And watching it all, the gothic spires with their mighty, welded plates of green metal rose like sentinels upward, to the sky.
Moss inhaled, buffeted by a breeze that was much stronger up here than in the sheltered park below. He slowed his run, the aches in bones and muscles returning. His bruised ribs caught at his lungs on every breath. The soles of his feet tingled with pins and his left wrist was on fire.
But Moss didn’t care. He felt the cars. The river surging below. The dancer’s prayers. He felt the strength of his comrades, and the people, and the beauty of the day.
In the midday sunlight, there on top of St. John’s Bridge, Moss felt the balancing point, the equinox, as it came to rest inside him.
For the first time in his life, Moss knew that he was whole.
40
Shaggy
Moss. Shaggy’s heart flew into her throat. She coughed and gulped at the wind. Phoebe was signaling to her, but she couldn’t pay attention. She’d seen him dive into the water. Had he surfaced? Why wasn’t he up on the bridge?
The rope tugged at her harness. Damn it. She grabbed at the rope, her hands slipping on the silks, she struggled to right herself again. To begin the climb back to the bridge.
What the hell is going on?
She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. Shaking her head, Shaggy narrowed her focus to her hands, gripping the rope. To her thighs and knees, grabbing and re-twining themselves around the silks. No matter what was happening below, Shaggy had to get back up top. Falling into the water wouldn’t help anyone. Wouldn’t help Moss. And who knew what that crazy witch was doing, anyway. He was supposed to be up on the bridge, not canyoning off a wooden dock into frigid water.
The sense of freedom she had felt was gone. It was hard, climbing in the open air. A lot more difficult than the descent. Descending, it didn’t matter much if the wind caught silk and swung you off course. Gravity was on your side. Battling wind and gravity at the same time wasn’t something she’d ever had to do before. This climb took all her effort. Sweat rolled down her back and sides.
Muscles burning, she heaved herself upward, wind battering her face, hands freezing despite the sweat. And there it was. A lug nut like a huge green eye before her, its cousins rising up the steel in one straight line. Marking the path. She gasped in a huge breath, lungs working like a bellows, muscles shaking with effort.
Shaggy’s feet pushed off from metal. Her left hand grasped the metal rail. Strong hands gripped her beneath her arms and yanked her up. Ribs and breasts crashing into metal, Shaggy tumbled over and onto the concrete walkway. Her butt landed with a bruising thump, cracking her teeth together. She fought to slow down her breathing and fight her way out of the silks.
“You’re good, girl. You’re good.” Terra. Hovering around her. Unclipping the harness. Untangling the top and silk.
The solid ground felt good. Familiar. But she already missed being cradled by the wind. And…
“Moss! He jumped into the water!”
“Someone else will take care of him. We’re taking care of you, now.” Terra raised her head and called out, “Can we get a blanket? Water?”
Boots slapping concrete. A voice. “Here you go.” Soft warmth enveloped Shaggy. Water bottle under her nose.
“Drink something,” Terra said.
Shaggy drank. The water was good. Really good. She gulped more down, wishing it was tea. Or a shot of whiskey. Yeah. She was really cold.
Cars started honking further down the bridge, around the blockade. Voices shouted.
“What the—?” Terra said.
Shaggy stood, trembling, still halfway tangled in the silks. She swayed, and Terra caught her.
Shaggy went up on the balls of her feet. She needed to see. On the other side of the lockdown, running, limping, one arm wrapped around his waist…. It was Moss. A soaking wet Moss. He was safe.
But even from a distance, his eyes looked different.
They were black as the bottom of a well.
41
Moss
There were people. Shouting. Cars. Honking. No police. So strange. Surely someone had called this in by now.
He ran up to Tariq, who gesticulated, deep in conversation with Squirrel. Tariq’s head snapped up as Moss got closer.
“Moss! What happened to you, man?”
Moss stopped and bent over, hands on his knees, breath wheezing in and out. Damn it. Every part of his aching body was on fire now and his ribs and wrist were killing him. It was as if he’d never been dunked in the icy water at all.
Except that, underneath the adrenaline and pain, the river still flowed steadily through his veins.
“He jumped in the river,” Alejandro said. “Idiot. And then ran all the way up here.”
Moss ignored both of his friends. He needed to catch his breath, but the magic rolled through him, making it hard to do anything except lie down on the bridge. He felt the kami strengthening, aided by Raquel and her Goddess, ready to meet the egregore head on. Moss felt ready, too. Ready to enter the æthers again. Ready to face the poison, the greed and the lies.
He wasn’t the best trained person in the coven, but he knew the river, and the river knew him. Moss sensed the GranCo egregore creeping around the edges of his consciousness, assessing the enemy, trying to get in. Well, it wasn’t going to.
“Alejandro!” he gasped out. “Protection. Around me.”
“You got it.”
Moss felt the air around him thicken, growing more palpable. He nodded, then receded back into his thoughts, seeking out the taste of magic and the work that needed to be done.
The egregore was built for one purpose only: to make money, by any means necessary. To make money and to delude those who might ask how or why. But that was only the beginning of its life. As it grew, the spirit of GranCo decided, deep in its sick little magical child brain, that it wanted more power. How to get that power?
By controlling shareholders and executives alike. By increasing the influx of capital and the output of the poisons that ensured the money would flow, no matter what.
And then? By choking the river until everything within it began to die. Then there would be no worries about environmental impact. No more struggle with pretending to keep the waters clean.
Distant drumming mixed with the honking of the cars. Moss smiled. The people were coming. In one long procession, they walked and danced and rolled their way up the bridge. They crowded the sidewalks, they danced between the cars. Feathers shook and rattles sounded. Ribbons and fringed shawls danced through the air. And above it all, bright banners announced to the world that Water is Life, that the Willamette Must Run Clean. Painted fish swam beneath cardboard birds, held aloft by adults and children alike.
The party had arrived.
As the crowd came closer, Moss closed his eyes, dropped his attention into his solar plexus, and listened, with all his might. He heard the silent prayers of the elders. Felt the GranCo egregore battling with the mighty Raquel, who wielded the power of Yemọja, she of rivers and oceans. She whose power would not be denied. He heard the kami of the Willamette, calling out his name.
And then he heard what the people were chanting, a vibrant call and response, and he threw back his head and laughed.
“The waters of life are rising up! The waters of life will drown all greed! The waters of life run sweet and clean! The waters of life are all we need!” Over and over, the chant looped, and swam, and soared. Tariq picked it up on the bullhorn microphone and began to chant with them.
“The waters of life are rising up!” Tariq sang.
“The waters of life will drown all greed!” the people replied.
“The waters of life run sweet and clean!”
“The waters of life are ALL WE NEED!”
The people had reached the lockdown. News cameras and reporters shoved their way through cars and crowd. Kiyiya walked forward, dark eyes darting between Moss and Tariq. The drums pounded, and the chant swirled, faster
and faster, until the lead drummer raised his stick, high in the air, and as if all the drummers were one body, and one drum, a booming echo rolled across the bridge. Three strikes upon the skins.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Kiyiya raised his hands. Slowly, silence spread from the front of the crowd to the back. Tariq held the mic of the bullhorn up to Kiyiya’s mouth.
“The waters of life must run clean!”
Every camera was trained on Kiyiya, and the backdrop of the locked down anarchists. They’d gotten one of the large “Water is Life” banners to the other side of the lockdown, where it formed a backdrop for Kiyiya to stand in front of. Moss smiled. In the dim recesses of his mind he knew that this was good messaging, and good theater. Everything needed to capture imaginations that would otherwise never pay attention to what was going on under their noses as they went about their lives.
But most of Moss’s consciousness was with the kami of the river. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and smelled the familiar scent of lilac. Shaggy. And on the other side of him, a solid presence, smelling slightly of mint. Terra.
“I might need you to hold me up,” he said. “I’m going under, and I’m going fast.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Terra replied, “but whatever you need, I’m here.”
“Me, too.” Shaggy’s voice was soft next to his ear. “Go with the river, Moss. We’re here. And I love you.”
She loves me… High up on the bridge, the waters closed over Moss’s head.
Then Moss was flying, buoyed by etheric waters, up to the astral planes.
42
Shaggy
The east side of the bridge was filled with people and cars as far as Shaggy could see. Fish and birds, banners and dancers. And one of the elders, saying something into the microphone that Shaggy couldn’t focus on long enough to even make out.
Her attention was on the man in front of her. On the heat of his body beneath the damp T-shirt. Like hanging upside down above the waters of the Willamette, standing beside Moss, facing whatever might come, felt right to her.
But that sense of rightness didn’t ease her worry.
Something was wrong with Moss. Very wrong. But strangely, he also felt more himself, somehow. Despite the fact that she could barely feel him in his body, she somehow knew that, just as she had felt her destiny while dangling off the side of this bridge, Moss’s destiny was unfolding around them all, right here. Right now.
“We’ve got you, Moss,” she whispered again. “Just let go.”
She looked at Alejandro, who gave her a nod, but said nothing, face set in a mask of concentration.
And then Moss began to speak. He lifted his arms in a mirror of Kiyiya, who was still speaking on the bullhorn mic box. Moss’s words were soft at first, growing louder with each utterance.
“There is poison in the water. There is poison in their hearts. There are mirrors, mirrors everywhere. Look! Look now! And never look away again.” His body swayed with the rhythm of his words. She and Terra kept a hand upon each shoulder, making sure he didn’t fall. It was funny: just moments ago, it had felt as if Shaggy could barely stand, but in this moment? Nothing could move her.
Kiyiya turned and said something to Tariq, who nodded, then moved to stand next to Moss, holding the square mic box in front of his mouth.
“We think that evil doesn’t walk here, with us. We think that this is the twenty-first century, and such language only belongs in the past. But together, we can create powerful community, and beauty, and together, we can flow with the river, bringing justice. Bringing change. But just as surely as we can do those things, humans can also create monsters out of our greed or helplessness. And that greed poisons soil and sky. And water.”
The words climbed their way up Shaggy’s spine, settling in the space between heart and throat. She was a little freaked out by this Moss-Not-Moss person who was speaking. Touching him, feeling the vibration of words through skin, felt alien. Strange. Her mind wanted to reject all of it as ridiculous—his words, and the fact that the man she knew as Moss wasn’t exactly speaking right now—but her heart knew otherwise. She could feel the poison he was speaking of. She knew the sense of hopelessness, and had brushed up against that kind of greed. It had tainted her mother and their relationship, though Shaggy didn’t think it had swallowed her mother whole.
Not yet, anyway.
But this evil Moss was talking about? It was a swallow-cities-whole kind of thing. Shaggy felt it in her bones.
“There are people here today who would poison our whole city and call it good. They were holding a press conference in the park, just moments ago. Ah.” He looked at something in the distance, across the cars and the crowd. Shaggy tracked his gaze past the lockdown and the news crews, toward a cluster of painted cardboard birds and fish. There were people in suits there, looking out of place. “Patricia Sloane. I see you.”
Shaggy saw a dark-haired woman in a suit look up. Saw her skin grow pale, her lips set in a thin, grim line. Even from a distance, Shaggy saw a sheen of sweat on the woman’s face despite the mildness of the day.
“You profit as you choke our waters, and poison the children, the animals, the trees. My people, Patricia here works for GranCo, and everyone here in this city is paying them. But the river thinks that it is time for them to pay. Time for you to pay, Patricia.”
It was as if a ripple moved through the whole crowd. As if something large had just washed over everyone on the bridge, whether bystanders stuck in traffic, or the people who had gathered to bless the river and confront the people intent on harm.
The dark-haired woman raised one hand to shield her eyes. Shaggy looked at Moss, who was still speaking, eyes fixed on the woman, as if engaged in silent battle.
From somewhere in the middle of the crowd, a voice shouted. “GranCo out! The river is sacred! GranCo out! The river is sacred!”
Words still flowed from Moss’s mouth, but they were washed away by the power of the crowd.
Shaggy shivered in the autumn sun, and the bridge began to shake.
“What’s happening?” she called to Terra.
“The cops,” Terra replied. “That’s the sound of their boots, running up the bridge.”
The crowd roared again. Tariq took up the chanting, bellowing it into the bullhorn mic. Fish and birds and banners waved in the air. Cars honked. The people beat their own feet on the bridge.
No longer on the mic, Moss still stared and murmured. Shaggy strained to catch his words.
“The river will protect its own. You, Patricia, you can hide no more.”
The small hairs stood up on the back of Shaggy’s neck. What the hell was happening here?
“GranCo out! The river is sacred!” The crowd jostled, danced, and chanted to the beating of the mighty drums. Cameras whirred. And a row of police in riot gear appeared at the far edge of the crowd.
Shaggy began to weep from the strange beauty of it all, or maybe out of fear. She couldn’t tell.
For the first time in her life, the two things didn’t seem to cancel each other out. Maybe this was what it could feel like to simply be alive.
Maybe this was what it felt like to show up as yourself, and know you mattered.
43
Moss
He was on the bridge, facing a bright crowd. He was in the river, flowing south. He was in concrete and steel. He was in the sky, tethered to a cloud drifting by. He was in the æthers, high on the astral planes.
Moss danced. Moss swam. Moss was the Willamette and the St. John’s Bridge. Moss was the people. Moss was a man.
Moss was a witch in battle, joined with the power of his sister, Raquel, connected, heart to heart, to every member of Arrow and Crescent coven.
High up on the astral, and walking between worlds, as the words of the river poured through him, Moss fought the egregore. Moss fought Patricia Sloane.
The egregore was made of light and sound. A being fed by money, toxins, and blood. A being
that cared for nothing. A cancer that cared only for more.
But Moss had more than enough. He had a triangle supporting him. Shaggy. Terra. Alejandro. He had Raquel, the river, and the crowd. But most importantly, they all had one another. The monster that he faced would never have that. It had to grow too large because otherwise? It would always die alone.
Alejandro fed Moss a solid skein of energy, gathered from the coven, amplified by the power of the crowd. It moved through Moss’s wrists into his fingertips. He was dimly aware of an aching in his left wrist, but it wasn’t quite enough to pull him from the æthers and back into his body. He linked with Raquel, sent her a questioning thread.
::Look:: she said. ::Stop focusing on the earth planes and look.::
Moss dragged his dual attention all the way up and focused. He saw it then, so clearly. On the astral plane, the monster looked like an oil slick surrounding an open, sharp-toothed mouth. It smelled like one thousand board rooms, and ten billion dollar bills. Raquel stood on the other side of the being, conch shell in one hand, wand in the other, sketching patterns in the air. Moss heard it roar inside his head.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Over here!” The egregore turned, and roared again, its breath like burning oil fields. It raked a limb outward again, battering at his shields. Moss hissed as the monster connected with the rips in his aura. The rips it had made when Patricia Sloane had looked him in the eye at Justice House. Up on the astral plane, Moss stumbled, then righted himself again.
Moss didn’t care. The egregore had already injured him. It had broken his car. Put him into the hospital. Dashed his body against a truck. It wasn’t going to hurt him anymore.
Not today. Not if he could help it.
By Dusk Page 16