almost invincible, like I’d lost concern over my own death. I was sick of running, sick of living in fear, sick of losing the people I loved.
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“The last I saw of you, you were drooling on yourself in a tomb,” I said to Clancy. I almost taunted him about Ultana, the head of Xepa, and how her dead body sprawled next to him when we left them. But her son stood at his side, staring at me with eyes slashed to thin, speculative slits. Had Clancy told him of his mother’s death?
“I told you this was a bad risk,” Finn grumbled next to me.
“I’m at risk just waking up every day.”
“Did you really think I’d not know where you went?” Clancy asked, stepping toward me with a smile, as if we were old friends. “Haven’t we been down this road before, pet?”
“Pet?” Giovanni yanked his arm from my grasp and shoved his way in front of me. “Cora will never be something you stake claim to, ever again.”
“Stop,” I whispered to Giovanni, reaching up to clasp his shoulder. “You save my life, you die. Is that such a hard rule to remember?”
His head turned enough that I could trace the noble slope of his nose and see the determined attitude of one blue eye as he snarled, “Yes.”
His Scintilla energy sizzled under my palm so ferociously that I fought the temptation to pull away. Instead, I tried to calm him the way he’d done for me so many times, but I was too dark, too angry to produce any positive feelings.
I had nothing to give.
Giovanni’s shoulder tensed as I squeezed harder and whispered, “You can’t afford to think like that. There’s someone else depending on you now.” There was a slow blink and an almost imperceptible nod. He understood. Giovanni had to worry more about taking care of his newfound daughter, Claire, than protecting me.
A series of crunching thuds resounded around us, like sledgehammers hitting gravel. A chorus of shrieks filled the air as bystanders pointed at a group of tourists who lay in a heap, their limbs piled chaotically over the top of one another.
“Stop!” I screamed at Clancy. They were innocents who had nothing to do with our drama and wouldn’t believe it even if they were told. But Clancy’s bushy white brows were bent in consternation at the pile of dead bodies, and I realized I hadn’t seen the Arrazi hook their auras into the bodies to take and kill. Yet, there they lay—dead. What…?
I’d thought the Arrazi were responsible for the drop-dead people. Could my father have been right? Was there a phenomenon randomly striking down clusters of people? And was I the antidote, as he’d suggested? My gut still said no. But it seemed like it could have something to do with us, with this ugliness of a war between two unique types of human. I just didn’t know how.
The park wasn’t crowded. It had just opened, but all the tourists were packed around the dead bodies, some snapping pictures and video with their phones. I couldn’t be caught on film again at the site of another incident. I wanted to turn my head away, shield myself, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the Arrazi.
Their eyes hadn’t left us for one second.
Clancy smiled widely. Before I could even guess what he found so amusing, he lifted a finger and, all at once, the Arrazi lashed their ensnaring auras at the living, pulsing crowd and siphoned their colors from their bodies. Giant tubes of color flowed from the tourists into the bodies of each Arrazi.
People died as they ran for their lives, their life force sucked from them, even as they hugged one another for comfort. Bodies fell like crushed flowers. And we could do nothing to prevent it.
Thunder cracked as the Arrazi’s auras exploded in a white as blinding as the lightning that shot overhead. The cloud of pure white energy surrounded them and reached for us like a misty, noxious vapor.
