I wandered over to the window, and saw a row of pigeons outside on the ledge. Dozens of them were crammed together in a line, their feathery chests puffed out against the cold. Lookouts, Morrigan-style, I guessed. One whiff of the men in black, and they’d dive-bomb them all, in that special way that only city-tough street pigeons can. Avian ninjas to the rescue.
Further off, I could see the panorama of the city, and sunlight finally starting to spread its fingers over the steely surface of the river. I could see buses crawling over the streets, and the shapes of the two cathedrals and St John’s Tower piercing the sky. The flat was a tip, but the views were spectacular. I felt a surge of affection for the place well up inside me. My life would never be the same, but Liverpool, I hoped, always would be. I wanted to come back here when this was all over, ideally without a trail of assassins on my back. Maybe I’d get to interview that male Cher impersonator after all.
‘I have prepared you a place to sleep,’ said the Morrigan. She gestured at what looked like two army-issue sleeping bags on the floor, still rolled up and toggled. Ooh. Luxury. ‘For you too, Child of Menhit,’ she added, looking through narrow eyes at Carmel.
I had no idea what that meant, and I saw Carmel open her mouth to ask. She was silenced by one slight shake of the Morrigan’s head, and her lips clamped shut. I’d never seen her so subservient to anyone before, not even the editor at the Gazette. Especially not the editor, in fact. It wasn’t a criticism – I wouldn’t argue with the Morrigan, either. She put me to sleep and hefted me to the Dingle last time I tried it.
I stared at the vicious slash across Carmel’s cheek, and felt a wave of shame sweep over me. I’d dragged her into all of this, and she’d been marked for life as a result. Kevin’s eye. Carmel’s face. Luca’s almost everything. After last night’s performance, my own self-respect. Where would the list of casualties end?
She saw me looking, and her fingers flew up to touch the ragged edges of the wound, a trail of loose thread still hanging from one corner like a drooping comma.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t hurt. Connor sewed it up for me. He used TCP and everything, so chill out, OK? It’ll only make things worse if I have to worry about you worrying about me on top of everything else. I made my choices, and I don’t regret them.’
‘Of course she doesn’t – she has the heart of a warrior,’ said the Morrigan, bustling away in a crinkling carrier bag in the corner of the room. ‘And there will be more injuries and more death to come, Goddess, possibly your own – you need to get used to that. You are being – what’s the word you people use … a wuss. Your Champion isn’t. Learn from her, and find the courage I know you must have hidden within you.’
Now, as pep talks went, I’d had better – but I suspected she had a point. The issue, at least for me, was that everyone around me was getting hacked and thwacked all over the shop, whereas I was fine, bar the odd broken finger and a few nervous breakdowns. I felt as though the world around me, and everyone I ever cared about – admittedly an exclusive list – was being torn apart, all because of me.
Me, me, me … OK, she definitely had a point.
The Morrigan emerged from the carrier bag bearing plastic-wrapped sandwiches and bottles of water. She’d obviously managed a quick trip to the Tesco Metro on the way home, for which I was eternally grateful. I almost knocked her over in my eagerness to grab the food, and to abandon a thought process I wasn’t enjoying very much at all. There was time for self-analysis later – now was the time for stuffing my face. That was much less stressful.
We sat on the ground – bare, apart from a few tufts of purple carpet left behind when the last owner tore it from the floor – and ate. It was the best BLT I’d ever tasted, and we all remained silent, happily munching away, for a few blissful minutes. Nothing like being plunged into life or death situations every other hour to make you appreciate the simpler things.
‘Now,’ said the Morrigan, finishing her sandwich and throwing the plastic package back into the bag, ‘we will rest, and we will learn. You know who sent me?’
I nodded. Didn’t want to say it out loud, though – it sounded a bit up myself to say, ‘Yeah, God asked you to look after me, cos I’m so super-special and all.’
She nodded, as if pleased to see that I wasn’t a complete imbecile. Maybe just 95.5 per cent.
‘There are two nights until Samhain, when you must present yourself at Tara and make your choice,’ she said. ‘Do you understand me?’
She spoke slowly and clearly, enunciating every word, and I started to wonder if she really did think I was mentally impaired. And whether she might just be right.
‘Yes, against the odds, I’ve somehow managed to keep up with you so far … but, well, what if I just don’t go?’ I asked. ‘I don’t really want to.’
Carmel looked at me in exasperation, as though she just couldn’t believe what I was saying. I made an apologetic face in her direction – she thought I should go, I knew. Accept Gabriel. Bless the world. The whole nine yards. She’d bought into it all, and even had the scars to prove it.
‘That is not an option,’ replied the Morrigan, icily. ‘If you refuse to go, I will take you forcibly. Do you doubt my capacity to do such a thing?’
I looked at her, taller than most women even though she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Her red-and-white hair was scattered like snakes over her powerful shoulders, and she was fixing me with a green glare that was brighter than the sunshine leaking through the grimy windows. Umm. No. I didn’t doubt that for a minute.
So much for Plan A: avoidance.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I know you could make me to go, and I was foolish even to ask. You’ve made yourself clear, and I’m not as stupid as you might think I am. I’ll go to Tara, OK? But once I get there, it’s up to me, right? Nobody can force me to do anything once we’re there? I may be a wuss, but I’m really unhappy about all this … forcing. And with Fionnula, and with Donn, there was mention of someone else taking me forcibly. Of taking away my choice.
‘I don’t know Gabriel well enough to understand where his boundaries lie, and I don’t want to leave it until it’s too late to find out. I’m told I have power – and I need to know how to use it if things seem to be heading in that direction. Or if I react like I did tonight, when I, uh, really wasn’t myself.’
That, of course, was an understatement. The way I’d felt just a few hours ago, I’d probably have accepted my school lollipop man as my eternal mate if it got me laid. I couldn’t let that happen at Tara, when of all times I would need a clear head.
The Morrigan nodded, thinking about what I’d said – and what I hadn’t said, for fear of being too crude. Old habits die hard.
‘That was the vampire’s fault – that and your lusty nature. It will not happen like that again if you guard against it,’ she said. ‘I can show you how.’
I swallowed back a laugh, and heard Carmel sniggering in the background. Lusty nature? Me? Abso-bloody-lutely hilarious. If only she knew.
‘What about the … other thing?’ I prompted, blushing. Must be my lusty nature getting the better of me again.
‘Men are feeble creatures,’ she finally replied, ‘dominated by petty needs and selfish drives. It has always been so, and in many ways your High King is no different. You must understand that he has been raised in a world where to take – women, wealth, territory – is seen as a sign of strength. And that this pairing, this mating, is what he has been destined to do for the whole of his existence. If he fails, then his life will be without meaning and without aim. He will most likely fall upon his own sword, rather than continue to live with such failure.’
There was a pause, as I tried to digest what she’d just told me. It was taking longer than the BLT.
‘What do you mean, fall upon his own sword? Like, commit hara-kiri? He’ll kill himself if I don’t say yes?’
Even to my own ears, my voice resembled that of a lab rat being tortured: I was squeakin
g several octaves higher than usual, and felt like all the air had been punched out of my lungs. Jesus. So, I had to agree to be Gabriel’s mate, or the world as I knew it ended, and he topped himself? Wow. No pressure there, then.
‘I do not understand, girl, why you squeak so?’ said the Morrigan, frowning in confusion. ‘If you do not care for him enough to take him as mate, why would it cause you concern to see him dead?’
That, I decided, was the kind of question only a centuries-old otherworldly being could ask. And there wasn’t enough time left to try and explain it all to her now.
‘Anyway,’ she continued, seeing that I was too busy hyperventilating to reply, ‘I still do not understand why you would choose not to mate him, when so much rests upon your answer. I have been wanting to ask this of you since we met in my other form.’
I dragged myself out of puffabilly land long enough to stare at her again. We’d never met before, in this form or any other. She wasn’t the kind of woman you easily forgot.
‘Look closer,’ she said quietly, reading my reaction, and smiling spookily with one side of her mouth.
I did as I was told and looked harder at her, trying to recall if she was one of those faces from the past that Gabriel had mentioned. Someone who’d been lurking on the edge of my life without me even knowing it.
When that failed, I tried half squinting my eyes, as though distorting the angle to get a different picture would help. But no – she was still a ginger-haired behemoth, squatting in the corner, looking amused.
I drew in a breath, suspecting this was one of those occasions when looking with my eyes wouldn’t be enough. I closed them, as they were useless, and instead called up the power that Fionnula had told me I had. I started with the white – I do like my routines – and blanked out everything else, scooping it all to one side as though there was a moving wall that bulldozed the present away. It was, as she’d predicted, getting easier. Maybe I’d even be able to experiment with different colour schemes soon.
When my mind was clear, I opened my eyes again – and that’s when I saw it. A flickering around the edges of her body; a dark juddering atop her shoulders. The fluttering got stronger, and the colours coalesced into an iridescent black. Shining, oil-dark wings unfurled and haloed around her, swooping up and down, fanning tendrils of red-and-white hair up around her face. Her human shape was still there – but the wings surrounded her, like a moving curtain of black satin.
It was lucky I was already on the floor, or I’d have been crash landing on my backside any minute now.
She was the crow. The crow from the hospital. The crow Coleen said had come for her.
My fists clenched so hard a spike of pain shot up from my damaged finger, and my concentration shattered. The wings disappeared, leaving nothing but a smirk on the Morrigan’s face, and confusion on mine.
‘You?’ I spluttered. ‘You took Coleen?’
‘I didn’t take her, you fool – it was her time. She knew that, and so do you – surely you had foreseen it? Her miserable existence had come to an end, and that was nothing to do with me. I was there only to share the moment with you, Goddess. But other times … yes, other times I take people, and I relish it,’ she said, her lips twisting into a joyous grin.
‘That’s why they’re all so scared of me – why they grovel so. They fear that, one day, I may land on their shoulder during battle. Is it not so, Champion?’
Carmel had gone pale – which is quite an achievement for someone with her colouring. The black cotton stitches stood out even more starkly as she gulped in air, and struggled even to nod. I was a bit freaked out, but Carmel seemed to be in the grip of a genuine, voice-stealing terror. I had no idea if she’d seen what I’d seen, but she was quaking like a very shocked blancmange.
I felt magic crackling in the air, and the Morrigan seemed to shimmer with energy – her body floated a few inches up from the ground as she smiled, apparently reliving glorious moments from battles gone by. Her hair was lifting with her, streaks of red and silver reaching out to the corners of the room as she laughed quietly away to herself. Death, disaster, mayhem. Such jolly times. Meet Mentor Number Two – a sociopathic crow to follow Fionnula the alcoholic dolly bird. No wonder I wasn’t exactly rocking out in goddess school.
The shimmer faded, and she hovered back on to her substantial haunches, muscular thighs swelling through leather that crackled and groaned as she resettled herself.
‘I still cannot grasp it, though, child,’ she continued, as though nothing at all out of the ordinary had happened, ignoring or simply not noticing the fact that Carmel and I were cowering out of reach.
‘Erm … what?’ I asked, hoping it wouldn’t be anything that was likely to get her all happy and excited again. She was hard enough to deal with when she wasn’t levitating and laughing like an evil genius.
‘I cannot grasp why you cling to your objections. Is Cormac Mor repellent to you? Do you find his physique not sufficient for your demands?’
‘No! There’s nothing wrong with his … physique!’ I gasped out, so not liking the way this conversation was going. I wanted to put my hands over my ears and sing out loud to avoid what I suspected was coming next.
‘Indeed there is not,’ she said emphatically. ‘Many women have lusted after him over the decades – he is much younger than I, but still I find he incites desire within me. Is it that you doubt his sexual prowess, then? You need not fear on that front – he was been well trained, and shared his bed with thousands of willing partners during his short life.’
Eek, yuck, and poo. His short life? And thousands of partners? Was this really supposed to be convincing me? I saw from the Morrigan’s serious expression that the answer to that was a resounding ‘yes’, and realised we were experiencing what you might call a mild culture clash. I’d grown up in the era of safe sex and condoms, and in my particular case, latent Catholic indoctrination – never mind my own problems with skin-to-skin contact. I was feeling a slight roiling sensation in my stomach, and had no words to express what I wanted to say. They simply didn’t exist.
Carmel looked at me, at my mouth flapping and skin flaming, and managed to find her voice again. Ever the Champion.
‘It’s like this, Morrigan,’ she said. ‘Lily doesn’t do men. Not so far, at least.’
‘You mean she prefers women?’ the Morrigan replied. ‘Because that is not the impression I formed when she tried to couple with both the vampire and the High King this evening …’
‘No!’ replied Carmel, nipping that train of thought in the bud. ‘I mean she doesn’t do sex, full stop. Her visions have left her … a little behind on that front. She’s playing a big game of catch-up, and, well, being forced to choose a mate when she’s only just started snogging is a bit of a head fuck for her.’
Eloquently put, I thought. Couldn’t have said it better myself – mainly because I was still guppy-gulping.
The Morrigan stared over at me, and narrowed her glittering eyes.
‘You mean you have lived without touch for all these years?’
I nodded, and met her gaze as brazenly as I could, considering that I was about to poo my pants. It’s not my fault that I’ve lived the way I have, and I wasn’t going to start apologising for it. That was someone else’s job.
‘Then I better understand your worries,’ she said. ‘You are but a child in the ways of man and woman, and deserve more kindness than I have shown you thus far.’
She went silent, screwing the top off her bottle and casually crushing the plastic cap with her fist, and I wondered if she’d finished. She downed the water in one, then crushed the bottle too. Maybe all the crushing helped her concentrate.
‘You should know, Goddess, right now,’ she continued, just when I was starting to think it was safe to breathe again, ‘that nobody will be forcing you to do anything. If you choose Cormac as your mate, it can be ceremonial to begin with – a ritual that needs not be followed with the carnal act until you are ready. Until you h
ave more … experience? And accepting him as your mate also does not mean that you must take him and him alone to your bed – that is not our way. You will always be free to take more – even the vampire, if that is what pleases you.’
I couldn’t see Gabriel being less than pissed off about that one, but hey, it was good to know. Maybe subconsciously my whole reluctance was based on wanting to get out there and slut around a bit – and from what the Morrigan was saying, I could still do that. I could have my beefcake and eat it. Yay.
She crawled across to me, and I instinctively shied away. Because, you know, she was huge and terrifying and could turn into a crow that ate people.
When my back reached the wall, and there was nowhere else to run to, she reached out and took my hand. Hers was half as big again, and her skin was cold and calloused and ridged with scar tissue.
‘Look at me, girl,’ she said, in her best or-else voice.
I looked at her.
‘Now, we will sleep. Tomorrow, we will learn. And when night falls, we go to Tara, where you will choose your fate. But hear me, and remember this: I am your protector, and your servant. If any man – mortal, High King or god – lays a hand upon you that you did not invite, I will slay him where he stands, crush his bones beneath my feet, and feed his entrails to the dogs.’
Huge. Terrifying. And on my side.
Chapter Thirty-Two
You see a lot of interesting things on a late-night bus in Liverpool. I’ve spent years riding them, people-watching, huddled on my own by the window, dreading the inevitably huge woman with seventeen shopping bags who usually wants to sit next to me and share her life story over a packet of custard creams.
There was the man who smelled of wee and read The Economist upside down; the woman from Haiti who muttered sinister-sounding curses under her breath every time the bus stopped to let someone on. And – my personal favourite – the old lady who had to be, like, a hundred and counting, with a carrier bag full of brochures for 18-30-style holidays, flicking through them, gnashing her bare gums and cackling, all the way to Aigburth.
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