by C. E. Murphy
I was a hunter, a warrior, a shaman, and I could not let this stand. Not this time. Not Coyote. Not my beloved friend, my teacher, my guide. He was not, in the end, my everything, but he had been my beginning, and I would not lose him. The very core of the earth was not so hot with power as I was; the moon itself was faint in the light of my magic.
The Master’s face contorted and he leaped at me, a desperate measure of a desperate creature. His meteoric blade rose and fell in a death blow.
I caught it on my shield. Power blazed. Iron fragmented, and I stood eye to eye with an unarmed monster.
Fear split his face again, then defiance so transparent that on another day it might have made me laugh. He had not spoken since the fight began, but now, with lifted chin, spat words: “Kill me if you can.”
“Oh, no.” I shook with rage, with hurt, and with determination. “Oh, no.”
I threw the sword away, released the shield. They became a part of me again, grew into the breastplate my mother’s necklace had become, until I was armored all over with a blaze of light. Copper bracers and arm guards. Gloves of flexible ash wood, fingertips glittering with silver. Purple laced the joints of armor so fluid it moved with my every breath. All the gifts I had ever been offered from family, from friends, from the inhuman to the unusual came together and made me into a thing of power, a thing as endless as the Master himself. I was what he had never understood, what he had struggled for and fought to attain for an existence longer than eternity.
I was love, honed to a blade by loss, and I thrust myself into the very heart of the Master himself.
We had danced it all together, me and Coyote and Annie. I took that dance with me into the Master’s garden, a place of cold and dark beyond comprehension. Even in the darkness, I could see the light of those things that had been born around him, and if those were two impossible things lying cheek by jowl, then in the depths and darkness of his garden it was not a conflict. There could be no shadow without light, and I did not deny that shadow must exist. But I would bring the light to the shadow if it was the last thing I did. He would know what he had taken: that would be his punishment for killing my friend. Not death. Death was too good for him. Death was an ending, death meant there was no more pain, and this was a pain upon which the Master could not thrive. He would feel it, feel it until the end of time, because now I would not let him die.
I danced in the darkness, pouring out the story of my life and the story of my love.
My mother’s love, misguided or brilliant as it had been, giving me up to my father to keep me safe. Such love there, and it had taken me so long, too long, to understand it. It was love, honed to a blade by loss, and I thrust it into the Master’s garden. Forced it to take root there with each step of my dance, driving it into barren earth that had only dreamed of life.
My father’s love, awkward and misguided, too, trying to protect me from the fate my mother had sent me away from. So many mistakes, muddying the path that I was always bound to walk, but done with such good intent. Not a road to hell at all, but love, laid down across the countryside to heal and strengthen it. I took that love and danced it into the garden, demanding that the garden accept it and become fruitful.
Gary’s love, running so deep. It became the soil, ready to grow. Morrison’s love, patient as only the earth could be. Coyote’s love, so bright it had burned him; it became the sunlight to warm the fields. Annie’s love, soft and unending, the rain to water the land. Billy, Melinda, their passel of amazing kids: I danced that love of family, of standing together, into this place. My crazy cousin with her fire-engine-red hair and her excitement over the magery burgeoning in her, I danced that, too, letting the idea of magic take root. I danced for my son, and for his sister, and the love I felt for them was something I threw into the Master’s teeth, making it a strong part of this new land so that he could never look on his garden without remembering the blade of loss. I danced and I built on everything my story had ever been, making it part of the Master’s story, too.
This was not what he wanted, a pain that lived inside him. The pain of love, much sharper than he could have imagined, the pain of loss when love failed—no. He had used that before, made slaves of those whose broken hearts made them vulnerable, and he feared that fate for himself. He did not want this, tried to throw it off, and I pulled him close to snarl in his ear: “I don’t care what you want.”
Love would grow here, the price of a life.
I left his garden.
The Master, my other self, fell with my soul-sword still piercing his body. Exhaustion swept me, but the battle wasn’t over yet. There was so much to do, too much to do, and I was so terribly tired. All I could do was ask as I’d asked once before, ask everything of everyone, and take what I was offered. I knelt over the shuddering, screaming, stolen body of the Master, and whispered, “Help me, help me, help me.”
I opened my soul to the world around me.
There was so much magic gathered in this place, in these moments before dawn. I had known there were others here now, more than those who had watched our battle begin, but I felt them now, bright and vivid marks on my soul as they came into a circle around me.
Fuchsia and orange: Billy, whose power gave the dead a voice. Across from him his wife, Melinda, in orange and yellow, blooming with the wise woman’s knowledge of life. Paired, a perfect complement. They were the west and the east, dying day and dawning sun.
Green and silver, fire without secondary attributes. Gary and Suzy, age and youth, standing north and south. The four of them, the four of them alone brought such strength to the circle that I cried out with it, hurting in my hands, my stomach, behind my eyes. Too much power already, and more were coming into place.
My father, what was my father doing here, his forest green and earthy browns stepping up to meet my own silver and blue, earth and sky together to make the world. I hadn’t even known I was part of the circle, had thought it was coming into place around me, not with me, until he placed himself opposite me. Tradition and madcap methods, tied together by blood.
Annie, no longer burning green, but wholly and fully mortal again, her colors copper and flame. There were seven of us, almost the strongest circle I had ever known, and then came the god.
How fair, I thought, how perfect. How perfect that the god he had sought to unmake would instead be part of the unmaking of the Master, that the brother of spirit he had tried to conquer would instead conquer him. Cernunnos was each of the things we brought to the circle, all in one. He was a voice to the dead, who served the living. He was eternal, age and youth encompassed in him. He was tradition, born of long cold nights and ancient needs, and he was fresh and newly made, given to the modern world. He was mortal, bound to this world by his son, the Boy Rider, and he was immortal, an undying god.
Morrison. I looked up, eyes blind to the world around me, only seeing the power that flowed and burned in everything. Morrison had not joined the circle.
“I’m here, Walker.” He stepped through, a blaze of purple and blue, and in his hands was a round thing of white magic. My drum. Scalding tears rolled down my cheeks and I nodded once. He knelt across from me, on the Master’s far side, and began to beat the drum.
Power ignited.
I had been fighting the wrong fight all along. Up until these past few moments, I had been making a terrible, fundamental mistake. I had seen the Master as the villain, and he was. Unquestionably. But he was also broken. He’d fought to be embodied, to be a thing that could walk the earth, and had lost that fight an impossibly long time ago. Now he finally had the body he’d always craved, and with it, he might take its inherent magic and climb it until he rivaled Cernunnos. Until the lord of the Hunt, the new god of my world, was as endangered as he had ever been.
I could kill the Master. I could end it that way. But that would never satisfy me, and my vengeance could run
as deep as any god’s.
I didn’t want to kill him. I wanted to heal him.
To help his spirit not to die, but to finally be born. To take on the physical aspect of life without being more than that. I had blunted him already, by setting life in his dead garden. By sowing love there, a punishment I would never regret. But there was more to be done. I had to give him some kind of real life, something that could hold him in place.
I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to give him peace of any kind. I was not that good a person. Unfortunately for me, I also wasn’t—quite—that stupid a person. If I didn’t finish the job, it would come back to bite me on the ass. It might anyway, but it was sure to if I didn’t finish.
The garden inside him was beginning to bloom. It was white fire, burning away the darkness that had bound him for so awfully long. Some part of it shook loose, a small part that modeled consciousness, and met my eyes.
It was dead, it said. It had never really lived. It could not be born now just because I insisted it would be.
“Don’t bet on it, buddy.” It was right, of course. Under normal circumstances, it certainly couldn’t. But I’d left normal behind months ago, and today I had the help of a free god. There had, I thought, never been a person on this earth as stupidly, painfully full of magic as I was right now, and all I wanted to do was get rid of it. I put one hand on the thrashing body’s forehead and the other over its heart, and whispered, “Live.”
Once. Twice. A third time, because three was a lucky number. Then the fire within, the garden I had sown, leaped for the life magic, the healing power, that I now offered it. Love was an unconquerable power, and life called to life. I answered, pouring the borrowed strength of the human heart and the endless power of a god into the birthing of a thing that had gone long unknown, unborn, unloved. It would be known, it would be born, it would know love every day until the day it died, and I hoped it would hurt for every single one of those days.
I had no sense at all of the time it took. It could have been mere seconds or it could have been all of forever, and I wasn’t at all certain it wasn’t both. Whenever it happened, it began slowly and picked up speed, until one of my beloved vehicle metaphors turned the entire process into speeding down a highway, Petite’s windows rolled down, wind in my hair and the needle buried. It was the very fastest thing of all, and yet so slow. Making life, refusing death, was complicated like that.
Slender, delicate hands settled themselves over mine, and the life I had been trying to give this broken form leaped upward, sinking into pale skin. I yelled, clawing at it, but Suzanne Quinley pressed my hands harder against the collapsing body, and challenged me with a gaze of unearthly green.
“He’s my father.”
“He’s not—!”
She curled her hands, taking the Master’s shattered miasma into them. “No. He’s not. But he is, or was, and you need something that can contain him.”
“Suzy, this is what he wanted, he wanted your body—”
“He wanted,” she said, and her emphasis was so slight as to make mine seem hyperbolic, “to destroy the world. I can See what you’re doing, Joanne. You’ve made life inside a thing that feeds on death. You’ve put love there, and now he loves the world, and that hurts him more than anything else. But if you just let him have this body and then let him go, he’ll go crazy just like Herne did, and then you’ll have a crazy half god to hunt down, just like Herne.
“But right now he’s just a spirit, Jo. He’s not bound to the body yet, not with love. Not the way you want him to be. So if I take him, he’s going to suffer exactly what you want him to. He’s going to understand love and loss and all of it, and he’s never going to be able to break away. I’m the granddaughter of a god, Joanne. I’m pretty sure I’m going to live forever, or close enough to count. You want him to be punished? Let me take him. He killed my parents. He killed my father. He’s tried to kill everybody I know and love. He’s going to have to live with all that human pain, forever. And it’s never going to make him stronger.” Power streamed off her so brilliantly my eyes watered. “You told me everybody who has power has a choice to make. This is my choice. I’m going to be his jailer, and you’re not going to stop me.”
I looked away once, through tears, at Cernunnos. His face was as terrible as Suzy’s, as stern and as still, but he dropped his head in a single nod.
“Okay.” I hardly heard my own whisper as I turned my palms up beneath Suzy’s, releasing the magic I’d built into her.
It coalesced and resolved, becoming smaller and denser and full of light. Darkness streaked through it, making shadows that tried and failed to dominate. In Suzanne’s palms, it looked like a diamond that had come to life, glittering and surging.
It was beautiful, and frankly, I hated it. I leaned in, speaking to it. “Go away from here. Go with Suzanne, and don’t imagine for a moment that this is a gift. You’ll live. You’ll survive. You’ll feel all the pain you ever wanted, and it will hurt you, the way you’ve hurt us. Your only chance of not going mad is learning to live with it, just like we do, and you’ve got this girl here whose heart is a lot bigger—” and a lot crueler, I didn’t say “—than mine. She may be your prison, but she’s your savior, too. You should understand this: stay quiet. Stay very, very quiet. I never. Want. To see you. Again. If you cross my path, if you show your face, I will tear you apart. I will end you. I will...”
I was reaching the “tear up the bits of you and jump on them” stage of threats, and since I had even less chance against a god within a god than I’d had against, well, the Master, it seemed foolish to continue. I lifted my eyes to Suzanne and whispered, “Be careful, Suzy. That thing is dangerous. You be careful, you be smart, and if you ever even think you need my help with it, you come running. You hear me?”
She nodded, pale hair cascading over her shoulders as she folded the spark of godhood to her chest. “I promise.”
“Good girl.” I closed my eyes. “Just take it away.”
I didn’t wait to see if she did. I just went inside, went back to the hard white desert with its impossible heat and the flat blue sky pressing down on me.
There was no one else there, just me and the hanging tree.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I waited. I waited a long time, hoping against hope that Coyote, Big or Little, would come back to me. I knew neither of them would, but I still couldn’t bring myself to leave the painfully hot desert. Breathing hurt, but fighting for sips of scalding air made it almost impossible to think about Raven or Rattler, or about Gary’s tortoise, or about Coyote himself. Every inhalation was an agonizing little hiccup, and I was grateful to face that pain, and hide from the rest of it. Sunlight beat through my clothes, bronzing my skin so fast it stung, but that was okay, too. I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay forever, because here it was hot and awful, but it was also silent and a barrier to the ramifications of the past hours.
I didn’t know how long it was until I felt Morrison’s hand on my shoulder in the Middle World, and heard his quiet, concerned voice. “C’mon, Walker. Come back to me. C’mon, Joanie.”
My eyes opened reluctantly. I wasn’t at all certain I’d be able to see, but the obliterating Sight that had burned my vision earlier was now gone. The world was made up of Morrison’s worried smile, and the relief in his blue eyes when mine opened. “There you are. There you are, Jo. You came back to me.”
I leaned forward—the Master’s body that had lain in front of me was gone—and put my arms around Morrison’s neck. Buried my face in his shoulder, and held on. I would have been happy to stay there forever, not letting the world intrude at all, but eventually he mumbled, “I’m sorry, Walker, but there’s a rock digging into my patella. If I don’t move we’re going to have to amputate my knee.”
To my surprise, I laughed. A muffled little sound, but a laugh. I hugged him tighter for one mo
re instant, then let go enough that we could both shift and start to get up.
Finding the Muldoons, the Hollidays, two gods and my father looking down on us was something of a shock. I’d known they were there, but I hadn’t really seen all of them, and I stared from one face to another uncertainly. Finally I focused on my father. “Dad?”
“Jo. Anne. Joanne.” Dad paused, then whispered, “Joanie,” and, despite the broken glass and concrete-riddled ground, dropped to his knees to pull me into a hug.
“Dad. Daddy, what are you... How did you even get here? It’s only been, like, a day...a day?” I took my face from his shoulder and looked in bewilderment to the pinkening eastern horizon. “Was it only a day?”
“Shamans can go quite a while without sleep. And that invisibility trick of yours turned out to be pretty helpful on long stretches of speed-trapped highway in the badlands.”
I stared at him. I’d never thought of that. Invisible driving. It would be awesome, except if a semi came out of nowhere. I started to say something like that, wanting to scold him, but it was a little hard to scold a man who’d just driven twenty-four hours straight to be at my side in the nick of time. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Petite’s in the parking garage. She’s fine,” Dad said as my spine straightened.
I was sure she was. I just had the irrational desire to see her. Everything had been turned upside down in the past day, all changed utterly. Seeing Petite would reassure me that something hadn’t changed. “Where’s Coyote?”
Morrison’s face went bleak in preparation for giving me the dreadful news. I shook my head, stopping him. “No. I know. I just... I want to see him. I need to see him.”
“Over here, doll.” Gary’s voice was solemn. More than solemn. I let Dad and Morrison help me to my feet. I felt oddly light as they did, like some heavy weight had burned out of me. Everyone, even the gods, stood aside as I walked slowly past them to where Coyote lay on a bier of concrete.
