A Feral Darkness

by Doranna Durgin

  Brenna slid the ball just to left of the sweet spot on the dog's chest, so close to Masera's head from this angle, too close—

  And pulled the trigger.

  The dog jerked back, gave Brenna a puzzled stare, and folded to the ground with the faintest of whimpers.

  "It doesn't matter." Parker's voice was jarring, his harsh laugh even more so. He'd gotten himself halfway down the hill, trailing blood that turned the grass black in Nuadha's light. "It's too late. If he's not dead yet, give him a few days. And then I'll be back for you."

  Brenna pumped another round in the chamber. One of the last, most likely; she'd lost count, but knew she'd started with twelve on hold and one in the chamber.

  He laughed again. "You won't do it. You know you won't do it. Don't even try to play that game."

  She hefted the rifle, then lowered it. He was right about that. He'd always been right. But...around her, the ground thrummed with a different song, one she'd heard only the night before, and this time she didn't think it was of Parker's doing. The darkness.

  She wouldn't have to do it.

  The darkness would use him. It would use him up.

  A feral darkness, never under his control.

  "You're right," she said. "We'll play another game instead." And she tossed the rifle inside the circle. Then she stumbled down the hill to Druid, moving as fast as her suddenly wobbly legs could take her without risking a fall.

  She didn't think she could get up if she fell.

  There he was. His head lolled back, his sightless eyes half-open and already glazing. Sweet Druid, dog of her heart. Quirky Druid, overcoming his fears long enough to sacrifice himself for her. Courageous Druid, sent through time to give his spirit to her.

  She pulled off her vest and wrapped him in it, avoiding the blood, moving as quickly as she could, her body operating independently of her stunned and ravaged emotions. His long body hung flaccid in her arms; the hanging brush of his tail grazed her knee at each steep stride back up the hill.

  And all the while the darkness gathered around them, angry and building up to power, with Parker just beginning to realize it.

  To see that he didn't have control this time.

  He scrabbled his way down the hill, stopping short of the bank as he saw he couldn't navigate it, tried to rise and failed.

  Brenna had no eyes for him. Inside the circle, the warmth of Nuadha's earth and light enfolded her, showed her just the right spot to lay Druid. And grieving, fearful, she turned to Masera, where he lay limply, one foot twitching, his uninjured arm moving aimlessly, its goal some purpose she couldn't fathom. Maybe just to move. To prove to himself he was still alive.

  She sank to her knees as she reached him, taking that groping hand in hers, and felt new pain tear across her chest when he didn't return the squeeze she gave it. "Iban," she whispered, close enough to see that his other arm, flopped across his stomach and badly ravaged, was too obviously crooked not to be badly broken. Close enough to see his shattered glasses bent beneath the body of the dog beside him.

  Close enough to see that his neck pumped steady blood into the earth, that his eyes had rolled back in his head, that his breath was no more than a shallow gasp. "Iban," she said, brushing his cheek her fingers, unable to stop herself from threading her fingers through his thick and ever-ruffled hair. "Don't go, Iban."

  Rabies. Better this death than that. But still— "Don't go, Iban," she pleaded, while the darkness rose around them, raging against the circle, desperate to break through and gain access to the spring and its unlimited power.

  Willing and able to use up every last bit of Parker in the doing of it.

  Brenna saw it all, silent beyond the shelter of the circle, and yet saw none of it. Dark whirling winds, buffeting black power, raging anger spinning out its stored chaos. It didn't touch her—not its fear or its power or its violence. Only one thing held her now, this face with its expression she'd never seen before. Faded. Without the force of personality Masera had brought to every word he'd exchanged with her. Every touch.

  "Please don't go," she said, so close she could feel his faltering breath on her cheek. "Not yet. Not yet."

  With impossible effort he brought his eyes into focus, and then his hand did tighten down on hers, somehow the trigger for tears to spill over her eyelids, one after another and each holding unvoiced misery. He said something—a few words, but no sound behind them, and she had no idea what they were. "I know," she told him anyway. "I'm here." She kissed him, carefully, and said into his mouth over and over again, "I'm here. I'm with you. I'm here," and at some point his breathing grew strange and erratic and then suddenly eased.

  Gone.

  She looked up, blinked, looked around. Gone. All of them. No sign of the pit bulls. No evidence that Parker had lived a last few frantic moments by the side of the creek, trying to escape his own darkness. Druid, gone; no sign of his furry body anywhere. And the shining silver of Nuadha's light had been replaced by the wash of a gentle rose-dawn.

  Nothing but Brenna and a knapsack and a bloody vest, surrounded by a circle of marching silver—some lurching, some flattened, all gleaming with an odd sheen in the morning light.

  It was as she sat numbly, contemplating what do to next, coming to terms with the fact that there was no sturdy little Cardigan to bury, to say good-bye to, that she realized the implications of it all.

  The dead, gone.

  Masera, by her side.

  Nuadha, the healing god.

  ~~~

  She threw herself back down beside Masera, frantic for signs of life. Let me be right, oh please let me be right—running her hands up and down his chest, seeing for the first time that the horrifying wounds at his throat were closed and healed, the scars there shiny but already fading to white, the broken arm still mangled but not bleeding as it once had been. And his good hand, twitching around a fistful of air as though he expected to find something else there.

  She slid her own hand into it, and neither of them were alone anymore.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  CHAPTER 19

  RAIDO

  Union & Reunion

  From the crest of the hill under the oak, the pasture presented an interesting sight, these days after god and darkness had fought their battles through mere flesh.

  On the far side of the creek, the bottom pasture—lush and green and crying out for horses—looked virtually untouched by the events of the past week.

  This side of the creek was a different story.

  The hillside around the spring was scoured clear of grass and thatch; barren, Brenna would have called it, if the persistent green tips of recovering grasses weren't already poking their way into the light. The time since their struggle on the hill didn't lessen the impact of what had happened here. Nor had it eliminated the thrum of life that came up through her bare soles and through her bottom planted firmly on the ground.

  Just below marched the disrupted circle of silverware, looking more like a strange child's game than the crucial border of safety it had been. Brenna had already determined to replace the silver with rocks, and to replace the rocks with gradually acquired but more seriously interesting rocks and mineral chunks.

  Supposing she still lived here. She'd given her mother a week, and most of those days had tumbled by; she might let it go to two. And then she'd leave. After all, it wasn't as if she had a job here, holding her down. Not anymore.

  Just this blessed spring. And the protected circle, within which the grass was as green and happy as that below and showed no signs of the dark blood that had soaked the ground.

  As hard as it would be to leave the farm, it would be even harder to leave this circle.

  But she could make another. Somewhere.

  And, she hoped, not alone.

  She leaned over to rub her nose on Masera's shoulder. The good one, the right one, although the padded sling straps passed over it, holding his arm with its cast and its wrappings up at a high angle. Hours and hou
rs in the emergency room, that's what that cast represented. Another day in the hospital, recovering from surgery as the doctors tried to understand how he'd lost so much blood from the arm injury. Brenna kept the truth to herself; when they asked about the silvered scars on his neck, she said airily, "Oh, old dog bite," and left it at that. She'd stayed by his bed with Eztebe, who wormed the whole story out of her in bits and pieces and now treated her like one of the family.

  Masera rested his cheek against the top of her head, which of course was what she'd wanted. He had new glasses, matched to the old ones as closely as she'd been able. They still softened his face, easing its hard edges and changing the scruffiness to appear urbanely ruffled. The rest of him was hard to fix—bones and bruises, wrought by Parker's bat as well as pit bull jaws; that, too, showed in his face—as well as a certain muzziness wrought by pain-killers.

  "You okay?" she said, now that she had his attention.

  "Just thinking," he said. "Still have a few brain cells up to the task. Just then, for instance, I was being grateful that you chose the only safe place to rub your nose on. Just an itch, right? I've got a handkerchief if you need it."

  "I will smack you," she warned him, though of course she wouldn't. Not on his first day out and about, on Beltane no less—or so Masera called May Day, and seemed to think it was a big deal—with Eztebe waiting for them at Masera's place.

  It just seemed right to come here first.

  Besides, she knew what he was thinking, and it wasn't about her nose. "You're not still worried about the rabies, are you?"

  He gave her the barest of shrugs.

  "I'm not," she told him.

  "That's quite some confidence."

  She smiled serenely, knowing it would annoy him enough so he'd really listen to her instead of barging ahead with his own thoughts. "Maybe I have inside information."

  He snorted, then stiffened. "Ow. Don't do that to me. So old Nuadha's dropping messages at your door now, is he?"

  "It's not a difficult code," she said. "Look at you. You're a mess. You're not going to work for months—"

  "—Weeks—"

  "—and maybe in a week or so you might even put on a shirt without help. But the injury that would have killed you—" and she traced a finger down the scars on his neck—" is so completely healed that no one can tell it was more than a surface wound."

  He caught her finger with his good hand. "Kindly don't do that until I can do something about it, would you?"

  "Don't duck the point. Druid sacrificed himself for me. Nuadha took that gift, and gave me one in return. You. That bite on your neck didn't just go away, it was healed. You may have had the shedding rabies in your system, but it was healed before I ever got you to the hospital."

  He didn't answer. Looking out over the hill, his face drawn and his eyes confused, he didn't answer. She thought maybe it was simply all a little too much, too intense to deal with. After all, she'd had days to think about it. He'd spent that time drugged and just trying to muddle through.

  But he surprised her, because once he worked it all through, he said, "If you're right...my blood..."

  "Just like Druid's!" Brenna said, sitting straight up. One of her greatest regrets of the past days was that she hadn't done anything with that blood sample, hadn't even thought about it until it had spent far too much time sitting in her anything-but-sterile refrigerator. "But there's no way we could explain it."

  "Maybe we don't even try," Masera said. "I'll use the contacts I made when I was working with animal control. The authorities take anonymous tips all the time."

  "I doubt they get many with blood samples attached," Brenna said, but not in argument. "Still...if only one person took it seriously..."

  "We'll try," Masera said, which was about all that could be said. It left them sitting in the afternoon sunshine again, while Brenna tried to think of all the pleasant times she'd shared this hill with Druid, instead of the last few moments of his life.

  Russell to the rescue.

  She heard him calling from quite a distance, though he'd never quite gotten the knack of bellowing across pasture distances. Not enough time spent calling in the boarding horses, just like he'd never spent much time with chores on the farm. What he wanted, she knew, was for her to come to him so he wouldn't have to walk all the way out to the oak. She just twisted around to wave to him.

  He was puffing by the time he reached them, and whatever greeting he might have had was lost in his shock. "What the hell happened here? What—is that Mother's silver?"

  "No," Brenna said, having decided that indeed her mother had abandoned it. Which didn't exactly make it Brenna's silver, but neither, strictly, was it her mother's.

  Though at that moment she suddenly realized she would have lied to him without qualm, just so she wouldn't have to deal with his reaction. It was a surprising revelation.

  "You must be Russell," Masera said, a distinctly cold note in his voice—though not one Russell was likely to notice. It surprised Brenna, who had said little about her family, good or bad. Then again, Masera had never been one to restrict his knowledge of her to what she told him. "Have a seat?"

  I'm not getting up, that's what that meant. Brenna brushed Masera's shoulder with hers and said, "It's a nice day, Russell, and the ground's dry." She patted the grass beside her.

  After a hesitation, he realized that she wasn't going to get up to talk to him, but he couldn't bring himself to sit; instead he came down the hill to stand before her, more or less at eye level. It was then she saw his fury, and his irritation at having to suppress it for a stranger. But it showed, to one who knew him—the high color on his cheeks and throat, the set of his shoulders, the way his full eyebrows somehow looked even thicker.

  And hope flickered in her throat, fluttering all the way down through her chest and legs and through the soles of her feet into Nuadha's earth.

  "I just spoke to Mother," he said, somehow making it a demand. "What have you said to her?"

  "Nothing, recently." It was his stage; let him play it out. "I've been busy. Gil Masera, this is my brother Russell. Russell—Gil."

  Russell nodded at Masera, a token thing meant to look polite but not the least so; Brenna felt Masera shift into predatory mode, through the drugs and the pain and his distraction. She brushed against him again, murmuring, "It's okay."

  So Masera only said, "Brenna's been helping me since I was hurt."

  "That would explain why you didn't bother to return my calls from this morning." Russell's hands landed at his hips, and he said bluntly, "Mother's signed the deed to this place over to you. She told me this morning, said she wanted to surprise you with it. What I want to know is what the hell you've been up to behind my back."

  Masera spoke first, while Brenna let the flutter of hope settle firmly into place and blossom into happiness, hidden from Russell...but not from Nuadha's earth, which fluttered back at her. "I don't suppose it'll be the surprise your mother wanted, now."

  "This is family business," Russell said.

  "If you don't want Masera in on the conversation, then you'll have to come back another time," Brenna told him, unbothered. "Once you talked about selling the place out from under me, I asked Mother for the deed. That's all there is to it." Well, perhaps a little more than that. But nothing Russell needed to know.

  "This isn't right, Brenna. It's not fair."

  "I had always thought that in your book, fair meant whoever thought of it first," she told him, and was surprised to see how much redder his face grew, though it faded as he regained control. "Besides, Russell, haven't you read the paper lately?" For that was one thing she had done these past days, while sitting around in the hospital or passing time with Ezteban while Masera slept. "The raids that took place around here? Whose property they took place on? I don't think you'll be hearing from your buyer."

  "I never told you—" he started, but stopped short of who it was, as though it was finally sinking in that Brenna was no longer someone who was j
ust letting life—letting Russell—happen to her, but that she knew more than he'd ever thought she did. He made a sudden change in tactics. "I want the chance to go through the house, Brenna. There are things there that I want."

  If they meant that much to you, you'd have asked for them long before now. "Okay," she said. "I'm sure I'll be cleaning some stuff out, anyway. Give me a call after a few days, and we'll arrange a time for you to take a look." And don't bother coming by when you think I'm out, because I'll have the locks changed before the end of the day. But she didn't say it. Let him discover it for himself.

  And he hesitated a moment more, as if there were something else he wanted to say, but he couldn't quite find the words...or use them front of Masera. Finally he muttered in excessively bad grace, "I'll call you. Soon." And stalked away.

  Masera waited only until Russell was barely out of earshot. "I always knew you had that in you."

  "How could you even wonder, considering our first conversation? And our second, and our third..."

  "You work at Pets!, that's how I could wonder. You think I didn't know what that place was like before I started with them? Being there was part of the cover, Brenna, so I could stick close to Mickey, see if anyone else there was part of it all. I'll find somewhere else to hold my classes now."

  She threw herself back on the grass, leaving the conversation behind, staring up at the roving clouds. Fluffy white ones, the fun kind. "Happy happy!" she said, and then couldn't stand it, but jumped to her feet, wanting to pull him up, too, but resisting and skipping around him instead. "It's mine, now, I don't have to go anywhere!" She wanted to throw her arms around him, too, but threw them around the deeply fissured bark of the oak instead, which bore no wounds from the night of battling darkness. "Happy me!"

  He'd gotten to his feet anyway; one arm closed around her from behind. "Happy us."

  But for all her happy, Brenna couldn't quite forget.

  There should have been three of them.