by C. E. Murphy
When I stepped between planes of existence, the one I was in tended to be all-consuming, whether it was my garden or the Dead Zone or a visit to the Upper and Lower Worlds that made up the trifecta of which the earth was the center. I had, once or twice, stepped out of my body and remained in the normal world, but my consciousness had gone with the spiritual version of myself, rather than the physical. I hadn’t ever learned to see in two versions of reality at once, maybe because it had never been necessary.
I learned real goddamn quick right then, because there was no way I was gonna miss this.
My garden was by far the clearer of the two realities I stood in. It was like the diner all over again, with my disembodied emotional self kneeling above a mangled idea of my body. I knew what I was doing this time, which was both good and awful: a girl shouldn’t have to patch up god-awful wounds like the ones I’d sustained once in a lifetime, much less two or three times. We were talking major bodywork, and to my huge relief, the magic wasn’t gone. It just apparently didn’t think blasting zombies was as important as surviving. It responded easily to my garden-self’s ministrations, and on a distant level I felt the screaming pain in my hand ease.
All of that was secondary in my interests to watching the home team kick the hell out of a zombie army.
Okay, it was a very small army, what with only four of them being left standing, but the Hunt itself wheeled away once it had deposited my friends across Redding’s back lawn. Even though I thought it’d be helpful to have a god on Morrison’s side, if Redding or that cauldron had drawn the Hunt in, I really couldn’t blame them for getting out of there as fast as they could. We puny mortals would only lose a lifetime, if we were thrown in the cauldron. A god and his Riders would lose eternity. Even if I wanted Cernunnos to help my friends, I could easily see how that price would be too high.
Besides, it wasn’t like I was in any condition to stop him.
Morrison had ridden with the god himself, both of them on the liquid-silver stallion and both of them wearing near-identical grins of fury. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what had convinced Morrison to ride with the Hunt, but he looked comfortable on the stallion right up until the moment he dived off its wide back. He hit the ground in a roll and came to his feet less than a yard from one of the zombies, his duty weapon at the fore. I saw six flashes of light from the gun’s muzzle, though I didn’t hear a thing, and the undead monster collapsed with a skull full of lead.
Gary’d ridden with the bearded king, and Billy with the archer. Suzy was with her uncle, the boy Rider, and all three of the mortal passengers flung themselves away from their inhuman hosts in the brief space of time it took Morrison to wipe out the warrior he’d faced. Gary smashed into another one with a flying tackle. This time I heard something: bone popping and cracking as his weight made a ruin of an already ancient body. He rolled to his feet as easily as Morrison had, breaking into a run, and skidded to a stop beside me.
Love and joy and all sorts of other gooshy things welled up in my chest. My God, I had good friends. I’d have never expected him to take time to check on me, not in the midst of chaotic battle. Tears blurred my already-poor vision and fell over the bridge of my nose to seep into the ground. I wanted to smile, but I was still too tired. That didn’t matter: the up-swell of emotion actually breathed new life into my power, and the garden version of myself sparked with relief and grim triumph. My breathing eased. I could still feel wrongness in my belly, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been.
Gary, my savior, my friend, my hero and my protector, yanked my still-glowing rapier from the earth, thundered back to the zombie he’d broken and began hacking it to pieces.
Every drop of romanticism and foolhardy joy went flat and wry within me. I mean, I had to hand it to him, that was a smart move, but it shot the shit out of my sails. A snicker bubbled up from somewhere inside me, which seemed like a positive sign, and I moved my head a little to get a better view of the rest of the fight. That I could was an even better sign.
Billy’d gone the same route Morrison had: he’d emptied a clip into one of the zombies, and stood over it with his gun at the ready, daring the thing to move again. It was normal, it was human, it was the expected response.
It made Suzanne Quinley look all the more extraordinary.
Suzanne flung her head back, hair white and crackling in light born of magic. Wildfire green seared from her raised fingertips, dancing over the yard like a plasma lamp. It touched Morrison, touched Gary and Billy and me, all of us at once, with a quick cold shock that discerned, deliberated and discarded us in an instant. We were living. We were meant to be.
It touched the undead warrior, and the silent monster opened its jaws in a noiseless scream. Green magic hissed into its thin blackened body, embodying it, enfleshing it. Color came back into its skin, hair sprouted, its eyes came alive. Its scream turned audible, a man’s voice torn from hell and spread across the night for examination.
Then it began to youthen, hair becoming fuller, its face losing the lines of age, its body growing stronger until it was in its prime. The scream continued, and so did its unaging: from man to teen, from teen to child, all the way back to a shriveled bit of nothing that winked out with a near-silent pop of sound.
An echo rolled over me, an echo of a life lived centuries ago and abruptly undone. Ripped wholly out of time, as if it had never been. The part of me given over to healing stopped, filled with horror, and I came together again, more or less whole in body and spirit, to stare at Suzanne and what she’d wrought.
That was wild magic. That was chaos magic, born from a child of immortal blood. She saw the future, but could unmake a man who’d become a monster so thoroughly that he’d never existed.
It was over in seconds.
Suzy collapsed, all the brilliant color of her magic fading away. I rolled to my hands and knees, determined to get to the girl’s side and make certain she was all right.
Morrison said, “Walker,” with unrestrained relief.
Archie Redding’s living, breathing, screaming wife erupted from the cauldron.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Redding cried out with a disbelief echoed by every other living being in the yard. His daughters scrambled out of the cauldron behind their mother, screams torn from their throats, too. Newborn babies cried on entering the world, but this was something worse. The Sight whispered on, stronger now than it had been over the past few minutes, and I started to move before I really understood what I was seeing.
They were alive. They were honestly, truly, swear-to-God alive, full of vivid energy and surrounded by snapping auras. Their fractured bodies were healed. Better than healed: the Sight and my magic wound together and looked through them on a fundamental level. They bled new life, as though they were newborns, not a single flaw or strain in muscle or bone or skin.
They screamed because smoky-black monsters were trying to pull their freshly born souls from their bodies.
The monsters reminded me of the banshee, narrow things cloaked in death shrouds that did nothing to hide their emaciated form. Bony fingers clutched each of their heads, the Sight showing me how bruises were forming beneath the vicious grips. Each of the things—hell, for all I knew they were banshees, if not the specific hatchet-faced Blade I’d faced once before—each of the banshees brought its hooded face to its victim’s, offering a bleak kiss that ripped at their very essence. They made me think of gas masks working in reverse, sucking up to the mouth and nose and forcing poison in instead of filtering it out. And Archie Redding, who had spent half a dozen lifetimes trying to bring his family back from the dead, was held by two more of the banshees, whose faces split in screaming laughter as he struggled to free himself and join his suffering wife and children.
Ida Redding hit the ground, writhing and clutching at her face. Scrapes appeared, only some of them from her own hands. The girls, especially the littlest, had less fight in them. The little one’s aura sparked too much fear and confus
ion to understand what was happening at all: her breath simply wasn’t there, and it didn’t make sense.
It made a terrible sense to me.
“Banshees feed the Master,” I said so quietly I wasn’t sure my voice carried beyond my own ears. I felt detached from myself, moving with purpose but watching myself from the outside. Time had slowed down; it did that a lot in critical moments. “The Blade performed ritual murders under the winter moons, only we disrupted that, so the Master’s got to be awfully hungry. This must be the next best thing, or maybe even better than the rituals. These are brand-new reborn souls, too weak to fight and totally innocent. I bet pure souls taste good.” The banshees, the Master, weren’t like the zombies, trying to snatch bits of memory from the living. They just wanted the essence of a human soul, a tender, sweet tidbit to snack on. “The Master’s one nasty son of a bitch.”
Morrison, predictably, said, “What the hell’s the Master?”
To my surprise, I could smile, a soft gentle little thing. I turned it on Morrison in lieu of the hug I wanted to give him, just for being himself. “I think I can save them. Sorry, Morrison. Maybe you’ll forgive me someday.”
I crashed back into my body, no longer feeling distant or as though time was stretching, and ran like hell for the cauldron.
Two steps away from it, Billy Holliday caught my shoulder, spun me around and cold-cocked me.
Once upon a time getting hit in the jaw by a guy Billy’s size would’ve laid me out. As it was, I still whipped around in a circle and staggered a few steps in the wrong direction while startled magic tried to steady my inner ear and reduce the ache in my jaw.
That was all the time it took for Billy to scramble up the aluminum stepladder leaning against the cauldron and dive in.
I said, “Oh, no, you fucking don’t,” and went in after him.
I lay on my back in tall grass, a straw hat knocked forward over my eyes and a hayseed, I kid you not, a hayseed, stuck between my teeth so I had something to gnaw on. Wind hissed around me, low and quiet and comforting as bees buzzed through it. I didn’t have to look to know I wore my favorite oil-stained jeans and a tank top, or that heavy boots were on my feet. I was so comfortable that pushing the hat back and rising up on my elbows to look around took some convincing.
The overgrown dry grass I lay in got shorter a few yards away from me, flattening out into a big rambling lawn that ran up against an old farmhouse. It looked ramshackle at first glance, but a second look told me it was just old, the boards faded to a non-descript gray and curtains in the windows washed free of color, but left softer than silk. It was probably a hundred years old, and for all that it showed its age, it’d been kept in good repair through all the intervening years. I liked it instinctively: it was a home, comforting and inviting.
A shadow passed through my sunshine and I squinted at the sky. Non-threatening thick white clouds puffed over the sun and moved on, letting summer heat spill down to warm my grass bed and the house’s dark shingles alike. I could smell tar on the roof and fruit from distant apple trees. A hand-built fence, grayed by time, marked off boundaries that only the handful of cows and horses beyond them might pay heed to. One of them worked its way to a stream and poked its nose in, slurping loudly enough to hear over the wind and the distant sound of laughter. There was no sound of traffic, no evidence of the peaceable holding being disturbed by anything from the outside.
It felt a lot like heaven.
Not my heaven, maybe. Mine would have a falling-down barn somewhere visible on the property: a place where I might find Petite, or a cousin to her, and where I could work on her for all the long hot daylight hours. But this was somebody’s idyllic world, and if this is what people got for climbing into the cauldron, I might think a deathtime of servitude to a dark master would be worth it, too.
I got up, grateful for the hat that turned sunlight into speckles instead of a blinding wall, and discarded my grass stem for another one to nibble on as I followed the laughter. Tir na nOg had brought laughter forth from the trees and earth itself, but I thought I was hearing ordinary kids. Whoever’s heaven this was, it didn’t seem like the kind of place peopled by the ethereal. When I got close enough to the house, I shouted, “Hello?” and had a sudden bemused hope that I wasn’t about to be greeted by a shotgun and a smile.
Three kids burst around the corner of the house instead, racing pell-mell after one another with the abandon of youth. The oldest was a boy of maybe fifteen, keeping well in the lead, with a girl of around eleven behind him and another boy, about eight years old, giving valiant chase to them both.
I knew the little girl.
She was the ghostly image who’d turned up in my garden a couple of days ago, so brief and unformed I hadn’t recognized her when I’d gotten a clearer look in the Dead Zone. It was the same hint of a ghost I’d seen hanging back and staying at Billy’s side during Sonata’s séance. She was all braided pigtails and smiles, with big brown eyes and strong fast legs, and as I watched, she gave up any hope of catching the older boy by turning to bellow, “Come on, Billy, we’ve almost got him!”
All the pieces fell into place.
Her name was Caroline Holliday, and she was Billy’s older sister. She’d died in a drowning accident when she was eleven, probably in the same creek I could hear burbling in the background. The red-cheeked little boy chasing her was Billy, and the older boy leading the game of tag was their officious big brother, Bradley, whom I’d met a few months earlier and had utterly failed to get along with.
This was Caroline’s heaven, or maybe Billy’s: a place and time when his family were all together, Caro safe and alive, Brad less uptight than the man he’d grown into being.
Brad skidded to a stop when he saw me, then spread his arms, keeping his younger siblings safe behind him as he thrust out his jaw in challenge. “Who’re you? What’re you doing here?”
“I came looking for Billy,” I said with maybe a little too much honesty. “He’s a friend of mine.”
“You’re a grown-up,” Brad said suspiciously. “And I don’t know you. How can you be his friend?”
Caroline crashed into Brad’s back, and Billy caught up with both of them, smacking Brad’s outstretched hand to yell, “You’re it!” in triumph. Then he grabbed that same hand and stared at me. “Who’s that?”
“She’s a bad guy,” Brad said with wonderful conviction.
“No,” Caroline said, and I could see all the excitement die in her eyes. “No, she’s not.”
The world changed around us.
I stood in a cemetery, but not a city-run or official one. It was a family plot littered with wooden grave markers and homemade crosses. Wildflowers grew up all over the place, richest on the low heaps of earth abutting the markers. Some of them were so old as to be barely there anymore, only scraps of wood that hadn’t quite melted back into the ground yet. Others were much newer, shellacked and gleaming against the elements. A fence like the one near the house surrounded the little graveyard, making it private and sacred, but still open and part of the world. It was a good place to be buried, better than almost anywhere I could think of.
Billy, an adult now, looking very like the man I knew, knelt by the freshest grave. Caroline Holliday, still eleven years old, still in pigtails and a solemn look, sat on the grave marker with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them. She shouldn’t have been able to: it was headstone-shaped and too narrow for even a little girl to sit on like that, but the dead, I thought, didn’t have to conform to quite the same laws the living did.
“Your friend’s come to get you, Billy. See?” Caroline pushed a toe out and nudged Billy’s shoulder so he would look around toward me. “She came to take you away. You’re not supposed to be here yet.”
Caroline could no more move an unwilling Billy than she could’ve moved the moon, but he shifted with her touch and looked over his shoulder at me. Dismay cut lines into his face. “You’re not supposed to be here, Walker. The whole damn
point of hitting you was to keep you out.”
I shrugged. “I’m not so good at letting my friends make dramatic sacrifices. What the hell am I supposed to tell Mel, huh? So either we’re both staying or we’re both going. I’m not letting this happen.”
“You have to. The only thing that’ll destroy the cauldron is a living body entering it willingly.”
“Yeah.” I squinted at Caroline, then at the sun, then around the graveyard. “Yeah, the problem with that is it didn’t break apart or anything when you jumped in, or I wouldn’t have been able to follow. Besides—” I shook my head and sat down, leaning against one of the headstones “—I mean, I get why you dove in. You were trying to save me. Thank you, by the way. But, Billy…why the hell did you dive in?”
He gave me a familiarly exasperated look, which made me happy. If I could still annoy him, there was hope for bringing him back. “You’re a hell of a lot more important in the grander scheme of things than I am. I wasn’t going to—”
I cut him off with a wave of my hand. “Overlooking the fact that I fundamentally doubt that, it’s not what I’m asking. It’s a death cauldron, Bill, and you’ve got four kids and another one due in a couple of days. Why on God’s little green earth would you do something like this?”
Silence rolled over the cemetery, Caroline looking between me and Billy and back again. It took a long time for him to say, with a note of uncertainty, “I had this idea it would be all right. That I could just…rest for a while. That it’d be comfortable.” Another few seconds passed before he admitted, “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s the cauldron.” I tipped my head against the headstone and looked toward the sky again. Clear and blue and reassuring, an unmitigatedly beautiful day. “Every time I’ve gotten near it I’ve started wanting to climb in. I don’t know if it really offers peace, Billy, but it sure as hell talks a good game. The cauldron itself is seductive. It makes you want to get in it.”