by C. E. Murphy
It made Suzanne Quinley look all the more extraordinary.
Suzanne flung her head back, hair white and crackling in light born of magic. Wildfire green seared from her raised fingertips, dancing over the yard like a plasma lamp. It touched Morrison, touched Gary and Billy and me, all of us at once, with a quick cold shock that discerned, deliberated and discarded us in an instant. We were living. We were meant to be.
It touched the undead warrior, and the silent monster opened its jaws in a noiseless scream. Green magic hissed into its thin blackened body, embodying it, enfleshing it. Color came back into its skin, hair sprouted, its eyes came alive. Its scream turned audible, a man’s voice torn from hell and spread across the night for examination.
Then it began to youthen, hair becoming fuller, its face losing the lines of age, its body growing stronger until it was in its prime. The scream continued, and so did its unaging: from man to teen, from teen to child, all the way back to a shriveled bit of nothing that winked out with a near-silent pop of sound.
An echo rolled over me, an echo of a life lived centuries ago and abruptly undone. Ripped wholly out of time, as if it had never been. The part of me given over to healing stopped, filled with horror, and I came together again, more or less whole in body and spirit, to stare at Suzanne and what she’d wrought.
That was wild magic. That was chaos magic, born from a child of immortal blood. She saw the future, but could unmake a man who’d become a monster so thoroughly that he’d never existed.
It was over in seconds.
Suzy collapsed, all the brilliant color of her magic fading away. I rolled to my hands and knees, determined to get to the girl’s side and make certain she was all right.
Morrison said, “Walker,” with unrestrained relief.
Archie Redding’s living, breathing, screaming wife erupted from the cauldron.
CHAPTER 28
Redding cried out with a disbelief echoed by every other living being in the yard. His daughters scrambled out of the cauldron behind their mother, screams torn from their throats, too. Newborn babies cried on entering the world, but this was something worse. The Sight whispered on, stronger now than it had been over the past few minutes, and I started to move before I really understood what I was seeing.
They were alive. They were honestly, truly, swear-to-God alive, full of vivid energy and surrounded by snapping auras. Their fractured bodies were healed. Better than healed: the Sight and my magic wound together and looked through them on a fundamental level. They bled new life, as though they were newborns, not a single flaw or strain in muscle or bone or skin.
They screamed because smoky-black monsters were trying to pull their freshly born souls from their bodies.
The monsters reminded me of the banshee, narrow things cloaked in death shrouds that did nothing to hide their emaciated form. Bony fingers clutched each of their heads, the Sight showing me how bruises were forming beneath the vicious grips. Each of the things—hell, for all I knew they were banshees, if not the specific hatchet-faced Blade I’d faced once before—each of the banshees brought its hooded face to its victim’s, offering a bleak kiss that ripped at their very essence. They made me think of gas masks working in reverse, sucking up to the mouth and nose and forcing poison in instead of filtering it out. And Archie Redding, who had spent half a dozen lifetimes trying to bring his family back from the dead, was held by two more of the banshees, whose faces split in screaming laughter as he struggled to free himself and join his suffering wife and children.
Ida Redding hit the ground, writhing and clutching at her face. Scrapes appeared, only some of them from her own hands. The girls, especially the littlest, had less fight in them. The little one’s aura sparked too much fear and confusion to understand what was happening at all: her breath simply wasn’t there, and it didn’t make sense.
It made a terrible sense to me.
“Banshees feed the Master,” I said so quietly I wasn’t sure my voice carried beyond my own ears. I felt detached from myself, moving with purpose but watching myself from the outside. Time had slowed down; it did that a lot in critical moments. “The Blade performed ritual murders under the winter moons, only we disrupted that, so the Master’s got to be awfully hungry. This must be the next best thing, or maybe even better than the rituals. These are brand-new reborn souls, too weak to fight and totally innocent. I bet pure souls taste good.” The banshees, the Master, weren’t like the zombies, trying to snatch bits of memory from the living. They just wanted the essence of a human soul, a tender, sweet tidbit to snack on. “The Master’s one nasty son of a bitch.”
Morrison, predictably, said, “What the hell’s the Master?”
To my surprise, I could smile, a soft gentle little thing. I turned it on Morrison in lieu of the hug I wanted to give him, just for being himself. “I think I can save them. Sorry, Morrison. Maybe you’ll forgive me someday.”
I crashed back into my body, no longer feeling distant or as though time was stretching, and ran like hell for the cauldron.
Two steps away from it, Billy Holliday caught my shoulder, spun me around and cold-cocked me.
Once upon a time getting hit in the jaw by a guy Billy’s size would’ve laid me out. As it was, I still whipped around in a circle and staggered a few steps in the wrong direction while startled magic tried to steady my inner ear and reduce the ache in my jaw.
That was all the time it took for Billy to scramble up the aluminum stepladder leaning against the cauldron and dive in.
I said, “Oh, no, you fucking don’t,” and went in after him.
I lay on my back in tall grass, a straw hat knocked forward over my eyes and a hayseed, I kid you not, a hayseed, stuck between my teeth so I had something to gnaw on. Wind hissed around me, low and quiet and comforting as bees buzzed through it. I didn’t have to look to know I wore my favorite oil-stained jeans and a tank top, or that heavy boots were on my feet. I was so comfortable that pushing the hat back and rising up on my elbows to look around took some convincing.
The overgrown dry grass I lay in got shorter a few yards away from me, flattening out into a big rambling lawn that ran up against an old farmhouse. It looked ramshackle at first glance, but a second look told me it was just old, the boards faded to a non-descript gray and curtains in the windows washed free of color, but left softer than silk. It was probably a hundred years old, and for all that it showed its age, it’d been kept in good repair through all the intervening years. I liked it instinctively: it was a home, comforting and inviting.
A shadow passed through my sunshine and I squinted at the sky. Non-threatening thick white clouds puffed over the sun and moved on, letting summer heat spill down to warm my grass bed and the house’s dark shingles alike. I could smell tar on the roof and fruit from distant apple trees. A hand-built fence, grayed by time, marked off boundaries that only the handful of cows and horses beyond them might pay heed to. One of them worked its way to a stream and poked its nose in, slurping loudly enough to hear over the wind and the distant sound of laughter. There was no sound of traffic, no evidence of the peaceable holding being disturbed by anything from the outside.
It felt a lot like heaven.
Not my heaven, maybe. Mine would have a falling-down barn somewhere visible on the property: a place where I might find Petite, or a cousin to her, and where I could work on her for all the long hot daylight hours. But this was somebody’s idyllic world, and if this is what people got for climbing into the cauldron, I might think a deathtime of servitude to a dark master would be worth it, too.
I got up, grateful for the hat that turned sunlight into speckles instead of a blinding wall, and discarded my grass stem for another one to nibble on as I followed the laughter. Tir na nOg had brought laughter forth from the trees and earth itself, but I thought I was hearing ordinary kids. Whoever’s heaven this was, it didn’t seem like the kind of place peopled by the ethereal. When I got close enough to the house, I shouted, “Hello?” and had
a sudden bemused hope that I wasn’t about to be greeted by a shotgun and a smile.
Three kids burst around the corner of the house instead, racing pell-mell after one another with the abandon of youth. The oldest was a boy of maybe fifteen, keeping well in the lead, with a girl of around eleven behind him and another boy, about eight years old, giving valiant chase to them both.
I knew the little girl.
She was the ghostly image who’d turned up in my garden a couple of days ago, so brief and unformed I hadn’t recognized her when I’d gotten a clearer look in the Dead Zone. It was the same hint of a ghost I’d seen hanging back and staying at Billy’s side during Sonata’s séance. She was all braided pigtails and smiles, with big brown eyes and strong fast legs, and as I watched, she gave up any hope of catching the older boy by turning to bellow, “Come on, Billy, we’ve almost got him!”
All the pieces fell into place.
Her name was Caroline Holliday, and she was Billy’s older sister. She’d died in a drowning accident when she was eleven, probably in the same creek I could hear burbling in the background. The red-cheeked little boy chasing her was Billy, and the older boy leading the game of tag was their officious big brother, Bradley, whom I’d met a few months earlier and had utterly failed to get along with.
This was Caroline’s heaven, or maybe Billy’s: a place and time when his family were all together, Caro safe and alive, Brad less uptight than the man he’d grown into being.
Brad skidded to a stop when he saw me, then spread his arms, keeping his younger siblings safe behind him as he thrust out his jaw in challenge. “Who’re you? What’re you doing here?”
“I came looking for Billy,” I said with maybe a little too much honesty. “He’s a friend of mine.”
“You’re a grown-up,” Brad said suspiciously. “And I don’t know you. How can you be his friend?”
Caroline crashed into Brad’s back, and Billy caught up with both of them, smacking Brad’s outstretched hand to yell, “You’re it!” in triumph. Then he grabbed that same hand and stared at me. “Who’s that?”
“She’s a bad guy,” Brad said with wonderful conviction.
“No,” Caroline said, and I could see all the excitement die in her eyes. “No, she’s not.”
The world changed around us.
I stood in a cemetery, but not a city-run or official one. It was a family plot littered with wooden grave markers and homemade crosses. Wildflowers grew up all over the place, richest on the low heaps of earth abutting the markers. Some of them were so old as to be barely there anymore, only scraps of wood that hadn’t quite melted back into the ground yet. Others were much newer, shellacked and gleaming against the elements. A fence like the one near the house surrounded the little graveyard, making it private and sacred, but still open and part of the world. It was a good place to be buried, better than almost anywhere I could think of.
Billy, an adult now, looking very like the man I knew, knelt by the freshest grave. Caroline Holliday, still eleven years old, still in pigtails and a solemn look, sat on the grave marker with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them. She shouldn’t have been able to: it was headstone-shaped and too narrow for even a little girl to sit on like that, but the dead, I thought, didn’t have to conform to quite the same laws the living did.
“Your friend’s come to get you, Billy. See?” Caroline pushed a toe out and nudged Billy’s shoulder so he would look around toward me. “She came to take you away. You’re not supposed to be here yet.”
Caroline could no more move an unwilling Billy than she could’ve moved the moon, but he shifted with her touch and looked over his shoulder at me. Dismay cut lines into his face. “You’re not supposed to be here, Walker. The whole damn point of hitting you was to keep you out.”
I shrugged. “I’m not so good at letting my friends make dramatic sacrifices. What the hell am I supposed to tell Mel, huh? So either we’re both staying or we’re both going. I’m not letting this happen.”
“You have to. The only thing that’ll destroy the cauldron is a living body entering it willingly.”
“Yeah.” I squinted at Caroline, then at the sun, then around the graveyard. “Yeah, the problem with that is it didn’t break apart or anything when you jumped in, or I wouldn’t have been able to follow. Besides—” I shook my head and sat down, leaning against one of the headstones “—I mean, I get why you dove in. You were trying to save me. Thank you, by the way. But, Billy…why the hell did you dive in?”
He gave me a familiarly exasperated look, which made me happy. If I could still annoy him, there was hope for bringing him back. “You’re a hell of a lot more important in the grander scheme of things than I am. I wasn’t going to—”
I cut him off with a wave of my hand. “Overlooking the fact that I fundamentally doubt that, it’s not what I’m asking. It’s a death cauldron, Bill, and you’ve got four kids and another one due in a couple of days. Why on God’s little green earth would you do something like this?”
Silence rolled over the cemetery, Caroline looking between me and Billy and back again. It took a long time for him to say, with a note of uncertainty, “I had this idea it would be all right. That I could just…rest for a while. That it’d be comfortable.” Another few seconds passed before he admitted, “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s the cauldron.” I tipped my head against the headstone and looked toward the sky again. Clear and blue and reassuring, an unmitigatedly beautiful day. “Every time I’ve gotten near it I’ve started wanting to climb in. I don’t know if it really offers peace, Billy, but it sure as hell talks a good game. The cauldron itself is seductive. It makes you want to get in it.”
“Well, how can that be? If living people just want to climb in—” His mouth worked and while I was pretty sure it wasn’t his original intention, his sentence ended with, “Shit.”
“Yeah. So I don’t know how we destroy it.”
Caroline’s foot thumped against her headstone. “You could ask the expert.” She sounded more like Billy than I’d expect a little girl to. They used the same inflections, though her voice was a couple octaves higher.
“Billy is my expert. What he don’t know, I don’t know. Only I don’t know a lot more than he don’t know.” I frowned and stopped talking, afraid I’d get myself stuck in a paradox or something.
“No,” Caroline said patiently. “I meant, you could ask the dead girl.”
She’d looked pretty normal, right up until then. She’d looked, you know. Alive. That trapping fell off, turning her into something unlike anything I’d ever seen. She was still generally little-girl shaped, still with braided pigtails and a solemn smile, but it was like the girl had been peeled away to reveal a pure bright soul beneath it. She wasn’t alive. She hadn’t been for a long time, but it hadn’t left the kind of mark on her that it had on Matilda Whitehead. Love had kept her from moving on, not vengeance, and over the years that had just kept building up.
Billy’s mortal form began to fall away, too. I didn’t like that: it suggested too strongly that he was dead, and that me diving after him into the cauldron hadn’t done any good, which was not an answer I was prepared to accept. But stripping away the human shell let me begin to understand just how tightly entwined his soul was with Caroline’s; how much she’d been informed who Billy had become. They’d been best friends in life, the big sister protective and proud of her little brother, the younger brother awed and admiring of the older sister. I could hardly imagine the intensity of their bond surviving into adulthood had she lived, and at the same time desperately hoped would have.
But she hadn’t lived. She’d drowned, and she’d been so worried for her baby brother that she hadn’t gone on to wherever human spirits usually went. She’d stuck around, protective and protecting, and the place that had always belonged to her inside his own soul had made a little more room, accepting her there. He saw ghosts because part of him was one.
Unhappy
certainty crawled up from within me and made me ask, “How do we break the cauldron, Caroline? If it’s not a living body, what is it?” I knew the answer. I hadn’t until now, but I knew the answer, and I wanted her to give me another one.
Radiance spilled from her as though the question made her glad. “An innocent spirit,” she said lightly. “That’s all it takes. An innocent spirit.”
“Like you,” I whispered. Like an eleven-year-old girl who’d never had much chance to live.
Caroline smiled. “Like me.”
Billy’s human form closed up over his spirit-self again, a growl contorting his voice. “Like hell.”
Caroline turned to him, putting brilliant fingertips against his chest. “I’m so far overdue, Billy. I should’ve gone on years ago. You know that. Even Bradley knows it. It’s why he hates all of this so much. It’s long past time for me to let go, and if I do it now…” Her smile blossomed again. Smile didn’t come close to what happened when she expressed happiness. The whole world around us lit up, grave markers casting white shadows and a sense of joy and excitement wiping out other emotion. It utterly lacked in artifice, but was wise enough about the world to make it achingly poignant.
“If I go now,” Caroline said again, “I can help you. I can save that family. I can put all those restless dead back to sleep. It’s a good time, Billy. This is a good time to go.”
“Caro…” Billy’s voice cracked.
I got up and jerked my head toward the world beyond the little graveyard. “I’ll wait out there. Take your time.” I walked out and closed the gate behind me, as though doing so could give them the privacy they deserved.
A few minutes later a supernova expelled us onto Archie Redding’s lawn.
CHAPTER 29
Tuesday, November 1, 12:01 a.m.
From my perspective, quite a lot of time had passed since I’d jumped into the cauldron. From the world’s, it looked like very little time had passed at all, and yet what had passed was filled with bitter dredges.
