by C. E. Murphy
The circle wasn’t going to do anybody any good. It was mine, after all, and in a few seconds I’d be taking the Master on and would no doubt reduce it to rubble. I took it down myself, feeling a distant surge of power as its magic poured back into me. I automatically made it into personal shields, strengthening them like it would do any good, and spoke to Coyote as I reached Morrison. “No matter what happens next, get them out of here, ’yote. Get them all the hell away from here. Promise me.”
“I promise.” His voice sounded as awful as mine, as if his tears were made of glass, and he’d drunk them all away. I nodded, then met Morrison’s black eyes.
The gun was still at his temple. I folded my hand around the barrel and moved it away. The Master didn’t resist, but he did direct where it went: to my own temple. No chance for a double-cross.
“Works for me,” I said in a low voice, and pressed my mouth to his.
The weight of the Master’s presence was incredible. Inside a breath I had a raging headache, and before I opened my eyes I could tell that the world was darker than it should be, like the darkness of his eyes bled into the way he saw the world. I did open my eyes to see Morrison’s horrified blue gaze before mine. He yanked the gun away from my temple, and I struggled for a smile.
It worked. It took almost everything I had, but it worked. I was still in control, my shields holding the Master apart from my own mind. Just barely, but that was all I needed.
“Morrison.” It hurt to say the word. Everything hurt, but talking when the Master was battering at the inside of my skull was almost impossible. He was already winning: just within my range of vision I saw my coat bleed to pitch-black, marking me as one of the bad guys. My shields were turning to blasted crystal, scored by his relentless power, bursting at seams that hadn’t been there a moment ago. They would be beautiful when they fell, I thought: a crystalline spray, like ocean surf turned to razors. The razors were already cutting up my mind in waves of pain I could barely see through. “Morrison,” I said. “I love you. Go with Coyote. I’ve got something to do.”
“Walker, you can’t—you can’t!”
“Watch me.”
I turned away from him and, stiffly, walked out of one of the shattered windows at the top of the Space Needle.
I didn’t know what I thought might happen. I supposed if I was really lucky I might kill myself and take the Master with me, but I didn’t have much faith in that succeeding.
It didn’t. Black magic clouded around me, thickening the air and slowing our descent. After tangling with the Morrígan, I’d suspected he could do things like that, but it had been worth a shot. And he didn’t push through my shields, even though I was pretty certain he could. But I was also pretty certain he was afraid Cernunnos would know somehow that it wasn’t me calling him, if he broke down my shields and took me over completely. I’d be a great host for a long time, but Cernunnos was his real goal, his forever home, and he didn’t want to blow that. So I risked doing stupid shit like walking out a fifty-story window, and it didn’t kill either of us.
In fact, we landed with flawless grace that didn’t even dent the already-broken concrete at the foot of the Needle. I stood up, feeling the Master’s anticipation, his urgency, and his great difficulty in restraining himself from shattering my mind as I pulled together the magic I wanted. And he was restraining himself, too, despite the constant barrage of tiny explosions I felt within my skull. They made bright colors, silver-blue and white against the black background of his own power, and I could hardly think through each eruption inside my head.
It had been a binding spell, in the beginning. I held on to that thought, struggling to follow it through. Gary and I had found it and he’d made me uncomfortable by reading it aloud. Later on I’d reversed it and used it to free Cernunnos’s son, the Boy Rider, from the sleep his half brother, Herne, had laid on him. I had evidence that what I wanted to do worked. The only trick was making it work as well as I needed it to without the Master cluing in, but since I’d just walked out a window without him stopping me, I thought I could probably hang on a few more seconds. The truth was my head and heart hurt so badly right now that after those few seconds, I almost didn’t care what happened next.
I wanted to do more than just call Cernunnos here. I wanted to unleash him on the earth, just as we had unleashed the Master. It was an alarming prospect, really. He was a god, a collector of souls, a master hunter, and while I was drawn to him, even liked him, I hadn’t forgotten that he was all but impossible to contain, or the dangers an unconstrained god represented.
On the other hand, a constrained god had no chance at all against the Master, and a god was about the only chance I figured we had.
“I call on the stars to guide thee to me. I call on the green things to welcome thee.” Starlight in his ashy hair. Fiery green in his gaze, burning as hot as the stars themselves. “I call on this earth to know thee again.” It had known him once, all the year around, until the world and the gods had changed so much as to diminish him. No more. Despite my rage toward her, I reached for Renee, asking for her delicate touch through time. Asking her to carry the love of wild things and the awe of the hunt from time immemorial into today, awakening something I hoped was only sleeping, and not forever dead, in the heart of humanity. “I call on things to be known now, that were only known then.
“I call on the god who has so often heeded me.” An ache began to build in my chest, hope and love and regret, though it was nothing to the pain hammering my skull. I lifted my hands to the sky, welcoming, and wondered if he would see or notice or care about the tears burning hot lines down my cheeks. Maybe not. He was there, just on the other side of the sky, waiting, straining, anticipating. I knew it. I felt it, and no matter what else happened, knew that after this, nothing in my world would ever be the same. He was magic. He was the Hunt. He was a god, and gods did not walk this earth lightly. He would change us, as we had once changed him.
“By my will and by these words,” I whispered, “Cernunnos, I free thee to eternity.”
I emptied of all power.
The unmaking of a god was not a small thing. It took centuries, millennia, to unmake one, to whittle away its believers and thus its power. Even now in our own world, the old gods lingered: Zeus and Odin, Sekhmet and Kali. We might not worship them, but we knew their names, and so long as those names remained some spark of their power would, too. They were bound now, much lesser than they had once been, but still they remained.
It was much faster to make a god. First, maybe there was the struggle, like what I’d seen between Cernunnos and the Master. Maybe that didn’t always happen, though. Maybe most gods weren’t archetypes given physical form. Maybe most of them were passion and zealotry that spread quickly, miracles buoying hopes, promises of a new world under benevolent rule to earn a young god strength commensurate with its predecessor’s withering. To begin anew was a great gift. I should know.
But for all the energy of a new beginning, there was something to be said for old ties, too. And my god, my lord of the Wild Hunt, my Cernunnos, had not been wholly diminished.
The earth heaved. The sky heaved; the stars themselves heaved, ringing with exultation as a thing changed within the universe. As a fettered god was given freedom, and as a choice was made for a world. My choice, my world: Cernunnos was the devil I knew, and if unleashing him would save my friends, then it was a choice I could live with. If it meant humanity had to face the magic they had so long denied, so be it. I did not for an instant imagine it would be an easy choice or that the path that lay ahead would be smooth.
All that mattered was that there would be a path, a path of light and life, a cycle of death and rebirth, rather than an endless drain into bitter darkness. Left unchallenged, the Master would take each of us by the soul and have us destroy that which we most loved, as he was trying to do with me. I was rich pickings, but he would burn me out eventually, and move on to the next, and the next and the next, until nothing was lef
t to this world but a blackened cinder. His stolen lives would extinguish, and he would start his unliving existence anew, hungrier than ever for a taste of the life he had known.
I would never be able to stop him, not by myself, and a bound god wasn’t enough to help me.
Cernunnos rode free.
The sky itself couldn’t hold him: it filled with storm clouds that raced like baying dogs, the howling wind their cry. Where shadows lay within the clouds, black birds burst forth, flapping wings and raw cries heralding the return of their master. Pain and loss twisted through me, turning my vision hot as I thought of how pleased Raven would have been to see the rooks that were his smaller, gray-beaked cousins. As the shadows parted from the clouds, the clouds themselves became the white-bodied, red-eared hounds of the Hunt. Behind them, thunder rolled in the rhythm of horses’ hooves, beating broken earth into place again.
They led him for once: a dozen riders I knew by sight, and then more, more, more, riders on bays and blacks, on grays and on browns. Some seemed to nod to me as they rode the horizon: the bearded king, the slim-faced archer. The child, the Boy Rider, upon whom I had laid a spell not unlike the one I had just called Cernunnos with, but also not the same. He, of all of them, was the one I was certain greeted me: he pulled his golden mare around and galloped past me twice, emerald eyes locking with mine. I saluted, but even he couldn’t hold my attention, because even he wasn’t him, the lord of the Hunt. The boy turned from me and rode hard again, leading the others. They swept across the sky, laying claim to it, and the moonlight cast off its natural milky tones and instead burned green.
Finally came the god. From the stars, from the night, from the quiet gray-greenery of Tir na nOg, he came to this world where he had once been known, and would now be known again in his full and deadly glory. He rode down sunset paths, and he rode straight for me, his gaze hot on mine, as if I was the only thing that mattered in this or any world.
I had never seen such joy before: wild, raw, untamed joy, so huge it seemed even a god must burst with it. Cernunnos reined in his silver steed before me, and the image seared into my vision just as his first appearance was forever burned there.
He had been everything then, and he was so much more now. The stallion was no longer liquid silver: he was molten, heat pouring off him, though his color remained unchanged. The god upon his back was one and the same with the beast, an animal creature himself, with eyes that trailed green fire and a whipcord body that bespoke such strength that I both feared and desired a touch of his hand.
His crown, thick and heavy antlers, wound around his head and contained his starlight hair. He was perfect, complete, free, and his smile was all the emancipator of a god could hope for.
I blurted, “I’m sorry,” and then my mind was no longer my own.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It had been so easy. So easy to manipulate the host into giving up her body and calling my brother to her like he was a lost dog.
The shape of the thought gave me momentary pause, its form so different from how the old man had spoken. Such was the price of a mortal shell, that their small minds wore thoughts and words into familiar patterns, like a river cutting through soft soil. I could reshape them if I wished.
But some of the sweetness of agony came from letting whatever spark of the host’s mind remained hear and see and think in the way she was accustomed to, forcing her to feel my actions as if they were her own. In desperation, she wanted to think of me as the Master, a thing separate from herself, but it was my delight to make us one, and leave her unable to protest. So: it had been easy, and I reveled in the way she thought it, because it hurt her all the more for me to think that way, too.
My brother came as if this host were the star around which he spun. He burned more brightly than he had in our last encounter, strengthened, perhaps, by her affection, and that pleased me.
He knew in the moment of change that he had been tricked. Some outward seeming of this body’s demeanor: the blackness of my eyes, or an uncanny sight that showed him my domination of the small shamanic spirit. His pleasure turned to pain, then to fury, almost as furious as the captured soul inside me. She screamed within my mind, puny fists pummeling me, louder by far than either the old man or her lover, but even so, too small to be so much as an irritation. Strange that she could also be large enough to feed my hunger for rage and despair. She had capitulated so easily, her companions such easy marks, and now before me stood an angry green god.
Hungering, I reached for him.
An emptiness swallowed me, startling and brief. It was this body’s nature to use its own power, and there was none to be had.
In that instant, the green god struck at me instead.
He showed no regard for the host’s fragile body, driving a silver blade deep through its chest. Pain, more intimate and immediate than any I had ever known, lived in me, though the buried voice of my host laughed in agonizing familiarity. Guided by her, I lifted my gaze, struggling for breath to make the words. “Really, my lord god of the Hunt? Again? We keep doing this dance. You stab me, I stab you...”
I wrapped my hand around the blade itself and withdrew it from my own body. My heart stuttered, knees weakening. Blood spilled, coating my chest, my clothes, making red streaks on my black coat. I tried again to breathe and couldn’t: there was a hole in me where there shouldn’t be.
Two holes. A physical one, piercing the body, and an emptiness where her magic had been. I scrabbled for it, hands making useless claws that closed on nothing. My weakened knees failed and I fell to them, broken stone sending lesser shards of pain through my legs.
Foggily, faintly, it came to me that I had perhaps been tricked. That this host had known what magic it would take to call a god from beyond his time, and had done it more willingly than I’d known. It had used all the magic she had inside her, and all that was left for me to feed on was her pain and rage.
And even that was diminished. Worse than diminished: gone. Fallen into exhaustion, unsustainable. She hadn’t even left me with so much as despair. She was still there, still present, a hint of life within my mind, but it was as if she slept, and intended to sleep forevermore. There was no anger, no hate, nothing but weary calm.
With astonishing clarity and for the first time in my impossibly long existence, I thought, I will die here, and believed it. I would die here, because a snot-nosed mortal and my brother had conspired together without speech, and I had let it happen.
No. If this body couldn’t be healed by its own magic, then the lives of this world would feed me as I bled, until I forced my brother from the shape he knew and took it for myself. With bared teeth and my own rage to feed me, I shoved to my feet again, searching for the nearest dregs of humanity to feast upon.
To my delight, it came in the form of the old man and his wife, in the form of the Raven Mocker, and in the form of the one Joanne Walker loved. Their fear for my host was rich, powerful and, if not healing, at least sufficient. Still bleeding, I gathered their anger, their hatred, their worry, and coiled those weighted emotions in my hands like whips. I cracked them once, and even I rocked at the sound: thunderclaps in our very presence, knocking the mortals aside.
I lashed again, bringing the whips of my power together to catch a god.
A young goddess rose from the earth and caught the strike.
For half a heartbeat, had I a heartbeat left, I stood stunned, gaping, as taken aback as any of the mortals. Not so much, perhaps, as my brother, whose despair was suddenly piquant.
I knew this girl. Not just through my host, whose horror was sharp enough to waken her from silence within me, but in my own right. She was new to me, a recent taste; a recent taint. I saw it within her, black roots spidering through a green that blazed nearly so bright as the god himself. They were tied together, child-goddess and ancient god, blood calling to blood. Power calling to power, and all power, from the start of the universe until its end, had a choice to make.
I would m
ake her choose me, and through her I would have Cernunnos, my brother, her grandfather. Through her I would bleed my brother dry forever, and never again fear hungering for pain.
I pulled the whips and she stumbled forward, unable to release them. Never able, had I my way: the spidering blackness inside her was already reaching to connect with the magic I bound her with. But the goddess only stumbled, then stopped. Held her ground, leaned back against the pain of my whips, and spoke with a shaking, determined voice. “Leave my grandfather alone, you son of a bitch.”
“Is this what you’ve come to?” I crowed to Cernunnos. “Hiding behind children? Letting them die for you? This is better than I ever imagined, my lord god of the Hunt. This is rich.”
“He’s not hiding,” the girl whispered. “I’m protecting him. There’s a difference.”
“There is,” I said gleefully. “Okay, kiddo. If you can stand against me, I’ll give him to you.” I hadn’t imagined, when I began to take human hosts, how their own words would affect mine, but the cringe of discomfort on the girl’s face as I spoke with her friend’s voice was well worth it. My host had reacted the same way when I had used the others, and used their voices. I’d known having a body would be superior. I hadn’t realized it would be fun.
The girl paled, then lifted her chin. Her eyes were those of her grandfather, emerald-green and startling in a so-human face. “I’m strong,” she said. “You don’t scare me.”
I smiled. It was easier now, having practiced with the old man. “No. I terrorize you, Suzy.” That was the name the host knew for this girl, and she blanched again when I used it. “But I don’t have to. Join me, and let me show you what you might be.”
It had always been easy to pluck dreams of greatness from the minds of mortals; it was how my creatures had come to me, time and again. They had a need they imagined I could fill, and this child was no different. She had strength and knew it. She had undone a life in her time, a dangerous and terrible thing, but to her, worse than that, was the thought of how she might make one, if she could so easily undo one.