Bound into the Blood

by Myers, Karen

  He spent the next few minutes giving George directions along a series of dirt roads that ascended the hills with the thick woods on either side. Eventually they pulled off and discovered a view to the south, through the trees, at an impromptu parking area. The place was open to the sky, but the weather was beginning to be a bit muggy and close under a growing overcast. No one else was there, and they got out to walk around and stretch their legs while they talked.

  It didn’t seem to George that anything could be kept here, despite his father’s promise that he had things of his mother’s to show him. Perhaps they were in the backpack, still in the car.

  He would not be fobbed off any longer. He turned his back to the view of the green Esopus valley below and, clearing his throat, he said, “Sir, how did my mother die?”

  “It was a car accident, son,” Corniad said gravely.

  “But you left together for a walk, I remember it,” George objected.

  “Aye, so we did, but we decided on a drive and returned for the car without stopping to tell you.”

  George didn’t know what had happened to the car. His grandfather had taken him away to Virginia the next day, and so he supposed it might be true.

  “We skidded at the turn to the arch bridge. You know the spot.”

  George recalled the bridge, over the swift trout stream where his father had taught him how to tickle a fish. The wooden bridge had a simple arch and no rail, and the approach was famous for minor collisions.

  “We flew into the water, and I was thrown from the car. When I got back to her, she was gone, lad, hit her head on the windscreen.”

  It sounded plausible, but it didn’t ring true. “What happened to you? Why didn’t you come back?”

  Corniad’s eyes evaded his for a moment, then returned. “By the time my head had stopped ringing the next day, why, there you were, being collected by her father, and I thought, that would be a better life for you than wandering with me.”

  “You saw my grandfather come?” George asked, trying to make sense of it. “He never mentioned it.”

  “Well, he never saw me, did he?”

  This tale couldn’t be right. He shook his head in disbelief. He remembered the dream of his mother telling him to be careful, but he couldn’t heed the warning. “No, I don’t believe you. No one acts like that.”

  He surprised a momentary flash of rage on his father’s face before it was suppressed, and he stopped walking to stare at him. “What really happened?”

  Corniad advanced a step toward him and George drew himself up, but was overwhelmed by the eruption of Cernunnos as the horned man, and he staggered at the weight change to hold up the heavy head. He had no control over the form or the words and could only witness the confrontation.

  “Why not tell him the truth?” Cernunnos demanded, in the deep voice of the horned man. “Why lie again and again? Will you not learn shame at last?”

  Corniad refused to retreat. “What shame, lord? She carried my son, and I would not give him to you. And you could do nothing to stop it.”

  George was blinded for a moment by a red rage not his own, but he joined it when he realized this was a confession of murder. He forced his voice through to the horned man’s throat. “How did she die, father? Tell me the truth. The real truth.”

  Corniad shrugged. “I drove the car into the river. It was not well-thought out—I had just discovered who her grandfather was. She didn’t know what Gwyn Annan signified, but I did. No wonder the breeding took. I turned her back from the walk and claimed the car, as being more easily explained for an accident.”

  George shook with fury to think of his mother talking baby names with her husband, only to trigger a cold-blooded plan for murder.

  “I was going to take the car off the bridge, make it more certain, but she questioned the night I came to her—in your form, lord— and would not stop. I lost my temper and showed her what I was, in the car and all, and we ended up in the river. She was hurt but not quite dead. I broke off part of an antler in the collision and was too stunned to end it quickly. It was a sloppy killing, and that, at least, I regret. It should have been quick. Merciful.”

  George’s skin chilled. His mother’s last thoughts would have been of her husband as a monster, of her son left defenseless, of her unborn child. He thought of her affectionate, laughing face. He wanted control of the form, he wanted to throttle his father, speaking so carelessly of the slaughter, talking of mercy.

  His father’s voice continued. “The sounder of boar was an afterthought, something to muddy the waters, but still I had men to evade. I came for the boy when I could, the next day, but couldn’t get at him.”

  I was next, George thought. Something to be put down as an inconvenience, like drowning a kitten. His stomach clenched, as he thought of his own child coming. What kind of monster could do that?

  My father is that sort of monster. And I carry his blood.

  Cernunnos said, in his deep, implacable voice, “You should have met your obligations as your ancestors did and sired the next of your line on a hind. No one need have been harmed.”

  Corniad faced him defiantly. “But I would have died.”

  “All creatures die,” Cernunnos said, and George remembered when he’d said it to him, after his capture by Madog months ago.

  “Perhaps,” Corniad said, “but not just now. I hid from you in the human world for decades, and then for another twenty-five years after the… crisis, and I count all of that time a success.”

  It struck George—that backpack, it probably held all he cared about. He was planning on walking away from this and vanishing again. He tried to warn Cernunnos of this, but couldn’t penetrate the persona of the god, still enraged at his errant servant.

  “I have just one more question,” Corniad said. “You, George,” speaking past the horned man to George within, “do you have children?”

  Despite himself, George couldn’t keep from thinking of Angharad and the coming birth. In despair, he heard Corniad’s frustrated expulsion of breath and realized he had witnessed the thought.

  “I should never have ignored the problem,” Corniad said, shaking his head. “Another damned loose end to clean up.”

  He faced off against the horned man with utter resolve. “No more for you, lord, no more of this blood. I will not have it.”

  Over his face stole a determined look. “And you will not stop me.”

  He drew a breath and blasted George through his beast-sense, not like the minor compulsion he had tried the day before, but with the fury and white light of a nuclear explosion. George felt his body collapse to its knees, no longer in the horned man form and out of his control. It toppled bonelessly sideways to the dirt.

  I’m dead, he thought in surprise, locked into his brain as the light faded.

  CHAPTER 27

  Angharad laughed with Maelgwn and Bedo at Seething Magma’s secondhand tale of Benitoe’s day at the fair.

  “I should have liked to see those balloons for myself,” she rumbled, and the image conjured up of her massive form suspended floating in the air arrested all speech for a moment.

  In that instant, Angharad felt something change. Something in the background had gone quiet. George, her sense of him had winked out.

  She staggered upright and the blood drained from her face. Maelgwn and Bedo turned to her in alarm, but she couldn’t speak. She looked to Seething Magma, who seemed to be attending to the cat.

  Imp leapt down, and Mag swapped her leading pseudopods to her other end and flowed back to the way.

  “I go,” Mag rumbled. “I will bring what news I can.”

  Angharad nodded weakly, still silent, as the rock-wight vanished back into the way. Then she cleared her throat and prepared to tell her companions what had happened, to tell them about the breaking of the link.

  Seething Magma held herself still for Bedo’s benefit and watched, amused, through his eyes as his sketch of her took shape. She compared what he saw when he lo
oked at her to the image on the paper. Both were strange to her. When she looked at one of her kin she saw them differently, the subtle shading of residual heat on their surfaces, and different color highlights.

  She’d spent an hour once, talking with George and borrowing his eyes, and he told her about light spectra and the limitations of human sight. She knew the fae were similar, but she thought the lutins might be different, more like her. Certainly they had less trouble getting around in the dark than the humans or the fae. She hadn’t yet made time to discuss it with Benitoe, one of the things she’d intended to do on this trip, until she’d let herself be obsessed by the earth experts at the university.

  The purr of Imp, half-asleep on her back, made a pleasant background as she regaled the three fae in the garden with the tales of the travelers. She was just telling them the story of Benitoe’s balloon ride, pleased with herself for making them laugh, when the cat sat bolt upright and then jumped down.

  *Better get back.*

  The voice of Senua in her mind startled her. It had never been so direct before. Seething Magma cast out for George, as she would for any of her kin, and the taste eluded her. Angharad’s sudden rise made her look, and she saw Angharad’s thoughts about her own link, broken. What has happened, she wondered.

  She flowed swiftly into the way and emerged from the hidden exit, behind the inn. She searched again, but she couldn’t find the taste of George anywhere, and was now well alarmed.

  She reached for Benitoe’s taste and found him in his room. He couldn’t hear her at a distance, she realized. How could she draw his attention without revealing herself to any humans nearby?

  She could see the main inn building and knew which window belonged to his room. The distance wasn’t too great, and she had a great deal of mass to draw upon, so she formed a thin, sturdy pseudopod and extruded it stealthily along the ground through the grass and plantings until the end was directly below the window. Just like trying to follow a tasty ore vein to see where it went, she thought. Extending the end of the pseudopod a few feet upward, she tapped lightly on his window, hoping no one else could see it clearly.

  Tasting his thoughts she knew he heard the sound but was confused, so she did it again, louder, and this time he walked over to the window where she could see him, through the pseudopod’s extended senses. She could taste his puzzlement.

  “Mag?” he asked, uncertainly.

  She tapped in response. One tap for yes, like she’d learned, months ago.

  “You want me to come to you?”

  One tap.

  “Are you back where we were yesterday, behind the inn?”

  One tap.

  “I’m coming.”

  She felt the vibration of the closing door through her touch on the windowpane, and she withdrew the pseudopod quietly along the ground.

  At least she could shelter Benitoe, she thought, whatever may have happened to George. I promised to get him back home.

  But where is George? She avoided considering the obvious answer. After all, when Granite Cloud, her young daughter, had been held captive by Madog, she’d been hidden from her mother’s searches, too. Let it be something like that, she implored Senua, not death. Not my first friend among the short-lived ones.

  “You scared me half to death,” Benitoe said as he scrambled into the woods where Seething Magma lay, her back portion masked by the hidden way. “Like a great stone snake, tapping away at my window.”

  He paused to catch his breath. “Everyone alright at home?”

  Seething Magma drew a pseudopod horizontally through the air to cut him off. “No time,” she rumbled. “I can’t find George.”

  “What, from all the way back in Annwn?” he said. “Is the distance too great?”

  “Not from here, either,” she said, and he thought he heard impatience in the artificial voice.

  “Oh.” This wasn’t good, he thought, and his pulse quickened. “Let me try calling him with the cellphone.”

  The device never left his pocket, as he’d promised George. He took it out now and pushed the special button that called George directly, and heard it ring. He held it away from his ear so that they could both hear the ringing, but after five tries, it went to voicemail.

  Awkwardly, he left a message. “Um, we were wondering where you were. Mag, uh, lost track of you. Call me.”

  Mag swayed slightly from side to side. In anyone else, the movement would be imperceptible, but to Benitoe, accustomed to her rock-like solidity, she seemed agitated.

  “You don’t think…” He didn’t want to finish the statement.

  “He counted on me,” Mag rumbled, softly. “And now I can’t find him.”

  She paused. “I should take you home,” she said. “It’s what he wanted me to do.”

  “Not without the huntsman,” Benitoe said. “I’m not leaving here without him.”

  “Damn you, lad.” Corniad stood over George’s body. “I should have found you years ago, before you had a chance to breed.”

  His eye was caught by faint movement. Still breathing, he thought. He probed the unresponsive mind at his feet. Well, he’ll shut down soon enough, like the whelps that aren’t destined to live. It just takes a little while sometimes.

  Too bad, he thought, a likely lad, but you mustn’t get too attached. He couldn’t leave him alive now, could he, a host to the beast-master as he is.

  Bending over the body, he grabbed one wrist in both his hands and dragged the dead weight off to the side of the parking area where it was out of the sight of any drivers passing by on the road.

  Cernunnos would be gone from him by now, he felt sure. Nothing left to keep him. Now how am I going to get to Annwn to finish the job, he wondered. I suppose I could poke around Virginia where he grew up. He probably found some sort of way there and, if that’s so, then I can find it, too.

  He reached down and felt George’s pockets, looking for the keys to the rental car. He came across a pocket watch, but he tucked that back in. No need to rob the dead, he thought. He pocketed the keys when he found them, and straightened up.

  With a sigh, he walked deliberately back to the car. And here I had a new job all ready for me. Good thing I travel light, he thought, remembering the backpack in the trunk. Well, I’ll cut my losses and start again. Got to find the rest of my line and correct my mistake first.

  He started up the car and drove quietly away.

  CHAPTER 28

  Inside his mental landscape, George rolled and tumbled away from the stone cottage he had built as a shelter from Cernunnos, months ago. A hot wind blasted him ceaselessly until, at last, he fetched up against a low wall, like a gold nugget hugging the ridge of a miner’s pan against the flow of the swirling water.

  He heard his father’s voice, dimly, and then followed his thoughts—he’s going to go after Angharad and the child! He strove to open his eyes, to raise his body, but nothing moved. He couldn’t even alter his shallow breaths. He remembered his father’s thought, that soon even the automatic breathing would stop, and he panicked, scrambling away in his mind from the pillar of dirty white light and smoke rising from where his stone shelter had been, and looked for some place to hide from the inevitable, once he stopped breathing.

  He was confronted by a succession of low walls to crawl over, with small pockets of space between them. It was like trying to crash out of a maze the hard way, right through the edges. They were sharp, sintered walls, like cement or broken lava bubbles, and even here, in this shadow land, he could feel the pain of trying to make his way over yet another rank of them. His heartbeat sped up but his breathing didn’t change, and he could no longer tell if that mismatch was the reason for the dimness of the interior light, or whether he was just failing, fading out.

  I have to quit, he thought, feeling the pounding of his heart as he bent over to clear another wall. This is killing me. The incongruity of the thought jolted him. But I’m already dead, aren’t I? What does it matter?

  He stopped
moving and deliberately straightened up, in his own mind if not for real. Stand fast, he told himself. Die like a man. He set his back to the central pillar of dying light and tried to see what lay ahead of him.

  Around him, in all directions, were small pockets of ash-covered ground, a few paces wide, delineated by low waist-high walls. He wondered idly if the ash and walls were the remnants of his stone hut. In front of him, not far off, was darkness, where both the walls and the ashes stopped. The ranks of walls stretched away on either side in faint arcs, outlining an immense circle, and he was nearing the edge.

  Something warned him away from the darkness beyond the edge, told him that there would be no coming back from there. He stood unmoving, trying to quiet his heartbeat to match the shallow breath of his body, to stretch out what moments he still had left.

  He felt the cuts and bruises on his palms, imaginary or not, and the contusions on his body from impacting the barriers during the blast were real enough. The walls made arcs and pockets, but they weren’t random or chaotic. The cells they contained were roughly rounded and symmetrical—not circles, but a more complex, organic shape, each a few yards across.

  He tried again to move his body, to concentrate on just opening his eyes, but nothing happened. He recalled his father’s hands frisking him for his keys, and the sound of the car driving off. He felt the position of his body, lying on its side in the grass, stretched out in the random posture of having been dragged then searched. One arm lay along the ground over his head where his father had dropped it, and his cheek itched from the weeds that pillowed it. He could feel his holstered revolver digging lightly into the small of his back. Much good it had done him.

  His heartbeat steadied and the body continued to breathe shallowly. What will happen to my body, he thought. Will my heart and lungs just… stop? Will I die of thirst, unmoving? What goes through the mind of a drowning kitten in its last few seconds, he thought, in sudden sympathy.

  Will the cougars find me first, or the coyotes? Do I have to start rotting, before the buzzards can smell me?