by C. E. Murphy
“What else?” I spoke as much to guide myself as Suzy. She probably needed it less than I did, but she jolted regardless, as though she’d forgotten I was there. Maybe she had. After all, she was the one looking into a future that didn’t yet exist. I’d think that could distract a person but good.
“Detective Holliday is shouting. Shouting at you. The cauldron is on fire—no, steaming, just steaming, and you—y’know,” she said, suddenly sounding much more like an ordinary teenage girl. “It’s really not much of a cauldron. It’s just a big barrel.”
The very pragmatic side of me said, “Well, you have to admit that ‘Matholwch’s Barrel’ sounds a lot less impressive than ‘Matholwch’s Cauldron.’ ‘The Barrel of Death’? ‘The Black Barrel’? One sounds like it’ll just roll over you, and the other sounds like some kind of fairy tale.” Of course, fairy tales didn’t used to be for children. Before I said that last bit aloud, Suzy laughed, and the lancing brilliance faded from her aura to leave her with the sunspots and solar flares that were a natural part of who she was.
Pale hair curtained her face as she ducked her head, laughter fading into apology. “I lost it there at the end, when I looked at the barrel. I’m not very good at holding on.”
“Good grief, kid. You gave me plenty to go on. Somebody with kids has stolen the cauldron.” That seemed especially awful, somehow, and I sketched past it with a wink. “That, and this all goes down outdoors next to a swimming pool. So if I stay inside all night I should be fine.”
“Then maybe we should go inside.”
Retreating to an indoor sanctuary hadn’t even occurred to me. Suzy was clearly much better at this whole Practical Applications of Saving the World than I was. I got up and collected my rock-salt shotgun, making certain it wasn’t primed before putting it over my shoulder and turning back to Suzanne with a swagger. “Well, li’l lady, Ah reckon that thar’s jist about the best ahdea Ah’ve heard awl day.”
Suzy’s giggle turned into an undignified snort that, in turn, became a blush. Ah, yes, being fourteen, when the most absurd things could haunt you to your grave. I had occasional moments of if I only knew then what I know now, but mostly trading in on those didn’t seem worth having to be a teenager again.
All the memories of might-have-beens rushed up around me for a moment, throwing me off. Some of those possible pasts might have been worth taking a second run at it, especially if I did know then what I knew now. The happy me, the one who’d had an oddball but stable family, would have been worth it.
For an instant, that life flashed even further forward, so vivid and unexpected I didn’t know if it was Suzanne’s precognition showing me another splinter, or if it was my own imagination running amok. The future affected the past: Sheila MacNamarra wasn’t dead in that world, and I’d never moved to Seattle. But I did come, on January third of this very year, and got into a taxi and asked the gray-eyed, white-toothed old driver to take me to a church on Aurora Boulevard. Marie d’Ambra lived in that world, as did so many others who’d been badly served by my incompetence in this one. That Joanne was so much better than I was. So much more in control, so much more centered and more stable.
And so when the battle was won and she walked around a corner near the police station to bump into a silvering, blue-eyed man of exactly her height, she knew so much more clearly what she’d lost. My hands hurt with the pulse of recognition at what she didn’t have, physical ache cutting across alternate worlds to knife my breath away and take the strength from my legs.
I didn’t imagine that that Joanne Walker, who called herself Siobhán Walkingstick, had ever told her Coyote husband how she’d kissed a stranger in the street and walked away from him with tears on her face. I did imagine that that Morrison wondered, time and again for the rest of his life, what the hell had happened that day. I knew, clear as if I’d lived it myself, that the Siobhán of that possible future-past spent many more long hours staring through a crack in time at the world I came from than I would spend reaching for hers. Happy was easy. Whatever I got out of my life, I was going to have to work for, and that made it all the more worth having.
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 Z
one. 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 SEVENTEEN
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.