by C. E. Murphy
I had seen those memories once before, from someone else’s point of view. From Virissong’s point of view. I clenched my eyes shut, trying to remember. He and Nakaytah had built a power circle, he’d said. Said, not shared; the memories were too painful and I’d been willing to listen instead of see. And the monsters tried to become them. Virissong’s spirit animals had been strong enough to protect him. Nakaytah’s had not.
I had the horrible feeling I was Nakaytah in this scenario, and I already knew the spirit animals I’d met were manifestations of Virissong’s power. Black eyes, bright eyes, all like the serpent towering above me. All like Virissong himself. All meant to draw me in—successfully—to the web he built for me.
I desperately wanted to burst into tears or throw up or run crying for help, but I was pretty sure the person I needed to get help from was me, which left me shit out of luck.
I leaned back without releasing the serpent, literally digging my heels into the ground, as if doing so would help me cut off the rush of power that it siphoned from me. The bubble in my belly stretched a little, not far enough to snap, but enough to encourage me. I was almost certain it was psychological, but what the hell: if vehicle analogies and physical action did the trick, I could work with that. All I needed was a moment to think, time to unjumble the memories and thoughts I’d shared with the monster I held on to.
Exhaustion swept over me, leaving me trembling and unable to haul backward on the serpent anymore. Screw understanding. I needed to cut off the flow of power, or better yet, do with it what we’d intended: translocate the damned monster somewhere safe. I gritted my teeth together, leaned forward, and shoved as hard as I could.
The monster smashed forward, dragging me with it.
Not in to some other place, outside the Hollidays’ front yard. No. That would have been good. That would have been what I wanted. No, it splintered through the pentagram walls like they’d never been there, and dove into Colin’s chest.
I went with it, all the way through the pentagram lines, and let go the instant before I, too, was absorbed into Colin’s body. I had too much momentum and stumbled forward, planting my hands on the tree behind his shoulders, so I was right there, half an inch from his nose, when his eyes went black and hard as obsidian, bright and dark like Virissong’s. Like Judy’s.
Like the snake I’d brought back to give him strength.
For one brilliant, aching moment I understood.
I understood something even Virissong hadn’t. There was no separation of one creature and another. The serpent was Virissong, and Virissong the serpent. They hadn’t always been one and the same. That much I could tell from the serpent’s memories that still lingered in my mind, their meaning becoming ever-more clear. Virissong’s spirits hadn’t protected him at all. He’d become a vessel for the serpent, allowing it into the Middle World. My world. He still thought he was in control, that the serpent did his whim. That the hunt he’d begun for the monster that had destroyed Nakaytah, so many thousands of years ago, was his own hunt.
But the serpent’s memory whispered to me that like the serpent itself, Virissong had only been trapped in the Lower World, unable to free himself and regain the Middle World that was the serpent’s own goal. With Virissong’s human face, they could together influence receptive mortals from time to time. Faye had been one, but her mistakes paled next to mine.
Because the black snake whose weight Colin’s slender shoulders had borne carried a thread of Virissong’s essence within it. A thread that I had carried back from the Middle World to make this all possible.
There’d never been any chance the pentagram would hold the serpent, not with a real and true shard of its self outside the star’s safe walls. Not with a willing host waiting to carry it into the world, and not with a helpful conduit shuttling pieces of its core back and forth from the Lower to the Middle World. Faye had done badly by beginning the process that would release Virissong, but I was the one who’d actually brought a piece of him into my world.
Virissong’s grin split Colin’s face in a nasty gash, his laughter a rich deep delight edged with diamond razors. He said, “Thank you,” the whisper rattling the small bones of my ears and sending chilly waves of nausea down my spine and into my fingertips. He swayed his head, watching me with cold flat eyes, snakelike, and split another vicious smile. “Perhapsss the Enemy cannot bind those who walk my path, asss I could not fully bind you. Perhapsss the Enemy is wissser in not trying,” he whispered, “but perhapss that iss not sso. In sso little time of following me, look what you have wrought, Walkingstick.” The hiss in his voice faded with each sentence, as if he was relearning the way a human tongue made speech. “You have brought me forth fully, as no one has been able to do in thousands of years. And there is no Enemy to bind me again, shaman. You are my greatest achievement.”
“Buddy,” I whispered, “I don’t know who your Enemy is, but whoever it is, I’m pretty goddamned sure he’s my friend.” I lifted my voice, hearing it crack as I called out, “Marcia? Take care of Mel.”
Then I wrapped my arms around Colin’s no longer frail body and let go with all the power I’d been collecting, focusing the coven’s spell on myself instead of on Virissong.
Air imploded around me with a soft bamf. I hadn’t previously known that imploding air was a sound in my repertoire of easily recognized noises, but it was. For a couple of seconds, I felt like a special effect in a movie, which was just so cool there wasn’t much else in the world to worry about. Besides, it didn’t hurt, and that made it even better. I’d sort of expected that moving myself from one point to another without going through the intervening distance would rupture my eardrums, or something equally unpleasant. I had some pretty recent experience with ruptured eardrums, and I was extremely pleased to not be revisiting that particular moment in my life. All in all it was a highly enjoyable two seconds.
At the end of that time I noticed I was falling very very fast toward a flat glimmering surface a long, long way below me. I was reasonably sure the part where it didn’t hurt was going to come to an abrupt end in the near future.
Colin twisted in my arms, screaming outrage as he writhed. An elbow caught me in the nose and I nearly let go, then held on tighter. For some reason dropping him seemed careless, even as he flailed and shrieked. “It’s gonna be okay,” I yelled. The air tasted thick and sour, too muggy and too hot, even though we were making our own wind by falling through it.
He gave me a black-eyed look of unmitigated hatred, pulling his lips back from his teeth to hiss, more like a cat than a snake. “It’ll be fine,” I yelled again. I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince, but I suspected of the two of us, I was the one concerned about our future well-being.
Which led me to wonder what the hell I thought I was going to do next. The glittering surface below was slowly getting larger—I was pretty sure it was Lake Washington, although I hadn’t ever seen it from quite this vantage before—and I wondered how high up we were and how long it would take us to hit the water, and whether terminal velocity gave any kind of softening on the odds of survival if you hit liquid instead of solid earth. It was amazing the kinds of things that just flowed right through my mind when the other option to think about was impending death.
Colin screamed again, a long thin sound that had no business coming from a human throat. His whole body bucked in my arms, wrenching itself rigid before it softened, as if the bones were melting out from under his skin. I shuddered and took my eyes away from the looming lake to try to calm him, and instead let out a hoarse yell and let him go despite my best intentions.
Hewas melting, skin molting and blending into black scales, the rage in his eyes flattened by the deadly dullness of the serpent’s gaze. His body threaded longer, arms melding to his sides, legs growing together, and his hair became wild with tiny Medusa-tentacles. Spires ripped from his spine, glistening and deadly with poison, until the boy was gone entirely and I fell beside the serpent.
It
flared wings, short and stubby, not nearly enough to lift its bulk through the air. Still, somehow, its fall slowed as its body thickened and lengthened, until it was the colossal monster I’d first met in the Dead Zone. I was still falling at a gravity-dictated rate of speed, but the serpent was above me now, black scales picking up sunlight and glancing the brightness through my eyes.
If I hadn’t promised once upon a time that it could eat me, I might’ve thought it was beautiful. As if the thought reminded the thing, it lunged forward, snapping massive jaws shut mere inches from my head.
Given the choice between being eaten alive and smashing at a billion miles an hour into Lake Washington, I decided smashing sounded good. I tucked myself into a pike, then straightened out so my head was pointed down and my body was streamlined. Maybe I could out-fall the thing. Anything was worth trying.
An unexpectedly powerful buffet of wind crashed into me, ignoring wholesale my attempts to streamline myself It knocked me back up into the air, far enough and fast enough that the serpent’s second lunge missed by yards instead of inches. For one startling instant, the whole thing felt very familiar, like every falling dream I’d ever dreamed had just come real.
Only it wasn’t a dream I was reminded of.
I arched back, closing my eyes against the warm wind, and let the thunderbird’s golden liquid fire burst free from my chest.
CHAPTER 33
I turned inside-out, my consciousness folding upward into the creature that I gave birth to. Disorientation and pain swept over me, bewildering in a muffled way. I felt like I’d turned a somersault that placed me firmly in a new body and put someone else in the driver’s seat. That was good: if I’d been in control of the thunderbird’s body, I’d be plummeting toward the lake at record speeds. Instead, massively powerful wings clapped against the muggy air so heavily I could hear thunder as I climbed higher into the sky.
I turned on a wingtip once I’d gained enough altitude, watching the world spiral below me in vivid colors that went beyond my second sight and into something purely inhuman. It was like discovering I’d been wearing sunglasses that’d been draining the life out of everything I looked at. Even through waves of heat rising off the earth, the leaves were more than just the emerald that gave Seattle its nickname. They had depth, wavering into gem-clear colors that made my hands—never mind that I didn’t seem to have any—ache with the desire to touch them. The sky around me was the same, so pure a blue I felt like I should draw my wings in for fear of being sliced apart on the clarity of air.
Amusement that wasn’t my own welled up from deep within the broad chest. Even that was so sharp it throbbed, making my own experiences and feelings shallow by comparison. Great. The thunderbird thought I was funny, with my tiny human emotions and my tiny human brain.
Disapproval, like another thunderclap. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to belittle myself while sharing flesh with mythical Native American archetypes. Morrison would approve.
I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what the hell we’re doing here? I asked internally, afraid to try speaking. God knows what might come out of the thunderbird’s beak if I did.
Fond exasperation, like you might feel toward a recalcitrant but cute child. This was not making me feel any better about myself. I added a hopeful, Please?, on the principle that people liked it when I was polite. At least, people who weren’t Morrison.
I wished I would stop thinking about him.
Memory hammered into me.
It was becoming familiar, this scene. I wondered how many more times I could see it played out from a new point of view, and then realized I’d never seen this actual moment before. The colors were still painfully vivid, white sun boiling cold in a pale blue sky, the frozen earth blinding with glare that made me squint until my eyes ached with the effort. No human saw in those colors, even if I seemed to be seeing through human eyes. I recognized the body I was in, but not the clarity of vision.
I stood in a power circle, holding Virissong’s hand. Nervousness bubbled in my stomach where I was used to feeling the ball of waiting power, and I clutched his fingers a little harder. He gave me a brief smile, squeezed my hand, and stepped away, moving into the absolute center of the circle.
Confidence fought the sickness in my belly. Virissong had spoken with the spirits and would save our people. I drew in a deep breath of cold air, straightening my shoulders, suddenly determined to do him proud. He had done things only the shamans could: spoken to the spirits, built a power circle that would protect us when the worlds opened up to give the spirits bodies that might be killed. My faith was born of love, and it warmed me even against the biting wind.
A spark of hope flew through me. Virissong hadn’t been born to the shamanic line. Perhaps I could learn to sense the magics that he’d learned, and stand with him as an equal. I saw nothing when I looked at the power circle, nothing more than lines etched in the ground. I took a few quick steps to the edge, brushing my fingers through the air.
Disappointment burst the nervousness in my stomach. I felt nothing, though Virissong swore that magic poured from the circle, protecting us. Only the true shamans among the People were meant to feel it. My shoulders slumped as I stepped away, knowing that pride would never buy the ability to sense magic.
Virissong’s hand touched my hair. I looked up with a sad smile that faded into uncertainty as I met his eyes. Their warmth was gone, the laughing brown that I knew so well drained all to hard, flat black. He saw my smile go and touched my cheek, lowering his head until his mouth almost brushed mine. “Sacrifice,” he murmured, “is the nature of power. I loved you, Nakaytah.”
Astonishing agony slid into my belly, wiping away disappointment and nervousness. I looked down, gaping, at Virissong’s bloody fingers wrapped around the hilt of his bone knife. The blade I had carved for him over one cold winter. Buried deep in my stomach, piercing what would have been my own center of power, had the body been mine. I wrapped my fingers around the hilt, over his hand, and looked up again, pain turning my vision white.
Virissong smiled at me, cold and inhuman, not at all the man I loved, and turned away to let me fall to the earth and spill my life’s blood there.
Dying took longer than I thought it would, and hurt less. The cold seeped into my body, taking the edges of pain away until I could roll onto my back with my fingers clutched around the knife. Visions danced in the pale blue sky, spirits crashing against walls that I couldn’t see, as if trying to break in and finish what Virissong had begun. He was right, I realized distantly. There was power in the circle. Pride filled me, then drowned under confusion. Nothing good could come of a power that had to be fed by death.
Taking the knife out of my belly almost didn’t hurt at all. The part of me that was Joanne Walker struggled to separate herself from Nakaytah so I could reach for my own power, the healing magic that would save my/our life. But the body I inhabited was Nakaytah’s, and she had no such power. Heedless of my attempts, she rolled to her stomach and slowly pushed herself to hands and knees, then staggered to her feet. Virissong stood a few feet away, head thrown back and arms spread wide in exultation. I wanted to surge forward and slam the knife through his ribs, but Nakaytah had no intention of becoming a killer.
Beyond the shielding I could see the serpent, rising higher and higher against the icy winter morning. Pale sunlight bled around it, making a glowing, gorgeous aura, like a benevolent god looking down at its people. Even against the back lighting, I could see its individual scales glittering and shifting against one another, my vision still too acute for a human’s. Especially for a human with no magic of her own. I stared up at the monster, trying to absorb the import of that, as Nakaytah whispered, “Amhuluk,” and then, in despair, “But where is Wakinyan?”
Trapped. The answer came to me—or to Nakaytah; I wasn’t sure which—with absolute certainty. Virissong’s sacrifice was to Amhuluk, the ancient serpent, not for his Enemy. That, at least, was something the coven had done right
. Or wrong, since it was unlikely that Virissong had intended for us to invite the good into the world along with the bad. Maybe some of those intentions the road to hell was paved with had come through despite our blindness and our guide.
While I was thinking that, Nakaytah gathered herself and tottered toward the edge of the power circle, her hands outstretched for balance.
One thing Virissong told me was true: it was Nakaytah’s blood that brought down the circle. She fell toward it, strength draining from her body, and with a hiss and a spatter the shielding came down. Even she felt it, and through her, so did I, a buzz of power shorting out, like a circuit breaker flipping. It knocked her askew, and she sprawled across the circle’s line, landing on her back so that she and I together watched Amhuluk come smashing down to close its massive jaws over Virissong. I saw a fang slash through his right arm, and another bite through his torso, just where he’d shown me the scars that he’d claimed Nakaytah had caused. Which, technically, I guessed she had.
“Wakinyan,” Nakaytah croaked. “We need you.”
For the second time in as many moments, liquid gold burst forth from my chest and I turned inside-out.
Minutes of memory-surfing meant nothing to the world outside: no more than a blink of time had passed when I resurfaced from the thunderbird’s memories. And theywere the thunderbird’s memories, I realized. Powerless or not, Nakaytah’s plea and her blood had made the creature’s passage into the Middle World possible, a dying wish granted by the very gods themselves. Her memories had played in such vivid, inhuman color because the thunderbird had partaken of the gift she offered, just as it’d gobbled through me in the skies of the Upper World. We were all in this together, shaman, spirit, and mortal alike.
I folded my wings back and tucked my claws up, plunging through the thick atmosphere. My eyes had no tears in them as wind ripped by, a thin membrane shuttering over red pupil as protection from the speed. Color dimmed only slightly with the membrane, but my focus changed, telescoping in on the serpent beneath me, its writhing form the only matter of importance in my world.