Clarion Call by Cayla Fay

Author:Cayla Fay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2024-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Neve ignored Clara asking her where she’d been when she stormed back into the convent with Aodh, blood still thundering in her ears.

Clara followed as Neve furiously searched out Maeve and Aoife, and Neve could hear Alexandria muttering, “No, I don’t know what’s going on,” before she pushed open the doors of Aoife’s workshop. Maeve and Aoife were inside, their heads bent over one of the paper-strewn tables, and both of them looked up in alarm at Neve’s abrupt arrival.

“Neve, what are you—?” Aoife’s eyes landed on Aodh and narrowed. The air crackled all of a sudden as Aoife gathered magic around herself. Neve ignored that, as well as the glare Alexandria had been boring into her since Neve reappeared with Aodh beside her at the cliff. Neve wasn’t even sure what excuses Alexandria had made to their friends. Her mind had turned into a haze of TV static as anger, the likes of which she hadn’t felt since her sisters vanished, lit inside her. She knew instinctively that it wasn’t going to last, but she clung to it as tightly as she could.

“Aoife, dear, be polite,” Aodh purred. Any vulnerability, imagined or otherwise, had vanished as if it had never existed at all.

“Did we kill Danu?” Neve demanded before either of them could speak again.

Aoife’s eyes grew massive. “What?”

“Did we…” Neve repeated with exaggerated patience. She clenched her fists, feeling like she was about to fly apart at any second. “… kill Danu?”

“Why would you ask that?” Clara had gone painfully white.

So it was true, then. It had to be, for them to react like this.

Neve wanted to scream. She wanted to break something. She wanted to burn every single book in this room and take the whole convent with it, then walk away from this place and never look back.

The rest of the pantheon was family in the loose definition of the term. They didn’t have the technology back then, and even if they did, Neve doubted anyone would be interested in doing blood tests to see exactly how related they were. They called themselves family, and that was enough for everyone.

Out of all of them, Danu was by far the most important and probably the least written about. The rest of their family—Neve and her sisters, poor Brigid, the Dagda, even Aodh—had all made their marks on the culture in some way or another. In books, songs, old folklore that had been written down after being oral for hundreds of years, there had been mentions of most if not all of them. But records of Danu were sparse, even for a pantheon that had mostly survived through stories. Some folklorists thought her name was actually Anu, or Dana, but besides a patchy and confusing history, there wasn’t that much about her.

For Neve and her sisters—and the Daughters, too, since Danu was their namesake and the one who’d created their order—Danu was a consistent presence, if in name only. Neve had only one memory of her, but she could feel others churning in the back of her head.

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