I looked around, hoping no one heard his increasingly excited rant. He softened his voice. “There is evidence everywhere of what you and I can see—in art, literature, and history. For a time, it was common to talk of someone’s light. Now it’s been suppressed, except in New Age circles, which sadly are not taken very seriously.”
I thought of that New Age nut from TV, Edmund Nustber, and had to agree. “Why has it been suppressed?”
Giovanni shrugged. “Why is anything true hidden away? Fear? Greed? Control? The existence of auras and spiritual energy isn’t easily provable, but there are people who are working on it, who’ve been working on it for a long time.”
“Like my mom.”
He patted my hand and pulled a Bible from the back of our chair, flipping the pages to a certain passage. “See here,” he said, pointing to Ezekiel 1:22. “‘Over the heads of the living creatures there was the likeness of an expanse, shining like awe-inspiring crystal, spread out above their heads.’”
“Wow. I feel like I’m the only person on earth who was in the dark about all of this.” Of course I was. My dad had purposely kept me in a darkened room all my life. I sighed. “Can you please explain what you meant when you said there was more than one kind of human, because my mother’s journal spoke of that, too. If Scintilla are one kind, what are the others?”
“Here’s what I believe.” He held up three fingers. “There are three breeds of human: those who give, Scintilla. There are the Arrazi, those who take.” Giovanni shrugged. “And then there’s everyone else, regular people. Though I do think some of them have faint traits of Scintilla or Arrazi because of family history. The people with the auras of all white, I believe they are Arrazi.”
“So, people who drain you, make you exhausted when you are around them, you’re saying they are descendants of these takers, the Arrazi?” That would explain people like Janelle and certainly Serena Tate. “And people like us? According to you, we are givers?”
“Yes. Though, pure Scintilla are extremely rare. We are givers of light, Cora. It is a beautiful thought, no? Problem is, the Scintilla have all but disappeared.”
“My mother. Her parents.”
“My parents.”
“Why are we disappearing, Giovanni? What’s happening to the Scintilla?” It was odd saying the name like I was talking about characters in a mythic tale.
He leaned close. I could smell the hint of espresso on his breath. His aura collided with my own again, and I felt a sudden infusion of scintillating energy. “You want to know what I think is happening to the Scintilla?” He looked around. “I think we are being hunted by the Arrazi.”
On instinct, my hands pressed together in front of me. I didn’t like the sound of being someone’s prey. I’d had a taste of that in California.
“We’re being wiped out. I don’t know the reason. If I did, maybe I could stop it. I couldn’t stop it—” His eyes misted over with a teary film. His voice suddenly choked, and his raw emotion choked me up as well. Of course he would be emotional. He’d lost his parents so young. I’d been searching for answers for a few weeks. He had been searching his whole life.
“It’s too late for our parents. I’m sorry, but I believe that in my heart,” he said with such surety it threatened to shatter my hope. “We will never see them again. But we are here.” He reached out to me, but his hand hovered inches from my skin. The contact was as real as if his hand cradled my face. He dropped his hand and stared intently into my eyes. “I thought there was no hope. Until you showed up. There must be a reason we’re both here together, Cora.”
“What reason?”
“To find out the truth. To protect the givers of light in this world.” My hand was taken up in his. “To protect each other.”
The chill of vulnerability slid over me. Like a baby deer in a wide-open field. “How do you know who’s doing the hunting?”
“Like any prey, we have natural enemies. I’d heard the word Arrazi more than once in my life. And I watched people feed, it’s the only way I can say it. One man took another man’s aura in a pub. At first I watched with interest because I’d seen the give and take of energy, but not one so blatant, so violent. I had no idea he was killing him until the man slumped over.” Giovanni snapped his fingers, making me jump. “Lights out. And the taker, his aura turned pure white, like that man at the airport we saw when the old couple died.”
I gasped. “Yes. I know.” I could barely breathe with the memory of it. “And there was one in California, too.”
Giovanni’s eyes went wide. He touched my hand.
“I saw him kill two women. He tried to kill me. It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever been through.”
His mouth opened in surprise. “It’s true then, what I’ve heard. There are a few Scintilla scattered everywhere. And where we are, there is the Arrazi.”
“But the woman he killed, she wasn’t like us. She had a normal aura. Colorful.”
“As did the poor man in the pub.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “There must be a reason they are killing regular people, too. We need to find out. I think there is a man who has been following me. He could be Arrazi. If we could follow him—”
I jumped to my feet. “I’m not volunteering to be bait for some soul-suckers!” An elderly couple looked over at me with shocked expressions. The woman crossed herself.
Giovanni got up and took my elbow, leading me deeper into the heart of the church. “If we could find out why they are killing and why there are so few Scintilla left in the world—”
I shook my head. “I came here to find out any information I could about my mother. I want to know about her. About myself. This is all too much.” I started to cry, overcome. “I want to go home.”
Giovanni pulled me into a hug. He was so tall that my face landed squarely in the middle of his chest. I could hear his heart rumble against my wet cheek, feel our auras commune and wrap us in an electrical storm.
One of us should pull away.
“Miss Cora.” When I didn’t answer, he held me back at arm’s length. I blinked my tears away and looked up at him. “I know you’re scared,” he murmured, brushing my tears with the pads of his fingers. “I bet our parents were scared. We can’t let them down. Please don’t run back home. You’ve already said there is a killer there. If he comes after you—”
“He already has.”
He squeezed my upper arms with a gentle shake. “You must understand, until we find out what they are after, we can’t hope to stop them. Please help me do that.”
I had to look away from his pleading eyes.
My gaze landed on a statue nestled in a marble column. Out of one smooth green-gold stone was carved a statue of Madonna and child. She held her child in front of her heart. I walked over, touched my palm to the smooth curve of the mother’s head, and ran one finger over the baby’s head. It didn’t look like a baby at all.
It looked like a mother and a little girl.
Turn right, turn left. Stay here or go home. Get up in the morning and attack life, or stay in bed and pretend you aren’t a motherless child who has seen murder right in front of your eyes. It was as Finn had said, all choices.
If I left now, I was no better than my father. Even if my mother was dead, I couldn’t abandon her again. I finally appreciated her quest to uncover the truth. It wasn’t just herself she was concerned about. She worried about me. About everyone like us. She was trying to understand the truth about humanity. I had to carry on in her place.