by C. E. Murphy
Or it had been up until Áine’s power slammed into the magic that actually was trying to rewrite me from the DNA on up, because then things got down to some serious pain. Intellectually I knew there’d probably been barely a second between the first intense burst of agony from the bite when Áine touched me, the cushioning effect of her magic rushing through me and the infection’s response, but the moment of respite had seemed wonderfully drawn-out.
At least, it seemed drawn-out in comparison to the railroad spikes now being driven through my arm. I pried one eye open to make sure that wasn’t really happening. It wasn’t. That was good enough for me. I closed my eyes again and tried not to snivel.
My own power had been going great guns holding the infection in place. I kind of thought Áine’s should just smack it aside like a pesky bug, but I could feel her crashing against it, waves against the shore, neither giving way to the other. I didn’t dare trigger the Sight, not with a goddess using her power full tilt. I’d go blind, or possibly burn my brain out. Neither would be any fun. So I just held on, teeth gritted against relentless surges of magic battling it out under my skin, until Áine suddenly released me and stepped back.
The bite still hurt like blue blazes, and I didn’t really need to look to know it wasn’t one bit more healed than it had been. I looked anyway.
It wasn’t one bit more healed than it had been. Some of the inflammation that had erupted when Áine touched me was already fading, but the bite itself was just as dark, infected and nasty as it had been since I’d received it. All I could think was, holy crap, the Master was powerful. Or the werewolves were powerful. Somebody, anyway, was powerful, because if a goddess was stymied by the shapechanging magic running through my bloodstream, then I was infected with something so absurdly far out of my league I didn’t even know where to begin. I’d thought Méabh had had power in spades when I’d seen her bind the werewolves to the lunar cycle. But she’d just told me that had taken a lifetime of preparation, so while it had been an astounding performance, it didn’t seem to be something she was in a position to repeat.
I took a moment—just a moment—to really hate being the go-to girl who could pull out the repeat performances, and then I got over myself, because Áine looked genuinely dismayed that my arm still shone with red, superheated infection. Offhand, I guessed she’d never run into something she couldn’t heal, either. That was considerably more of a come-uppance for a goddess than it was for snot-nosed little me. “It’s okay. I’m gonna figure it out. And I know it means I bear his mark and all, but don’t let that stop you from helping my mother, okay? Please? I’ll bow out of the circle if I need to, so there’s no taint, but man, she really doesn’t deserve this.”
Áine got an expression I suspected had crossed my own face more than once in the past several months. Petulance was not an emotion I would typically expect to ascribe to a goddess, but if there was a better word for the pouty lower lip, the set jaw and the slightly drawn-down eyebrows, I didn’t know what it was. She did something peculiar: scooped her hands at her shoulder, then spread them palms-down over mine in a kind of splashing, throwaway gesture, then whipped away from me. Dramatically, with all that white leather swooping around, even if the coat was much too large for her—and raised her hands like the world’s tiniest conductor calling an orchestra to attention.
I’d regret for the rest of my life that I only dared see, and not See, what she did next.
There was a fair amount of magic already flying around the mountaintop. Méabh and I had plenty of power to unleash individually, and together it made for an impressive show, especially when Raven was throwing his whole black-winged little soul into helping out. Sight or no Sight, I heard him shrieking in utter delight, and bet a bird’s-eye view of Áine’s antics was a delight to see.
I felt her bring my power into line with hers while at the same time excising my heart. Excising the part of me closest to the werewolf bite, and, to be fair, probably the least important part of my power in terms of saving my mother went. I had barely known the woman. I hadn’t much liked her, much less loved her. I had learned enough now to regret all three of those things, but it was a little late now. So my intellectual good intent went into Áine’s weaving, if not my heart-wrenching loss and sorrow, and I was okay with that.
I felt her gathering up Méabh’s magic, too, both the connection to the earth that the aos sís’ long lives offered, and, as I’d thought was important, the connection of past and present. Not that a goddess didn’t encompass all that time frame herself, but despite Áine coming to lend a hand, this was still a working of power of and for mortals. Méabh might barely qualify as mortal, but elves could and did die, so in my book, that counted.
I knew without having to See that Caitríona lent the heart I lacked. I wanted very badly to view the conjuring she’d dreamed up of who and what my mother had been, but even if this succeeded and we broke the bond of bones and spirit, we still had to hunt down Sheila-the-banshee and rescue her, whatever that took. I couldn’t afford to be blinded or burned out no matter how much I wanted to See what was going on. It was a crying shame, because Cat had loved my mother, and it would’ve been nice to see the woman through those eyes. Still, I felt the surge of emotion build up and become part of Áine’s working, and that was something.
Then, unexpectedly, I felt one more addition to the circle. Áine reached back to all the days my mother had spent on Croagh Patrick working toward healing it, and wrenched all those years of power forward. I knew that was what she was doing: I had mucked with time enough myself, both today and over the past year, to recognize the sensation. Two things became obvious. One, the mountain was so parched because Áine had pulled forty or fifty years of magic away from it so it could be invested here, today, all at once. Yet another closed time loop. I hated them, but they were probably better than open ones.
Two—not that I hadn’t already known this, but still—my mother’s willpower was staggering. Literally. I staggered as Áine yanked all that magic forward, its weight pressing down on me as heavily as if Mother was there herself, guiding a lifetime’s worth of power into a healing ritual meant to change the landscape forever. No adept would stand to have her home overlooked by a shadowed magic, not if she could help it, and my mom could by God help it.
It no longer mattered that I wasn’t using the Sight. As occasionally happened, the power had taken on real-world visibility, white magic sheeting down around us in waves of extraordinary beauty. I bet half of Ireland could see the mountaintop glowing, and I started thinking we’d better get the show on the road before people came bounding up to find out what was going on. Not that right now I could have the slightest effect on whether the show got on the road or not, so I decided I’d better stand back and enjoy it.
I could almost see my mother stepping through the curtains of magic. Kneeling here and there—always somewhere different—to invest the mountain with magic. Covering so much ground over the decades, so many times a year, that she became multiples of herself, crouched side by side by side, until she had knelt and touched virtually the whole of the mountaintop. There were spaces between handprints—finger-width spaces—but they touched the curve of a different year’s thumb or hand, heel or fingertips, so there was a continuous net of power built up, glimmering with her distinctive magic. It sank into the earth in her time, and burst upward in mine.
Áine caught all that magic, more focused will than I thought any human could handle at once, and gave it right back to the Reek. She pushed it down, deeper and deeper, until it went below the mountain’s foot. Until it rooted out the blood that had once stained the holy place, and scrubbed it clean.
Pure triumph erupted from the cool green earth as the last of ancient blood faded away. Everywhere for miles, tens of miles, flared with joy. With life exultant, with the thrill of victory after so many eons of defeat. Hot tears sliced trails down my cheeks, and I didn’t even have much of a horse in this race, not as far as an abiding love of t
he countryside went. But this, once more, was what I could be good for: making things a little better. At the end of the day I wasn’t sure anything else really mattered.
Áine gave a happy trill, bringing all the newly awakened power to high alert. It wanted to dance for her, wanted to celebrate its survival, and if there was anything more suited to the tiny goddess than that jubilant emotion, I couldn’t imagine what it was. She brought her hands together, heels touching and fingertips dancing like flames.
Every ounce of celebratory power in the West shot to her, and, guided by her desire, became the fire that burned my mother’s bones.
It took no time at all for them to become dust. Áine, with an air of total satisfaction, discarded my leather coat, did a twelve-step dance—I counted—around it, then gave me a blinding smile and disappeared.
This once I didn’t hold it against the disappearee. I was okay with gods doing things like that. Disappearing mysteriously should, in fact, be high up in a god’s repertoire. Besides, I was too agape to be upset. Áine had taken the power circle down with her when she went, and I sat with a thump, gawking across its remnants at my mother’s smoldering remains.
“What… I mean, what the… Who’s Áine? Really, seriously, did you see that?” Of course they had. They’d been right there, just like me. They’d been right there while a goddess dropped by to immolate a dead woman’s bones and sink so much fresh life magic into a mountaintop I was expecting it to spontaneously erupt in flowers. Or possibly in song. Or both. At any moment Julie Andrews would appear, and it would all be over. I wondered if I would rate that kind of exit performance when it was my turn to go.
Caitríona stalked over and hit my shoulder with a solid fist, which put paid to any self-aggrandizing ideas of shuffling off my mortal coil. I clutched my shoulder in astonished injury as she yelled, “‘Can’t set things on fire with me mind?’ Jaysus, the lip on ye! Can’t set—!” She stalked off again, but only as far as Méabh, to whom she also said, “Can’t set things on fire with her mind so! Sure and it’s a pity, isn’t it? It’s every day I get up and say to meself, no, not today, Cat, today ye can’t set things on fire with yer mind, but tomorrow so, tomorrow will be grand and you’ll just set things on fire with your mind.”
The chapel roof exploded into flames.
Chapter Eighteen
I burst out laughing. I just couldn’t help it. I’d had enough. More than enough, and the flames dancing merrily over the chapel roof were the final straw. Although setting things on fire with my mind was not in my skill set, I was surprisingly confident of being able to douse them, and extended shields over the chapel. If I could keep scythes and avalanches and psychic attacks out with my shields, I saw no reason why I couldn’t keep oxygen out, too, and within moments the fire sputtered out under the increasing pressure of silver-blue magic. There wasn’t even any damage to the roof, possibly thanks to my hastiness, but more, I thought, thanks to the magical nature of the flames. They had been set with the power of the mind. Probably that kind of fire didn’t really need fuel at all, but it did need concentration, and Caitríona’s was gone all to hell and back.
When I turned away from the chapel, Méabh was staring accusingly at Caitríona, who was in turn staring at me accusingly. “Oh, no,” I said. “That was you, sister, not me.”
“What?”
“But she hasn’t the power!”
My eyebrows shot up. “Maybe she hadn’t the power, but I’d say she’s got it now. Áine kissed her, remember?”
“It doesn’t work that way!”
My eyebrows remained elevated. They felt like they might never come down, in fact. “Doesn’t it? Because as far as I knew, I didn’t have the power, either, not until Cernunnos skewered me. I’m kinda thinking close encounters with the deitific kind trigger all sorts of interesting responses in—” and I dropped my voice dramatically “—the granddaughters of Méabh.”
Méabh looked like she would set my head on fire if it was within the power of her mind to do so. “There are rituals, Granddaughter. There are slow awakenings. There are—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Sweat lodges and spirit danc—”
I was vaguely aware Caitríona had been saying, “Sorry, what?” and “Sorry?” and “Excuse me,” in increasingly voluble tones, but she broke into my litany with a roared, “What do you mean, that was me?” that stopped Méabh and me from snapping at one another’s heels I peeked over my shoulder to make sure the chapel wasn’t on fire again, then smiled brightly at Caitríona. “I mean I can’t set things on fire with my mind, and I’m guessing Méabh can’t, either, which leaves you, who was concentrating very hard on the idea of setting things on fire with your mind when the chapel went up. Wow. That’s a totally offensive power.”
Offense was the right word, all right. Caitríona balled her fist again and came at me. To her huge outrage, I caught the punch in my palm effortlessly. I was a lot bigger than she was, and it was a lousy attack. The verbal one was clearer, if not necessarily more heartfelt. “What do you mean, an offensive power? Sure and you’re the one trucking with a dead woman’s bones, there’s nothing more offensive than that!”
“No, no.” I leaned into Cat’s fist, holding her in place. “Not offensive bad. Offensive like offense, defense. It’s a power you can bring to the attack.” She relaxed a little, suddenly less, well, offended. “Which I’m guessing means whatever you are in the cosmic scheme of things, it’s not a shaman. Maybe more like Méabh here. She doesn’t heal. She just brings the fight to the bad guys.”
“I wield shamanic power,” Méabh said stiffly.
I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t think you do. You wield magic, absolutely, and it’s a magic that can shape bodies, but I’m not sure it’s shamanic. Healing’s a big part of shamanism. You’re more of a…” My hand fluttered away from holding Caitríona’s fist, waving in the air as if searching for words to pluck from it. I had firsthand experience with sorcerers. They were basically evil shamans. Méabh wasn’t one of those. And witches needed a coven and a deity to guide them, so she wasn’t a witch, either. I’d never met a wizard, but that had too many fantasy novel connotations for me. I finally settled on, “Mage!” and felt pretty good about it.
Or I did until I remembered that was exactly the word a Seattle speaker-with-the-dead had used to describe my mother. Sheila MacNamarra, the Irish mage, she’d said. Which meant your average mage, if there was such a thing, should be able to heal, since my mother apparently had been able to. Either that or magery came with different skill sets depending on the adept, which seemed fairly likely.
I was going to write the goddamned handbook, is what I was going to do. As soon as I was done hunting down a banshee and finding Gary and right after I’d gone home to tie Morrison to a bed for a week and then taken up jogging with any energy I happened to have left over. I didn’t have a job to go to anymore, after all. No doubt I could write a bestselling shamanic handbook in my suddenly copious free time and live off the riches from that.
Méabh and Caitríona, who were not, thankfully, privy to that whole line of thought, had equal looks of satisfaction. Apparently being mages sounded cool. I kind of thought it did, too, and momentarily tried it on for size. Joanne Walker, Mage For Hire. Siobhán Walkingstick, Magistrate. Not that I was certain magistrate could be used that way, but on the other hand, who was going to stop me?
I was, really. I’d kind of gotten used to the idea of being a shaman. Maybe if Sheila had raised me, I’d have come up in the idea of being a mage, but I’d had more exposure to my Cherokee side, and the magic had shaped itself in the idea of shamanism. Perhaps an unnaturally broad spectrum of shamanism, but still, that was the title I was comfortable with. Caitríona could be a mage. The mage, presumably. The Irish Mage. I felt guilty. That was a hell of a burden to plant on a nineteen-year-old.
“Am I really like you so? Like Auntie Sheila?” Cat didn’t sound burdened. She sounded breathless. Hopeful. Excited. All the things I’d been, now
that I reached back for it, when Coyote had approached my thirteen-year-old self in dreams and had started to teach me to be a shaman. Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.
Méabh, grumpily, said, “No,” at the same time I said, “Yeah, I think so.” We eyed each other, my expression falling into a frown. “What’s your problem, Granny? I’d think you’d be pleased.”
She looked as though she’d like to throttle us both. “The power doesn’t come on ye in a burst. It’s grown up into, day by day, bit by bit. It’s madness to be drowned in it all at once.”
I could hardly argue the latter point, but the former was manifestly untrue. I started to protest, trailed off before I got going, then tried again, with something totally different than I’d expected to say. “You’re aos sí, Méabh. We’re human. It might work differently for you. You’re connected to the world in a way I’ve never seen. If that all came up and smacked a person at once, yeah, it’d be madness, but I think maybe we mere mortals don’t have quite as much oomph to take under our wings.”
Méabh’s jaw worked. She clearly wanted to be annoyed, but I was honestly a bit agog at the aos sí connection to the world, and it had come through in my voice. It’s hard to be irritated with someone who’s all impressed by you. “Well,” she finally said, somewhere between grudging and exasperated, “what are we to do with her, then? Sure and we can’t leave a newly awakened power to fumble along on her own.”