The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1)

by Maureen O'Leary

  The Arrow

  Maureen O’Leary

  Copyright © 2014 Maureen O’Leary

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-0990737148

  ISBN-10: 0990737144

  eISBN: 978-0990737155

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014918639

  LCCN Imprint Name: Geminid Press, LLC. Albuquerque, New Mexico

  Dedication

  This is for Margaret

  Acknowledgments

  This novel is in honor of the magical ones.

  Thanks first of all to Paul and Phillip Garver, the true Story Keepers. It is an honor to be a Geminid Press author.

  Tricia Ireland Stirling is a goddess of imagination who manages to be both a supportive and honest reader. I am beyond lucky to work with her.

  I am inspired by a pantheon of artists who never allow me to forget the power of making art. Thank you Laura Alvarez, Evan Hartzell, Marie Durquet and Andrew Kjera.

  Healing goddess Lora Schoen always believes in me and is actually made of magic.

  I am grateful to MW for being an early reader of this work. Someday I will be standing in line at your book signings.

  Thanks to my husband Jim Wanket and daughters Ciara and Margaret. You are the reason for everything. Thank you for not teasing me for believing in faeries.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  1. The Pilgrim

  2. The Professor

  3. The Need

  4. The Family

  5. The Good Son

  6. The Mercy of Sharks

  7. The Rock Star

  8. The Limo

  9. The Fun House

  10. A Real Bacchanalia

  11. The Morning After

  12. The Three Brothers

  13. The Unhuman

  14. The Hunger

  15. The Bus

  16. The Witch’s Promise

  17. The Four Scorpions

  18. The Story Keeper

  19. The Scent of Drying Sagebrush

  20. The Good Mother

  21. The Healing

  22. The Hanging Man

  23. The Beautiful Dream

  24. The Goddess Strain

  25. The Awakening

  26. The Nine Talking

  27. The What-ifs and the Demons

  28. The Betrayal

  29. The Cave

  30. The Demon Brother

  31. The Square of Golden Rushes

  32. The Bad Friend

  33. The Protector

  34. The Plain Order

  35. The Arrow

  36. The Rescue

  37. The Vine

  38. The Altar

  39. The Operation

  40. The Witch Mother

  41. The Awakened Ones

  42. The Apprentice

  43. The New Day

  1. The Pilgrim

  Eight years ago

  The day that young Fynn Kildare was infected began like any other Saturday in the walled commune by the sea. Children ran through the meadow, weaving through the groups of outsiders waiting to be healed. Fynn gazed at the young ones through the windows of the meeting room. Saturdays were always hard work for her. She sat on a cushion surrounded by disciples who were dressed as she was in rich colors like jewels. Her older sister, Liadan, brought in the sick and injured, one by one. Fynn was only fifteen, but she acted with an old soul when she placed her hands on the pilgrims’ heads, their legs, their stomachs. Where does it hurt? With the first touch, she knew the answer. With the second touch, the pain was gone.

  Fynn loved the pilgrims who lined the road outside the gate on the Saturdays when they opened Brigid’s Keep to strangers. She loved chasing away their illnesses and making them well. Gifts spilled over the altar and onto the floor. Lia liked the silver jewelry and the chocolates, while Fynn liked the art supplies and arrows. They shared everything else later with their Keep friends in a party around the bonfire where they played drums and drank wine.

  Their father, William the Story Keeper, kept the arrows locked in bunkers built in the eastern end of the Keep. They would need them one day, he said. Fynn knew well the zing of the bowstring. She was ready for the war against the demon armies her father said were amassing like storm clouds to bring about the end of the world. During practices, she never missed her marks. Fynn was not afraid of anything. She knew how to fight, and besides, her mother would protect her. Her mother would protect everyone.

  Sunbeams from the enormous windows bathed Fynn’s shoulders in warm gold. She stretched her arms over her head. The day was almost over. Her palms burned with the work of the healing. She held them to her cheeks to cool them.

  A shadow passed in front of the entrance. Komo bowed to get through, his guitar strapped on his back. He leaned against the wall, a slow smile making Fynn’s stomach light. A few of the commune girls clung to his sides, combing his long hair with their fingers. He winked at Fynn and her belly flipped. He was so beautiful, he stole her breath.

  “One more and we’re through,” Lia said. “Komo will still be there in a few minutes.”

  Fynn was not sure that was true. Komo forgot to meet her after archery practice the day before. She found him later, in the meadow weaving a windflower crown with one of the girls who hung on him in the meeting room. His attention span could be as short-lived as a spray of sparks, but she didn’t know jealousy. Komo belonged to her in a special way. He was the son of Dionysus, she the daughter of Brigid. She met his light brown eyes and felt the pull of the late afternoon breeze, the good surfing waves beyond the wall.

  Come play with me, he said. He did not speak, but her ears hummed as if he sang out loud.

  “Sister,” Lia said in her gentle voice. “You must concentrate.”

  Komo blew a kiss before turning away, his entourage following. Fynn sighed as she waved him good-bye. She forced her attention to the final pilgrim, while Lia whispered the facts.

  The last patient was a homeless woman who had managed to walk the ten miles from the town of St. Cocha. The heap of diseased flesh and tattered clothing reeked of urine and sweat. The poor woman. How fortunate that she had made it so far. She would leave the Keep glad she’d had the faith to come. Earlier that day, Fynn had cured a boy with a severed spinal cord. He walked away on thin, but working, legs. Fynn’s dad had to remind the boy’s parents to take his wheelchair with them when they left. She could do at least as well for this woman.

  The pilgrim clasped a used bottle of perfume in her grimy hand. Some gifts the disciples threw out after the outsiders left. The rule was for the pilgrims to give the best they could. For some, their best wasn’t much. Fynn took the bottle as though it were the finest thing and expressed thanks. She forgot for a moment the lure of Komo and the cool ocean waves. It would be wonderful to rid this woman of her discomfort and pain.

  Before beginning, Fynn looked around for her mother among the Keep disciples. Brigid usually stayed in the meeting room on healing days. Fynn had not noticed her leave.

  “Mother says to go on,” Lia said. “She will see us at the fire.”

  Fynn nodded, white light already flooding her eyes as her hands spread across the sick woman’s back. In the space of a breath, healing energy pulsed in her palms. Fynn sent tendrils of light into the woman’s body to find the sick places to direct the power.

  What bubbled up was worse than the end of the world.

  Fynn went rigid. The light exploded, and then vanished. There was nothing, but the mouths of starving children filling with flies, mothers sobbing over their dead babies, the unearthly moans of a thousand torture victims. Lia pulled her away, but it was
too late. Fynn bucked on the floor in pain that felt like her spine was bursting from her skin. She opened her mouth to cry, but nothing came out.

  Lia called her name, but Fynn was circling down. The gentle hands of her sister and disciples turned into grabbing claws of demons that would pull her into the depths of a hell where love could never find her.

  She found her voice and screamed.

  2. The Professor

  Present day

  Someone wicked followed Dr. Fynn Kildare. His presence hung in the air of the University Café like a sick person’s breath. The student onstage at the open mic railed against the evils of the Cain Pharmaceuticals Company in a series of rhymes, cheers of appreciation rising after every couplet. Rants about corporate evil went over well with this crowd. Fynn sipped a cup of good coffee, but she couldn’t relax and enjoy herself. A bad feeling flowed through her inborn psychic frequency. Every demon story her father ever told when she was a kid tumbled in her head, a comic book’s gallery of villains: demon armies, demon stalkers, demons in the shapes of men.

  Whoever had followed her to the cafe through the campus woods did not mean well. She couldn’t spot him, but she sensed jealousy, possession. She sensed a heart twisted enough to be demon-blooded, but humans could be just as broken. Either way, it was no good. Dread stirred in her stomach. In the café, no one looked strange or out of place, yet gooseflesh crawled up her back. It was confusing. There was no reason why she shouldn’t be able to see who it was. It was like she was getting choked with static through a bad connection. She decided to leave.

  On the way out, one of her organic chemistry students blocked the door. Jasmine was her name, smelling like patchouli.

  “I’m so glad to see you, Professor,” she said. She’d been onstage when Fynn entered, deep in a spoken word piece about the environment that equated lumberjacks with serial killers.

  “Yeah, great poem,” Fynn said, looking over the girl’s head. “Didn’t know there were so many words that rhyme with trees.”

  “I feel guilty even being here, you know?” Jasmine said. “My roommate had a 104 fever this afternoon, but she won’t go to the student health center. I hate even asking and I know you’re super busy, but could you like, check in on her for a second?”

  So it was that Fynn Kildare found herself descending into a freshman dorm hall party on a Friday night. At least she’d found the one place no self-respecting demon stalker would ever follow. She reminded herself that she loved all humanity, even when it sweat cheap beer through its skin and blasted the Beastie Boys through mega speakers. A crude banner hung from the ceiling. Bacchanalia. As if any of these kids could handle a real one of those. Not one of them would last even seven minutes in the woods under the moonlight alongside maenads and satyrs, drinking wine made by the gods.

  A boy in a toga threw himself against Fynn as Jasmine fumbled with her key.

  “Back off,” Fynn said, elbowing him in his soft stomach. He smelled like pickles.

  “You’re so hot,” he said. A speck of his spit flew against her nose.

  “Shut up, Brandon,” Jasmine said. “This is my professor. Have some respect.”

  “You’re a professor? You don’t look old enough. I don’t believe it”

  “Believe it,” Fynn said.

  “Damn, girl. If my professor looked like you, I might actually go to class.”

  Fynn shook her head. Stupid boy. A real Bacchanalia had nothing to do with beer bongs and doomed pick-up lines. A real Bacchanalia could change a person’s life.

  Once they were inside her room, Jasmine slammed the door against the party noise. A girl lay silent as a corpse in one of the long twin beds.

  “Tell her she needs to go to the doctor,” Jasmine said. “She won’t believe me.”

  Fynn knelt by the bed. She rested her hand on the girl’s head and felt along her spine.

  “What’s her name?” she asked.

  “Karen.”

  A bad heat radiated off of Karen’s skin. Despite the booming bass line that shook the walls, the cloak of death muffled the room.

  “You did the right thing bringing me here,” Fynn said. “Now call 911.”

  “Professor?”

  “Tell them she’s barely breathing.” Karen’s system was on the losing side of a war in her spinal column. Viral meningitis clustered in the bone marrow. Swarming viruses invaded healthy cells and exploded them apart like swallowed grenades. Jasmine pulled out her phone, but she would be too late. If the paramedics were already there, they would be too late.

  Fynn turned her full attention to the dying girl. She rubbed her hands together, then placed one on Karen’s neck and the other on her head. It had been eight years since she had last tried a healing. She hesitated for just a moment, then plunged in. With a few muttered lines of Gaelic, the room fell away. Light absorbed her vision, as if she were looking into the sun. She gripped the back of Karen’s neck until the writhing masses of virus began to shatter into fragments. Fynn’s hair lifted off her scalp. Energy flowed from her hands into Karen’s bloodstream until every bit of the mindless virus withered.

  Karen gasped, her forehead already cooling under Fynn’s palm. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Have I been sleeping?”

  The EMT crew burst in. They pushed Fynn to the side and took Karen away on a stretcher through a gauntlet of boozy kids with shamed faces. Someone cut the music and Fynn almost thanked the Goddess out loud for it.

  “She was dying and you cured her,” Jasmine said. “Professor Kildare, you cured Karen.”

  The students’ whispers echoed in the hall. Professor Kildare is a witch. Her mother and sister would be furious with her for this. She felt a twinge of regret, but just a twinge and it seemed to wave at her like an old friend. Diamond chips of anger cut her on the inside. She sure as hell wasn’t going to be afraid of her family, not after all she’d been through and everything she’d accomplished. Maybe she couldn’t help remembering her father’s horror stories, but she’d also earned a doctorate at twenty-two and worked as the lead researcher in immunology at St. Cocha University. Her courses were packed with students who were dying to have her for a professor. She made her own way now.

  Fynn’s family did not rule her life anymore. She was nothing like the girl she was growing up in the Keep. Her family had no say in what she did. They lost that right eight years before when they failed to protect her from the demon virus that had sneaked past the gate. She squared her shoulders as she strode past the ambulance outside the dorm. Fynn’s mother hadn’t wanted to see her hurt, but she could not protect Fynn, and it was that weakness that Fynn could not forgive.

  St. Cocha University sat on a forested hill, with the Pacific Ocean spread out below. The water looked like tempered steel from the distance. She loved to swim in the evening and surf in the morning. She’d forgotten how much the rush of making someone well was like riding the highest wave imaginable. She felt as if she could touch the pink ends of the setting sun and meet the emerging stars. She had forgotten that she was too powerful to be afraid of invisible stalkers, or her mother and sister, either. She had forgotten who she was.

  Or maybe she had just forgotten how much fun it was to be a goddess.

  3. The Need

  Cain lived to watch Fynn. The flashing red ambulance lights bathed the wide planes of her face as she walked past the oblivious driver. Her wild hair fell down her back like molten bronze and her eyes seemed to shoot emerald sparks. She was so clearly an otherworldly creature. He could not fathom how the emergency guys let her pass without throwing themselves at her feet. How could they not fall to kneeling at the sight of her?

  In the dorm parking lot, Fynn paused by her truck, shifting her weight from one boot to the other. She gazed in Cain’s direction, her almond-shaped eyes narrowing. He flinched, but her expression didn’t change. She glanced over her shoulder before climbing in.

  She can’t see me. Next to the life-force power of the goddess, his mother’s witc
h magic was a set of cheap tricks. The veiling spell was as crude as putting a paper bag over his head, but it worked well enough to hide him from Fynn’s sight. The time he stole to watch Fynn under the veiling spell was the only thing that kept him from putting a gun to his head.

  The absurd old step side she drove sputtered down the hill toward the ocean. Cain followed in his Porsche, holding two fingers to the leather steering. When she belonged to him, she wouldn’t drive a beat-up truck. She wouldn’t need to drive. He touched the plastic barrel of the syringe in his pocket. He would give her everything she wanted. She would need for nothing, except the substance he kept in his pocket like a talisman.

  Fynn didn’t go home right away. She stopped at the beach first, as he knew she would. From the safe distance of the dry sand, he watched as she shed her black boots, jeans, and halter. He held his breath as she dove into the waves. There were sharks this time of year, hunting along the shore. In the dark, they could mistake her for a seal.

  For nearly an hour, he sat by Fynn’s discarded clothes, glancing at his phone every few minutes, the time flashing in its cold light. He grabbed hers from her jeans. He knew the passcode from weeks of following close enough to smell her perfume, or to feel her hair against his cheek. He found her number and programmed it into his own phone. It was nice to see her name in his list of contacts. It was another game he could play. Fynn Kildare was his friend. His girlfriend. His wife. Of course, he had her number in his list of contacts. She was the most important person in the world to him.

  When she emerged, he stared at her body gleaming in the moonlight. Relief and desire broiled within him all at once, and he almost cried out. It took everything he had to stay rooted in place. He rolled the syringe between his fingers. A wrong move at the wrong time would ruin his plans, but he could hardly wait to take her. She put herself in such unnecessary danger. When she was his, they would live on the remotest of islands, but he would never allow her to do something as stupid as swim.