by C. E. Murphy
I closed my fingers on something in my coat’s inside chest pocket. I hadn’t even known it had an inside chest pocket. I took the thing out, eyebrows elevated. It looked like a sharpened hair stick of pale wood, which I decided for no particular reason must be ash, its end tipped in silver. First I was astonished it had made it through security, and then I wasn’t. Ash and silver had enough known magical qualities that even I was aware of them, and I doubted any kind of security could stop magic that really wanted to get on an airplane. I wondered if Caitríona had slipped it into my coat back in Ireland and I’d just never noticed. Except the coat had been balled up repeatedly over the past few days, so I thought I’d have noticed. I squinted down at the distant bayou again, feeling vaguely as though I’d missed something.
Morrison eyed the hair stick, then me, dubiously. “Going to grow your hair out, Walker?”
“Not in this lifetime, but it’s pretty, isn’t it?” I tucked the stick back in my pocket for safekeeping, and pressed my forehead against the window, watching New Orleans fade in the distance.
When I moved again, a faint circle of sweat and grease was left on the window. I stared at it, then snorted. It seemed like about a million years since I’d last done that, but it had only been fifteen months.
“What?” Morrison sounded concerned.
I slipped my hand into his, not sure which of us I intended to reassure. “This all started flying back home to Seattle. I feel like I’m coming full circle.”
“You’re better prepared for it now.”
“Am I?” I’d been running nonstop for two weeks, ever since a dance performance had caused me to accidentally turn Morrison into a wolf. And that had been the least of it. I’d also quit my job, stopped a sacrifice, gotten bitten by a werewolf, been to Ireland, made amends with my dead mother, defeated an avatar of evil, flown to North Carolina, reconciled with my estranged father, met the son I’d given up for adoption, and released an evil angel into the world. Furthermore, I could count the number of meals and hours of sleep I’d had in that time, which was never a good sign.
Morrison spoke with simple confidence. “You are.”
I looked at him, at his clear blue eyes and serious face, at the tiredness in his own expression and the strength of conviction that was such a great part of his appeal. There were deeper lines than usual around his mouth. I suddenly wanted them to go away, so I leaned over and kissed him.
His surprised smile gave me the boost I needed as much as his certainty did. I mashed my face against his shoulder, feeling better. “I need a vacation.”
“You can have one when this is over.”
“You think we’ll be alive to vacate when it’s over?”
“I do.” Again, his confidence was unwavering.
I smiled into his shoulder again. “Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
We rented a car at Sea-Tac. Morrison gave me a hairy eyeball for that and suggested the taxi ranks, but I wasn’t about to climb into another taxi like I’d done with Gary a year ago. I had visions of dragging some other unsuspecting driver into my unrelentingly weird life, and that would be just too much. Renting the car didn’t take long, but it still took longer than I wanted it to. I glanced at the clock as we pulled out into what passed for late-night traffic in Seattle. Dad was probably somewhere around Saint Louis by now, if he was burying Petite’s needle. I wished we could do the same, but it took almost an hour to get to Seattle’s General Hospital. I took my drum and went into the too-familiar, loathed, sharp-antiseptic-scented building.
For the first time since I could remember, it didn’t give me a visceral twist of pain and a seizure of sneezes. I’d been braced against both, and stumbled at not encountering them. Morrison put a hand under my elbow and I gave him a half-surprised smile. Maybe a lot more than I had realized had healed while I was in North Carolina. It was easier to see the scars now, easier to admit my hatred of hospitals came from Aidan’s sister dying in one so soon after her birth. Easier, now that I knew she lived on in her own way, in Aidan’s powerful two-spirited soul.
“You all right, Walker?”
“Better than I have any right to be.” Feeling stronger than I should, I led Morrison up to Annie’s room, where every hope I had of telling Gary that his wife was probably a simulacrum embodying evil died on my lips.
Annie Muldoon’s aura burned raging, brilliant green around a fist of darkness that throbbed and strained with her every heartbeat. I Saw it without even trying, without triggering the shamanic Sight I would normally use to diagnose a patient with. Gary, ashen and old, got up from Annie’s bedside and hugged me until I couldn’t breathe. His aura wasn’t visible: the Sight was registering extraordinary power, like the occasions when my own magic took on a visible component. I hugged him back and mumbled a promise about everything being okay, then stole a glance at Morrison.
His aura wasn’t visible, either, but thunderclouds in blue eyes offered an opinion on me promising things were going to be okay. Not for the first time, I wished my cosmic power set came with telepathy, because I wanted to say, “Well, I have to at least try!” but I could hardly say it out loud with Gary right there. Besides, I’d said it about every seven minutes on the flight, or it had felt like it, anyway. I did have to try, and I would have even if Annie’s aura had been a mire of black pitch and oil slicks.
But it wasn’t. The green was vibrant, and I knew that color. I knew it down to the depths of my soul. The creature who wore that color within himself had wormed his way in, way deep inside me, and he had no intention of leaving. I would know his mark anywhere. It was Cernunnos’s color, blazing green that threatened to burn my eyes, my mind, away if I looked at him unguarded for too long. Cernunnos had been there when Annie died, in the memories Gary had recovered.
I set Gary back a few inches, my hands on his shoulders, and met his eyes. “Tell me again, Gary. Tell me exactly what happened when she died. All of it. She had two spirit animals with her, a cheetah and a stag—” Embarrassment caught me and I blushed so hard I couldn’t speak for a few seconds. Of course Cernunnos had been in attendance, if a stag, of all creatures, had come to her. Cernunnos wasn’t the horned god for nothing: every year he grew a crown of antlers, becoming more and more of the stag, before shedding them again and regaining something approaching humanity. In the parlance of my teenage years, d’oh.
“—toldja, Joanie, at a minute past midnight he came through the damned wall and Annie sat up, reachin’ for him, and the whole goddamned world went white and next thing I knew I was back with the Hunt, headin’ back to you.”
“What did he say?”
Gary shoved a hand through his white hair. He had a headful of it, but it needed washing or brushing or some kind of attention, because it looked thinner than usual. So did he, for that matter. “He said...hell, Jo, I don’t know. He said somethin’ about the stag and sagebrush—”
I shot a look at Morrison, whose eyebrows were raised. “Call Dad. Find out what sage has to do with anything.”
“He’s in the car, Walker. He shouldn’t talk while driving.”
“Call him anyway, please. Go on, Gary.”
“And he said somethin’ about bending time to come to her when the stag called, an’ he said...hell, Jo,” Gary said again. It wasn’t, I thought, that he didn’t remember, so much as, as I had discovered time and again, it was hard to talk about magic. People loved stories about it, and liked to imagine maybe it was real, but faced with real magic in their lives, a reticence cropped up even when everybody listening knew the truth. I gripped his shoulders and nodded, encouraging him, and after a minute he went on. “He said we’d been waitin’ for the very end so we could make our move, like we’d talked about. An’ he said she was beyond my reach, but that she always had been as long as I’d known him. An’...an’ he said he’d guide her to her resting place when it was all over
.”
A tiny thump of hope squeezed the air out of my lungs. It escaped as a laugh, almost without sound. “And she went into the light, is that what you said before? She actually literally went into the light, that was the last you saw of her?”
“Yeah.” Gary gave a smile, thin and watery, but a smile. “Yeah, Horns said she’d gone into the light an’ he figured that wasn’t the fate the Master’d been plannin’ for her at all, so it made it kinda bearable. Except...” He looked back at his wife, then at me, all humor gone and his gray eyes hollow. “C’mon, Jo,” he said, as quietly as I’d ever heard him speak. “Who’re we kiddin, doll? What’re the chances that’s really Annie lyin’ there?”
Morrison glanced up sharply, relief and admiration in his expression. My lungs emptied again, this time with a blow-to-the-gut rush, because although it was what I’d been dreading telling him, I didn’t want Gary to have thought of it himself. It was too sad and too cynical, and far too likely, when I wanted like crazy to pull off some kind of fairy-tale ending.
But the fact that he’d thought of it made it a little easier to draw a deep breath and admit “Not good” aloud. “I hope like hell it is, Gary, but...”
He nodded. A nurse came in to check Annie’s blood pressure, stopped short at seeing a crowd in the room and said in an excellent, hackle-raising warning tone, “Visiting hours aren’t until—”
“This’s my granddaughter and her partner,” Gary said flatly. “They’re family. They stay.”
The nurse was old enough to have the authority age brings, but Gary’s tone and greater age apparently trumped hers. She stiffened from the core out, then gave one sharp nod and went about her business. Morrison, who wasn’t exactly uncomfortable with authority, and I, who often had problems with it, both stood still as hunted mice until she left, pretending if we didn’t move she wouldn’t notice us again.
Gary’s big shoulders rolled down in apology after she was gone. “Sorry ’bout that.”
“For preemptively adopting me? I’m okay with it.” I hugged him again and he grunted, casting a look at Morrison. I caught a glimpse of Morrison’s smile before he said, “Partner works for me. Holliday’s going to have to adapt.”
To my surprise and pleasure, Gary gave a huff of laughter. “Diff’rent kind of partner. ’Sides, Joanie quit the day job, so Holliday’s gonna have to adapt anyway.”
He was still calling me Joanie, which meant he was really not okay. Gary had never called me Joanie, always Jo, unless I was undergoing some sort of major emotional meltdown. Unless, as it turned out, he was undergoing some sort of major emotional meltdown. I didn’t think he even knew he was doing it. I put on my best smile, which was pretty wry. “Yeah. Billy is going to kill me for quitting without even warning him. I’m hoping he’ll have cooled down in the two weeks he hasn’t seen me.”
“Him and Melinda came by yesterday,” Gary said. “He’s worried, not mad. Worried about a lotta things.”
Including, no doubt, Annie Muldoon’s reappearance on the scene. I nodded, then lifted my chin a little. “Go on, go sit back down, or go get a drink of water if you want. I’ll do everything I can, Gary. You know I w—”
A doctor swept in imperiously and glowered at us all. “Mr. Muldoon, I understand we have some more family visiting. It’s already well past visiting hours and we don’t normally allow more than one family member at a time—”
“My dead wife turned up again outta nowhere and you’re tellin’ me my granddaughter ain’t supposed to be here? I’m an old man, Erickson, and I’m tired. You need to talk to anybody from here on out, you talk to my granddaughter, Joanne Walker. Jo, this’s Dr. Pat Erickson. Erickson, this’s Jo’s partner, Mike. If Jo ain’t here, you talk to him.” Like a cranky bear just out of hibernation, Gary lumbered back to Annie’s bedside and sat.
Dr. Pat Erickson was about forty-five, with expertly dyed auburn hair and a long nose. She was about six feet tall, just like I was, and I bet she was accustomed to people deferring to her because of her height, if nothing else. So was I, so there was a possibility of an interesting-in-the-Chinese-sense dynamic raising its ugly head, but after a few long seconds of sizing me up, Dr. Erickson sighed. “I’m sorry for the confusion with your grandmother, Ms. Walker. May I speak to you outside for a moment?”
My jaw flapped. Erickson herded me into the hall while I collected my wits and, once we were there, apologized again. “Hospital records get lost,” she said unhappily. “People do not. Ms. Walker, can you explain any of this? The only thing that makes sense is that she’s been in private care for the past four and a half years, but there are no records of it, and clearly your grandfather has no recollection of that....”
“You’re right. She has been in private care.” If my suspicions were right, it had been very, very private care, and there would never be any real-world explanations for it. I stared at the bridge of her nose, hoping I was giving the impression of looking sincerely into her eyes as I struggled to pull together a story she might accept. “She, um. We...weren’t aware of it. I know that sounds impossible, but it appears that a...humanitarian organization...has been caring for her. They...prefer to remain anonymous, so they can select the people they wish to help without...their doors being beaten down by needy applicants. They specialize in providing long-term life support to patients on the verge of death. Apparently my grandmother...had arranged that if she became very ill, they were to take her away at the point of death. She didn’t want us to know, because she felt our lives would better be able to go on, the healing process would be able to proceed, if we believed she was...really dead. It was only when she was returned to the hospital that we were...notified that this had taken place.” I was going to give myself an award for fast talking. Maybe Erickson’s long nose had inspired me, Pinocchio-like.
Confused relief flashed across the doctor’s features. She wanted to believe me, because it gave the medical professionals who had lost Annie Muldoon a way out. Besides, I was almost telling the truth. Or I thought I was, anyway, and that helped sell the story. Erickson’s only protest was, “But your grandfather didn’t mention any of this...”
“He’s had a very hard few days, Doctor. In his position I don’t think I’d have tried to explain it, either.”
Erickson’s shoulders relaxed a fractional amount. “No, I suppose not. Ms. Walker, I understand private organizations wanting to remain anonymous, but it would be enormously helpful if we could receive their medical records for Mrs. Muldoon. If they’ve released her to standard care they must believe there’s some hope or change in her diagnosis. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t admit her through regular channels, though. I don’t understand how they could avoid it. We do not have people simply walk in and claim a bed, Ms. Walker.”
“I’ll see if I can get answers for you,” was probably the most useless promise I’d ever made, but Dr. Erickson seemed grateful for it. She shook my hand and let me go back into Annie’s room, where Morrison was standing over Gary like a protective gargoyle.
“Sagebrush is used in shamanic healing to help clear the lungs,” Morrison offered as I sat across from them. “Your father says good luck.”
“Lungs, of course. Emphysema, or something that presents as it. And the sickness is still right there.” I put my hand above her chest, not quite touching her, and added, “Tell him thanks,” even though Morrison was obviously no longer on the phone with Dad.
Gary stirred, everything about his actions heavy and hopeless. “Everything okay with the doctor, Jo?”
“Yeah.” I told them the story I’d given Erickson, ending with her supposition that the mysterious private carer had concluded something had changed and that was why Annie had been returned to a public hospital. I took her hand as I spoke, letting my consciousness sink more toward investigating her health than the discussion we were having.
It didn’t take healing
magic to feel her fragility. Paperlike skin lay against knobbly bones, no excess flesh to pad them. Her breathing remained perfectly steady, but a machine was doing most of it for her, so that wasn’t surprising. The heart monitor beeped, such a familiar sound from film and television that I hadn’t even heard it until I was sitting quietly and listening. An oxygen monitor was taped to one finger, weighting not just her hand, but her whole self: it seemed like she was so light and fragile that without that inconvenient piece of plastic she might float away. She had a strange scent, the hospital’s antiseptic cleanliness lying over a deeper, earthier smell. It should probably have been the smell of death and decay, but it brought to mind cool green growing places, and mist beading on leaves. I knew that scent: I’d been to the place that birthed it.
For all that it had only been a moment since I’d stopped speaking, I was still startled when Gary asked, “Is the doc right? Did somethin’ change?”
“Yeah. Me. I’m ready now.” I pressed my eyes shut and put my forehead against Annie’s hand a moment before looking up again, meeting Gary’s eyes, glancing at Morrison, basically trying to establish myself as calm, cool and in control. “I wasn’t, when she got sick. I didn’t know you, and even if I had, I could never have helped. Not back then.”
“I nearly called you about a million times, anyway.” Gary’s mouth thinned, fair acknowledgment of the twist his life had evidently taken. At this stage, I was used to my own past not being quite as I remembered. Weirdly, that didn’t make it any easier to know Gary’s wasn’t what he remembered, either. “It ain’t normal, Jo, remembering things two ways.”