by C. E. Murphy
Billy came down the stairs, surprisingly light-footed for a guy as heavy as he was. “Robert wheedled another half hour of reading time out of me. The rest of them are asleep.”
“Robert would’ve read for another half hour whether you gave him permission or not.” Melinda smiled and stood on her toes to kiss her husband, who grinned.
“I know, but now he feels like we’ve entered a conspiracy. It’s a male-bonding thing.”
Mel rolled her eyes in my direction, then tipped her head at the door. I shut it. The room warmed up noticeably within a few seconds. Maybe sweating was an important part of summoning a goddess, although that sent my mind down paths I didn’t think it should follow. I mean, candlelight, sweat and deity-summoning all went together if you were summoning a particular sort of goddess, but Mel’d never mentioned being a disciple of Aphrodite. Of course, she’d never mentioned being anybody’s disciple, so what the hell did I know?
“Since we have four of us, we might as well make use of that. Two men and two women.” Mel dimpled. “That works out well.”
Gary and I exchanged glances. “I keep telling people it’s not like that, but nobody believes me.”
“I don’t tell ’em any such thing. Who’m I to shatter their illusions, ’specially when their illusions set me up with a pretty girl?”
“You could do worse,” Mel told me. “I mean, not that you’ve done badly with Edward.”
The smile that’d come up at Gary’s flattery fell away again while Billy made a small no! stop! gesture toward Mel that I probably wasn’t supposed to see. She looked between us in bewilderment. I muttered, “Yeah, that thing with Thor didn’t turn out so well in the end. We broke up tonight.” Chasing ghosts and cauldrons was a pretty good distraction, but the reminder made me want to crawl in a hole and pull the earth over my head for a while.
Dismay washed over Melinda’s face. “Oh, Joanne. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. What happened?”
“It…” Pulling the world over my head wasn’t going to work, and I had more important things to do than dwell. “It doesn’t really matter very much right now. Let’s deal with the zombie-producing cauldron first.” I caught Gary’s frown and exhaled in exasperation. “Look, teacher-man, I know you don’t like me running away from problems, and I promise I’ll get all maudlin and heartbroken tomorrow, okay? This is more important.” While that was true, it didn’t stop my head from stuffing up like somebody’d filled it with cotton bandages. I snorted snot into a thick murky sinus cavity and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. Yeah, that was me, Joanne Walker, Tough Girl. “What do we need to do, Mel?”
She said, “Choose a direction,” and while she was probably talking to all of us, I said, “North,” without thinking about it, which made her smile. Defensive, I said, “What?” and her smile broadened.
“Nothing. It’s just that north is the direction usually associated with finding wisdom.”
Oh, God. My esoteric self was making Meaningful Choices in the midst of my minor emotional breakdown. I hoped the Maker of the world, or whoever’d mixed me up, found that kind of thing amusing, because I didn’t. Melinda pointed to the bar of the circle that pointed north, and I stomped over to it and folded my arms like a sulking child. Which I was.
“East,” Gary said, and I couldn’t help notice that when we were both facing the center of the circle, that put him on my left, beside my heart. Apparently not even the universe believed it wasn’t like that. Jeez.
Melinda was smiling again. “Sunrise, the opening of the ways, the opening of the heart. Bill, I think you’d better take west. It’ll balance us man and woman, and you can be the guide to closing what Gary’s opened.” She stepped up to the circle directly across from me, and power danced over my skin as Billy took his place to my right.
“I thought we were going ask a goddess for help,” I said uncomfortably. “How come this feels a little too much like it’s about me?” I didn’t think I was being egocentric, not when Melinda’d arranged the circle around my initial choice.
“You’re the strongest of us.” Somehow Melinda managed to be reassuring, placating and teasing all at once. “Besides, I could have come up with something equally impressive-sounding if Gary’d chosen somewhere else. Youth to age, if he’d taken the south, man to wife if Billy and I were facing each other. Want me to go on?”
A blush curdled my cheeks. “That’s okay, thanks. What now?”
“We may as well sit down. This can take a while.” Melinda did as she suggested, tugging a pillow beneath herself. Gary and Billy followed suit, but I froze halfway into my own crouch.
Light shimmered at the heart of Melinda’s power circle before she even began speaking, so faint I called up the Sight in hopes of seeing more clearly. For long seconds nothing resolved, only scattered bits of brilliance, like the last rays of sunset on the water. Without really thinking, I knelt and put my fingertips on the chalk outline. Magic sparked as if I’d touched a live wire, a gentle shock that pulled silver-blue power from me. It bolted around the circle, hiccuping with recognition as it touched first Gary and Billy, then whisked around to greet Melinda and meet itself.
Silver shot up, crashing into the ceiling. I looked up for the first time, finding another circle inscribed above us, capturing the magic that poured out of me. A nattering little part of my mind thought I should be afraid: spilling power like that was usually a bad sign. This time, though, it felt more like healing; like it had when I’d tried to breathe life back into Cernunnos’s forest, or like when I shared a bit of my own strength with Gary to shore up his weakened heart. Encouraged, I leaned in to it, pressing my fingers against the concrete.
Magic cracked, an audible sound of thunder, and slammed through the quartered cross. Hints of color that weren’t mine danced in the silver and blue: fuchsia and orange, rose-pink and yellow, and a deeper silver that was somehow different from my own, carrying more weight and confidence with it. The effect was a gorgeous cascade that made auroras pale by comparison.
And something at the heart of it was desperately trying to break through. The nattering voice at the back of my head cried another warning, but something familiar rippled through the encroaching presence: the cool touch of mist, the scent of rich earth, a soft crystalline laughter from an unearthly throat. I breathed, “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”
Power spiked, almost all of it my own, but bits and pieces fed in by my friends. Their trust burgeoned in me, and I lent that to the blazing circle, offering a safe refuge for the traveler.
The boy Rider appeared, pale and disheveled and without his mare. Without the Hunt, for that matter, and, as I frowned at him more carefully, it started to look like he was without mass or physical presence, either. He whispered, “We bring death where we ride, and now death itself has called us to it. Follow me, gwyld. Follow me if you can.”
He winked out, leaving only a glimmer of starlight behind.
CHAPTER 25
Magic wiped itself clean behind him, all the power dropping back to the earth with the ripple of a digital system creating a visual representation of music playing. It hissed into nothingness, and silence wrapped around me as my friends turned curious gazes my way.
Gary broke it, saying, “Ain’t seen him in a while.”
Billy, released from silence, said, “Who—what—was that?”
“Rider of the Wild Hunt,” Gary said when it was clear I wasn’t going to answer. “Cernunnos’s son. Jo here rescued him from oblivion, or somethin’ like it, back in January. What’s he doin’ here, Jo?”
I didn’t answer. I was afraid to blink, much less speak, because I wasn’t sure the whisper of starlight the Rider had left would remain visible if I did. Instead, I got to my feet and was halfway to the door before Melinda snapped, “Where do you think you’re going?” in a dangerous mommy-voice.
I winced and my eyes closed. To my relief, starlight remained streaked behind my eyelids, lingering when I opened them again. “Just to save the Rider
s. I’ll be right back.”
“Not by yourself you’re not.” Steel came into Gary’s voice, answering my question as to where the other silver in the aurora of power had been birthed from.
“Yeah, actually, I am.” I kept my voice to a whisper, still afraid I’d blow away my trace vision of the Rider.
I called magic, bent light around myself, and disappeared in front of their eyes.
It was a dirty trick, and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have been sure I could do it. I’d never rendered myself invisible with a bunch of people actively looking on, and part of my brain thought I shouldn’t be able to. Fortunately, my need was far greater than my uncertainty just then. The Rider’s trail was fading, and I wasn’t going to get out of that particular discussion with anything less than a melodramatic exit.
My friends’ voices erupted in astonishment as I ran as quietly as I could for the stairs, taking them two at a time. I stopped at the head to grab the key off the top of the door frame—that was where the Hollidays habitually kept keys, though I bet by tomorrow afternoon they’d be in new hiding places—and locked my friends in the basement. Between Gary and Billy I figured the door would last about thirty seconds, a minute if I was lucky, but that was time in which Petite’s big old engine could warm up and I could get the hell out of Dodge. Or Aurora, as the case actually was.
They hadn’t made it to the front door by the time I pulled out of the driveway. I let my magic go, not wanting to find out what would happen if a cop saw a car driving itself, and focused on the Sight harder than I ever had in my life.
The starlight trail didn’t, of course, lead tidily down streets and highways. It barely made a trail at all, really: it was more of a gut feeling, certainty buried under my breastbone and charging me to make a left here, a right there. I could’ve navigated with my eyes closed and I’d still have “seen” just as clearly where I was meant to go.
It was a long enough drive that regret had a chance to raise its ugly head. None of my friends would happily accept “Suzy’s premonition had a bunch of people in it, so I figured I’d change the scenario by leaving you behind” as an excuse for me running out. As it happened, that was exactly the reason for my daring escape—the more I changed the details of Suzy’s premonition, the more likely it was the whole scenario would change—but my friends wouldn’t think it was very convincing. Neither would Billy be any too happy with “your wife is about to give birth, stay home with her, you idiot,” which was every bit as valid a motivation for abandoning him.
Oh, well. They could only kill me if I survived.
The starlight pull turned to sharp white agony through my diaphragm, cutting my breath away. I pulled Petite into an illegal parking space in front of somebody’s driveway and doubled over, hands cold on the steering wheel, then shoved myself straight and stared blindly down the block. I didn’t know where I was, except half a city from where I’d been. The Sight glowed with trees overhanging the blue-black mark of the street, and moonlight cut through branches to turn them even more ghostly in magic vision.
Moonlight. Suzy’d said there’d been moonlight when I went into the cauldron. That was a good sign, for some perverse value of good; it meant things were aligning properly for me to find it. On the other hand, if I could’ve pulled a cloud cover over and sent the details of the premonition that much more askew, I’d have been happy to. I’d have to see if quick-fixing the weather was supposed to be in a shaman’s repertoire.
Later. Later, assuming there was a later. I inhaled through my nose, trying to breathe away some of the pain slicing my stomach. This was a family neighborhood: the Sight showed me sparks of high-energy life in the houses along the road. I imagined a lot of them to be kids too wired on sugar to be sleeping yet, and some of the more sedentary spots to be parents willing to put up with a houseful of kids on a school night just to hold an appropriately spooky party.
Cernunnos had to be in there somewhere. Maybe not one of these houses specifically, but it’d been the boy who’d come to me, not the god. If the boy had been removed from the Hunt, if he was dead, as the sudden cessation of starlight from him suggested he might be, then Cernunnos was no longer bound to the mortal wheel of life and death. I’d nearly blinded myself looking on him with the Sight once. I wasn’t sure what he’d look like unbound, but I bet I’d be able to see it blazing, no matter where he was in the city.
I’d gotten out of Petite and left her several steps behind without noticing it. My keys were in my hand, suggesting I’d locked her up safely, and either I’d be dead or I’d move her before anybody tried leaving the driveway I’d blocked. That, or a never-around-when-you-need-one cop would impound her while I was out fighting bad guys.
None of which really mattered. This was classic Joanne Walker-style dilly-dallying. I took a deep breath, held it until determined air sluiced away the rest of the cramps in my belly, and asked the Sight to find me a god.
Most of the world faded away. The black bands of human-built streets became translucent, then clear, and the purposeful rigid forms of buildings melted into mist and disappeared. Even natural things like trees and moonlight became cut-away simulacra of themselves, then bleached away. Only living things were left, sparks of brilliance that turned to dust as the Sight discarded them as insufficient to be a god. The smallest things went first, bugs and birds and squirrels. Their disappearance reminded me too much of the undead critters I’d fought, and for a few seconds my concentration wavered as I hoped there were no graveyards nearby.
If I lost my focus there would be zombies all over the damn place. My hands turned to firsts and I leaned into my efforts, looking at a world growing increasingly dark, in hopes of finding a single point of radiance.
Cernunnos’s wildfire green hit me between the eyes, and the cauldron’s black mass took me down for the count.
Monday, October 31, 11:37 p.m.
All the blood in my body had come to live in my head. My skull was so swollen with it my eyes felt puffy and my nose was stuffed. I was pretty sure it was blood and not, say, a sudden-onset head cold, because of the throbbing in my temples and the general ferocious itching of my face. I’d dangled upside down often enough as a kid to recognize the symptoms. Furthermore, the rest of my body had the opposite kind of itch, the kind that comes on from being cold due to a lack of blood flow. My hands were pretty much numb, in fact. My brain sent signals that my fingers should wiggle, but didn’t get any feedback on whether that was happening.
I really didn’t want to open my eyes, but I had to try anyway. Try was the operative word: for some reason they wouldn’t open, and my psyche was of two minds about what I thought of that. The first mind was just as happy, since it didn’t really want to look around anyway. The second mind was reasonably certain not being able to open my eyes was bad. I had to agree with the second one, and for all that my body was already cold, its core temperature dropped another couple degrees as low-grade panic set in. My face became a sticky, sweaty mess and bile came to make friends with already-worn enamel. My heart jumped into triple time, which made my face itch more, which was the only reason my panic stayed low grade instead of racheting up to top level. I was just too damn physically uncomfortable to give terror more than its basic due.
Beyond the thudding in my ears I could hear a whisper of leaves, the lapping of water and a man’s voice mumbling in a language I didn’t know. It wasn’t any of the easy ones I didn’t know, like Russian or Spanish or Latin. I decided I needed a smaller repertoire of ignorance, and made a note to get right on that. As soon as I figured out what had happened to me.
Well, said my sarcastic little voice, you could use the Sight to take a look around. Or would that be too easy?
I was going to start therapy and get rid of that voice as soon as I got out of wherever I was. Before reducing my general ignorance, even. Because if I didn’t, one of these days I was going to take a rock and bash my own head in so I didn’t sarcasm myself to death.
There
was, as usual, a flaw in my logic, but I didn’t want anybody, not me and not my smart-ass back-talking brain, to point that out. Teeth set together against peanut-gallery commentary and bile, I reached for my magic, and had the sudden hideous idea that it wasn’t going to respond.
For once sensationalism didn’t win out. Brilliant, unearthly vision spilled through the darkness, and I came to terms with an ugly truth: there were probably more humiliating things than being a shaman who awakens to discover herself trussed up, blindfolded and hanging inverted over a death cauldron, but right then I really couldn’t think of any.
The goddamn cauldron was enormous. I’d seen pictures, and I’d known how much space it took up at the museum, but that was a whole different perspective than staring into its deadly gaping maw. Intellectually I knew it couldn’t be more than five or six feet deep, but looking into it with the Sight was worse than looking across the Dead Zone. There, I had a sense of perspective. Granted, it was a perspective that told me how very very small I was, but that was better than staring into the cauldron. It was full of empty nothingness, and it went on forever.
Black magic rolled out of it, seductive and cool. Black didn’t mean evil, just black: that was its color, but it didn’t feel dreadful and wrong. It felt inviting, and it was much, much more powerful than its remnants had been at the museum. It whispered that I could relax, give up my cares, be comfortable and quiet, undisturbed for eternity. All I had to do was accept that all life came to an end, and slip within its hungry mouth.
For all that being dangled like a worm on a line was mortifying, it was a hell of a lot better than being free to fall into the thing beneath me. I scrabbled for healing magic, slamming up a barrier between myself and the cauldron. Shale blue wrapped around me, all the silvers and blues mixed together to create the most cohesive shield I’d ever built, but it didn’t release me from pig-squealing terror. The magic wasn’t afraid of death, not in the least. What it did and what the cauldron offered were two sides of a coin.