Blood War

by Russell Moon

  It is unmistakable. There is an ocean between us. Somehow, a whole ocean. A shore at her feet, powerful waves crashing around her. Behind her is a green and rolling landscape, somehow barren and rich at the same time. I recognize this landscape as ancient, Celtic. It is deeply familiar, though I have never been there. It is somehow homelike.

  She holds her hands out, palms open, and she waves me toward her. Fierce wind blows in her face, whipping her hair like a flag. She looks gorgeous. She looks lethal.

  And then she is gone. I am left looking at the red light of the darkroom, the image of Eartha across an angry ocean burning into my memory.

  I slam the door closed again and stand there listening to the sirens outside and all the voices upstairs, and now an accumulation of feet snapping down the marble stairs, and some pounding on the pavement outside.

  I think I can do this.

  They are pouring down the stairs now, teachers and cops and whoever else.

  I can do this.

  I make two fists. I think about it, about what I have to do, what must be done.

  Everything and everyone, a fabric containing everything, flashes before me, a roulette wheel of all I have done, everywhere I have been, until my mind’s eye locks in on it. I feel the rings, both of them pulling toward each other like magnets and heating up so intensely I have to scream.

  And then.

  I am standing in my yard. Overlooking the stream as it burbles coolly, soothingly before me. My buddy Chuck is lying peacefully under the earth, guarded, at my back.

  For the first time in God knows how long, I smile.

  I can control it, this ability to move things—cows, boulders, trees—that has been with me since I came into my power as a witch. Back then it terrified me—it was the first indication that I was not who I thought I was.

  Now it has delivered me to safety. I have moved myself. I can control it.

  It is part of my birthright, as is an obair. And so is this: the knowledge of what the vision in the darkroom meant. The knowledge of the place I saw—where and what it is—though it is so completely foreign to me. The knowledge of what I must do next.

  CHAPTER 2

  I can do a lot of stuff now, but apparently I cannot fly across oceans. At least not in the way that everybody else can.

  Problem there is money.

  I have no job, no savings. No Mom. I have no relatives that I know of. No friends.

  I also have no time for bullshit.

  I am standing in front of the biggest liquor store in Blackwater. I wait, searching my conscience, and my guts, for about a minute as I debate for the last time whether I think this is the way to go about raising cash. As I do, I watch poor suckers enter and exit on an almost ceaseless conveyer belt, going in empty-handed, coming out loaded down and loaded up.

  There are three types, really. The kind who look like they could be doing any kind of shopping, for a new track suit or some nice baking potatoes for supper. Then there is the euphoric kind, clearly supplying themselves for some kind of festivity. And then there is what seems to be the dominant type. On a mission. Determined to get at what’s on the inside.

  I watch all the same types come out—loaded up with beer, wine, Jack Daniels, and Absolut, cigarettes and cigars and loads and loads of lottery tickets, every opiate available over the counter. Suckers. Poor suckers.

  I have no problem taking money from the operators of this business, I think. Then I tell myself to shut up.

  I’m no damn Robin Hood. Right now I could probably rob a pet store, an old folks’ home, a day care center if I had to, because whatever I have to do to get to Eleanor seems worth it.

  Bang, like that, I am in the store, in the sweet liquors aisle, as my power moves me smoothly and swiftly where I want to go. It has taken less than a fraction of an instant for me to bypass the doors and land in this spot. Now that I’m learning how to control it, the magic moving of myself has become more and more doable, and I am doing it with precision.

  I grab a bottle of Irish Mist for myself and chuckle.

  Bang, I am behind the counter, behind the cashier. Avoiding the security cameras as much as possible, though I am half tempted to dance and wave at them.

  There is nobody waiting to be served at this instant, so now is the time.

  I reach right over the cashier’s shoulder, shocking holy hell out of her. She is a girl my age—Marissa, I read on her name tag.

  She lets out a short crisp scream that immediately sets motion in motion all over the place.

  “I am sorry, Marissa,” I say as I bang a couple of keys and relieve the cash register of a monstrous wad of tens and twenties and fifties and hundreds.

  People are rushing toward the register, including one armed guard person who is drawing his weapon.

  “Really,” I say to the gasping Marissa, “I am sorry.”

  And bang, I am gone. Just like that.

  I do a magical hopscotch across town, moving myself from phone booth to public toilet to parking lot, then over to the next town, then the next. It’s exhilarating, to tell the truth, to be doing this. Only I am feeling some guilt about Marissa. I didn’t expect a Marissa. I mean, I expected a someone, a body, a placeholder. But I didn’t expect a person, exactly, to get involved.

  Then I think about Eleanor and forget to feel guilty.

  In minutes I find a place where I can hire a car to the international airport about two hours away. I have one medium-small bag full of clothes that will probably be of no use. Did I pack socks and underwear? Possibly. A sweater? I don’t think so. Shoes?

  I haven’t planned very well, but none of that matters much. I have enough for now, and I have my passport, which I have never had the need to use.

  I crack the passport open in the car as we hit the highway and things start to feel more settled.

  “What do you think of that weather, huh?” the driver says. “First hot as a mother, then not. That’s just the way it can be around here. You here on business, or—”

  “Listen,” I say, feeling irritable but trying to sound merely tired, “we don’t have to talk. Could we not talk?”

  He answers me by not answering. Offended, I guess. Not too long ago, that would have bothered me tremendously. I wish I had the energy, the strength, and the time to still be bothered.

  I miss my humanity and hope to see it again soon, though I realize that is all but impossible.

  I go back to my passport and get choked up almost immediately.

  Eleanor got me my passport four years ago, when we were planning, hoping, trying to make a trip overseas. She so badly wanted to do this. Just the two of us. We were going to see places. European capitals, do it on the cheap but cheerful. It was so exciting, it was so beyond exciting, beyond the life we lived.

  But it petered out, the way things always did. No mystery. No money. Try and try and work though she did, the tank just never seemed to get any fuller, and her dreams always ended up just that, just dreams.

  So sad, it makes me. It is a good thing the driver and I aren’t speaking to each other because I couldn’t manage it anyhow. She was always trying, Eleanor. Always trying.

  I envision her at points throughout the last seventeen years. Her face, contracted with drink, so often lonely as I have always been, maybe even lonelier, but still there and strong. Her face, shattered into a million tortured fragments, full of uncommon hate when I told her the awful truth about the witch that I’d discovered myself to be—the hate that was, more than anything, aimed at my father and his leaving and his witch “bullshit,” and of course at all the torment the news brought with it.

  I let my hand fall on top of my bag, crammed with cash. The possibilities of my power. Jeez, the possibilities, El. Somebody owes you. Everybody owes you. I owe you.

  When you come back. Oh, when I get you back, you’re getting yours. You are getting paid back.

  I flip backwards through the passport and land on my picture. No. Not my picture.

 
I flip down the little visor provided here in the plush backseat of this not-too-shabby ride.

  I look at myself now, in the small vanity mirror.

  I look at Marcus, four years ago. I look at fourteen-year-old, clean, alive Marcus. Unblemished, unsullied, largely untroubled Marcus. Lonely, maybe, sort of invisible, but still so human.

  I look back up. At today Marcus. At tomorrow Marcus. At hard and haunted, murderous Marcus, pallid, vicious, and vengeful.

  I flip up the visor with a snap that causes the driver to check me out in his rearview.

  I take a last look at young Marcus.

  I feel a powerful wave of something I never used to feel. Now it is so familiar.

  Mourning. I feel like I am mourning for all the loved ones who are not around me right now, who should be. But even more, for Marcus. I miss Marcus.

  I pull out the bottle of Irish Mist from my bag, and I start drinking it.

  Maybe it is the drink or the exhaustion or just the simple helplessness of riding in the cab, but I sleep. The driver wakes me at the airport, at the curb of the international departures terminal. I pay him, in cash of course, and throw in a hefty tip for the guilt factor.

  I can tell he is pleased, but that’s not going to make him my friend. He nods.

  “You want a receipt for your expenses?” he asks.

  That sounds so funny. Like maybe I will submit my expense report to the boss and get the money back. Get the liquor store’s money back.

  “No, thanks,” I say. “That won’t be necessary.”

  I enter the building and move with purpose. I have known since seeing Eartha reaching out to me across the ocean. I have known where I am headed, though it means leaving all of my connections, possibly also my father if he is still alive, behind. I am going back to the Celtic land, back to the origins of the people, to the source of the supposed great god of Celtic forests, Cernunnos. A few months ago I would not have believed in this, in him. Now I accept it as a matter of fact.

  The coven has abandoned Blackwater, and America, for Ireland.

  Don’t get me wrong. I realize Eartha could just have been throwing me off the scent. More likely, though, the coven is waiting for me there in Ireland, setting a trap. So be it. I have no other choice but to deal in the unfortunate mysteries of faith. I am going to have to follow along, follow my nose, follow an obair, and hope for the best.

  At the Aer Lingus desk, I find there are several seats left on the flight to Shannon in the west of Ireland. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be going anyplace else, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I would be going exactly there either. I hear, even as I am discussing it with a sharp-eyed, blue-eyed, fairy-featured lady in a silly hat, the internal noise of an obair growing more insistent, like a Geiger counter ticking madly at the approach of uranium. It tells me I am on the right track.

  The lady is staring intensely, however, at my picture. And at me. And at my picture.

  “It was from four years ago, as you can see,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says very slowly, unsatisfied.

  “I was just a kid then,” I say, leaning a little closer so we can assess the damage together, and probably breathing Irish Mist all over her.

  “Mmmm,” she says.

  I sigh. I understand her difficulty with the innocence of my picture and the diabolical reality standing before her sparkling clean Aer Lingus counter.

  I will help her. I will help both of us and the people behind me in line.

  “Heroin,” I say, whispery-secret.

  Her elfin eyes go wide. “Yes?”

  “Heroin. I had a heroin…thing.” And here I lay it on thick with the embarrassment, the horror of my own degradation, and the shame of having to recount it here. “That’s why I look like I look and not like I should.”

  She pulls her lips tight, bravely.

  “But I’m better now,” I say earnestly.

  She nods, assigns me a window seat, gives me a talk about packing my own bag and not carrying anything for strangers, and hands me my boarding card.

  I imagine the customs guys going thoroughly through my bag. And I try and remember again whether there is any clean underwear in there.

  I have three hours to shop in duty-free before takeoff. The latest in a long, long line of sick, cruel jokes. I don’t know anybody where I’m going. I don’t know who I’m going to find there or what. And for damn sure there’s not going to be anyone meeting me at the airport, holding up a big MARCUS sign. So shopping for gifts would seem to be a bit of nonsense at best, a psychotic delusion at worst.

  But I’m going to get something nice for my mom. That’s what I’m going to do. Because, goddammit, I am finding her.

  It’s an overnight flight, and that is just as well, for I pass out before the plane is even off the ground. I wake briefly when they come around with the complimentary beverages and I have myself a complimentary can of Guinness. Which does nothing for my alertness, and I am promptly gone again, thinking as I fade that maybe mixing alcohol and supreme magical power might not be prudent, but not caring much.

  I wake up again when a meal is put in front of me, but I haven’t got the strength to eat it. I stare, eyes half-open, at the little plastic tray, plastic plates and utensils and cup, but I don’t even get as far as lifting the plastic cover to see what’s underneath. I sleep. I sleep in an impossibly awkward position with my left temple bouncing off the Plexiglas window, my knees tucked up and pressed to the wall while the large man next to me takes up far more than his ticket should allow.

  But I sleep. The sleep of the dead.

  Almost. It is deep, but it is dreamy. I dream of Ireland, lush and wet, smelling of moss and peat and yeast. I have never been there, never had any impressions of the place beyond the pop images of leprechauns and red hair, whiskey, horses, and rain. But I see people as I sleep, see them as they come to me, greet me, burly red-faced men in wool caps pulled low, smiling gap-toothed grins as they pump me handshakes designed to loosen my bones. And I see shadows, faceless shadows playing in the short distance behind every smiling face, every warm greeting, every generously offered pint of stout or plate of food, so that I cannot focus for long on what is going on in front of me. Watch the shadows, I think. Watch and watch them.

  And then…there, who is that? And that? I know them, disappearing into the hills, or the surf, or the stone ruins. My eyes dart, my head spins as I try to keep up with them.

  I am twitching like I am having a seizure when I come to. I look to my right and see the large man staring at me angrily.

  Fully awake now, I turn the other way, toward the window. And there it is.

  I see it as we approach, as we sweep in low, beneath the rising red sun and above the unnatural green patchwork quilt of this old land. I see it, the home I have never been to, the people and the land that I know belong to me and me to them. I feel the rings on my hands warming, and I stare down at them with interest—the rings handed to me by my father. Handed, I suppose, all the way down through our line of princes, through generations and centuries tracing all the way back to this place and to the god Cernunnos himself. They are truly magic. It still surprises me.

  I turn back to the window and then I blink. I see…I swear I can see them all flickering below, each tiny, shimmering malevolence, each member of the coven. I see us involved in a long, perverse dance, from Port Caledonia to Blackwater and now on to Shannon below us. I see it now: I see them. I feel them, as they must feel me. I hear them, like a loud, screaming welcome in my ears.

  An obair hears them, and I hear an obair.

  I have been all over in the past couple of days: in my head, around the clock, across the ocean, in and out of intoxication. It is hard to get my legs and my bearings as I watch the luggage carousel spin around and around and finally present my bag.

  I walk without purpose, following the bulk of travelers out of the baggage claim area and through the blue doors to have my passport stamped. I emerge into the modest expa
nse of Shannon International Airport, shielding my eyes, for I have forgotten that it is high morning.

  I stop briefly, looking out over the sea of anxious, happy faces waiting to pick up friends and family and lovers.

  And my heart drops. It is a combination of things, I know. The overnight flight and the total strangeness of the place; strangeness of the whole journey and all, I know.

  But it hurts. Just the same, it hurts.

  Friends and family and lovers.

  All gone. At this moment, I am further than I could ever imagine from friends, family, lovers.

  Christ, where am I?

  “County Clare just now. But you’ll be headed to Galway.”

  I scan the faces before me and immediately see the man who is talking to me. He is all I can hear. Everyone around me is moving here and there, mouths working, waving at folks, bumping into one another. But I can hear none of it. It is as if this man, middle-aged, sweet smile, dressed in a neat tan suit, has got a private line direct into my ears: his words come across digital clear, like I’m wearing an earpiece.

  And he is doing exactly what I said nobody here would be doing. He is holding up a sign that says MARCUS.

  I walk up to him, eventually.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  He lowers his sign and takes my bag.

  “I’m Mr. Blake,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say, staring at him holding my bag in his hand. “But who are you? Why are you?”

  “I am your driver. I am one of your father’s subjects. I am one of your subjects.”

  Ever so slightly, he bows. I get a chill.

  “Please,” I say, reaching out to straighten him up. “Oh god, please don’t do that. Can you just tell me why you are here? How you knew I would be here? How this is…happening?”