“Balor is comin’ for ye,” Macha said.
I shrugged. I’d be dead long before that happened; the fire would take care of that. The one-eyed bastard could do what he wanted with what remained—I’d have no stake in the game, at that point.
“He’s already sent out his advance troops. Mortals are dyin’ by the score.”
“Go do somethin’ about it, then, if you’re so concerned,” I said. “Or don’t. Just leave me be.”
“The one who did this is with him,” Badb said.
Something stirred in the ashes Dez’s death had left behind, and I slowly turned to look up at the dark-haired goddess. My aunt. “What d’ye just say?” I rasped.
“It’s true,” Macha said.
Dobby.
Dobby was with Balor. But…why? I shook my head. It made no sense. None of this made any sense. How had he gotten past the wards? And why had he gone after Dez? We’d had a minor falling out, sure, but killing my only family…I couldn’t wrap my head around it. In the end, I suppose I didn’t need to. I simply needed to wrap my hand around his spriggan heart.
And squeeze until it popped.
“I’m goin’ to murder him,” I said in an entirely too calm voice. I tried to stand, but ended up coughing instead, spittle soaking into the carpet as I fought to get the acrid taste of smoke out of my mouth.
“You’ll never get close,” Badb said. “Not without us.”
My hair hung over my face, obscuring my vision—a wave of red clouding my sight. “If ye are lyin’ to me, and he isn’t there…” I began, locking eyes with each of them, “the t’ings I’ll do to ye two will make ye wish you’d never been worshipped,” I promised.
“We aren’t lyin’,” Macha said. “And I swear you’ll get your vengeance. If,” she added, holding up a single, leather-covered finger, “ye agree to join us.”
I slid my hair over to one shoulder and stared down at the face of the only mother I had ever known, tracing the faint smile that tugged at Dez’s lips.
The hint of a smile I’d never get to see again.
The smile that would herald destruction and devastation like the world had never seen.
And they said Nate Temple had a temper?
I was about to redefine the word.
“Where do I sign?” I asked.
Chapter 32
Apparently, my signature wasn’t needed. Instead, the sisters held out their hands, clearly expecting me to take hold and fulfill whatever destiny they had in mind. I rubbed at my grimy cheeks. “Ye have to stop the fire, first,” I said. “Dez was Catholic. She’ll have wanted a proper burial.” Frankly, such things made little difference to me, but—if Dez’s Second Coming theory held up—it’d be great to see her walking about like her old self.
From my view down below, of course.
Because I had no illusions about where I was going to end up, after this; I already had the paint colors picked out for my room in Hell.
Macha and Badb exchanged looks. The dark-haired Crow Goddess nodded and headed for the hallway, while Macha closed her eyes and waved her hands about in the air. In moments, the smoke was funneled through the open window, as if suctioned out, leaving nothing behind but breathable air. The crackle of flames and heat from below died out a second later, and Badb returned.
“It’s time,” Macha said.
I glanced at Dez once more, then nodded. I climbed wearily to my feet and, this time, held out my hands for them to take. The sisters obliged. We stood like that, the three of us, for what seemed like at least a full minute. I frowned. “Do we have to chant somethin’? Or do we just wait until we feel it?” I asked.
“You’re closed off,” Macha replied, clearly irked.
“And?”
“And we didn’t think you’d be able to block us out,” Badb said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Macha insisted. “Badb, let’s see if we can get her power to respond. Hit her with energy.”
Cool, charged air—like a breeze on a stormy afternoon—washed along my right side, the side Macha stood on. A wave of dry heat blasted my left. It felt like I was standing between a refrigerator and a furnace, each fighting for dominance.
For control.
In a way, the sensations reminded me a lot of my brief interactions with other powerful beings.
Hemingway—the Horseman of Death.
Johnny Appleseed—the embodiment of life.
Even Alucard—with his stolen heat and sun-drenched vitality.
I frowned. What the sisters were doing wasn’t going to work, I realized. They were each immensely powerful in their own right, but they were magnetic opposites—the way Hemingway and I had been, the first time we met—incapable of working in harmony without someone else steering.
I snorted, the play of air on my skin whipping my hair back and forth.
“What is it?” Macha asked.
“This,” I replied.
And then I did the only thing I could think of to bridge the gap between the three of us.
I swallowed their power whole.
Power.
It’s a word heavy with implications.
There’s implied power—that which gives people the ability to govern and lead.
And there’s express power—the ability to exert our will on the world.
What I felt as Macha’s cool, biting energy combined with her sister’s brash heat within me was something else altogether, a power so vast it threatened to take me over completely.
The sensation reminded me, inexplicably, of one of my earliest memories, from when I was perhaps nine or ten. I’d been out with Dez on one of her Bible Camp retreats, skipping stones along the water with a few of the other children, when I’d spotted something floating on the surface. I don’t remember why or how—probably a dare from one of the other children—but I’d leapt out into the water without so much as a warning. I didn’t remember being rescued, or sitting by the fire that night. What I remembered was fighting to stay afloat, to keep coming back up for air no matter how much river water I swallowed.
The power I felt was like that—so immense it was all I could do to keep breathing. But—no matter how strong the current—I held tight to that memory, to all my memories, refusing to drown.
“How?” I heard Macha gasp, her voice inside my head.
“She’s usin’ us,” Badb complained, the anger in her voice like sandpaper on varnished wood. “Ye said we’d be in charge, Macha!”
I sneered at the ridiculousness of that sentiment, as if this kind of power could be shared. I held out my hand and—with little more than a thought—saw a tiny raincloud form, little arcs of lightning dancing across my palm.
“What d’ye mean?” Badb asked, her question directed at me, as if she’d heard my thoughts.
Badb, the Crow Goddess—the avatar of war, to use Oberon’s expression—didn’t know, I realized.
But Macha had known.
She had to have known that the power couldn’t be shared, and had assumed she could take it for herself, or else she never would have agreed to this.
She’d anticipated being able to manipulate Badb and I, to wield us like weapons. I could feel the nature goddess in my mind. Her resentment, her jealousy. Her desire to finally be the one behind the wheel.
“Why?” Macha asked, sounding defeated. “Why are ye the one the power chose?”
I wished I could explain it to her, but I couldn’t—not in terms she could understand. Macha perceived power as an absolute thing. Something that the strong had and the weak didn’t.
But that wasn’t the case.
The power we three possessed, the power my mother had channeled to become the Morrigan, was as vast as the ocean itself. You didn’t force the ocean to do your bidding. You sailed it, constantly adjusting—constantly adapting. Macha refused to do either; adaptation was anathema to her because it demanded something no goddess needed: courage. The courage to be wrong, to make mistakes, to grow. That’s what had set Morrigan,
my mother, apart from the other members of the Fae Court. She’d been courageous. Violent, passionate, cruel, sure…
But also courageous.
Suddenly, I saw her as my aunts had seen her. Their fierce, redheaded sister draped in shadow. Beautiful—but a distant, untouchable beauty, secure behind her mask.
“Had she only but shared a little of herself, we would have loved her,” Badb said, sounding unaccountably sad.
“She didn’t want our love,” Macha spat, her voice ugly with disdain. “She only wanted our power. And now we’ve given it to her daughter, who has no idea how to use it.”
It was hard to argue with that. Just because I could feel their power surging through me didn’t mean I knew what to do with it. In fact, if I was being honest, it was taking everything I had to simply keep us afloat. If the power took control, I knew, we’d be lost to it; we’d drown, incapable of acting on our own. Incapable of stopping Balor. Incapable of seeking vengeance.
“So show me,” I said.
Their reticence tugged at me, threatening to pull me under all on its own. They were goddesses. They’d been alive, impacting the realms for millennia. Who was I, the mortal, to ask them for help? To ask them to serve? Their thoughts were easy to read: better to drown than to give the power to someone unworthy of it.
But they had it wrong.
Because I wasn’t asking.
No one, not even my aunts, were going to get in the way of my revenge. I reached down and thrust their heads below the waves inside our mind, pinning them there with my hate, my grief; if they weren’t going to be useful, they may as well drown. I’d figure it out on my own.
I always did.
“Enough!” Macha sputtered, her outrage replaced by fear.
“We’ll do it,” Badb added, sounding cowed.
I released them. “Show me,” I demanded again.
And so they did.
Chapter 33
We—the three of us locked together in one body—my body—flew over the city, riding a current of air that bent to our combined will, soaring towards the tumultuous Massachusetts Bay. It’d taken me a little while to get the hang of it, but once I’d understood the basic mechanics, I’d realized commanding the air wasn’t all that different than joy-flying with Barbie in Neverland had been.
Below, I could make out the enormous whirling pattern of the hurricane—no longer an abstract image on a television screen, a technicolor sawblade being prodded at by baffled meteorologists.
The sky boomed and cracked all around us, forks of lightning hammering down upon Boston, the thunder sounding like laughter from some malevolent god.
Frankly, it was worse than I could have ever imagined; the waves smashed against the city’s harbor, tearing up wood and stone and steel, destroying homes, factories, and offices.
And they weren’t alone.
There were creatures—built like Manlings, but considerably larger—riding the crests, wielding weapons fashioned from coral, only their torsos visible. Blue-skinned and broad-shouldered, hairless, they emerged from the water to lash out at the city’s infrastructure, smashing and stabbing at random.
The Fomorians. The race of giants my mother and her sisters had once chased back into the sea—enemies so ancient that the Tuatha—Fae so powerful they’d once been worshipped as gods—had all but forgotten about them. Talk about a previous generation screwing things up for the rest of us.
Unfortunately, before I could share that little insight with my passengers, a coral spear came hurtling at us from below, so suddenly that—if Badb hadn’t started screaming—I might have missed it. I shot my hand out, halting the projectile in mid-flight with a blast of air. Then, I let it drop to the ground below, its momentum completely stilled.
“I didn’t know we could do that,” Badb said, her voice echoing in my head like dry twigs rubbing together.
Clearly, she’d never seen The Matrix.
Which meant this would be fun.
I concentrated on riding the wind, plunging towards the Fomorian horde with all the confidence of The One—sans sunglasses. Granted, I wasn’t yet to the point where I could go around breaking sound barriers as I sped between buildings and shit, but I had a decent handle on the straight shots, which was all I needed.
I beelined straight for the Fomorian who’d thrown the spear. Up close, he was even bigger than I’d originally thought—like Andre the Giant big. Fortunately, big in this case also meant slow; he was still winding up to swing at me with his blade by the time I hit him, inverting at the last moment to dropkick him in the chest.
A dropkick which—literally—tore him in half.
I landed among a veritable buffet of steaming blue viscera, mercifully unable to identify which organs were squishing between my bare feet. Apples, I told myself. They’re all just blue apples. Badb was laughing, uproariously.
“Ye hit him so hard! That was fuckin’ awesome!” she crowed.
“There’s another behind ye,” Macha warned.
I whirled in time to catch sight of another blue-skinned giant riding the crest of a wave, preparing to gore me with his spear. I took a deep breath, deciding it was as good a time as any to play with my new toys. I waited for the Fomorian to get close, his spear less than a foot from me, before deflecting it with a gust of wind. His arm went wide, leaving his body open. I pressed my palm against his chest and called down the lightning rumbling high above us. It answered on the first ring, pealing from the heavens down towards my hand.
It was just the Fomorian’s bad luck that he was between the bolt of lightning and me.
I watched as the bolt struck the Fomorian’s naked back in its hunt for my palm, electricity dancing across his skin, smoke instantly erupting out of his eyes and mouth.
I removed my hand, and he toppled into the water from whence he came.
I flexed my fingers open and closed. Was this the combined power of my mother’s two sisters—the result of their fusion? Feeling the immense potential at my fingertips, I could understand what had driven so many to hate them and fear their combined might—the ability to wield the elements of air and lightning with absolute precision…all that was missing was the power to wield the darkness.
My mother’s power.
According to my aunts’ memories, only with her power in the mix were we truly complete. Truly unstoppable. But…how was I supposed to access it? Sure, I was controlling their powers, unifying them like a braided rope. But two strands wound together were about as effective as a stool with two legs—a thought which made me very nervous. Without the addition of the third power, were we going to suddenly collapse?
“It will come,” Macha reassured me, drawing me back to the present moment. “When ye need it, it will come.”
I cringed, preferring she hadn’t been able to read the depths of my uncertainty.
Two more waves of Fomorians approached before I could dwell any further, carrying several riders prepared to avenge their fallen brethren, howling at me over the roar of the surf. I launched up into the air and settled down on top of the water, standing on the liquid surface as surely as if it were solid earth—the thinnest, sturdiest layer of air beneath my feet. I sighed, the shine of playing with my new toys already wearing off. I’d come here to find vengeance, and so far, all I’d done was murder a couple peons. What we needed, I decided, was to show them we meant business; I wasn’t interested in picking off Balor’s troops one-by-one, like plucking pawns off a chessboard.
I wanted the King himself to come out and play.
Because now there was a fucking Queen on the board.
Before the Fomorians could get any closer, I raised my hands—the air obeying so quickly in response that I felt my ears pop—and then I savagely flung them down. The air obeyed; the waves were immediately forced flat by the immense pressure. As was everything that had stood between the water and my blast of air.
The Fomorians.
Although more like blue applesauce, now.
The water was perfectly still for a few moments, as placid as the surface of an undisturbed lake.
I stepped around the corpses of the riders, and found the surviving Fomorians stepping back to open up a path for me—or perhaps attempting to circle around me, like vultures.
I ignored them and marched forward.
We found Balor One-Eye at the center of the storm, the waves supporting him as though he were sitting on a liquid throne. He was as large as the sisters remembered, a giant even among his own kind, a helmet wrapped like a lion’s mane around his face. One eye socket sat empty, while in the other a blue stone glinted. It was easily twice the size of the fifty-six-carat blue diamond Geriatric Rose had dumped unceremoniously in the ocean at the end of Titanic. I had to admit I was surprised. Based on the myths, I’d assumed he’d be uglier—with one gaping hole in the middle of his forehead. But he wasn’t—and there wasn’t.
Had the myths been wrong? Or had they simply evolved over time, as myths so often did? I shook my head, realizing the longer I looked at him, the more fear—unfamiliar and unwelcome—I felt prickling along the edges of my consciousness. I was moments away from yelling at my chicken-shit passengers when I was assaulted by memories that were not my own.
Balor One-Eye and his army of ships approached our shores, their numbers so great they blotted out the horizon. The Fomorian warmonger led the charge, wearing seven patches, seven seals—a check against its power—over his malevolent eye.
A seal of wind, earth, water, and fire.
A seal of light and of darkness.
And, finally, a seal of iron.
We knew to fear it, but had not yet learned the true terror it represented.
He began removing those seals, one at a time, and we watched as the power of his eye grew and grew until his eye was unfettered by restraints.
And then…
Everything he looked upon withered and died.
Then we remembered how, after it was all over—after Balor killed Nuada, our King, and was slain by Lugh, Balor’s very own son—we’d hidden the eye away, too frightened of its power to destroy it.
Dark and Stormy: Phantom Queen Book 4 - A Temple Verse Series (The Phantom Queen Diaries) Page 21