Masters of the Hunt: Fated and Forbidden

by Sarra Cannon

  “Okay. Okay. Could you get down before you drive me into the dirt?”

  Fionn blew out an exasperated-sounding breath. “Let’s have another meal,” he suggested. “It’s been hours since breakfast. We’re all getting testy. If we’re all going—and that is far from a foregone conclusion at this point—I suppose it includes Bella.” He shook his shaggy head. “We need a better strategy. I was just going to dip my senses in there to see if the gateway even worked.”

  “Hmph.” Aislinn turned and headed for the ladder, afraid if she opened her mouth, they’d get into an argument. Now that he mentioned it, food did sound like a good idea. She mounted the rungs and diverted her ill mood by thinking about what to make. After canvassing bins and canisters in the cupboard, she tossed barley, nuts, dried apricots, and strips of some sort of dried meat into a large pot and deployed magic to cook them.

  “Start at the beginning. Tell me again what Marta was trying to accomplish.” She poured half a bag of dried peas to her mélange.

  “She was convinced she could find a way to seal Taltos off from Earth.”

  “Why focus on the Lemurians? Seems to me we’d be better off if we could send the six dark gods packing.”

  Breath hissed through Fionn’s teeth. “If you’d stop asking questions, I might be able to come up with something that didn’t sound quite so disjointed. I had trouble following Marta’s reasoning, too.” Bella, who’d been perched on Fionn’s shoulder, flapped over to the cook pot and hooked her talons over the edge.

  “What are you doing?” Aislinn made shooing motions.

  “Seeing what’s for dinner.” The raven mock-pecked at her before settling on the back of a chair.

  Fionn put out his arm for the bird. She hopped onto his shoulder. Turning a chair around, he crossed his arms over its backrest. “Marta had magic long before the Surge. I peeked in some of her earlier journals. It was why she went to medical school. She already knew when people were going to die, so she figured maybe she should study something that might help her do something about it.

  “She stumbled on the gateway out of this house when she was still a teenager.” In response to something in Aislinn’s face, he added, “Yes, this is where she grew up. Of course, in the beginning, she didn’t understand where she went when she called magic to take her through the basement walls. She’d go to her special place to think and get away from things.”

  “That’s what she called it in her journals?”

  He nodded.

  “Must’ve been hard being her,” Aislinn murmured. “No teen likes to be different, and she sure couldn’t tell anyone about herself.”

  Fionn quirked a brow.

  Reading his meaning easily, Aislinn nodded. “Okay, I’ll shut up. Go on.” She tasted her stew and added sage and basil.

  “She met Dewi on one of her earliest trips, and they struck up an odd sort of friendship. The Lemurians were always there, but in those days, they came and went. Often as not, when Marta went to Taltos, she was the only living thing there. No Dewi, no Old Ones. During those trips, she spent time in a massive library. Most of the books were written in something similar to Greek, so she started to study the language on her own.”

  “Enterprising soul, wasn’t she?”

  “Now that you mention it,” Fionn said with a grin, “she certainly was. How’s dinner?”

  “Barley’s not soft yet. Maybe another twenty minutes. Keep talking.”

  “Obviously, she barely made a dent in the library, but she did find ancient tomes that detailed the fall of Mu. They also prophesied many future events, including what would happen during the last Surge.” He stopped and raked a hand through his hair. “I guess when that came true, it rattled Marta. Magic or no, she saw herself as a scientist, and she became desperate to know what else was in the library. She tried to bring books back here, but they’d only go as far as the gateway. The first time she tried, when she realized she was back in her basement sans book, she hustled back to put the book away before anyone noticed it sitting out by itself.”

  Fionn pursed his lips. “She got caught sneaking the book back into the library. The Lemurians weren’t terribly organized then. She played the gee, I was experimenting with magic I don’t understand card, and they let her go with exhortations never to return.”

  “But she didn’t listen,” Aislinn interrupted. Since her concoction didn’t need anything but time, she settled next to Fionn and Bella.

  “She did for a while,” Fionn said, a serious note in his voice. “After the Old Ones started herding masses into the vortex and after losing her husband, she felt compelled to find answers. I understand better why people ran into that damned thing like lemmings, though. They were hypnotized. Marta was careful to sedate her husband, Ryan, if she had to leave for very long. She was frightened of what might happen if he left the house without her.”

  “I remember that day.” Rune, who’d been pacing as he listened to Fionn, spoke up. “I tried to tell Father not to leave. It was like his body was here, but his mind had left. When I took hold of his pant leg with my teeth, he hit me. He’d never hit me before. I was so shocked, I let him go.” The wolf whined. “I wish I would have thrown my body over his. If I had known, I would have.”

  “Not your fault.” Aislinn bent and stroked him.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered what you did,” Fionn said. “Once the Old Ones put out the call, it was impossible to ignore. Anything shy of rendering him unconscious wouldn’t have worked. Somehow, they did nose counts of who they called versus who threw themselves into the vortex. They would’ve known he was missing and upped the ante.”

  “I knew they had some way of figuring out who had magic and who didn’t. Was their system so precise they could tack it down to every individual on Earth?” Aislinn felt flabbergasted. It was hard to breathe.

  “According to Marta, yes.” Fionn looked more discomfited than she’d seen him before.

  So he’s feeling it, too, she thought and tugged at the neck of her shirt. The kitchen suddenly felt far too warm.

  “Och aye, lass, how could I not?” He inhaled sharply. “Anyway, once Marta lost her husband, she became far less cautious. Guess she felt she didn’t have much left to lose.”

  “Me.” Rune sounded hurt.

  Fionn nodded. “Sorry.” He beckoned with an open hand, and Rune came to him. “I don’t really know how she felt, I was just conjecturing. Desperation probably played a role. Her notes suggest she felt time was running out. She found something in one of the books that made her believe the Lemurians and dark gods were linked. That one couldn’t exist without the other. Sort of like the dark and light halves of the human psyche. Dewi told her something that may have clinched that, but she didn’t put what it was in her journal.”

  “Damned inconvenient,” Aislinn muttered.

  He waved her to silence. “If you think about it,” he continued, “it makes sense. The Lemurians have been here since Mu sank, and they never caused any problems. Enter the dark gods, and suddenly, they found the power to throw their weight around. They were always arrogant asses. I’m certain they sat around wishing they could rid Earth of everyone without magic for millennia. They’ve been trying to recreate Mu ever since they lost it. Everyone there had magic—to varying degrees, of course.”

  It was hard to sit still. Aislinn got up to check their food. What Fionn said made sense. And it was good news—sort of. Getting rid of the dark gods was still an impossible task, but for some reason, it felt slightly less impossible than before. She dished up the thick broth, filled a couple water glasses from the sink, and ferried everything to the table.

  “So what was Marta trying to do?” Aislinn asked around a mouthful of food. She’d waited for Fionn to start talking again, but he’d been silent.

  He laid down his spoon. “She didn’t see how she could tackle the dark gods—”

  Aislinn snorted and nearly choked. “No shit. At least if you’re a woman, you can’t get anywhere clos
e to them without forgetting about everything but opening your legs. Wonder if Perrikus’s mother has the same effect on men.”

  “She does. For the love of God, woman, stop interrupting after you’ve asked a question.”

  Aislinn shot him a look that she hoped was all injured innocence. “I get why Marta targeted the Old Ones. What I wanted to know was how she planned to get rid of them. There.” She clapped her mouth shut. “I won’t say another word.”

  “You just did.” But he was smiling. “Apparently, there’s an energy balance the Lemurians need to maintain Taltos. She was trying to subvert it enough that they’d have to leave.”

  Aislinn opened her mouth to ask how, but bit her tongue.

  “Excellent.” His smile grew broader. “You may not be learning, but at least you’re trying.”

  “Good to get credit for something,” she muttered sotto voce.

  “Anyway, there’s a harmonic running through Taltos. Its source is an underground tunnel—probably the place you met Dewi. Marta planned to disrupt it for long enough to change its oscillation and pitch permanently. I think Dewi was essential to her plan, but I’m not positive about that.”

  “That’s all it would take?” Aislinn was incredulous. “Another harmonic would make them leave?”

  “Marta seemed to think so,” Fionn said thoughtfully. “I’m not so certain. The Lemurians are the Third Race. I believe them more resilient and resourceful than that, but I may be wrong.” He scraped the bottom of his bowl. “If a different harmonic only severed their connection with the dark, it wouldn’t really matter if they left.”

  “If they’re the Third Race, what am I?”

  “Fifth.”

  “Who was in between?”

  “Didn’t they teach you anything in school?” He looked genuinely surprised. “That would be those who sank along with Atlantis.”

  Biting off a snarky comment about it being hard to get an education after the world imploded, she asked, “Would you like more?” He nodded, so she took his bowl and ladled more dinner into it.

  “What I really should do,” he said, “is confer with some of the others. Now that we’ve sat and talked things through, it would be foolhardy for any of us to test the gateway without knowing more than we do.”

  “The other who?”

  “Celtic gods.”

  Oh, sorry I asked… “How are you going to travel to Ireland?”

  He gave her another odd look. “The same way you met Dewi: astrally.”

  Aislinn thought about it. She wanted to do something other than wait around while a bunch of ancient gods chewed the fat, but the stakes in this game were particularly high. If they went in hell for leather and screwed up, no one else would even know where they’d gone. And if they died, all of Marta’s painstakingly gathered knowledge would be for naught. She raised her gaze to his. “How long would you be gone?”

  Something like relief lit his face, and she knew he’d been afraid she was going to put up an argument. “Not more than a day or so. Depends who I can raise on short notice.”

  “When do you plan to leave?”

  “Are ye so anxious to be rid of me, then, lass?” He narrowed his eyes. “Doona be getting any ideas in that flame-red head of yours. Ye will wait here with the bond animals till my spirit returns to my body.”

  “Stop with the Irish already.” She blew out a breath, then sucked in another to buy herself time to get her temper under control. She didn’t understand how something as simple as an Irish dialect could make her feel things so acutely.

  “Okay.” His gaze hadn’t left her face. “You didn’t answer me.”

  “No, I don’t want to get rid of you—at least, not most of the time. And I will be here when you get back. Unless you take years or something. Then I might not be.” Getting up, she carted their dishes over to the sink and walked back to the table.

  He drained his water glass, pulled a flask out of a pocket, tipped it to his mouth, and swallowed. He held it out to her, but she shook her head. “Come hug me, lass.” He opened his arms invitingly. “I would prefer to feel you against me through the night, but I will leave now. I fear there’s not much time to waste.”

  “Something else in the journals?”

  She sat on his lap and wove her arms around him. He pulled her close, and the fear that had surged at his last words subsided a little. Laying a hand against her head, he turned her face so he could kiss her.

  “Mo croi,” he murmured, pulling away. “Keep everyone safe.” He set her on her feet, got to his, and walked purposefully from the kitchen. “You’ll have time while I’m gone,” he called over his shoulder. “You can read her journals for yourself.”

  “Wh-Where will your body be?”

  “In our bed, lass.” He did turn then and gave her a broad wink. “Take good care of it.”

  — —

  She curled herself around his body through the night. The next day, she settled in with Marta’s journals. What she found was so unsettling it was hard to keep reading. Once she’d lost Ryan, there’d been a part of the woman that went mad—or became highly irrational, to put a kinder spin on things. Aislinn wondered how Marta had managed to hide her craziness from the Old Ones.

  Other than occasional trips outside, Rune never left her side. Bella flew into the bedroom and stood watch over Fionn. Aislinn tried to interest her in water and food, but the bird ignored her.

  On a hunch, Aislinn riffled through drawers in the study and found photographs she assumed were Marta. She considered double-checking her assumption with Rune, but the wolf was edgy. He seemed to be asleep for the moment, and she didn’t want to bother him.

  The pictures were vaguely disturbing. Marta had been a tall, muscular woman, with long, coppery hair and clear, green eyes. She was built more like a man than a woman, with broad shoulders and a square jaw. In the pictures that included her husband, she towered over him by a good six inches. Aislinn squeezed her eyes shut to clear the afterimage from one particular photograph and then looked at it again. She shook her head. No matter which angle she chose, Marta didn’t look entirely human. Something about her eyes and her posture were almost more Lemurian than human.

  After searching further, Aislinn found family photographs with an older couple. Who were they? Marta’s parents? She didn’t look much like either of them, but perhaps she’d been adopted. Aislinn rubbed her eyes. The older couple had a distinctly alien cast as well. She shoved the pictures back in their drawer, feeling uneasy.

  “Yeah,” Aislinn mumbled, “if those were Marta’s parents, what happened to them?” They couldn’t have been more than about sixty or so. Had they been forced into the vortex, too? Returning her attention to the lines of careful script in Marta’s journals, Aislinn hunted for something, anything, about the woman’s parents. Coming up dry, she started on some of the earlier years. When she surfaced, light was fading from the sky. Pushing heavily out of the upholstered leather chair she’d sat in for hours, she stretched and walked into the kitchen, where she flipped on the tap and splashed cold water on her face to clear her head.

  She’d found references—lots of them—to Marta’s parents in those earlier journals. Apparently, they’d also been doctors—a pediatrician and a surgeon. But the references ceased abruptly the year Marta finished medical school and began her residency in Internal Medicine. Why? What the fuck happened to them? The damned Surge wouldn’t happen for another ten years. The elder couple’s disappearance would also have predated Rune, who likely wouldn’t know anything, even if she asked. Marta hadn’t had children, and she’d done a hell of a job playing overprotective mother with her wolf.

  Marta’s parents weren’t the only element missing from the last thirteen years of journal posts. Other than a brief notation about her marriage and another about her husband’s death, Marta hadn’t written anything of substance about Ryan, either. Why? What was it about him that Marta didn’t want to risk putting on paper? Speaking of which, why was she still usin
g paper and not doing her journaling electronically? Unless they were hidden extremely well, Aislinn hadn’t found a computer anywhere in the house. Not that it would’ve mattered, since the electricity to power them was long gone, but the lack of such a common device was another unexplained oddity.

  Nibbling on leftovers from the night before, she tried to make sense of what she’d read. Fionn was right about one thing. The urgency in Marta’s postings had escalated dramatically right before her death. It was hard to say whether something real lurked behind her frantic scribblings, or whether her insanity was spiraling out of control.

  Because she couldn’t do anything but wait, Aislinn culled through the study and selected an old underground novel, Islandia, by Austin Tappan Wright. By the time she realized it was a fictionalized account of a place like Mu—or maybe Atlantis—the story had sucked her in. She read herself to sleep, lying next to Fionn. When morning came and he hadn’t returned, she began to worry. She’d had a restless night, waking with her heart in her throat twice, sure Fionn was dead. She’d even called up her mage light to look at his body to make sure he was still breathing. After the second time that happened, she gave up on sleep and went outside into the dawn with Rune. She tried to get Bella to come along, but it was like the raven had turned into a statue. Who knew? Maybe she’d sent her astral self after Fionn.

  Gazing at pink edges on the eastern horizon, Aislinn longed to forget the last three years, just for a moment. The sunrise was normal, damn it. Why couldn’t everything else be? She tried talking with Rune, but the wolf was uncharacteristically silent. When she finally understood that he wanted to be left alone, she worked her way back through the wards and into the house, using the back door, since it wasn’t booby trapped like the front and she didn’t have to spend half an hour re-sheathing blades.

  To kill time, she read Islandia and made a pan of something like biscuits with real flour. She didn’t realize how sick she’d gotten of pine nut flour until she concentrated heat in the oven with magic to bake them. They smelled incredible and melted in her mouth when she broke off a corner to taste, not able to wait for them to cool. She found unopened jars of homemade preserves and spread a strawberry-esque one lavishly on a hot biscuit. It tasted amazing.