Raven Calls
Raven Calls
C.E. Murphy
Something wicked this way comes…Suddenly, being bitten by a werewolf is the least of Joanne Walker’s problems. Her personal life in turmoil, her job as a cop over, she’s been called to Ireland by the magic within her. And though Joanne’s skills have grown by leaps and bounds, Ireland's magic is old and very powerful…In fact, this is a case of unfinished business. Because the woman Joanne has come to Ireland to rescue is the woman who sacrificed everything for Joanne —the woman who died a year ago.Now, through a slip in time, she’s in thrall to a dark power and Joanne must battle darkness, time and the gods themselves to save her.
Suddenly, being bitten by a werewolf is the least of Joanne Walker’s problems.
Her personal life in turmoil, her job as a cop over, she’s been called to Ireland by the magic within her. And though Joanne’s skills have grown by leaps and bounds, Ireland’s magic is old and very powerful….
In fact, this is a case of unfinished business. Because the woman Joanne has come to Ireland to rescue is the woman who sacrificed everything for Joanne—the woman who died a year ago. Now, through a slip in time, she’s in thrall to a dark power and Joanne must battle darkness, time and the godsthemselves to save her.
Praise for
C.E. Murphy
and The Walker Papers series:
Urban Shaman
“A swift pace, a good mystery, a likeable protagonist, magic, danger—Urban Shaman has them in spades.”
—Jim Butcher, bestselling author of The Dresden Files series
Thunderbird Falls
“Fans of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels and the works of urban fantasists Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff should enjoy this fantasy/mystery’s cosmic elements. A good choice.”
—Library Journal
Coyote Dreams
“Tightly written and paced, [Coyote Dreams] has a compelling, interesting protagonist, whose struggles and successes will captivate new and old readers alike.”
—RT Book Reviews
Walking Dead
“Murphy’s fourth Walker Papers offering is another gripping, well-written tale of what must be the world’s most reluctant—and stubborn—shaman.”
—RT Book Reviews
Demon Hunts
“Murphy carefully crafts her scenes and I felt every gust of wind through the crispy frosted trees….I am heartily looking forward to further volumes.”
—The Discriminating Fangirl
Spirit Dances
“An original and addictive urban fantasy!”
—Romancing the Darkside
Raven Calls
C.E. Murphy
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This one’s for my Mom, Rosie Murphy,
because it’s the rest of the story
Contents
Chapter One (#ua498eefd-e9f1-50e1-b34d-5ad706dabd71)
Chapter Two (#u75dd3c23-026f-5508-bee2-c71dbcee0380)
Chapter Three (#u4e8691f1-5acc-5883-86da-eaf69c4877e9)
Chapter Four (#u34396535-b354-5918-a23c-e17e201a0116)
Chapter Five (#u19098c6c-06f4-5ecd-b8b6-c6ec5c92ed72)
Chapter Six (#u5872c30b-d38a-5f95-b103-3c39d0c5f42b)
Chapter Seven (#u29c8b452-9117-5977-aa0b-7a8264749cc7)
Chapter Eight (#uaeca0cfb-9022-5e2c-abd3-e25d5957943b)
Chapter Nine (#u9509f024-a347-52b5-90e0-043db848a765)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
Sunday, March 19, 9:53 a.m.
The werewolf bite on my forearm itched.
Itching was wrong. It wasn’t old enough to itch. It should hurt like the dickens, because I’d obtained it maybe six hours earlier. Instead it itched like it was a two-week-old injury, well on the way to healing.
Only I was quite sure it wasn’t healing. For one thing, I kept peeking at it, and it was still a big nasty slashy bite that oozed blood when the bandages were loosened. For another thing, my stock in trade was healing. Fourteen months, two weeks and three days ago—but who was counting?—I had been stabbed through the chest. A smart-ass coyote—kinda my spirit guide—had given me a choice between dying or becoming a shaman. Even for someone with no use for the esoteric, like I’d been, it hadn’t been much of a choice. So now, nearly fifteen months on, a bite on my forearm was something I really should be able to deal with.
And it wasn’t that I hadn’t tried healing it, because I had. Magic slid off like oil and water, or possibly more like oil and gashed flesh, if oil slid off gashed flesh, which I assumed it did but didn’t want to actually find out. Either way, the magic wasn’t working. Normally that would be a bad sign, but my talent had taken both a beating and a boosting in the past twenty-four hours, and wasn’t behaving. It reacted explosively when I tried using it, and I didn’t want to explode my arm. So I was getting on a plane with absolutely no notice and flying to Ireland, because I’d had a vision of the woman who had turned werewolves from slavering beasties 100% of the time into part-time monsters, and in my vision, she’d been in Ireland. I figured if anybody could keep me human, it had to be the woman who’d bound the wolves to the moon’s cycle.
That’s what I was telling myself, anyway, because it was slightly better than a full-on panic attack in the middle of the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. A day earlier I hadn’t believed werewolves existed. Now I was petrified that come the next full moon—which was tonight, the second of three—I would get all hairy and toothy. It was a dire possibility even without adding international air travel to the mix, which, who was I kidding, was possibly the worst idea I’d ever had. Turning into a werewolf was potentially bad enough. Doing it mid-flight presumably meant a plane full of handy victims, although I might get lucky and have an air marshal on board so it would just be me who got dead.
My life was a mess, if I considered that lucky. But I had this rash idea that because I’d be missing moonrise all the way around the globe, the magic shouldn’t trigger. And I could always lock myself in the bathroom if I thought I was about to get bestial. Locking myself in the bathroom wasn’t that bad an idea anyway. I was afraid of flying, and bathrooms didn’t have windows. That automatically made them less scary than the body of the plane. Either way, it wasn’t just the werewolf cure that had me wandering the duty-free shops at SeaTac. The other vision I’d had, the one of a sneering warrior woman, had made my healing magic respond as if a gauntlet had been thrown down. It felt like fishhooks in my belly, hauling me east. I was going to Ireland whether I liked it or not.
My personal opinion leaned heavily toward or not. There were places I’d rather be and things I’d rather be doing. Specifically, those things were Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department, who up to about three hours earlier had been my boss. I’d quit, he’d kissed me and the more I thought about him, the more I wanted to tear out of the airport, jump in a cab and race back into his arms. The fishhooks pulling at my gut, though, weren’t about to let that happen. Their horrible prickle and tug had become familiar enough over the past year that I knew it meant something serious coming down the line, as if finding a cure for a werewolf’s bite wasn’t serious enough. Whatever awaited me in Ireland, I was not especially looking forward to it. So I was trying to distract myself by shopping, which wasn’t my favorite pastime in the best of circumstances. Still, I’d wandered the international terminal twice already. The shops hadn’t changed displays since my first pass, but the second time through I laid eyes on something I neither needed at all, nor was I sure I could live without.
A not-helpful part of my brain whispered that I had a credit card. I mean, I was American. I didn’t think I’d be allowed to keep my citizenship if I didn’t have at least one rectangle of plastic money. But it was reserved for emergencies, like buying a plane ticket to Ireland on no notice.
An ankle-length white leather coat did not in any way qualify as an emergency.
I stood there staring at it through the shop window. The shoulders were subtly padded, just enough to give the mannequin a really square silhouette. It had a Chinese-style high collar and leather-covered white buttons offset from the center straight down the length of the entire coat. It nipped in at the waist tightly enough to look pinned, but nobody would pin leather of that quality. There had to be a discreet belt on the back. Its skirts fell in wide loose folds, and looked like they would flare with wonderful drama.
No normal person would wear a coat like that. A movie star might. A tall movie star. A tall, leggy movie star with really good sunglasses and enough confidence to shift the earth with her smile alone.
I stepped back from the window. Light caught just so, letting me see my reflection.
Nobody could argue that, at a smidge under six feet in height, I wasn’t tall and leggy. I had cool sunglasses, although I wasn’t wearing them. And that coat might instill enough confidence in the wearer that she could do anything.
Five minutes later I was eighteen hundred dollars poorer, but so pleased with myself I slept the whole flight to Ireland without once worrying about the plane falling out of the sky.
Monday, March 20, 6:28 a.m.
I wasn’t a werewolf when I woke up. Fuzzy logic said I’d left the States on Sunday morning, flown all day and arrived in Ireland early Monday morning, thus having skipped the night of the full moon entirely and saving myself from shifting into a monster of yore. That was very fuzzy logic, but then, the whole not being a werewolf thing supported it. Besides, who was I to say an ancient curse wouldn’t work that way, when magic by its very definition defied the laws of physics. I left the plane grateful to not be furry and, aware of the advantages of having been born in Ireland, slipped through customs on the European Union passport holders side.
The insistent ball of magic within me wanted me to head west, but Irish roads were legendarily convoluted. I needed a car, a map and a cup of coffee before I struck off into the sunset. Never mind that sunrise was in about half an hour, so I had many hours to wait before I could strike off into its sister darkness.
For a woman who’d slept the entire ten-hour flight across a continent and an ocean, I was certainly running on at the brain. I stopped just outside the arrivals area and scrubbed both hands over my face hard, trying to waken some degree of native intelligence.
“Hey, doll,” said a familiar voice. “Can I give you a lift?”
I left my hands where they were, covering my face, for a good long minute while I tried to understand how that voice—the voice of my best friend, a seventy-four-year-old Seattle cab driver—could possibly be addressing me in the Dublin International Airport. Last I’d known, Gary Muldoon had been in California for the St. Patrick’s Day weekend, partying with old Army buddies in a yearly event he refused to give details on. Since it was now the twentieth of March and the weekend in question had just ended, my information was pretty up-to-date. It was therefore impossible in every way for Gary to be here. It had to be somebody else. Satisfied with my reasoning, I lowered my fingers enough to peer over them.
Gary leaned against a pillar, arms folded across his still-broad chest, and gave me a wink and a grin that from a man thirty years younger would set my heart aflutter.
I rubbed my eyes again and squinted. Gary’s grin got wider. He looked like a devilish old movie star in a set scene, and like he knew damned good and well his presence was the culminating factor. After about thirty seconds’ more silence, I said, “Sure,” and wished I’d been suave enough to just say that in the first place. And then because I wasn’t suave at all, I squeaked, “What the hell are you doing here?!” in disbelieving delight.
Gary threw his head back and laughed out loud. He had suspiciously good teeth for a man his age who used to smoke. I suspected dentures, but had never been rude enough to ask. Then he stepped forward and swept me up in a bear hug, which put paid to any thoughts of his teeth as I grunted happily and repeated, “No, seriously, what the hell?”
“Mike called me. Told me to, and I quote, get my old ass on the next flight to Dublin and try to catch up to Joanne goddamned Walker, who’s gone off again and needs somebody to keep her from doing anything stupid, end quote. So I got on the next flight outta L.A. Got in ten minutes ago. What’s going on?”
I pulled my head back far enough to look up at him. “Mike? Mike who? You mean Morrison? Morrison called you? Morrison sent you to Ireland after me? Morrison, my boss? That Morrison?”
“That’s the one.” Gary set me back, hands on my shoulders, as his grin faded. “’Cept I hear he ain’t the boss anymore.”
“Not the boss of me, anyway.” I wrinkled my nose. “I’m not six, really.”
“What happened, doll?” Real concern was in my big friend’s gray eyes. I’d gotten into Gary’s cab over a year ago, on the very morning my shamanic powers had been violently awakened. He’d been at my side, backing me up, ever since. Gary was the sort of person I wanted to grow old to be: vital, fascinated by the world and always up for an adventure. At twenty-six, when I’d met him, I’d been none of those things. At pushing twenty-eight I was just getting on the bandwagon. I couldn’t have a better role model.
“It’s okay, I quit. I mean, I didn’t get fired. Everything’s cool. I just…” It turned out I had other things to not think about besides a werewolf bite. The enormity of what I’d done—quit my detective job on the police force with no notice and with no prospects for other employment in the future—hit me, a mere twelve hours after the fact. Or a full day, counting elapsed travel time. Either way, I felt myself go colorless and the insistent pit of magic in my belly turned to just a boring old pit of sickness for a moment.
Gary put a hand under one of my elbows and crooked a smile. “Don’t worry, Joanie. I can always get you a job at Tripoli Cabs.”
If Gary was calling me Joanie, I looked even worse than I suddenly felt. Usually he went with Jo, a nickname I’d never liked until he used it. Still, rough laughter bubbled up from somewhere beneath the ook in my tummy. “Petite would never forgive me if I took to driving another car most of the day.”
“You better not tell her ’bout your plans to get a winter vehicle, then.”
“She’d understand,” I said unconvincingly. “Classic Mustangs aren’t meant to weather the winters Seattle’s been having lately. She’s got no clearance. I’ll just get her a boyfriend. A 1936 Dodge pickup. In red.”
“They got no clearance, either, darlin’,” Gary said with the confidence of a man who’d been there and done that, never mind that he’d been only four years old in 1936. “’Sides, you get that sweet young thing an old fella like a ’36 Dodge and you’ll start giving me ideas.”
Laughter won again, this time because half the people I knew were convinced I had a Thing going on with Gary. Even Morrison thought so, despite it being fairly clear that I was hopelessly, idiotically, madly in love with him. “Petite’s older than I am,” I pointed out, like it made a difference.
“And I’m older than a ’36 Dodge. You all right, Joanie?”
“Stop that. It makes me think I’m falling apart.”
“Are you?”
“A w—” I nearly swallowed my tongue. I hadn’t even told Morrison a werewolf had bitten me, and there I was about to confess all to Gary. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel like sharing. Mostly I just figured they couldn’t do anything about it, so there was no point in worrying them. I said, “A wee little bit,” instead, in honor of being in Ireland, where one adjective was never enough if three would do. “It’s been a really long day. Weekend. You missed a lot.”
Childish dismay splashed across Gary’s face. “One weekend, Jo! I went to California for one weekend, and you had to have adventures without me?”
“You have no idea. I can shapeshift now,” I said almost idly. The weird thing was, learning to shapeshift really did come low on the totem pole of what had gone on the past three days. No wonder I’d slept so hard on the plane. I was pretty sure the last time I’d napped had been in the shower a couple of days earlier.
Gary’s eyes bugged and he pointed imperiously to the door. “We gotta get out of here so you can show me.”
A tug in my gut wiped away the last of my job-related nausea. My boiling-over magic thought getting out of there was an excellent idea. We made mad rushes for different car rental agencies, eyeing each other to see whose line moved more quickly. I beat Gary to a counter by thirty seconds, and he came to loom over me as I filled out paperwork. “Second driver?” the woman asked, and Gary muttered, “Don’t you dare think I ain’t doin’ some of the driving, Jo.”
I obediently put him down as the second driver. He snagged the keys out from under my fingertips and in retaliation I grabbed his carry-on suitcase as well as my own. He looked ever so slightly smug and I suspected I had gotten the raw end of the deal, but he flashed me another one of his legendary grins. “Hey, Jo?”
I muttered, “What?” about as graciously as an angry alligator, and the big lug of an old man earned a lifetime’s forgiveness with two words as we headed out the door:
“Nice coat.”
Chapter Two
The last time I’d been in Ireland—also the first time, overlooking the detail of having been born here, which I didn’t remember—I’d had none of the phenomenal cosmic powers I was now endowed with. Part of me wanted to trigger the Sight and look into the depths of history and magic the island was legendary for.
The much smarter part of me didn’t want to, since I’d stolen the keys back and was driving. The Sight had been whiting out and blinding me for the past twenty-four hours. Driving blind seemed like a spectacularly bad idea. So instead of calling up the mystical mojo, I filled Gary in on the weekend’s details while we worked our way through Dublin traffic, which was negligible compared to Seattle. By the time I got to the werewolves, we’d left the capital city behind, and Gary kept saying, “Werewolves,” in audible disappointment. “Werewolves. I’m never around for the good stuff.”
“Says the man who left an annual shindig to fly last-minute to Ireland.”
“I couldn’t risk missin’ something else, now, could I?” Gary peered out the window. In theory there were green rolling hills out there. In reality, there were concrete walls fifteen feet high that blocked off the countryside. “Where we goin’, anyway?”
“The Hill of Tara.” I knew almost as much about Irish history as I’d known about shamanism a year ago, which was to say nothing, but even I’d heard of Tara. I scowled at the road, trying to remember if I’d gotten that far in what I’d told Gary. “It’s in County Meath, which is sort of the wrong way, more north than west, and I keep feeling like I need to go west. But I had a vision last night. Or the night before. Saturday night. Anyway, I saw a hill in the vision, so Tara seems like a good place to start.”
“What with bein’ a hill and all,” Gary agreed solemnly.
I said, “Exactly,” even though I knew perfectly well I was being mocked. Gary laughed and I gave him a dirty look. “Besides, starting with a known cultural and spiritual center probably isn’t a bad idea, even if it’s the wrong one. Did I tell you about the woman wearing my mother’s necklace?”
Gary arched his bushy eyebrows, which I took as a no, and I asked, “You ever get the feeling your life is a string festooned with bells and tied to hundreds of others you don’t know anything about? And that sometimes somebody pulls their string, and your bells ring?”
Gary looked at me a long moment before rather gently saying, “Yes and no, darlin’. We all get that feeling from time to time. Difference is, with you, it could be real.”
“But Coyote said I was a new soul. Mixed up fresh.” I wasn’t sure I’d ever mentioned that to Gary. Or to anybody else, for that matter. There were, according to my mentor, old souls and new souls. Mostly people were old souls, with all the baggage and all the wisdom from previous incarnations resting somewhere in the hind brain, there to draw on or drown in. I was something of a rarity, mixed up fresh and new by Somebody or Something responsible for those aspects of the universe. The positive side of being a new soul was a lack of baggage and the potential for great power. The negative side was the corresponding lack of accumulated wisdom with which to wield that power. I’d certainly demonstrated that lack time and again the past fifteen months.
Either I’d mentioned the whole new-soul thing to Gary, or he thought it didn’t matter, because he snorted. “So what if you are? New soul don’t mean no ties. You still got parents, right? Grandparents? Cousins? And friends or lovers can tug your strings, too. No man’s an island, Jo.”
That was not the first time Gary had gone philosophical on me, nor was it the first time I was surprised by it. Properly chastened, I swallowed and continued my original line of thought: “The woman with my mother’s necklace rang my be…” That sentence could not end anywhere happy. Gary guffawed and I grinned despite myself. “You know what I mean.”
“I know Mike’s gonna be real disappointed if some woman’s ringing your bells, darlin’.”
“When did you start calling him Mike?”
“After the zombies,” Gary said with aplomb.
I cast a glance heavenward and nearly missed our exit. Gary grabbed his door’s armrest as I yanked us into the right—which was to say, correct, which in on Irish roads meant left—lane, and muttered, “After the zombies. Of course. Normal people don’t say things like that, Gary.”
“Normal people don’t fight zombies.”
That line of conversation wasn’t going to end anywhere happy, either. I let out an explosive breath and tried again. “The woman in my mother’s necklace had some kind of pull with me. Maybe it was just that she looked all sneery and challenging, but there was some kind of connection. I have to find out who she was.”
Gary, cautiously, said, “It wasn’t your mother, was it?”
“No. She kind of looked like her, dark hair, pale skin, but no. My mother was sort of restrained and prim. She liked Altoids. This woman was more of a kick ass and take names type.” Only it had turned out my mother was exactly that kind of person, too. I just hadn’t known it until after she died.
I hadn’t known much of anything about my mother until after she died, except that she’d flown to America and left me with my father when I was six months old. I hadn’t seen her again until I was twenty-six. That kind of thing leaves a mark. In my case, it was an entirely unjustified mark, as Mother had been trying to protect me from a bad guy bigger and nastier than I ever wanted to deal with. But again, I hadn’t known that until after she died. Nothing like a little “I was trying to save your life” to take the wind out of sails puffed up with childish abandonment issues. I wished I’d had the opportunity to tell her I finally understood.
But that was spilt milk, and I was getting better about not crying over it. I turned down the road leading to Tara and Gary frowned as a tour bus taking up two-thirds of the road came the other direction. “You sure this is the right way?”
“Yeah. Only in Ireland do they put cultural heritage monuments at the end of one-track roads.” I couldn’t decide if I liked the idea or not. It certainly gave the impression the heritage site had been there forever, which was true. On the other hand, I had to hold my breath as I pulled over to let the bus pass, for fear we’d be broadsided if I didn’t. Gary let his breath out in a rush when the bigger vehicle rambled by, and we grinned sheepishly at each other as I pulled forward again. “Glad it’s not just me. At least we’re not on a mountainside with roads this narrow. The landscape kind of reminds me of North Carolina.”
“Never been out there,” Gary said. “I kept getting stuck in St. Louis. Annie and I used to go to the jazz festival.”
“Did you play?” Gary’s wife had died before I met him, but he’d mentioned once or twice that he’d been an itinerant sax player for a few years after the Korean War, while Annie, a nurse, had brought home the bacon.
“Nah. Left that to the guys who were really good.” Gary leaned into the window as we went up the hill leading to the, er, Hill, and frowned. “Thought there’d be more cars.”
“Me, too.” The parking lot—small and graveled and graced at one end by gift shops and at the other by a switchback path—was completely empty of vehicles besides our own. I got out of the car and turned in a slow circle, taking in the view—there was a tower in the distance, soft with misty air—and finally came back to Gary, who stood on the other side of our car with a befuddled expression. “You remember that night at the Seattle Center?”
“You mean the night somebody stuffed a broadsword through me? Nah. Why would I?”
“Remember how quiet it was?” The parking garage had been empty. There’d been no late-night tourists wandering, nobody from the monorail hurrying one way or the other, no joggers making their way across the closed grounds.
Gary, very firmly, said, “Jo, no matter how much I love you, I ain’t gettin’ stuck with another sword.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got mine now.” I patted my hip like I wore a sword there, which of course I didn’t, because I lived in the early twenty-first century, not the early seventeenth. Not that as a woman I’d have been able to carry a sword in the seventeenth century anyway, but that wasn’t the point. The point was I had an honest-to-God magic sword that I’d taken off an ancient Celtic god, and I’d spent a good chunk of the past fifteen months learning how to use it properly. If anybody tried skewering Gary—or me, for that matter—I had defenses.
“Your sword’s in Seattle.”
I put on my very best mysterious magic user voice: “A detail which is nothing to one such as I.” Gary snorted and I laughed, then waved at the path. “Come on, if we’ve got the place to ourselves we might as well take advantage of it. Busloads of tourists will probably show up any minute.”
Gary fell in behind me dubiously. “You really think so?”
“No. I think something’s conspiring to keep the place quiet awhile, and that we’ll probably regret finding out why. But I’m trying to keep a positive mind-set.” The path up to Tara was foot-worn but not paved. Nothing suggested “tourist attraction” except for the gift shops, and even they weren’t particularly in-your-face about it. Gary and I kept pace with one another, both stealing glimpses at each other from the corners of our eyes like we expected something to jump out at us but if the other was cool, we weren’t going to show our nerves. After the third or fourth time we caught gazes, Gary actually giggled, which was unnerving in itself. Six-foot-one former linebackers in their seventies weren’t supposed to giggle.
A woman said, “There’ll be nothing to worry about,” out of nowhere, and we both shrieked like little girls. I regained my equilibrium first. Gary, after all, had already been giggling, which was bad enough with me as an audience, never mind with a complete stranger looking on. We turned together, though, to find a lovely woman of indeterminate age smiling at us. She wore a white eyelet-lace sundress with gold scarves wrapped around her hips and shoulders, and sandals on her feet. On most people I would call it a hippy-dippy look, but somehow she imbued it with more elegance than that. Her hair was the color of sunrise shot with clouds. She wasn’t young, even if I couldn’t tell how old she was.
“You’ll be Siobhán Walkingstick,” she said to me.
Hairs stood up on my arms. The bite itched, and I rubbed it surreptitiously, resulting in a wave of oh god, scratching feels so good I may never be able to stop that sometimes happens. I wondered suddenly if that was why dogs would go thumpa-thumpa-thump with a hind leg when a human got a good itchy spot, and then I wondered if, as a werewolf, I would do the same thing.
I stopped scratching and muttered, “People don’t normally use that name for me. Who’re you?”
“Am I wrong to think until very recently it wouldn’t have been you at all?”
Another chill ran over me. I made fists to keep from scratching again. “…you’re not wrong.” The name she’d used, Siobhán Walkingstick, was technically the one I’d been born to. Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick. Dad had taken one look at that mess and nicknamed me Joanne. I’d dropped the Walkingstick myself, taking Walker as my mostly official last name when I graduated high school. Joanne Walker and Siobhán Walkingstick had almost nothing in common, at least not up until the past year. More specifically, up until two nights earlier, when I’d been reborn under a rattlesnake shapeshifter’s guidance. That had a lot to do with why my powers were out-of-control wonky. Joanne had had a handle on her skill set. Siobhán apparently resided in another league. And I was going to have to stop thinking of them as separate or I’d become a headcase in no time flat.
“But you’ll prefer Joanne,” the woman said with a nod, then looked to Gary. “And you come with a companion.”
Gary, who was rarely gruff, said, “Muldoon. Gary Muldoon,” gruffly, and she inclined her head toward him.
“Are you here of your own free will, Mr. Muldoon? Will you be traveling the roads Joanne travels, walking beside her, or will you stand aside and let her pass where she must go alone?”
“I’m here, ain’t I?”
The woman smiled. “So you are. Now there’re two ways to approach the Hill. You might go the way everyone does, and see what they all see. Perhaps more,” she added, giving me a significant look. “Perhaps not.”
I was pretty sure I would See more than most people, assuming the Sight didn’t knock me for another loop. I was equally sure strange women didn’t show up to make portentous comments if they expected me to take the path more traveled by. It hadn’t passed me by that she’d failed to say who she was, but I’d lay long odds she wouldn’t even if I asked her again, so I just said, “What’s the other way?” like a good little stage player.
She gestured to the rise of green grass behind her. “Pass through the Hall of Kings, and hear what secrets they might share with you.”
“I didn’t even know there was a Hall of Kings. I thought Tara was…” For once I shut up before I made a total fool of myself. Truth was, I hadn’t really thought much at all about what Tara was or wasn’t. I figured it was mystical. Druidic. Stuff like that. I hadn’t considered that ordinary mortals might have passed this way, too, not that kings were exactly ordinary.
The woman’s mouth quirked, which was nicer than her outright laughing at me. “Tara is where the ancient kings were crowned, Joanne. Temair na Rí, Hill of the Kings. Here they wedded Méabh to become ard rí, the high kings.”
“What, all of them? Liberal sorts, weren’t they?” That time my mouth should have shut up before it did.
The woman gave me a sort of weary look, the kind mothers bestow on precocious but irritating children. “Symbolically, Joanne. Symbolically. Méabh was—”
“No, wait, I know this one! She was a high queen, right? Kind of a warrior princess?”
There was a certain expression I tended to engender in people more mystically apt than I. It started under the eyes with a slight tensing of fine skin, and went both up and down, making lips thinner and foreheads wrinklier. As a rule, I interpreted it as the pain of one whose cherished childhood dreams have just been spat upon, and it always made me feel guilty. The woman got that expression, suggesting that “warrior princess” was not how she thought of Méabh, but it was too late. I couldn’t take the words back. I put on a pathetic hangdog smile of apology instead, and the look faded into resignation, which was generally how people ended up responding to me. At length she said, “Something like that. Queen of Connacht and of Ulster, descended from or perhaps incarnated of the Morrígan herself, and any man who would be king of Ireland needed the blessing of the trifold goddess.”
“I thought that was Brigid,” I said nervously. Brigid was the only deity I knew anything about—well, besides Cernunnos, but I had a close personal relationship with him—and what I knew about her fit in a nutshell. “Trifold goddess” was stamped on the nutshell, in fact, and that was the sum total of my knowledge.
A little of the dismay left the woman’s face. Apparently I’d gotten something right. “Brigid would be the Morrígan’s other face, perhaps. The coin turned upward instead of down. Maiden, mother, crone, to the Morrígan’s warrior, witch and death.”
I swallowed. “Right. Um. We’re not going to meet her, are we?”
The woman stepped aside with another smile, gesturing us up the hill. “There’ll be one way and one way only to find out.”
Gary was halfway up the hill before the woman finished speaking. I jolted after him, vaguely ashamed that even now, he was more enthusiastic for my adventures than I was. I caught his shoulder as he reached the low crest and tugged him back. “Hey, hang on a second, wait up.”
He glanced at me with elevated bushy eyebrows, and I found myself mimicking the woman’s gesture, waving at the low stretch of land beyond our hill. Annoyed that I’d done so, I glanced back to glower at her, but she was gone. I stared down the deserted pathway a moment, then passed a hand over my eyes and said, “Hang on a sec,” again.
“I’m hangin’, doll. What’s up?”
“Obviously there’s something down there for us to see. I’m just thinking it might be helpful if you could…See.”
“I see just fine,” Gary said in mild offense. “I wear reading glasses, but who doesn’t?”
“No, not see. See. With a capital ess. With the Sight. Like I do.”
Gary looked down his nose at me. It wasn’t very far down—he was only a couple inches taller than I—but it was far enough. “Last I checked you were the one with the magic mojo, Jo.” A glitter came into his gray eyes and I pointed a warning finger at him.
“You are not calling me Mojojo. Ever. I refuse it as a nickname.”
The glitter turned into a grin. “Sure…Jo.”
I turned my pointy finger from him toward the green below us. “Do you or do you not want a chance to See what we’re facing?”
“’Course I do!”
“Then no Mojojojo.” I bit my tongue on getting carried away with the jojos, then exhaled. “Okay. I know this works because I’ve done it with Morrison and Billy.” Billy, my police detective partner—former partner, which he didn’t even know yet. He was going to kill me. Anyway, Billy was an adept himself, able to speak with the recently dead, but Morrison had the magical aptitude of a turnip. If I could make the Sight ritual work on him, I had no doubt it would work on Gary. “But I’ve only done it while stationary, which is no help.”
Gary’s eyebrows shot up, dancing with mad glee. I threatened to whack his shoulder and he laughed out loud, which made me laugh. “You’re good for me,” I informed him. “I laugh more when you’re around.”
“You need some laughter in your life, darlin’. Speakin’ of which, how’s things with Mike now that he ain’t the boss?”
“Of all the awkward segues. I’ll let you know. Stop distracting me.”
“From what? You don’t look like you’re doing much.”
“I’m trying to think!” Which wasn’t my strong point even when I hadn’t flown all night. I walked a few steps away, squinting at Tara. I’d never awakened second Sight in someone when I wasn’t already using it. Quite certain it wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had, I held my breath and triggered the Sight.
Time revved up a Roto-Rooter and tunneled through a thousand years of history.
Chapter Three
The landscape changed. Hills reshaped, stone walls rose where none currently stood and in the distance a double row of wooden henges spread out in an unbelievably large circle, containing vastly more area than I expected. I could see modern-day shadows of the new highway cutting through what had once been sacred land, its effect so significant as to mar the world even in retrospect. Mist-softened sunlight caught a hollow between the sets of henges where it had been dug out, and dug deep, to create a true barrier around Tara.
I was accustomed to Looking at Seattle, which wasn’t an old city even by the U.S.’s standards. The Native American settlements there had been so thoroughly bulldozed over that they left depressingly little mark on the modern city. I probably could See them if I needed to, but so far I hadn’t had to.
Tara, despite the highway, despite its long-ago abandonment as a spiritual center, despite the tourists that tromped through it daily, roared with ancient power. Everything within the henge barrier shone brilliant, healing blue, with spikes of yellow that spoke of a warrior heritage. Where they blended, they became adamant green, a color I’d long since associated with the protective, stolid quality of buildings that knew their business as shelters for those within. My vision shifted and shimmered, trying to accommodate the changes Tara had seen. Changes that were still living within the sacred earth: what had gone on here left its mark, year after year, until years turned into centuries and centuries to millennia.
Only one thing remained the same. A white standing stone poked up impudently, barely altered by time. There was life within that stone, more life than the usual shaman-recognized spirit which infested all things. Everything had purpose, but most inanimate objects were rooted and calm and patient.
The standing stone screamed with impatience, a hair-raising shriek that echoed under my skin. I was used to the Sight showing me things beyond the ordinary. It had never before given me the ability to listen in on something that I was certain reached out of this world. I wondered if that was part of the upgrade to the shiny new Siobhán Walkingstick package, or if I’d simply never faced an inanimate object old enough to have a voice of its own.
“What is that?” I had the impression I was walking, an impression confirmed when Gary’s hand closed around my biceps and stopped me from going any farther.
“Hold up, doll. Don’t forget about me.”
“Right.” I turned away from the standing stone, though its voice still shrieked against the small bones in my ears.
Something uncomfortable happened in Gary’s expression as I faced him. His voice dropped half an octave on one syllable: “Jo?”
“Yeah?”
“You look…” He circled one hand, and stopped, still discomfited. I waited for further explanation, which was not forthcoming. After a few seconds my eyebrows went up and I shrugged one shoulder. There was hardly any point in being magically adept if I couldn’t use it to figure out what was bugging my friends, so I stepped out of my body to take a look at me.
Gary was right. I looked “…” and my noncorporeal self made a hand circle just like he had.
I would not have recognized me, eighteen months earlier. Not on the levels that mattered. The height, yes; the spiky short black hair, sure. The slightly too-generous nose with its scattering of freckles: those things remained the same. But my eyes, to hear me tell it, were hazel, while the woman I was looking at had eyes of blaze-gold. A thin scar cut across her right cheekbone, breaking a few of those freckles apart, and she wore cuff earrings—a stylized raven on one ear, a rattlesnake on the other—which I’d never done. Nor did the me of a year and a half ago wear a silver choker necklace or the copper bracelet that barely glinted under the new leather coat, though I would have at least recognized the bracelet. My father had given it to me when I left for college. The necklace had been a gift from my dying mother, barely two weeks before I became a shaman. I didn’t need to see the last of my talismans, a Purple Heart medal given to me by Gary, to know it was there: it lay over my own heart, pinned discreetly inside my shirt. I would probably die of embarrassment if Gary ever found that out.
I’d thought earlier I needed great sunglasses to really work that coat. Now I thought I needed them to hide my spooky eyes, which were the most visible change in me. Not everyone would be able to see the silver-blue psychic and physical shields wrapping around me so smoothly they looked like liquid silk, but those who could—people like my mentor, Coyote—would respect their strength. Actually, Coyote would just be astonished I’d finally gotten them so integrated that they were intact even though I wasn’t consciously thinking about them, and annoyed it had taken a werewolf bite to force me into that mental space. That wasn’t the point.
The point was, I looked confident. I had presence beyond what my height conferred. That, above all, was the element Joanie Walker, cop shop mechanic, wouldn’t have known what to do with if she’d seen her future self reflected in the mirror. And that, apparently, was what Gary saw, too.
I said, “Ah,” rather softly as I stepped back into my body. My Sight was still on full bore, and Gary’s aura was its usual deep solid mercury-silver, reminding me of the old V8 engine I’d initially thought of him as being. His unease glimmered around the edges, lighter shades of silver, but it was turning to something else: a brighter white, like pride was overtaking discomfort.
“Lookit you, Joanie,” he breathed. “All growed up.”
I grinned, stepping forward to put my hand on top of his head. “Let’s not be hasty. Stand on my feet.” Unlike anybody else I knew, Gary didn’t argue, ask why or prevaricate. He just stepped on my feet with his full weight, evidently unconcerned that he might crush my toes. Fortunately, I was wearing some of my favorite leather stompy boots which had lots of internal structure, and my toes were perfectly safe as I chanted, “This man I hold dear, let him See clear, let that vision hold sway til the end of the day.”
A poet I was not. Fortunately, I didn’t have to be Tennyson in order to trigger the power. The other times I’d done this, I’d felt nothing in particular, though Billy and Morrison had both reacted instantly and gratifyingly. This time, though, I was asking a whole lot more of the magic: it wasn’t supposed to become independent. The spell I’d read about only worked if the caster and the castee remained standing the way Gary and I were, which would be no use at all if we had to explore ancient Tara. But shamanism was based on the precept of change: in theory, if I could imagine it, I could do it. I wasn’t about to stop Italy from rotating while the rest of the world continued on, but in theory, I could.
Giving Gary the Sight until sundown was, by comparison, small potatoes. He already believed in not only the arcane in general, but specifically in my talent, so there was no resistance as the coil of magic within me built up and spilled out in a distinct, feel-able wave. My brighter silver-blue coated his mercury, then faded inside it, wriggling and adjusting to a different set of eyes. It left behind a sheen of blue on his aura, and only as that faded did Gary let out a long, slow whistle. “God almighty, Jo.”
“Just Jo.” I released him slowly, feeling the magic linking us stretch, then settle comfortably. “How’s that?”
“Incredible.” His voice softened with awe. “You can see like this and you don’t all the time?”
“It’s too much.” I turned back to Tara, cold swimming over me as the stone screamed again. “I’m afraid if I always look at this world, I’ll lose sight of the real one. I’ve been afraid of that since the beginning.”
“I think there ain’t much more real than this.”
I smiled at him, then did a double take. Gary’s eyes, usually gray, were as solid silver as his aura. I chortled and hugged him, inordinately pleased. He grunted, a sound intended to mask his own pleasure, and made a question with his eyebrows that I answered cheerfully: “Your eyes are silver. You’re the only one who’s ever held his own when I set this spell on him. Everybody else’s have gone gold, like mine.”
“Old dog’s got a lot of tricks, darlin’.” Gary did not look old, not one little bit at all. Not to my normal sight, and not to the Sight. Part of it was his totem spirit, a tortoise whose steady ways had gotten us out of major trouble at least once. I could See it now, surrounding him comfortably, always there if its strength needed to be drawn on.
But mostly it was his joie de vivre. Nobody who loved life and new experiences that much was ever going to get old, not really. Wiser and eventually dead, maybe, but not old. This time I said what I’d so often thought: “You’re my hero, you know that, Gary? I want to grow up into somebody like you.”
Color stained his cheeks, which I hadn’t thought possible. “You’re doin’ just fine, doll. C’mon. We better go see what there is to see.” He offered his hand. I slipped mine into it, and we walked together into the Hall of Kings.
The stone’s cry went mute as the Hall’s ephemeral walls surrounded us. I slowed, straining to hear it, and Gary stuck a finger in his ear. “What was that? I didn’t even hear it until it quit.”
“I don’t really kn… Do you hear that?” Whispers rattled around the hall, bouncing off my skin. Drowning out the stone, maybe, except they were whispers and the stone had screamed. There was probably some old adage about a whisper being louder than a scream, but I couldn’t come up with it off the top of my head.
Gary swallowed audibly. “What’s weird is I can understand ’em, doll. Pretty sure that ain’t English they’re speaking.”
“It’s not.” My mother had spoken in Irish a few times in the months we’d walked side by side without ever getting to know one another. It had sounded more or less like the whispers did, but somewhere in my mind the words twisted from a language I didn’t know into one I did. “It’s like with Cernunnos. Remember how you only understood him when he wanted you to? There’s magic afoot.”
The half-spooked expression faded from Gary’s face. “I can’t believe you just said that.”
I grinned. “That’s why I said it. All right, let me listen.” Why I thought me listening would do any more good than Gary listening, I didn’t know. Of course, if he was quiet then we could both listen, which was probably twice as good as just me listening. Which I couldn’t do when I was running on at the brain, again. In the past, my brain babbling at such length had meant there was something it either didn’t want to think about—which things numbered in the dozens right now—or it was working out some extreme cleverness that would at any moment leap out and surprise me.
Much to my dismay, nothing leapt out. The whispers, though, became clearer: men, all of them men, which in a hall called of Kings probably made sense. Some were bitter, claiming unrighteous loss of kingship; others were pure and joyful with their duties. Hints of decay spread through all of them like a warning that their histories and legends, that those stories were being lost to time.
Less lost than some, though. At least Tara remained and was recognized as an important site. There were so many places in the world completely lost, or barely rediscovered, that for a moment, standing in the heart of memory broke my heart.
Ice touched the back of my neck and I turned without thinking. A tall and slender man, almond-eyed and pale-skinned, stood behind me. He wore leather and wool and metal, and a crown of silver over fair hair, and there was nothing even remotely human about him.
I wasn’t sure how I knew that. He had none of the telltale marks that non-human people in legend had: his ears were round, his eyes, while not Western-European-shaped, were hardly so tilted as to be inhuman, and his build was no more slender than that of a slim mortal man. But he wasn’t human, and with my usual flair, I said, “What are you?” only realizing afterward that that was probably unforgivably rude.
“The ard rí,” he said in a tone which suggested I’d been unforgivably rude. “What are you?”
“Gwyld.” I was a bit startled the word came out of my mouth, but Cernunnos—and a woman who had died hours after I’d met her—had both used the word for me. It was, as best I could tell, an old Irish word for shaman or magic-maker, and it apparently meant something to this high king, because surprise filtered through his gaze.
“I thought I knew all the connected at Tara.”
Delighted, I chewed on connected as a new term for magic users. I liked it more than adepts, and wondered why it had fallen out of use. Then again, maybe it hadn’t in Ireland. It wasn’t like I’d grilled my mother on the subject.
While I chewed, the high king looked me over, his expression growing incrementally more dour. “What,” he finally asked, “are you wearing, gwyld?”
I said, “The fashion of my century,” then kicked myself in the ankle for setting up a question that had to be answered.
Except instead of looking like he needed answers, his shoulders relaxed and he let out a soft sigh. “And which of us is displaced? The Tara I see before me wavers and trembles in my sight. Have you called me forward, gwyld, or have I called you back?”
I scrunched my face. “Joanne. My name’s Joanne, not ‘gwyld.’ And I think I’m the one displaced. Who…when…are you?”
“My name is Lugh,” he said, “and today is the day I die.”
Chapter Four
“Gosh,” I said brightly, “good thing I didn’t show up tomorrow.” Then I wanted to kick myself, but I’d done that once already during this conversation. I didn’t want Lugh to think I had a nervous twitch.
Much better he should think I was an unbelievable idiot with a terrible sense of humor and no manners instead. I puffed my cheeks and stared at the wavering walls a moment before trying for a more human and humane response. “I mean, how awful, are you sure?”
Judging from his expression, I had not much improved my original comment. “The dark of winter is upon us, gwyld. My wife and mistress must be assuaged to bring back the light.”
“Has anybody suggested marriage counseling?” There was something wrong with me. I was usually mouthy, but not this much of a jackass. I took a moment for introspection and determined the cause of my behavior was probably the unmitigated terror sluicing through my veins. I’d meant to give Gary the Sight, not throw myself back through time. I had no clue how I’d done it or, more important, how to get home again. Lugh was attractive, but not worth staying displaced in time for. Especially since he was going to die soon. I held up a finger, asking for his patience, and knelt to curl myself up in a little ball, forehead against the grass.
Grass and stone: once upon a time there’d been a floor in this hall. In my time it was gone, but whenever we were now, it was present, but had modern-day grass growing up through it. That suggested I was still tethered in some fashion to my own era, which was reassuring. Some of the impulse to lash out faded, and I took a deep cleansing breath of green-scented air.
My leather coat creaked as I sat back on my heels. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting to step out of time and it’s making me act like a jerk. I’m not usually quite this bad.”
“The connected are often unusual.” The way he said the last word implied he really meant “unforgivable assholes,” but he was offering rope to hang myself with.
I took it, though I stayed kneeling. One knelt before royalty, after all. Also, equilibrium restoring itself or not, my legs felt shaky and I didn’t want to test them. “Who’s your wife? I thought stories about druids doing human sacrifices were just that. Stories. Also, dark of winter? Really? It’s the spring equinox when I am. Or just past. Close enough, anyway.”
He opened his mouth to answer two times while I rambled on, then stood there with a moderately patient glare until I fell silent. “I am wed to the Morrígan, and dark of winter or a balance of light, the quartered sun days are powerful. They do not have to be the same to draw us together. How is it that I, only a king, knows what a gwyld does not?”
“My training’s been spotty.” I got to my feet, feeling no need to add that the spottiness was entirely my own doing. “Wait, the Morrígan? The death goddess? That Morrígan?”
“The one and same,” Gary said at my elbow.
I nearly jumped out of my skin, having sort of forgotten about him. Lugh, though, exhaled unmistakable relief, and nodded to the big guy standing behind me. “I see from your garb you are with the gwyld. Her teacher, perhaps?”
Gary said “No” and I said “Yes” at the same time, leaving the high king to look as though he’d rather be having teeth pulled than this conversation. I said, “You are, too,” over my shoulder, and pleasure ran through Gary’s aura.
Auras. I looked back at Lugh.
His was all wrong. Not like a human aura and not much like the blaze of light and power that was a god, either. He was more connected to the earth than that, his aura reflecting the health of the land around him. That was what had triggered the assumption he wasn’t human. At the moment his aura lay sallow against his skin, dark of winter indeed. I could See the same quietness, even exhaustion, spreading through Tara to the countryside beyond. “Does this happen every year? I mean, no offense, but she must go through a lot of high kings this way.”
“She comes and goes as the years call her,” Lugh said patiently. “We kings rule in her name and with her blessing until the land hungers for us, and then she returns to claim us for it. Gwyld, why have you come here?”
My mouth, as it all too often did, skipped over consulting with my brain and blurted, “Maybe to save your life.”
Hope flashed across Lugh’s face and died again so quickly that I wasn’t sure I’d seen it. There was certainly no trace of it in his voice as he said, “A generous proposal, but not one I think you can manage. Not unless a high king called Lugh still reigns over Eire in your time, gwyld.”
Dismay crashed through me, but Gary stepped in. “Hard to say. Legend says all your kind went underground thousands of years ago. Could be anybody on the throne. Lugh’s part of the mythology here, though. Sun god, I think, so maybe not. What?” he demanded when I gaped at him. “Look, it ain’t native knowledge, doll. I been reading up the past year, just like you have. Guess we’ve been covering different territory. Anyway, aincha ever heard of fairy mounds? ’Swhere the fair folk go to ground. Everybody knows that.”
“No, I’ve never heard of fairy mounds! I swear to God, did I miss a college course? Life Lessons 103: How to Recognize Magic?” My hands waved in the air like demented puppets. “And I thought I was doing so much better!”
“You are.”
That was not reassuring. I stuffed my hands in my coat pockets, shoulders hunched defensively high as I shuffled to face Lugh again.
He didn’t look any more reassured than I felt. I sighed and scrubbed my hands through my hair, which needed to be washed. “So this Morrígan. Is she really a goddess? I’ve never met a goddess.”
“The Morrígan,” Lugh said, a bit severely. “She was one of us once, long ago. She has left us since, and rides the night sky with her ravens and her bloody blades.”
“Ra…” The woman in my vision had been accompanied by ravens. I swallowed and gestured to indicate a height equal to my own. “Is she about yay tall, with hip-length black hair and a death’s head face? Blue robes? Badass tattoos? Necklace like this one?” I stuck my thumb under my necklace, bringing it to Lugh’s attention.
He focused on it momentarily. “All but the last, yes.”
I tried to focus on the necklace, too—difficult, when it was a choker and didn’t pass my chin when tugged forward—then muttered, “She’s the reason I’m here. I mean, in Ireland. Not here—here, whenever this is. Hey!” I let go of the necklace, suddenly hopeful. “Maybe I really do get to save you! Maybe that’s why she called me!” Of course, the call had felt like more of a gauntlet across the face than a request for a rescue mission, but maybe that didn’t matter.
Or maybe it did. Lugh shook his head. “She is not known for her kindness. I think she wouldn’t call you to rewrite my fate.”
“Well, I’m here now. I think I’ll give it a shot, if you don’t mind.”
Complexity crossed Lugh’s face and he looked to Gary. “You are her teacher. In my time the connected say fate is not to be toyed with. Is it not so in your time?”
Gary’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “Forgive me for sayin’ so, your majesty, but what the hell’s the point in being connected if you don’t mess with fate? Rightin’ wrongs, fighting the good fight, setting kids named Arthur on the path to be king? That’s what the connected do.”
Now Lugh shot a surreptitious glance at me. “Arthur?”
“After your time. Don’t worry about it. What do your adepts do?”
He tipped his head curiously, then smiled. “Adepts. A suitable word. They maintain balance. Between justice and injustice, between life and death, between light and dark. What do you do?”
“That,” I admitted, “only less portentously. I hope. My version involves getting my ass kicked a lot, and screwing around with fate. I don’t know what else to call getting a kid turned into a sorcerer’s vessel.” There were a whole bunch of other threads I’d tugged in my year as a shaman, but that one continued to upset me.
“Your world,” Lugh said after a long, long time, “must be badly out of balance.”
“You have no idea.”
He drew himself up, suddenly regal. “Then you must see what a world in balance looks like, gwyld. Perhaps that is why you’re here. Come.” He turned and walked away and I made to follow him.
Gary hissed, “Jo,” despite my name having not a sibilant in sight. “Jo, hang on.”
I hung, letting Lugh stride down the Hall of Kings without us. “What’s wrong?”
His eyes popped. “We’re standin’ in the middle of a million-year-old hall that’s just a bunch of green hills in our time, talkin’ to an elf king, and you gotta ask what’s wrong? What’d you do to us, Jo? This ain’t what the Sight’s like, is it?”
“Oh. No. Not normally. I mean, no—wait. What do you see?”
“I see Tara, Jo. Tara the way it musta been a million years ago. It’s…” Gary, who was never at a loss for words, trailed off as he gazed around. “There’s swords on the walls. Lot of ’em don’t look like they’ve ever been used. They’ve got carvings below them, faces. Except they don’t look like carvings, more like they just lifted right out of the stone itself. All the kings, I guess. Makes you feel like you’re walkin’ through history.” He paused, then said in a more normal tone, “You know what I mean.”
I grinned. “Yeah. I don’t see that, not as clearly. I’ve got overlap going from our time. I don’t see the faces.”
“Too bad. They’re somethin’, Jo.” He refocused on me. “So what the hell’d you do? You said your rhyme, then disappeared for a minute, and then everything changed to this and the elf king.”
I stared at him. “How’d you know he wasn’t human?”
Gary did his plate tectonics shrug. “Pretty sure the human high kings of Ireland married Maeve, not the Morrígan. That and the mythology said Lugh was one of the sí. It stood to reason.”
My hands started doing the Muppet thing again. “What the hell’s a shee? No, never mind, forget it, just tell me how it stood to reason that some random guy in the annals of history wasn’t human? How it stood to reason that—”
Gary gave me a level look. “Sweetheart, in the fifteen months I’ve known you, I been stabbed by a demigod, ridden with the Wild Hunt, fought a wendigo, been witched into a heart attack an’ killed a couple zombies. What part of that would make a guy think there weren’t any elves prancin’ about somewhere in the world?”
I stared at him again. Pushed my glasses up. Stared some more. Then, in my very best academic tone, I said, “Oh. Well, when you put it like that, yeah, okay. I don’t know how we got here, Gary. And what do you mean, I disappeared?”
“Poof,” he said with a demonstrative puff of his fingers. “Gone. Had me worried for a minute, but then I got sucked back through time, too.”
“I can still See our time,” I said nervously. “I don’t like that I went poof. That can’t be a good sign.”
He whacked my shoulder in a way that could, if I was liberal with my definition, be construed as a pat. “Roll with it, doll.”
“Right. Because I don’t know how to get us home, so what choice do I have.”
Gary beamed and patted my shoulder again. This time I didn’t stagger from it. “That’s my girl. You’re getting the hang of this carpe diem stuff.”
“I have a good teacher. I think I also have an impatient elf king up there.” Indeed, Lugh stood framed by the hall’s far doorway, looking for all the world like a graceful marble statue. A graceful, impatient marble statue, though I’d never encountered a statue which exuded impatience. It made me wonder if there was a Museum of Statues of Unusual Expression somewhere in the world. There should be, if there wasn’t.
Lugh’s statuesque pose relaxed as we caught up to him. Gary caught his breath—his own breath, not Lugh’s—and even I, who still saw my era overlying ancient Tara, said, “Wow.”
The screaming white stone stood a few hundred yards away in a straight shot from the hall’s exit. I could See another version of it about a hundred yards off to the right; it had been moved in comparatively modern times, but the sheer solidity of its long-term presence beyond the hall made its modern-day location a mere shadow. Beyond it, the henges rose up with banners snapping, making the barrier around Tara that much more impressive.
Everything within the henges was focused on the screaming stone, which shone with gathered energy. It was capped with rich green magic at the moment, power waiting to be released. I wanted to yank the cap off to see if the energy shot upward like a spotlight directed at the sky. I kind of thought it would. That it would shoot up, crash into the cloud layer and rain back down over the entirety of Ireland in an island-size distribution of goodwill, serenity and balance.
Except Ireland didn’t exactly have a history of goodwill, serenity and balance. I frowned at the screaming stone like that was its fault, but Lugh brushed the thought away with a dramatic sweep of his hand. “Here lies the heart of our civilization. The collected spirit of the aos sí, where at midsummer those who would rule pass through the hall and come to the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny. The stone cries out for all of Ireland to hear when a worthy man lays hand on it. The Morrígan comes to wed him, and we kneel before our new king.”
“You get a lot of people eager for that job when they know the wedding bed ends up with a sacrificial knife through it?” My analogy sucked, but Lugh got the point. So to speak.
“It is an honor and a duty to be tested,” he said stiffly, and just to teach me a lesson, struck off across the hills while he spoke. I chased after as he replaced stiffness with haughtiness that I was sure covered uncertainty. “All creatures must die. What better reason than for your people?”
Wrongness twitched up my spine again, just like it had when I’d contemplated Ireland’s emotional balance. “See, now, I get you’re elves or whatever, but if I’ve learned one thing being a shaman it’s that blood sacrifice is just not cool. It leads to all kinds of bad moj—” I broke off and glared over my shoulder at Gary, who had no problem keeping pace as we approached the Lia Fáil. He widened his eyes and mimed zipping his lips: no MojoJo from him. Satisfied, I finished, “Bad mojo. I can’t see that undergoing a 180-degree reversal, even over the course of a jillion years. Also,” I said, glancing around, “if there’s going to be a sacrifice here, shouldn’t there be a bloodthirsty crowd gathering?”
“It is a private affair,” Lugh said, still uptight and arrogant about it.
I snorted, then gaped as the penny dropped. “Oh, shit. You mean you didn’t know this would happen when you signed on, don’t you. Oh, crap. This cannot be good. This can’t be good at all. Sacrifices are bad enough. Secret sacrifices, that, no, just no. I put my foot down. That’s enough of this bullshit. Where is she? I’m going to have a word with this chick.”
Lugh, wordlessly, pointed skyward. I whipped around, arms akimbo.
The woman who stalked out of the sky was my mother.
Chapter Five
It wasn’t really, not after a second shocked look. But that first one was a blow to the gut, sharp enough to make me breathless and sick. I took a woozy step backward and clung to the standing stone like an ingénue while I took stock of the Morrígan.
She was actually far more beautiful than my mother, but there was a definite similarity. More than just the long jet-black hair and light-colored eyes: they had a ferocity I didn’t think I shared. In my mother, that ferocity came out in the way she chewed Altoids.
In the Morrígan, it was more in the way she charged down out of the sky with a blazing sword in one hand and a trio of shrieking ravens flapping around her shoulders. Lugh, the damned fool, stepped between me and her and flung his arms wide, making himself an easily skewerable target.
Gary muttered, “Elves ain’t too bright,” as he lumbered by me and tackled Lugh to the ground just as the Morrígan swung her sword at him.
It slammed into the Stone of Destiny so hard that something, either the stone or the sword, should have shattered. Neither did, but the clang nearly broke me into a billion pieces. Chills dashed up my spine, down my arms, back up again and took up residence at the base of my neck, where they did a tap dance. Lugh gave a little grunt that made a nice counterbeat to the tapping. Gary rolled off him as the Morrígan squalled in pure outraged astonishment. The ravens took their distance from her and she landed on the ground in a cinematic rush of blue robes and black hair. It was very John Woo. All we needed was a flock of doves.
The Morrígan came to her feet in a surge of power and grace and began stalking toward Gary. “You dare deny me my sacrifice?”
He sat up and jerked a thumb my way. “Not me, doll. Her.”
I waved and produced my best perky smile. “Hi.”
The Morrígan gave me a dismissive look, then looked again more carefully. “You bear my lord’s mark.”
“I do?” I glanced at myself, half expecting the sign of the cross or some other inappropriately modern religious marker to have cropped up on my skin. Then I clapped my hand at my throat, where the necklace’s pendant had a quartered cross. “Oh! This?”
“No.” She flicked a finger and the sleeve of my new $1800 leather coat ripped apart to expose the bandaged werewolf bite. My vision washed out, leaving nothing in the world but my ruined sleeve. Static filled my ears, mostly drowning out her, “That. What does a sister in blood wish with my sacrifice?”
It hadn’t split on the seam. The leather was damaged. It couldn’t be fixed, and there was no earthly way I was going to get an exchange on an item damaged by supernatural beings. I lifted my gaze inch by incremental inch to fix the laserlike focus of consumer fury on the Morrígan.
Gary mumbled, “Uh-oh,” and got out of the way.
“First,” I said in the lowest, deadliest voice I had at my disposal, “fix my coat. Then we’ll discuss what I want with your sacrifice.”
To my utter astonishment, she arched an eyebrow, shrugged and flicked her finger again. My coat put itself back together, not a hint of damage done to it. The wind sailed right out of my rage and despite myself I said, “That was kind of cool. How’d you do it?”
“Will it and it is so. The Master gives us such gifts. You must be new to your mark, if you haven’t yet learned that. Now.” Her eyebrows arched again. “My sacrifice?”
“Oh yeah. You can’t have him.” I smiled at her, all pleasant resolution. Amazing what a little thing like an undamaged coat sleeve did for my humor. Then her answer began trickling toward comprehension, and cold slid down my spine. “Um. Mark of the Master? You mean your boss is the same… Shit. Shit, shit, shit shit shit.” It didn’t take very many repetitions for that to become an absurd-sounding word. I said it one more time for good measure, turned around, kicked the Stone of Destiny and turned back.
This time, though, I had a sword in my hand. My silver rapier, taken off a god and usually resident beneath my bed. It had at least two feet of reach on the Morrígan’s short sword. I hoped like hell that was enough to make up for what I suspected were her vastly superior fighting skills.
She looked wonderfully nonplussed by the new addition to my accessories. It was all I could do to not dance a jig. The blade was part of my psychic armor, so I’d been pretty sure I could pull it from halfway across the world. The Morrígan’s astonishment was just a terrific bonus. Gary gave a triumphant “Hah!”
Lugh, as astounded as the Morrígan, said, “No gwyld I know carries a sword,” and then it was on.
She was fast. God, she was fast, and had obviously been using a sword forever, whereas I’d started learning barely a year ago. Her first flurry came down like an avalanche, short blade cutting the air so quickly it made the whipping sounds children usually add to swordplay. I couldn’t see it, not even with the Sight running at full bore. Instead I watched her shoulders, her hips, her feet and somewhere at the back of my mind all the training Phoebe had pounded into me did its job. The rapier was where it needed to be time and again, preventing the Morrígan from skewering me.
My arms were already getting numb, and she’d been hitting me for only about half a minute. I hadn’t come close to an offensive measure. I was going to earn Lugh a whopping fifteen seconds of life if I didn’t do something else fast.
Do something else fast. That was the key. I whispered, Rattler? I need your gift of speed, silently, and a slithering, sibilant personality came to life within me.
We ssstrike, he agreed, but he sounded weary. As well he should: barely a day ago he’d stripped me right down to the core in order to make sure I survived getting smashed by a truck. It had taken a lot out of both of us, even if spirit animals didn’t technically have a lot to be taken out of. He was less of a sketch of light in my mind than usual, but adrenaline pumped through my veins, lending me the swiftness of a striking snake.
The Morrígan was astonished again when my rapier came up and not just blocked, but tangled and threw her short sword to the side. Not away: her loose, strong grip was too much for that, but I made an opening with the parry, and for the first time pressed the fight. She dropped back, not retreating, but distancing herself so she could get a better look at me. I’d apparently suddenly become worthy. That wasn’t exactly the accolade I wanted, but it was better than having my head handed to me. I took a step toward her, but just one. I had the screaming stone at my back and wanted to keep it there. Her mouth flattened, recognition of what I was doing, and for an instant her gaze went beyond me, to Gary and Lugh.
I knew I shouldn’t look. I knew it, and I couldn’t help it. Just one quick glance over my shoulder, to make sure they were all right.
When I looked back, ravens tried to eat my face.
I shrieked, dropped my sword and flailed at the damned birds. Beaks and talons caught my hands, my hair, my arms, my cheeks, scoring vicious digs and slashes. Healing magic sluiced through me, keeping blood from spattering, but I didn’t know how to fight a flock of birds.
We ssstrike, Rattler said in audible irritation, and my left hand snapped out to seize one of the ravens by its throat.
The snaky impulse was to squeeze and crack its fragile bones. Somehow I didn’t, though I felt the play of muscle in my arm and saw it enter my hand. It stopped just before my fingers spasmed shut. The raven, with no evident concern for its mortality, twisted its head and bit the tender flesh between the thumb and forefinger.
The other two ravens beat wings backward, taking themselves just out of my range of attack. Taking themselves out of their range of attack, too, for which I was grateful. Bird in one hand, I knelt to scoop up my sword, then leveled it at the Morrígan, who once more looked astonished. And furious, but she held still, which led me to a rapid conclusion. “Your power’s tied up in the birds. What happens if one dies? You can’t fly out of here on their wings the way you just arrived, that’s for damned sure. Quite a letdown to walk where you once flew, eh? What else, Morrígan? What else do you lose if you lose a bird?”
Truth was, I hadn’t stopped myself from killing the raven because I thought it might be a bargaining chip. I hadn’t killed it because Raven was my other spirit animal, and I thought he might take issue with me obliterating one of his brethren. But the Morrígan didn’t have to know that. I was pretty pleased with myself.
Right up until she snarled, “Less than if I lose the sacrifice,” and with another twitch of her fingers, broke the bird’s neck.
Don’t ever try to tell me animals don’t mourn. The remaining ravens made god-awful sounds, noises that I would call shrieks of horror in humans, and renewed their attack. On me, not on the damned Morrígan, even though she was the actual criminal here. I dropped the dead raven and swung wide with my rapier, cutting an errant feather as it fell. For half a breath I was impressed with the sword’s sharpness, and then I was back to facing three opponents as the Morrígan took the fight to me again.
Rattler’s power surged through me, lending me the speed to meet hers. I already had the strength, thanks to having spent most of a lifetime working on cars. I did not, however, have a duo of infuriated ravens on my side, and the birds were rapidly tipping the odds in her favor. I blurted, “Raven?” out loud and a pleased kak kak KAK! ricocheted through my mind as Raven exploded from the back of my head.
That’s what it felt like, anyway, and from the Morrígan’s expression that might have been what it looked like. Unlike Rattler, Raven wasn’t worn to a nub. Just the opposite, in fact. He hadn’t scraped me off a highway after I’d been hit by a truck, but he had partaken in the following spirit dance. It had brought Rattler and me from exhausted to functioning, and had taken the already-lively spirit bird from functioning to exuberant. This was his first chance since then to burn off some of that energy. He came swinging around my head in a sparkling display of brilliance and smacked the nearest normal raven with his wing.
Nominally normal, anyway. I wasn’t sure how normal any bird that helped fly a full-grown woman through the sky was, but it was black and glossy and looked like it belonged to the real world, whereas my Raven was made of fireworks. My Raven was also about two and a half feet long with a nearly five-foot wingspan, which made him gigantic in raven terms. The Morrígan’s were merely ordinary in comparison.
And they were totally unprepared to be buffeted by those great long wings. He’d hit me with them any number of times. It hurt. Apparently the Morrígan’s raven thought so, too, because it squawked in outrage and left off whacking me to claw at Raven. He did a lovely wing-tip pivot practically on top of my head and crashed into the other raven, then shot skyward with two black streaks of cawing anger chasing him. I said, “Thank you!” and got down to the serious business of having my ass handed to me.
I mean, really. I had strength, I had speed, but not in a hundred years would I have skill like the Morrígan’s. Hell, she even looked tougher than me, though I had a brief vision of how Gary probably saw us—her decked out in blue robes with long flying black hair, me with my short-cropped ’do and flowing white leather coat—and I decided we probably both looked pretty badass. Her more than me, though, because she was obviously the one taking her opponent apart bit by bit with her swordplay.
I parried like hell and tried every trick Phoebe’d taught me, plus a few I’d made up myself. I ducked. I jumped. I threw grass in her face. I kicked and almost got my foot cut off for my troubles. My left forearm throbbed worse with every passing moment, and the Morrígan smiled every time I fumbled on that side, like she knew exactly where my weakness was and only had to wait for me to give in.
Well, I was nothing if not stubborn. I might be bleeding, cursed with a dark mark and about to turn into a werewolf, but I wasn’t going to give the beautiful bitch the satisfaction of my failure. I retreated until I had the Stone of Destiny against my spine. Lugh and Gary weren’t there anymore, which I hoped was good.
What I really wanted was a minute to stop and think. What I got was a merry chase around the Stone, which was small enough to hug and therefore not really much use as an object to hide behind. Still, I ran around it, the Morrígan on my heels, while I tried to put it all together. It was obvious Lugh was fundamentally wrong about his Ireland being a place of balance and peace if the Morrígan recognized a werewolf bite as her master’s mark. I’d watched the werewolves being birthed from the mouth of a black hellhole. I knew their master, at least in passing. He was not one of the good guys.
In fact, he’d been trying to kill me since before I was born. My mother had thwarted him and sent me to America to keep me safe, but I’d regained his attention when my shamanic powers reawakened last year. If the Morrígan, mistress of death and war and doom, was under his command, then—
Then I tripped on the toes of my stompy boots, which were not meant for running circles in, and did a nosedive into the soft earth of ancient Tara.
Lugh, the goddamned fool, came up out of nowhere and took the blow that would have ended my life.
Chapter Six
Blood spattered me, the Stone, the green grass, everything, but I couldn’t even cry out. My voice was lodged in my throat, held there by horror. The Morrígan howled a mixture of delight and anger. She’d gotten her sacrifice, if not her target. Lugh slid off her sword and dropped to the earth. For an instant even the ravens ceased fighting and we all stared at the king’s prone form.
Then he dragged a shallow, shuddering breath, and hope seared me. I jammed my rapier upward, scoring the first blood I’d actually taken from the Morrígan, but not doing enough damage to take her down for the count. She shrieked and whirled, sword lifted to impale me.
Gary, hero of the revolution, bashed her on the back of the head with a rock.
There was something about watching the mighty fall ignominiously. Goddesses weren’t supposed to be taken down with a stone any more than Goliaths were. It lacked respect, and if I’d learned anything, it was that power demanded respect.
With that in mind, I bellowed, “Hot damn, you go, Gary!” dropped my sword and scrambled across the Morrígan’s unconscious body to get at Lugh.
Blood bubbled at his lips, a fine deadly froth. I was pretty sure that meant she’d gotten him in the lung. That should bode ill for him, but I’d healed myself from a punctured lung once. Healing somebody else couldn’t be that hard, especially since he knew of and accepted the power shamans wielded. Nothing like a willing victim to ease things along. I reached for the healing magic within me, flexing it for the first time since I’d arrived in Lugh’s era.
The Stone of Destiny stopped screaming.
It had gotten to where I didn’t notice it anymore, so the cessation was very loud. My head jerked up and I scanned for danger, but the Morrígan was still out and there was no one else at Tara but me, Gary and the ghosts of sacrifices past.
One of which went pop! like a soap bubble. Disappeared like he’d been erased entirely, and a glimmer of brilliant emerald-green power filled the space his voice had been in.
Familiar power. The power of a teenage demigod, granddaughter to the Wild Hunt. Suzanne Quinley, who had, at Halloween, unraveled a thread of history, and wiped a man from existence.
A man who had been birthed from a legendary cauldron that raised the dead as zombies, bound to do the bidding of the living. The Master had made it. Somebody had bound it so it could do relatively little evil. And I had—with some help—destroyed it.
If an ancient king of Tara had been one of the unfortunates caught within the cauldron’s magic, there was more than a little bad magic going on here. It was like the entire history of the world was corrupt, although as soon as I thought it I didn’t know why I was surprised. Corruption was kind of civilization’s story of humanity, from Adam and Eve all the way down the line.
That didn’t mean I had to like it. It certainly didn’t mean that in the here and now, thousands of years before my own time, I had to sit back and let him have his way. There was no point in having great power if I didn’t sling it around a little bit. Lugh, ard rí of the aos sí—I bet that sounded much cooler if I said it all in Irish instead of pidgining it together—did not have to die today. Determined, I pulled my magic into line and turned it on the dying king.
And slammed headlong into Suzanne’s power, lush and green and implacable. My own silver-blue talent shorted out in a fizzle of sparks, gathered itself again and buzzed against Suzanne’s, searching for a way in.
I hit reverberations instead, shockwaves that came from the none-too-distant past. No matter how I tried to slither by, they caught me in their wake and tossed me back to the beginning. I had mad skills, but they didn’t add up to godlike power. Despite this accidental traipse into the past, I also didn’t make a habit of jumping around through time, and the more I pushed for a way through, the more I had the impression I was simply on the wrong side of time to change anything in the here and now. To heal Lugh, I needed to step even further back, back to before Suzy’s rewrite, and work my way forward. Too much had already changed. The old needed to be fixed before the new could be altered.
Not very hopefully, I said, “Rattler? Raven?” but while my guides were still awake within me, they gave no clarifying power surge in response. Shapeshifting, dealing with the dead: they could handle those things. Time travel was evidently a whole ’nother kettle of fish.
For the first time since I’d gotten a handle on my shamanic powers, I let the magic go without having healed someone I genuinely wanted to see live. Lugh dragged another blood-bubbly breath and my face crumpled. Failure sucked. “I’m sorry. Something’s already happened here, Lugh. Time’s been changed, and I can’t change it again to heal you. Do you…”
Of course he wouldn’t remember. I didn’t even really have to ask. Suzanne had wiped out Lugh’s predecessor so thoroughly that he’d never existed at all. Someone else had played his role instead, a thought which dropped through me like a lead balloon.
Time had been rewritten. The Morrígan had accepted the Master as, well, her master. I was willing to put money on that not being a coincidence. “Lugh, ah, God, I’m sorry, but how long have the sacrifices been going on? How long have the high kings been marrying the Morrígan?”
“Al…ways. Since…Haw-hee…was slain…by the Morrígan.”
That was about as useful to me as a hole in the head, since I had not a clue what a Hawhee was, but this was not a good time to go into it. I nodded and clutched Lugh’s hand, feeling once more like the useless ingénue. “I’m so sorry. I am so sorry, Lugh. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
He smiled, faint bloody expression. “It was supposed to happen…exactly…this way.”
Great. I’d just gotten an I told you so from a dying king. I was trying to figure out how to respond to that when his hand spasmed around mine and determined fear came into his eyes. He surged up half an inch, which under the circumstances was a heroic effort, and whispered, “Warn…Nooda…!”
I had no more idea what a Nooda was than a Hawhee, but I nodded a vigorous, wordless promise, and Lugh, reassured, collapsed silently into death.
Gary stopped to pick up the Morrígan’s sword and throw it several yards away, then came to kneel by me. We sat together silently for what seemed like a long time, but eventually I said, “Who’s Hawhee?” with no expectation of an answer.
“I’m guessin’ a king,” Gary said, which was equal parts obvious and helpful. “Nuada’s one. They called him Nuada of the Silver Hand ’cause his got— Ah, hell, that’s who Hawhee was. It ain’t spelled like it sounds. It’s spelled…” He frowned, clearly calling the name up in memory, then rattled off, “E-o-c-h-a-i-d-h, Eochaidh, yeah. He’s the guy who cut off Nuada’s hand.”
I’d heard of Nuada. He’d made my necklace. It was just, “I thought it was pronounced New-AH-da.”
“Yeah, well, I thought Eochaidh was pronounced Ee-ock-chaye-d-hhh.” He aspirated the last sound like an old wheezing dog and I coughed on his behalf. Gary closed Lugh’s eyes, then cautiously asked, “What happened, Jo? I kinda saw you start to do your thing and then bounce right off a green granite cliff face.”
I blinked up from the dead king in surprise. “You saw that? I mean, you Saw it? Wow. That was…” I trailed off and stared at Lugh again. “That was repercussions. That was Suzanne Quinley, Gary. That was her in the zombie fight. You know the one she obliterated? He came from here. Not quite now, but somewhen around now. Time had to be rewritten around the space he wasn’t anymore.” The language was not well suited to referring to events that had been made to not-happen. I wet my lips and kept going as best I could. “Maybe he was supposed to be Eochaidh’s successor. Maybe he was meant to defeat the Morrígan, or to really marry her, but maybe instead the Master slipped in where he was supposed to be and made her a goddess instead.”
We both looked over at where she still lay sprawled across the grass, a bit of blood leaking through her hair. I said, “Only she isn’t, you know. She’s more than Lugh was, but she’s not like Cernunnos. She’s just very, very powerful.”
“So’re you.”
Somehow that made me feel a little better. I said, “Anyway,” more softly. “Anyway, so this whole era, which I guess means the whole timeline going forward, is all screwed up because of Suzy wiping that zombie out. I couldn’t heal Lugh because there was already too much interference. Something big already got changed. It wouldn’t let me change even more.”
Gary’s gray eyes were big as a lemur’s. “Are you gonna rewrite the whole history of the world, darlin’?”
“It doesn’t work that way.” I sounded very sure of myself, but I had, to a much smaller degree, already been there and done that. “Time tidies things up. The best I can do is close the loop, but I have to do it from our end of time. I can’t set the fix in motion back here.”
“But you can if we get home?”
“I can try.”
“Damn,” Gary said in a low voice. “I mean, damn, Jo.”
A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. “Yeah, well, don’t get too impressed. I haven’t pulled it off yet. And I still don’t even know how we ended up here, much less how to get us home, never mind how to find Nuada, and I can’t go home without trying to warn him.”
Gary’s expression went funny and he nodded over my shoulder. “We could ask her.”
Alarm crashed into the pit of my stomach and I tried scrabbling for my sword and leaping to my feet at the same time. Neither was wildly successful. I ended up lurching in a half circle with fingertips full of grass.
Fortunately, the woman coming up behind us was unarmed except by radiant beauty. I stole a glance at the unconscious Morrígan and the dead king. They were both still inhumanly attractive. I knew plenty of good-looking people, but these guys made the best of them look like ugly stepsisters. I glanced at the new arrival again, then shot a look at Gary, whose eyebrows had risen. He nodded, and we both gaped at the woman.
She was youthful now when she hadn’t been minutes ago, in the future. She wore a robe identical to the Morrígan’s, only hers was white bound with gold rather than blue with black. She, too, had tattoos banding her upper arms, but in red, not blue. Her hair was coppery and her eyes green, and she had the same kind of gently overflowing aura that had helped tip me off to Lugh’s alienness. Like the Morrígan, she exuded power. Also like the Morrígan, it wasn’t honest-to-God deity-level power. I knew who she was before she spoke.
“Welcome to Tara, Siobhán Walkingstick. I am Brigid.”
Score one for me. With my usual politeness, I said, “Couldn’t you have told me all this from the other end of time?” instead of “Hello.”
Surprised amusement shot her eyebrows toward her hairline. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know what you mean.”
I squinted. “Yeah, I’m sure not.” Well, maybe she didn’t. Not right now, anyway. I was going to have a talking-to with her, though, when we got back home. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter. Hello, Brigid. Nice to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Have you, now.” She kept sounding amused, which was better than the Morrígan’s snide superiority. “And what is it you’ve heard?”
“That you’re her opposite,” I said with a thumb-jerk toward the Morrígan, “and…” Okay, maybe I hadn’t heard all that much about her after all. I knew who she was. That was really about it, but for me, that was a lot. “And you’re one of the good guys?”
Brigid’s eyes grew more serious. “Death is not an aspect of evil, little sh—”
“Joanne.” I really hated being called “little shaman.” It was bad enough from Cernunnos, a certified god. I was not going to take it from people who were somewhere between human and sublime on the divinity scale.
Her eyebrow quirked. “Siobhán.”
“For God’s sake, what is this, a haggle? My name’s Joanne. Use it or don’t, but lay off with the insulting diminutives. And I know death isn’t inherently evil, but I’m not so sure there’s not something fundamentally wrong about war, ’cause, you know, basic rule of thumb: killing people is bad. So don’t try to tell me she’s one of the good guys—” I did the thumb-jerk again “—or that you don’t represent basically everything she’s not. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.” That was probably an unforgivably American way of phrasing it, but it got the point across.
Brigid made a face that indicated I had won a free pass for this round. I let out an explosive breath, tried to reel my temper back in and snapped, “So what do you want from me?”
So much for reeled-in tempers. Brigid smiled indulgently, like I was an ill-mannered five-year-old she wouldn’t have to deal with for very long. Probably that should’ve chastised me, but it only irritated me all the more. I turned to Gary and made a series of exasperated faces, trying to work myself into a better mood as Brigid said, “It’s your help I’m needing, gwyld. There’s a thing that’s been made in the near-distant past, and I can sense its touch on you.”
I clutched my left forearm, then bit back a hiss. Gnashy dog bites were not meant to be seized. It hurt. While I waited for the pain to fade, Brigid said, “Not that mark. This is the touch of death and life reborn, visited upon you thrice.”
I said, “Thrice, who says thrice,” under my breath and tried to count up the number of times I’d been through the life-and-near-death cycle in the past year or so. I stopped when I got to five, satisfied that Brigid didn’t know what she was talking about. Then I wondered if individual instances mattered or if it was a per-adventure count, in which case she might be on the money with three. There was the whole mess with Cernunnos and Herne that started all this, the dive into the cauldron and Saturday night’s exhaustive rebirthing scene. I didn’t think I’d been grievously injured the other thirty-seven or so times I’d figured I was about to die, so they probably didn’t add to the tally. “All right, okay, thrice. So what does that mean? Why does three times matter if you need my help?”
“There’s power in threes.” It sounded as if she was having a hard time not adding “You idiot” to that statement, but after a moment she managed to go on without saying it. “Bran’s cauldron has left its mark on you.”
“Less mark than I left on it,” I muttered.
Brigid laughed. “And it’s that which makes me need your help. I can sense its history on you, gwyld. I can sense that for most of its existence it has done little harm.”
I stared at her. “Little harm? Are you serious? That thing seduces the living. Invites them to crawl inside so it can suck their life out and turn them into zombies bidden to do the command of—” Bidden. Who says bidden? I turned my stare at the sky, as if answers or excuses for my word choices lay there. They didn’t.
“How many…zombies…were within the cauldron, Joanne Walker?”
“I don’t know, ten or so. Not very many.”
“Ten men,” Brigid murmured, “including Bres, he who was once ard rí of this land and is now taken from time, have died for the Morrígan and her master.”
My jaw flapped open. “Wait. Bres? He’s the guy who came undone? You remember him? How?”
“The world cannot abide imbalance. When my sister became death’s warrior, a similar and opposite path was offered to me. We remember that which has been changed, and your presence here gives me hope that the cauldron might yet be bound.”
“It can be. I mean, it was. Oh!” God, I was slow. “You’re the one who did it! Somebody broke the bindings, but not until just last year. I knew something powerful had set them—”
Brigid’s face froze momentarily, offense taken at something rather than someone. She let it go, though, as I rattled on. “I’ve been dying to meet whoever did it. Not actually dying. I do enough of that. But it didn’t feel like human magic, and I was right!” I wanted to dance a jig, by gum, though doing so over the bodies of a dead man and an unconscious powermonger seemed ever so slightly inappropriate. “How did you do it? How will you do it?”
“How did you destroy it?”
The impulse to jig faded. An innocent soul had sacrificed herself to make sure the cauldron was destroyed. Much more subdued, I said, “With help.”
“Then it is with help that I’ll bind it.”
I genuinely didn’t get she meant me until she held out her hand in invitation.
Chapter Seven
“…is this why you threw me back to this end of time? I mean, you’ve been here before, right? You knew this was going to happen when you met us at Tara in the future. Seriously, couldn’t you have just said something back then? Future then?”
Her eyebrows rose. “I meant what I said, Joanne Walker. I wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. You’re the one unstuck in time, the one who passes through many points at once. I travel through time day by day, as most living creatures do. If you have met me again, it awaits me in my future even if it resides in your past.”
I liked the idea of Brigid being responsible for our time traveling a lot more than I liked being responsible for it myself, so it took me a minute to get over that. Actually, it more like took me a moment to even approach it. Getting over it was still on the agenda. Gary, meantime, hissed, “That was her?”
He’d picked up the sword I’d dropped and had taken to standing guard over the Morrígan, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t listening. I gave a big sloppy frustrated shrug. “I think so. Or an avatar. Do you use avatars? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. How am I supposed to help? I don’t know any binding spells.”
I gave that a mental once-over to make sure it was true, then startled. It wasn’t: I’d encountered a binding spell in my first hours as a shaman. It called on gods and elements and things, and it probably wasn’t a safe bet to rely on me to cast it. Wisdom being the better part of valor, I said nothing about it.
Turned out it didn’t matter, as Brigid said, “The binding will be tied to you. Now that I know you have the power and the will to destroy it, the binding need only last until the cauldron comes into your presence.”
I stared at her. Began to speak. Held up a finger to stop both myself and her from saying anything. Turned around. Walked away. Stared fiercely at the southern horizon. There was a tower there, about a mile away, just like in my time. I glared at the tower until I trusted myself not to shriek like a harpy, then gathered myself to face Brigid again.
“I don’t know why you’d set a binding that can be broken when the damned cauldron enters my vicinity, like, my city, rather than my actual physical presence, but that’s what happens. People die because of that, Brigid. I get that closed time loops are tidy and all—” and, hoo boy, was I developing a hate-on for them “—but we’re talking about people’s lives here.”
“I would not set such a spell,” she said both serenely and alliteratively, “but the years are long between now and then, are they not? Even the most powerful of magics may slip, over so much time. And how many would die, Siobhán Walkingstick, if I did not make the magic at all?”
Using logic to derail my head of steam was a lousy trick. I muttered, “Well, at least promise to tighten up the wards every few centuries so the bindings can only be broken if I’m there. Or better yet, so only I can break them. Without murdering poor Jason Chen.” It didn’t work that way. I knew it didn’t, because it hadn’t. I doubted we’d get back to our time and discover history had retrofitted itself and that Jason had gotten to take his sisters trick-or-treating after all. For one intense, searing moment I wished like hell it did work that way, but time, life and Grandfather Sky were not that kind. If I ever got to meet the makers of the world I had a word or two I wanted to say to them.
Brigid promised, “I’ll do my best,” and I nodded, knowing it wouldn’t be enough. Then I followed her gaze as it went to Lugh. She murmured, “My sister must take her sacrifice so we might find the cauldron to bind it,” apologetically.
It wasn’t physically possible for my head to spin, but it tried. A headache sprang up for its efforts, and while I was struggling to find something politic to say, Gary growled, “You gotta be kidding, lady. All this and you don’t even know where the damned thing is?”
Brigid stiffened. “It would be a great prize for my sister’s master. They would not leave it somewhere easy to find.”
“It’s in the cave.” I sighed as Gary and Brigid both raised their eyebrows at me. “The one the werewolves came from. Somewhere to the west of here, near a…” I waved my hands. “Near another hill.”
“Ireland,” Brigid said dryly, “is full of hills.”
I glowered. “A built-up one. Somebody made a huge pile of rocks on top of a gigantic flat hill.”
“Cnoc na rí,” Brigid said every bit as dryly as before. “We would call it a mountain, Joanne Walker. The mountain of kings. You speak of the cairns atop it.”
“I don’t know what Knocknaree is,” I said, approximating her pronunciation as best I could, “but it’s a marker for the cave, and if you know where it is, we should probably haul ass that direction and bind the damned cauldron so Gary and I can go home.”
Gary squeaked, “That might be a problem, doll,” and when I looked over, the Morrígan had my sword at his throat.
I had shot somebody four mornings ago. It was not something I was proud of and not something I wanted to repeat. Ever. Except I’d have dropped the Morrígan in a heartbeat, if I’d had my gun. I doubted it would change the whole history of the world. Someone else similar would just replace her. But I didn’t have my gun, and later I would probably think that was good, because digging modern-day shell casings out of a millennia-old Tara hillside would really throw archaeologists for a loop.
Right now, though, my fingers clenched like I was squeezing a trigger, and the Morrígan gave me a tight, nasty smile. “Don’t think of it, gwyld. You may draw a blade from the air, but not while it resides in my hand.”
She was right, too. I could almost feel the hilt in my hand, but there was a trembling resistance, too, like a magnet not quite strong enough to pull its counterpart toward it. But the Morrígan’s magic—or grip—was stronger, and the harder I tried calling it to me, the redder a scratch on Gary’s throat became.
I stopped trying. The sword relaxed, giving Gary room to swallow. In fact, his whole big self relaxed. Sagged, some might even say. He had both hands on the Morrígan’s arm, classic knife-at-throat pose, but he wasn’t going to be able to pull her away without slitting his own gullet. His head fell forward, shoulders caved as best they could to protect his throat in a moment of defeat. His spirit animal’s presence was agitated, not something I’d ever imagined a tortoise could be. But even tortoises had vulnerable throats.
I was trying to figure out what to do when Gary threw his head back and smashed the Morrígan’s nose.
Roughly one million awful things happened at once.
Cartilage crunched. The Morrígan bellowed with pain. She even dropped the sword, but blood was already pouring from Gary’s throat: he’d cut it himself with the sheer violence of his action.
The Morrígan dropped him, too, and staggered back with both hands clapped to her nose. Blood ran down her forearms toward her elbows. Normally I would mock a warrior woman who couldn’t take the pain of a little broken nose, but Gary was bleeding, and besides, I’d broken my nose when I was a kid. It hurt like a motherfucker.
Gary’s hands went to his throat, such a familiar cinematic response that it could have been funny if it wasn’t a real person a few seconds from bleeding to death. He dropped to the earth with lumbering grace as I charged forward, vision turning silver-blue with fear and fury.
In the center of that brilliance, the Morrígan crouched over Lugh’s body. She glanced up, saw me coming and splayed one hand open with much the same gesture she’d used to ruin my coat. Power exploded out, black wrath laced with blue.
Brigid, inexplicably, stood between me and the burst of power. Her shields flared, white and gold, but the blast of black magic still hit hard enough that her torso bowed with the impact. She fell gracefully, never in my way as I ran for Gary.
An ugly sound of frustration erupted from the back of the Morrígan’s throat, but she didn’t try again. Her ravens came to her, one on each shoulder. She sneered at me, then dissipated in a whirl of blue mist.
The sleeve of my coat turned to shredded leather again as she disappeared.
I hit the bloodstained grass on my knees, both hands covering Gary’s at his throat. There was no careful visualization, no rebuilding of vessels, veins, muscle, tendons, skin one by very quick one. No delving into the garden of Gary’s soul to find the heart of him and the idea of how he thought he should be. I didn’t need to, for two reasons. One, I’d tried healing a cut throat once before. It hadn’t worked, but the concept was familiar.
Two, and much more important, he and I both had total faith in my ability to heal him. That was all it took, really. A rush of magic and suddenly all the blood was on our hands, on our clothes, on the ground, without any more pumping free of his body.
I sat back on my heels, my own heart pumping at about a zillion miles an hour. As far as I could tell, the entire incident, from the moment the Morrígan put the rapier to Gary’s throat all the way through to his healing, had taken about ten seconds. Ten very exciting, heavily punctuated seconds, but ten seconds.
Gary, hands now exploring his throat to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, croaked, “What took you so long, doll?”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. It was high-pitched and hysterical, not amused, but I did laugh, and he gave me one of the sexy old coot grins that had all my friends convinced he was my sugar daddy. I waved a bloody hand, said, “Oh, you know, I could tell she hadn’t hit the jugular, I had all the time in the world,” then burst into tears and fell over on him. “What were you thinking?!”
He put his arm around me, mouth on top of my head. “Figured I knew a girl who could fix me up in no time flat if I did somethin’ crazy to break the status quo. You were never gonna risk it.”
“Of course I wasn’t! Jesus, Gary!” I wanted to punch him, but punching a guy who’d just had his throat cut seemed low. I sniffled into his shoulder instead.
He chuckled against my hair, then drew a deep breath. “Thanks, sweetheart.”
I wrapped my arm over his ribs and hugged him as hard as I could. “I’d say ‘anytime,’ except if you ever do something like that again I’ll kill you myself.”
“Nah, you wouldn’t. Who’d go on all these crazy adventures with you then?”
“Billy. Morrison, the poor bastard. Random strangers getting swept up in my wake. Ha—” The last sound wasn’t a word, just an inhaled breath that Gary rumbled a laugh over.
“Yeah yeah yeah. Look, I hate to break our quality time up, Jo, but wasn’t there a bad guy here a minute ago?”
We both pushed up on our elbows. The Morrígan’s disappearing act had left no trace of where she’d gone. Brigid, though, sat against the bloodstained Lia Fáil, one hand pressed to her chest. I whispered, “Shit,” and scrambled to her on hands and knees, then stopped with my hands hovering above her, half-afraid to touch her, totally afraid to try healing her after the disaster with Lugh. “Jesus, are you okay?”
“Well enough.” Her voice was faint, and her overflowing aura weak. I bit my lower lip, waking healing power, but she shook her head. “Not in this time and place, I fear. My sister’s strength is the greater here. Do not expose yourself to her any more than you must.”
“You look like you could use some must.”
She smiled, but it faded. “Do not concern yourself with me. Concern yourself instead with my sister. I had meant to follow her to her master’s lair, to the cauldron’s seat—”
“But instead you took one for the team. Um, thanks for that. I think you might have saved my life there. That was a lot of power she threw at me.”
“Yes. Her success would have been unparalleled, had she taken your life so far out of your time. I could not allow that, even—” She sighed and I finished for her:
“Even if it meant losing her and the cauldron? I dunno, Bridge. Magic’s damned hard to track. Unless you’re better at it than I am.”
Brigid shook her head. I nodded and glanced at the sky. Raven had been up there somewhere, fighting with the Morrígan’s ravens. “I don’t suppose you know where they all went, do you?” I asked him, and he flew down out of the sunlight to whack me on the head with a wing. “Yeah, sorry, I didn’t think so. Next time I’ll try not to lose the bad guy. You did a good job kicking her ravens’ asses, though. Shiny food in your future.”
Raven cawed with pleasure and faded away. Gary came to crouch beside me looking big-eyed and happy as a kid in a candy store. “I saw him, Jo. Your raven. I saw him.”
I smiled, then leaned over to hug him again, hard. “Welcome to having the Sight, Mr. Muldoon. All right, let’s head for Knocknaree so we can kill that bitch. Look what she did to my coat.”
Gary grinned a little. “You’re gonna kill her over a coat, Jo?”
For some reason it wasn’t as funny as it should be. I shook my head. “I’m going to kill her for cutting your throat. The coat was just petty.”
“Good to know I’m loved.”
“You are,” I said, still solemn. “You are.” Then in a rush of delight, I smacked his shoulder. “Dude! Dude, you totally busted her nose, you know that, right? How many people get to say they head-butted a goddess?”
Gary chortled, then tried to disguise his pleasure by saying, “Thought you said she wasn’t a goddess.”
“Oh, ffssht. Close enough for government work. Okay, Knockna…” We were several thousand years in the past. There were no itty bitty Irish cars to drive on the itty bitty Irish roads. In fact, I bet there weren’t even many itty bitty roads to drive on. “…just where is this Knocknaree place?”
“In the West.” Brigid sounded like Galadriel, except I was pretty sure she only meant the west of Ireland, not some far-off land of everlasting peace and calm.
From our perspective, however, the difference was negligible. Ireland wasn’t a big island, but a couple hundred miles was a long way when you were traveling on foot. I exhaled noisily. “I don’t suppose we can go home, drive over and meet you there in a few thousand years, huh? You oughta be able to make it there by then.”
“I think not,” a brand-new voice said, and Brigid faded away.
Chapter Eight
I refused to flinch. It took every last bit of willpower, but I refused to flinch. Instead, with all the panache at my command—which wasn’t much—I said, “I’m getting tired of mysterious voices and people disappearing,” to Gary before I allowed myself to look around.
The air had changed quality: mist sparkled more, like bits of ice rode on it, and my breath steamed as another of the annoyingly beautiful, slightly inhuman aos sí came up on us. This one looked like he’d been dipped in silver from his hair to his boots. I’d never seen genuinely silver hair before; even Cernunnos’s was really brown and ashy. This guy’s actually shone like the metal. My gaze fell to his left hand.
It was silver, the knuckles gleaming and flexing like molten metal as they moved. I stared at it, mesmerized, then shook myself. “You’d be Nuada, then.” I gave myself bonus points for pronouncing it correctly. He didn’t have to know I’d only just learned how.
“I would be. And you would be…” He was silent a long time, then cleared his throat uncertainly. “You would be my bride? The Morrígan?”
My jaw fell open and my eyes went googly while Gary had a good laugh. While it was nice to know having his throat cut hadn’t changed his laughter, it was also clear Nuada wasn’t keen on being the butt of a joke. I elbowed Gary, who manned up and stopped laughing as I said, “No, my name’s Joanne. The Morrígan’s stepped out for a bite to eat.”
Gary snorted laughter again. I elbowed him harder, to no avail. “Look, no, sorry. She just took off with Lugh, and Brigid disapp—”
“Lugh?” Nuada’s eyebrows made a heavy silver line across his forehead. “Lugh is half a year gone. How else might I be here, ready to wed the Morrígan?”
“What?” I’d thought the days of me saying “What?” all the time were past. Apparently not. “No, he just died not ten min—”
“Died?”
Oh yeah. The aos sí weren’t hip to the actual goings-on with the Morrígan. I started to cast my gaze heavenward, as if to gather strength for an explanation, but it got only about as high as the horizon before Nuada’s sword was at my throat. He repeated, “Died?” and it didn’t take a super genius to grasp that I was up next on the list of dead people.
Panic was clearly the right response. Panic, some flailing, a frantic explanation; all the sorts of things I’d done before. They’d gotten old, though. This time I just sighed and said, “The Morrígan killed him, your royal nitwitness, not me.”
His sword poked half an inch closer, which was enough to part the skin on my throat.
Or it would have been, if I hadn’t finally learned the habit Coyote had been trying to hammer into me my entire shamanic career: shields up, Captain. Shields up at all times.
Nuada’s sword rubbed against the glimmer of power layering my body, and didn’t so much as leave a scratch. The Morrígan hadn’t drawn blood, either. I had the damned werewolf to thank for that: she had driven home what Coyote had failed to. Unfortunately, she’d only done so after she’d bitten me. There was an argument for better late than never, but I probably wasn’t the person to be making it.
The silver-handed elf king’s forehead wrinkled ever so slightly. He pushed a little harder and the sword, rather than sticking in my gullet, began sliding sideways. Chagrined, he pulled it back into place, but stopped leaning into it. “What are you?”
“A shaman. Gwyld. You might as well put the sword away. It’s not going to do you any good. What do you mean, six months have passed?” The landscape looked the same. No particular hint of winter. Of course, I neither had any idea what an Irish winter thousands of years in the past looked like, nor any call in judging what time was or wasn’t doing. I was already millennia out of my league, after all. Six months here or there probably didn’t count for much, and the air was colder.
“What do you mean, dead?”
“It ain’t nice to go around interrogatin’ people by holdin’ swords at their throats,” Gary rumbled.
Nuada looked at him. Looked at me. I could just about see the wheels turning: if the young woman could hold a sword attack off with the power of her mind, what could the old guy with several decades more experience do?
Judiciously, and with the expression of a cat who meant to fall off the wall, Nuada put his sword away. Then he spread his hands, palms up, in a gesture of conciliation and goodwill. “I would hear your tale.”
“Yeah, I just bet you would.” Snark would get me nowhere. I raspberried a long breath out, inhaled again and put on my best perky tour guide voice. “The Morrígan’s been murdering your high kings for at least the last ten or so. I would strongly suggest not marrying her, if I was you. Were you. Was? Were. If I were you.” I didn’t care if it was right. It sounded better.
“Jo,” Gary muttered, “shut up.”
I said, “He asked,” with the pitch and tone of an insulted child, then kicked myself in the ankle. It was a good thing I already had an Indian name, or my Indian name would be Kicks Self In The Ankle. “Nuada,” I said with every ounce of patience at my disposal, “your bride to be is one of the bad guys. I have literally traveled through time to tell you this, a statement which I expect is supported by my outlandish clothing. I would beg of you, your majesty, to listen to me.”
The poor guy recognized the patience in my voice, but not that it was directed at myself. Nobody could be as exasperating as I was. I suddenly felt sorry for Morrison. And for Nuada, who drew himself up with offense, because who wouldn’t when some weirdly dressed chick from the future condescended at you.
“I’m sorry,” I said before he had time to launch into a tirade. “Really. It’s me I’m disgusted with, not you. I’m having a hard time with the explaining. Time travel sucks.” Lightning struck—metaphorically, thank God; that was not the sort of phrase I should use lightly—and I shoved a thumb under my necklace, bringing it to his attention. “Look! Wait! Look at this!”
If nothing else, my increasingly bizarre antics caught him off guard, giving me time to unfasten the choker before he decided to berate my bad manners. The necklace gleamed as I handed it over, misty light catching the triskelions and the quartered circle that was its pendant.
Nuada took it with his silver hand, which wasn’t articulated or in any other fashion prosthetic-like, aside, of course, from it being silver. It moved and flexed like flesh, and I fancied I could even see blood vessels beneath the surface as he turned the necklace up to examine it. “This is my work,” he said eventually. “I would know it anywhere. And yet I have never made such a piece in all my years.”
“And this?” I put my hand out and called my sword. It zinged across the ten or so feet of intervening space and slapped into my palm like it and I were magnetized.
Nuada’s eyebrows shot up, though his words suggested he was more impressed by the sword itself than the zooming across space: “I’ve never seen a blade such as that. What is it?”
“It’s called a rapier. They come into fashion in about…” I had a vague idea rapiers were sixteeth-century weapons, but I had no idea when that was in relation to us. “In a few thousand years.”
“It’s beautiful.” He opened his hand in request and I put the sword into it, watching his attention flit between rapier and necklace. “Both mine,” he said. “Both not yet forged. For whom do I make such pieces of art? A far-flung gwyld?”
“I think you make the necklace for the Morrígan. The sword belongs—belonged—to Cernunnos. I took it.”
His gaze snapped to mine. “You took a blade from the god of the Wild Hunt?”
“It’s a long story.”
“This is not the sword I made for that god.”
For a statement, it sounded remarkably like a demand. I nodded and made a space of about four feet between my hands. “You made him one about this long. Narrower at the hilt and broader at the point. It’s beautiful, too, but it’s brutal. It’s for killing things. This one’s more elegant. It’s for killing things, too, obviously, but you can imagine it’s for…toying with them, too. He asked for it, when they came into style, and after he lost it to me you wouldn’t make him another.” I wet my lips. “That happens in the future. Don’t tell him I told you you didn’t make him another, because I’m pretty sure that’d end up being my fault somehow and he and I already have a lot of water under the bridge to get over.”
Nuada squinted. So did I. Gary just groaned. “You gotta learn to control your mouth sometimes, Jo.”
“What fun would that be?”
“Can you call him here?” Nuada asked, ever so softly. “I am inclined to believe you, unborn gwyld, but I would like to hear it from Cernunnos, as well.”
My heart jumped at the idea. If it was midwinter, Cernunnos rode our world with the Hunt at his back. I might be able to call him to a center of power like Tara. “He and I don’t meet for thousands of years.”
Nuada gave me a familiar look, the one suggesting I was the slow kid in the class. “Do you imagine one such as he is bound by time?”
“…” I shuffled my arguments away without even voicing them. Cernunnos had never mentioned meeting me in the distant past. On the other hand, it wasn’t like our first encounters had been old home night at the bar. Having silenced my own objections, I glanced around Tara.
“It’s too big.” It wasn’t, and I knew it. The tower to the south—southwest, really—was matched at the other three lesser compass points, too, though none of those had survived into my time. I could feel power lines dragging through all four of them, centering in Tara. Centering where we stood, really, at the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny. Some idiot had moved it, in my time. Not very far, a couple hundred yards, maybe, but it was no longer dead at the center of a vast quartered circle.
I knelt, one hand on the blood-spattered stone and one in the cool green grass, and my last thought for a few minutes was that maybe it had been a wise man, not a fool, who had moved the Stone from its original resting place.
Tara required only a nudge to awaken. Just a touch of magic seeking out the power circle. I was astonished, in fact, that it hadn’t roared to life when I’d healed Gary, but perhaps that had been internal enough not to draw the site’s attention. Now, though, with my power seeking to build a sanctuary and to gain a god’s attention, Tara came to the fore. I was little more than a conduit for a land so steeped in magic that it had its own will. No wonder the Master wanted this place under his thrall: with Tara’s power at his command he could alter events in an ever-growing circle from this epicenter.
Magic shot up from the Lia Fáil, hit some distant invisible ceiling and spilled down evenly to set the four towers alight. The faintest gray taint ran through it all. Gray, not black; the Master’s hold wasn’t that strong, not here, not yet, despite the sacrifices. This was still a place given over to what was good in humanity, and if I had anything to say about it, it would remain that way.
I glanced up at the midwinter sun and whispered the closest thing to a prayer I’d ever spoken. A plea to a god to come and visit me, so I could prove myself to a skeptical elf king and perhaps alter the course of events back to how they always should have been. It was possible he would; these were the first days of his greatest power, the time from the solstice through to the twelfth night after Christmas. He rode across the world now, collecting souls, and would soon retreat to the world he had been born of, Tir na nOg, there to rest until Halloween welcomed him back to our world. He had ridden to others when they’d asked, in the past.
I was still somehow surprised when the sky split open and he came to me.
Even knowing what to expect, he was overwhelming. The changes were coming on him, earlier than they had in my time. A thickness to his shoulders and neck, preparing to bear the weight of horns beginning to distort his temples. His eyes were light-flecked, wild and alien: this was a being who belonged to the universe, and the universe to him. He went beyond time as I understood it, a raw piece of star stuff made into a beautiful, inhuman form full of lust and energy and anger.
His host was smaller than I’d seen it before. The gray-bearded king was missing, as was the archer who had shot Petite’s gas tank full of holes. The boy Rider was with him, though, which gave me a shock. It shouldn’t have, since we were centuries, maybe millennia, before Herne and his spells, but I’d never seen the boy looking quite so comfortable at his father’s side. That child bound Cernunnos to time, but not, it seemed, to linear time. For a moment I wondered if magic was just physics nobody understood, but that was philosophy beyond my scope.
Particularly when Cernunnos himself was before me, taking up all the air in Tara. I loved Morrison, but something about the horned god just hit me on a primal level.
Probably the fact that he was a primal creature. Nuada, silver and beautiful as he was, looked like a bad knockoff beside the ancient god. Cernunnos swung down from his stallion, the beast that made me think of unicorns, if unicorns were depicted as savage, brilliant, vicious warmongers of devastating power instead of light fluffy balls of purity and rainbows.
“Little gwyld,” Cernunnos said, dry as a southwestern desert. “Siobhán Walkingstick. Joanne Walker. Thou has—”
Cernunnos rarely spoke English. Mostly, magic translated what he meant. In this particular case, I knew there were underlying words, a language I didn’t actually know, but what I heard was an incredibly idiomatic, “Thou hast a lot of nerve, Joanne Walker.”
That put the world back under my feet. I laughed and turned my palms up apologetically. “I know. Sorry. Hello, Cernunnos. It’s been a while.” It hadn’t really. Not from my direction. But from another direction it had been a few thousand years, and I figured that counted for more. I turned to Nuada, hands still spread. “Is this convincing enough?”
Nuada looked a bit pale around the edges. “It is.”
“A point?” Cernunnos asked in disbelief. “Thou hast—”
“I asked you not to do that. The theeing and the thouing.” I found it disconcerting and peculiarly attractive, which added to the disconcertment.
Cernunnos snapped his teeth at me, but for the second time in our relationship, complied with my linguistic preferences. “You’ve brought me here to make a point, Siobhán Walkingstick?”
“More like to prove I am who I say I am so he won’t marry the Morrígan and end up in that damned cauldron like the rest of them. Apparently elves need a lot of convincing,” I added a bit sourly, because really, I felt like the whole being out of time and having magic items created by the silversmith should count for enough. On the other hand, though I would have never believed I’d end up thinking this, any day that involved a chat with the horned god was a pretty good one, so I wasn’t going to complain too much.
“She speaks truly,” Cernunnos said, just in case Nuada hadn’t picked up on that. He nodded stiffly, and Cernunnos looked back at me, wickedness in his emerald eyes. “Ride with me. Let us go to Cnoc na rí and battle the beast who so nearly drains my spirit so many eons hence. Let us render the gift you gave me then unnecessary.”
His memory really did work in both directions. A shiver spilled over my arms and I looked away. “You knew,” I said uncertainly. “In the future, in my past, you must have known it was me at the diner. That I would take your sword. That we’d become…”
Wickedness lit his beautiful angular face again. “Siobhán Walkingstick, thou hast no idea what we shall become. But I do. I do. Come,” he said again as I gaped at him. “Let us change the future that you know, my gwyld. Let us defeat death in these backward days of history, and see what new world awaits.”
I wanted to. Oh, God, I wanted to. But I had ridden with the Hunt three times already, and I had barely escaped with my soul to call my own. And I knew I hadn’t ridden with him now, in the past, because I had escaped with my soul, and I didn’t think for a moment I could ride with him four times and not be his. Part of me wanted to be his. Part of me always would.
But sometime in the distant future I had already made this choice. Chosen a mortal existence with a mortal man, and even then Cernunnos had left me with an offer. A moment at the end of everything, where he and I might ride together one last time.
And he knew what I didn’t: what we would become. I had only had glimpses of it, if that was the future we shared at all, and I still wasn’t ready to make that choice.
“I can’t,” I whispered with genuine regret. “You know I can’t, my lord god of the hunt. I can’t ride with you again. I never could.”
“And yet I try,” Cernunnos said playfully. “Time and again throughout time, I try. Until we meet again, my gwyld. Until time brings us together again.” He swept a bow from the back of his great silver stallion, then looked to Nuada, all his grace turned to sour prissiness. “I would like that sword back, elf king.”
“It seems time and this gwyld are yours to weave and weft,” Nuada said without a hint of remorse. “Make your plea to her, not me. No one else in history has borne two of my blades, horned god. No one else has dared lose one.”
I actually expected him to finish the little lecture with “Don’t push it,” but he managed to avoid the temptation. Cernunnos crooked a smile, acknowledgment of both the scolding and its unspoken end, then reined the stallion up, its hooves punching dents in the soft green hillside. “A pity,” he said to all of us. “It would have been good to challenge the Morrígan’s master so early in his bid for power, but even I will not ride against death without a force for life at my side.”
Gary, diffidently, said, “I could go.”
Chapter Nine
“What?” At least this time it wasn’t just me. Nuada, Cernunnos and I all blurted the word, though Cernunnos looked an awful lot like the cat who stole the cream as he said it. Me, I finished with, “No way. Are you nuts? Are you crazy? Ride with the Wild Hunt without me to watch your back? Ride off through time on your own? Are you batshit insane? Are you nuts?”
“I’ve done it before,” Gary said a bit belligerently.
My hands flew upward and waved in the air like they were trying to escape my wrists. “With Morrison and Suzanne and Billy! You weren’t alone! And you weren’t thousands of years out of time! And—”
“And I didn’t have the Sight,” Gary reminded me. “And somebody’s gotta go meet Brigid, right? Maybe it ain’t you the cauldron spell gets bound to, Jo. Maybe it’s me. Besides, Horns here ain’t gonna let anything happen to me, are you?” he said to Cernunnos. “Because if you do, you’re gonna have Jo to reckon with, and I don’t figure that’s the kind of reckoning you’re lookin’ for with her.”
The horned god lifted an agreeing eyebrow, which didn’t reassure me at all. I gargled in frustration. “Come on, Cernunnos! You’re the one who remembers meeting me in the future! You’d remember Gary going gallivanting off with you in the past, too, if it had already happened!”
Cernunnos’s other eyebrow rose to match the first. “Would I? Perhaps in the past I remember best he came not to Tara with you. Of all mortals, you should realize that there are paths not taken. Nothing is immutable, Joanne. Not even for a god.”
That was not the answer I wanted, especially after future-Brigid hadn’t particularly seemed to know who Gary was. It lent credence to Cernunnos’s argument. I made throttling motions with my fingers, envisioning the horned god’s neck between them. “Okay, okay, all right, fine, but you just said you needed a force for life—”
“He may not heal,” Cernunnos said, “but Master Muldoon is as bright a force of life as I have seen, and I have seen many. More, he carries with him the spirit of tenacity, a creature of great age and soul. He—”
“That’s his spirit animal!” I howled. “I helped him find that!”
“All the better. It binds him to you and adds some note of your strength to his.”
Gary looked triumphant. I stomped my foot, afraid I’d already lost the battle. “I said no! God, just because I got you into this doesn’t mean you have to go gallivanting off across time and space to—”
“Save the world?” Gary planted himself in front of me. He made a big wall of a man, especially when he folded his arms across his chest and puffed up a little. “I’ve told you a hundred times you’re the best thing that’s happened to me in years, Joanie. You got me all tangled up in this crazy fantastic world of yours and brought me back to life after Annie died. I’ve watched you fling yourself into things you got no idea what’s coming, and you do it all because you’re trying to make the world a better place. You keep saying you want to grow up to be like me. Kid, I wish I’d been young like you. Now listen to me. You’re my girl, and I’m doing this thing because it’s what you would do if you could. ’Sides,” he added, gray eyes bright, “this might be my one chance to kick death in the balls. Can’t let an old guy miss that dance.”
I laughed. I didn’t want to, but I laughed. Then I hugged him, muttering, “If you don’t come back,” which I repeated when I let go of him, except this time I said it to Cernunnos, with a threatening finger added to the phrase.
He inclined his ashy head, temple bones visibly distorted in the fading light. “You have my word, Siobhán Walkingstick, and that is not a thing I give lightly.”
“All right. Here.” I thrust my rapier into Gary’s hands. “You can use this, right? I mean, hell, you can do everything else.”
He took it, but not gingerly. “I’m better with a saxophone, doll, but I’ll make do. You sure? You might need it.”
“I’m not the one proposing to go face down the man himself. You need it more than I do. Gary, are you sure? Because this is nuts.”
The big man’s voice gentled. “You can’t do it, Jo. It’s time you learn we’ll go into battle for you, even if you ain’t there.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“Good generals don’t.” Gary stuck the rapier point down into the ground, took me by the shoulders and kissed my forehead. “I’ll see you on the other side, darlin’.”
“Of time. Just the other side of time, okay? No stupid heroics, Gary. Not when I’m not there to save you.”
“I promise.” Gary let me go, took up the rapier again and turned to Cernunnos. “Mind if I share your ride?”
Cernunnos looked pained and gestured to the boy who rode beside him. “Share his. The mare is well used to a mortal rider.”
The mare was the boy Rider’s human mother, transformed. A whole pile of unfortunate things, mostly involving crude comments about riders, immortal and mortal alike, rose to and were compressed behind my lips. I could be dumb, but not that dumb. Gary took the kid’s hand and swung up onto the mare behind him, then gave me a jaunty salute. “Go get ’em, Jo.”
And then my best friend rode off into the sunset.
Nuada remained silent until Gary and Cernunnos vanished into misty golden skies, which was just as well. I didn’t like Gary going off on his own, and had the sneaking suspicion hypocrisy was my middle name. After a while I said, “So you can’t marry her,” at the same time he said, “I think I have no choice but to wed the Morrígan.”
I was tired of saying “What?” so I just looked at him. He exhaled slowly. I half expected to see silver stream on his breath, but it was just a puff of air like anyone else’s. On it, he said, “Because as we are bound to her, she is bound to us. I may be able to temper her actions if I become her groom.”
“Or you might end up skewered on the Lia Fáil.”
Nuada’s eyebrows quirked. “Not if I have yet to make that sword and that necklace. Did you not say the sword comes from many centuries hence?”
Everybody was smarter than me. I clicked my jaw shot, looked for an argument and didn’t find one. Or not much of one, anyway: “What if Cernunnos came back in time to have you make it?”
“Then I still live some little ways into the future, for that has yet to happen. She is a goddess, Siobhán. How would you have me escape her?”
“She’s only a, a, a small god. An avatar. You, aos sí, you’re more connected to the earth than humans are. You run way down deep, but the Morrígan’s lain down with the devil, which gives her bonus points in the mojo department.” I’d used the word mojo plenty of times in the past. It had never triggered the mojojojo thing until Gary’d started snickering. I was going to smack him as soon as he got back from galumphing across time and space. “But somebody saddled up with Brigid, too, and it looks like you hang around for centuries making priceless magical artifacts, so stop putting so much stock in gods and…”
He waited a moment while I stared at the earth, dumbstruck by a slowly forming thought. “And forge this necklace,” I mumbled eventually. “Close the time loop. Give it to her as a wedding gift. I don’t know if the necklace has any power itself.” Except it did, because in my personal arsenal it represented shielding my mind. My soul. My garden. However I wanted to look at it, the necklace was definitely invested with some power. I swallowed and kept going. “But it makes it down through the centuries from her all the way to me. That’s got to count for something. Maybe I’m not supposed to go up against her back now at all. Maybe this is all just preparation for a throw-down in my era.”
In much the same tone Brigid had used, Nuada wondered, “Is this how it is with you, gwyld? The connected I have known are not so…”
“Connected?”
He nodded, looking as though he felt a bit foolish. I shook my head, dismissing his embarrassment. “They’re probably not. I’m apparently a special case, which is less fun than you might think.”
His mouth pursed, almost a smile. “I might remind you that I came to be crowned ard rí, and instead have learned I walked to my doom. I may understand “less fun than expected” better than you think I do.”
I was too weak to resist. Given the opening, I seized it and nodded toward his silver hand. “You probably do. Gary said one of the other high kings chopped that off. What, um. How did…?”
“The magic that gives it life is beyond any I could command. The horned god invested it with warmth and motion in exchange for the sword I made him.” His eyebrows quirked again. “The first sword. I wonder what gift he offers for the second.”
“Probably not taking the magic hand away. Really? Cernunnos can do that?” An entire world lived and breathed with Cernunnos’s life force. It probably wasn’t all that difficult for him to lend a little life to a hunk of metal. I just didn’t know why he’d want to.
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C.E. Murphy
Something wicked this way comes…Suddenly, being bitten by a werewolf is the least of Joanne Walker’s problems. Her personal life in turmoil, her job as a cop over, she’s been called to Ireland by the magic within her. And though Joanne’s skills have grown by leaps and bounds, Ireland's magic is old and very powerful…In fact, this is a case of unfinished business. Because the woman Joanne has come to Ireland to rescue is the woman who sacrificed everything for Joanne —the woman who died a year ago.Now, through a slip in time, she’s in thrall to a dark power and Joanne must battle darkness, time and the gods themselves to save her.
Suddenly, being bitten by a werewolf is the least of Joanne Walker’s problems.
Her personal life in turmoil, her job as a cop over, she’s been called to Ireland by the magic within her. And though Joanne’s skills have grown by leaps and bounds, Ireland’s magic is old and very powerful….
In fact, this is a case of unfinished business. Because the woman Joanne has come to Ireland to rescue is the woman who sacrificed everything for Joanne—the woman who died a year ago. Now, through a slip in time, she’s in thrall to a dark power and Joanne must battle darkness, time and the godsthemselves to save her.
Praise for
C.E. Murphy
and The Walker Papers series:
Urban Shaman
“A swift pace, a good mystery, a likeable protagonist, magic, danger—Urban Shaman has them in spades.”
—Jim Butcher, bestselling author of The Dresden Files series
Thunderbird Falls
“Fans of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels and the works of urban fantasists Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff should enjoy this fantasy/mystery’s cosmic elements. A good choice.”
—Library Journal
Coyote Dreams
“Tightly written and paced, [Coyote Dreams] has a compelling, interesting protagonist, whose struggles and successes will captivate new and old readers alike.”
—RT Book Reviews
Walking Dead
“Murphy’s fourth Walker Papers offering is another gripping, well-written tale of what must be the world’s most reluctant—and stubborn—shaman.”
—RT Book Reviews
Demon Hunts
“Murphy carefully crafts her scenes and I felt every gust of wind through the crispy frosted trees….I am heartily looking forward to further volumes.”
—The Discriminating Fangirl
Spirit Dances
“An original and addictive urban fantasy!”
—Romancing the Darkside
Raven Calls
C.E. Murphy
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This one’s for my Mom, Rosie Murphy,
because it’s the rest of the story
Contents
Chapter One (#ua498eefd-e9f1-50e1-b34d-5ad706dabd71)
Chapter Two (#u75dd3c23-026f-5508-bee2-c71dbcee0380)
Chapter Three (#u4e8691f1-5acc-5883-86da-eaf69c4877e9)
Chapter Four (#u34396535-b354-5918-a23c-e17e201a0116)
Chapter Five (#u19098c6c-06f4-5ecd-b8b6-c6ec5c92ed72)
Chapter Six (#u5872c30b-d38a-5f95-b103-3c39d0c5f42b)
Chapter Seven (#u29c8b452-9117-5977-aa0b-7a8264749cc7)
Chapter Eight (#uaeca0cfb-9022-5e2c-abd3-e25d5957943b)
Chapter Nine (#u9509f024-a347-52b5-90e0-043db848a765)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
Sunday, March 19, 9:53 a.m.
The werewolf bite on my forearm itched.
Itching was wrong. It wasn’t old enough to itch. It should hurt like the dickens, because I’d obtained it maybe six hours earlier. Instead it itched like it was a two-week-old injury, well on the way to healing.
Only I was quite sure it wasn’t healing. For one thing, I kept peeking at it, and it was still a big nasty slashy bite that oozed blood when the bandages were loosened. For another thing, my stock in trade was healing. Fourteen months, two weeks and three days ago—but who was counting?—I had been stabbed through the chest. A smart-ass coyote—kinda my spirit guide—had given me a choice between dying or becoming a shaman. Even for someone with no use for the esoteric, like I’d been, it hadn’t been much of a choice. So now, nearly fifteen months on, a bite on my forearm was something I really should be able to deal with.
And it wasn’t that I hadn’t tried healing it, because I had. Magic slid off like oil and water, or possibly more like oil and gashed flesh, if oil slid off gashed flesh, which I assumed it did but didn’t want to actually find out. Either way, the magic wasn’t working. Normally that would be a bad sign, but my talent had taken both a beating and a boosting in the past twenty-four hours, and wasn’t behaving. It reacted explosively when I tried using it, and I didn’t want to explode my arm. So I was getting on a plane with absolutely no notice and flying to Ireland, because I’d had a vision of the woman who had turned werewolves from slavering beasties 100% of the time into part-time monsters, and in my vision, she’d been in Ireland. I figured if anybody could keep me human, it had to be the woman who’d bound the wolves to the moon’s cycle.
That’s what I was telling myself, anyway, because it was slightly better than a full-on panic attack in the middle of the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. A day earlier I hadn’t believed werewolves existed. Now I was petrified that come the next full moon—which was tonight, the second of three—I would get all hairy and toothy. It was a dire possibility even without adding international air travel to the mix, which, who was I kidding, was possibly the worst idea I’d ever had. Turning into a werewolf was potentially bad enough. Doing it mid-flight presumably meant a plane full of handy victims, although I might get lucky and have an air marshal on board so it would just be me who got dead.
My life was a mess, if I considered that lucky. But I had this rash idea that because I’d be missing moonrise all the way around the globe, the magic shouldn’t trigger. And I could always lock myself in the bathroom if I thought I was about to get bestial. Locking myself in the bathroom wasn’t that bad an idea anyway. I was afraid of flying, and bathrooms didn’t have windows. That automatically made them less scary than the body of the plane. Either way, it wasn’t just the werewolf cure that had me wandering the duty-free shops at SeaTac. The other vision I’d had, the one of a sneering warrior woman, had made my healing magic respond as if a gauntlet had been thrown down. It felt like fishhooks in my belly, hauling me east. I was going to Ireland whether I liked it or not.
My personal opinion leaned heavily toward or not. There were places I’d rather be and things I’d rather be doing. Specifically, those things were Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department, who up to about three hours earlier had been my boss. I’d quit, he’d kissed me and the more I thought about him, the more I wanted to tear out of the airport, jump in a cab and race back into his arms. The fishhooks pulling at my gut, though, weren’t about to let that happen. Their horrible prickle and tug had become familiar enough over the past year that I knew it meant something serious coming down the line, as if finding a cure for a werewolf’s bite wasn’t serious enough. Whatever awaited me in Ireland, I was not especially looking forward to it. So I was trying to distract myself by shopping, which wasn’t my favorite pastime in the best of circumstances. Still, I’d wandered the international terminal twice already. The shops hadn’t changed displays since my first pass, but the second time through I laid eyes on something I neither needed at all, nor was I sure I could live without.
A not-helpful part of my brain whispered that I had a credit card. I mean, I was American. I didn’t think I’d be allowed to keep my citizenship if I didn’t have at least one rectangle of plastic money. But it was reserved for emergencies, like buying a plane ticket to Ireland on no notice.
An ankle-length white leather coat did not in any way qualify as an emergency.
I stood there staring at it through the shop window. The shoulders were subtly padded, just enough to give the mannequin a really square silhouette. It had a Chinese-style high collar and leather-covered white buttons offset from the center straight down the length of the entire coat. It nipped in at the waist tightly enough to look pinned, but nobody would pin leather of that quality. There had to be a discreet belt on the back. Its skirts fell in wide loose folds, and looked like they would flare with wonderful drama.
No normal person would wear a coat like that. A movie star might. A tall movie star. A tall, leggy movie star with really good sunglasses and enough confidence to shift the earth with her smile alone.
I stepped back from the window. Light caught just so, letting me see my reflection.
Nobody could argue that, at a smidge under six feet in height, I wasn’t tall and leggy. I had cool sunglasses, although I wasn’t wearing them. And that coat might instill enough confidence in the wearer that she could do anything.
Five minutes later I was eighteen hundred dollars poorer, but so pleased with myself I slept the whole flight to Ireland without once worrying about the plane falling out of the sky.
Monday, March 20, 6:28 a.m.
I wasn’t a werewolf when I woke up. Fuzzy logic said I’d left the States on Sunday morning, flown all day and arrived in Ireland early Monday morning, thus having skipped the night of the full moon entirely and saving myself from shifting into a monster of yore. That was very fuzzy logic, but then, the whole not being a werewolf thing supported it. Besides, who was I to say an ancient curse wouldn’t work that way, when magic by its very definition defied the laws of physics. I left the plane grateful to not be furry and, aware of the advantages of having been born in Ireland, slipped through customs on the European Union passport holders side.
The insistent ball of magic within me wanted me to head west, but Irish roads were legendarily convoluted. I needed a car, a map and a cup of coffee before I struck off into the sunset. Never mind that sunrise was in about half an hour, so I had many hours to wait before I could strike off into its sister darkness.
For a woman who’d slept the entire ten-hour flight across a continent and an ocean, I was certainly running on at the brain. I stopped just outside the arrivals area and scrubbed both hands over my face hard, trying to waken some degree of native intelligence.
“Hey, doll,” said a familiar voice. “Can I give you a lift?”
I left my hands where they were, covering my face, for a good long minute while I tried to understand how that voice—the voice of my best friend, a seventy-four-year-old Seattle cab driver—could possibly be addressing me in the Dublin International Airport. Last I’d known, Gary Muldoon had been in California for the St. Patrick’s Day weekend, partying with old Army buddies in a yearly event he refused to give details on. Since it was now the twentieth of March and the weekend in question had just ended, my information was pretty up-to-date. It was therefore impossible in every way for Gary to be here. It had to be somebody else. Satisfied with my reasoning, I lowered my fingers enough to peer over them.
Gary leaned against a pillar, arms folded across his still-broad chest, and gave me a wink and a grin that from a man thirty years younger would set my heart aflutter.
I rubbed my eyes again and squinted. Gary’s grin got wider. He looked like a devilish old movie star in a set scene, and like he knew damned good and well his presence was the culminating factor. After about thirty seconds’ more silence, I said, “Sure,” and wished I’d been suave enough to just say that in the first place. And then because I wasn’t suave at all, I squeaked, “What the hell are you doing here?!” in disbelieving delight.
Gary threw his head back and laughed out loud. He had suspiciously good teeth for a man his age who used to smoke. I suspected dentures, but had never been rude enough to ask. Then he stepped forward and swept me up in a bear hug, which put paid to any thoughts of his teeth as I grunted happily and repeated, “No, seriously, what the hell?”
“Mike called me. Told me to, and I quote, get my old ass on the next flight to Dublin and try to catch up to Joanne goddamned Walker, who’s gone off again and needs somebody to keep her from doing anything stupid, end quote. So I got on the next flight outta L.A. Got in ten minutes ago. What’s going on?”
I pulled my head back far enough to look up at him. “Mike? Mike who? You mean Morrison? Morrison called you? Morrison sent you to Ireland after me? Morrison, my boss? That Morrison?”
“That’s the one.” Gary set me back, hands on my shoulders, as his grin faded. “’Cept I hear he ain’t the boss anymore.”
“Not the boss of me, anyway.” I wrinkled my nose. “I’m not six, really.”
“What happened, doll?” Real concern was in my big friend’s gray eyes. I’d gotten into Gary’s cab over a year ago, on the very morning my shamanic powers had been violently awakened. He’d been at my side, backing me up, ever since. Gary was the sort of person I wanted to grow old to be: vital, fascinated by the world and always up for an adventure. At twenty-six, when I’d met him, I’d been none of those things. At pushing twenty-eight I was just getting on the bandwagon. I couldn’t have a better role model.
“It’s okay, I quit. I mean, I didn’t get fired. Everything’s cool. I just…” It turned out I had other things to not think about besides a werewolf bite. The enormity of what I’d done—quit my detective job on the police force with no notice and with no prospects for other employment in the future—hit me, a mere twelve hours after the fact. Or a full day, counting elapsed travel time. Either way, I felt myself go colorless and the insistent pit of magic in my belly turned to just a boring old pit of sickness for a moment.
Gary put a hand under one of my elbows and crooked a smile. “Don’t worry, Joanie. I can always get you a job at Tripoli Cabs.”
If Gary was calling me Joanie, I looked even worse than I suddenly felt. Usually he went with Jo, a nickname I’d never liked until he used it. Still, rough laughter bubbled up from somewhere beneath the ook in my tummy. “Petite would never forgive me if I took to driving another car most of the day.”
“You better not tell her ’bout your plans to get a winter vehicle, then.”
“She’d understand,” I said unconvincingly. “Classic Mustangs aren’t meant to weather the winters Seattle’s been having lately. She’s got no clearance. I’ll just get her a boyfriend. A 1936 Dodge pickup. In red.”
“They got no clearance, either, darlin’,” Gary said with the confidence of a man who’d been there and done that, never mind that he’d been only four years old in 1936. “’Sides, you get that sweet young thing an old fella like a ’36 Dodge and you’ll start giving me ideas.”
Laughter won again, this time because half the people I knew were convinced I had a Thing going on with Gary. Even Morrison thought so, despite it being fairly clear that I was hopelessly, idiotically, madly in love with him. “Petite’s older than I am,” I pointed out, like it made a difference.
“And I’m older than a ’36 Dodge. You all right, Joanie?”
“Stop that. It makes me think I’m falling apart.”
“Are you?”
“A w—” I nearly swallowed my tongue. I hadn’t even told Morrison a werewolf had bitten me, and there I was about to confess all to Gary. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel like sharing. Mostly I just figured they couldn’t do anything about it, so there was no point in worrying them. I said, “A wee little bit,” instead, in honor of being in Ireland, where one adjective was never enough if three would do. “It’s been a really long day. Weekend. You missed a lot.”
Childish dismay splashed across Gary’s face. “One weekend, Jo! I went to California for one weekend, and you had to have adventures without me?”
“You have no idea. I can shapeshift now,” I said almost idly. The weird thing was, learning to shapeshift really did come low on the totem pole of what had gone on the past three days. No wonder I’d slept so hard on the plane. I was pretty sure the last time I’d napped had been in the shower a couple of days earlier.
Gary’s eyes bugged and he pointed imperiously to the door. “We gotta get out of here so you can show me.”
A tug in my gut wiped away the last of my job-related nausea. My boiling-over magic thought getting out of there was an excellent idea. We made mad rushes for different car rental agencies, eyeing each other to see whose line moved more quickly. I beat Gary to a counter by thirty seconds, and he came to loom over me as I filled out paperwork. “Second driver?” the woman asked, and Gary muttered, “Don’t you dare think I ain’t doin’ some of the driving, Jo.”
I obediently put him down as the second driver. He snagged the keys out from under my fingertips and in retaliation I grabbed his carry-on suitcase as well as my own. He looked ever so slightly smug and I suspected I had gotten the raw end of the deal, but he flashed me another one of his legendary grins. “Hey, Jo?”
I muttered, “What?” about as graciously as an angry alligator, and the big lug of an old man earned a lifetime’s forgiveness with two words as we headed out the door:
“Nice coat.”
Chapter Two
The last time I’d been in Ireland—also the first time, overlooking the detail of having been born here, which I didn’t remember—I’d had none of the phenomenal cosmic powers I was now endowed with. Part of me wanted to trigger the Sight and look into the depths of history and magic the island was legendary for.
The much smarter part of me didn’t want to, since I’d stolen the keys back and was driving. The Sight had been whiting out and blinding me for the past twenty-four hours. Driving blind seemed like a spectacularly bad idea. So instead of calling up the mystical mojo, I filled Gary in on the weekend’s details while we worked our way through Dublin traffic, which was negligible compared to Seattle. By the time I got to the werewolves, we’d left the capital city behind, and Gary kept saying, “Werewolves,” in audible disappointment. “Werewolves. I’m never around for the good stuff.”
“Says the man who left an annual shindig to fly last-minute to Ireland.”
“I couldn’t risk missin’ something else, now, could I?” Gary peered out the window. In theory there were green rolling hills out there. In reality, there were concrete walls fifteen feet high that blocked off the countryside. “Where we goin’, anyway?”
“The Hill of Tara.” I knew almost as much about Irish history as I’d known about shamanism a year ago, which was to say nothing, but even I’d heard of Tara. I scowled at the road, trying to remember if I’d gotten that far in what I’d told Gary. “It’s in County Meath, which is sort of the wrong way, more north than west, and I keep feeling like I need to go west. But I had a vision last night. Or the night before. Saturday night. Anyway, I saw a hill in the vision, so Tara seems like a good place to start.”
“What with bein’ a hill and all,” Gary agreed solemnly.
I said, “Exactly,” even though I knew perfectly well I was being mocked. Gary laughed and I gave him a dirty look. “Besides, starting with a known cultural and spiritual center probably isn’t a bad idea, even if it’s the wrong one. Did I tell you about the woman wearing my mother’s necklace?”
Gary arched his bushy eyebrows, which I took as a no, and I asked, “You ever get the feeling your life is a string festooned with bells and tied to hundreds of others you don’t know anything about? And that sometimes somebody pulls their string, and your bells ring?”
Gary looked at me a long moment before rather gently saying, “Yes and no, darlin’. We all get that feeling from time to time. Difference is, with you, it could be real.”
“But Coyote said I was a new soul. Mixed up fresh.” I wasn’t sure I’d ever mentioned that to Gary. Or to anybody else, for that matter. There were, according to my mentor, old souls and new souls. Mostly people were old souls, with all the baggage and all the wisdom from previous incarnations resting somewhere in the hind brain, there to draw on or drown in. I was something of a rarity, mixed up fresh and new by Somebody or Something responsible for those aspects of the universe. The positive side of being a new soul was a lack of baggage and the potential for great power. The negative side was the corresponding lack of accumulated wisdom with which to wield that power. I’d certainly demonstrated that lack time and again the past fifteen months.
Either I’d mentioned the whole new-soul thing to Gary, or he thought it didn’t matter, because he snorted. “So what if you are? New soul don’t mean no ties. You still got parents, right? Grandparents? Cousins? And friends or lovers can tug your strings, too. No man’s an island, Jo.”
That was not the first time Gary had gone philosophical on me, nor was it the first time I was surprised by it. Properly chastened, I swallowed and continued my original line of thought: “The woman with my mother’s necklace rang my be…” That sentence could not end anywhere happy. Gary guffawed and I grinned despite myself. “You know what I mean.”
“I know Mike’s gonna be real disappointed if some woman’s ringing your bells, darlin’.”
“When did you start calling him Mike?”
“After the zombies,” Gary said with aplomb.
I cast a glance heavenward and nearly missed our exit. Gary grabbed his door’s armrest as I yanked us into the right—which was to say, correct, which in on Irish roads meant left—lane, and muttered, “After the zombies. Of course. Normal people don’t say things like that, Gary.”
“Normal people don’t fight zombies.”
That line of conversation wasn’t going to end anywhere happy, either. I let out an explosive breath and tried again. “The woman in my mother’s necklace had some kind of pull with me. Maybe it was just that she looked all sneery and challenging, but there was some kind of connection. I have to find out who she was.”
Gary, cautiously, said, “It wasn’t your mother, was it?”
“No. She kind of looked like her, dark hair, pale skin, but no. My mother was sort of restrained and prim. She liked Altoids. This woman was more of a kick ass and take names type.” Only it had turned out my mother was exactly that kind of person, too. I just hadn’t known it until after she died.
I hadn’t known much of anything about my mother until after she died, except that she’d flown to America and left me with my father when I was six months old. I hadn’t seen her again until I was twenty-six. That kind of thing leaves a mark. In my case, it was an entirely unjustified mark, as Mother had been trying to protect me from a bad guy bigger and nastier than I ever wanted to deal with. But again, I hadn’t known that until after she died. Nothing like a little “I was trying to save your life” to take the wind out of sails puffed up with childish abandonment issues. I wished I’d had the opportunity to tell her I finally understood.
But that was spilt milk, and I was getting better about not crying over it. I turned down the road leading to Tara and Gary frowned as a tour bus taking up two-thirds of the road came the other direction. “You sure this is the right way?”
“Yeah. Only in Ireland do they put cultural heritage monuments at the end of one-track roads.” I couldn’t decide if I liked the idea or not. It certainly gave the impression the heritage site had been there forever, which was true. On the other hand, I had to hold my breath as I pulled over to let the bus pass, for fear we’d be broadsided if I didn’t. Gary let his breath out in a rush when the bigger vehicle rambled by, and we grinned sheepishly at each other as I pulled forward again. “Glad it’s not just me. At least we’re not on a mountainside with roads this narrow. The landscape kind of reminds me of North Carolina.”
“Never been out there,” Gary said. “I kept getting stuck in St. Louis. Annie and I used to go to the jazz festival.”
“Did you play?” Gary’s wife had died before I met him, but he’d mentioned once or twice that he’d been an itinerant sax player for a few years after the Korean War, while Annie, a nurse, had brought home the bacon.
“Nah. Left that to the guys who were really good.” Gary leaned into the window as we went up the hill leading to the, er, Hill, and frowned. “Thought there’d be more cars.”
“Me, too.” The parking lot—small and graveled and graced at one end by gift shops and at the other by a switchback path—was completely empty of vehicles besides our own. I got out of the car and turned in a slow circle, taking in the view—there was a tower in the distance, soft with misty air—and finally came back to Gary, who stood on the other side of our car with a befuddled expression. “You remember that night at the Seattle Center?”
“You mean the night somebody stuffed a broadsword through me? Nah. Why would I?”
“Remember how quiet it was?” The parking garage had been empty. There’d been no late-night tourists wandering, nobody from the monorail hurrying one way or the other, no joggers making their way across the closed grounds.
Gary, very firmly, said, “Jo, no matter how much I love you, I ain’t gettin’ stuck with another sword.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got mine now.” I patted my hip like I wore a sword there, which of course I didn’t, because I lived in the early twenty-first century, not the early seventeenth. Not that as a woman I’d have been able to carry a sword in the seventeenth century anyway, but that wasn’t the point. The point was I had an honest-to-God magic sword that I’d taken off an ancient Celtic god, and I’d spent a good chunk of the past fifteen months learning how to use it properly. If anybody tried skewering Gary—or me, for that matter—I had defenses.
“Your sword’s in Seattle.”
I put on my very best mysterious magic user voice: “A detail which is nothing to one such as I.” Gary snorted and I laughed, then waved at the path. “Come on, if we’ve got the place to ourselves we might as well take advantage of it. Busloads of tourists will probably show up any minute.”
Gary fell in behind me dubiously. “You really think so?”
“No. I think something’s conspiring to keep the place quiet awhile, and that we’ll probably regret finding out why. But I’m trying to keep a positive mind-set.” The path up to Tara was foot-worn but not paved. Nothing suggested “tourist attraction” except for the gift shops, and even they weren’t particularly in-your-face about it. Gary and I kept pace with one another, both stealing glimpses at each other from the corners of our eyes like we expected something to jump out at us but if the other was cool, we weren’t going to show our nerves. After the third or fourth time we caught gazes, Gary actually giggled, which was unnerving in itself. Six-foot-one former linebackers in their seventies weren’t supposed to giggle.
A woman said, “There’ll be nothing to worry about,” out of nowhere, and we both shrieked like little girls. I regained my equilibrium first. Gary, after all, had already been giggling, which was bad enough with me as an audience, never mind with a complete stranger looking on. We turned together, though, to find a lovely woman of indeterminate age smiling at us. She wore a white eyelet-lace sundress with gold scarves wrapped around her hips and shoulders, and sandals on her feet. On most people I would call it a hippy-dippy look, but somehow she imbued it with more elegance than that. Her hair was the color of sunrise shot with clouds. She wasn’t young, even if I couldn’t tell how old she was.
“You’ll be Siobhán Walkingstick,” she said to me.
Hairs stood up on my arms. The bite itched, and I rubbed it surreptitiously, resulting in a wave of oh god, scratching feels so good I may never be able to stop that sometimes happens. I wondered suddenly if that was why dogs would go thumpa-thumpa-thump with a hind leg when a human got a good itchy spot, and then I wondered if, as a werewolf, I would do the same thing.
I stopped scratching and muttered, “People don’t normally use that name for me. Who’re you?”
“Am I wrong to think until very recently it wouldn’t have been you at all?”
Another chill ran over me. I made fists to keep from scratching again. “…you’re not wrong.” The name she’d used, Siobhán Walkingstick, was technically the one I’d been born to. Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick. Dad had taken one look at that mess and nicknamed me Joanne. I’d dropped the Walkingstick myself, taking Walker as my mostly official last name when I graduated high school. Joanne Walker and Siobhán Walkingstick had almost nothing in common, at least not up until the past year. More specifically, up until two nights earlier, when I’d been reborn under a rattlesnake shapeshifter’s guidance. That had a lot to do with why my powers were out-of-control wonky. Joanne had had a handle on her skill set. Siobhán apparently resided in another league. And I was going to have to stop thinking of them as separate or I’d become a headcase in no time flat.
“But you’ll prefer Joanne,” the woman said with a nod, then looked to Gary. “And you come with a companion.”
Gary, who was rarely gruff, said, “Muldoon. Gary Muldoon,” gruffly, and she inclined her head toward him.
“Are you here of your own free will, Mr. Muldoon? Will you be traveling the roads Joanne travels, walking beside her, or will you stand aside and let her pass where she must go alone?”
“I’m here, ain’t I?”
The woman smiled. “So you are. Now there’re two ways to approach the Hill. You might go the way everyone does, and see what they all see. Perhaps more,” she added, giving me a significant look. “Perhaps not.”
I was pretty sure I would See more than most people, assuming the Sight didn’t knock me for another loop. I was equally sure strange women didn’t show up to make portentous comments if they expected me to take the path more traveled by. It hadn’t passed me by that she’d failed to say who she was, but I’d lay long odds she wouldn’t even if I asked her again, so I just said, “What’s the other way?” like a good little stage player.
She gestured to the rise of green grass behind her. “Pass through the Hall of Kings, and hear what secrets they might share with you.”
“I didn’t even know there was a Hall of Kings. I thought Tara was…” For once I shut up before I made a total fool of myself. Truth was, I hadn’t really thought much at all about what Tara was or wasn’t. I figured it was mystical. Druidic. Stuff like that. I hadn’t considered that ordinary mortals might have passed this way, too, not that kings were exactly ordinary.
The woman’s mouth quirked, which was nicer than her outright laughing at me. “Tara is where the ancient kings were crowned, Joanne. Temair na Rí, Hill of the Kings. Here they wedded Méabh to become ard rí, the high kings.”
“What, all of them? Liberal sorts, weren’t they?” That time my mouth should have shut up before it did.
The woman gave me a sort of weary look, the kind mothers bestow on precocious but irritating children. “Symbolically, Joanne. Symbolically. Méabh was—”
“No, wait, I know this one! She was a high queen, right? Kind of a warrior princess?”
There was a certain expression I tended to engender in people more mystically apt than I. It started under the eyes with a slight tensing of fine skin, and went both up and down, making lips thinner and foreheads wrinklier. As a rule, I interpreted it as the pain of one whose cherished childhood dreams have just been spat upon, and it always made me feel guilty. The woman got that expression, suggesting that “warrior princess” was not how she thought of Méabh, but it was too late. I couldn’t take the words back. I put on a pathetic hangdog smile of apology instead, and the look faded into resignation, which was generally how people ended up responding to me. At length she said, “Something like that. Queen of Connacht and of Ulster, descended from or perhaps incarnated of the Morrígan herself, and any man who would be king of Ireland needed the blessing of the trifold goddess.”
“I thought that was Brigid,” I said nervously. Brigid was the only deity I knew anything about—well, besides Cernunnos, but I had a close personal relationship with him—and what I knew about her fit in a nutshell. “Trifold goddess” was stamped on the nutshell, in fact, and that was the sum total of my knowledge.
A little of the dismay left the woman’s face. Apparently I’d gotten something right. “Brigid would be the Morrígan’s other face, perhaps. The coin turned upward instead of down. Maiden, mother, crone, to the Morrígan’s warrior, witch and death.”
I swallowed. “Right. Um. We’re not going to meet her, are we?”
The woman stepped aside with another smile, gesturing us up the hill. “There’ll be one way and one way only to find out.”
Gary was halfway up the hill before the woman finished speaking. I jolted after him, vaguely ashamed that even now, he was more enthusiastic for my adventures than I was. I caught his shoulder as he reached the low crest and tugged him back. “Hey, hang on a second, wait up.”
He glanced at me with elevated bushy eyebrows, and I found myself mimicking the woman’s gesture, waving at the low stretch of land beyond our hill. Annoyed that I’d done so, I glanced back to glower at her, but she was gone. I stared down the deserted pathway a moment, then passed a hand over my eyes and said, “Hang on a sec,” again.
“I’m hangin’, doll. What’s up?”
“Obviously there’s something down there for us to see. I’m just thinking it might be helpful if you could…See.”
“I see just fine,” Gary said in mild offense. “I wear reading glasses, but who doesn’t?”
“No, not see. See. With a capital ess. With the Sight. Like I do.”
Gary looked down his nose at me. It wasn’t very far down—he was only a couple inches taller than I—but it was far enough. “Last I checked you were the one with the magic mojo, Jo.” A glitter came into his gray eyes and I pointed a warning finger at him.
“You are not calling me Mojojo. Ever. I refuse it as a nickname.”
The glitter turned into a grin. “Sure…Jo.”
I turned my pointy finger from him toward the green below us. “Do you or do you not want a chance to See what we’re facing?”
“’Course I do!”
“Then no Mojojojo.” I bit my tongue on getting carried away with the jojos, then exhaled. “Okay. I know this works because I’ve done it with Morrison and Billy.” Billy, my police detective partner—former partner, which he didn’t even know yet. He was going to kill me. Anyway, Billy was an adept himself, able to speak with the recently dead, but Morrison had the magical aptitude of a turnip. If I could make the Sight ritual work on him, I had no doubt it would work on Gary. “But I’ve only done it while stationary, which is no help.”
Gary’s eyebrows shot up, dancing with mad glee. I threatened to whack his shoulder and he laughed out loud, which made me laugh. “You’re good for me,” I informed him. “I laugh more when you’re around.”
“You need some laughter in your life, darlin’. Speakin’ of which, how’s things with Mike now that he ain’t the boss?”
“Of all the awkward segues. I’ll let you know. Stop distracting me.”
“From what? You don’t look like you’re doing much.”
“I’m trying to think!” Which wasn’t my strong point even when I hadn’t flown all night. I walked a few steps away, squinting at Tara. I’d never awakened second Sight in someone when I wasn’t already using it. Quite certain it wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had, I held my breath and triggered the Sight.
Time revved up a Roto-Rooter and tunneled through a thousand years of history.
Chapter Three
The landscape changed. Hills reshaped, stone walls rose where none currently stood and in the distance a double row of wooden henges spread out in an unbelievably large circle, containing vastly more area than I expected. I could see modern-day shadows of the new highway cutting through what had once been sacred land, its effect so significant as to mar the world even in retrospect. Mist-softened sunlight caught a hollow between the sets of henges where it had been dug out, and dug deep, to create a true barrier around Tara.
I was accustomed to Looking at Seattle, which wasn’t an old city even by the U.S.’s standards. The Native American settlements there had been so thoroughly bulldozed over that they left depressingly little mark on the modern city. I probably could See them if I needed to, but so far I hadn’t had to.
Tara, despite the highway, despite its long-ago abandonment as a spiritual center, despite the tourists that tromped through it daily, roared with ancient power. Everything within the henge barrier shone brilliant, healing blue, with spikes of yellow that spoke of a warrior heritage. Where they blended, they became adamant green, a color I’d long since associated with the protective, stolid quality of buildings that knew their business as shelters for those within. My vision shifted and shimmered, trying to accommodate the changes Tara had seen. Changes that were still living within the sacred earth: what had gone on here left its mark, year after year, until years turned into centuries and centuries to millennia.
Only one thing remained the same. A white standing stone poked up impudently, barely altered by time. There was life within that stone, more life than the usual shaman-recognized spirit which infested all things. Everything had purpose, but most inanimate objects were rooted and calm and patient.
The standing stone screamed with impatience, a hair-raising shriek that echoed under my skin. I was used to the Sight showing me things beyond the ordinary. It had never before given me the ability to listen in on something that I was certain reached out of this world. I wondered if that was part of the upgrade to the shiny new Siobhán Walkingstick package, or if I’d simply never faced an inanimate object old enough to have a voice of its own.
“What is that?” I had the impression I was walking, an impression confirmed when Gary’s hand closed around my biceps and stopped me from going any farther.
“Hold up, doll. Don’t forget about me.”
“Right.” I turned away from the standing stone, though its voice still shrieked against the small bones in my ears.
Something uncomfortable happened in Gary’s expression as I faced him. His voice dropped half an octave on one syllable: “Jo?”
“Yeah?”
“You look…” He circled one hand, and stopped, still discomfited. I waited for further explanation, which was not forthcoming. After a few seconds my eyebrows went up and I shrugged one shoulder. There was hardly any point in being magically adept if I couldn’t use it to figure out what was bugging my friends, so I stepped out of my body to take a look at me.
Gary was right. I looked “…” and my noncorporeal self made a hand circle just like he had.
I would not have recognized me, eighteen months earlier. Not on the levels that mattered. The height, yes; the spiky short black hair, sure. The slightly too-generous nose with its scattering of freckles: those things remained the same. But my eyes, to hear me tell it, were hazel, while the woman I was looking at had eyes of blaze-gold. A thin scar cut across her right cheekbone, breaking a few of those freckles apart, and she wore cuff earrings—a stylized raven on one ear, a rattlesnake on the other—which I’d never done. Nor did the me of a year and a half ago wear a silver choker necklace or the copper bracelet that barely glinted under the new leather coat, though I would have at least recognized the bracelet. My father had given it to me when I left for college. The necklace had been a gift from my dying mother, barely two weeks before I became a shaman. I didn’t need to see the last of my talismans, a Purple Heart medal given to me by Gary, to know it was there: it lay over my own heart, pinned discreetly inside my shirt. I would probably die of embarrassment if Gary ever found that out.
I’d thought earlier I needed great sunglasses to really work that coat. Now I thought I needed them to hide my spooky eyes, which were the most visible change in me. Not everyone would be able to see the silver-blue psychic and physical shields wrapping around me so smoothly they looked like liquid silk, but those who could—people like my mentor, Coyote—would respect their strength. Actually, Coyote would just be astonished I’d finally gotten them so integrated that they were intact even though I wasn’t consciously thinking about them, and annoyed it had taken a werewolf bite to force me into that mental space. That wasn’t the point.
The point was, I looked confident. I had presence beyond what my height conferred. That, above all, was the element Joanie Walker, cop shop mechanic, wouldn’t have known what to do with if she’d seen her future self reflected in the mirror. And that, apparently, was what Gary saw, too.
I said, “Ah,” rather softly as I stepped back into my body. My Sight was still on full bore, and Gary’s aura was its usual deep solid mercury-silver, reminding me of the old V8 engine I’d initially thought of him as being. His unease glimmered around the edges, lighter shades of silver, but it was turning to something else: a brighter white, like pride was overtaking discomfort.
“Lookit you, Joanie,” he breathed. “All growed up.”
I grinned, stepping forward to put my hand on top of his head. “Let’s not be hasty. Stand on my feet.” Unlike anybody else I knew, Gary didn’t argue, ask why or prevaricate. He just stepped on my feet with his full weight, evidently unconcerned that he might crush my toes. Fortunately, I was wearing some of my favorite leather stompy boots which had lots of internal structure, and my toes were perfectly safe as I chanted, “This man I hold dear, let him See clear, let that vision hold sway til the end of the day.”
A poet I was not. Fortunately, I didn’t have to be Tennyson in order to trigger the power. The other times I’d done this, I’d felt nothing in particular, though Billy and Morrison had both reacted instantly and gratifyingly. This time, though, I was asking a whole lot more of the magic: it wasn’t supposed to become independent. The spell I’d read about only worked if the caster and the castee remained standing the way Gary and I were, which would be no use at all if we had to explore ancient Tara. But shamanism was based on the precept of change: in theory, if I could imagine it, I could do it. I wasn’t about to stop Italy from rotating while the rest of the world continued on, but in theory, I could.
Giving Gary the Sight until sundown was, by comparison, small potatoes. He already believed in not only the arcane in general, but specifically in my talent, so there was no resistance as the coil of magic within me built up and spilled out in a distinct, feel-able wave. My brighter silver-blue coated his mercury, then faded inside it, wriggling and adjusting to a different set of eyes. It left behind a sheen of blue on his aura, and only as that faded did Gary let out a long, slow whistle. “God almighty, Jo.”
“Just Jo.” I released him slowly, feeling the magic linking us stretch, then settle comfortably. “How’s that?”
“Incredible.” His voice softened with awe. “You can see like this and you don’t all the time?”
“It’s too much.” I turned back to Tara, cold swimming over me as the stone screamed again. “I’m afraid if I always look at this world, I’ll lose sight of the real one. I’ve been afraid of that since the beginning.”
“I think there ain’t much more real than this.”
I smiled at him, then did a double take. Gary’s eyes, usually gray, were as solid silver as his aura. I chortled and hugged him, inordinately pleased. He grunted, a sound intended to mask his own pleasure, and made a question with his eyebrows that I answered cheerfully: “Your eyes are silver. You’re the only one who’s ever held his own when I set this spell on him. Everybody else’s have gone gold, like mine.”
“Old dog’s got a lot of tricks, darlin’.” Gary did not look old, not one little bit at all. Not to my normal sight, and not to the Sight. Part of it was his totem spirit, a tortoise whose steady ways had gotten us out of major trouble at least once. I could See it now, surrounding him comfortably, always there if its strength needed to be drawn on.
But mostly it was his joie de vivre. Nobody who loved life and new experiences that much was ever going to get old, not really. Wiser and eventually dead, maybe, but not old. This time I said what I’d so often thought: “You’re my hero, you know that, Gary? I want to grow up into somebody like you.”
Color stained his cheeks, which I hadn’t thought possible. “You’re doin’ just fine, doll. C’mon. We better go see what there is to see.” He offered his hand. I slipped mine into it, and we walked together into the Hall of Kings.
The stone’s cry went mute as the Hall’s ephemeral walls surrounded us. I slowed, straining to hear it, and Gary stuck a finger in his ear. “What was that? I didn’t even hear it until it quit.”
“I don’t really kn… Do you hear that?” Whispers rattled around the hall, bouncing off my skin. Drowning out the stone, maybe, except they were whispers and the stone had screamed. There was probably some old adage about a whisper being louder than a scream, but I couldn’t come up with it off the top of my head.
Gary swallowed audibly. “What’s weird is I can understand ’em, doll. Pretty sure that ain’t English they’re speaking.”
“It’s not.” My mother had spoken in Irish a few times in the months we’d walked side by side without ever getting to know one another. It had sounded more or less like the whispers did, but somewhere in my mind the words twisted from a language I didn’t know into one I did. “It’s like with Cernunnos. Remember how you only understood him when he wanted you to? There’s magic afoot.”
The half-spooked expression faded from Gary’s face. “I can’t believe you just said that.”
I grinned. “That’s why I said it. All right, let me listen.” Why I thought me listening would do any more good than Gary listening, I didn’t know. Of course, if he was quiet then we could both listen, which was probably twice as good as just me listening. Which I couldn’t do when I was running on at the brain, again. In the past, my brain babbling at such length had meant there was something it either didn’t want to think about—which things numbered in the dozens right now—or it was working out some extreme cleverness that would at any moment leap out and surprise me.
Much to my dismay, nothing leapt out. The whispers, though, became clearer: men, all of them men, which in a hall called of Kings probably made sense. Some were bitter, claiming unrighteous loss of kingship; others were pure and joyful with their duties. Hints of decay spread through all of them like a warning that their histories and legends, that those stories were being lost to time.
Less lost than some, though. At least Tara remained and was recognized as an important site. There were so many places in the world completely lost, or barely rediscovered, that for a moment, standing in the heart of memory broke my heart.
Ice touched the back of my neck and I turned without thinking. A tall and slender man, almond-eyed and pale-skinned, stood behind me. He wore leather and wool and metal, and a crown of silver over fair hair, and there was nothing even remotely human about him.
I wasn’t sure how I knew that. He had none of the telltale marks that non-human people in legend had: his ears were round, his eyes, while not Western-European-shaped, were hardly so tilted as to be inhuman, and his build was no more slender than that of a slim mortal man. But he wasn’t human, and with my usual flair, I said, “What are you?” only realizing afterward that that was probably unforgivably rude.
“The ard rí,” he said in a tone which suggested I’d been unforgivably rude. “What are you?”
“Gwyld.” I was a bit startled the word came out of my mouth, but Cernunnos—and a woman who had died hours after I’d met her—had both used the word for me. It was, as best I could tell, an old Irish word for shaman or magic-maker, and it apparently meant something to this high king, because surprise filtered through his gaze.
“I thought I knew all the connected at Tara.”
Delighted, I chewed on connected as a new term for magic users. I liked it more than adepts, and wondered why it had fallen out of use. Then again, maybe it hadn’t in Ireland. It wasn’t like I’d grilled my mother on the subject.
While I chewed, the high king looked me over, his expression growing incrementally more dour. “What,” he finally asked, “are you wearing, gwyld?”
I said, “The fashion of my century,” then kicked myself in the ankle for setting up a question that had to be answered.
Except instead of looking like he needed answers, his shoulders relaxed and he let out a soft sigh. “And which of us is displaced? The Tara I see before me wavers and trembles in my sight. Have you called me forward, gwyld, or have I called you back?”
I scrunched my face. “Joanne. My name’s Joanne, not ‘gwyld.’ And I think I’m the one displaced. Who…when…are you?”
“My name is Lugh,” he said, “and today is the day I die.”
Chapter Four
“Gosh,” I said brightly, “good thing I didn’t show up tomorrow.” Then I wanted to kick myself, but I’d done that once already during this conversation. I didn’t want Lugh to think I had a nervous twitch.
Much better he should think I was an unbelievable idiot with a terrible sense of humor and no manners instead. I puffed my cheeks and stared at the wavering walls a moment before trying for a more human and humane response. “I mean, how awful, are you sure?”
Judging from his expression, I had not much improved my original comment. “The dark of winter is upon us, gwyld. My wife and mistress must be assuaged to bring back the light.”
“Has anybody suggested marriage counseling?” There was something wrong with me. I was usually mouthy, but not this much of a jackass. I took a moment for introspection and determined the cause of my behavior was probably the unmitigated terror sluicing through my veins. I’d meant to give Gary the Sight, not throw myself back through time. I had no clue how I’d done it or, more important, how to get home again. Lugh was attractive, but not worth staying displaced in time for. Especially since he was going to die soon. I held up a finger, asking for his patience, and knelt to curl myself up in a little ball, forehead against the grass.
Grass and stone: once upon a time there’d been a floor in this hall. In my time it was gone, but whenever we were now, it was present, but had modern-day grass growing up through it. That suggested I was still tethered in some fashion to my own era, which was reassuring. Some of the impulse to lash out faded, and I took a deep cleansing breath of green-scented air.
My leather coat creaked as I sat back on my heels. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting to step out of time and it’s making me act like a jerk. I’m not usually quite this bad.”
“The connected are often unusual.” The way he said the last word implied he really meant “unforgivable assholes,” but he was offering rope to hang myself with.
I took it, though I stayed kneeling. One knelt before royalty, after all. Also, equilibrium restoring itself or not, my legs felt shaky and I didn’t want to test them. “Who’s your wife? I thought stories about druids doing human sacrifices were just that. Stories. Also, dark of winter? Really? It’s the spring equinox when I am. Or just past. Close enough, anyway.”
He opened his mouth to answer two times while I rambled on, then stood there with a moderately patient glare until I fell silent. “I am wed to the Morrígan, and dark of winter or a balance of light, the quartered sun days are powerful. They do not have to be the same to draw us together. How is it that I, only a king, knows what a gwyld does not?”
“My training’s been spotty.” I got to my feet, feeling no need to add that the spottiness was entirely my own doing. “Wait, the Morrígan? The death goddess? That Morrígan?”
“The one and same,” Gary said at my elbow.
I nearly jumped out of my skin, having sort of forgotten about him. Lugh, though, exhaled unmistakable relief, and nodded to the big guy standing behind me. “I see from your garb you are with the gwyld. Her teacher, perhaps?”
Gary said “No” and I said “Yes” at the same time, leaving the high king to look as though he’d rather be having teeth pulled than this conversation. I said, “You are, too,” over my shoulder, and pleasure ran through Gary’s aura.
Auras. I looked back at Lugh.
His was all wrong. Not like a human aura and not much like the blaze of light and power that was a god, either. He was more connected to the earth than that, his aura reflecting the health of the land around him. That was what had triggered the assumption he wasn’t human. At the moment his aura lay sallow against his skin, dark of winter indeed. I could See the same quietness, even exhaustion, spreading through Tara to the countryside beyond. “Does this happen every year? I mean, no offense, but she must go through a lot of high kings this way.”
“She comes and goes as the years call her,” Lugh said patiently. “We kings rule in her name and with her blessing until the land hungers for us, and then she returns to claim us for it. Gwyld, why have you come here?”
My mouth, as it all too often did, skipped over consulting with my brain and blurted, “Maybe to save your life.”
Hope flashed across Lugh’s face and died again so quickly that I wasn’t sure I’d seen it. There was certainly no trace of it in his voice as he said, “A generous proposal, but not one I think you can manage. Not unless a high king called Lugh still reigns over Eire in your time, gwyld.”
Dismay crashed through me, but Gary stepped in. “Hard to say. Legend says all your kind went underground thousands of years ago. Could be anybody on the throne. Lugh’s part of the mythology here, though. Sun god, I think, so maybe not. What?” he demanded when I gaped at him. “Look, it ain’t native knowledge, doll. I been reading up the past year, just like you have. Guess we’ve been covering different territory. Anyway, aincha ever heard of fairy mounds? ’Swhere the fair folk go to ground. Everybody knows that.”
“No, I’ve never heard of fairy mounds! I swear to God, did I miss a college course? Life Lessons 103: How to Recognize Magic?” My hands waved in the air like demented puppets. “And I thought I was doing so much better!”
“You are.”
That was not reassuring. I stuffed my hands in my coat pockets, shoulders hunched defensively high as I shuffled to face Lugh again.
He didn’t look any more reassured than I felt. I sighed and scrubbed my hands through my hair, which needed to be washed. “So this Morrígan. Is she really a goddess? I’ve never met a goddess.”
“The Morrígan,” Lugh said, a bit severely. “She was one of us once, long ago. She has left us since, and rides the night sky with her ravens and her bloody blades.”
“Ra…” The woman in my vision had been accompanied by ravens. I swallowed and gestured to indicate a height equal to my own. “Is she about yay tall, with hip-length black hair and a death’s head face? Blue robes? Badass tattoos? Necklace like this one?” I stuck my thumb under my necklace, bringing it to Lugh’s attention.
He focused on it momentarily. “All but the last, yes.”
I tried to focus on the necklace, too—difficult, when it was a choker and didn’t pass my chin when tugged forward—then muttered, “She’s the reason I’m here. I mean, in Ireland. Not here—here, whenever this is. Hey!” I let go of the necklace, suddenly hopeful. “Maybe I really do get to save you! Maybe that’s why she called me!” Of course, the call had felt like more of a gauntlet across the face than a request for a rescue mission, but maybe that didn’t matter.
Or maybe it did. Lugh shook his head. “She is not known for her kindness. I think she wouldn’t call you to rewrite my fate.”
“Well, I’m here now. I think I’ll give it a shot, if you don’t mind.”
Complexity crossed Lugh’s face and he looked to Gary. “You are her teacher. In my time the connected say fate is not to be toyed with. Is it not so in your time?”
Gary’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “Forgive me for sayin’ so, your majesty, but what the hell’s the point in being connected if you don’t mess with fate? Rightin’ wrongs, fighting the good fight, setting kids named Arthur on the path to be king? That’s what the connected do.”
Now Lugh shot a surreptitious glance at me. “Arthur?”
“After your time. Don’t worry about it. What do your adepts do?”
He tipped his head curiously, then smiled. “Adepts. A suitable word. They maintain balance. Between justice and injustice, between life and death, between light and dark. What do you do?”
“That,” I admitted, “only less portentously. I hope. My version involves getting my ass kicked a lot, and screwing around with fate. I don’t know what else to call getting a kid turned into a sorcerer’s vessel.” There were a whole bunch of other threads I’d tugged in my year as a shaman, but that one continued to upset me.
“Your world,” Lugh said after a long, long time, “must be badly out of balance.”
“You have no idea.”
He drew himself up, suddenly regal. “Then you must see what a world in balance looks like, gwyld. Perhaps that is why you’re here. Come.” He turned and walked away and I made to follow him.
Gary hissed, “Jo,” despite my name having not a sibilant in sight. “Jo, hang on.”
I hung, letting Lugh stride down the Hall of Kings without us. “What’s wrong?”
His eyes popped. “We’re standin’ in the middle of a million-year-old hall that’s just a bunch of green hills in our time, talkin’ to an elf king, and you gotta ask what’s wrong? What’d you do to us, Jo? This ain’t what the Sight’s like, is it?”
“Oh. No. Not normally. I mean, no—wait. What do you see?”
“I see Tara, Jo. Tara the way it musta been a million years ago. It’s…” Gary, who was never at a loss for words, trailed off as he gazed around. “There’s swords on the walls. Lot of ’em don’t look like they’ve ever been used. They’ve got carvings below them, faces. Except they don’t look like carvings, more like they just lifted right out of the stone itself. All the kings, I guess. Makes you feel like you’re walkin’ through history.” He paused, then said in a more normal tone, “You know what I mean.”
I grinned. “Yeah. I don’t see that, not as clearly. I’ve got overlap going from our time. I don’t see the faces.”
“Too bad. They’re somethin’, Jo.” He refocused on me. “So what the hell’d you do? You said your rhyme, then disappeared for a minute, and then everything changed to this and the elf king.”
I stared at him. “How’d you know he wasn’t human?”
Gary did his plate tectonics shrug. “Pretty sure the human high kings of Ireland married Maeve, not the Morrígan. That and the mythology said Lugh was one of the sí. It stood to reason.”
My hands started doing the Muppet thing again. “What the hell’s a shee? No, never mind, forget it, just tell me how it stood to reason that some random guy in the annals of history wasn’t human? How it stood to reason that—”
Gary gave me a level look. “Sweetheart, in the fifteen months I’ve known you, I been stabbed by a demigod, ridden with the Wild Hunt, fought a wendigo, been witched into a heart attack an’ killed a couple zombies. What part of that would make a guy think there weren’t any elves prancin’ about somewhere in the world?”
I stared at him again. Pushed my glasses up. Stared some more. Then, in my very best academic tone, I said, “Oh. Well, when you put it like that, yeah, okay. I don’t know how we got here, Gary. And what do you mean, I disappeared?”
“Poof,” he said with a demonstrative puff of his fingers. “Gone. Had me worried for a minute, but then I got sucked back through time, too.”
“I can still See our time,” I said nervously. “I don’t like that I went poof. That can’t be a good sign.”
He whacked my shoulder in a way that could, if I was liberal with my definition, be construed as a pat. “Roll with it, doll.”
“Right. Because I don’t know how to get us home, so what choice do I have.”
Gary beamed and patted my shoulder again. This time I didn’t stagger from it. “That’s my girl. You’re getting the hang of this carpe diem stuff.”
“I have a good teacher. I think I also have an impatient elf king up there.” Indeed, Lugh stood framed by the hall’s far doorway, looking for all the world like a graceful marble statue. A graceful, impatient marble statue, though I’d never encountered a statue which exuded impatience. It made me wonder if there was a Museum of Statues of Unusual Expression somewhere in the world. There should be, if there wasn’t.
Lugh’s statuesque pose relaxed as we caught up to him. Gary caught his breath—his own breath, not Lugh’s—and even I, who still saw my era overlying ancient Tara, said, “Wow.”
The screaming white stone stood a few hundred yards away in a straight shot from the hall’s exit. I could See another version of it about a hundred yards off to the right; it had been moved in comparatively modern times, but the sheer solidity of its long-term presence beyond the hall made its modern-day location a mere shadow. Beyond it, the henges rose up with banners snapping, making the barrier around Tara that much more impressive.
Everything within the henges was focused on the screaming stone, which shone with gathered energy. It was capped with rich green magic at the moment, power waiting to be released. I wanted to yank the cap off to see if the energy shot upward like a spotlight directed at the sky. I kind of thought it would. That it would shoot up, crash into the cloud layer and rain back down over the entirety of Ireland in an island-size distribution of goodwill, serenity and balance.
Except Ireland didn’t exactly have a history of goodwill, serenity and balance. I frowned at the screaming stone like that was its fault, but Lugh brushed the thought away with a dramatic sweep of his hand. “Here lies the heart of our civilization. The collected spirit of the aos sí, where at midsummer those who would rule pass through the hall and come to the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny. The stone cries out for all of Ireland to hear when a worthy man lays hand on it. The Morrígan comes to wed him, and we kneel before our new king.”
“You get a lot of people eager for that job when they know the wedding bed ends up with a sacrificial knife through it?” My analogy sucked, but Lugh got the point. So to speak.
“It is an honor and a duty to be tested,” he said stiffly, and just to teach me a lesson, struck off across the hills while he spoke. I chased after as he replaced stiffness with haughtiness that I was sure covered uncertainty. “All creatures must die. What better reason than for your people?”
Wrongness twitched up my spine again, just like it had when I’d contemplated Ireland’s emotional balance. “See, now, I get you’re elves or whatever, but if I’ve learned one thing being a shaman it’s that blood sacrifice is just not cool. It leads to all kinds of bad moj—” I broke off and glared over my shoulder at Gary, who had no problem keeping pace as we approached the Lia Fáil. He widened his eyes and mimed zipping his lips: no MojoJo from him. Satisfied, I finished, “Bad mojo. I can’t see that undergoing a 180-degree reversal, even over the course of a jillion years. Also,” I said, glancing around, “if there’s going to be a sacrifice here, shouldn’t there be a bloodthirsty crowd gathering?”
“It is a private affair,” Lugh said, still uptight and arrogant about it.
I snorted, then gaped as the penny dropped. “Oh, shit. You mean you didn’t know this would happen when you signed on, don’t you. Oh, crap. This cannot be good. This can’t be good at all. Sacrifices are bad enough. Secret sacrifices, that, no, just no. I put my foot down. That’s enough of this bullshit. Where is she? I’m going to have a word with this chick.”
Lugh, wordlessly, pointed skyward. I whipped around, arms akimbo.
The woman who stalked out of the sky was my mother.
Chapter Five
It wasn’t really, not after a second shocked look. But that first one was a blow to the gut, sharp enough to make me breathless and sick. I took a woozy step backward and clung to the standing stone like an ingénue while I took stock of the Morrígan.
She was actually far more beautiful than my mother, but there was a definite similarity. More than just the long jet-black hair and light-colored eyes: they had a ferocity I didn’t think I shared. In my mother, that ferocity came out in the way she chewed Altoids.
In the Morrígan, it was more in the way she charged down out of the sky with a blazing sword in one hand and a trio of shrieking ravens flapping around her shoulders. Lugh, the damned fool, stepped between me and her and flung his arms wide, making himself an easily skewerable target.
Gary muttered, “Elves ain’t too bright,” as he lumbered by me and tackled Lugh to the ground just as the Morrígan swung her sword at him.
It slammed into the Stone of Destiny so hard that something, either the stone or the sword, should have shattered. Neither did, but the clang nearly broke me into a billion pieces. Chills dashed up my spine, down my arms, back up again and took up residence at the base of my neck, where they did a tap dance. Lugh gave a little grunt that made a nice counterbeat to the tapping. Gary rolled off him as the Morrígan squalled in pure outraged astonishment. The ravens took their distance from her and she landed on the ground in a cinematic rush of blue robes and black hair. It was very John Woo. All we needed was a flock of doves.
The Morrígan came to her feet in a surge of power and grace and began stalking toward Gary. “You dare deny me my sacrifice?”
He sat up and jerked a thumb my way. “Not me, doll. Her.”
I waved and produced my best perky smile. “Hi.”
The Morrígan gave me a dismissive look, then looked again more carefully. “You bear my lord’s mark.”
“I do?” I glanced at myself, half expecting the sign of the cross or some other inappropriately modern religious marker to have cropped up on my skin. Then I clapped my hand at my throat, where the necklace’s pendant had a quartered cross. “Oh! This?”
“No.” She flicked a finger and the sleeve of my new $1800 leather coat ripped apart to expose the bandaged werewolf bite. My vision washed out, leaving nothing in the world but my ruined sleeve. Static filled my ears, mostly drowning out her, “That. What does a sister in blood wish with my sacrifice?”
It hadn’t split on the seam. The leather was damaged. It couldn’t be fixed, and there was no earthly way I was going to get an exchange on an item damaged by supernatural beings. I lifted my gaze inch by incremental inch to fix the laserlike focus of consumer fury on the Morrígan.
Gary mumbled, “Uh-oh,” and got out of the way.
“First,” I said in the lowest, deadliest voice I had at my disposal, “fix my coat. Then we’ll discuss what I want with your sacrifice.”
To my utter astonishment, she arched an eyebrow, shrugged and flicked her finger again. My coat put itself back together, not a hint of damage done to it. The wind sailed right out of my rage and despite myself I said, “That was kind of cool. How’d you do it?”
“Will it and it is so. The Master gives us such gifts. You must be new to your mark, if you haven’t yet learned that. Now.” Her eyebrows arched again. “My sacrifice?”
“Oh yeah. You can’t have him.” I smiled at her, all pleasant resolution. Amazing what a little thing like an undamaged coat sleeve did for my humor. Then her answer began trickling toward comprehension, and cold slid down my spine. “Um. Mark of the Master? You mean your boss is the same… Shit. Shit, shit, shit shit shit.” It didn’t take very many repetitions for that to become an absurd-sounding word. I said it one more time for good measure, turned around, kicked the Stone of Destiny and turned back.
This time, though, I had a sword in my hand. My silver rapier, taken off a god and usually resident beneath my bed. It had at least two feet of reach on the Morrígan’s short sword. I hoped like hell that was enough to make up for what I suspected were her vastly superior fighting skills.
She looked wonderfully nonplussed by the new addition to my accessories. It was all I could do to not dance a jig. The blade was part of my psychic armor, so I’d been pretty sure I could pull it from halfway across the world. The Morrígan’s astonishment was just a terrific bonus. Gary gave a triumphant “Hah!”
Lugh, as astounded as the Morrígan, said, “No gwyld I know carries a sword,” and then it was on.
She was fast. God, she was fast, and had obviously been using a sword forever, whereas I’d started learning barely a year ago. Her first flurry came down like an avalanche, short blade cutting the air so quickly it made the whipping sounds children usually add to swordplay. I couldn’t see it, not even with the Sight running at full bore. Instead I watched her shoulders, her hips, her feet and somewhere at the back of my mind all the training Phoebe had pounded into me did its job. The rapier was where it needed to be time and again, preventing the Morrígan from skewering me.
My arms were already getting numb, and she’d been hitting me for only about half a minute. I hadn’t come close to an offensive measure. I was going to earn Lugh a whopping fifteen seconds of life if I didn’t do something else fast.
Do something else fast. That was the key. I whispered, Rattler? I need your gift of speed, silently, and a slithering, sibilant personality came to life within me.
We ssstrike, he agreed, but he sounded weary. As well he should: barely a day ago he’d stripped me right down to the core in order to make sure I survived getting smashed by a truck. It had taken a lot out of both of us, even if spirit animals didn’t technically have a lot to be taken out of. He was less of a sketch of light in my mind than usual, but adrenaline pumped through my veins, lending me the swiftness of a striking snake.
The Morrígan was astonished again when my rapier came up and not just blocked, but tangled and threw her short sword to the side. Not away: her loose, strong grip was too much for that, but I made an opening with the parry, and for the first time pressed the fight. She dropped back, not retreating, but distancing herself so she could get a better look at me. I’d apparently suddenly become worthy. That wasn’t exactly the accolade I wanted, but it was better than having my head handed to me. I took a step toward her, but just one. I had the screaming stone at my back and wanted to keep it there. Her mouth flattened, recognition of what I was doing, and for an instant her gaze went beyond me, to Gary and Lugh.
I knew I shouldn’t look. I knew it, and I couldn’t help it. Just one quick glance over my shoulder, to make sure they were all right.
When I looked back, ravens tried to eat my face.
I shrieked, dropped my sword and flailed at the damned birds. Beaks and talons caught my hands, my hair, my arms, my cheeks, scoring vicious digs and slashes. Healing magic sluiced through me, keeping blood from spattering, but I didn’t know how to fight a flock of birds.
We ssstrike, Rattler said in audible irritation, and my left hand snapped out to seize one of the ravens by its throat.
The snaky impulse was to squeeze and crack its fragile bones. Somehow I didn’t, though I felt the play of muscle in my arm and saw it enter my hand. It stopped just before my fingers spasmed shut. The raven, with no evident concern for its mortality, twisted its head and bit the tender flesh between the thumb and forefinger.
The other two ravens beat wings backward, taking themselves just out of my range of attack. Taking themselves out of their range of attack, too, for which I was grateful. Bird in one hand, I knelt to scoop up my sword, then leveled it at the Morrígan, who once more looked astonished. And furious, but she held still, which led me to a rapid conclusion. “Your power’s tied up in the birds. What happens if one dies? You can’t fly out of here on their wings the way you just arrived, that’s for damned sure. Quite a letdown to walk where you once flew, eh? What else, Morrígan? What else do you lose if you lose a bird?”
Truth was, I hadn’t stopped myself from killing the raven because I thought it might be a bargaining chip. I hadn’t killed it because Raven was my other spirit animal, and I thought he might take issue with me obliterating one of his brethren. But the Morrígan didn’t have to know that. I was pretty pleased with myself.
Right up until she snarled, “Less than if I lose the sacrifice,” and with another twitch of her fingers, broke the bird’s neck.
Don’t ever try to tell me animals don’t mourn. The remaining ravens made god-awful sounds, noises that I would call shrieks of horror in humans, and renewed their attack. On me, not on the damned Morrígan, even though she was the actual criminal here. I dropped the dead raven and swung wide with my rapier, cutting an errant feather as it fell. For half a breath I was impressed with the sword’s sharpness, and then I was back to facing three opponents as the Morrígan took the fight to me again.
Rattler’s power surged through me, lending me the speed to meet hers. I already had the strength, thanks to having spent most of a lifetime working on cars. I did not, however, have a duo of infuriated ravens on my side, and the birds were rapidly tipping the odds in her favor. I blurted, “Raven?” out loud and a pleased kak kak KAK! ricocheted through my mind as Raven exploded from the back of my head.
That’s what it felt like, anyway, and from the Morrígan’s expression that might have been what it looked like. Unlike Rattler, Raven wasn’t worn to a nub. Just the opposite, in fact. He hadn’t scraped me off a highway after I’d been hit by a truck, but he had partaken in the following spirit dance. It had brought Rattler and me from exhausted to functioning, and had taken the already-lively spirit bird from functioning to exuberant. This was his first chance since then to burn off some of that energy. He came swinging around my head in a sparkling display of brilliance and smacked the nearest normal raven with his wing.
Nominally normal, anyway. I wasn’t sure how normal any bird that helped fly a full-grown woman through the sky was, but it was black and glossy and looked like it belonged to the real world, whereas my Raven was made of fireworks. My Raven was also about two and a half feet long with a nearly five-foot wingspan, which made him gigantic in raven terms. The Morrígan’s were merely ordinary in comparison.
And they were totally unprepared to be buffeted by those great long wings. He’d hit me with them any number of times. It hurt. Apparently the Morrígan’s raven thought so, too, because it squawked in outrage and left off whacking me to claw at Raven. He did a lovely wing-tip pivot practically on top of my head and crashed into the other raven, then shot skyward with two black streaks of cawing anger chasing him. I said, “Thank you!” and got down to the serious business of having my ass handed to me.
I mean, really. I had strength, I had speed, but not in a hundred years would I have skill like the Morrígan’s. Hell, she even looked tougher than me, though I had a brief vision of how Gary probably saw us—her decked out in blue robes with long flying black hair, me with my short-cropped ’do and flowing white leather coat—and I decided we probably both looked pretty badass. Her more than me, though, because she was obviously the one taking her opponent apart bit by bit with her swordplay.
I parried like hell and tried every trick Phoebe’d taught me, plus a few I’d made up myself. I ducked. I jumped. I threw grass in her face. I kicked and almost got my foot cut off for my troubles. My left forearm throbbed worse with every passing moment, and the Morrígan smiled every time I fumbled on that side, like she knew exactly where my weakness was and only had to wait for me to give in.
Well, I was nothing if not stubborn. I might be bleeding, cursed with a dark mark and about to turn into a werewolf, but I wasn’t going to give the beautiful bitch the satisfaction of my failure. I retreated until I had the Stone of Destiny against my spine. Lugh and Gary weren’t there anymore, which I hoped was good.
What I really wanted was a minute to stop and think. What I got was a merry chase around the Stone, which was small enough to hug and therefore not really much use as an object to hide behind. Still, I ran around it, the Morrígan on my heels, while I tried to put it all together. It was obvious Lugh was fundamentally wrong about his Ireland being a place of balance and peace if the Morrígan recognized a werewolf bite as her master’s mark. I’d watched the werewolves being birthed from the mouth of a black hellhole. I knew their master, at least in passing. He was not one of the good guys.
In fact, he’d been trying to kill me since before I was born. My mother had thwarted him and sent me to America to keep me safe, but I’d regained his attention when my shamanic powers reawakened last year. If the Morrígan, mistress of death and war and doom, was under his command, then—
Then I tripped on the toes of my stompy boots, which were not meant for running circles in, and did a nosedive into the soft earth of ancient Tara.
Lugh, the goddamned fool, came up out of nowhere and took the blow that would have ended my life.
Chapter Six
Blood spattered me, the Stone, the green grass, everything, but I couldn’t even cry out. My voice was lodged in my throat, held there by horror. The Morrígan howled a mixture of delight and anger. She’d gotten her sacrifice, if not her target. Lugh slid off her sword and dropped to the earth. For an instant even the ravens ceased fighting and we all stared at the king’s prone form.
Then he dragged a shallow, shuddering breath, and hope seared me. I jammed my rapier upward, scoring the first blood I’d actually taken from the Morrígan, but not doing enough damage to take her down for the count. She shrieked and whirled, sword lifted to impale me.
Gary, hero of the revolution, bashed her on the back of the head with a rock.
There was something about watching the mighty fall ignominiously. Goddesses weren’t supposed to be taken down with a stone any more than Goliaths were. It lacked respect, and if I’d learned anything, it was that power demanded respect.
With that in mind, I bellowed, “Hot damn, you go, Gary!” dropped my sword and scrambled across the Morrígan’s unconscious body to get at Lugh.
Blood bubbled at his lips, a fine deadly froth. I was pretty sure that meant she’d gotten him in the lung. That should bode ill for him, but I’d healed myself from a punctured lung once. Healing somebody else couldn’t be that hard, especially since he knew of and accepted the power shamans wielded. Nothing like a willing victim to ease things along. I reached for the healing magic within me, flexing it for the first time since I’d arrived in Lugh’s era.
The Stone of Destiny stopped screaming.
It had gotten to where I didn’t notice it anymore, so the cessation was very loud. My head jerked up and I scanned for danger, but the Morrígan was still out and there was no one else at Tara but me, Gary and the ghosts of sacrifices past.
One of which went pop! like a soap bubble. Disappeared like he’d been erased entirely, and a glimmer of brilliant emerald-green power filled the space his voice had been in.
Familiar power. The power of a teenage demigod, granddaughter to the Wild Hunt. Suzanne Quinley, who had, at Halloween, unraveled a thread of history, and wiped a man from existence.
A man who had been birthed from a legendary cauldron that raised the dead as zombies, bound to do the bidding of the living. The Master had made it. Somebody had bound it so it could do relatively little evil. And I had—with some help—destroyed it.
If an ancient king of Tara had been one of the unfortunates caught within the cauldron’s magic, there was more than a little bad magic going on here. It was like the entire history of the world was corrupt, although as soon as I thought it I didn’t know why I was surprised. Corruption was kind of civilization’s story of humanity, from Adam and Eve all the way down the line.
That didn’t mean I had to like it. It certainly didn’t mean that in the here and now, thousands of years before my own time, I had to sit back and let him have his way. There was no point in having great power if I didn’t sling it around a little bit. Lugh, ard rí of the aos sí—I bet that sounded much cooler if I said it all in Irish instead of pidgining it together—did not have to die today. Determined, I pulled my magic into line and turned it on the dying king.
And slammed headlong into Suzanne’s power, lush and green and implacable. My own silver-blue talent shorted out in a fizzle of sparks, gathered itself again and buzzed against Suzanne’s, searching for a way in.
I hit reverberations instead, shockwaves that came from the none-too-distant past. No matter how I tried to slither by, they caught me in their wake and tossed me back to the beginning. I had mad skills, but they didn’t add up to godlike power. Despite this accidental traipse into the past, I also didn’t make a habit of jumping around through time, and the more I pushed for a way through, the more I had the impression I was simply on the wrong side of time to change anything in the here and now. To heal Lugh, I needed to step even further back, back to before Suzy’s rewrite, and work my way forward. Too much had already changed. The old needed to be fixed before the new could be altered.
Not very hopefully, I said, “Rattler? Raven?” but while my guides were still awake within me, they gave no clarifying power surge in response. Shapeshifting, dealing with the dead: they could handle those things. Time travel was evidently a whole ’nother kettle of fish.
For the first time since I’d gotten a handle on my shamanic powers, I let the magic go without having healed someone I genuinely wanted to see live. Lugh dragged another blood-bubbly breath and my face crumpled. Failure sucked. “I’m sorry. Something’s already happened here, Lugh. Time’s been changed, and I can’t change it again to heal you. Do you…”
Of course he wouldn’t remember. I didn’t even really have to ask. Suzanne had wiped out Lugh’s predecessor so thoroughly that he’d never existed at all. Someone else had played his role instead, a thought which dropped through me like a lead balloon.
Time had been rewritten. The Morrígan had accepted the Master as, well, her master. I was willing to put money on that not being a coincidence. “Lugh, ah, God, I’m sorry, but how long have the sacrifices been going on? How long have the high kings been marrying the Morrígan?”
“Al…ways. Since…Haw-hee…was slain…by the Morrígan.”
That was about as useful to me as a hole in the head, since I had not a clue what a Hawhee was, but this was not a good time to go into it. I nodded and clutched Lugh’s hand, feeling once more like the useless ingénue. “I’m so sorry. I am so sorry, Lugh. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
He smiled, faint bloody expression. “It was supposed to happen…exactly…this way.”
Great. I’d just gotten an I told you so from a dying king. I was trying to figure out how to respond to that when his hand spasmed around mine and determined fear came into his eyes. He surged up half an inch, which under the circumstances was a heroic effort, and whispered, “Warn…Nooda…!”
I had no more idea what a Nooda was than a Hawhee, but I nodded a vigorous, wordless promise, and Lugh, reassured, collapsed silently into death.
Gary stopped to pick up the Morrígan’s sword and throw it several yards away, then came to kneel by me. We sat together silently for what seemed like a long time, but eventually I said, “Who’s Hawhee?” with no expectation of an answer.
“I’m guessin’ a king,” Gary said, which was equal parts obvious and helpful. “Nuada’s one. They called him Nuada of the Silver Hand ’cause his got— Ah, hell, that’s who Hawhee was. It ain’t spelled like it sounds. It’s spelled…” He frowned, clearly calling the name up in memory, then rattled off, “E-o-c-h-a-i-d-h, Eochaidh, yeah. He’s the guy who cut off Nuada’s hand.”
I’d heard of Nuada. He’d made my necklace. It was just, “I thought it was pronounced New-AH-da.”
“Yeah, well, I thought Eochaidh was pronounced Ee-ock-chaye-d-hhh.” He aspirated the last sound like an old wheezing dog and I coughed on his behalf. Gary closed Lugh’s eyes, then cautiously asked, “What happened, Jo? I kinda saw you start to do your thing and then bounce right off a green granite cliff face.”
I blinked up from the dead king in surprise. “You saw that? I mean, you Saw it? Wow. That was…” I trailed off and stared at Lugh again. “That was repercussions. That was Suzanne Quinley, Gary. That was her in the zombie fight. You know the one she obliterated? He came from here. Not quite now, but somewhen around now. Time had to be rewritten around the space he wasn’t anymore.” The language was not well suited to referring to events that had been made to not-happen. I wet my lips and kept going as best I could. “Maybe he was supposed to be Eochaidh’s successor. Maybe he was meant to defeat the Morrígan, or to really marry her, but maybe instead the Master slipped in where he was supposed to be and made her a goddess instead.”
We both looked over at where she still lay sprawled across the grass, a bit of blood leaking through her hair. I said, “Only she isn’t, you know. She’s more than Lugh was, but she’s not like Cernunnos. She’s just very, very powerful.”
“So’re you.”
Somehow that made me feel a little better. I said, “Anyway,” more softly. “Anyway, so this whole era, which I guess means the whole timeline going forward, is all screwed up because of Suzy wiping that zombie out. I couldn’t heal Lugh because there was already too much interference. Something big already got changed. It wouldn’t let me change even more.”
Gary’s gray eyes were big as a lemur’s. “Are you gonna rewrite the whole history of the world, darlin’?”
“It doesn’t work that way.” I sounded very sure of myself, but I had, to a much smaller degree, already been there and done that. “Time tidies things up. The best I can do is close the loop, but I have to do it from our end of time. I can’t set the fix in motion back here.”
“But you can if we get home?”
“I can try.”
“Damn,” Gary said in a low voice. “I mean, damn, Jo.”
A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. “Yeah, well, don’t get too impressed. I haven’t pulled it off yet. And I still don’t even know how we ended up here, much less how to get us home, never mind how to find Nuada, and I can’t go home without trying to warn him.”
Gary’s expression went funny and he nodded over my shoulder. “We could ask her.”
Alarm crashed into the pit of my stomach and I tried scrabbling for my sword and leaping to my feet at the same time. Neither was wildly successful. I ended up lurching in a half circle with fingertips full of grass.
Fortunately, the woman coming up behind us was unarmed except by radiant beauty. I stole a glance at the unconscious Morrígan and the dead king. They were both still inhumanly attractive. I knew plenty of good-looking people, but these guys made the best of them look like ugly stepsisters. I glanced at the new arrival again, then shot a look at Gary, whose eyebrows had risen. He nodded, and we both gaped at the woman.
She was youthful now when she hadn’t been minutes ago, in the future. She wore a robe identical to the Morrígan’s, only hers was white bound with gold rather than blue with black. She, too, had tattoos banding her upper arms, but in red, not blue. Her hair was coppery and her eyes green, and she had the same kind of gently overflowing aura that had helped tip me off to Lugh’s alienness. Like the Morrígan, she exuded power. Also like the Morrígan, it wasn’t honest-to-God deity-level power. I knew who she was before she spoke.
“Welcome to Tara, Siobhán Walkingstick. I am Brigid.”
Score one for me. With my usual politeness, I said, “Couldn’t you have told me all this from the other end of time?” instead of “Hello.”
Surprised amusement shot her eyebrows toward her hairline. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know what you mean.”
I squinted. “Yeah, I’m sure not.” Well, maybe she didn’t. Not right now, anyway. I was going to have a talking-to with her, though, when we got back home. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter. Hello, Brigid. Nice to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Have you, now.” She kept sounding amused, which was better than the Morrígan’s snide superiority. “And what is it you’ve heard?”
“That you’re her opposite,” I said with a thumb-jerk toward the Morrígan, “and…” Okay, maybe I hadn’t heard all that much about her after all. I knew who she was. That was really about it, but for me, that was a lot. “And you’re one of the good guys?”
Brigid’s eyes grew more serious. “Death is not an aspect of evil, little sh—”
“Joanne.” I really hated being called “little shaman.” It was bad enough from Cernunnos, a certified god. I was not going to take it from people who were somewhere between human and sublime on the divinity scale.
Her eyebrow quirked. “Siobhán.”
“For God’s sake, what is this, a haggle? My name’s Joanne. Use it or don’t, but lay off with the insulting diminutives. And I know death isn’t inherently evil, but I’m not so sure there’s not something fundamentally wrong about war, ’cause, you know, basic rule of thumb: killing people is bad. So don’t try to tell me she’s one of the good guys—” I did the thumb-jerk again “—or that you don’t represent basically everything she’s not. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.” That was probably an unforgivably American way of phrasing it, but it got the point across.
Brigid made a face that indicated I had won a free pass for this round. I let out an explosive breath, tried to reel my temper back in and snapped, “So what do you want from me?”
So much for reeled-in tempers. Brigid smiled indulgently, like I was an ill-mannered five-year-old she wouldn’t have to deal with for very long. Probably that should’ve chastised me, but it only irritated me all the more. I turned to Gary and made a series of exasperated faces, trying to work myself into a better mood as Brigid said, “It’s your help I’m needing, gwyld. There’s a thing that’s been made in the near-distant past, and I can sense its touch on you.”
I clutched my left forearm, then bit back a hiss. Gnashy dog bites were not meant to be seized. It hurt. While I waited for the pain to fade, Brigid said, “Not that mark. This is the touch of death and life reborn, visited upon you thrice.”
I said, “Thrice, who says thrice,” under my breath and tried to count up the number of times I’d been through the life-and-near-death cycle in the past year or so. I stopped when I got to five, satisfied that Brigid didn’t know what she was talking about. Then I wondered if individual instances mattered or if it was a per-adventure count, in which case she might be on the money with three. There was the whole mess with Cernunnos and Herne that started all this, the dive into the cauldron and Saturday night’s exhaustive rebirthing scene. I didn’t think I’d been grievously injured the other thirty-seven or so times I’d figured I was about to die, so they probably didn’t add to the tally. “All right, okay, thrice. So what does that mean? Why does three times matter if you need my help?”
“There’s power in threes.” It sounded as if she was having a hard time not adding “You idiot” to that statement, but after a moment she managed to go on without saying it. “Bran’s cauldron has left its mark on you.”
“Less mark than I left on it,” I muttered.
Brigid laughed. “And it’s that which makes me need your help. I can sense its history on you, gwyld. I can sense that for most of its existence it has done little harm.”
I stared at her. “Little harm? Are you serious? That thing seduces the living. Invites them to crawl inside so it can suck their life out and turn them into zombies bidden to do the command of—” Bidden. Who says bidden? I turned my stare at the sky, as if answers or excuses for my word choices lay there. They didn’t.
“How many…zombies…were within the cauldron, Joanne Walker?”
“I don’t know, ten or so. Not very many.”
“Ten men,” Brigid murmured, “including Bres, he who was once ard rí of this land and is now taken from time, have died for the Morrígan and her master.”
My jaw flapped open. “Wait. Bres? He’s the guy who came undone? You remember him? How?”
“The world cannot abide imbalance. When my sister became death’s warrior, a similar and opposite path was offered to me. We remember that which has been changed, and your presence here gives me hope that the cauldron might yet be bound.”
“It can be. I mean, it was. Oh!” God, I was slow. “You’re the one who did it! Somebody broke the bindings, but not until just last year. I knew something powerful had set them—”
Brigid’s face froze momentarily, offense taken at something rather than someone. She let it go, though, as I rattled on. “I’ve been dying to meet whoever did it. Not actually dying. I do enough of that. But it didn’t feel like human magic, and I was right!” I wanted to dance a jig, by gum, though doing so over the bodies of a dead man and an unconscious powermonger seemed ever so slightly inappropriate. “How did you do it? How will you do it?”
“How did you destroy it?”
The impulse to jig faded. An innocent soul had sacrificed herself to make sure the cauldron was destroyed. Much more subdued, I said, “With help.”
“Then it is with help that I’ll bind it.”
I genuinely didn’t get she meant me until she held out her hand in invitation.
Chapter Seven
“…is this why you threw me back to this end of time? I mean, you’ve been here before, right? You knew this was going to happen when you met us at Tara in the future. Seriously, couldn’t you have just said something back then? Future then?”
Her eyebrows rose. “I meant what I said, Joanne Walker. I wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. You’re the one unstuck in time, the one who passes through many points at once. I travel through time day by day, as most living creatures do. If you have met me again, it awaits me in my future even if it resides in your past.”
I liked the idea of Brigid being responsible for our time traveling a lot more than I liked being responsible for it myself, so it took me a minute to get over that. Actually, it more like took me a moment to even approach it. Getting over it was still on the agenda. Gary, meantime, hissed, “That was her?”
He’d picked up the sword I’d dropped and had taken to standing guard over the Morrígan, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t listening. I gave a big sloppy frustrated shrug. “I think so. Or an avatar. Do you use avatars? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. How am I supposed to help? I don’t know any binding spells.”
I gave that a mental once-over to make sure it was true, then startled. It wasn’t: I’d encountered a binding spell in my first hours as a shaman. It called on gods and elements and things, and it probably wasn’t a safe bet to rely on me to cast it. Wisdom being the better part of valor, I said nothing about it.
Turned out it didn’t matter, as Brigid said, “The binding will be tied to you. Now that I know you have the power and the will to destroy it, the binding need only last until the cauldron comes into your presence.”
I stared at her. Began to speak. Held up a finger to stop both myself and her from saying anything. Turned around. Walked away. Stared fiercely at the southern horizon. There was a tower there, about a mile away, just like in my time. I glared at the tower until I trusted myself not to shriek like a harpy, then gathered myself to face Brigid again.
“I don’t know why you’d set a binding that can be broken when the damned cauldron enters my vicinity, like, my city, rather than my actual physical presence, but that’s what happens. People die because of that, Brigid. I get that closed time loops are tidy and all—” and, hoo boy, was I developing a hate-on for them “—but we’re talking about people’s lives here.”
“I would not set such a spell,” she said both serenely and alliteratively, “but the years are long between now and then, are they not? Even the most powerful of magics may slip, over so much time. And how many would die, Siobhán Walkingstick, if I did not make the magic at all?”
Using logic to derail my head of steam was a lousy trick. I muttered, “Well, at least promise to tighten up the wards every few centuries so the bindings can only be broken if I’m there. Or better yet, so only I can break them. Without murdering poor Jason Chen.” It didn’t work that way. I knew it didn’t, because it hadn’t. I doubted we’d get back to our time and discover history had retrofitted itself and that Jason had gotten to take his sisters trick-or-treating after all. For one intense, searing moment I wished like hell it did work that way, but time, life and Grandfather Sky were not that kind. If I ever got to meet the makers of the world I had a word or two I wanted to say to them.
Brigid promised, “I’ll do my best,” and I nodded, knowing it wouldn’t be enough. Then I followed her gaze as it went to Lugh. She murmured, “My sister must take her sacrifice so we might find the cauldron to bind it,” apologetically.
It wasn’t physically possible for my head to spin, but it tried. A headache sprang up for its efforts, and while I was struggling to find something politic to say, Gary growled, “You gotta be kidding, lady. All this and you don’t even know where the damned thing is?”
Brigid stiffened. “It would be a great prize for my sister’s master. They would not leave it somewhere easy to find.”
“It’s in the cave.” I sighed as Gary and Brigid both raised their eyebrows at me. “The one the werewolves came from. Somewhere to the west of here, near a…” I waved my hands. “Near another hill.”
“Ireland,” Brigid said dryly, “is full of hills.”
I glowered. “A built-up one. Somebody made a huge pile of rocks on top of a gigantic flat hill.”
“Cnoc na rí,” Brigid said every bit as dryly as before. “We would call it a mountain, Joanne Walker. The mountain of kings. You speak of the cairns atop it.”
“I don’t know what Knocknaree is,” I said, approximating her pronunciation as best I could, “but it’s a marker for the cave, and if you know where it is, we should probably haul ass that direction and bind the damned cauldron so Gary and I can go home.”
Gary squeaked, “That might be a problem, doll,” and when I looked over, the Morrígan had my sword at his throat.
I had shot somebody four mornings ago. It was not something I was proud of and not something I wanted to repeat. Ever. Except I’d have dropped the Morrígan in a heartbeat, if I’d had my gun. I doubted it would change the whole history of the world. Someone else similar would just replace her. But I didn’t have my gun, and later I would probably think that was good, because digging modern-day shell casings out of a millennia-old Tara hillside would really throw archaeologists for a loop.
Right now, though, my fingers clenched like I was squeezing a trigger, and the Morrígan gave me a tight, nasty smile. “Don’t think of it, gwyld. You may draw a blade from the air, but not while it resides in my hand.”
She was right, too. I could almost feel the hilt in my hand, but there was a trembling resistance, too, like a magnet not quite strong enough to pull its counterpart toward it. But the Morrígan’s magic—or grip—was stronger, and the harder I tried calling it to me, the redder a scratch on Gary’s throat became.
I stopped trying. The sword relaxed, giving Gary room to swallow. In fact, his whole big self relaxed. Sagged, some might even say. He had both hands on the Morrígan’s arm, classic knife-at-throat pose, but he wasn’t going to be able to pull her away without slitting his own gullet. His head fell forward, shoulders caved as best they could to protect his throat in a moment of defeat. His spirit animal’s presence was agitated, not something I’d ever imagined a tortoise could be. But even tortoises had vulnerable throats.
I was trying to figure out what to do when Gary threw his head back and smashed the Morrígan’s nose.
Roughly one million awful things happened at once.
Cartilage crunched. The Morrígan bellowed with pain. She even dropped the sword, but blood was already pouring from Gary’s throat: he’d cut it himself with the sheer violence of his action.
The Morrígan dropped him, too, and staggered back with both hands clapped to her nose. Blood ran down her forearms toward her elbows. Normally I would mock a warrior woman who couldn’t take the pain of a little broken nose, but Gary was bleeding, and besides, I’d broken my nose when I was a kid. It hurt like a motherfucker.
Gary’s hands went to his throat, such a familiar cinematic response that it could have been funny if it wasn’t a real person a few seconds from bleeding to death. He dropped to the earth with lumbering grace as I charged forward, vision turning silver-blue with fear and fury.
In the center of that brilliance, the Morrígan crouched over Lugh’s body. She glanced up, saw me coming and splayed one hand open with much the same gesture she’d used to ruin my coat. Power exploded out, black wrath laced with blue.
Brigid, inexplicably, stood between me and the burst of power. Her shields flared, white and gold, but the blast of black magic still hit hard enough that her torso bowed with the impact. She fell gracefully, never in my way as I ran for Gary.
An ugly sound of frustration erupted from the back of the Morrígan’s throat, but she didn’t try again. Her ravens came to her, one on each shoulder. She sneered at me, then dissipated in a whirl of blue mist.
The sleeve of my coat turned to shredded leather again as she disappeared.
I hit the bloodstained grass on my knees, both hands covering Gary’s at his throat. There was no careful visualization, no rebuilding of vessels, veins, muscle, tendons, skin one by very quick one. No delving into the garden of Gary’s soul to find the heart of him and the idea of how he thought he should be. I didn’t need to, for two reasons. One, I’d tried healing a cut throat once before. It hadn’t worked, but the concept was familiar.
Two, and much more important, he and I both had total faith in my ability to heal him. That was all it took, really. A rush of magic and suddenly all the blood was on our hands, on our clothes, on the ground, without any more pumping free of his body.
I sat back on my heels, my own heart pumping at about a zillion miles an hour. As far as I could tell, the entire incident, from the moment the Morrígan put the rapier to Gary’s throat all the way through to his healing, had taken about ten seconds. Ten very exciting, heavily punctuated seconds, but ten seconds.
Gary, hands now exploring his throat to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, croaked, “What took you so long, doll?”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. It was high-pitched and hysterical, not amused, but I did laugh, and he gave me one of the sexy old coot grins that had all my friends convinced he was my sugar daddy. I waved a bloody hand, said, “Oh, you know, I could tell she hadn’t hit the jugular, I had all the time in the world,” then burst into tears and fell over on him. “What were you thinking?!”
He put his arm around me, mouth on top of my head. “Figured I knew a girl who could fix me up in no time flat if I did somethin’ crazy to break the status quo. You were never gonna risk it.”
“Of course I wasn’t! Jesus, Gary!” I wanted to punch him, but punching a guy who’d just had his throat cut seemed low. I sniffled into his shoulder instead.
He chuckled against my hair, then drew a deep breath. “Thanks, sweetheart.”
I wrapped my arm over his ribs and hugged him as hard as I could. “I’d say ‘anytime,’ except if you ever do something like that again I’ll kill you myself.”
“Nah, you wouldn’t. Who’d go on all these crazy adventures with you then?”
“Billy. Morrison, the poor bastard. Random strangers getting swept up in my wake. Ha—” The last sound wasn’t a word, just an inhaled breath that Gary rumbled a laugh over.
“Yeah yeah yeah. Look, I hate to break our quality time up, Jo, but wasn’t there a bad guy here a minute ago?”
We both pushed up on our elbows. The Morrígan’s disappearing act had left no trace of where she’d gone. Brigid, though, sat against the bloodstained Lia Fáil, one hand pressed to her chest. I whispered, “Shit,” and scrambled to her on hands and knees, then stopped with my hands hovering above her, half-afraid to touch her, totally afraid to try healing her after the disaster with Lugh. “Jesus, are you okay?”
“Well enough.” Her voice was faint, and her overflowing aura weak. I bit my lower lip, waking healing power, but she shook her head. “Not in this time and place, I fear. My sister’s strength is the greater here. Do not expose yourself to her any more than you must.”
“You look like you could use some must.”
She smiled, but it faded. “Do not concern yourself with me. Concern yourself instead with my sister. I had meant to follow her to her master’s lair, to the cauldron’s seat—”
“But instead you took one for the team. Um, thanks for that. I think you might have saved my life there. That was a lot of power she threw at me.”
“Yes. Her success would have been unparalleled, had she taken your life so far out of your time. I could not allow that, even—” She sighed and I finished for her:
“Even if it meant losing her and the cauldron? I dunno, Bridge. Magic’s damned hard to track. Unless you’re better at it than I am.”
Brigid shook her head. I nodded and glanced at the sky. Raven had been up there somewhere, fighting with the Morrígan’s ravens. “I don’t suppose you know where they all went, do you?” I asked him, and he flew down out of the sunlight to whack me on the head with a wing. “Yeah, sorry, I didn’t think so. Next time I’ll try not to lose the bad guy. You did a good job kicking her ravens’ asses, though. Shiny food in your future.”
Raven cawed with pleasure and faded away. Gary came to crouch beside me looking big-eyed and happy as a kid in a candy store. “I saw him, Jo. Your raven. I saw him.”
I smiled, then leaned over to hug him again, hard. “Welcome to having the Sight, Mr. Muldoon. All right, let’s head for Knocknaree so we can kill that bitch. Look what she did to my coat.”
Gary grinned a little. “You’re gonna kill her over a coat, Jo?”
For some reason it wasn’t as funny as it should be. I shook my head. “I’m going to kill her for cutting your throat. The coat was just petty.”
“Good to know I’m loved.”
“You are,” I said, still solemn. “You are.” Then in a rush of delight, I smacked his shoulder. “Dude! Dude, you totally busted her nose, you know that, right? How many people get to say they head-butted a goddess?”
Gary chortled, then tried to disguise his pleasure by saying, “Thought you said she wasn’t a goddess.”
“Oh, ffssht. Close enough for government work. Okay, Knockna…” We were several thousand years in the past. There were no itty bitty Irish cars to drive on the itty bitty Irish roads. In fact, I bet there weren’t even many itty bitty roads to drive on. “…just where is this Knocknaree place?”
“In the West.” Brigid sounded like Galadriel, except I was pretty sure she only meant the west of Ireland, not some far-off land of everlasting peace and calm.
From our perspective, however, the difference was negligible. Ireland wasn’t a big island, but a couple hundred miles was a long way when you were traveling on foot. I exhaled noisily. “I don’t suppose we can go home, drive over and meet you there in a few thousand years, huh? You oughta be able to make it there by then.”
“I think not,” a brand-new voice said, and Brigid faded away.
Chapter Eight
I refused to flinch. It took every last bit of willpower, but I refused to flinch. Instead, with all the panache at my command—which wasn’t much—I said, “I’m getting tired of mysterious voices and people disappearing,” to Gary before I allowed myself to look around.
The air had changed quality: mist sparkled more, like bits of ice rode on it, and my breath steamed as another of the annoyingly beautiful, slightly inhuman aos sí came up on us. This one looked like he’d been dipped in silver from his hair to his boots. I’d never seen genuinely silver hair before; even Cernunnos’s was really brown and ashy. This guy’s actually shone like the metal. My gaze fell to his left hand.
It was silver, the knuckles gleaming and flexing like molten metal as they moved. I stared at it, mesmerized, then shook myself. “You’d be Nuada, then.” I gave myself bonus points for pronouncing it correctly. He didn’t have to know I’d only just learned how.
“I would be. And you would be…” He was silent a long time, then cleared his throat uncertainly. “You would be my bride? The Morrígan?”
My jaw fell open and my eyes went googly while Gary had a good laugh. While it was nice to know having his throat cut hadn’t changed his laughter, it was also clear Nuada wasn’t keen on being the butt of a joke. I elbowed Gary, who manned up and stopped laughing as I said, “No, my name’s Joanne. The Morrígan’s stepped out for a bite to eat.”
Gary snorted laughter again. I elbowed him harder, to no avail. “Look, no, sorry. She just took off with Lugh, and Brigid disapp—”
“Lugh?” Nuada’s eyebrows made a heavy silver line across his forehead. “Lugh is half a year gone. How else might I be here, ready to wed the Morrígan?”
“What?” I’d thought the days of me saying “What?” all the time were past. Apparently not. “No, he just died not ten min—”
“Died?”
Oh yeah. The aos sí weren’t hip to the actual goings-on with the Morrígan. I started to cast my gaze heavenward, as if to gather strength for an explanation, but it got only about as high as the horizon before Nuada’s sword was at my throat. He repeated, “Died?” and it didn’t take a super genius to grasp that I was up next on the list of dead people.
Panic was clearly the right response. Panic, some flailing, a frantic explanation; all the sorts of things I’d done before. They’d gotten old, though. This time I just sighed and said, “The Morrígan killed him, your royal nitwitness, not me.”
His sword poked half an inch closer, which was enough to part the skin on my throat.
Or it would have been, if I hadn’t finally learned the habit Coyote had been trying to hammer into me my entire shamanic career: shields up, Captain. Shields up at all times.
Nuada’s sword rubbed against the glimmer of power layering my body, and didn’t so much as leave a scratch. The Morrígan hadn’t drawn blood, either. I had the damned werewolf to thank for that: she had driven home what Coyote had failed to. Unfortunately, she’d only done so after she’d bitten me. There was an argument for better late than never, but I probably wasn’t the person to be making it.
The silver-handed elf king’s forehead wrinkled ever so slightly. He pushed a little harder and the sword, rather than sticking in my gullet, began sliding sideways. Chagrined, he pulled it back into place, but stopped leaning into it. “What are you?”
“A shaman. Gwyld. You might as well put the sword away. It’s not going to do you any good. What do you mean, six months have passed?” The landscape looked the same. No particular hint of winter. Of course, I neither had any idea what an Irish winter thousands of years in the past looked like, nor any call in judging what time was or wasn’t doing. I was already millennia out of my league, after all. Six months here or there probably didn’t count for much, and the air was colder.
“What do you mean, dead?”
“It ain’t nice to go around interrogatin’ people by holdin’ swords at their throats,” Gary rumbled.
Nuada looked at him. Looked at me. I could just about see the wheels turning: if the young woman could hold a sword attack off with the power of her mind, what could the old guy with several decades more experience do?
Judiciously, and with the expression of a cat who meant to fall off the wall, Nuada put his sword away. Then he spread his hands, palms up, in a gesture of conciliation and goodwill. “I would hear your tale.”
“Yeah, I just bet you would.” Snark would get me nowhere. I raspberried a long breath out, inhaled again and put on my best perky tour guide voice. “The Morrígan’s been murdering your high kings for at least the last ten or so. I would strongly suggest not marrying her, if I was you. Were you. Was? Were. If I were you.” I didn’t care if it was right. It sounded better.
“Jo,” Gary muttered, “shut up.”
I said, “He asked,” with the pitch and tone of an insulted child, then kicked myself in the ankle. It was a good thing I already had an Indian name, or my Indian name would be Kicks Self In The Ankle. “Nuada,” I said with every ounce of patience at my disposal, “your bride to be is one of the bad guys. I have literally traveled through time to tell you this, a statement which I expect is supported by my outlandish clothing. I would beg of you, your majesty, to listen to me.”
The poor guy recognized the patience in my voice, but not that it was directed at myself. Nobody could be as exasperating as I was. I suddenly felt sorry for Morrison. And for Nuada, who drew himself up with offense, because who wouldn’t when some weirdly dressed chick from the future condescended at you.
“I’m sorry,” I said before he had time to launch into a tirade. “Really. It’s me I’m disgusted with, not you. I’m having a hard time with the explaining. Time travel sucks.” Lightning struck—metaphorically, thank God; that was not the sort of phrase I should use lightly—and I shoved a thumb under my necklace, bringing it to his attention. “Look! Wait! Look at this!”
If nothing else, my increasingly bizarre antics caught him off guard, giving me time to unfasten the choker before he decided to berate my bad manners. The necklace gleamed as I handed it over, misty light catching the triskelions and the quartered circle that was its pendant.
Nuada took it with his silver hand, which wasn’t articulated or in any other fashion prosthetic-like, aside, of course, from it being silver. It moved and flexed like flesh, and I fancied I could even see blood vessels beneath the surface as he turned the necklace up to examine it. “This is my work,” he said eventually. “I would know it anywhere. And yet I have never made such a piece in all my years.”
“And this?” I put my hand out and called my sword. It zinged across the ten or so feet of intervening space and slapped into my palm like it and I were magnetized.
Nuada’s eyebrows shot up, though his words suggested he was more impressed by the sword itself than the zooming across space: “I’ve never seen a blade such as that. What is it?”
“It’s called a rapier. They come into fashion in about…” I had a vague idea rapiers were sixteeth-century weapons, but I had no idea when that was in relation to us. “In a few thousand years.”
“It’s beautiful.” He opened his hand in request and I put the sword into it, watching his attention flit between rapier and necklace. “Both mine,” he said. “Both not yet forged. For whom do I make such pieces of art? A far-flung gwyld?”
“I think you make the necklace for the Morrígan. The sword belongs—belonged—to Cernunnos. I took it.”
His gaze snapped to mine. “You took a blade from the god of the Wild Hunt?”
“It’s a long story.”
“This is not the sword I made for that god.”
For a statement, it sounded remarkably like a demand. I nodded and made a space of about four feet between my hands. “You made him one about this long. Narrower at the hilt and broader at the point. It’s beautiful, too, but it’s brutal. It’s for killing things. This one’s more elegant. It’s for killing things, too, obviously, but you can imagine it’s for…toying with them, too. He asked for it, when they came into style, and after he lost it to me you wouldn’t make him another.” I wet my lips. “That happens in the future. Don’t tell him I told you you didn’t make him another, because I’m pretty sure that’d end up being my fault somehow and he and I already have a lot of water under the bridge to get over.”
Nuada squinted. So did I. Gary just groaned. “You gotta learn to control your mouth sometimes, Jo.”
“What fun would that be?”
“Can you call him here?” Nuada asked, ever so softly. “I am inclined to believe you, unborn gwyld, but I would like to hear it from Cernunnos, as well.”
My heart jumped at the idea. If it was midwinter, Cernunnos rode our world with the Hunt at his back. I might be able to call him to a center of power like Tara. “He and I don’t meet for thousands of years.”
Nuada gave me a familiar look, the one suggesting I was the slow kid in the class. “Do you imagine one such as he is bound by time?”
“…” I shuffled my arguments away without even voicing them. Cernunnos had never mentioned meeting me in the distant past. On the other hand, it wasn’t like our first encounters had been old home night at the bar. Having silenced my own objections, I glanced around Tara.
“It’s too big.” It wasn’t, and I knew it. The tower to the south—southwest, really—was matched at the other three lesser compass points, too, though none of those had survived into my time. I could feel power lines dragging through all four of them, centering in Tara. Centering where we stood, really, at the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny. Some idiot had moved it, in my time. Not very far, a couple hundred yards, maybe, but it was no longer dead at the center of a vast quartered circle.
I knelt, one hand on the blood-spattered stone and one in the cool green grass, and my last thought for a few minutes was that maybe it had been a wise man, not a fool, who had moved the Stone from its original resting place.
Tara required only a nudge to awaken. Just a touch of magic seeking out the power circle. I was astonished, in fact, that it hadn’t roared to life when I’d healed Gary, but perhaps that had been internal enough not to draw the site’s attention. Now, though, with my power seeking to build a sanctuary and to gain a god’s attention, Tara came to the fore. I was little more than a conduit for a land so steeped in magic that it had its own will. No wonder the Master wanted this place under his thrall: with Tara’s power at his command he could alter events in an ever-growing circle from this epicenter.
Magic shot up from the Lia Fáil, hit some distant invisible ceiling and spilled down evenly to set the four towers alight. The faintest gray taint ran through it all. Gray, not black; the Master’s hold wasn’t that strong, not here, not yet, despite the sacrifices. This was still a place given over to what was good in humanity, and if I had anything to say about it, it would remain that way.
I glanced up at the midwinter sun and whispered the closest thing to a prayer I’d ever spoken. A plea to a god to come and visit me, so I could prove myself to a skeptical elf king and perhaps alter the course of events back to how they always should have been. It was possible he would; these were the first days of his greatest power, the time from the solstice through to the twelfth night after Christmas. He rode across the world now, collecting souls, and would soon retreat to the world he had been born of, Tir na nOg, there to rest until Halloween welcomed him back to our world. He had ridden to others when they’d asked, in the past.
I was still somehow surprised when the sky split open and he came to me.
Even knowing what to expect, he was overwhelming. The changes were coming on him, earlier than they had in my time. A thickness to his shoulders and neck, preparing to bear the weight of horns beginning to distort his temples. His eyes were light-flecked, wild and alien: this was a being who belonged to the universe, and the universe to him. He went beyond time as I understood it, a raw piece of star stuff made into a beautiful, inhuman form full of lust and energy and anger.
His host was smaller than I’d seen it before. The gray-bearded king was missing, as was the archer who had shot Petite’s gas tank full of holes. The boy Rider was with him, though, which gave me a shock. It shouldn’t have, since we were centuries, maybe millennia, before Herne and his spells, but I’d never seen the boy looking quite so comfortable at his father’s side. That child bound Cernunnos to time, but not, it seemed, to linear time. For a moment I wondered if magic was just physics nobody understood, but that was philosophy beyond my scope.
Particularly when Cernunnos himself was before me, taking up all the air in Tara. I loved Morrison, but something about the horned god just hit me on a primal level.
Probably the fact that he was a primal creature. Nuada, silver and beautiful as he was, looked like a bad knockoff beside the ancient god. Cernunnos swung down from his stallion, the beast that made me think of unicorns, if unicorns were depicted as savage, brilliant, vicious warmongers of devastating power instead of light fluffy balls of purity and rainbows.
“Little gwyld,” Cernunnos said, dry as a southwestern desert. “Siobhán Walkingstick. Joanne Walker. Thou has—”
Cernunnos rarely spoke English. Mostly, magic translated what he meant. In this particular case, I knew there were underlying words, a language I didn’t actually know, but what I heard was an incredibly idiomatic, “Thou hast a lot of nerve, Joanne Walker.”
That put the world back under my feet. I laughed and turned my palms up apologetically. “I know. Sorry. Hello, Cernunnos. It’s been a while.” It hadn’t really. Not from my direction. But from another direction it had been a few thousand years, and I figured that counted for more. I turned to Nuada, hands still spread. “Is this convincing enough?”
Nuada looked a bit pale around the edges. “It is.”
“A point?” Cernunnos asked in disbelief. “Thou hast—”
“I asked you not to do that. The theeing and the thouing.” I found it disconcerting and peculiarly attractive, which added to the disconcertment.
Cernunnos snapped his teeth at me, but for the second time in our relationship, complied with my linguistic preferences. “You’ve brought me here to make a point, Siobhán Walkingstick?”
“More like to prove I am who I say I am so he won’t marry the Morrígan and end up in that damned cauldron like the rest of them. Apparently elves need a lot of convincing,” I added a bit sourly, because really, I felt like the whole being out of time and having magic items created by the silversmith should count for enough. On the other hand, though I would have never believed I’d end up thinking this, any day that involved a chat with the horned god was a pretty good one, so I wasn’t going to complain too much.
“She speaks truly,” Cernunnos said, just in case Nuada hadn’t picked up on that. He nodded stiffly, and Cernunnos looked back at me, wickedness in his emerald eyes. “Ride with me. Let us go to Cnoc na rí and battle the beast who so nearly drains my spirit so many eons hence. Let us render the gift you gave me then unnecessary.”
His memory really did work in both directions. A shiver spilled over my arms and I looked away. “You knew,” I said uncertainly. “In the future, in my past, you must have known it was me at the diner. That I would take your sword. That we’d become…”
Wickedness lit his beautiful angular face again. “Siobhán Walkingstick, thou hast no idea what we shall become. But I do. I do. Come,” he said again as I gaped at him. “Let us change the future that you know, my gwyld. Let us defeat death in these backward days of history, and see what new world awaits.”
I wanted to. Oh, God, I wanted to. But I had ridden with the Hunt three times already, and I had barely escaped with my soul to call my own. And I knew I hadn’t ridden with him now, in the past, because I had escaped with my soul, and I didn’t think for a moment I could ride with him four times and not be his. Part of me wanted to be his. Part of me always would.
But sometime in the distant future I had already made this choice. Chosen a mortal existence with a mortal man, and even then Cernunnos had left me with an offer. A moment at the end of everything, where he and I might ride together one last time.
And he knew what I didn’t: what we would become. I had only had glimpses of it, if that was the future we shared at all, and I still wasn’t ready to make that choice.
“I can’t,” I whispered with genuine regret. “You know I can’t, my lord god of the hunt. I can’t ride with you again. I never could.”
“And yet I try,” Cernunnos said playfully. “Time and again throughout time, I try. Until we meet again, my gwyld. Until time brings us together again.” He swept a bow from the back of his great silver stallion, then looked to Nuada, all his grace turned to sour prissiness. “I would like that sword back, elf king.”
“It seems time and this gwyld are yours to weave and weft,” Nuada said without a hint of remorse. “Make your plea to her, not me. No one else in history has borne two of my blades, horned god. No one else has dared lose one.”
I actually expected him to finish the little lecture with “Don’t push it,” but he managed to avoid the temptation. Cernunnos crooked a smile, acknowledgment of both the scolding and its unspoken end, then reined the stallion up, its hooves punching dents in the soft green hillside. “A pity,” he said to all of us. “It would have been good to challenge the Morrígan’s master so early in his bid for power, but even I will not ride against death without a force for life at my side.”
Gary, diffidently, said, “I could go.”
Chapter Nine
“What?” At least this time it wasn’t just me. Nuada, Cernunnos and I all blurted the word, though Cernunnos looked an awful lot like the cat who stole the cream as he said it. Me, I finished with, “No way. Are you nuts? Are you crazy? Ride with the Wild Hunt without me to watch your back? Ride off through time on your own? Are you batshit insane? Are you nuts?”
“I’ve done it before,” Gary said a bit belligerently.
My hands flew upward and waved in the air like they were trying to escape my wrists. “With Morrison and Suzanne and Billy! You weren’t alone! And you weren’t thousands of years out of time! And—”
“And I didn’t have the Sight,” Gary reminded me. “And somebody’s gotta go meet Brigid, right? Maybe it ain’t you the cauldron spell gets bound to, Jo. Maybe it’s me. Besides, Horns here ain’t gonna let anything happen to me, are you?” he said to Cernunnos. “Because if you do, you’re gonna have Jo to reckon with, and I don’t figure that’s the kind of reckoning you’re lookin’ for with her.”
The horned god lifted an agreeing eyebrow, which didn’t reassure me at all. I gargled in frustration. “Come on, Cernunnos! You’re the one who remembers meeting me in the future! You’d remember Gary going gallivanting off with you in the past, too, if it had already happened!”
Cernunnos’s other eyebrow rose to match the first. “Would I? Perhaps in the past I remember best he came not to Tara with you. Of all mortals, you should realize that there are paths not taken. Nothing is immutable, Joanne. Not even for a god.”
That was not the answer I wanted, especially after future-Brigid hadn’t particularly seemed to know who Gary was. It lent credence to Cernunnos’s argument. I made throttling motions with my fingers, envisioning the horned god’s neck between them. “Okay, okay, all right, fine, but you just said you needed a force for life—”
“He may not heal,” Cernunnos said, “but Master Muldoon is as bright a force of life as I have seen, and I have seen many. More, he carries with him the spirit of tenacity, a creature of great age and soul. He—”
“That’s his spirit animal!” I howled. “I helped him find that!”
“All the better. It binds him to you and adds some note of your strength to his.”
Gary looked triumphant. I stomped my foot, afraid I’d already lost the battle. “I said no! God, just because I got you into this doesn’t mean you have to go gallivanting off across time and space to—”
“Save the world?” Gary planted himself in front of me. He made a big wall of a man, especially when he folded his arms across his chest and puffed up a little. “I’ve told you a hundred times you’re the best thing that’s happened to me in years, Joanie. You got me all tangled up in this crazy fantastic world of yours and brought me back to life after Annie died. I’ve watched you fling yourself into things you got no idea what’s coming, and you do it all because you’re trying to make the world a better place. You keep saying you want to grow up to be like me. Kid, I wish I’d been young like you. Now listen to me. You’re my girl, and I’m doing this thing because it’s what you would do if you could. ’Sides,” he added, gray eyes bright, “this might be my one chance to kick death in the balls. Can’t let an old guy miss that dance.”
I laughed. I didn’t want to, but I laughed. Then I hugged him, muttering, “If you don’t come back,” which I repeated when I let go of him, except this time I said it to Cernunnos, with a threatening finger added to the phrase.
He inclined his ashy head, temple bones visibly distorted in the fading light. “You have my word, Siobhán Walkingstick, and that is not a thing I give lightly.”
“All right. Here.” I thrust my rapier into Gary’s hands. “You can use this, right? I mean, hell, you can do everything else.”
He took it, but not gingerly. “I’m better with a saxophone, doll, but I’ll make do. You sure? You might need it.”
“I’m not the one proposing to go face down the man himself. You need it more than I do. Gary, are you sure? Because this is nuts.”
The big man’s voice gentled. “You can’t do it, Jo. It’s time you learn we’ll go into battle for you, even if you ain’t there.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“Good generals don’t.” Gary stuck the rapier point down into the ground, took me by the shoulders and kissed my forehead. “I’ll see you on the other side, darlin’.”
“Of time. Just the other side of time, okay? No stupid heroics, Gary. Not when I’m not there to save you.”
“I promise.” Gary let me go, took up the rapier again and turned to Cernunnos. “Mind if I share your ride?”
Cernunnos looked pained and gestured to the boy who rode beside him. “Share his. The mare is well used to a mortal rider.”
The mare was the boy Rider’s human mother, transformed. A whole pile of unfortunate things, mostly involving crude comments about riders, immortal and mortal alike, rose to and were compressed behind my lips. I could be dumb, but not that dumb. Gary took the kid’s hand and swung up onto the mare behind him, then gave me a jaunty salute. “Go get ’em, Jo.”
And then my best friend rode off into the sunset.
Nuada remained silent until Gary and Cernunnos vanished into misty golden skies, which was just as well. I didn’t like Gary going off on his own, and had the sneaking suspicion hypocrisy was my middle name. After a while I said, “So you can’t marry her,” at the same time he said, “I think I have no choice but to wed the Morrígan.”
I was tired of saying “What?” so I just looked at him. He exhaled slowly. I half expected to see silver stream on his breath, but it was just a puff of air like anyone else’s. On it, he said, “Because as we are bound to her, she is bound to us. I may be able to temper her actions if I become her groom.”
“Or you might end up skewered on the Lia Fáil.”
Nuada’s eyebrows quirked. “Not if I have yet to make that sword and that necklace. Did you not say the sword comes from many centuries hence?”
Everybody was smarter than me. I clicked my jaw shot, looked for an argument and didn’t find one. Or not much of one, anyway: “What if Cernunnos came back in time to have you make it?”
“Then I still live some little ways into the future, for that has yet to happen. She is a goddess, Siobhán. How would you have me escape her?”
“She’s only a, a, a small god. An avatar. You, aos sí, you’re more connected to the earth than humans are. You run way down deep, but the Morrígan’s lain down with the devil, which gives her bonus points in the mojo department.” I’d used the word mojo plenty of times in the past. It had never triggered the mojojojo thing until Gary’d started snickering. I was going to smack him as soon as he got back from galumphing across time and space. “But somebody saddled up with Brigid, too, and it looks like you hang around for centuries making priceless magical artifacts, so stop putting so much stock in gods and…”
He waited a moment while I stared at the earth, dumbstruck by a slowly forming thought. “And forge this necklace,” I mumbled eventually. “Close the time loop. Give it to her as a wedding gift. I don’t know if the necklace has any power itself.” Except it did, because in my personal arsenal it represented shielding my mind. My soul. My garden. However I wanted to look at it, the necklace was definitely invested with some power. I swallowed and kept going. “But it makes it down through the centuries from her all the way to me. That’s got to count for something. Maybe I’m not supposed to go up against her back now at all. Maybe this is all just preparation for a throw-down in my era.”
In much the same tone Brigid had used, Nuada wondered, “Is this how it is with you, gwyld? The connected I have known are not so…”
“Connected?”
He nodded, looking as though he felt a bit foolish. I shook my head, dismissing his embarrassment. “They’re probably not. I’m apparently a special case, which is less fun than you might think.”
His mouth pursed, almost a smile. “I might remind you that I came to be crowned ard rí, and instead have learned I walked to my doom. I may understand “less fun than expected” better than you think I do.”
I was too weak to resist. Given the opening, I seized it and nodded toward his silver hand. “You probably do. Gary said one of the other high kings chopped that off. What, um. How did…?”
“The magic that gives it life is beyond any I could command. The horned god invested it with warmth and motion in exchange for the sword I made him.” His eyebrows quirked again. “The first sword. I wonder what gift he offers for the second.”
“Probably not taking the magic hand away. Really? Cernunnos can do that?” An entire world lived and breathed with Cernunnos’s life force. It probably wasn’t all that difficult for him to lend a little life to a hunk of metal. I just didn’t know why he’d want to.
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C.E. Murphy
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Зарубежное фэнтези
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Something wicked this way comes…Suddenly, being bitten by a werewolf is the least of Joanne Walker’s problems. Her personal life in turmoil, her job as a cop over, she’s been called to Ireland by the magic within her. And though Joanne’s skills have grown by leaps and bounds, Ireland′s magic is old and very powerful…In fact, this is a case of unfinished business. Because the woman Joanne has come to Ireland to rescue is the woman who sacrificed everything for Joanne —the woman who died a year ago.Now, through a slip in time, she’s in thrall to a dark power and Joanne must battle darkness, time and the gods themselves to save her.