The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1)

by Maureen O'Leary

  “Fynn, we need her addicted,” Sullivan said. “We need her sick so we can find the cure.”

  “We have the vial of infected blood to work with. It will have to do,” Fynn said.

  “You’re setting us back,” Dr. Sullivan said.

  “I don’t care.”

  The University swells drank cheap wine upstairs, jostling one another for a chance to stand next to the Chancellor. They were as irrelevant as paper dolls. Fynn’s work had brought prestige to St. Cocha University, but the animal in her arms had given everything she had to cure disease in a species not even her own.

  Fynn bent her head. She held her hand over the monkey’s belly and lowered herself to kneeling. A sledgehammer slammed against the inside of her eardrums beneath the humming of a million angry bees. This was worse than the meningitis in the dorm. It was like the demon virus that almost killed her when she was too young to know what was happening. In the hammer’s wake, screams approached, as if from down a long road, getting closer and closer.

  She focused on love. She loved Artemis. The gentle, generous animal had endured so many needles just so humans who would never know her could someday have a cure they needed. Fynn focused love through her hands until the only thing she knew was love flowing through her veins, through her hands, filling the small animal with light.

  In she didn’t know how much time, she became aware of Dr. Sullivan crouching next to her. The screaming in her head faded. Fynn waited for the nausea to fade, as well. It didn’t, but Artemis shifted from diseased semi-consciousness to peaceful sleep. Dr. Sullivan lifted her to her feet. She leaned against him to keep from falling over. Her throat stung with dryness, but she felt her mouth forming a word in her mother’s voice.

  “Unhuman,” she said.

  “What did you say?” Dr. Sullivan’s eyes widened.

  A great smashing shook the walls. The last thing she saw before the lights went out was the steel reinforced door to the hall flying across the lab.

  13. The Unhuman

  Auxiliary fluorescents flashed on over the animal cages. Artemis raised a groggy head to see what was going on. Mother Brigid roared in Fynn’s ears. The Unhuman!

  Fynn dropped to the floor, pulling Dr. Sullivan under the counter with her. She passed Artemis to his trembling hands. Strange footsteps passed down the rows. It was not the sound of feet in shoes. It was the padding of leathery paws along with the ticking of claws.

  Fynn held her breath. Her fingers itched for a bow and arrow.

  They were close. There was a shuffle, a brush, and click. One of the intruders let out a low laugh.

  “Goddess of the Three, come to me,” a voice gurgled in mockery. Something metal tinked against a steel counter. She only had to peer down the row to see what it was. A knife?

  Stand. Her mother’s voice was loving, but firm. Face them. You are a goddess. She froze. She didn’t want to be a goddess.

  You know what you are, daughter. Stand.

  Fear jumbled her memory. Face. Attack. Evade. Avoid daemonium weapons. Her parents had forced her to spend so many hours of her life on demon-fighting lessons, yet now that she faced the monsters of their collective nightmares, she could not move.

  An overwhelming smell of sulphur burned the inside of her nose, as though someone lit a thousand matches. Sulphur indicated mayhem demons. If they were truly the mayhem demons of the Story Keeper’s prophecies, then that meant---

  Her breath clouded in the suddenly frigid lab.

  One of the long metal counters bent back like a stick of gum. A microscope exploded against the wall. Dr. Sullivan covered his ears. A hailstorm of broken glass bounced off the floor as more equipment flew through the air.

  They had to get out, but not without the means to make more cure. She reached up to where she had left the syringe of Artemis’ infected blood. Her hand knocked it and it clattered to the floor.

  The smashing in the lab stopped. She breathed in low, short gasps, as she pocketed the bloody syringe. A face rounded the edge of the doorway.

  Not a human face. Flattened. Gnarled. Molded by pure hate. Its cracked lips rolled back over its misshapen hole of a mouth, stuffed with jagged teeth two rows deep.

  Fynn pointed Sully toward the door to the hallway. “Run,” she whispered.

  With the howls of the clawed ones behind them, they ran.

  ***

  Fynn left Dr. Sullivan huddled with Artemis under a stairwell. It was Fynn the demons wanted. Mayhem demons were the only kind with the strength to kill a goddess. It was the sole reason they were bred and made. Her father the Story Keeper had schooled her well.

  She lured them out from the building by running down the path she walked every day between classes. It led straight to the campus square, where students lingered. Branches snapped behind her. She headed off trail toward an ancient redwood hollowed out by a centuries-old fire. Its blackened core offered shelter.

  The moonlight waned. On the path, three men crashed through the trees. They were the three guys from the Alley, Komo’s party, and the University reception: Eligos, Amon, and Samael. They were hungry, led by the one with eyes like water. They circled the path, their heads jerking from side to side. Fynn swallowed despite a dry throat while the men smelled the air. Eligos turned in her direction. The two others followed his gaze. Their eyes were glowing hollow orbs in the darkness. In their demon incarnation, she recognized them from the hardbound books her father drew by hand. They were three human brothers who emerged from three years in Hell. Their only purpose was to kill the Divine. Mayhem demons.

  “There will be nothing human left in the three brothers,” the Story Keeper had said.

  They stepped off the path toward her burned tree. With every step, they became less like men. Their bodies thickened, their faces flattened, and their mouths opened to reveal double rows of teeth. Eligos hissed. His enlarged, soulless eyes glowed from inside like Jerusalem candles.

  Fynn ducked from the tree’s shelter to face the nightmare men.

  They crept with bent knees, as though they had the powerful legs of enormous wolves. Her whole world shifted in one seismic moment, while the Three Brothers of her father’s most terrifying story sniffed the air one last time. Then they charged. She wished for three well-aimed arrows, but her weapons were stored at the Keep. Well, not all of her weapons. Fynn shook out her hands. She was a goddess who had spent the first fifteen years of her life training to fight the monsters of an entire world’s worst fears.

  The demons’ massive shoulders hunched forward. They communicated to one another through clicking sounds that sounded like the language of insects. They circled and converged on her, a shock of sun-streaked hair falling across Eligos’ grossly misshapen forehead. He leapt over a sapling as though from a trampoline. A yellow fire burst alive in Fynn’s core. Heat coursed through her arms and legs.

  “Get what you came for,” she said, her hair lifting from her scalp in a fiery halo. “I’ll give you your fight.”

  Eligos’ pointed teeth gleamed in the dim moonlight. A shadow flickered across his glowing eyes. He made a deep, animal noise, but he did not move any closer. His brother rushed her neck with an open mouth. She knocked him away. He leapt for her throat again. She grabbed his arm and pulled him close.

  Fynn hugged the demon she had caught as though they were long lost friends. He still had the tag on his shirt. Samael. He squirmed in her embrace like a bulbous insect, but through force of will, she stood. She squeezed tighter. The golden light pulsed deep inside her from a source that had no end. The light flowed through her hands like molten lava. The demon cried in agony while his flesh bubbled. It stank as it burned. She gagged in revulsion, but still she held.

  Amon scrambled behind her to reach over and claw at her head and face. Eligos hung back, circling them. With blood dripping into her eyes, she grabbed the clawing one by the wrist while still holding his brother in a crushing embrace with one arm.

  The forest echoed with demon howling. Gol
den beams of light filled her eyes, ears, and mouth. She did not feel the ground beneath her feet, nor the sting from the gashes in her skin. The power flowed through her in a blinding force that destroyed the demon in her embrace to a pile of bone and ash. She fell to the ground, still grasping a demon wrist, still awash in light, still fighting against her family’s nightmares come to life.

  ***

  Dr. Sullivan called her name.

  “Fynn? Can you hear me?” Her cheek rested on wet leaves. Flashes of light popped in her vision as she pushed herself up. Her fingers ached. She held tight to Amon’s hand by the wrist above where he’d chewed it off in raggedy strips of flesh and splintered bone.

  She dropped it. “Gross,” she said. “I hate demons.”

  “This has happened to you before?” Dr. Sullivan asked.

  “No. But I was prepared for the eventuality.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Extraordinary.”

  Fynn smoothed her hair with the hand that hadn’t been gripping the claw. Static electricity crackled against her palm. “Artemis okay?” she asked. Dr. Sullivan held open his jacket to reveal her tucked under his arm, snoozing.

  “To the Keep?” He helped her to her feet. They hustled in the direction of the parking lot. There were two demons left. They were out there. Her ears were primed for their unearthly howling.

  She felt under the frame of the Chevy for the spare key. She usually loved her truck, but at that moment, she really wished that she’d accepted her mother’s offer of an armor-plated SUV. It was a waste of money, Fynn had said the last time her mother had made the offer. SUVs were bad for the environment. They used too much gas. Besides, she preferred old things.

  If she had only known. Well, she couldn’t fault her family for not giving plenty of warnings.

  “Put on your seat belt,” she said, pressing the gas. She’d retooled the engine for fuel efficiency, but it wouldn’t go more than seventy miles an hour. She took out her phone, her eyes darting the outside for any sign of glowing eyes.

  All that mattered in that moment was getting Sully and Artemis safely to the Keep. Then Fynn would head back to the mansion by the sea to find Komo. They needed to move to the Keep for a while. The Mayhems weren’t regular demons who would be held back by a goddess/lover/bodyguard. They wouldn’t stop until Komo and Fynn were dead. She doubted they would try a face-to-face attack again. Eligos was too smart to try it and if she wasn’t mistaken, she thought she saw a weapon flashing in the moonlight: a rough-hewn dagger inscripted with ancient lettering.

  Please don’t let it be daemonium. Please let daemonium blades be a myth, the kind that stays in stories, not the kind that is real.

  She called Komo’s number. She cursed at his gravelly voicemail message and resorted to texting.

  Demons. Call me. She gunned it as fast as the truck would carry them down the hill.

  “Praise the Goddess,” Dr. Sullivan said.

  “Please stop talking,” Fynn said. She was in no mood for goddess worship.

  She drove with her phone in hand, waiting for the screen to alight. Where are you? She reached out with her feelings, but sensed nothing in return. The demons could not have reached him already. At this point, they would be reeling from their failed attack. She barreled down the road to the Keep and stopped at the gate. A disciple exited the guard station, a smile on his goofy face. Fynn felt like punching him.

  “You’re not coming in?” Dr. Sullivan cradled Artemis. “You’ve got to come in and see your mother, at least.”

  “Don’t tell me what I’ve got to do,” Fynn said. She revved the engine. “Get out of the truck. Tell her I’m bringing Komo here tonight.”

  Dr. Sullivan looked like he wanted to say more, but they weren’t in the lab. Their problems were beyond the hierarchy of the university, and far beyond the realms of science. He sighed and did as she said. As soon as he slammed the door closed, she turned the wheel to St. Cocha and left Brigid’s Keep in her rearview mirror yet again.

  14. The Hunger

  The women inside the house had no idea they were in danger. They sat on the sofa and on cushions on the floor holding glasses of sparkling wine. One was telling a funny story that made the others laugh so hard they almost spilled their drinks on the carpet. If they looked over their shoulders, they would have seen the steam cloud on the window forming from Amon’s breath. His brother Eligos dragged him to the bushes.

  “You’re visible now,” Eligos said. His lips hurt moving over his teeth. He wasn’t yet used to being corporeal. It was a clumsy feeling. They had gone for the youngest daughter of Brigid too soon, losing their brother and Amon’s hand for their mistake. Their witch mother hired physical therapists to move them through somnambulant exercises during their half sleep to keep their muscles strong. But inhabiting bodies took practice after being conscious solely in spirit form for three long years.

  Eligos wiped drool away with the back of his hand. His face was flattened into a hellish grimace. After the attack on Fynn earlier that evening their shift to human form wasn’t sticking. Their teeth were too big for their human mouths. They both drooled blood from biting their tongues. He hated looking at Amon because he knew he was looking into a replica of his own face.

  “We are turning,” Eligos said. “Wait.” Amon shook his head, long past speech. Blood dripped down his chin like sauce. Eligos glared at him, hatred a bubbling tar smothering his human soul.

  His reawakened human soul. It was causing him excruciating pain. He didn’t know what was happening to him. He did know that he had to hide it from his brother or die at his hands.

  For Eligos could not kill the youngest goddess earlier that night. He stood impotent with the daemonium blade in his hand and watched while she turned one brother to ash. Amon had to chew off his own hand to get away, not noticing that Eligos hung back from the fight, paralyzed.

  He moved his mouth to speak, but what came out was a guttural croak. Panic shook him to his core but he couldn’t let his brother see it. He had to swallow the anxiety that replaced his demonic rage ever since Fynn jumped for the Nine tablet and grabbed his hand instead.

  He had been too eager. He never should have taunted the goddess with the drug. Demon rage was a powerful weapon but it made you so fucking stupid.

  They were sent to Hell in order to be reborn to destroy the Triple Goddess. It was the brothers’ job to break down every obstacle to the coming Demon Age. The Triple Goddess in the incarnation of Mother Brigid, Liadan and Fynn weren’t just their prey. Those women were their very reason for being.

  Panic shivered under his skin. He was reborn to kill Fynn. He was the strongest of the three brothers, reborn for mayhem. Yet from the moment she shook his hand at the party he felt a hard crack of his ice heart. It hurt. He couldn’t stand how much it hurt. It felt like a hot pitchfork stabbing his internal organs and that was bad enough. The worst part was the racing tide of fear.

  For a moment as they chased Fynn in the woods outside the buildings he thought he smelled the spicy scent of the purple daisies that grew inside the Keep. He’d flexed his fist and instead of a warted claw he saw a child’s hand holding a bouquet of those same purple flowers, a gift he had picked for his mother.

  His mother. He huffed, a spark of rage returning. He welcomed it. He let it cradle him like a warm sea.

  Eligos and Amon watched the women from the darkness of the shadows. When the time came to fulfill their purpose, Eligos would be ready. After three years in Hell, it was unthinkable that any human part of him could remain to reawaken. In time it would have to disappear and there would be no escape for their prey then. When they descended upon the Three, there would be no mercy. After they killed the goddesses, their mother and oldest brother, Cain, would be free to unleash a chaos that would spread across the world. Their family would share more than the power of kings. They would be the new absolute gods.

  Without a noise, Eligos leaped over his brother. Before Fynn touched him, the change exalted him.
He could jump three times his own height, run faster than any human could ever dream. But the most wonderful part was the strength. The power of ten thousand years of destructive force coursed through his muscles.

  “It’s time,” Eligos said, his voice a series of low ticks. Saying it would make it true. He ignored his heart thudding a warning in his chest. The women’s laughter carried through the open window. With one claw, Eligos pushed the window further along its track. Slowly. Creeping. These women would present no challenge. The Three they were meant for were more powerful than any mortal women. The encounter with Fynn that night had more than proven the strength of the goddesses. The remaining two brothers had to practice stealth. They would practice on these human cows.

  Amon lunged for the throat of one of the women on the floor. Eligos meant to let him do it. He meant to help him do it, to kill most of them himself. But without thinking he swept ahead of his brother. The women screamed as the two demons grappled on the floor. Eligos grabbed Amon by the back of the neck and threw him out the window before following him the way they came.

  “Patience, Brother,” Eligos said through clenched teeth. His own need clawed at his insides. He needed to kill the way he needed to eat and drink. The hunger rose in him like a great hollow emptiness but the new goddess force that stopped him from feeding it was greater. It was a sticky feeling, something unnamable and so powerful that he found he could not kill the women in the same way he could not kill Fynn.

  Amon howled but Eligos was stronger. He pulled his brother along, away from the house of women. Amon feared Eligos because he was stronger, but he would not be yanked from a kill again.

  They fled over the backyard fences of the suburban neighborhood. Eligos eyed the open sliding glass doors of the houses. He knew Amon shared the killing hunger. It would be nothing for them to break a swath of death through the whole neighborhood. They ran across a vacant schoolyard toward their car. Their clawed toes scraped against the asphalt.