The Walker Papers: Raven Calls Part 4

"I don't know what Knocknaree is," I said, approximating her p.r.o.nunciation as best I could, "but it's a marker for the cave, and if you know where it is, we should probably haul a.s.s that direction and bind the d.a.m.ned cauldron so Gary and I can go home."

Gary squeaked, "That might be a problem, doll," and when I looked over, the Morrigan had my sword at his throat.

I had shot somebody four mornings ago. It was not something I was proud of and not something I wanted to repeat. Ever. Except I'd have dropped the Morrigan in a heartbeat, if I'd had my gun. I doubted it would change the whole history of the world. Someone else similar would just replace her. But I didn't have my gun, and later I would probably think that was good, because digging modern-day sh.e.l.l casings out of a millennia-old Tara hillside would really throw archaeologists for a loop.

Right now, though, my fingers clenched like I was squeezing a trigger, and the Morrigan gave me a tight, nasty smile. "Don't think of it, gwyld. You may draw a blade from the air, but not while it resides in my hand."

She was right, too. I could almost feel the hilt in my hand, but there was a trembling resistance, too, like a magnet not quite strong enough to pull its counterpart toward it. But the Morrigan's magic-or grip-was stronger, and the harder I tried calling it to me, the redder a scratch on Gary's throat became.

I stopped trying. The sword relaxed, giving Gary room to swallow. In fact, his whole big self relaxed. Sagged, some might even say. He had both hands on the Morrigan's arm, cla.s.sic knife-at-throat pose, but he wasn't going to be able to pull her away without slitting his own gullet. His head fell forward, shoulders caved as best they could to protect his throat in a moment of defeat. His spirit animal's presence was agitated, not something I'd ever imagined a tortoise could be. But even tortoises had vulnerable throats.

I was trying to figure out what to do when Gary threw his head back and smashed the Morrigan's nose.

Roughly one million awful things happened at once.

Cartilage crunched. The Morrigan bellowed with pain. She even dropped the sword, but blood was already pouring from Gary's throat: he'd cut it himself with the sheer violence of his action.

The Morrigan dropped him, too, and staggered back with both hands clapped to her nose. Blood ran down her forearms toward her elbows. Normally I would mock a warrior woman who couldn't take the pain of a little broken nose, but Gary was bleeding, and besides, I'd broken my nose when I was a kid. It hurt like a motherf.u.c.ker.

Gary's hands went to his throat, such a familiar cinematic response that it could have been funny if it wasn't a real person a few seconds from bleeding to death. He dropped to the earth with lumbering grace as I charged forward, vision turning silver-blue with fear and fury.

In the center of that brilliance, the Morrigan crouched over Lugh's body. She glanced up, saw me coming and splayed one hand open with much the same gesture she'd used to ruin my coat. Power exploded out, black wrath laced with blue.

Brigid, inexplicably, stood between me and the burst of power. Her s.h.i.+elds flared, white and gold, but the blast of black magic still hit hard enough that her torso bowed with the impact. She fell gracefully, never in my way as I ran for Gary.

An ugly sound of frustration erupted from the back of the Morrigan's throat, but she didn't try again. Her ravens came to her, one on each shoulder. She sneered at me, then dissipated in a whirl of blue mist.

The sleeve of my coat turned to shredded leather again as she disappeared.

I hit the bloodstained gra.s.s on my knees, both hands covering Gary's at his throat. There was no careful visualization, no rebuilding of vessels, veins, muscle, tendons, skin one by very quick one. No delving into the garden of Gary's soul to find the heart of him and the idea of how he thought he should be. I didn't need to, for two reasons. One, I'd tried healing a cut throat once before. It hadn't worked, but the concept was familiar.

Two, and much more important, he and I both had total faith in my ability to heal him. That was all it took, really. A rush of magic and suddenly all the blood was on our hands, on our clothes, on the ground, without any more pumping free of his body.

I sat back on my heels, my own heart pumping at about a zillion miles an hour. As far as I could tell, the entire incident, from the moment the Morrigan put the rapier to Gary's throat all the way through to his healing, had taken about ten seconds. Ten very exciting, heavily punctuated seconds, but ten seconds.

Gary, hands now exploring his throat to make sure I hadn't missed anything, croaked, "What took you so long, doll?"

I couldn't help it. I laughed. It was high-pitched and hysterical, not amused, but I did laugh, and he gave me one of the s.e.xy old coot grins that had all my friends convinced he was my sugar daddy. I waved a b.l.o.o.d.y hand, said, "Oh, you know, I could tell she hadn't hit the jugular, I had all the time in the world," then burst into tears and fell over on him. "What were you thinking?!"

He put his arm around me, mouth on top of my head. "Figured I knew a girl who could fix me up in no time flat if I did somethin' crazy to break the status quo. You were never gonna risk it."

"Of course I wasn't! Jesus, Gary!" I wanted to punch him, but punching a guy who'd just had his throat cut seemed low. I sniffled into his shoulder instead.

He chuckled against my hair, then drew a deep breath. "Thanks, sweetheart."

I wrapped my arm over his ribs and hugged him as hard as I could. "I'd say 'anytime,' except if you ever do something like that again I'll kill you myself."

"Nah, you wouldn't. Who'd go on all these crazy adventures with you then?"

"Billy. Morrison, the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Random strangers getting swept up in my wake. Ha-" The last sound wasn't a word, just an inhaled breath that Gary rumbled a laugh over.

"Yeah yeah yeah. Look, I hate to break our quality time up, Jo, but wasn't there a bad guy here a minute ago?"

We both pushed up on our elbows. The Morrigan's disappearing act had left no trace of where she'd gone. Brigid, though, sat against the bloodstained Lia Fail, one hand pressed to her chest. I whispered, "s.h.i.+t," and scrambled to her on hands and knees, then stopped with my hands hovering above her, half-afraid to touch her, totally afraid to try healing her after the disaster with Lugh. "Jesus, are you okay?"

"Well enough." Her voice was faint, and her overflowing aura weak. I bit my lower lip, waking healing power, but she shook her head. "Not in this time and place, I fear. My sister's strength is the greater here. Do not expose yourself to her any more than you must."

"You look like you could use some must."

She smiled, but it faded. "Do not concern yourself with me. Concern yourself instead with my sister. I had meant to follow her to her master's lair, to the cauldron's seat-"

"But instead you took one for the team. Um, thanks for that. I think you might have saved my life there. That was a lot of power she threw at me."

"Yes. Her success would have been unparalleled, had she taken your life so far out of your time. I could not allow that, even-" She sighed and I finished for her: "Even if it meant losing her and the cauldron? I dunno, Bridge. Magic's d.a.m.ned hard to track. Unless you're better at it than I am."

Brigid shook her head. I nodded and glanced at the sky. Raven had been up there somewhere, fighting with the Morrigan's ravens. "I don't suppose you know where they all went, do you?" I asked him, and he flew down out of the sunlight to whack me on the head with a wing. "Yeah, sorry, I didn't think so. Next time I'll try not to lose the bad guy. You did a good job kicking her ravens' a.s.ses, though. s.h.i.+ny food in your future."

Raven cawed with pleasure and faded away. Gary came to crouch beside me looking big-eyed and happy as a kid in a candy store. "I saw him, Jo. Your raven. I saw him."

I smiled, then leaned over to hug him again, hard. "Welcome to having the Sight, Mr. Muldoon. All right, let's head for Knocknaree so we can kill that b.i.t.c.h. Look what she did to my coat."

Gary grinned a little. "You're gonna kill her over a coat, Jo?"

For some reason it wasn't as funny as it should be. I shook my head. "I'm going to kill her for cutting your throat. The coat was just petty."

"Good to know I'm loved."

"You are," I said, still solemn. "You are." Then in a rush of delight, I smacked his shoulder. "Dude! Dude, you totally busted her nose, you know that, right? How many people get to say they head-b.u.t.ted a G.o.ddess?"

Gary chortled, then tried to disguise his pleasure by saying, "Thought you said she wasn't a G.o.ddess."

"Oh, ffssht. Close enough for government work. Okay, Knockna..." We were several thousand years in the past. There were no itty bitty Irish cars to drive on the itty bitty Irish roads. In fact, I bet there weren't even many itty bitty roads to drive on. "...just where is this Knocknaree place?"

"In the West." Brigid sounded like Galadriel, except I was pretty sure she only meant the west of Ireland, not some far-off land of everlasting peace and calm.

From our perspective, however, the difference was negligible. Ireland wasn't a big island, but a couple hundred miles was a long way when you were traveling on foot. I exhaled noisily. "I don't suppose we can go home, drive over and meet you there in a few thousand years, huh? You oughta be able to make it there by then."

"I think not," a brand-new voice said, and Brigid faded away.

Chapter Eight.

I refused to flinch. It took every last bit of willpower, but I refused to flinch. Instead, with all the panache at my command-which wasn't much-I said, "I'm getting tired of mysterious voices and people disappearing," to Gary before I allowed myself to look around.

The air had changed quality: mist sparkled more, like bits of ice rode on it, and my breath steamed as another of the annoyingly beautiful, slightly inhuman aos si came up on us. This one looked like he'd been dipped in silver from his hair to his boots. I'd never seen genuinely silver hair before; even Cernunnos's was really brown and ashy. This guy's actually shone like the metal. My gaze fell to his left hand.

It was silver, the knuckles gleaming and flexing like molten metal as they moved. I stared at it, mesmerized, then shook myself. "You'd be Nuada, then." I gave myself bonus points for p.r.o.nouncing it correctly. He didn't have to know I'd only just learned how.

"I would be. And you would be..." He was silent a long time, then cleared his throat uncertainly. "You would be my bride? The Morrigan?"

My jaw fell open and my eyes went googly while Gary had a good laugh. While it was nice to know having his throat cut hadn't changed his laughter, it was also clear Nuada wasn't keen on being the b.u.t.t of a joke. I elbowed Gary, who manned up and stopped laughing as I said, "No, my name's Joanne. The Morrigan's stepped out for a bite to eat."

Gary snorted laughter again. I elbowed him harder, to no avail. "Look, no, sorry. She just took off with Lugh, and Brigid disapp-"

"Lugh?" Nuada's eyebrows made a heavy silver line across his forehead. "Lugh is half a year gone. How else might I be here, ready to wed the Morrigan?"

"What?" I'd thought the days of me saying "What?" all the time were past. Apparently not. "No, he just died not ten min-"

"Died?"

Oh yeah. The aos si weren't hip to the actual goings-on with the Morrigan. I started to cast my gaze heavenward, as if to gather strength for an explanation, but it got only about as high as the horizon before Nuada's sword was at my throat. He repeated, "Died?" and it didn't take a super genius to grasp that I was up next on the list of dead people.

Panic was clearly the right response. Panic, some flailing, a frantic explanation; all the sorts of things I'd done before. They'd gotten old, though. This time I just sighed and said, "The Morrigan killed him, your royal nitwitness, not me."

His sword poked half an inch closer, which was enough to part the skin on my throat.

Or it would have been, if I hadn't finally learned the habit Coyote had been trying to hammer into me my entire shamanic career: s.h.i.+elds up, Captain. s.h.i.+elds up at all times.

Nuada's sword rubbed against the glimmer of power layering my body, and didn't so much as leave a scratch. The Morrigan hadn't drawn blood, either. I had the d.a.m.ned werewolf to thank for that: she had driven home what Coyote had failed to. Unfortunately, she'd only done so after she'd bitten me. There was an argument for better late than never, but I probably wasn't the person to be making it.

The silver-handed elf king's forehead wrinkled ever so slightly. He pushed a little harder and the sword, rather than sticking in my gullet, began sliding sideways. Chagrined, he pulled it back into place, but stopped leaning into it. "What are you?"

"A shaman. Gwyld. You might as well put the sword away. It's not going to do you any good. What do you mean, six months have pa.s.sed?" The landscape looked the same. No particular hint of winter. Of course, I neither had any idea what an Irish winter thousands of years in the past looked like, nor any call in judging what time was or wasn't doing. I was already millennia out of my league, after all. Six months here or there probably didn't count for much, and the air was colder.

"What do you mean, dead?"

"It ain't nice to go around interrogatin' people by holdin' swords at their throats," Gary rumbled.

Nuada looked at him. Looked at me. I could just about see the wheels turning: if the young woman could hold a sword attack off with the power of her mind, what could the old guy with several decades more experience do?

Judiciously, and with the expression of a cat who meant to fall off the wall, Nuada put his sword away. Then he spread his hands, palms up, in a gesture of conciliation and goodwill. "I would hear your tale."

"Yeah, I just bet you would." Snark would get me nowhere. I raspberried a long breath out, inhaled again and put on my best perky tour guide voice. "The Morrigan's been murdering your high kings for at least the last ten or so. I would strongly suggest not marrying her, if I was you. Were you. Was? Were. If I were you." I didn't care if it was right. It sounded better.

"Jo," Gary muttered, "shut up."

I said, "He asked," with the pitch and tone of an insulted child, then kicked myself in the ankle. It was a good thing I already had an Indian name, or my Indian name would be Kicks Self In The Ankle. "Nuada," I said with every ounce of patience at my disposal, "your bride to be is one of the bad guys. I have literally traveled through time to tell you this, a statement which I expect is supported by my outlandish clothing. I would beg of you, your majesty, to listen to me."

The poor guy recognized the patience in my voice, but not that it was directed at myself. n.o.body could be as exasperating as I was. I suddenly felt sorry for Morrison. And for Nuada, who drew himself up with offense, because who wouldn't when some weirdly dressed chick from the future condescended at you.

"I'm sorry," I said before he had time to launch into a tirade. "Really. It's me I'm disgusted with, not you. I'm having a hard time with the explaining. Time travel sucks." Lightning struck-metaphorically, thank G.o.d; that was not the sort of phrase I should use lightly-and I shoved a thumb under my necklace, bringing it to his attention. "Look! Wait! Look at this!"

If nothing else, my increasingly bizarre antics caught him off guard, giving me time to unfasten the choker before he decided to berate my bad manners. The necklace gleamed as I handed it over, misty light catching the triskelions and the quartered circle that was its pendant.

Nuada took it with his silver hand, which wasn't articulated or in any other fas.h.i.+on prosthetic-like, aside, of course, from it being silver. It moved and flexed like flesh, and I fancied I could even see blood vessels beneath the surface as he turned the necklace up to examine it. "This is my work," he said eventually. "I would know it anywhere. And yet I have never made such a piece in all my years."

"And this?" I put my hand out and called my sword. It zinged across the ten or so feet of intervening s.p.a.ce and slapped into my palm like it and I were magnetized.

Nuada's eyebrows shot up, though his words suggested he was more impressed by the sword itself than the zooming across s.p.a.ce: "I've never seen a blade such as that. What is it?"

"It's called a rapier. They come into fas.h.i.+on in about..." I had a vague idea rapiers were sixteeth-century weapons, but I had no idea when that was in relation to us. "In a few thousand years."

"It's beautiful." He opened his hand in request and I put the sword into it, watching his attention flit between rapier and necklace. "Both mine," he said. "Both not yet forged. For whom do I make such pieces of art? A far-flung gwyld?"

"I think you make the necklace for the Morrigan. The sword belongs-belonged-to Cernunnos. I took it."

His gaze snapped to mine. "You took a blade from the G.o.d of the Wild Hunt?"

"It's a long story."

"This is not the sword I made for that G.o.d."

For a statement, it sounded remarkably like a demand. I nodded and made a s.p.a.ce of about four feet between my hands. "You made him one about this long. Narrower at the hilt and broader at the point. It's beautiful, too, but it's brutal. It's for killing things. This one's more elegant. It's for killing things, too, obviously, but you can imagine it's for...toying with them, too. He asked for it, when they came into style, and after he lost it to me you wouldn't make him another." I wet my lips. "That happens in the future. Don't tell him I told you you didn't make him another, because I'm pretty sure that'd end up being my fault somehow and he and I already have a lot of water under the bridge to get over."

Nuada squinted. So did I. Gary just groaned. "You gotta learn to control your mouth sometimes, Jo."

"What fun would that be?"

"Can you call him here?" Nuada asked, ever so softly. "I am inclined to believe you, unborn gwyld, but I would like to hear it from Cernunnos, as well."

My heart jumped at the idea. If it was midwinter, Cernunnos rode our world with the Hunt at his back. I might be able to call him to a center of power like Tara. "He and I don't meet for thousands of years."

Nuada gave me a familiar look, the one suggesting I was the slow kid in the cla.s.s. "Do you imagine one such as he is bound by time?"

"..." I shuffled my arguments away without even voicing them. Cernunnos had never mentioned meeting me in the distant past. On the other hand, it wasn't like our first encounters had been old home night at the bar. Having silenced my own objections, I glanced around Tara.

"It's too big." It wasn't, and I knew it. The tower to the south-southwest, really-was matched at the other three lesser compa.s.s points, too, though none of those had survived into my time. I could feel power lines dragging through all four of them, centering in Tara. Centering where we stood, really, at the Lia Fail, the Stone of Destiny. Some idiot had moved it, in my time. Not very far, a couple hundred yards, maybe, but it was no longer dead at the center of a vast quartered circle.

I knelt, one hand on the blood-spattered stone and one in the cool green gra.s.s, and my last thought for a few minutes was that maybe it had been a wise man, not a fool, who had moved the Stone from its original resting place.

Tara required only a nudge to awaken. Just a touch of magic seeking out the power circle. I was astonished, in fact, that it hadn't roared to life when I'd healed Gary, but perhaps that had been internal enough not to draw the site's attention. Now, though, with my power seeking to build a sanctuary and to gain a G.o.d's attention, Tara came to the fore. I was little more than a conduit for a land so steeped in magic that it had its own will. No wonder the Master wanted this place under his thrall: with Tara's power at his command he could alter events in an ever-growing circle from this epicenter.

Magic shot up from the Lia Fail, hit some distant invisible ceiling and spilled down evenly to set the four towers alight. The faintest gray taint ran through it all. Gray, not black; the Master's hold wasn't that strong, not here, not yet, despite the sacrifices. This was still a place given over to what was good in humanity, and if I had anything to say about it, it would remain that way.

I glanced up at the midwinter sun and whispered the closest thing to a prayer I'd ever spoken. A plea to a G.o.d to come and visit me, so I could prove myself to a skeptical elf king and perhaps alter the course of events back to how they always should have been. It was possible he would; these were the first days of his greatest power, the time from the solstice through to the twelfth night after Christmas. He rode across the world now, collecting souls, and would soon retreat to the world he had been born of, Tir na nOg, there to rest until Halloween welcomed him back to our world. He had ridden to others when they'd asked, in the past.

I was still somehow surprised when the sky split open and he came to me.

Even knowing what to expect, he was overwhelming. The changes were coming on him, earlier than they had in my time. A thickness to his shoulders and neck, preparing to bear the weight of horns beginning to distort his temples. His eyes were light-flecked, wild and alien: this was a being who belonged to the universe, and the universe to him. He went beyond time as I understood it, a raw piece of star stuff made into a beautiful, inhuman form full of l.u.s.t and energy and anger.

His host was smaller than I'd seen it before. The gray-bearded king was missing, as was the archer who had shot Pet.i.te's gas tank full of holes. The boy Rider was with him, though, which gave me a shock. It shouldn't have, since we were centuries, maybe millennia, before Herne and his spells, but I'd never seen the boy looking quite so comfortable at his father's side. That child bound Cernunnos to time, but not, it seemed, to linear time. For a moment I wondered if magic was just physics n.o.body understood, but that was philosophy beyond my scope.

Particularly when Cernunnos himself was before me, taking up all the air in Tara. I loved Morrison, but something about the horned G.o.d just hit me on a primal level.