by Layla Lawlor
"Sorry?" my mother's voice said through a slurry of static. "... didn't catch that."
The dog met the beast halfway, sliding low and ripping at its belly. I hadn't realized how huge the thing was until seeing the dog right next to it—bigger than a gorilla, bigger than a bear. It was the size of a buffalo.
And that was all I could see, because my eyes slid off it every time I tried to look. I'd seen this happen to other people when they tried to look at the sword or one of Muirin's glamours. I'd never had it happen to me before. Usually that kind of thing didn't affect me much; it was how I'd accidentally ended up with the sword in the first place.
"... but the other ... about your grandmother," my mother was saying, through bursts of static.
I couldn't hang up on her. The maternal guilt reflex was so deeply ingrained that I literally could not bring myself to push the button, even as I backed away from the dog and the monster rolling in the mud, ripping at each other. Muirin leaped over the foundation, graceful as a gazelle, drawing one of her hooked glass knives.
"Mom," I said, "the signal's awful, and I'm busy. Call you later?"
"... reception ... terrible, Kay." She sounded like she blamed me personally for this. Static blurred something else, and then, "... just isn't ... thinks she's twenty-five!" Still complaining about Grandma, then.
The gorilla-thing struck the dog with one tremendous paw, sending it skidding twenty feet through the brush. Next to me, Lily's gun went off with a sharp pop, not as loud as I was expecting. A streak of smoke arced from the barrel and burst in a brilliant cascade of red flame, but it missed the writhing, snapping animals and hit the wet ground instead. It wasn't a real gun; it was a flare gun.
The gorilla-thing flung the dog aside and swung its shaggy head in our direction. Lily snapped another flare into place.
I brandished the sword, which caused the phone to slide out of its tenuous perch between my ear and shoulder. I caught it just in time to hear my mother say, "... weekend. Kay? This weekend—"
"Sounds great, Mom," I said absently, trying not to take my eyes off the gorilla-thing.
The creature, unhurt as far as I could tell, closed the distance between us in a series of long bounds. Lily fired another flare, which it dodged with that supernatural speed.
"... really couldn't stop ... next weekend works for you, then?" my mother said.
"Nope, no problem, none, talktoyounextweekend," I babbled before the phone slipped from my wet grasp and vanished into the weeds.
I could feel the sword taking hold of me, as it always did—the chill spreading down my arm and reaching icy fingers into my chest. Bathed in blue fire, the blade rose up at my side, moving me as much as I was moving it.
The creature leaped over the foundations of the ruined house and suddenly it was on us, stinking of wet fur and a pungent smell that I only later, in retrospect, identified as whiskey.
It was horribly fast, gliding out of the sword's way. Lily, no coward, braced herself and pumped a flare into its chest at point-blank range, but the flare bounced off and fizzled among the house's foundation stones. The creature spun in her direction with inhuman speed. Lily dropped the flare gun and snatched up a stick, wielding it like a baseball bat.
I opened a thin line down its back with the sword. It whipped around and slashed at me with its claws. Nothing but clumsiness saved me—as I frantically tried to backpedal, my foot slipped in the mud and I went down on my back as the massive paw swept over my head. I managed to keep hold of the sword, but for a moment lost track of everything else.
"Muirin!" I screamed.
I didn't see where she came from, but she was suddenly in the middle of everything, gripping a hooked glass knife in each hand. Her aim was perfect; she caught it in the throat with one knife, in the belly with the other, ripping through its flesh. Blood as red as any human's slicked her hands. But the wounds were healing almost as fast as she made them, and the sword—
The sword was doing something it had never done before. Normally it drew a little energy from me, enough to light up and cut through anything. But this time it had gone incandescent, a tower of blue flame blazing up from my hand. My first instinct was to let go, but it didn't feel any different than usual—wherever it was getting that energy from, it wasn't coming from me.
The creature stumbled and fell to its knees. For an instant I glimpsed dark tendrils of fog unrolling from its body, spiraling into the sword. Then Muirin knifed it under the chin, drawing the blade up through its jaw. I heard bone crack. She sliced its throat open with the other blade, and the huge body fell heavily in the muddy, trampled grass.
When Muirin fights, she doesn't mess around.
I got up slowly and shakily, then saw with horror that the creature wasn't dead yet. Its shaggy back rippled as it tried to stand up. Reacting semi-instinctively, I plunged the sword downward into its head. As I did so, the sword elongated, becoming slender and rapier-like, and pierced the creature through the skull. It shuddered and writhed, and as it died, its body dissipated—unraveling like something in a Dali painting, until it might never have been there at all. I was left half-kneeling where it had been, with the sword's tip buried in the ground. The sword had reverted back to its usual shape, an ancient Iron Age blade about a foot and a half long.
"What was that thing?" I panted, wiping off the sword on the grass and weeds inside the old house's foundation.
Muirin shook her head, gasping. Her short brown hair, dark with rainwater, was plastered to her skull like a helmet. "I've never seen anything like it before. The entity, or the sword's response to it." She looked past me with sudden alarm. "Where did she go?"
Excellent question. I spun in place, staring around the clearing. Lily had disappeared. There was no sign of anywhere she could have gone. She just wasn't there. The ghost house had vanished along with her. There was nothing but a broken stone foundation, overgrown with brambles and bleak in the rain.
But the flares remained, entirely physical and nonghostly, hissing and sizzling on the wet ground. After a moment, Muirin went to the nearest and kicked dirt over it, then stomped it a couple of times.
I found my phone, wiped it thoroughly on the driest part of my sleeve I could find, and tucked it back into my pocket. A lingering ache between my brows made me think it wasn't a good idea to try to invoke my second sight again just in case it could reveal something my normal eyes couldn't see.
Instead, I hunted around a bit while Muirin extinguished the other flares. I found the place where the dog had fallen in the brush, snapped-off twigs showing clean and white against the black branches. There was fresh blood washing away in the rain. No dog.
I went back to Muirin, who had returned to the ruins. She was studying the graffiti on the steps, touching it occasionally.
"Anything interesting?" I asked. She shook her head, possibly an answer, possibly a general expression of puzzlement. "Whose dog was that, anyway?"
"The Master of the Wild Hunt, and lord of the Welsh underworld. That was one of the Wild Hunt's wolfhounds."
"Oh. That's probably not good." And then I asked, "Welsh?" —because Muirin was from the Irish pantheon herself.
She ignored my question. "It's two weeks from Midsummer, the nadir of his powers, and we are far from his domain. I'm not particularly concerned." A small crease appeared between her brows as she surveyed the clearing. "I'm more curious what just happened here. We were expected, and I'm not sure how or why. And I have no idea what that thing was, or why that woman decided to attack it with a flare gun of all things." She gave me a sharp look. "Did you know her?"
"Muirin, all black people in the world don't know each other." Though the sense of familiarity nagged at me. I had seen her somewhere: in a picture, in real life, on TV. "She seemed to know you."
"I know," Muirin said thoughtfully. She removed the envelope from her pocket and stared at it, then squared her shoulders and took a deep, sharp breath: a decision made. A quick spurt of flame burst from her
fingertips, consuming the letter despite the rain. It fell in ash around us.
"... oh," I said. "Are you sure that's, uh. Wise?"
"No," Muirin said. She turned away. When it became obvious that she was leaving, without saying a word or waiting for me, I scrambled to catch up.
We seemed to be heading directly back to the car, thank God. I kept the sword out in case any more of those whatsits turned out to be around, and practically got a crick in my neck from craning around at every plop of water falling off a leaf, but we seemed to be alone in the damp, dripping woods.
"Do you think that's what was showing up on your weird-o-meter?" I asked.
"Maybe." She started to chew her nails, noticed what she was doing, and stuffed her hands into her pockets instead. "I need to do some research."
Asking more questions at this point was likely to result in losing all my upcoming days off to helping with her "research," so I shut up. Since Muirin seemed to have staked out the grumpy-mentor role in my life (heaven help me), she might as well do the heavy lifting on that kind of thing.
Still, a bit closer to the car, I couldn't help venturing, "Did you see what I did with the sword back there? It's responding to me a lot better now. I think we could start practicing more advanced stuff soon, like turning it into things, don't you think?" And by "things" I mostly meant "guns." Or at least a nice crossbow. She'd mentioned before that the sword might be able to turn into ranged weapons, and then refused to actually teach me how. I had sneakily tried on my own, but the only time the sword responded to me that way was in actual combat, which luckily wasn't frequent enough to count as practice.
"No," Muirin said flatly. "You need to master basic sword technique before you even think about deliberately transforming the sword in a combat situation."
"It does it anyway, though."
"It will do it a great deal more if you try, so don't." She gave me a thoughtful look. "One thing you do need is a proper training sword. We can't keep practicing with broom handles."
"Where do I get one of those?" I asked. Muirin sometimes seemed to forget that it wasn't the fourteenth century anymore, and there were no longer armorers on every streetcorner.
"I'll make one for you," Muirin said. "It needs to be fitted to your grip and balanced to match the sword."
"No offense, but that sounds like a lot of unnecessary effort. I mean, I'm only gonna have the sword 'til you find someone else to take it." She had promised to search for another bearer, and she couldn't lie to humans. I couldn't help wondering how hard she was actually looking, though.
"It's nothing but a milled piece of wood, sized and weighted for you. Bill has a full woodworking shop at the house." As usual, she spoke of the sword's deceased former wielder in the presence tense; and also as usual, I didn't have the heart to point it out. "Actually," she went on, "sooner is better, so why don't I pick you up in the morning and we can do that tomorrow."
I knew I should've kept my mouth shut.
Chapter 2
A wet gray dusk had fallen by the time Muirin let me out in front of the rambling old house that I shared with my roommates. "I'll see you tomorrow morning," she said.
I just grunted; the car ride had aggravated my pre-existing motion sickness from my time in Second Sight Hell. Besides, Muirin would show up whether I agreed or not.
At the kitchen table, my roommate Fresca Serrano looked up from her laptop when I squished through the door, leaving a trail of mud and leaves. "Muirin?" she said.
"Muirin." I shed my rain slicker, jacket, and sodden shoes at the door.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
I grunted again.
"I'll put coffee on," Fresca said as I squelched toward the stairs in my muddy socks.
Our other roommate, Leanne, was nowhere in evidence. Leanne was new; she had answered our ad about a month ago, and so far she seemed to have taken the sensible option of avoiding us as much as possible. Which was just fine with me, because that way we weren't in danger of letting anything slip about what had happened to her predecessor.
It's not that our roommates die a lot. Really. But once is definitely more than enough.
I took two aspirin and luxuriated under the hot spray for all of five minutes before a male voice said, right outside the shower curtain, "Kay?"
I froze, one hand on the raspberry body gel, the other on my loofah.
"There's some lady at the door for you," my unwanted bathroom guest continued. "Your roommate just let her in."
"Drew," I said carefully over the pattering of the shower, "what have I said about the bathroom when one of us is already in it?"
Through the shower curtain, I could see the shadowy outline of my roommate cross his arms—my ex-roommate, actually, in several different senses of the term. "Off limits, but you also said it was fine if it's important."
"Emergency. I said emergency. Someone at the door is not an emergency!"
"Someone's touchy today," Drew murmured, and vanished. Literally.
I wasn't sure if I envied my other roommates their blissful ignorance. On the one hand, they couldn't see Drew's ghost at all. On the other hand ... they couldn't see Drew's ghost, and Fresca, at least, knew that he was still hanging around, which meant she had only my second sight (lucky me) to let her know whether he was in the room or not. Although he claimed he couldn't enter our bedrooms, I wasn't sure if I believed him. And I had yet to find a way to ghostproof the bathroom. I made a mental note to ask Muirin about that the next time I saw her.
Wrapped in a bathrobe, I padded barefoot down the stairs. Outside, full darkness had fallen. Rain hissed on the roof and pattered in the driveway puddles.
Fresca was pouring coffee for a stranger at the kitchen table. She was a Hollywood-beautiful white lady with high cheekbones, large wide-spaced eyes, and full lips with just a hint of lip gloss. Her blonde hair was wound in an artful updo, held in place with a couple of decorated hairsticks. She wore a draped green shirt that looked like it had been on a rack in some Fifth Avenue boutique just that morning; her slacks were tastefully coordinated and equally spotless and pressed. The whole ensemble made me think of some Hollywood costume director's idea of upscale casual clothes, rather than something an actual person would wear.
Despite the pouring rain, there wasn't a drop of water on her anywhere.
She smiled when she saw me, showing teeth that were small and white and perfectly even. "Hello," she said, and rose gracefully, holding out a hand. "I'm Jill Frost. You must be Kay."
I didn't take it. I looked at Fresca, then back at her, and moved carefully to insert myself between Fresca and the stranger. "What are you?" I said.
She couldn't be human. Not looking like that. I had never met others of Muirin's kind—Tuatha dé Danann, the Irish gods of old—but I thought she might be one of those.
"Kay?" Fresca said, turning around.
Jill gave me another of those perfect smiles. "We have a friend in common. Muirin O'Connor."
"Fresca," I said, low, "can we talk alone, please?" I didn't want Fresca near her.
Fresca raised her eyebrows at me in an unspoken question. I answered with a teeny shrug and jerked my head toward the living room. She rolled her eyes, but took her mug of tea and laptop, and retreated as asked.
"If you did anything to Fresca, put any spells on her," I whispered, "you're screwed, you understand that?"
Jill glided to the counter and selected a mug from the drain. It was one of mine, with splotches of fake paint and WHO DO I LOOK LIKE, REMBRANDT? She poured it half full of coffee.
"Cream? Sugar?"
"I'm not messing around here, lady."
"Neither am I," Jill said quietly. She held the cup out to me wordlessly.
"No." I folded my hands under my arms. Tension tugged painfully at the strained muscles in my shoulders. I wished I was wearing something other than a frayed, paint-stained bathrobe. At least I was slightly taller than her, by an inch or two. "No, I know better than to take food or dr
ink from one of you."
"It's your coffee."
"No."
She let out a small sigh and put the mug aside, leaning a hip against the counter. "Not everything Muirin tells you about us is true."
"She can't lie to humans," I said.
Even her eyebrow-raising was perfect, a slight quirk that I hadn't realized anyone could achieve outside a comic-book page. "There is a difference between lying, and failing to tell the truth."
"Thanks for reminding me that I can't trust you either. Why are you here?"
"I'm concerned for Muirin," Jill said.
Uh-huh. "You look real worried."
"Believe what you like. How would you assess Muirin's state of mind at the present time?"
I stared at her. "I'm not her therapist. Why don't you ask her instead of me?"
"Things didn't end well the last time we spoke. That's why I'm approaching you first."
I genuinely couldn't tell if she was for real or not. Either way, I wasn't going to share Muirin's business with some rando, old friend or old enemy or whatever she was. "Yeah, well, I can't tell you anything about her. She never tells me anything about herself. If you want to ask her questions, go talk to her."
"How often do you see her?"
"What part of what I just said did you not understand?"
Maybe it was my imagination, but her glossy half-smile was beginning to look somewhat strained. "Kay, I am worried about her. It is possible that she may try to harm herself."
Something thunked in my chest, even though I'd had similar thoughts myself. As a banshee, Muirin had been attached to the O'Connor family for centuries. Two months ago, when Bill died, it had knocked the world out from under her feet. Muirin's life had been inextricably tied to the O'Connor line, and she'd fully expected to die when the last of their line died. That she hadn't was a fact I gathered she was somewhat ambivalent about.
"Look, I don't know what you think you know about me and Muirin, but we aren't friends. She doesn't confide in me. We don't go out for coffee or catch a movie. It's strictly a business arrangement." I wasn't even lying, not really. I was willing to serve as the interim keeper of the sword until Muirin found someone else to take it off my hands, but only until then.
