by C. E. Murphy
“We were called too early from our place beyond the stars, little shaman. This is why I came in such anger, and took you as my enemy.” His wildfire gaze went to Suzanne and came back to me. “You can be a fool, Sio—”
I put my fingers over his lips. “You can call me Joanne.”
Silence went on far longer than was strictly warranted. I removed my fingers, and the silence kept going, very loudly. Eventually the Horned God said, “You are a fool. Joanne Walk—”
“—er.”
Another one of those silences happened. “C’mon,” I said. “I don’t go bandying your true name about. Leave mine in peace.”
Green fire flashed again. “You do not know my true name.”
“Totally beside the point. You’re a fool, Joanne Walker. What comes next?”
The third time he drew out the silence I began to think he’d never break it again. I’d have given a great deal to know what was going on behind his brilliant gaze, but I couldn’t read it any more than I could read a rock.
Actually, okay, truthfully, I could probably read quite a bit from a rock, if I turned the Sight on it. But looking at Suzy had damn near burned my eyes out, and I wasn’t in a hurry to see Cernunnos in any more primal a visage than the one he presented by choice. “You’re a fool, gwyld, but had we come through at our rightful hour, I wouldn’t take you for one great enough to threaten a child of my blood. My weakness is to your benefit. Had I been at full strength…”
Gwyld. I hadn’t heard that word in a while. Not since the last time I’d encountered the likes of a death god, in fact. It meant wise man or shaman in Irish, and therefore technically applied to me, though I wasn’t very wise. “If you’d been at full strength you wouldn’t have tried riding me down, and I wouldn’t have been able to kick your ass nearly that easily.” I stood up and offered Cernunnos a hand. To my eternal astonishment, he looked at it, then accepted it and let me pull him to his feet.
I’d mostly only touched him when we were trying to kill each other. He was tall and hit like a load of bricks, so I didn’t expect his body weight to be negligible. I gave him a quick surprised nod, but he knotted his hand around mine and stepped in very close, gaze hot on mine. “I trust you would not have ‘kicked my ass’ at all, Siobhán Walkingstick.”
I swallowed, trying to remember why it was I usually thought breathing was important. He smelled of the forest in autumn, rich and crackling and clean, and I thought he would taste of cold fresh water from the stream. A smile curved his mouth and he let me go, though his eyes on mine kept me as arrested as his hands might’ve. I was okay with that. I could happily drown in his blazing gaze. I even felt a stupid little smile start working its way into place.
A light of satisfaction flashed in Cernunnos’s eyes. “Granddaughter,” he said then, and released me by looking toward Suzanne. My breath left me in a rush and I squeaked, reaching for the mare to lean against. She ignored me, ambling toward the boy Rider and Suzanne, then stood with her head between their shoulders, snuffling for treats. I was abandoned all around.
“Granddaughter,” Cernunnos said again. “Why have you called me before my time?”
“And how,” the boy Rider said dryly, but hushed himself when the god’s glare fell on him.
Suzy ducked her head so hair curtained her face. I wanted to step forward and pull it back so I could see the three of them together, the two part-mortal descendants of the god, rude copies of his narrow elegance, and yet both fragile by human terms. She whispered, “I was scared,” and looked up apologetically.
“Frightened enough to tear down walls between the worlds?” Cernunnos did what I wanted to, brushing her hair back with a light touch. His hair was ash with starlight, and hers wheat-pale, but they were of a kind. My heart twisted to see them together, a strange family torn apart by worlds and time. “What could unnerve the child of a god so badly?”
“That.” Suzanne pointed beyond him, beyond me, to the thing I’d forgotten about. I turned, dismayed, to find Matilda Whitehead far less a thing of death, and much more a simulacrum of a living girl.
She might have been pretty, if her idea of herself was true. Not happy, but then, I wouldn’t be happy if I was a hundred-plus years dead, either. She had a solemn face with large eyes, and dark hair tied in a neat braid and decorated with a fat, colorless bow. She was still far too thin, but no longer cadaverous; another few bursts of magic on my part, and she might work her way up to healthy, though she’d never be plump.
Cernunnos let go a breath cold enough to chill the air, and turned to me with a look of both disgust and cunning. “This is a thing that isn’t meant to be, little shaman, and it’s born of you and your magic.”
“I know.” Non-existent bugs crawled over my skin and I shuddered, trying to wipe them away. “I was trying to get rid of it when Suzy called for you.”
“Its name is Matilda,” the thought-formed ghost said in a thin voice. She watched me like I was her next and maybe only meal. Hairs stood up on my arms and I told myself-again—that there was no such thing as vampires. “I only want to live. You can give me life.”
“You’ve been dead a hundred years. I can’t do anything for you. I’m sorry.” I wasn’t, very, but some bizarre form of deep-seated societal training made me say it.
“All I need is a little more of your power.” She took a weak step toward me, thin body straining with effort. “Please?”
I considered it for about a nanosecond, then shot a look at Cernunnos. He was a god of death. He should know something about this sort of situation. “What happens if I do what she asks?”
To my surprise, he turned a palm up and offered an answer with the gesture. “You feed a wrongness in the worlds. Make no mistake, little gwyld, you and she cannot both survive. Give her what she requires, and you wipe away the years granted to you.”
“Right.” My voice shot up and broke on the single word. “How do I get rid of it? I can’t fight it with magic.”
“Ah.” Fine lines appeared around the corners of his eyes, evidence of a wicked smile that barely touched his mouth. “Perhaps I can help you.”
On a scale of one to ten, that was up there around vampires in its reassurance factor. My heart tried making a break for it, then, stymied by my ribs, decided squeezing down into an invisible knot would do the trick. I thumped a fist against my breastbone and coughed out a pathetic little burp before getting enough voice together to ask, “At what cost?”
“A bargain,” Cernunnos offered. “You’ve done so well with those in the past. You cannot fight this creature, not here, not anywhere, but I can. Ride with me, Joanne Walker. Ride with the Hunt a third and final time, and I will take you so far from this place that your magic will stretch and thin, and leave nothing for your undead child to live on.”
“And what do you get out of this?”
“You’ll bear my mark.” His eyes were brilliant, compelling green, and his smile full of delight. “You will become a part of the Hunt, and when your final day comes, you will choose to ride with me through eternity.”
“I thought…” I wet my lips and tried again. “I thought I already did. Bear your mark.”
“Marked for me is not the same as bearing my mark. Many mortal souls are marked for me, and I carry those souls beyond this world and into the next. Make no mistake, I shall come for thee and I shall have thee in such a way at the end of thy days, but this thing I offer now, Siobhán Walkingstick, is a thing all of its own.”
I closed my eyes and murmured, “You’re talking in my head again, aren’t you? Thank you.” He was a god. I probably couldn’t stop him from flinging my name around if he wanted, but the echoing depth of his voice suggested he’d changed from spoken speech to silent. It was a gift, and I was inclined to consider it in his offer. I opened my eyes to look at him again, repeating his words in my mind. “‘I’ll choose to ride with you through eternity.’ You mean I’d have a choice. Even if I ride with you now, when I die I’ll have a choice. I coul
d just go through the Dead Zone and on to whatever happens next. Reincarnation, if that’s what’s on the plate.”
“You’ll make the choice now, in exchange for this monster’s destruction.” Smooth voice, soft voice, speaking perfect reason. I put my face in my hands, then looked up over my fingertips.
“I can’t. I can’t make the choice now. I could lie to you, but I won’t do that. I don’t know who I’m going to be when that day comes around, my lord master of the Hunt. I might need to come back around to this world more than I need to keep my promise to you. So I can’t make the promise. I don’t know how I’m going to get rid of this Matilda-thing, but I’m not going to lie to you to do it.”
“Wise little gwyld.” Cernunnos lifted a hand to trace the scar on my cheek. “But think on thy words, Joanne Walker. Dost thou know for certain that I mean the end of this mortal existence as thy final day? I would have all of you that I could, and yet even I cannot stand against the makers of the worlds.”
I stared at him, heart sick and small in my chest. “What do I miss out on? If I say yes, am I walking away from…from Heaven? From some kind of end-days party that everybody else is going to be at? Do I miss out on eternity with…” Morrison, was how that sentence finished, but I just let it fade away.
To my surprise, amusement quirked the corner of Cernunnos’s mouth. “I am neither born of your world nor of your flesh, little shaman. I have no answer for you.” He inclined his head, eyes lidding to hide some of the fire in his gaze. “Choose.”
I looked back at Matilda. At Suzanne and the boy Rider, and the Hunt and the world around and beyond them. The Sight washed over my vision, turning the world to a quiet haze of waiting, as though I’d stepped a little out of time. Matilda was a black streak in that, a wrongness, as Cernunnos had said; the boy Rider was more brilliant even than Suzanne.
And the god, the god himself, I finally dared turn my Sight on, and found him blazing with restraint and quiescence. There were no easy words for his colors; they were raw and hard edged, mixing and spilling together and over and under, raw chaos and primal life clinging to a slender alien form.
I put my hand in his, and joined the Hunt.
CHAPTER 18
The boy Rider lent me his mare again. I put my palm under her nose, an apology for not having apples or carrots. She huffed over it before dipping her head in agreement to let me ride her. I hadn’t asked the first two times, and didn’t know why it seemed important now. Maybe because three was a magic number. Once astride, I looked back to the graveyard and to Suzanne standing alone with the young Rider, and at Matilda staring them both down. “Are they going to be all right?”
I’d asked Cernunnos, but it was the boy who gave me another of his father’s feral smiles. “I invite it to test me.”
Maybe on a rational level, that wasn’t the answer I should’ve been looking for, but on a purely emotional one, it was perfect. I guessed that, like Cernunnos, he was coming in to the height of his power. If Matilda wanted to tangle with him, I was pretty sure she’d be digging her own grave. She might not stay in it, but I had very little doubt the green-eyed boy would put her there, and hard.
In fact, I kinda wanted to stay and watch. Cernunnos swung up on his silver stallion, though, and the Hunt fell into place, hounds slinking under horse bellies and gray-beaked rooks winging overhead. “Where are we going?”
He lifted his hands, reins held loose in them, and made fists that wove and touched together and bumped apart again. “Your world,” he said of one, and then of the other, “and mine.”
The Hunt leaped forward, and left my world behind.
There were ways upon ways to travel between the worlds, and I was beginning to think the differences in scenery were at least partly imposed by my subconscious. Starscapes littered my idea of the space between Tir na nOg and the Middle World, which normal people would call “the earth.” Those same diamond-cut lights had winked in the void between my world and Babylon, because if I was moving between worlds, there ought to by God be stars. I suspected, though, that I was traveling the Dead Zone when I crossed to different worlds, and that the differences I saw were merely cosmetic.
In either case, this place was as cold as the Dead Zone, too cold to feel heat from the infinite stars streaking by. I buried my fingers in the mare’s mane and hunched against her neck as much for warmth as to simply hang on. Time, space, speed, all apparently meant very little to the Hunt, and I wasn’t sure what would happen to me if I fell off out here in the far reaches of forever. I’d ridden this road before, but never in body.
My heart went into triple time when that thought came home. I’d actually physically gotten on an animal that could break through the barrier between one world and another, and had left my own world behind, all on the offer of a god who’d more than once tried to steal or seduce my soul.
I was a nice girl. Not too bright, but a nice girl.
Cernunnos, under the rush of hooves, murmured, “Home.”
A recognizable longing sprang up in me. It came through the mare, or through the Hunt; came, anyway, from somewhere that lay deeper across time than I did. It clawed at my belly, sinking hooks into me, and drew an image that became more and more real as we rode toward it. A misty world of silver-barked trees with deep green leaves came into focus, and then the scent of good rich earth and clean sea air. Crystalline laughter broke on whispering wind, then died in surprise as the Hunt broke through and trotted into a courtyard shaped from living oak.
So far as I could tell, it had been the trees themselves sharing laughter. Stillness rippled out around us, quiet and comforting until I realized how complete it was. There were no birds twittering, no hum of insects, no crack of sticks or hiss of grass as animals passed through. There was only the mist, peaceful and silent, barely disturbed by the Hunt dismounting. Even the rooks went quiet, settling in trees, some to tuck beak under wing and nap, others to stare with black-eyed interest at the gathered group of demi-humans, gods and mortals. The hounds lay down, stretched out long over dew-ridden grass, and one by one the Riders faded away until I was alone in the courtyard with Cernunnos. “What happened here?”
Tragedy marred the silver god’s face. “Mortals seek eternity. Immortals seek rest. It is the irony of our lives.” He dismounted, the last to do so, save myself, and the stallion melted into the forest as had everyone and everything else. I stayed where I was, swaying in my saddle as he walked to a bower where twined oak reshaped itself to make a leafy seat. He loosed his sword from his hip, then sprawled in the seat, all silver and inhuman, with the sheathed blade across his thighs. “Come, let her go. We cannot do this with her here.”
I put my hand on the mare’s shoulder and asked what seemed like both an obvious and an idiotic question: “Who is she?”
A hint of cruel amusement curved his mouth. “Don’t you know?”
All of a sudden, I did. I blanched and the mare danced, discomfited at my sudden tension. I slid off her back, trying to cobble calm back together, but she pranced away, then galloped into the forest while I stared after her. “Does he know?”
“The boy? He did once. Now?” Cernunnos shrugged, a ripple of quicksilver. “He may have bound me to time and taken my immortality for himself, but his mind is partly human. He forgets things, and in doing so saves his sanity.”
“But she doesn’t.” I swallowed against a tight throat, glancing after the mare again. “That’s why she lets me ride her. She remembers what it was to be human.”
“More,” Cernunnos said softly, “she remembers what it is to become entangled with one such as me. She might have taken your life that night we raced down your highway.”
I looked back at him, strength and low certainty coming into my voice. “Not if she wanted me to rescue her son.”
Cernunnos tilted his head in acknowledgment. I straightened my shoulders, trying to put the mare out of my thoughts. “Okay. So here we are. How do I take Matilda on?”
“Ah.” The god sl
ipped his sword from its sheath, dropping the latter to the side and rebalancing the short blade across his thighs, fingertips light against its broad side. “Tir na nOg is a dying world, little shaman. A dead world, perhaps, but I am its king. What magic left here is mine to command.”
At least half of me listened, I swear it, but my mind hitched on the sword he’d laid across his lap. It had no crossguard worth mentioning, and the hilt was wrapped with silver wire that turned into a heavy pommel. Tir na nOg’s magic being his to command was obviously important. I could see how that might affect both Matilda and myself in a battle of wits, or what have you. Instead of following that opening, though, I said, “That’s a different sword.”
Cernunnos turned a dry green gaze on me. For a moment I forgot about the sword, too, and just had a dizzying moment of breathlessness. He was a god and a monster who had changed his son’s mother into a horse, trapping her as part of his Hunt for eternity, and yet my brain still short-circuited when he wanted it to. I needed therapy. In a voice as dry as his gaze, he said, “You stole mine, little shaman.”
“Stole? You stuck it in me, not—” That wasn’t actually true. I’d impaled myself, if you wanted to get technical about it. I bit my tongue to keep from getting technical, and tried another tack. “You had a broadsword at the Seattle Center in January. I thought you’d have that, or another rapier. That one’s…” I had no intention of using the word that came to mind, for fear the Horned God would disapprove.