Shaman Rises

by C. E. Murphy

  He wasn’t burned or blackened anymore. A small favor, a gift to me, though from whom I didn’t know. His beautiful hair lay quietly, no wind to disturb it, and someone had folded his hands neatly over his breast.

  His eyes were closed, but he didn’t look like he was sleeping. His color was wrong, his face too still. I knelt beside him and unfolded one of his hands, hating that it was already cool to the touch, and pressed my forehead against the back of it. After a minute or so, I heard the others slowly move away, for which I was grateful. I heard them shifting, taking seats, speaking quietly among one another as the light gradually changed, but they stayed away, giving me space for things I couldn’t even name. I wasn’t at mourning yet. My rage was burned out, poured into the Master’s punishment and release. I was too tired for anything else, too emptied of emotion. Sooner or later it would come back, but right now, later sounded okay.

  I had been sitting there maybe half an hour when a scream like the thunderbird’s tore the air far above me. I flinched out of my solitude and threw shields around my friends, wondering if shields would even protect from a thunderbird’s claws and wondering what a thunderbird was doing hunting us at this late stage of the game anyway, and if the thunderbird even existed anymore, after the fight in the Upper World. We all looked up, hands cupped around our eyes to block out an incongruously brilliant sunrise.

  The Space Needle’s restaurant, already at a dramatic cant that tilted opposite of the direction the Needle itself listed, let go of another few yards of height with another metal-rending scream. It jolted to a stop just long enough to notice, then dropped again, and again, glass and concrete and metal shattering with each collapse.

  After the fourth, it gave up all hope of retaining integrity and slammed, crashed and bashed its way down the Needle’s slender spire in deafening roars. Dust and debris flew, clouding the clean air. Chunks of metal bounced off my shields repeatedly, and we all shrieked with each impact, so our screams made shrill counterpoints to the impossible noise of the restaurant’s collapse.

  The fall itself lasted only a few seconds. The debris took longer to settle. All nine of us, even Cernunnos, just sat there, staring upward through the shimmer of my shield, like Moses on the mountain waiting for the commandments. Bit by bit the ruins came clear as wind swept the dust away to reveal the restaurant caught about halfway down the spire, where it began to flare toward the earth. It looked like somebody had been playing horseshoes with a UFO.

  “Well, shit,” I finally croaked. “Somebody’s gonna have to clean that up.”

  Then I put my face in my hands and began to cry.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Sunday, April 2, 6:59 a.m.

  Cernunnos, unexpectedly, was the one who came to me. He put one hand on my shoulder, turning my sobs to a gasp, then crouched beside me, long and elegant fingers dangling just above the earth. I drew a shuddering breath and dashed tears from my eyes, though they rolled down my cheeks again without a moment’s hesitation. Still, I could see him. Or See him, more accurately.

  As somber as he’d ever been, he was also glorious in the rising sun. His fire, the power that so easily blinded me, had new depth to it. It was still green, but it had always been emerald wildfire, a color so rich it had edges. Now there were shades to it, from that pure hard emerald into new leaves and from there into fading grass, with all the subtle differences in between reaching deep into the earth. That was it: when he moved now, it was with a sense of belonging. Like the green of this earth had claimed him. Not that he’d lost the green of Tir na nOg, but looking at him now, I felt like I’d always been seeing only half of what he was supposed to be. Now he was whole.

  Whole, but at huge cost. I closed my eyes against his beauty, wondering what had happened to Herne’s body. I wondered what the hell he’d been doing here at all. He had not been part of my plan. Not that I’d had much of a plan, but insofar as I had, it hadn’t included gods dying.

  My stomach clenched, ice sheeting over my skin as hot tears scalded my cheeks. I’d been wrong. It hadn’t taken a god to defeat the Master.

  It had taken three. One freed, one dead, and one...changed. The truth was, I didn’t know what had happened to, or with, Suzy yet. I was a little afraid to find out. So there were a lot of things behind my apology when I whispered, “I’m sorry, Cernunnos.”

  “Thou’rt difficult, little shaman.”

  I opened my eyes again to stare at him, waited until it was clear I had to speak next, then said, “I thought we’d settled that ‘little shaman’ thing a while back.”

  “We had, and yet in the light of this new day, I find I do not wish to speak thy name quite yet, my shaman. Thou hast done...much, this day.”

  “Yes.” We’d also settled the thee-ing and thou-ing thing, but for once I thought maybe the god’s formality—sensual and shivery as it was—might be more appropriate than the more common language I’d become accustomed to from him. My shoulder was against Coyote’s bier, a cold hard reminder of what had changed. As if I needed one. “Sorry for the summoning.”

  “No.” Cernunnos barely whispered the word, then took my hand in his. His touch was gossamer, so light that if I didn’t see our fingers intertwining I wouldn’t be certain it was happening. My heart missed a beat and heat rose in my cheeks. I tried hard not to look at Morrison, who was studiously looking the other way.

  “Be thou not sorry, my shaman. I might have refused thy call had thy casting not made so clear thy intentions.” A note of doubt lingered deep in the claim: he wasn’t certain he could have refused it, but I wasn’t about to call him on that. He shifted a few inches, turning himself toward me. Toward Coyote, to whom he lifted his gaze before he spoke. “It is I, mayhap, who should offer an apology to thee.”

  “You sure as fuck should.” I wasn’t talking about Coyote. I wasn’t ready to talk about Coyote. “The Master, Cernunnos. The frigging Master. You could have told me.”

  “The Devourer.” Cernunnos had the grace to look away from Coyote and pay full attention to me. “For that, too, yes. What would I have told thee, gwyld? That the thing you feared and hated most was half of me? Wouldst thou have trusted me e’er again? No,” he said very softly, “and without trust between us we could never have wrought this day.”

  “The cauldron,” I said in despair. “You almost dying in Tir na nOg. You bet everything on me and lied to me about it.”

  “I did not lie.” Cernunnos sounded very slightly affronted. “I withheld truth, but I did not lie.”

  “Tomayto, tomahto. And you would have killed me back in Ireland, rather than let me become a werewolf. One of his monsters. Only because then your brother might have ended up on equal footing with you.”

  The silence was very long indeed, before the green god breathed, “Not only.”

  He couldn’t have hit me harder if he’d shoved an iron sword through my gut. All my breath went away and left a hollow in my stomach that felt echoed in my gaze. I couldn’t look away from him. Two little words, two words of promise and regret, and every part of me except my vocal cords wanted to demand that he explain himself, that he make that hint absolutely, undeniably clear.

  My vocal cords, though, were in rebellion, too tight to speak, and in the end it was Cernunnos who looked away. Looked back toward Coyote’s body, and murmured, once more, “I am sorry. I could not save him.”

  “Neither could I.” There it was, raw and broken. The tears started again, wrenching through me in a shudder I felt to the bone. Cernunnos drew me up with his touch. I followed blindly, tears too thick to see through, until he stopped and I bumped into the solid shoulder of a silver stallion.

  The beast bent his neck around and shoved his forehead against my arm. I stumbled and he caught me, hooking his big head beneath my arm so I leaned on him. Then he shook me off and pressed his face against my torso. All of my torso: his head went from
my collarbones to my thighs, a reminder of how preposterously massive the god’s horse was. I supposed he had to be, to carry Cernunnos in his fully fleshed, broad-shouldered and antlered form.

  Mostly when I’d been this close to the stallion, he’d been trying to kill me. This was nicer. I put my forehead between his ears and mumbled something idiotic. He snorted down my pants, then pushed me away and tossed his head. I blinked away tears in time to catch an expressive eye roll before he looked pointedly at his own back.

  “We would offer thee a gift,” Cernunnos said quietly, “and ask a boon of thee all at once. Ride with us a final time, my shaman. Not to the stars and not between worlds, but here in this place, through this city. Thou hast made thy people mine, and I thine. I would not leave them broken and ravaged where I can help. The earth is mine as it was my son’s, and it will be soothed by my presence. But the gift of healing is thine, and so I ask thee: ride with me, and help me heal this land.”

  “Cernunnos...” I wanted to. I always wanted to, when he asked me, and on this occasion he was asking something different. Usually he was asking for something that would bind me to him irrevocably, and that wasn’t a ride I was willing to take. Not yet. This, though, wasn’t a ride through the stars or time or space. It was a sharing of a world that had become ours, instead of belonging to one of us or the other. I wanted to, and just this once, I thought I might be able to get away with it.

  But my father was here. Billy and Melinda were here. Gary and Annie were here, and Suzy, who should not be left alone with strangers right now, was here.

  Morrison was here. And we all had a hell of a lot to work through, and I had finally grown up enough not to walk out on a difficult moment like this. I couldn’t abandon them, much as I might want to go with the horned god.

  I was still struggling to find a way to explain that when Morrison said, “Go on, Walker. We’ll manage here. We’ll...” He didn’t quite look at Coyote’s body. “I’ll call someone.”

  “Cindy. Heather Fagan’s niece. She works for the coroner and she...understands.” I wasn’t sure how understanding would help explain the death of an apparently healthy and undamaged young man, but it wouldn’t hurt.

  “All right. I’ll call you when we’re settled somewhere.”

  I lifted my eyebrows, but closed my eyes as I said, “My cell phone is lying somewhere in the middle of Woodland baseball field,” because I didn’t want to see Morrison’s expression at the reminder.

  I didn’t need to. The volume of his silence expressed it just fine. “Then we’ll be at your apartment,” he said after a while, then came over to wrap his arms around me.

  I startled a little, then buried my face in his shoulder for a minute before mumbling, “Gary’s got a key. Wait. You have my keys.” Of course he did. That was how he’d gotten in to clean up. Either that or he was an expert at breaking and entering, which was too strange a thought to contemplate.

  “I have your keys,” he agreed. “Go on, Walker.” He kissed me, then nudged me on my way. I turned back to find Cernunnos watching both of us thoughtfully, and for once was grateful that my powers didn’t include telepathy. I really didn’t want to know what he thought of my relationship with Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department.

  Lucky for me, he didn’t volunteer his opinion. He merely leaped onto the stallion’s back with absurd and impossible grace, as if the earth itself had shrugged a little and thrown him skyward.

  Or not. I’d watched the earth shrug and throw a lot of people around today, and it wasn’t nearly as pretty as Cernunnos getting on his horse. He offered me a hand. I took it and he pulled me up like I weighed nothing at all, settling me behind him on the stallion’s broad back. The big animal pranced a time or two before looking at Cernunnos, obviously waiting for his cue.

  Cernunnos, though, waited on me, his head lowered and turned in profile so I could see the sweep of his bone crown through the tangle of his ashy hair. It swirled and spiked from his temples, protruding horns dangerously sharp. They came together at the back of his head, then spilled downward to strengthen his neck and broaden his shoulders. His scent was musky, more animal than I remembered it being, and I couldn’t help thinking of the first time I’d ridden with him. He’d offered to take away my pain, then. Right now, with my arm around his waist and the line of my body against his, the world I’d just stepped away from, the world the horse still stood on, seemed very far away, and very full of pain. All I had to do was not get off this ride.

  I made myself look away from Cernunnos. Made myself look at Morrison, and despite the sudden distance from the world that I felt, I smiled when I saw him. He smiled in return, sad, relaxed, tired, and as abruptly as I’d considered staying with Cernunnos, I considered throwing myself off the horse and back into Morrison’s arms. I didn’t, but it was good to know he had every bit as much pull as the horned god. I gave him a little nod, said, “Okay,” to Cernunnos, and glanced over the rest of my friends as the stallion stretched his legs to take us away. “Wait!”

  Cernunnos sat deeper into the stallion’s back, stopping him, and I got the impression both of them, god and beast, verged on snapping, “What now?”

  “Dad.” I cleared my throat and tried again. “I need Dad. I can heal people. I can heal a lot of people. But Dad can... He does this magic thing,” I said lamely. “He turns blood into roses.”

  Cernunnos’s silence briefly matched one of Morrison’s better ones for thunderous. I tried again. “There are people out there, people who are trapped and too badly hurt for me to try healing them. Or there were last night. Yesterday. Whenever that was.” I honestly had no idea how much time had passed. It had been at least a day since I got back to Seattle, but if somebody’d told me it’d been a year and a day, I wouldn’t have doubted them. “If Dad can convert the buildings into...roses...I can heal them.”

  “Joanne, I can’t. I don’t have...I don’t have that kind of raw power. Your kind of power.” Dad came up to me, Cernunnos and the horse, and managed not to look too awed by the latter two. Possibly hanging out all night while I threw down with an elemental had taken the edge off, or—more likely, judging from the haggard lines across his face and shadows under his eyes—he was just too damned tired to be awed right now. We all were.

  “This once,” Cernunnos said, more than a little dryly, “I think power will not be a problem...” He cast a sideways glance at me and finished with, “Master Walkingstick,” rather than whatever variant of little shaman or puny mortal had first crossed his mind. He flicked his fingers and the Boy Rider joined us, golden mare dazzling in the rising sunlight. The Boy had always been especially ethereal, even among the Hunt, but today—now, after all of this—he looked somehow as though he’d come into his own. There was new power in the slim lines of his body, and a presence that felt more rooted in this world than he ever had before.

  Dad, staring at him, paled visibly. I snorted. “What, afraid of a horse, Injun?”

  “Hey,” Gary rumbled. “Perpetuating stereotypes through joking isn’t funny, doll.”

  I laughed, even if it was a little watery. “Long time since I said that to you.”

  “Long time. Good times.”

  “You’re crazy, Gary.”

  Dad looked between us like he’d glare if he could get up the energy, and instead took the Boy Rider’s hand, allowing himself to be pulled onto the mare’s back. “I’m not afraid of horses,” he muttered at me as they passed by us. “Riding with gods, though...”

  “That one’s only a half god,” I offered helpfully, and got a withering look in response. It lifted my spirits a little and I mashed my face against Cernunnos’s shoulder, rather like he might be a more godly version of Morrison, as I mumbled, “Okay, we can go now.”

  He said nothing, because I suspected he wanted to say, “Hnf,” and regarded that as being insufficiently godly, so I
was smiling as I turned my head again and waved goodbye to Morrison and the others.

  I’d ridden with the Hunt before, but it had always been a hunt. It had always been fast, busy, breathless. This time we walked, long-legged horses picking their way carefully over broken ground. Cernunnos didn’t speak, but I felt vast power rolling from and through him: green power. Earth magic. The land didn’t exactly stitch itself back together as we passed over it, but it didn’t exactly not, either. Dirt and stone shivered and settled, sometimes swallowing shattered concrete and ruined buildings, sometimes just smoothing them until they were passable.

  Time and again we paused when I could feel lives struggling to hang on inside the walls of fallen structures. I wasn’t exactly tired anymore, or empty. I still felt remote, but that was a blessing, something I owed Cernunnos for. Viewing Seattle’s wreckage from within the Hunt was just within the limits of bearable. I would have fallen apart on my own, on foot, and this was exactly the wrong time for me to do that.

  The first crushed buildings lay not that far from the Seattle Center. Cernunnos settled the stallion there without me asking, and I sent threads of magic into the twisted girders and torn concrete, searching for lives to save. Some were easy; others, like Manny, were complicated. I’d never felt spread so thin as I concentrated on one, then another, of the broken bodies, preparing for the moment to unleash full healing magic. Only when I was absolutely certain I held every thread in hand did I whisper, “Okay, Dad.”

  I got a wild-eyed stare in return, though it took me a full minute or so to look his way when it became apparent he wasn’t doing anything. “Just...turn it all to roses, Dad. Or air. Air would be better. I don’t want rose petals inside of wounds.”

  “Joanne, it’s half a city block. I can’t change half a block of anything into anything.”