Masters of the Hunt: Fated and Forbidden

by Sarra Cannon

  “Which is why it left,” she finished for him and got up to give the stew another stir. “Earlier, you said the Old Ones came from Mu. So that’s a true story? About the continent sinking and all.”

  “Of course. Never could figure out why it dropped out of the histories. Unless the Lemurians wanted to cover their tracks. It was their own damned fault they lost their land—”

  She held up both hands. “Uh-uh. Maybe sometime I’d like to hear about it, but my head’s too full right now.”

  A corner of his mouth turned down. “I’m guessing now would not be the time to tell you the history of Ireland and the MacLochlainn clan, either?”

  “Prescient of you.” She smiled as she sat back down. Her earlier anger scattered like so much dust. She reached a hand across the small table that lay between them, and he took it. Her next words came hard. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you. I just kept thinking it wasn’t all that bad. After all, it was just D’Chel. It wasn’t as if he had an army at his back—”

  “Not that you knew about,” Fionn growled.

  She waved him to silence. “Hush. I’m trying to apologize. It isn’t easy. Anyway, I promise I’ll try to do better. It’s hard to see myself as part of something. It’s been just me for three years.”

  He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. It was such a courtly, old world gesture that it warmed her. “I think our meal’s nearly ready,” he said. “Not sure what time it is, but it might qualify as a romantic midnight supper.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Her smile widened into a grin. “I’m hungry.” Aislinn rose, intent on filling bowls with stew.

  Rune had been asleep since feasting on raccoon scraps. He got to his feet and rubbed against her as she crossed the room. Something nagged in the back of her mind. “Oh.” She laid a hand on the wolf’s head. “Sorry, Rune, I’d forgotten.” She turned to face Fionn. “Rune wanted to go back to where he and Marta lived. There are things he thinks I should look at.”

  Fionn glanced at the wolf.

  Rune’s tail swished from side to side. His amber gaze shifted from one to the other of them as he spoke. “Marta kept notes about the Old Ones. They may help you. And I would like to visit my home one last time.”

  “How long since she died?” Fionn asked. “And where exactly did you and Marta live?”

  “In a town named Ely. I’m not exactly certain how much time has passed since I lost my last bondmate.” Rune shook himself from head to tail tip.

  “About a month, maybe a bit more,” Aislinn cut in. “Animals measure time differently than we do.”

  “We should leave tomorrow, then. We don’t want anyone to get there ahead of us, and it seems much time has already passed.” Fionn got to his feet. Looking at Rune, he asked, “Did Marta ward her home?”

  “Of course.”

  Fionn exhaled sharply. “Then we may not be too late.” He placed his hands on Aislinn’s shoulders. “Sit. I’ll get our food.”

  She returned to her chair, thinking about looters. Christ, she’d looted the McCloud Fishing Lodge just yesterday. Or had it been the day before? Bottom line was everyone took whatever they could, wherever they could find it. Unless Marta’s house had been very well hidden, wards or no wards, they may well find it stripped of everything. No one else would care about her notes. They’d see paper as something to start a fire with.

  “Thanks.” She beamed at Fionn, who’d just set a steaming bowl, fragrant with herbs and spices, in front of her.

  “Eat. You could use a bit more meat on your bones.” He looked down his nose at her. “Don’t crinkle up those golden eyes. Do you know they’re almost exactly the same shade as Rune’s?”

  “Mother’s eyes,” she mumbled. “I have my mother’s eyes.”

  “They’re a MacLochlainn trait,” he informed her with a hint of a supercilious grin.

  They ate in silence. Once she started on the thick stew, she realized she was half-starved. It was easy to follow one spoonful with another, washed down by several cups of mead, and not think at all.

  “Maybe,” she ventured after her bowl was empty, “as long as we’re heading to where Rune and Marta lived, we could take whatever we find there to my place. It will be much closer than this. We’re still in California. Where I first met Rune was only a couple hundred miles from home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  She held up her hands, palms outward. “Near the Utah-Colorado border, about halfway down Utah.”

  Fionn crinkled his brow in thought. “I can’t tell for certain without dredging out my maps, but if Rune means Ely, Nevada, he and Marta lived just about dead center between our two homes.” He nodded. “Sure, we can go to your house if you’d like.”

  Remembering Travis’s interest in her library, she felt uncomfortable. “There’s something I should tell you.”

  His gaze zeroed in on hers, suddenly wary. He crooked two fingers as if to say, out with it.

  “I, ah, I have books, too.”

  A long, uneasy silence bounced back and forth between them. “That’s it?” he demanded. “You made a point of telling me you have books? So what?” He flung an expansive arm skyward. “I have books. Without them the knowledge of the world will truly die out.”

  “I-I felt the same way,” she murmured, “which is why I kept all I could from Mom and Dad, even though it was forbidden.”

  “Are you done?” He glanced at her empty bowl. When she nodded, he put it on the floor for Rune. Getting to his feet, he came to her, pulled her upright, and led her to some cushions. “Sit with me.

  “People have been trying to outlaw books on-again, off-again, ever since the fourteen hundreds, when Gutenberg invented the printing press. The thing I fail to understand is how the combination of the dark gods and the Lemurians managed to break the will of billions of people on this planet.”

  “I wonder if there’s even a single billion left,” she muttered.

  “Oh, I think there is.”

  “How would you know?”

  He draped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her against him. “I know because I’m not the only Celtic god left. We have ways of communicating with one another. And,”—his eyes glinted darkly—“we number far more than the dark gods. I’m not so sure about the Lemurians. No one has ever been certain of their numbers.”

  She thought about the hundreds she’d seen. “There were a lot of them in Taltos. It was odd, though. They all seemed to be hurrying somewhere. I wondered at the time what they were up to.”

  “It could’ve been illusion. Maybe they wanted you to think there were lots of them. It’s possible that only the three you actually spoke to were real.”

  Aislinn considered it and wished she’d paid closer attention. “I just don’t know. I suppose I might’ve been able to use my Mage senses to figure that out. Sorry. I was so nervous, it never occurred to me.” She thought of something and cocked her head to one side. “They must’ve been real, because they were still there when Rune merged his senses with mine.”

  “Hmph. Not the answer I’d hoped for, but it’s good to know all the same. Come closer.” He tightened his grip around her shoulders.

  He was murmuring wordless endearments, breath warm against her neck, and caressing her shoulder with calloused fingers, when something occurred to her. Drawing away slightly, she tilted her head and gazed at him. “If there are more of you than them, why haven’t you gotten together with your buddies and blown the dark gods back to the hell they came from? I’m pretty sure the Bal’ta and other abominations would go away if that happened. Then we’d just have the Old Ones to contend with.”

  “It seems like a long time to you since the dark gods came.”

  He posed it as a statement, so she continued to study his face. Of course it was a long time. What was he, brain damaged?

  He must have been inside her head, because the corners of his mouth twitched. “Lass, three years is nothing in real time. It’s the blink of a cosmic eye. We were waitin
g to see if the human inhabitants of this planet could rescue themselves. Generally, we don’t like to interfere.”

  “Were you going to wait until we were all dead?” She bristled and pulled away from his embrace. “Shot to shit in that damned movable vortex? If you had some means to alter what was happening and didn’t use it—”

  Fury ripped through her. She’d been fighting with everything she had, even though she knew it wouldn’t be enough. Earth, her Earth, was worth it. What had he been doing all that time? Nothing! Fucking nothing, that’s what. “Damn you.” She drew back a hand to slap him, but he caught it midair.

  “It’s my turn to apologize.” He laid her hand gently in her lap. “We kept thinking humans would mobilize. We didn’t count on the Lemurians slaughtering so many. By the time we got worried, millions had walked into that damned vortex like sheep—”

  “What exactly is it?” she interrupted, still furious. “Do you know?”

  “It’s a gateway. They can open it wherever they want.”

  “Yes, but where does it go?”

  He shrugged. “To Hell.” At the look in her eyes, he held up both hands. “Near as we can tell, it emits a highly specific radioactivity that scrambles human brains. It kills instantly. The cells just explode.”

  “It sounds…unnatural.” She went cold inside.

  “It is. Why do you think there are so many shades? The vortex interrupts their journey across the veil. Makes them forget what their spirits need to do once their bodies are no longer living.” Pain floated behind his eyes.

  “Do you think it’s too late?” The anger drained out of her, replaced by fear.

  “I hope not.” He set his jaw resolutely. “The silver lining in this cloud is all those humans who discovered they carried magic within them. Were it not for the Harmonic Convergence and all those synchronized Surges, the majority of humans would’ve remained magic-less.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “The Convergence, and the Surges that followed it, distorted the energies binding this world with others parallel to it. Those energies created the possibility of magic here on Earth, not just for the gods, but for everyone.”

  “So everyone who threw their lives away had magic?” she asked, aghast.

  “Not all, but many. Just not enough magic to satisfy the Lemurians. They’re up to something. I’ll be damned if I know what it is, though.”

  “Mother,” she murmured. “If anyone was magical, it was Mother.” She thought about Tara Lenear’s wild hair and dead eyes once the madness took hold. Sorrow tore through her like a riptide, tears so close to the surface it took all her will to keep from collapsing into helpless sobs.

  His mage light fluttered close. He studied her face. “You, mo croi, my heart, would have found your magic even without the Surges.” She opened her mouth, aching to talk about her mother—to tell Fionn about her—but he shook his head. “Not tonight. We need sleep. I want to be out of here as close to dawn as we can.”

  Chapter 15

  They initiated the jump from underground, even though it meant they couldn’t go as far. Fionn insisted, saying, “If that dark hellion waylays us the second our heads pop out, we’ll burn a lot of energy that could be spent traveling.”

  “Where are we?” She looked at terrain a little more arid than what they’d left, but nothing like the innards of Nevada.

  “Does it matter?” He gave her a crooked grin. “You take the next jump.”

  It felt good to be away from the forest around Fionn’s. Though it was ridiculous, she’d nearly talked herself into D’Chel living nearby. There are lots of reasons I saw him twice that don’t include him living there, she lectured herself. For all I know, he has his own private hell on one of the border worlds.

  “Doona be making that mistake.” The Irish lilt was back in force. “The dark gods can go anywhere. Quickly, too. It was coincidence he found us. Once found, though, he saw us as easy pickings and decided to stay.” Fionn winked at her. “Delectable morsel that ye are, lass. What man could resist?”

  “Bah!” She tapped into magic as she talked. “And ye’ll be turning this lassie’s puir head with all that balderdash.”

  He made a sour face.

  “If you don’t like having Irish tossed back at you,” she said, “then don’t use it in the first place. There. Ready when you are.”

  Rune came to her side. Bella lit on her shoulder. Fionn put an arm around her. “Lead out.”

  She pictured one of the many places she knew in northern Nevada, gratified when her magic worked and they came out within spitting distance of her planned location. Squinting, she looked at the sun. “This may do it for today.” She checked around them for traces of dark magic and blew out a relieved breath when she didn’t find any. “Let’s figure out a place to camp.”

  “I can take us farther. Remember, there are two of us now.” Fionn walked to where Rune and Bella had begun hunting rodents in a sagebrush thicket. He clucked, and the wolf loped to his side. Fionn shut his eyes. “Send me an image of where you lived with Marta. Thanks! Good hunting. I’ll tell you and Bella when we’re ready to leave.”

  He returned to where Aislinn sprawled in the dirt, drinking from her water bottle. She turned her gaze upward. “Fine by me if we can get all the way to Rune and Marta’s today.” She smiled to herself. It was actually much more than fine. It was incredible that they could cover so much distance in such a short time. Made things easier. She recalled the time it had taken her to get from her home to Mount Shasta. Of course, it was farther, and she’d stopped off in that other world, but still… Maybe pairing up with someone could work to her advantage.

  Yeah, I’ve spent so much time avoiding entanglements, it never occurred to me that having someone else around could actually be helpful.

  “You’re only just now coming to appreciate that?” Fionn was on his knees, facing away from her bent over his maps.

  “Awk. Damn it! What? Do you live inside my head?” She crawled over to him and studied the map he’d laid out.

  “No, lass. I merely visit there occasionally. It’s fair interesting, though. Maybe I should spend more time—”

  She slugged him in the thigh, but he just laughed. “Ye canna hurt me, lassie.”

  “Stop that, too.”

  “Why does it bother you?” He looked at her. Curiosity shone from the depths of his eyes.

  She swallowed hard. May as well tell him. If I do, maybe he’ll quit. “Because it reminds me so much of Mother, it hurts.”

  “Och aye.” He pulled her into his arms. “Speaking in a brogue is more comfortable for me, but I’ll try to honor your wishes.”

  Wanting to change the subject, she wriggled free and jabbed a finger at the map. “Show me where we are.”

  “Here.” He pointed. “According to Rune, we are going there.” Fionn tapped at a spot not far from the Utah-Nevada line.

  She gauged the distance. “Shouldn’t take long.”

  “No, not long. What do you think we’ll find?”

  She turned her palms upward. “Don’t know. Depending on how voluminous Marta’s notes are, though—assuming they’re still there—we might spend a couple days sifting through them.”

  “I thought the same.” He rolled back onto his heels and then proceeded to fold the maps and stuff them into the pocket of an old khaki field jacket. Patched pants made of the same fabric, battered leather boots, and a faded sweatshirt blazoned with Go Bears hung off his tall, well-muscled frame. Fionn extended a hand and helped her to her feet.

  “I should’ve shopped for you while I was at that fishing lodge. This”—she fingered a hole in his jacket—“isn’t long for this world.”

  He shouldered a North Face backpack. It looked newer than his clothes. “Get your things,” he suggested and then whistled. Rune came at a run. Bella dive-bombed Fionn, spreading her wings at the last possible moment.

  Aislinn laughed. “What’s that? Her version of chicken?”

>   Bella cawed at her, sounding annoyed.

  Fionn eyed his bird. “Looks like she has your number, sweetheart.”

  Another displeased avian sound burst from the raven. “I am not a chicken.”

  “Oh, so that’s it!” Aislinn dissolved in laughter.

  Fionn joined her.

  — —

  Aislinn had been correct that the jump wouldn’t take long. Between Fionn’s magic, which was stronger than hers, and the relatively short distance, they stood in front of a dilapidated yellow and blue Victorian before Rune even had a chance to merge with her.

  “Great!” Aislinn bounded forward, hit something invisible that tossed her backward through the air, and landed on her ass.

  “Hmph. Answers one question,” Fionn muttered. “Wards are still intact.”

  “No shit.” Taking his proffered hand, Aislinn pulled herself upright and dusted dirt off her pants. She looked reproachfully at Rune. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “You moved so quickly, I did not have a chance.”

  “Can you disable them?” she asked the wolf.

  “No, but they’ll let me in.” As if to demonstrate, he sashayed up to the front door and placed a paw to the right of it. The heavy, ornate oak slab swung inward. Rune disappeared inside.

  “Good for him. Less good for us.” Aislinn took off her pack, dropped it in the dirt, and sat on it. She sent her Mage senses spinning outward to try to figure out how to dismantle the warding. When she sensed the complexity of Marta’s work, she groaned. “This will take days,” she muttered.

  “Maybe not.” Fionn returned from walking around the house. “The back is far less complicated. I say we attack it from there.” He pulled her to her feet for a second time. “What is it about you and sitting in the dirt. Do you like it down there? Get your pack.”

  They worked together. He illuminated the working so it was visible, while she clipped a large enough hole in the weave to let them through. “Well,” she said as the last piece fell, making a hissing noise, “that wasn’t so bad.”