by Tracy Clark
I wanted to go to Ireland immediately, an idea Mari supported in the spirit that all quests were daring and noble, and if they weren’t, at least I would have an adventure for once in my sad, sheltered life. She offered to use the rest of her airline miles to get me a ticket, and we tallied my savings with a couple hundred dollars she was willing to lend me. If I stayed in youth hostels, it might buy me a couple of weeks to search for information.
Dun remained doubtful. “What, you’re going to roam the Irish countryside by yourself and go door-to-door asking if anyone knows anything about your mother?”
“Maybe she won’t go alone. Maybe Finnegan will escort her,” Mari teased.
Dun jumped in. “Oh, and rule number three of the Articles of Friendship states that when you go on your first date with Gorgeous O’Guinness, we have a debriefing. How’d it go?”
I tore my eyes from my mother’s letter once more, thinking of my afternoon with Finn in the forest. “You want to know what it was like? Surreal. We were a movie. We were my favorite book. Dreamlike. Sweet—and hot—and you guys will tease me for saying this, but I feel like I’ve known him forever.”
“Aaaah. Love and lightning,” Mari said with dramatic pause. She tucked her straight hair behind her ear and winked at me. “They both can strike sudden and hot.”
“And they can burn you crispy!” Dun shouted from the backseat.
“I still can’t believe it happened.” I exhaled. Truth.
Dun pinched the back of my neck. “So, the kissing didn’t suck?”
I shrugged him off. Now wasn’t the time to think of Finn and replay our spectacular kisses. I had work to do. I wanted to go straight to Ireland, try to find information on my mother, and arrange all my extremely confused feelings into tidy little mind-files.
Anger: that belonged with Dad for taking my mother’s love away by telling me she left us. He could at least have let me believe in her love for me. Anger had a subcategory for my mother, too, for forgetting that when you have children, you’re supposed to put them first.
Concern: a woman named Grace Sandoval loved me for five years but risked her life and our future for a mystery. Also file under: driving need to unravel that mystery.
It seemed I inherited that need to know the truth. Would it cost me what it did her?
“Where’d he take you?” Mari asked.
“Who?”
“Finn!”
“He didn’t do the taking. I took him,” I said, irritated we were still on the topic of Finn when everything I thought I knew about my life turned out to be a treasure box full of crap. “I wanted to show him the redwood grove and the albino—” The faintest trail of an idea formed in my mind.
“Mari, will you take me to the redwoods?”
“Right now?”
“Now. Yes, now. I have to go there now.”
Dun poked his head between us from the backseat. “Intriguing. Could not have anticipated that request. I almost thought you were going to say ‘airport,’ but the woods, much more logical.”
The parking lot at the state park was empty, probably due to the rain that pattered steadily on the windshield. I threw my hood over my head and climbed out of the car. Mari leaned over. “I love you, girl, so I’m staying here to, you know, keep the car warm for you.”
“Want me to come?” Dun asked. I wondered if he knew he was shaking his head as he asked.
“I just need a few minutes,” I said and jogged toward the entrance.
Moments later, I was swallowed up by the forest. My forest. A gift from my father. The circular trail through the groves was the only place when I was little that Dad let me run free, out of his immediate vision. And it was the only place he ever opened himself up. I think he felt as I did, that no matter what we said, the trees would keep our secrets.
The rain was less intrusive under the large fingers of the redwoods, their foliage covering me in all directions. Steam rose from the split-rail fencing along the trail, and large spiral spiderwebs, so much like Finn’s tattoo, stood empty. I pondered what a perfect design the spiral must be if nature herself utilized it in so many ways. Water droplets fell from strand to strand, and the spiral web vibrated with the music of the rain.
My breath blew out in a vapor. I shivered, cursing myself for the fool’s errand I’d undertaken in the chilly drizzle. I stood in front of the albino redwood and stared.
Bury this under the ghost so no one will find it.
I’d written it off as an obscure Irish turn of phrase or perhaps something buried in a grave somewhere. But when Mari asked about my date with Finn, I immediately thought of the only ghost I’d seen with my own eyes.
Slowly, I circled the phantom tree. Hidden from the trail was a small hollow—like a fairy door—at the base of the tree. I squatted down, ran my finger lightly over the tiny hole, and immediately sensed the impression of panic. Not my own. It was like the tree had a memory and mine weren’t the first hands to do this. I dropped to my knees and started to dig.
First, I scraped away a layer of albino pine needles, white and spent, like tiny bones left out to dry. Then, the moist earth, dark and pungent with life. Water trickled down my nose as I clawed at the rain-soaked ground until the tips of my fingers were raw. Was I crazy to think there might be something here? In this sea of dirt, did I really think I could feel an emotional memory at the base of the tree? Despite my doubts, I couldn’t stop. Through the pain of tender skin, I kept my hands searching. The moment they fell upon something unnatural, I dug faster and seized a small velvet sack, ripping it up from the soaked ground like a dirty purple flower.
I yanked the top open and dumped the contents into my palm: a delicate silver key, no longer than my pinky and weighty with a sense of age. The top was ornately scrolled in the almond shape of an eye with two shimmering red crystal pyramids—connected at each apex like an hourglass—suspended in the middle where the iris would be. When I touched it, the gem spun, as did the forest around me.
I fell backward, hitting the ground with a thud. I tried to anchor myself by focusing on the trees above me, but my vision faded to black. I gasped for air as images flooded my mind, a kaleidoscope of whirling pictures and sensations.
Symbols and images from around the world fired at me, one after another. Triangles and pyramids, the triple spiral, the Star of David, Borromean Rings, the pagan triple moon, golden Hindu statues of some three-headed god, triquetras, and an ancient stone with a carving of the maiden, mother, and crone. Trefoil symbols in church windows in Moscow and on bridges in Central Park. The father, the son, and the holy ghost of the Christian trinity. Every manner of horrific death. Every method of inhumane persecution. The last of the images was an emblem I’d never seen before until I found this key: the two pyramids connected at the tips. All of these spun past my vision, demanding I capture their meaning.
My mother had clutched this key in her palm. I heard her voice in my head saying, “The Light Key.” I could feel her fear and see her trembling hands as she walked through a beautiful, cavernous library. She had needed to hide her journal, the written record of what she’d uncovered so far, knowing that someone very powerful wanted to keep its truths silent. Words on a sign spun past my scope: Turning Darkness Into Light. A wisp of memory, like smoke, carried her thoughts through time and space, and they somehow landed with me. Whatever truth about humanity she was uncovering was a huge one and an old one.
People killed to keep this truth buried.
And I was digging it up.
When the vision stopped, I lay gasping for breath in the mud, surrounded by ferns and clover. Mist fell upon my face as I looked up into the canopy of redwoods. They reminded me of a circle of elders looking down on me, witnesses to my absurd new life. My right shoulder burned fiercely as I clung to the key and stood on wobbly legs.
I stumbled from behind the albino tree and froze, thinking I heard the crackling of footsteps in the brush. I waited, listened, but heard nothing else over the calm patter
of drops around me. I wanted to run but was shaking too badly. What the hell was happening to me? How was it possible to touch objects and be battered with images like that? When I felt my shoulder sting again like I’d been burned with a hot branding iron, I yanked the edge of my jacket down my arm and gasped at the unmistakable marking of the silver key above my biceps. With cold, trembling hands, I stuffed its physical twin in my pocket.
Somehow, one step after another, I reached the car. Exhaust trailed out of the tailpipe into the fog. Muffled music blared from inside the car where Mari and Dun sat in the front.
“Holy crap,” Mari said when I opened the back door and slid in.
“It looks like the mud won,” Dun deadpanned. My shoes were caked with deep-brown earth. My pants were soaked and muddy at the knees. Every nail was a crescent moon of dirt. I stuffed my hands between my legs to stop their violent shaking.
Mari asked in a quiet voice, “You wanna tell us what the hell happened?”
All I’d have to do was show them the key or expose my newly tattooed shoulder, and they’d believe me. They couldn’t think I was lying or crazy. But I saw death in that vision alongside the symbols. I knew that the people who wanted to protect the secrets the key held would kill anyone to do so. Had killed to do so. Death echoed in nearly every one of those strange images. That made it okay to sit quietly trembling and tell them I was fine.
“Dead end,” I finally answered.
Fifteen
I
had never felt so alone. So freakishly, echoingly alone.
My cell phone rang. I stared at the phone as it trilled. It was my father. The call went to voice mail. Mari and Dun didn’t say anything, and we silently waited for the voice mail chime.
He wanted to know where I was, said he knew that I hadn’t gone to school and that Mari and Dun weren’t there, either, and demanded I go home immediately and wait for him there.
I wouldn’t be doing that.
“Is a mounted posse going to come after us now?” Mari asked.
“I love it when you say things like mounted,” Dun joked.
“You’re twelve.”
I rolled my eyes, and my phone rang again. Irritated, I answered without looking. “What!”
“Pardon? Cora?” Finn’s gorgeous voice.
“God. I’m sorry. I thought you were my father.”
“You and your friends aren’t in school. And besides the bothersome fact that I didn’t get to inscribe something cleverly stupid into your yearbook, I got worried.” There was an adorable pause. “Truth is, I was afraid you were sick again.”
“No. I’m not sick. I’ve… There’s something I had to do.”
“Are you okay?”
Finn’s asking made the sadness pressing just under my heart’s surface swell and rise to my throat. “No.”
“Can I help?”
I was about to say no, but who else could wrap me in his warm aura and comfort me? I wanted Finn’s arms around me. I wanted to sink into him. But I had an ulterior motive, too. I didn’t know when, I didn’t know how, but finding my way to Ireland was suddenly very crucial. “Yes. Meet me at the rec center in fifteen minutes?”
Dun squeezed my shoulder as I slid from the car. I tried not to wince when he touched the tender spot where I’d been inexplicably tattooed. I hurried to the rec center with a new alertness. The flood of images from the key rotated over and over in my head. Besides the dirt, fear stuck to my skin, making me feel the need to be more on guard. I looked over my shoulder more than once as I walked through the tree-lined parking lot. Finn hadn’t arrived yet.
The copy of my mother’s letter and the key rested against my heart in my inside coat pocket. Emotionally wrung out, I leaned against the wall. Without warning, I burst into tears, crying into my hands. I cried for my mother, who was either massively brave or massively stupid. I cried about my father, who had let me down while trying not to let her down. I cried for myself. I couldn’t stop. Tear after tear dropped into my dirty palms.
There’s a difference between old tears and new. The old ones you’ve held back scrape from the inside when they come up. My throat ached with the effort to battle them. I’d been battling them for so long. Too long. The new ones flowed freely, a faucet of emotion that felt like it would never run dry.
There was more to my mother than the few memories Dad thought he could hide in a box. We had something dangerous in common, and I had a right to know what it was. I was at the core of a secret storm swirling around me, and my father wanted to cover my eyes.
I would not let his secrets blind me anymore.
Two warm hands covered my own and a tender kiss graced my forehead.
I knew who it was; I’d felt him approach.
Finn pulled my hands from my face and wiped my tears with the hardened pads of his fingers. “What’s the matter, Cora?”
“Everything. My father lied to me about my mother. He let me believe she left us.” My sobs grew louder, a torrent of emotions unplugged. “But she didn’t abandon me. She didn’t. She’s somewhere…I mean…I don’t know what happened to her.”
“Oh, sweetness—”
“I have to find a way to go to Ireland.”
“I’m not surprised at all that you want to go there. Ireland’s in your blood, Cora. It’s familiar to you in some part of your soul.” He leaned in close, his eyes alight, sparking gold and soft brown and so understanding. “Of course you want to look for your mother. Is there any way I can help you?”
Our faces moved closer, the kisses and warmth I needed just a fraction away, but then I stopped him. “Wait.” I ignored his raised eyebrow. His pretty lips. “You have a way of saying the exact thing I’m thinking.”
He kissed me softly, nibbling my bottom lip. “You must know your eyes broadcast every thought you have.” He cocked his head. “But sometimes you surprise me with what you say or do. I figured you’re extraordinarily direct.”
I didn’t like the idea that my thoughts and actions weren’t always my own around Finn. I’d have to be vigilant not to reveal too much. “No. Extraordinarily direct is not normal for me. That’s Mari’s job. Also not normal is grabbing your shirt like a thug in the hospital because I was curious about your tattoo.” My mind puzzled over it. The fever could have permanently scratched my record. But if that was true, why wasn’t I out of control with everyone the way I was with Finn?
“You’re curious about my tattoo?” he asked with a brash grin. He started to pull his shirt up, exposing the taut ridges of his stomach.
I shoved his shirt down and looked around us frantically. “Stop that!” I liked the laugh that pushed up out of me through my tears.
He shrugged. “Fine. Maybe I’ll show it to you some other time.”
I reached up and tugged the neck of his T-shirt away, trying to see more of it. “It reminds me of the triple spiral.” The flash of iconic and violent imagery from the key played in my mind again. “But it looks sort of like stars, too. Like a spiral galaxy.”
Finn nodded. “Fair play to ya, Cora. You do know your Ireland. It is what you say.”
“The triple spiral? But why?”
“It’s a family thing. If you’re familiar with Irish mythology, you’ll know they haven’t a clue what the triple spiral means. Loads of theories. My mum used to tell me the triple spiral was a puzzle that was important to our family’s history. It’s something of a family crest to her. Personally, the fact that no one knows what it means is what makes it cool. I see it as a tale with no beginning and no end.”
I traced my finger over the top of the labyrinthine constellation. “Maybe that’s the best kind of tale.” He covered my hand with his and pressed it to his skin.
It was our tale.
Finn hugged me. Strong arms around my back, almost lifting me from the ground. His heated embrace cocooned me, and I buried my face in his neck. My hysteria receded like a tide. He’d warmed me, soothed me. Pulsing, sweet energy swirled around my heart and expanded,
pushing out through my chest. It was a door, opening for only him.
His mouth moved softly against my neck. “Since I met you, nothing else exists. No one has ever touched me the way you do. You’re like a fookin’ hypnotist. I don’t know what you do to me, Cora Sandoval, but I can’t stay away from you.” He released me and stood back. “I can’t. I’m here, standing in front of you because I can’t.”
“You’re here because I said I needed you.”
He shook his head. When he ran the back of his fingers across my cheek, a slab of resistance fell away like a chunk from a glacier, melting under his heat. When he bent to look deep into my eyes, I was sure I cracked open and bared my soul.
“I’m here with you and I’m here for you. I have dramas and confusion in my life, too. But it feels better when we’re together. Don’t you feel that, luv?”
I did.
When he kissed me, I was irretrievably his.
I waited in his car, holding my hands up to the heater vent, and watched him walk around to the driver’s side, his long legs flexing under his jeans, his shoulders flaring beneath his shirt. He smiled as he got in, and happiness surged through me. My dad would call it “smitten.” He’d used that word while walking among the redwoods one day, describing how he’d felt when he first met my mother when she was visiting Chile. I recalled the exact word because of the wistful longing in his eyes and because he so rarely spoke of her.
Finn kissed my dirty knuckles, feather soft. He touched the back of my mud-caked hair and laughed. “There’s got to be a story about why you look like you were dragged through a bog.”
Telling him about my dad and my mom was one thing. Parent issues were universal, right? But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I was an aura-seeing, New Age nut job who unburied a key in the woods that seared its twin on my arm. Besides, I never forgot Faye’s warning not to tell anyone about myself.
