The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1)

by Maureen O'Leary

  Eligos ran his tongue over the ridges of his teeth. He moved to the window.

  She approached closer. He had to run.

  Mother Brigid burst into the room. Eligos lost his balance and he was gripped by the longing to skitter into a crack in the wall. Her presence in the small space was too much for him. He clamped his mouth against an uprising of vomit.

  Everyone ignored him. The doctors talked all at once, telling Mother Brigid vital signs, white blood cell levels, stats. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, then he couldn’t hear them. The buzzing of five million bees rose in pitch as if they clustered around his ears. Brigid hushed the doctors. They stood in obedient silence as Brigid unhooked the monitors and tubes and gathered the child in her arms. The tiny body almost disappeared in the folds of the Goddess’ dress. The doctors bowed their heads in hushed reverence. Eligos sidled to the door.

  “Be still,” Brigid said. He froze, terrified. A wind blew through, smelling of orange flowers and honeysuckle. The bees thrummed inside of Eligos’ head.

  A wave of healing power hit him like a bomb blast. He made a croaking sound as he fell to his knees. He needed to get out of that room or he would die. He tried to look away from Brigid but it was like his head was caught in an iron vise.

  “Stay,” she said. Her voice ricocheted like the ringing of a heavy bell. He whimpered in the corner, his legs no longer able to hold him. Pure fear ran through his veins and turned his bones to jelly. A light as dangerous to look at as the noontime sun pulsed under Brigid’s hands over the girl’s body.

  The child called out. The screaming bees waned and the pressure against Eligos’ body lessened. He curled into a ball on the floor.

  The little girl wanted her mother. The doctors looked at Eligos with questions in their eyes. They had thought that he was the girl’s father. But she wasn’t looking at him, the quivering stranger in the corner.

  Brigid lie slumped on the bed. “Take the child outside,” she said. “Leave us.” Even in weakness, her voice commanded respect. The doctors paused just a second and then one of them took the girl in his arms and motioned for the others to follow him out.

  “I know what you are,” Brigid said as soon as the door clicked shut. Her face was white and her skin plastered against her skull like an ancient woman’s. The beautiful, if tired, lady who first entered was gone. This woman could have been a hundred years old. She could have been a thousand.

  Eligos’ spine hunched. He gnashed his teeth, expecting double rows of points, but they were still flat as a cow’s molars. Her skirts rustled. She was coming for him. She would turn him to ashes. Blind with terror, Eligos fumbled in his pocket for the blade and tossed it with a flick of his wrist. The blade thunked into her belly.

  She bent forward at the waist. Her hands curled around the handle, but she did not try to pull it out. Despair overwhelmed him at what he had done. He reached for the blade handle, careful to avoid touching her. She folded over the blood rose blooming through her white tunic, just like the petals of blood falling on the pink dress of the quinceanera girl of his first kill. Her shoulders shook as though she were weeping.

  But then she raised her eyes. They were dry. She wasn’t crying. She was laughing.

  She straightened herself. Someone knocked on the door, calling her name.

  “Stay away,” she said.

  The voices on the other side quieted. There was no more knocking.

  “Oh, your witches and their daemonium blades,” Brigid said. She looked ancient but she sounded like a very young woman. “They have the one trick and that’s it. You would think after centuries of battle that they would think of something new.”

  “You’ll die.” Eligos choked. He bounced on the balls of his reptilian feet. His teeth were sharpening now. He was trapped, confused.

  She stretched out her arms. “Then do it already,” she said. “Get it over with. I’m tired.” Her voice was husky and mocking. He hesitated.

  “You know the difference between your mother and me?” She coughed and the blood gushed around the blade. The poison of the metal would be corrosive within her. It would feel like acid pouring into her bloodstream yet she smiled like she felt no pain.

  “The difference between your mother and me is that if we were both tied to stakes and put in fire, she would burn up and I wouldn’t. She’s not real magic.”

  He grabbed the handle. He could save her. Maybe it would not be too late to undo the terrible thing he had done.

  She snapped her hand around his forearm. Her fingers were bony, but they held him like a handcuff made of granite. Her other hand held the back of his head at the nape of his neck. She pulled him to her face and opened her mouth over his as though he were a drowning man.

  He jerked but she held him fast. He curled like a slug under a salt pour until he was as small as a child. He was himself at three years old holding out a daisy for his mother. And then he was the daisy crushed in her fist.

  His throat burned, his nose burned, he couldn’t breathe as she exhaled into him. Sadness flooded Eligos’ whole being. He collapsed to his knees. He was the girl he killed in the hotel, the girl whose death damned him. His victim’s grief washed through him, the feelings she’d had while she was dying. She would never see her mother again. It was her last thought and now Eligos felt every bit of her loneliness.

  Eligos’ eyes rolled back in his head. He descended through three years of open consciousness in the deepest recesses of Hell. He swam through the betrayal of children as abused as he was, the horror of murdered innocents, the despair of lost souls. There were goose-stepping, black-booted soldiers, all in line, their hands up in razor sharp salute. Slave masters holding whips. Scientists building bombs. Every atrocity of human history flowed through him like a river of sludge.

  Time coiled like the tail of a pig. He was both participant and observer, caught in a nightmare from which he could not wake. In an ancient time, a soldier impaled his head on a stick to warn others not to pass. In a modern city under a freeway overpass, he was a young boy offering himself to a stranger, his body sick for the drugs he would get in exchange. Then he was a young Miwok Indian woman in that exact place, but a time two hundred years in the past, chased by a man on horseback.

  In Hell, he had soaked in the hatred and soul-dead selfishness of the killers and rapists and hunters of the innocent. Now it felt like Mother Brigid was pulling him through it again from the other side, from the side of the fear and sadness of the innocent themselves. Remorse pushed against his throat, forced its own way down into his lungs and pressed at them until they felt that they would burst.

  Then it was gone. He lay at Brigid’s feet, panting for breath. She bent over him and stroked his hair. Her fingers traced over his bumpy, misshapen head. He saw he was wrong. She wasn’t pulling him through Hell again. She was finishing the work her daughter had started. She was pulling the Hell right out of him and now she was done. The tide of pain ebbed. What he was left with was the aftermath of deep shame.

  He wanted to die.

  “Take out the blade,” she whispered. With bleary eyes he groped for the handle. “Hurry,” she said.

  He pulled. The blade dripped with her blood. She moved his hand so that he dropped it on the tray by the bed. She lowered herself to rest on the hospital pillow. He looked at where she still held him by the wrist. His skin wasn’t burning like his brother’s did when Fynn grabbed him in the woods.

  “I should be dead,” he said. His voice was fully human, but his arms were still long and his fingers clawed. His feet were still animal and strange.

  “Well,” she said with a wry smile. “The Lady taketh away and then she giveth back.”

  Voices collected on the other side of the door. His hand remained a claw. They would see him. They would know what he was. He tried to turn back into a man.

  “Not so fast,” she said. Her voice was reed thin. She nodded to the window. “I won’t be able to hold the door much longer.”
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br />   She closed her eyes and winced. Her pain made the shame in his belly grow spines.

  “Eligos is no more,” she said. “You are Eli now. I need you to protect my daughter. You will regain your power and it will be your job to protect Fynn.”

  She took his cheeks in her hands and pressed her forehead to his. She was so beautiful and he was so ugly. But then his vision became white and he saw her. Fynn Kildare, her hair a wave of silken fire.

  He loved Fynn. He would protect her. He would do anything for her.

  The doorknob rattled again. There was the jangling of keys. “Go,” she said, pushing him away. Her hands fell like dead lilies on the bed.

  “My Lady,” he said. He was bereft without her touch. He didn’t want to leave her there, dying. He wanted to save her.

  “Go,” she mumbled into the sheet. “Obey what I say.”

  There was the grinding of a key thrust into a lock. The metal doorknob turning. Eligos growled and leapt to the ground. He threw open the window, dropped silently onto the roof. He moved with the lightness of a butterfly on new wings. He dropped again from the roof to the ground below. Eli ran through the parking lot toward the hills dotted by oak trees that welcomed him with branches outstretched like the arms of the Goddess, open and beckoning.

  22. The Hanging Man

  In the kitchen of the Keep, Fynn sat by the lamp with the eternal flame and watched disciples chop potatoes and herbs for the evening meal. Dark blue windings of snakes and dragons writhed across the young men and women’s arms. The tattoos of committed Brigidine disciples brought her childhood to life. She’d almost forgotten that people did this. They found Brigid’s Keep and made it the center of their lives.

  The smells of the Keep tugged memories to the surface as well. The Keep was a mix of sugar pine, sage smudges, and mint tea steeping next to baked bread steaming on the board. It was the smell of always finding something good to eat, someone to play with, and somewhere to go to feel welcomed. It was the smell of her family.

  She scowled at her own sentimentality. No need to get soft. She ran away at seventeen and had not returned to visit for a reason. It was easy for Dr. Sullivan to praise the Goddess and for these disciples to mark their arms with snakes. None of them was made to stand as a child in the line of fire. Fynn’s head pounded. Since leaving home she lived in the gap between the past and the future. Resentment had carved such a well-worn groove in her heart that it had become a habit.

  She texted Komo. I’m coming for you today. She would find William and say hello before taking off to find Komo. They would have to cancel the Vine appearance, or at least postpone it. Until the Mayhem demons were destroyed, they needed to hang out in the Keep for a while.

  A heavily inked disciple poured her tea.

  “I’ve never seen you before,” Fynn said, pocketing her cell phone.

  “I moved in three years ago,” she said. “Praise the Goddess.”

  “You’re a true believer,” Fynn said. “Mother must love you.” Fynn heard the ugly resentment in her own voice, but was too tired, too stressed to stop herself.

  She sat for a time watching the the lamp on the mantle. Scented oil held the flame that never died out, not once in all of Fynn’s life. For nineteen days, nineteen different followers kept it burning. On the twentieth night, the spirit of the original Goddess Brigid Herself came from Heaven to tend the sacred fire. Or so her father the Story Keeper always said.

  Men and women Fynn had never met filled her mother’s kitchen, the large room ringing with vegetable chopping and kettle whistling. One of the cooks filled an enormous stockpot from a hose that hung from the ceiling. They’d done over the kitchen since she left. It was big enough to feed more people than she ever remembered living within the walls.

  Fynn felt awkward. She didn’t know anybody. The perpetual flame flickered as someone opened the door to the garden.

  “Fynn? Is that you?”

  William the Story Keeper stood at the threshold. Fynn ran to him like a child. She pressed her face into his soft chambray shirt. He always wore plaid shirts and cowboy boots. She felt like crying over the fact that whatever else had changed, her father remained the same.

  “You look wonderful,” William said as he let go. He held her at arm’s length, rubbed the tear on his cheek with his shoulder. “Different.”

  The kitchen workers lowered their eyes. They scooted to the other side of the room to do their work. Fynn had almost forgotten about how everyone at the Keep deferred to her family.

  “Did you notice your sister’s tattoos?” he asked. He moved to the stove, his work boots shuffling against the earthen floor.

  “She was wearing long sleeves.”

  “They are on her face,” he said. He chuckled. “Ah, you three. Always the same. You look inside of each other, but forget to really look at each other.”

  Fynn puzzled over that. He was right. She hadn’t noticed Lia had tattoos. If they were on her face that meant that she had settled on her Aspect.

  “Midwifery?” Fynn asked. She didn’t have a right to feel left out, but she did. She would have liked to know that her sister had decided on which Aspect of the goddess would be her own, if only because Fynn would be left with what her sister did not choose.

  “Midwifery and Healing. Yes,” William said. He chose a couple of potatoes from a box on the floor.

  The Triple Goddess in full power was a Circle of three women, each imbued with a universe’s worth of strengths and powers. There was Brigid the Mother, and now Liadan the Healer. When she was young, Fynn was supposed to be the Healer. They were both trained in medicine, as well as fighting, but it was always in Fynn that the healing power flowed strongest.

  “That leaves me with the Arrow,” Fynn said. The fighter. The protector.

  “Which you already knew.” William’s matter-of-fact truth withered any indignation or complaint. He motioned for her to sit while he cooked.

  Fynn placed her phone on the table in case Komo called. Her dad was full of gossip. Some of the kids she’d grown up with were married now. She tried to imagine never leaving, never going to Athenian with Komo. Never enrolling at St. Cocha.

  “You ever talk to Komo?” he asked. He broke an egg over a popping hot skillet.

  “Just the other night,” Fynn said, her heart fluttering.

  “Really? And how is he?” She stared at the back of her father’s head. He was acting casual, but the man wanted more information. He wanted nothing less than every single fact of the whole story between her and Komo.

  “Fine, Dad,” she said. She hoped he was fine. Surely if he was not, Cate or Cara would have called. Someone would have let her know.

  “Well, I hear his father is a mess,” he said. “Dionysus with the drink, you know. Nobody has seen him in years.”

  He lowered two plates overloaded with fresh skillet potatoes, red onions and bacon smothered with eggs and cheese. It was always their favorite. Peasant food for the two of them. It was the way they liked to eat. He grabbed a ketchup bottle and sat beside his daughter. She patted the papery skin on his forearm as he bowed his head over a prayer of thanks.

  “Blessed be this meal from the gifts of earth, air, water and fire. Blessed be our hearts in empathy for all.” His voice was as deep as an ocean wave. She had missed him. They ignored the kitchen workers and ate with the same bad manners they shared when she was a kid. They shoveled in food without talking and knew when to pass the ketchup without asking.

  “I’ve got to get going soon,” she said when she was done. “Last night was rough. I’ve got to find Komo, actually. Make sure he’s safe.” She watched her father to see a sign of what he thought about that, but his face revealed nothing.

  “You see your mom yet?” He dabbed his mouth with a napkin but missed a gob of ketchup on his chin. She wiped it off as though he were the child.

  “She left,” Fynn said. “You didn’t hear? Something about a healing at the Oaks Healing Center.”

  “S
houldn’ta gone,” he said. “Old Brigid is tired lately. So am I.”

  Old Brigid. Her mother had the appearance a woman in her forties at the most. Her father had aged more.

  “I wanted to go with her,” Fynn said. “She wouldn’t let me.” She looked at her hands to avoid his eyes. She knew he had been against her mother healing her of her Nine addiction. She wouldn’t blame him for being pissed.

  “Let’s talk before you go.” William pushed back his chair. She followed him out to the garden. They walked through the rows of tomatoes, careful not to step on crawling vines of pumpkin. Mother Brigid’s garden was always an explosion of herbs, vegetables and fruit trees no matter the time of year.

  She bent to pinch an aphid off of a windflower stem. “I’d been doubting the whole demon idea,” Fynn said. She flicked away the insect. “I was trying to make a life on the outside.”

  “Doubt all you want, daughter. Those are the Mayhem brothers that are after you.”

  “I know, Dad.” Fynn gazed past the gate, hoping William would get the hint that she didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t have time for one of his long stories.

  “I saw it in the fire,” he said. “There are three brothers who have been dipped into Hell for longer than any humans in history. It’s rare for anyone to survive three hours, but these survived three years.”

  “Uh-huh.” She realized she’d left her phone in the kitchen. She considered going back to get it.

  “In their returned form, they are barely human. Shape shifters, Fynnie. Bad mother fuckers. Worse than anything the modern age could dream.”

  “Okay, Dad.” She let the phone stay in the kitchen or else risk a lecture about the evils of modern technology.

  “You should stay in the Keep. You’ll be safe here.”

  “How is that?” Her voice was sharper than she wanted it to be. The one time in her life she was ever truly hurt was within the Keep’s walls.