by C. E. Murphy
“Were you summoning me on Halloween?” Suzy asked faintly.
“No, just now! OMG! Are you dangerous?”
Suzy’s response was so even, so steady, that she barely even knew it for her own voice: “You have no idea.”
For the first time since Suzy had arrived, Kiseko actually went silent, her eyes round and her throat moving as she swallowed heavily. When she spoke again, it was hardly more than a squeak: “So should I, like, not let you out of there?”
“You couldn’t keep me in if you tried. Kiso, what are you doing? Who is this boy?” Suzy’s somber tone changed as she squinted again at Robert. “You’re too young to be her boyfriend, right? I mean, no offense, but you look like you’re twelve.”
“I am. I’m Robert Holliday. My dad—”
“Detective Holliday? Detective Walker’s partner?”
“Yeah.” Robert looked apologetic. “If I’d had any idea she was going to summon you…”
“I wasn’t summoning her! I wanted a nature god, because it’s like April and it’s snowing and I don’t want my sixteenth birthday party to be in a snowstorm—!” Kiseko broke off with a small noise of dismay. “Um, Suzy, are you a nature god?”
“No.” Suzanne flicked a finger against the power circle, shattering the shields. “But my father is.”
Kiseko fell over with a thud. Suzy winced and stepped out of the circle—Kiso had drawn on the carpet with chalk, her mother was going to kill her—to help Kiso sit up. “My head’s ringing,” Kiseko mumbled. “It feels like somebody broke a crystal glass inside it.”
“I think I kind of did. Hang on, I’ll get you some aspirin.” Suzy stepped over Kiseko and scurried to the bathroom, which hadn’t changed at all since she’d last been there. Well, the towels had probably been changed, but otherwise it, and the rest of the house Suzy glimpsed, looked the same as it had six months earlier. That was a relief. Houses should stay the same, even if the people in them changed. She came back with water and aspirin, which Kiseko took as obediently as she ever did anything. Then she gave Suzy a gimlet stare, though Suzy didn’t know what a gimlet actually was, and said, “Well?”
“No, wait, first I want to know how you know Detective Holliday’s son.” Suzy sat down between Kiso and Robert, close enough that their cross-legged knees were all touching.
“I summoned you,” Kiseko muttered. “I should get to ask the questions. We’re in chess club together.”
Suzy eyed Robert. “You’re twelve and in high school?”
“I come over from the middle school because I can beat everybody there too easily.”
“Oh. Cool. Okay, um.” Suzy pulled her hair over her shoulder and twitched into a nervous braid, then undid it again. “Um.”
“Suzanne’s biological father is Herne, a nature god,” Robert volunteered into Suzy’s nervous silence. “She didn’t find out until last January, when her parents were killed. He was going to sacrifice her so he could take over his father’s position as a wild god, but Aunt Jo stopped him. Also Suzy really, really helped with the zombies last Halloween. Like, she got her grandfather, the wild god, to ride early and save Seattle from them.” He cleared his throat uncomfortably as Suzy and Kiseko both goggled at him. “Is that right?”
“Not…exactly,” Suzy said faintly. “But that’s…pretty close. How do you know…how did you…?”
Robert looked slightly apologetic. “Dad and Aunt Jo talked about it where I could hear, is all. And you looked like you were having a hard time getting started so I thought I’d help.” His face was turning increasingly red. “Sorry.”
“No, that’s okay. That, um. Yeah. Pretty much.” Suzy cast a tentative glance at Kiseko, whose eyes and mouth formed nearly perfect O’s.
“And you didn’t tell me?” Kiso demanded in a whisper. At least she had the presence of mind to whisper. Her parents weren’t going to know what to do when they woke up and found Suzy, who was supposed to be in Olympia, in their basement instead. “You didn’t tell me?” Kiseko asked more loudly.
“It’s not that easy to tell!” Suzy protested. “I wanted to, I just, well, I mean, how? How do you say, “Hey, best friend, turns out I’m like only partly human and by the way my biological father is the one who killed everybody at the high school that day?””
Kiso went white. “What?”
“Oh, God.” Suzy ducked her head and shook her hair so it fell to hide her face as she whispered, “Yeah. I guess Robert didn’t mention that part. He killed my parents, too. He was crazy,” she whispered apologetically through her hair. “I don’t even know all of it, but he was…he was like mostly human for hundreds of years, and it kind of made him crazy. I think. And he was trying to align things so he could become a whole god, when really he was supposed to be a half-god. It was awful. He was awful. It was a mess. I didn’t want to talk about it. And I can’t really anyway, because who would believe it?”
“I would have!”
Suzy looked up through the curtain of her hair. Kiseko’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright, either with offense or anger. “Would you have?” Suzy asked. “I mean, up until half an hour ago when you went crazy stupid and did magic and summoned me, would you have?”
“Well—well you could’ve told me anyway!”
“Aunt Jo says people work really hard at explaining magic away when it happens,” Robert said quietly. “Kiseko’s different to start with, because she didn’t believe the Hollywood story about the zombies—”
“What about you?” Suzy asked. “How come you’re even here?”
“My dad is a medium. He sees ghosts,” Robert clarified. “Mom’s a wise woman. My family’s all kind of cool with this stuff.”
“And Kiseko found this out how?”
“I was reading a book about magic before chess club started, a couple weeks ago. Rob said it wasn’t very good if I really wanted to learn about magic. At first I thought he was kidding but he looked so serious. So then I got curious. So you’re magic? Do something magic!”
“I don’t—it’s not like that. Most of my magic is seeing the future.”
Kiseko lunged forward, grabbing Suzy’s arms. “OMG! Can you tell me what college I’m going to? Can you tell me if I get married? How many kids do I have? No, wait, am I totally cool like Isadora Duncan and I go around having lots of kids but never getting married—”
“—and getting your neck snapped by a scarf catching on a motor car wheel,” Robert mumbled.
“—oh, not like that part, jeez,” Kiso said without catching her breath. “Can you tell me—”
“No!” Suzy held her hands up. “It doesn’t work like that. The future doesn’t work like that. There are millions of different ones, all based on whatever choices you make day by day. Sometimes something goes wrong and a whole lot of the futures turn bad. That’s why I came up here at Halloween, I had to warn Detective Walker that her futures had all gone bad. And she managed to squeeze into the one that hadn’t. So I can’t, like, read your palm, Kiso. And I wouldn’t want to if I could. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen, and I bet you don’t really either.”
Kiskeo stuck her chin out, then slumped back to sitting. “I guess not. Well, what good is magic you don’t want to use? And why did we get you when we were trying to call up a nature god? I mean, because of your biodad, I guess, but—”
“Or maybe,” Robert said worriedly, “maybe her magic responded so she could come along and protect us from that.”
Suzy turned to see a slender earthy figure unfurling from the floor.
It didn’t look evil. Not in the first few seconds, anyway. It looked quite beautiful, dark and barky, with soil spilling through the breaks in the bark. Leaves shimmered down its back like hair, and it stretched, sending the scent of new-turned earth and crushed greenery through the basement.
A deeper, older smell wafted along, too. A smell of decay, of old earth rotting and dead things falling to pieces in it. Suzy thought of zombies, and of Detective Walker’s pa
nic, and feeling very stupid, she got up and put herself between the rising green and her friends. She didn’t know how to fight or protect or any of the things Detective Walker did. But she was magic, and that had to make her a better match for the than Robert or Kiseko were.
Robert leaned forward past her calf and slapped his hand onto the pentagram chalked onto the carpet. Suzy felt a hint of strength from him, a promise of power, but—”Kiseko!” Robert hissed. “You drew it, you have to activate it!”
“Actiwhat? Oh. Oh!” Kiseko flung herself forward too, making Suzy feel like an Egyptian god statue, flanked by two low-lying animals. Kiseko’s energy sparked out, not at all organized or well-presented, but it did the job. The pentagram came to life again, still a flickering feeble thing like it had been when Suzy arrived. Suzy took a jerky step forward, lifting her hands to add her own strength to the pentagram.
The thing inside the circle lashed out, smashing a branchy arm into Suzy’s chest. She staggered, but only a step. Only enough to be out of the pentagram’s reach, instead of knocked aside like she should have been. Kiseko squeaked with delight, but Suzy’s chest felt caved in, like she couldn’t quite breathe anymore. It wasn’t just the hit, either. It was the knowledge that flooded her with the ancient nature spirit’s touch. Once it had been neutral, neither intentionally caring nor harming. Not anymore. Sometime, so long ago it barely remembered the neutrality, it had tasted blood. Been fed blood, until the earth itself was poisoned. Until the very world was riddled with spots of hate, alive with it, waiting for magic to draw it out so it could attack.
It was hungry. It wanted youth, vitality, magic, blood. Its spindly branch arms shot out, growing at an impossible rate, but they bypassed Suzy and went straight for Kiseko and Robert.
“No!” Suzy flung her hands out like she could stop the green with a word, with an action. Like she could undo the last minutes of time, because she could. She had, before, or almost. She had unraveled a man from time once before, taken the zombie corpse he had become and undone him all the way back to conception. It had been easy, like pulling a dangling thread from a shirt, and it had popped at the end, satisfying sound of the thread snapping. She couldn’t do it again: something stopped her. Time resisted her, like it had been changed once recently and refused to be again, even for a semi-god.
Still, her magic was alive now, its own threads snapping and weaving through the air. Futures shone along them, mostly dark and deadly. Kiseko, infected by the ancient earth spirit, eyes blazing and hands becoming stretched branches like the green’s. Robert falling under that attack. Suzy running, Suzy fighting, Suzy dying: she cast away a thousand futures, searching for one where they won. Time might refuse to listen, but the future was hers to choose. She held onto the thought, leaning hard against the earth magic’s hunger. It would have everything, it said, because it was the endless turn and tide of seasons, of life. It was the rising green, and would never die.
But Suzy’s power was green and rising too.
She pushed, pushed as hard as she knew how, using just her mind. Pushed them toward the rare and faltering futures where they survived. Only a handful among hundreds, but she wouldn’t let her friends die. If the green wanted a conduit, it could try her, daughter of gods.
It hesitated like a living thing, tempted by her strength. Tempted by the ancient blood inside her, by that tie to something not of the world. Then its hesitation ended and it came for her. Suzy opened her arms and drew it in, tasting the most ancient scraps of earth that tied her to her demi-god father and the wild thing that was her grandfather. Herne was of this earth, as Suzy was, but Cernunnos came from far beyond, and there was something in the rising green that was as old and foreign as Cernunnos. It howled triumph as Suzy called it to herself, and it crashed into her, taking up lodging in her mind. Safe, certain, a part of her: it belonged, in a dark and frightening way.
Darkness. Utter and complete, overwhelming, and beyond the darkness, silence. Wind and breaking branches had howled and snapped a minute earlier, though Suzy hadn’t heard them until they were gone. Light returned in a painful rush. The pentagram was losing cohesion, its color fading and power failing, but there was nothing left inside.
Kiseko, squealing, caught Suzy before she fell. “OMG, you banished it! OMG, how did you do that?!”
“There was a…a future where we won. I just…shoved us that way.” Suzy sat down, her head in her hands. “It worked, but it…it got dark.”
“No it didn’t!” Kiseko bounced around Suzy, barely able to contain her delight. “You were awesome! You kicked ass! Did you see that thing, it went fwssht! and zooft! and—”
“No, it…” The green—except it wasn’t green anymore, it was just the dark—it felt like it was behind her eyes now, or even deeper into her head than that. It didn’t hurt, but it weighed a lot, and it throbbed in time with her heart. A trickle of it fell down from her brain to her stomach, making her want to throw up.
Kiseko, oblivious to Suzy’s half-muttered protests, only ceased her praise when the ceiling creaked. All three of them froze, Suzy peeking upward and seeing Rob and Kiso doing the same thing. “Shit,” Kiso whispered. “My parents. If they find a boy here—!”
Rob pressed a finger to his lips, then darted across the basement in a few long steps. He cranked a daylight window open, then glanced back, checking the room like he was making sure everything was okay. Kiseko flapped a frantic hand at him and he gave her and Suzy a quick, concerned smile before scrambling up to and through the window. A heartbeat later, he was gone, eaten by a suburban Seattle yard.
Suzy trembled. The wood creature would’ve eaten him for real, all of them. Inside her head, the darkness flared like it thought that sounded good. She clenched her hands against her temples, trying to squeeze its presence away. Green power, she told herself. Rising green, like the wood spirit had been rising green, but this was her own strength, her own magic. She didn’t want a dark seed at its heart. She imagined her grandfather’s vast power in her own hands, crushing the darkness away.
In an agonizing instant, it winked out. Suzy whimpered.
Kiseko was there all of a sudden, wrapping her arms around Suzy’s shoulders. She was warm and sturdy, not cold and shaking like Suzy was. “You’re okay, Suze. I’m here. You okay? That was crazy,” she said more softly. “That was really brave, Suzy. I didn’t know you had it in you. I’m sorry for messing with magic, all right? I won’t do it again. I don’t want to mess my best friend up. Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Suzy croaked the word. “I think so.”
“Good.” Kiseko sat back on her heels just enough to grin lopsidedly at Suzy. “Because we’re going to have to come up with some kind of totally awesome story to explain why you’re here in the middle of this mess. And then we’re gonna have to convince your aunt that since you’re here you might as well stay for the whole weekend, right? And—” She bounced up, bright and cheerful as always, but Suzy caught a glimpse of deeper worry as Kiseko offered a hand. The performance was all for Suzy’s sake, Kiseko’s way of making sure everything seemed normal.
Suzy let Kiso pull her up, then hugged her and did her best to sound light-hearted and frivolous, too. “Localized windstorm. You left the window open and look what happened!”
“That’s a terrible cover story, Suze.”
“Your parents believed the zombie movie thing, didn’t they?”
“Mmrgh.” Kiseko rolled her eyes. “I guess so. And so what, did the windstorm blow you in too?”
“That’d be an awfully big storm. Uh—”
“Suzy! Your aunt called!” Kiseko’s parents, wearing robes and slippers, came down the stairs together and stopped, expressions comically confused at the mess spread around the basement. “She said you were coming up as a surprise for Kiseko’s birthday, but we didn’t expect you so soon…what happened down here?”
Suzy gave Kiseko a wide-eyed look, then smiled at her parents. “I, um, got in way earlier tonight but I was, um, trying
to surprise Kiseko so I snuck in and then we, uh, fell asleep? And then the window let in the storm and we were all like ‘Oh god we have to clean this up before Mr and Mrs Anderson see,’ and—but you woke up. Early. Uh. Hi!”
“It must have been the wind that woke us,” Kiso’s mom said to her dad, who frowned at Kiseko. “How many times have I told you to be sure the windows are closed at night?”
“I’m totally sorry, Dad. We’ll get it cleaned up, okay?”
Mr Anderson nodded, appeased, and his wife smiled. “I’m glad nothing was destroyed. It’s good to see you again, Suzy. I’ll make you girls some strawberry waffles in the morning, but we’re going back to bed now.”
Kiso’s parents waved and went back upstairs, leaving the two girls to blink uncertainly at each other. Kiseko finally whispered, “Your aunt called?”
Suzy shook her head. “No way. It’s the magic, or the effect of magic. Making sense of things that don’t make sense. I hope it worked on Aunt Mae, too, or I’ll be grounded until I leave for college.”
“Are you still gonna go to UDub?” Kiseko became light and chipper again as she looked over the wreck of the basement. “Think Mom and Dad will mind if we don’t clean up until morning?”
Suzy gave her a look and Kiso giggled. “Yeah, I thought so. Okay. I’ll get some towels for the water and I’ll scrub up the chalk marks if you can get the branches and things.” She ran off to the bathroom without waiting for an answer, and Suzy picked up the nearest branches. The window was still open, so she pushed the branches through and peered into the darkness, trying to see if Robert had escaped safely.