by C. E. Murphy
She had lost her parents, I saw. Mortal parents, no blood of her blood, but those who had raised and nurtured her, given her the link to humanity that she still clung to. Their deaths were a still-raw wound, and she had dreamed of salving that pain.
“Like this?” I gestured and they stood beside me, Rachel and David Quinley, startled and joyful.
The girl gasped, and the darkness in her grew. She lurched a step forward, but I waggled a scolding finger at her. “Not yet, Suzy. They can’t live again until you’re mine. That’s how this works.”
“Suzy.” The old man’s voice grumbled over my winning ploy. “Suzy, you were there, doll. You remember Archie Redding. You remember what he did to bring his family back, and you gotta remember it wasn’t ever really them. That ain’t Jo in there and you know it. It’s the Master, and he’s about death and pain, not about giving you your loved ones back.”
“You got your wife back!” The girl’s voice cracked in accusation and agony. Laughter bled in me just like the wound in my chest, but I held it back, knowing Suzy was fragile and that laughing now would lose her.
“Only ’cause she never really died. Your own gran’pa there took her and kept her safe for me, Suzy.”
The girl whirled on the green god, her pale hair a living thing. “Then why didn’t you save my parents?”
His gaze went to the old man and woman, then returned to the girl. “I had meddled too close to that time already. Time would not allow another change.”
“Why did you choose her?” Misery rang in the girl’s voice.
I sighed contentedly, tasting her betrayal, tasting her sadness and fears. Tasting her loneliness, and offering a salve for it: her mother’s simulacrum stepped forward with outstretched arms. “Suzy, sweetheart. Come to us. We miss you so much, baby. I’m so sorry we left you.”
“You didn’t leave. You were taken.” The girl had more strength in her than I imagined: she didn’t turn, although she trembled with the effort. Instead she looked on my brother, still seeking answers he wouldn’t give, while she spoke to the images of her parents. “It wasn’t your fault, but I still hate that you’re gone. Sometimes I hate you for being gone.”
Tears scalded her voice, tears of fire, tears so sweet I could feel their fire and revel in them. I was healing, the body knitting itself back together with the meal of her rage and sorrow. I’d be ready to strike soon, and tried to hold myself still with the anticipation of it.
“Why?” The girl threw the question at the god again. “Why did you choose her, and not my parents?”
“Because I too see all the possible paths, and their deaths led to this moment, where their survival did not. Because her survival led to this moment, and her death did not. If it could have been otherwise and led here, I might have chosen differently.”
“Why? What’s so important about here?”
“You.” My brother took a step forward, just as her false parents had done. I didn’t like that, didn’t like that they continued to speak, but I was so nearly healed, and her pain was so great, that I knew I could be whole again before she had made her choice. Then I would have her whether she wanted it or not, and then I would have them all.
“You,” the god said again. “Even more than my corrupt little shaman, in this moment you are important, granddaughter. Your parents died so you would awaken to your heritage. Annie Muldoon lived so this moment could come, with you aware and able to choose.”
The girl half turned, her gaze glassy between myself and the green god. “Are you telling me the fate of the world rides on what I choose?”
My brother almost laughed. “No. Only my fate. You know that our fates are not fixed, granddaughter, but you also know that they...trend.”
“But I can’t see the trends anymore. It’s just all black.” Despair rose in her, blackened and strengthened by the false faces of her parents turned hopefully on her. “If it’s all black, then the paths are chosen, aren’t they? There’s no point in even trying.”
I had her. In that moment, I had her, and triumph rose in my chest. The wounds sealed, my strength burgeoning as I drew darkness from girl. It was startling, how weak these bodies were, but in a minute or two it would no longer matter. Now it was just the joy of waiting, the stretching out of anticipation. I coiled a little, ready to pounce.
The green god spoke as though I wasn’t even there, much less of any importance. “Being unable to see the path does not mean it has disappeared. It means only that you must trust yourself, and if you cannot trust yourself, then trust me. I still see the paths, and I tell you that neither your fate nor mine is yet written on them. Find a light, Suzanne. Cling to it.”
Impossibly, her power in me weakened, fading away as her strength to resist grew. Seeing that, I risked all. To the hissing, spitting rage of the host mind, I gave the mother-simulacrum palpable form, and with it touched the girl’s face.
Suzanne’s resistance crumbled.
* * *
For one instant I wrenched control back from the Master and screamed, “Suzy, no!”
* * *
It came too suddenly to stop. I’d never imagined that a mortal mind could wrest control from me, and in my surprise, I lost the simulacrums. The mother-thing vanished and the girl’s face changed profoundly: horror, sorrow, resolution.
“Joanne’s good,” she said in a clear light voice. “Joanne’s awesome. But I’m a quarter god, and that trumps good. Come on, you son of a bitch. Catch me if you can.”
She fled, and I left Joanne Walker behind to pursue her.
* * *
I hit the ground like a sack of rocks, every muscle spasming from the Master’s sudden release. I fumbled for healing power, trying to calm the convulsions that wracked me, and wasn’t exactly surprised when the magic didn’t answer. I’d emptied it breaking all the laws of how gods worked when I brought Cernunnos into this world, and whatever hideous stitching-back-together the Master had done after Cernunnos had impaled him did not exactly lend itself to healing magic thinking everything was all systems go.
The warmth of a low desert sun relaxed my twisting body, and the heat of desert sand washed upward, taking the pain away. I melted against the ground, immediately aware that it wasn’t soft giving sand, but actually concrete, and smiled up at Coyote. “Hey. Thanks.” I sounded like I’d been drinking glass.
His return smile was sad. “You’re welcome. Better power up, Jo. Things are going to hell.” He offered a hand and pulled me to my feet.
It felt weird to be fully back in control of my own body. I leaned on Coyote, taking quick assessment. The headache had vanished, for which I was eternally grateful. Morrison and the Muldoons no longer looked like they were under any kind of attack, but their distress hadn’t lessened one bit at all. I followed their attention, wondering what had gone wrong in the five or six seconds since the Master had abandoned me.
Well, nothing new had gone wrong, exactly, except the Master was now a roaring dark cloud chasing Suzy all over hell and breakfast. A miasma, as he’d been before. But now he rushed around with a sense of urgency, as if he was uncomfortable unbodied among mortals. This, despite pretty clearly having it all over all of us in terms of raw power. Nice to know even world-ending cosmic powers had their insecurities.
Suzy was doing something impossible. Something I thought I could do: blurring from one step to another, like she was bending time itself to stay ahead of the Master. I tapped Renee, and she swung gently, her whole body moving in a negative. No. She does not share your gift.
“Then what...?” Cautiously, I triggered the Sight. Apparently it didn’t need a lot of power, because it slipped on.
The world turned to fire-green pathways. One after another, they flared, burning so brilliantly they hurt my eyes. Suzy leaped from one to another, sometimes crossing dozens of yards with a single step. Every jump lurched the air, and each path she left behind burned out, becoming a black hiss against the concrete before it faded entirely. The Master howled wit
h impotent outrage, leaping on the fading black paths like a cat not quite fast enough to catch a string. The landscape changed beneath them, broken concrete to smooth lawn to forest floor back to concrete, and a dozen things in between as they leaped from...not from place to place, but from time to time.
“Oh, my God.” I breathed the words, watching as the girl left green fire trails behind while she ran from one time line to another, time lines that she could see and anticipate. Time lines where the Master wasn’t there, time lines where this moment played out a little differently, so that she avoided his attacks by stepping into an alternate world where his attention was directed elsewhere. I wondered if, to her eyes, there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of copies of her, all leaping frantically from one time line to another, or if she was the only variant who had thought of this ploy. “My God. Can she even do that?”
My god, which was a phrase I would have to reconsider using from here on out, stood at my side, his own blaze-green eyes burning as he watched his granddaughter lead the Master in a merry chase. “It seems she can.”
“Can you?”
“Not with such alacrity. I lack the...flexibility. Watch thyself, my Siobhán.” He stepped away.
I blinked after him, wondering what that was about, then blinked back at Suzy’s helter-skelter chase. “Morrison, are you see—”
Suzy appeared immediately in front of me, arms already thrust straight out. She caught me in the chest, knocking my breath away and knocking me a few hard steps backward. “Wha—!”
The world burned green.
Time twisted. Not like I was accustomed to it doing. I slid back and forth through this time line, when I moved through time at all. This was a wrench, a twist that told me the very world around me was not the same as it had been. The place hadn’t changed: I was still in the Seattle Center, but this one hadn’t been ravaged. Tourists were everywhere, breathing air that tasted wrong in my lungs, pointing at exhibitions that had never been displayed there in my world, watching televisions that showed news anchors I didn’t know. All except one. Laurie Corvallis was on CNN, chatting up the president of the United States.
I stumbled, and Joanne Walker caught my arm to help me up.
For a couple seconds we gaped at each other, nose to nose and shock for shock. She looked very like me, except her hair had been trimmed more recently. She also brimmed with power where I was empty, and all of a sudden I knew what Suzy had done. “Wild, stupid, amazing, crazy kid,” I said to Suzy, even if she wasn’t there, and to the other Joanne I said, “I am so sorry about this.”
I put my hand on her chest and recharged my batteries. Power zinged from her to me and an image of Petite and jumper cables leaped to my mind. I hadn’t thought that. My dopplegänger lifted her eyebrows, then broke the cable connection and said, “Woo,” all dizzily.
I said, “Sorry,” again, and then Suzy grabbed me by the collar and dragged me back to our world.
The moment had cost her. She’d taken me somewhere to recharge, but she hadn’t been able to plot out her next jump while she was doing that. The Master was on her heels, and scrambling to escape, Suzy tripped. She fell away, across another time line, and caught a few seconds of freedom in it, but she was not on her feet when it spat her back out, and the Master was only a few steps behind. She pitched herself forward, fear keening from her throat. The Master rose to take her, a black boiling mass of hunger.
Herne, first-born mortal son of Cernunnos, father to Suzanne Quinley, broke free of the earth between them.
The impact took Herne’s very soul out of him, miasma suddenly contaminated with the roaring green power of an earth-born demigod. The green disappeared in waves and twists, fading into blackness. In less than a breath Herne’s soul had been consumed, and the Master stood in a new, living body that had once been the flesh of a half god.
Chapter Twenty-Six
For a moment the silence was thunderous, the shocked quiet of an audience after an unexpectedly brilliant performance. It was broken not by applause, but by two voices screaming loss: “Father!” cried one, and, “My son!” cried the other.
I took about half a second to wonder just how Suzy and Herne’s reconciliation had gone, that she called him father, but under the strain of these circumstances, maybe a little poetic license was advisable. “You murdering bastard who killed my adoptive parents and tried to sacrifice me,” just didn’t have the same ring to it.
Beneath the snark, though, cold and calm satisfaction rose. The Master had made his first real mistake.
He was half a god now, but he was all of this earth, his bitter, black aura bound to it. Herne had been born to a human mother, and I had brought Cernunnos back to this world in full. The god belonged here, belonged in a way he never had before, and Herne had been his son. The power of those things was tremendous, so great it came off the Master in waves, making it clear to me what had been done. Herne had given up his soul to save his daughter and—perhaps intentionally—to offer the temptation of flesh sculpted to the Master’s preference. Flesh that he couldn’t easily discard, as he’d done with me. Flesh and form, body and bone.
I finally had something I could fight.
A shudder ran over me from scalp to soles. The power I’d borrowed from my counterpart came to full life inside me, and was deepened by the focused will of my friends, my broken city, my god and his granddaughter, who still remained free. I took it and armored myself in it, bracer shield on my left arm and Cernunnos’s silver rapier in the opposite hand. My mother’s necklace, which had never offered more than moral support before, warmed and changed, became the living silver it had been made of, and slipped down my torso as—
I took a quick look to be sure and exhaled in relief. As a silver breastplate and greaves, not a chain-mail bikini. Thank goodness.
My coat, gratifyingly, turned white again.
For some reason that in particular brought a grin to my face. A vicious, sharp berserker’s grin, to be sure, but a grin. I lifted my gaze and found the Master watching me. Not waiting; he wasn’t gentleman enough to wait. I thought maybe he was adjusting. It had, after all, taken him a minute or three to get fine motor control going when he’d jumped into Gary, and a demigod’s systems might work differently from a human’s.
And it was new. It wasn’t Herne, with his stooped shoulders and long sad face. It was a face I knew better than that. Young. Hot. Multiethnic.
My own face, looking back at me with black eyes, black coat, black blade in hand. My blade, but made of obsidian.
“Please,” I said softly. “I’ve battled my demons. You’re not going to get anywhere with that guise.”
“I’ll get far enough,” he said in my voice, and fifteen months of pent-up anticipation burst free in a headlong rush.
In the first minute or two neither of us had anything even vaguely resembling strategy. We got in too close to even use our swords, which both disappeared when it became clear fists were the choice weapon of the moment. We each had one of the other’s lapels and pounded each other’s faces with the free fist, all schoolyard brawl and no finesse at all. Every hit that landed on me was of skull-splitting agony, but every one I landed on the Master carried a fistful of healing magic, and hurt him just as badly. I healed: he didn’t, not exactly, but he was full up of godling power, and it let him repair himself without reaching beyond the two of us to suck the lives out of the people around us.
I had to cut his ability to do that. If I could keep him from draining lives to repower himself, eventually even Herne’s life force would run out and I’d find myself pounding on a sack of meat.
That sounded extremely satisfying. Not easy, but satisfying. A hit cracked my cheekbone and the pain blinded me. I loosened my grip on his coat and he slammed his arms up, freeing himself. I healed as we backed away from one another, and then, like prizefighters with the thirst for first contact satisfied, began to circle each other. He looked wary, which was a lot more than I expected. I tried not to look like I’
d already had the crap beaten out of me, in hopes of striking fear into the heart of my enemy.
Then I thought about the time I’d just spent with him in my head, and concluded I didn’t actually want him to fear me. Fear strengthened him. I wanted him to think I was easy pickings, that I didn’t stand a chance of defeating a creature like him. Only then I got scared, which didn’t help, either. I said, “Oh, fuck it,” under my breath, called my sword to life again and charged him.
His black blade reappeared as well, singing with the blow, but not breaking. Not obsidian, then. Obsidian would have shattered under the weight of that blow. I had no idea what kind of metal came in pure and glittering black. The dark heart of a meteor, maybe, which was a lovely image and did nothing for my confidence. My sword was only silver, which wasn’t exactly as hard as meteor iron.
Of course, my sword was also magic, which probably evened the odds. I swung my shield, using it as a weapon, as well. Black lightning smashed into it, absorbed by purple and copper. Nothing more than a faint sting came through to my arm, and even that swelled and altered, purifying and changing from his death power into my shamanic warrior’s magic.
I’d never seen him falter before. It gave me hope, and I pressed the advantage, yelling as healing power roared into my sword. It cut him deeply, magic crackling and shriveling his flesh. He screamed and fell back, but when the sword left his body, the wound remained. Healing fire danced in it, flat lightning snaps as ruthless as his own magic. I had no idea what it thought it was healing, but it hurt the Master, and not in a way he seemed to gain strength from, so I was all for it.
It occurred to me, as we came together again, that this was likely to be a very long fight. It would do me good to not think about every play, every strike, because I would exhaust myself mentally long before the job was done. I fell back myself, looking around. Reminding myself of who and what I was fighting for.