by Cate Morgan
And in a rush of the old familiar anger, she determined Julien-bloody-Dante had no right to take that away from her.
She was going to win.
Tara left Stephen at the edge of the woods between the visitor center where a bonfire illuminated the crowd of bundled onlookers enjoying hot food, beverages of the homemade alcoholic variety, and waited for the torch’s unveiling.
“Go on,” she told him, giving him a little shove in their direction. “I’ll be fine.”
Stephen hesitated, looking down into her eyes. He smiled, seeming to sense the change in her.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said, kissing her temple. “Be careful. He’s not worth so much as a broken nail.”
She nodded. “Time to finish what we started.” She kissed him hard before striding off.
Stephen stood there, startled, then broke into a wide grin.
Tara circled Fort Wood, keeping to cover as much as possible. The museum lights were on, but that could be from the event planners. After a long while with no movement in or out of the building, she gave a mental shrug and broke cover.
Her breath came in little frosted puffs as she climbed the stairs, managing her energy until she reached a Zen-like state of being instinctively in tune with each and every given moment. She kept her hands deep in her pockets, her pace casual. No need to advertise she was gearing up for a fight.
No need to advertise she was at all concerned at the idea of a fight. Gwen had told her, time and time again, her greatest advantage lay in the element of surprise. Tara fully intended to lead off with that. The rest she would play by ear, adapting and twisting as necessary. After all, this wasn’t a sparring ring, but life and death.
Tara would just have to see to it life was hers by the end—the rest was up to Julien.
She entered the illuminated but apparently empty museum, the door swinging shut with a mute echo. Her footsteps were silent on the polished floor, and she knew immediately she wasn’t alone. She felt the vibrations of Julien’s presence all along her skin. Once, it would have excited her, creating a pool of luxuriant, bubbling heat in her stomach until she felt a little giddy. To earn that soft smile of pleasure, the approving flash of blue, blue eyes…
Now, she realized, it wasn’t enough. And it wasn’t her. Even in apparent desire he’d held himself apart from her, separate, other. He’d given nothing of himself, while expecting unwavering, blind all from her.
Stephen was far from blind, but he gave her everything of him, regardless, without condition. Julien had insisted she be less than she was by seeking to conform her character into what he needed her to be, while Stephen pushed her to be more, never once faltering in his faith in her. What she had foolishly taken for Julien’s confidence in her she now saw as entitled arrogance.
She found Julien in the torch room of the museum. His back was to her, one hand resting on the upper railing of the display and the other in the pants pocket of his elegant suit. Even shot and bleeding in his own bed, Julien hadn’t had a hair so much as out of place. Julien emanated a certain untouchable quality, which probably explained why she’d always waited for him to make an initial move in their long, non-courtship, and thrilled so intensely when he did.
“Hello, Tara,” he said, turning with the smile she’d loved so much, once.
“Julien,” she replied, relieved when her voice remained steady. She stopped a few feet from the entrance and waited, leaving a large swath of floor between them like an abyss that could not be breached.
He took a few steps toward her, unwittingly filling the breach like one of Gwen’s victims filling one of her infamous silences. “This was supposed to be your night, you know. You were going to light the torch. Imagine my surprise to find I hadn’t been invited.”
Tara stood at ease, hands clasped behind her back. Stephen’s innovation in powering the torch with solar power stored during the day so the “flame” would be illuminated at night had been a work a genius, one she would have been proud to reveal to the world. “Well, considering I didn’t even know about it…”
Julien chuckled, visibly relaxing as he closed the distance between them. She looked up into his beautiful, chiseled face and felt nothing but contempt. “Vincent and his damnable secrets.” He reached one hand to brush the damp, curling hair from her eyes.
Tara whipped her hand out from behind her back and shot him square in the chest with her stun gun. At close range.
Julien flew off his feet and hit the ground several yards away, sliding on the polished floor, ruining the lines of his expensive suit.
“Funny thing about secrets,” Tara said, strolling toward him as he slowly got to his hands and knees. “Turns out everyone has them.” She lashed her foot out like a striking cobra. Her steel toes smashed him in the ribs and sent him flying once more.
Coughing interspersed with laughter, Julien struggled to his feet. “The cat finally draws her claws. I wondered what it would take.”
“Betrayal will generally do it every time,” Tara returned, maintaining the calm of a still lake—on the surface. Beneath, her mind and blood raced with possibilities and the knife’s edge of preparation versus reaction. The reality of Julien’s superiority in the sparring ring never left her. She couldn’t let her early advantage make her overconfident.
But something happened to her, as she watched Julien limp toward her with that pleased, arrogant smile. The bubbling of anger in her belly didn’t flood her, as it normally would have by now. It percolated, built on itself and grew steadily, but under her control. Anger became something else entirely. Energy buzzed in her veins, made her muscles fluid and ready.
“You’re already a gifted dancer technically,” Gwen had said to her once, ages ago—or had it been just a few days, perhaps a week? “You just need to learn to lose yourself in the music. Let go, Tara.”
Tara exhaled, a strange serenity coming over her as she accepted the outcome of the fight, before it even started. Without knowing what the outcome would be. It was the fight that mattered.
Julien stood a few feet from her, clenching and unclenching his fists in a sure signal of his preparing to engage. “Did it ever occur to you, all those times in the ring, that I might be holding back?”
He launched himself at her.
Tara ducked and whirled away, arm swinging up as she faced him coming from the other direction. “Of course it did.” She ducked and dodged and blocked some more, as Gwen did to work out Tara’s emotions to a point where she could focus. On Julien it served the opposite affect—building his anger to boiling.
“But I’m damned sure,” she added, “it never once occurred to you.” She grabbed his arm as it flew by and flipped him head over heels until he landed on his back once more, cracking his head on the wood floor. It should have been a difficult evasive maneuver for her. Instead, his momentum and her calm made it the most natural thing in the world.
Julien’s rage reached a point where he was actually landing hits now. Flashes of pain in ribs and stomach and shoulder, quickly pushed away in the wake of her narrowed focus. Tara employed a few offensive strikes of her own, highly calculated for those few moments he left himself open. On one such occasion, she instinctively followed through, only to find herself spun head over heels in mockery of her earlier maneuver.
She landed with startling precision through a glass display case. Glass erupted musically around her, pricking and slicing into her bare skin, a discordant note in her graceful dance. Before she could free herself, Julien’s hand descended and hauled her out by the collar of her shirt as though bringing to heel a recalcitrant puppy.
He threw her to the floor, where she rolled out of reach to catch her breath. “What’s the matter, Tara mine? No righteous, witty little comebacks? Gwen will be so disappointed when she hears.”
Tara struggled to her feet. “I’m not—
Yours, she never got
to say, as his fist smashed into the side of her face. Beyond the stunning pain lay the realization he was still holding back. He backhanded her the other direction, picked her up, and threw her with great force against the nearest wall.
She slammed into brick and landed on the floor in a limp heap. Leveraging herself on hands and shaking arms, she spat out blood and shards of molar. His rapid footstep grew louder as he came after her.
Mistake. She turned and lashed out her foot again, catching him in a most unfortunate juncture. He doubled over and she executed a snap kick from her prone position to his perfect face. He staggered back, and she had room to pull herself up using the brick and mortar of the wall behind her, and slipped her knives from her boots on the sly. She leaned against the wall, breathing hard.
Julien roared after her. Her arm slashed up, slicing open his arm. Fine droplets of blood splashed upward in a long, thin, curving arc.
Rage finally got the better of him. While Tara struggled with every fiber of her being to maintain control, Julien utterly lost it.
He grabbed her by the throat and squeezed, slamming her hard against the wall. Her arms were too short to reach his face or torso with her knives, so she went for his hands. He slammed her head so hard against the bricks she thought she heard her own skull crack. Miniscule pebbles of mortar rained down behind her, achingly loud with slowed time and breath.
The slick steel knives tumbled from her hands. She tried to claw his fingers away, to find escape from the crushing blackness, and could not. He slammed her one last time, and she sank unwillingly into unconsciousness. The hands from her throat dropped. She fell, and continued to fall. Her head was yanked back by her hair, the touch of cold steel pressed against her neck, and she knew no more. Darkness closed in over her.
Tara awoke in a dark, empty place. Her throat burned, along with every pinprick and cut piercing her skin. She discerned no temperature to speak of, or even air current. It was all eerily still, like a room pregnant with inevitable explosion. She could sense no walls, or ceiling, or floor, for that matter, though she was apparently laying on it.
She should be more worried, she decided, in a distant sort of way. Instead she found herself bemused, in the manner of the recently concussed.
“She’s coming around.”
Tara’s eyes snapped open. She knew that voice. Hell, she was pissed at that voice. “Gwen?”
A cool hand cradled her cheek, and Gwen’s lovely, smiling face filled her immediate vision. “Tara. What happened?”
“I ran out of snappy comebacks.” Tara pushed herself upright, head swimming. “You should have told me. Earlier, I mean. It would have saved an awful lot of trouble. Where are we?”
Instead of taking offense, Gwen turned her smile on someone standing behind her. “You see what I’ve been dealing with.”
“Indeed I do. She reminds me of you, at that age.” This woman’s voice was rich, full of laughter and musically lilted with long vowels and short consonants. The entire place—whatever it was—hummed with her presence.
Gwen helped Tara to her feet.
The other woman exited shadow, bringing what light there was with her. Her hair, a strange mixture of gold, brown, and red, curled nearly to her knees. Her eyes were neither blue, or brown, or green, but all these colors and more, all at once. Tara immediately thought Queen…Empress…Goddess…and fought the urge to drop to genuflect as though she were in church.
Hell, she didn’t even genuflect in church.
“Tara, this is Brighid,” Gwen told her. “She’s…well, not what we are, exactly. But she is the reason for it, and the source of our power.”
Strangely, Brighid’s gown provided no hint of color in this empty place, other than a flicker of firefly movement along swirling seams as she moved forward to get a good look at Tara. A slender finger tilted Tara’s head up in deep interest, a Mona Lisa smile on her lovely face.
Tara could not look away from Brighid’s utterly changeable, mesmerizing eyes. Before she quite knew it was happening, a rush of knowledge and memories flooded Tara’s mind: Her mother, taking Tara’s hand as they left the Times Square subway station just before the first bombs hit. Further back, her mother as a child, exploring a stone circle on the outskirts of someone’s property in…Ireland? Her mother had been born there.
The images began to race and unravel like a pulled thread. More women, more girls, sudden, intermittent bursts of light—all leading to this woman. Brighid.
“Goddess,” Tara breathed, and only realized she spoke out loud when the other woman’s laughter brought her back to the present.
“Your ancestors—my antecedents—did not worship gods,” Brighid explained, “but those of us who stand between gods and man, and the champions who performed feats in our honor. We are the Tuatha du Danaan: timeless, ageless, and with much to do before the apocalypse ushers in a new era of evolution. Humanity is in grave danger from being caught between the armies of good and evil, and there are those who would annihilate humans completely from the Earth. It is my responsibility, with assistance of my champions, to protect them as much as possible in the coming days.”
Again, Tara remembered that day when the first attacks reached the city. “Did…did my mother know?” she asked.
“Your mother was one of us, though she had not ascended, as you are now. She was always drawn to the stone circle on her family’s property, though she never knew why.” Brighid said sadly. “Her unexpected loss was deeply mourned in the Tír. But I’m relieved her bloodline proved true. More Keepers of my Flame than I care to admit have already been lost, and the fight has not yet truly begun.”
“Bloodline?” Tara managed to sputter out.
“Yes,” Brighid said, with fierce pride. “Mine. Come.” Her cool hand threaded Tara’s, leading her off into the dark empty. Tara looked back at Gwen, who nodded encouragement.
The empty spun, disorienting as an off-balance merry-go-round in a midnight playground. Tara felt the contents of her stomach slosh in menacing fashion, days full of bad coffee and uncertain processed food following years of the high-quality, good and fresh.
If I toss my giblets all over a goddess, Tara reflected, I will never, in all my life, live it down.
Following on the heels of this horrified realization her giblets were, in fact, going to be tossed, came an abrupt flooding of light, sound, and smell into her world. So startled by the overload of sensation, her stomach completely forgot to be sick.
Stunning, world-spinning height. Rushing wind, and the laughter of a goddess or a saint, Tara couldn’t decide which.
She slammed her eyes shut. Once sound and smell had been duly catalogued and adjusted to, only then did she creak one eye open at a time.
And caught her breath at the view. Blue-green water for miles around, shrunken buildings across the harbor, and an endless, golden swath of land past the horizon, clear, summer-blue sky overhead with the fluffy white clouds she couldn’t recall seeing since she was a little girl. She grasped the sun-warmed steel railing in both hands and basked in it.
She turned to look behind her, but the view was blocked by a massive, stylized flame, elegant in its mathematical precision. That was when she realized she was atop the Statue of Liberty’s torch—the new one, Stephen’s fantastical design. She ran her hands over the metal bands and intricate filigree, pride welling up within her.
“He is the mind of a generation—with the soul of a poet.”
Tara turned to Brighid. “He’s magnificent,” she agreed, tone reflecting her wonderment. “And he is mine.”
Brighid didn’t answer, running her own hands, eerily like Gwen’s, over the flame with evident pleasure. “Only he could have seen this—seen it, and realized it. A man of his taste and talents are highly regarded by our kind, for good reason. Come, feel this.”
Tara placed her hand over what she’d thought was a bro
nze wash to the glass, lent heat by the sun. Instead, the golden glow pulsed, faint at first, but growing as though, sensing her, it lay on the brink of awakening.
“This is what lies inside you,” Brighid told her. “With it, you can protect Stephen. You can protect them all. You can give them the time they need to rebuild their lives. Your light is as weak as this, but it grows stronger with every heartbeat.”
Tara swallowed. “I’m dying, aren’t I?”
Brighid nodded. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have made it this far. Your sacrifice brought you here, to me. Your mother never got the choice. But now comes the time of making yours. You can accept your death, accept your humanity—or you can transcend it, and guard theirs.”
“What’s the catch?” Tara wanted to know.
Brighid tucked Tara’s hair behind her ear, maternal and everlasting. “Nothing will ever be the same again. However, I will allow you to keep one thing—one, only.”
Tara didn’t hesitate. “Stephen. I want Stephen.”
Brighid cocked her head. “Anyone else might have sacrificed love to see evil defeated. Or kept a powerful patron, a cunning teacher.”
Tara shook her head, silken hair falling before her face once more.
Brighid’s smile stretched into a pleased grin. “Well done.”
The torch’s glow pulsed strong enough to bend the glass against Tara’s hands. An answering pulse within her pressed against the insides of her chest, pooled heat in her guts. A second pulse took her breath away, choked it from her throat.
The third blasted her from that place, off the ledge and into the blue-green-gold-black void. She had just enough time to register Lady Liberty bore a striking resemblance to Brighid before the empty swallowed her whole once more.
This time, when Tara creaked an eye open, all she discerned was pain. Her brain beat a tribal rhythm in her aching skull, while various cuts and bruises lined up to voice their own complaints. In the blurred distance, two figures struggled. A familiar voice cried out, carrying panic through her bloodstream to her dulled synapses. Fortunately, her muscles seemed to be working without need of mental commands. She scrabbled on the floor for a slim bit of metal forgotten among the diamond shards of glass.
