by C. E. Murphy
God, I’d turned into Dostoyevsky. I liked the Russian writers, but that didn’t mean I had to embrace their dour viewpoint. I shivered, trying to shake off the ache shared with a me from another world, and pulled together a lopsided smile for the still pink-cheeked Suzanne. Time was funny stuff, dragging you through a whole lifetime in the space of a teenager’s blush.
Time was funny stuff, indeed. I drew breath to speak, and something incremental and almost unseeable happened in Suzy’s face. I didn’t have time to see it, not in any way that could be broken down and made sense of, but I saw it anyway: how the corners of her eyes, crinkled with embarrassment, widened fractionally; how the embarrassed smile just barely began to change shape. One of the articles we’d read in the academy talked about how the human face can telegraph tremendous emotion in such fine detail that our forebrains completely miss it. A few really good cops trust their hind brains, and can read the most minute expressions so well it might as well be telepathy.
I didn’t know if I was a good cop or just getting to be a decent shaman. Either way, I swung away from Suzy long before even her aura started to shout alarm, and had the shotgun cocked and ready to blast before I knew what I was facing.
A cadaverous Matilda Whitehead stood before me.
No doubt attempting a dialogue would have been the morally superior course of action. Me, I went “AAAAGH!” and pulled the trigger a couple times, forgetting to re-cock the gun in between. Rock salt exploded out the first time, and nothing, of course, happened the second. I remembered to cock it again, but Matilda staggered back far enough that I didn’t pull the trigger a third time. Instead I stood there panting, trying to figure out what the hell a ghost was doing in corporeal form, and how it’d snuck up on me. There weren’t any freshly opened graves, and even if there had been, my rain of holy water should’ve done the trick. And even if there had been, again, Matilda Whitehead shouldn’t have come out of one. She’d gone missing a century ago, the body never found. I seriously doubted I’d just happened on her grave site.
Her body was stitching itself back together, not in any human fashion, but with little sparks of brightness that zotted from one wound’s edge to another, pulling flesh behind it. It was a special sort of awful, and I locked my knees to keep from staggering myself. I was pretty sure there were more important things to do than pass out, like wonder, once more, how a ghost had become corporeal. As far as I knew, that didn’t happen. I mean, apparently it did, because it was, but it wasn’t supposed to happen. Matilda Whitehead was not supposed to be standing in front of me, nasty lime aura overflowing a body too gaunt and inhuman to be recognizable as a specific person. Wherever she’d gotten the body, it was in lousy condition.
A layer of muscle and fat blopped out of the skeletal form as I thought that, making her a tiny bit less horrible to look on. Dizzying exhaustion swept me, and the instinctive part of my brain suggested I pull the shotgun trigger again. I did. Matilda screamed. More sparks flew, trying desperately to repair the damage I’d done. The books said salt banished ghosts. They didn’t say anything about the ghosts hanging around to do a frantic patch-up job.
A piston fired way at the back of my brain. Morbid curiosity made me fire the gun again. Matilda collapsed to her knees.
So did I.
The phrase fuck a duck sprang to mind. I set the shotgun butt into the ground and leaned on it, trying like hell not to topple over as I dragged in a long slow breath through my nostrils. “Suzy, I think you’d better get out of here. Walk, please. Casually. I don’t think that thing’s fast, but I’d rather not have you running.” And looking like prey was how that sentence finished, but I didn’t want to put the idea into her head. Either “her,” for that matter, just in case Matilda hadn’t already decided Suzanne would be a nice tender juicy morsel.
I’d checked the garden. I’d checked the Dead Zone. Billy and Sonata had both cleared me. But it hadn’t occurred to me that the last vestiges of a furious dying spirit might have managed to dive inside my magic, hiding in the very core of the healing power I had to offer. I hadn’t looked there, and life magic had apparently been enough to shield her from Sonata’s eyes.
Life magic, with enough outraged will behind it, was also apparently enough to create a thought-form body for a vengeful spirit to inhabit. I was goddamn lucky that the thing seemed to need active, not latent, power to feed on, or I might very well have woken up dead today.
Suzanne, bravely, if not wisely, didn’t run. She screamed for help, which seemed like the other sensible option. Nobody would answer, but that didn’t make it any less sensible. I might’ve joined her, if I’d had the breath to spare. Mine was all taken up with pushing myself to my feet again.
Fifteen feet away, Matilda did the same thing. I lifted the shotgun, but even doing so, knew it was a stopgap measure. I’d completely cut my access to my power once before, in order to keep a bad guy from gobbling up Morrison’s life force. I was pretty certain I’d have to do the same thing in order to cut Matilda’s lifeline. The problem—there was always a problem—was I didn’t know how long she’d survive once she was cut off, and I didn’t know how fast she could move. In her shoes—well, okay, in her bony rigid bare feet—I wouldn’t go for me. I’d go after Suzy. So I didn’t dare try it until Suzy was safe, and she, bless her pointy little head, was still screaming for help. I really didn’t want to shoot Matilda again and suffer the knockback myself, but she started forward and I cocked the shotgun, not sure I’d have a choice. “Suzy, please, please, please get out of here. I can’t fight this thing until I know you’re out of reach.”
She gulped her last scream and scurried away. Matilda’s head snapped after the motion. Bloodless lips pulled back from gumless teeth, rictus of a smile, and she leaped toward Suzanne with all the speed I feared she might be hiding. I pulled the trigger and rock salt knocked her from the air.
Weariness lashed back at me, no physical injury, just another announcement that my power took a beating every time I blew holes in the living ghost. I managed to keep my feet that time and lurched forward, zombie-like myself, to stand over Matilda’s healing body and prepare another shot.
Above me, the cloudy sky tore asunder with a rip of lightning and a roll of thunder. I flinched back a few steps, gaze yanked upward as thunder turned to the pounding of hooves, broken by the long cold call of a hunter’s horn. Cawing rooks poured out of the wound in the sky, and a howling pack of white hounds, their ears tipped in red, gave chase. Finally, behind them all, thirteen riders, led by a child but commanded by a deity, crashed down toward us on a thin beam of sun.
Someone had answered Suzy after all.
CHAPTER 17
I had a problem with the Horned God of the Hunt: I quite simply couldn’t take my eyes off him. I’d never been able to, not from the first moment he’d roared into my life, a living thing of liquid silver and burning green. Nothing had changed since then, not his anger, not his strength, not his beauty, and not my ability to be anything other than stunned by him, either.
He came at me like a flash flood, hugged close to his mercury-hued horse. They were larger than life, the pair of them, magical creatures poured from molds that humanity only dreamed of. Nearly all I could see of the god was his wildfire green eyes, blazing with intent that was wholly focused on me. Everything else about him was a blur, written in by my memory: the starlight-spattered brown hair, the terrible sharp widow’s peak it fell back from and the distorted bone at his temples that would give birth to the magnificent antlers he was named for. His body was slender now, not yet changed to bear the weight of a too-heavy head, and his clothes were living silver, flowing and caressing. I’d seen otherworldly beauty time and again in the past year as I’d raced through one madcap adventure after another, but nothing held a candle to the Horned God. Like an idiot, I found myself smiling at his approach.
Cernunnos slammed by at top speed, twitching at the last second to knee me in the jaw.
From the outside it must�
�ve been fantastic to watch. I felt my whole body stretch out in slow motion, head thrown back with the impact. My hands flew up like a backstroker off the block, and for an instant my body traced a perfect arch in the air.
Then, as it was wont to do, gravity called me home with a vengeance.
I just barely broke my fall with my hands, and more or less crumpled down on myself like an accordion. Astonishment kept me in a lump on the ground; astonishment, and the distant idea that the moment I moved I was going to start hurting an awful lot. I was pretty sure I should be hurting already, but surprise held it at bay. Cernunnos and I had parted on good terms, if you called him kissing me until my knees went wobbly good terms. I certainly had. Maybe gods judged these things differently.
Hooves smashed around me and I coiled up with my hands over my head, yelling wordlessly. Yeah, that hurt: pain exploded through my skull in piercing shards. In fact, I thought it was likely my skull was indeed made up of piercing shards, and that all the king’s doctors and all the king’s men weren’t going to put Jo back together again. Oh, God. That was worse than the banshee. It had been going to rhyme me to death. Now I was going to rhyme myself to death. That was so unfair.
Worse, I was clearly about a million mental miles away from the calm that might help me heal myself. I stopped yelling and just groaned, then gave that up as a bad job, too, and went right for pathetic whimpering. I hoped I’d at least chipped the bastard’s kneecap with my thick head, but I was reasonably certain I’d gotten the raw end of the deal.
The hoof beats had faded into the distance. The tiny part of me that wasn’t busy being impressed with how my brain ricocheted around inside its casing informed me that they were now returning, and that I might want to do something about it. In a supreme effort of will, I rolled over in time to watch Cernunnos’s stallion skid to a stop above me. It reared up, front feet pawing, and it was clear that for the second time in my life, the majestic beast had every intention of killing me.
It was probably a dumb-ass time to leave my body behind, but that’s what I did.
My garden was mind-blowingly peaceful after the cacophony of the Hunt. My head didn’t hurt any less, but the silence felt like a pillow around my bruises. It took a few seconds to pull myself together and tentatively probe my face. Astonishingly, there was nothing broken, just a point of swollen flesh that I bet would bleed like a stuck pig if I poked a pin in it. It was just as well I didn’t have a pin. My brain thought gallons of blood squirting out of my jaw sounded kind of cool.
I wrested my mind away from that image and searched for one that would help me fix my head. What leaped to mind were bubbles in the paint job, but I was hardly going to sand the bruise off my head and paint over it. My car metaphor didn’t always work smoothly. Draining the oil would have to do, though that led back to the squirting. I gritted my teeth and imagined working a clog out of the oil filter so it could flow smoothly through the engine again. I didn’t want blood clotting up my head. It needed to move away from the injury, get back into the rest of my system. Then I could do a touchup on the paint job, bruise and swollen flesh smoothing away.
With the ache in my skull considerably reduced, I took the shielding I’d so poorly protected my garden with, and brought it back with me to the real world.
The stallion’s hooves smashed down on shimmering silver-blue magic, clanging like steel on steel. I watched reverberations shoot up the poor animal’s legs—how it had gone from trying to kill me to poor animal, I didn’t know—and gave a relieved meep at not being crushed to death. The horse slipped off my shields to the ground and pranced uncomfortably. Cernunnos, about a thousand feet above me, bared his teeth and drew blade.
This was all starting to seem strangely familiar.
Sadly for me, last time I’d had a steel butterfly knife in hand, and all I had right now was a whole bunch of diddly and a big lump of squat. More, this time I had a passionate amount of really truly swear-to-God cross-my-heart hope-to-die not wanting to impale myself again. Or be impaled, for that matter, but there was a short sharp sword on its way down to do just that. I closed my eyes, put my hand out and hoped like hell that I was right about being able to pull a rapier through inconveniently intervening space when I needed it.
It was even money on who was more surprised, me or Cernunnos, when I did. The god’s jaw dropped open in as human an expression as I’d ever seen on anything, and my face split with a relieved, foolish grin. The sword was there, as solidly, as reliably, as it had been in the astral plane. Moreover, my armor came with it: a copper bracelet on my wrist, silver necklace settling in the hollow of my throat and a small round shield decorating my arm. Those four items together spun a circle of brilliance around me, and their connection to one another quartered the circle with me in its center. The psychic shields I could build had nothing on what gifts of love and spoils of war offered. I knew I wasn’t invincible, but in that armor, carrying that sword, I thought I might be the best me possible.
That other Joanne, the one who called herself Siobhán, could never have had all of these things because she’d never met Gary, not the way I knew him, and she never would have fought Cernunnos the way I did the first time I faced him.
Something very like joy surged through me, and I slammed my rapier into the god’s sword, knocking it aside. Then, because I was an idiot and suddenly full of piss and vinegar, I scrambled to my feet. I didn’t know what the hell his problem was, but he’d started it. That was fine. I’d finish it. I did the classic “c’mon, buster” hand thing, with my palm turned toward myself and my fingers crooking in invitation.
And the master of the Hunt, who wasn’t any brighter than I was, drove his heels into the silver stallion’s sides, accepting the challenge. The animal leaped at me with an outraged scream. I shrieked and flung myself to the side as Cernunnos’s sword went whistling over my head. Next time I pick a fight with a god, remind me to make sure he gets off his horse first.
Cernunnos wheeled the stallion and charged at me again. There was no possible way I was anything other than totally screwed, but this time I did my best to stand my ground, letting his blow smash into my shield and send me spinning. On the full circle I lashed out at the stallion’s flanks, feeling that it wasn’t quite fair to pick on the horse, but that it was distinctly less fair to get trampled. Ol’ Silver clearly wasn’t accustomed to taking hits for the home team, because he bucked with a violence that surprised even Cernunnos. There was no chance the Horned God would come unseated, but it took long seconds for him to get the stallion back under control.
In the meantime, the child who led the Hunt, the pale boy Rider who was Cernunnos’s only immortal son, who bound the god to a mortal cycle of life and death, and whose life I’d saved once upon a time, tapped me on the shoulder and offered me the reins to his own golden mare.
I said, “Oh hell yeah,” and swung up on the gorgeous beast like I knew what I was doing. The young Rider stepped back with a smile on his face, the same feral thing his father could wear, then fell back farther still, to stand side by side with his niece. Suzanne’s screams had long since fallen silent, and now she had both hands over her mouth and her eyes were wide and green with either astonishment or fear.
Behind her—behind them both—stood the Hunt, waiting restlessly for their master to finish his business. Men, each and every one, from the thick-shouldered bearded king whose name I knew and would never dare speak, to the slim blond archer whose longbow had driven arrows through Petite’s sturdy steel body. I wondered if there were no women because women committed fewer crimes that would condemn them to an eternal ride, or if they were simply better at not getting caught.
The boy Rider flicked an eyebrow, and I stopped wondering about the sociological makeup of a mythical host of riders in order to face its leader in single combat. “Mano a mano,” I said aloud, remembering.
Eager rage contorted Cernunnos’s features, and we came together like goddamn Titans clashing. I saw silver peel off the e
dge of my rapier, a sizzling thread that fell to the ground and was smashed beneath dancing hooves. My arm wobbled with the hit, and for some reason I laughed, utterly thrilled with pitting myself against a god. I wheeled my mare around with nothing more than a lean and charged Cernunnos again, standing in the stirrups to add to my already considerable advantage in reach. He was my height, maybe even a little better than, but the sword he carried was much shorter than the rapier, and I sucked in my gut to make his passing slash a miss. He rode by, and for the first time I could remember, I twisted and shot a bolt of deep blue magic from my fingertips.
It surged out of me like a tidal wave, more draining than fighting Matilda had been. I learned two things right then: one, using my power as a weapon would probably kill me, and two, even when I was thinking in terms of weaponry, the magic itself was hard to corrupt. Light crashed into Cernunnos, knocking him from his horse, but he didn’t get up again. I brought the mare around and slid from her back, sword at a god’s throat.
“Do you yield?” Power danced over my skin, blue and silver threads weaving to make a net. I could drag him all over the world if I needed to, but there was a hell of a lot of appeal in just sitting on his chest and pinning his arms down with my knees, if he seemed inclined to continue fighting.
Green fire spat through his eyes. “You’ve changed since we last met, little shaman.”
My mouth said, “So have you,” and my mind only caught up with that a few seconds later. Surprise washed through my magic, loosening it a little, and I stepped back a few inches. “You have changed, my lord master of the Hunt. Your horns are gone.”
Not just gone. He’d said they grew with his power, erupting fully on the last day before he returned to Tir na nOg, the world from which he came. I expected them to be nothing more than subtle patterns against his temple now, so early in his ride. But nothing at all graced his forehead, no distortion or stretching of bone and skin. I crouched and slid my fingertips against his temple, taking victory as an excuse for intimacy, and found no rough malformation through touch, either. “Cernunnos, what happened to you? You’re all wrong.” Magic stirred under my skin, searching for a way to put a wild thing back together.