The Winter Oak

by James A. Hetley

  Fiona glanced out of the corners of her eyes. The black cat crouched there, less than an arm's length to her right, tension in every quivering muscle, with his ears and whiskers laid back. His tail thrashed.

  {One could kill you easily.}

  {Move and the baby dies.} Even blocked as she was, she could kill the baby. It was still a weapon, against a sentimental weakling like Maureen.

  Fiona reached out and groped with her other hand, hunting for the wet slick skin of the child's back. Press it against her, and the breathing would stop, the heart would stop.

  Teeth clamped on her wrist, tight as a vise, driving pain through the skin into muscle and grating on the bone. The fox. It had to be the fox, another of Maureen's puppets.

  Fiona walled the pain away and drew back into her self. She groped for the words and workings of a curse, but they wouldn't come. The birth had drained even her hatred. Cunning, though -- that she still had, twisting through the fog shrouding her thoughts.

  Cunning and the baby and some little dragons if it came to that.

  Weapons.

  That redheaded bitch would weaken soon. She was relying on sheer will, no time for spells or bindings. Commanding another Old One's muscles gulped Power the way that dragon swallowed meat. Maureen would weaken and lose control and Fiona would bite into the tender skin just touching her lips and drink the blood pulsing underneath and strike back with the Power flowing in it.

  Revenge. She could taste it now, smooth and heady like the finest wine.

  Like blood.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned." Jo stared down into the chalice in her hand, into the red wine shimmering inside cut-glass crystal. If the Church offered communion wine like this, damn sure they'd draw a bigger crowd for Mass. The stuff tasted like ambrosia brought down to earth.

  Sinned big-time, that's for sure. Patricide would rank up there pretty far in the all-time top ten Hit Parade.

  Thick-stemmed crystal goblet, cut glass and heavy but delicate, scarlet fire where she held it in the thin blade of sunlight leaking through the shutters. Scattered rainbows from the facets. Wealth and elegance. Blood.

  The wine burned red like blood glowing with the inner fire of magic. Magic she'd used to murder her own father.

  She'd grabbed the goblet and bottles of wine on the way up to this refuge, looking to get blind drunk. Then, between the opening and the drinking, she'd thought about Maureen. Maureen and alcohol, bane of the Pierce and O'Brian bloodlines. Thinking of that, she'd barely sipped the stuff.

  Orange weight oozed between her and the wine. It settled into her lap, pin-prick of claws and warmth and fur and fish-breath. Cat. Maureen had acquired cats somewhere, three of them. Had the run of the castle, kept the mice at bay.

  {You have work to do.}

  Talking cats. It figured. Maureen would have talking cats.

  {Pay attention. You are needed.}

  Imperious talking cats. Jo stared into green slit-pupil eyes. They glowed in the gloom of the shuttered room. Magic.

  Shivers ran across her shoulders and down her spine. Suddenly she felt cold, in spite of the wine. Cold, the cold of watching stone, waiting, calculating. Everything in this land watched, calculated, weighing advantage and Power. She felt the spiders thinking in their webs, measuring air currents and the spiral vibrations down the strands, sifting for the touch of dinner. It could drive her mad, if she weren't already there.

  The eyes floated closer, closer, clear and green and glowing and hypnotic. Jo felt her own eyes crossing, trying to keep focus. Fur bumped her nose, short and bristly with static.

  {You have work to do.}

  And how the hell had a cat followed her into this room? She'd barred the door. She remembered that quite clearly, and she hadn't seen any cats. None. No leprechauns sleeping against the far wall, either. Just bare stone walls, stone floor, stone vaulted ceiling, and a lot of dust. Nobody had used this room for decades. Maybe centuries. She'd brought the wine-bottles and goblet with her.

  Leprechaun?

  He lay slumped against the far wall, by the door, a small brown-skinned man in ragged clothing and bare feet.

  "Who the hell are you?"

  She set the goblet down, careful of its heavy fragile beauty, careful of the godawful cost and labor of it and of the priceless rotted grape-juice that it carried. No need to worry about a job in this place. Maureen was rich. So whyinhell did the cat keep talking about work?

  {There is pain, and you can ease it. Come.}

  A paw batted her cheek, just the pad, no claws. The cat flowed off her lap. It turned its head back over its shoulder, his shoulder, she could plainly see his potent maleness, and he stared at her and then at the huddled form slumped against the far wall, by the door. The barred door, just as she remembered.

  Jeezum. The room spun around her, almost as if she had chugged all that wine. This place seriously creeped her out, people and cats that ignored locked doors. She forced herself to hands and knees. No way she was going to try to stand up. But hands and knees were still reliable, four-point stance that didn't depend on a mental gyroscope for stability. Why'd humans ever switched?

  {Trading stability for thumbs. Nor are you human.}

  Right. Thanks for the reminder.

  The leprechaun stank. Not just B.O. and need of a bath, unless the Little People had some strange metabolisms. He smelled like he'd been left too long in the back of the refrigerator, rotting meat. Dead meat.

  {He lives. The Stone needs him.}

  Jo heard that capitalized title, loud and clear. The cat meant something specific, not the generic stone surrounding her. Stonehenge came to mind, or one of those rough-hewn windswept monoliths on an Irish hill. Grandfather O'Brian used to say that people left offerings at such places -- a bowl of cereal, spring flowers, a dead rabbit, a bottle of uisce beatha. Placate the old gods of the land. The offerings disappeared, between the evening and the dawning.

  The Stone wanted this scarred lump as a sacrifice?

  {The Stone wishes him to live. You have the Power to make it so.}

  She heard that capital as well. But she'd tried using her Blood to heal, and failed.

  {Your mother did not wish for healing.}

  In fact, she'd fought against it. Jo remembered the old Naskeag woman, speaking, soothing, calming, after all the thunder and stink and blood. Mom's spirit beating at the walls of her body like a trapped bird, longing to be free. Longing to die.

  Did this little man wish to live?

  She ignored the cat. It was just a figment of psychosis, anyway. She touched hot dry skin, felt the weak and racing pulse under it, felt the spreading death in blood and lymph. Her fingers traced scars old and new, followed rivers of pain, felt weakening lines of Power, slipped into feverish dreams of a labyrinthine pattern etched in fire. A core of stone waited, deep inside, not cold stone or ash but living brilliance of rainbow gems in the sun. Yes, this man still wished to live. Did he deserve healing?

  He wasn't evil. She could feel that, as well. He didn't love people, didn't care whether most people lived or died, but he did love stone. He loved this pile of stone around her. He loved its heart and . . . grieved for it?

  Yes. Grief. Grief and rage at some scar or vandalism and a way of healing twisted through his fever dreams. But his heart felt nothing like her father's, nothing like Sean's. Calculation, but no malice.

  Green threads bound him, draining Power beyond the poisons in his blood. Vines, twisting evil vines of magic that sucked at his life and thoughts and fed them back to another. Jo shuddered. Her loathing burned the tether, cutting the small man loose and leaving the orphaned vines to shrivel into dust.

  His scars faded, but the livid infection still raged through his body. It would kill him, kill him soon. His own Power couldn't touch it.

  Sweat dripped down Jo's forehead and stung her eyes. His fever burned in her veins, devouring the wine. Even the heat could kill. She reached to one side an
d found the goblet and drained it, ignoring the creepy feeling that it had followed her across the floor on magic feet. She let the alcohol flow straight through her body and the touch of her hand on his arm and turn its fire into cooling evaporation. He shuddered under her hands, relaxing as the binding died.

  Bandages wrapped his arm, hiding the source of the infection. She tore them, her fingernails sharp as knives, and found black oozing sores underneath, and curved rows of pits down through his flesh. She gagged on the stench. Gangrene. A vision touched her, the black dragon she'd faced in the forest shrunk small and mindless, twisting claws and teeth and sudden pain and blood. Those tooth-marks would fit the curve of such a jaw.

  Jo's shoulder muscles burned with strain. She reached back in her mind, seeking the Power, and the Stone responded. Power flowed from the heart of the keep, and she sent it pulsing through the man's blood and bone and nerve.

  He writhed under her hand, slick now with sweat, the Power eating poisons and microbes, and he screamed. More wine foamed into the goblet, and she stared into it and willed the water in it elsewhere and transmuted wine into brandy. Alcohol splashed the arm, killing, sterilizing, alcohol flowed into the man's veins at a concentration that would kill him if she didn't guard his brain and guts and healthy tissue, but she didn't have the time to summon penicillin or other modern magic. She didn't have the time for them to work.

  Complex poisons tainted his blood, and she lacked understanding of how they worked. Fuck this, and she broke the chains of molecules as she'd broken the binding vines. The molecules no longer killed. Her power swept the tattered remnants into his liver and left them there for cleansing. Brandy oozed from his pores, undigested alcohol cooling her patient's fever as it evaporated.

  He shuddered and lay still.

  Jo rocked back on her heels, exhausted, head spinning. Dead flesh peeled from the wounds as she watched, dry, falling as black flakes and harmless dust. They left deep pits behind, shiny with scar tissue. She didn't know if he'd ever use that arm again, with so much muscle damage. Call in the rehab therapists. Different specialty.

  {He will live. He will work again. The Stone embraces you and protects you.}

  The cat licked her fingers, wet cold rasping tongue soothing the burn where Power had flowed stronger than her flesh could bear. It had left her limp, the same wrung-out dishrag feeling she remembered from her killing rage, but this time a man lived because of her.

  This time she felt clean. She'd healed someone.

  She couldn't make sense of what she'd done. By all she knew, that concentration of alcohol should have killed the man. Embalmed him. Instead, it had cured him. Maybe it had been metaphor, her brain turning the magic into forms it could understand. But the tower reeked of brandy, and all the wine bottles lay empty on the floor. Still sealed.

  {Do not try to fit magic into the framework of human medicine. Results matter, not methodology.}

  Five-syllable words from a cat? But the message rang clear, whether it came from her own subconscious or the broad flat head of an orange tomcat or from the stones around her and the glowing heart she'd sensed in that pattern of fire buried in the man's fevered dreams. Results mattered.

  She remembered the old Naskeag's words about magic. "Nothing to be ashamed of, child. Nothing bad. Just how you use it, that's all that matters."

  Jo could use her Power to heal.

  Ease flowed into her. Killing Sean, killing Daddy, those had been a form of healing. Those men had been pathogens, just as much as the bacteria she'd banished from this patient sleeping under her hand. Daddy had been an overgrown form of the AIDS bug, killing his family slowly across decades. Look what he'd done to Mom and Maureen.

  Look what he did to you, for Chrissakes, thirty-two years old and just groping your way into your first healthy relationship with a man. You think what you did with Buddy and all the others was any less sick than Maureen's fear?

  Jo shivered. David was the first lover she'd ever had, lover as opposed to sex toy. She gritted her teeth as pieces fell into place and the puzzle formed a picture. Most of the others had been modeled on Daddy, one way or another, starting out with Buddy. She'd only met David because Maureen had brought him home . . . .

  Her heart froze. Jesus Christ and all the angels, David. She'd been so busy running away from herself, she'd left David behind. And he couldn't come here by himself. She had to go back.

  {The Tree has spoken to the Stone. There are other paths between the worlds. Your mate comes.}

  Relief flooded through her. If she was going to fuck up that badly, she was sure as hell glad to have a safety net she could trust. "The Tree" must be Maureen's Father Oak. She felt his strong rough bark again, smelled his bitter tannin and damp moss. His Power touched her for an instant, instantly familiar.

  {Few understand the Power hidden within trust. You and your blood bring a new thing to this world. Believe in it. Trust defends you now.}

  She couldn't decide whether that was Father Oak speaking, or the Stone, or the cat warm in her lap. Or all of them combined.

  {Come.}

  The orange tom flowed off her lap again and stretched from end to end and marched to the door, tail up. He sat down and stared up at the bar. Apparently he wasn't going to walk through the wall while anyone was watching.

  "I thought I was done. You said this man would live."

  {Others suffer.}

  She staggered to her feet, woozy from the flow of Power and exhaustion. Her shirt stuck to her shoulder blades and she stank of sweat. Didn't Maureen have a hot-tub somewhere in this pile of rocks? A good long soak, waiting for David to show up . . .

  {You have work to do.}

  Insistent little bastard. Persistent. Whatever. Words tangled up in her head, a symptom of exhaustion. Or maybe all that alcohol hadn't burned away. She unbarred the door and stepped out into the stairwell, to face two more cats. They wanted her to go down. She followed them, hand on the wall and careful of her footing, fingertips drawing strength and clarity from the rough stone as she went. By the time they reached the bottom, she felt almost human. Or whatever.

  The cats led her into the great hall and the stink of sickness. A compound of vomit, piss, shit, rot, rancid fever-sweat, all the sickroom stench they'd kept under control at the nursing home -- it roared in her nose and wiped questions of her own need for a bath off the slate. Dozens of bodies lay swathed on the floor, thrashing in pain and fever or lying ominously still. Drifts of straw padded the floor and soaked up the worst of the fluids, but the scene looked more like a pigsty than a hospital. At least she was wearing boots . . .

  Maureen had mentioned some refugees, humans fleeing an attack. She hadn't mentioned this. God above, even the stones felt the pain and mourning.

  Or maybe Jo just hadn't heard. She hadn't been exactly . . . rational . . . when she arrived.

  The nearest form lay still, eyes open and empty, staring at the ceiling. Jo thought the woman was dead, until she saw the slight rise and fall of her chest. She knelt on a dry patch of straw and laid her palm on the woman's forehead. Cold. Empty. Deep inside, she felt the same deep-locked vault of pain and fear she'd found in her mother's head. And inside that, she found freeze-frame images of flame and blood and butchered children, and a brutal rapist who looked a lot like Daddy. Or maybe Jo painted her own memories into the picture.

  Her hand jerked back, and she shivered. The Power reached out again, using her hand, and the images grew again, but as each one reached clarity it crumbled into ash. Fire -- gone. Blood -- gone. Children -- gone. And the rape, oh, yes, the leering drooling rape, wiped into blankness that left no memory of the last days of the sacked and ravaged keep, the burned village.

  That was all she could do: Leave a gap in the woman's life where horror had passed through. Maybe the poor wretch could live with what was left.

  Her head hurt. Jo wasn't sure whether it was her own head, or the woman's. She staggered to her feet and moved to the next makeshift bed. She knelt and tou
ched skin again, reading pain. This one was fever, second and third degree burns, an infection. At least the leprechaun up in the tower had trained her for those. She pulled more Power out of the stone beneath her feet.

  She stood up. She staggered, groping for the wall to hold her up, and her head hurt.

  "Is there any coffee in this shithole?"

  A man appeared at her elbow, steaming mug in his hand. She swallowed two gulps, savored the heat and bitterness of it, and let her eyes come into focus. That was good coffee, just like the wine had been good wine. And her head eased. Caffeine withdrawal, not a hangover.

  The man studied her eyes for a moment and then blinked. He seemed to relax. "You're not Maureen." He was tall and thin-ish, with long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her nose told her he was human. She was having trouble getting used to this species thing.

  "I'm Padric. If you need anything, just ask."

  Padric? Maureen's jailer, and she'd let him live? That girl was turning into a Christian in her old age.

  The next one was dying, no question, shock and blood loss and infection and he didn't want to live after what he'd seen and lost. But he seemed to feel her near and opened his eyes. They focused on her crucifix, and his fingers stirred. Jo pulled the chain over her head and set Grandfather O'Brian's gift in the man's hands and closed his fingers around it. He smiled gently. She granted him grace as best she could remember and waited a minute while he died. Then she reclaimed the crucifix and moved on, numb, to another bleeding sweat-soaked body.

  And another. And another. She moved through a daze, no longer noticing the stench, dead to the pain, sustained by Power drawn from the keep and the solid stone on which it sat.