by Russell Moon
My family. Will be back together.
“No,” she screams as he steps nearer. “No, Marcus, no, no.”
I wince as I hold her still, feeling like some horror dentist’s assistant. But I reassure myself, as I have reassured her, that this will bring it all to a close, that this moment of magic will at least stop all the awfulness that has been swirling around for so long. Whatever we get next has got to be better than what we have now.
She is screaming like an eagle as he comes right up.
And shows his hand.
“What is this?” I ask, seeing what it holds.
He raises a hand that has foot-long razor nails, curved, yellowed, pointed, like the bony claw of some great bird of prey.
“This is what has to be done, son.”
“This, meaning what?” I ask desperately.
“Mingling the blood,” he says harshly. “Completely. She must be opened and filled. With your blood.”
“What?” I scream, just as loud as Eartha is still screaming.
“When our bloods are mingled, completely, irrevocably, the blood war is over. The blood of us all is one blood once more. The infernal purity issue is dead forever.
“As long as you both survive it.”
My heart sinks like a stone. He doesn’t care about me—about anything. Why can’t I get it straight?
At that instant, I feel it again, and I see on his face that he does too. They are coming. The only one not sensing it is Eartha. She merely screams away, with superhuman stamina.
My father strikes, his long, middle fingernail catching Eartha at the hinge of the jaw just before I catch him.
“Don’t fight this, Marcus,” he says, the force of our struggle twisting his face upward.
“Don’t,” I say, pushing, pushing back.
“Don’t be duped,” he says.
“Stop,” I say. “Stop, just stop.”
Neither of us will give, and neither will stop to negotiate. I feel, as he does, the approach of the coven like a cavalry of thundering hoofbeats.
Eartha runs finally out of strength and breath, and I feel her go limp in my arms as he makes his final, fearsome lunge.
With everything I have, and much I never had before, I drive back, hearing the deep, foreign, gravelly voice come out of me, seeing my vision go all shimmery with the rage.
And I take his hand, snap the wrist, and shove the five deadly nails right back up into his own face, the skin tearing wide open in front of me.
Then I add one more shove.
Off the cliff. Down and down and down, into the surf.
I stare after him, watching him, absorbing the moment, praying to God or gods or whoever matters that this is the last view I’ll ever have of the selfish, evil, rotten bastard.
CHAPTER
8
“Oh, no, not by a long shot,” Dr. Spence says as he tends to the wound so close to his daughter’s jugular.
He is discussing the possibility that my father is dead.
“Power like he has,” he says, shaking his head solemnly, “it takes quite a bit more than a little scratch and a seven-hundred-foot drop to finish the job.”
The job. I wonder how much of what I am getting caught up in is just business as usual in their world, when for me every day feels like Armageddon, and frankly, the end of everything can’t come soon enough.
“But we don’t need him dead, Marcus. We just need his power taken. We need our throne back. We need him deposed.”
“The rings,” I say.
“The rings,” he says.
Eartha is sitting up on the kitchen table, looking shy and sorry, hurt physically and psychically and ready to quit.
The rest of the coven have gone.
“I knew,” Dr. Spence says, speaking tenderly to his daughter, though the words seem addressed to me as well. “I knew something was brewing, but I couldn’t tell what. I knew he was very much with us. So when I knew the two of you were also out in the forest, I realized precisely what he was up to.”
I feel a powerful shame at that moment, even if I am not certain I have earned it. I drop my chin to my chest.
“It is not your fault,” he says to me. “You are certainly not the first to be caught up in his web, and you have far more reason than most.”
I look at Eartha, who is the vision of innocence, her neck still angry and raw around the bandage that now covers the wound.
“The important thing,” says Dr. Spence, “is that you now know. It was an expensive lesson but a necessary one. He cannot be trusted. You must protect yourself from him. You must protect everyone from him.
“You must protect Eleanor from him. Yes? Yes, Marcus?”
This is, I think, the first thing my father and Dr. Spence have agreed on. Eleanor needs protection.
No, actually, the first thing they agreed on was Eleanor herself. They’re both big on Eleanor. Though only one of them left her.
I would so love to see Eleanor right now. I need to look out for her, just to be near and know that she is safe, even if she will not talk to me. Even if all she wants to do is slap me, I will take it.
“He cares not for you, for Eleanor, for anyone.”
“I know that, all right?”
“He left you.”
“I said I know that, goddamn it!”
“What you don’t know is that he left you as a sacrifice to this quest for power and immortality.”
I stare at him, trying to figure out what exactly I am being told. Is he just being sadistic, reminding me over and over that I was thrown away like trash? Or is there something more to it? I feel my whole body flush and burn.
“What are you saying?”
“When he abandoned you and your mother, Marcus, it was to appease Cernunnos. He abandoned you to us believing that we would eliminate you in the name of purity. When he left you as a baby, and your mother defenseless, it was his intention that you die.
“He sent you both to the slaughter.”
I cannot breathe. The walls come close, the ceiling presses down on me. I feel the rage and the humiliation at once. I hear thunder in my ears and see blood on every surface.
And I see his face and I cannot bear it. I am gasping. I need air. I need release.
“You will be going,” Dr. Spence says calmly, putting a hand on my shoulder to steady me.
I nod. He nods.
“I realize how this all must be for you, Marcus. It is horrifying, the truth, but all the more reason you must be made aware now. You will have to meet him, Marcus. The end of this is coming. It is coming quickly. He will not rest. He has come back for a purpose. You are central to that purpose and so is your mother, and no one will be safe until this is finished.
“He has come to see himself as a god. The equal of Cernunnos. That has been the source of all our troubles. You are the only one who can end this, Marcus.”
I have to go home. I have to make sure that Eleanor is all right.
“We need those rings, Marcus. And we need you.”
I take a deep breath, feel my own ring biting into my bones as it grows and grows.
“You need the fingers,” I say, pointedly.
He shrugs, helps Eartha down off the table.
“He can learn to live without the fingers,” he says coldly. “It will be nothing compared to all the pain he has caused and will cause.”
I say nothing, for I have nothing to say.
I walk out of the kitchen, down the hall, to the front door. I feel her at my back as I push through, onto the porch.
“Thank you,” she says softly, turning me around and kissing me on the cheek. “For what you did.”
She kisses me again, on the other cheek.
“And for what you are going to do.”
Her kiss lingers there lightly, on my cheek, for a long time. I close my eyes and just feel it. Think of nothing. Just feel it.
It feels so good. So right.
Eleanor is all right. In a way.
S
he is unharmed, is all. Still, she is not back to her old self, not anywhere near it. She will talk to me, but in very short, flat spurts.
Still, she is not presently livid with me. This is progress, at any rate. I will take what I can get these days.
We sit across the table at breakfast, on the verge of conversation, but the problem is neither one of us has the right thing to say. I am not a witch would be the right thing to say, on my part. It really doesn’t matter that you are a witch would be the right thing to say on hers.
But the knowledge that neither of us can deliver on that keeps us stealing glances at one another and then quickly returning to piling our scrambled eggs onto our toast and shoveling the whole thing into our mouths.
I am, in fact, surprised to find her still here. She has taken to doing almost all her work out of the house these days, hauling her stuff over to Spence’s house or to the college itself, as if she had an actual, full-time position.
Which does not please me at all, for the record.
“I’ll be working at home today,” she says, surprising me with information. “I don’t feel quite up to going out.”
As a matter of fact, this statement makes perfect sense, for Eleanor does not look up to going out. She has been coming down with something—or just plain coming down—since our bad time in the woods. She looks weak to me and gray in the face. As if age is coming over her at a slightly accelerated pace. Her movements, even, are slighter and more gentle than normal. So I am glad to hear that she is taking note and taking care.
Not least of all because I feel so totally responsible for it.
But for an instant, she brightens just slightly. “I have my own office now,” she says through the gloom of us. “At the college.”
And she breaks my heart doubly.
She breaks it first with the sound of her voice, so small and so sad, and so full of the same longing I feel in my own chest. Breaks it with the realization that she has been dying to tell me this because I am her best friend and she mine, and she hasn’t had something like this development to report for a long time, and my little problem has popped up at just the right time to pour ice water over the whole thing.
But she breaks my heart in a whole other conflicting way. Breaks my heart because I don’t want her to have it. I don’t want her out of the house, out of my sight, out of my reach, or away from my protection.
Out of the house and into Dr. Spence’s domain.
He may be all right. They may be my people and my coven. But everybody still bears watching.
And Eleanor is off limits. To everyone.
“Wow,” I say, and conversation of any kind feels not so bad. “That’s really something, Eleanor. That’s great. Moving along quickly now, are ya?”
She smiles demurely, and I know I am right about how she has been bursting to tell me, bursting to share.
We are not greedy or unrealistic, Eleanor and I. We know what is still lying there between us, against us. But we are both truly happy to have crossed this one little bridge, and we won’t mess it up by going for more. We smile. We eat.
Chuck is scratching at the porch door.
Chuck is not a scratcher of doors.
I go immediately to the porch and look out, down toward the water.
It is, of course, for me. It is the bastard himself, looking like he is fresh up from the grave, though we know already that he has not had the good grace to die at all.
He has come for me.
Standing there in the water the way he has many times before, he is now infinitely more unnerving. His face, where I have marked him with his own claws, is shocking in its savage redness, the sheared and fresh nature of his wounds, as if he has been deliberately keeping them alive. He stares at me, expressionless, waiting.
For he knows there is nothing he need say.
“I’m going out for a bit, Eleanor,” I say, walking to her where she sits and hugging her so hard and so long that I can only be making her feel weaker, not better.
Except that she then, halfway through, begins hugging me so long and so hard that I might not be able to leave the house at all.
It feels large, this moment … our moment. Like we both know much more than we are saying.
Which is, of course, true.
I head for the door—not the porch and the stream, for I know he won’t be waiting for me there—and Chuck comes ambling up right behind me.
“No,” I say to him, stroking his great face on both sides. “You need to stay. You can’t be there this time. And you need to watch Eleanor for me. You have to take care of Eleanor.”
He sits down there, right at the door, as if he doesn’t believe me. As if he expects to shoot right out as soon as the door opens.
“No,” I say, more emphatically, and shove him in the direction of Eleanor, who for once seems genuinely to want his company. He sits by her chair, and she rests a hand on his flat head.
That’s the way I see them this last time, perfectly framed in the doorway as I back out.
When I reach the seat of the coven, among the standing stones, he is not yet there. Not visibly there.
I walk through the honor guard of stones, across the glossy morning moss, to the very center, turning two, three circles, taking it all in.
Once in motion, I see the stones for what they are: men, women, witches—centuries, millennia old, giants among our people, now standing watch over all we do. They are all beautiful, and only rarely do I perceive in one or another anything of the venal, untrustworthy nature I have encountered regularly in my dealings with the live ones.
I feel almost safe now, here. Almost protected. I feel like I belong, as I have not felt before.
“Time,” I call out, loudly, into the cool dewy air.
He materializes, walks smoothly across the moss to me.
As he stands before me, I come close to pity.
His face is a mangled mess. Like butcher’s meat strapped across a human skull. He is still bleeding, though it is days later, from the wounds I gave him.
He is stooped a bit, one shoulder riding lower than the other, his neck listing about ten degrees to one side.
He is a sad, fractured figure.
Lightning. Streaking from the sky, diagonally down, cutting the air between the two of us, precisely between the two of us, sinking into the ground as I gawp, then—zing—back up out of the earth, blasting into my face.
I scream, am blinded, thrown backward fifteen feet to land with a thump on my back.
I writhe, grabbing my face, rubbing, trying to see what I can see.
I see him. Standing over me in a riot of exploding white and red and orange flashes.
“Don’t pity me,” he says dispassionately. “Pity becomes pitiful in the blink of an eye.”
I am furious, as much with myself as with him. I climb to my feet, malevolence on my mind.
And am stunned once again to find, when I stand, that I am standing over my father. Certainly two feet taller than him and big, broad, stony muscular. I look at my arms, my burstingly huge arms, I flex my muscles, I open and close my fists, and watch it all like watching a film of myself, but not myself. I pound a fist on my own chest just to hear the thud of it. Then I look down at him. I lean toward him.
And as quick as the lightning before, his hand, that sneaky malicious hand, is shot straight up under me, as if in a boxer’s uppercut, only with a long-nailed index finger extended like a sword.
And thrust up under my chin, through the underside of my mouth, tearing the flesh, the muscle, every fiber. I feel him, as if it were happening in slow motion, cutting my tongue, through my tongue, pushing upward still.
Until finally his finger, with its razor-sharp nail, is lodged in the roof of my mouth.
I fall backward, falling and falling and falling with all the bulk of my newfound size, falling like the greatest tree in the forest, long and hard….
And I crash with him on top of me, on my chest. His blade is still stuck through
me, nailing my mouth shut, though my brain screams with everything I’ve got.
His horrible minced face is one comfortable inch from my own. He hardly looks like the man he was before. But those eyes.
Those damned mismatched gray-green eyes are practically bumping up against mine, as he speaks.
“You still have very, very much to learn,” he says. “You have all the power in the world, and not a clue what to do with it.”
What can I do but listen? And hate him. I can lie here hating him, and I do.
But then he quickly—not painlessly—draws his nail out of my mouth.
He gets to his feet and, ponderously, I follow.
I lean over and spit about a liter of blood on the ground.
“The rings,” I say.
“Yes,” he says, unsurprised.
“I need the rings.”
“Why are you so easily deceived, my son?”
“Please,” I say, “just let this be over. Please,” I am using a voice that is too pleading for my own good. Too weak to be trying to do what I am doing.
“I am to blame, I know,” he says. “You should have been taught by your father. You would know truth when you saw it, if you had been brought along. I am sorry, son. I am truly sorry.”
I spit more and more blood till the ground at my feet looks like a slaughterhouse floor.
“Don’t make me kill you. Don’t say you are sorry, and don’t make me kill you.”
“They have told you nothing but lies. Because you are the only one who can kill me, Marcus.”
“Liar. They don’t need you dead. All they need are those precious rings of yours.”
He smiles sadly. “Marcus Aurelius, there is no difference.
“Liar!” I shout.
He points with both hands at his chest, at his hips, at his legs.
“You know this by now, son. You can sense it. Feel inside yourself. Feel how deep are the roots of this thing. These rings do not come off of us. They come out of us. As I told you before, you are an assassin. You have been sent to kill me.”
I do not want to. I do not want to do what he says, do anything he says. I do not want to hear anything he says.