A Feral Darkness

by Doranna Durgin

  "Is he?" Masera said, surprised. He rubbed his index finger against the bridge of his nose, then—carefully—his eyes. "Extended wear contacts," he said wearily. "Don't mess with 'em."

  "I'll remember that," Brenna said. "Masera, it's dark. I need to eat something. So does Druid. And I have to get ready for work in the morning."

  "I know. I'm sorry," he said, sounding it, and spent a moment looking for words, his mouth twitching as he discarded this one and that. She finally sat cross-legged in the grass before the porch, which delighted Druid. He draped himself over her ankles and commenced a whisker inspection of her calves. Masera gave a little grin; it seemed to get him started. "The Basque provinces haven't been exposed to Christianity or even God for as long as most of Europe. You could say that we're a little closer to our roots than the rest of you. And some of us have a family history that puts us closer than others. It gives me a different perspective on things."

  "Have you even been to Basque?"

  "To Euskal Herria? Don't let my English fool you. I spent my childhood there—all except the first four years. Those, I spent here. And I came back when I was able. My brother—"

  "Eztebe," Brenna said, and then smiled sweetly. The smile everyone expected from this face. The one that wiser souls knew not to take at face value. "Or Steven, but he prefers Eztebe."

  He shook his head—not disagreeing, but perhaps in lieu of throwing up his hands. "Yes. He was born in Alsasua. And he wasn't old enough to really understand the way things were before—" He stopped short, as if he'd stumbled somewhere he didn't want to go. It gave Brenna the chance to let her own thoughts stray, to wonder why she was sitting out here in the dark. Listening. And wanting to hear more.

  Maybe because she, as much as he—more than he—wondered what was going on in her life.

  "My mother," he said finally, "is euskotar. Ethnic Basque. My father is Spanish, and he didn't truly understand her ties to her land. He brought her here; she was miserable. Nothing here spoke to her like it did in her homeland. She was Catholic, and she tried very hard to be a good one. But she was also sorgin."

  "Of course she was," Brenna said, in no way interested in making this easy for him—and at the same time fascinated. On the one hand, he was as he'd always been to her—with something else going on beneath the surface, something he didn't share with anyone, but that seemed to drive him—and drive him right over anyone who got in the way.

  She wondered if he knew that some people would politely step out of his way if they had the chance.

  She wondered if it made him as lonely as it sometimes made her. To be so uncompromising of self.

  "Sorgin," he said, and when he looked up, enough light caught his face so she could see that his eyebrows had gone to trying to pinch the bridge of his nose. "I don't want to use the word witch, although that's the literal translation...it's more than that, and not the things people think of when they think of a witch."

  "That's why you asked if I were pagan," she said, smoothing Druid's ears flat to his skull as he fell asleep—and then stilling as she felt a bloom of anger. She lifted her eyes to glare at him. "You said you weren't. But you are, aren't you? Is it so easy for you to lie to me? You're probably sorgin yourself!"

  "No," he said quietly. In the darkness, she thought she saw him wince. Good. "No, it's not so easy to lie to you. I didn't say I wasn't pagan. I said I was lapsed Catholic—and that's true."

  "You deceived me," she said steadily, not backing off. Druid woke to give her an uneasy look. "It comes to the same thing."

  "I didn't—" he hesitated, shook his head in frustration. "All right, I did. I didn't want to get into it then. It's a complicated issue—there are as many different kinds of paganism as there are Christianity, and none of them are really what people assume they are." He met her gaze in the darkness and repeated, "I didn't want to get into it. I didn't think it would come up again."

  "You were wrong on both counts then, weren't you?" Brenna said, surprising herself with the faint tremor in her voice. It shouldn't matter. "Why should I bother to talk to you at all, if I never know when to believe you?"

  He rubbed his forehead, as if it pained him. "That's up to you, I guess. My assurances that I've never lied to you probably won't mean much. And just because you ask a question doesn't mean I'm going to answer it."

  And she still had too many unknowns orbiting around her. To many to spurn anything—anyone—that could help her fill them in.

  She'd have to pay closer attention to the questions he didn't quite answer.

  Like the one she'd asked him moments ago. "Are you?" she said. "Sorgin?"

  He laughed, a quiet sound. "No. I'm nosy, and I'm a hardass, but I'm not sorgin. I just know what I see and what I feel. Better than most, I suppose."

  "Then just what was it that you saw and felt, and that put you on my porch without so much as a phone call?"

  "I did call," he said. "You didn't answer. I left a message—go check it."

  "In a moment." She leaned back on the heels of her hands and looked up at him, careful not to pull her own hair as it puddled on the ground around her.

  He hesitated for so long she thought he was just going to get up and leave—there was a moment she thought he was on his way. Touch and go. Then he sighed, and said, "I felt power. And presence. More than one. The kind of thing that doesn't show up unless it's called. Or at least spoken to, and from the right place. The oak, the spring, the creek..."

  "More than one what?" Brenna demanded, not about to be the first person to say a god. She'd see where he went with this on his own.

  But Masera shook his head, the slightest of movements, not taking his eyes from her. "If I had all the facts, I wouldn't be here. You're the one who's got them. And that worries me, because part of what I felt was a dark power. The kind of power you don't want anything to do with."

  "As if you know me so well," she said, bitingly sarcastic. From fear, maybe...and maybe because she didn't really want to think about what he was saying. What it meant. How it fit into the events of her life.

  He let his breath hiss out through his teeth, a thoughtful sound rather than impatient. "I know you're unexpected," he said, as if it were some profound thing. And maybe, from the look he was giving her, it was.

  "And we're having this conversation so I can reassure you that I'm not sacrificing small animals to a dark power?"

  "Among other things."

  "I'll leave that to Rob Parker." She stabbed the words at him with the anger she felt at Rob—anger she was only coming into, having so recently realized that he was the one who had wreaked such destruction at her private place. "He seems to have the knack."

  He stiffened at that. "Akelarre," he said, to himself as much as to her, and then shook his head at her, rubbing that spot between his eyes with a finger. "I don't have a translation. Please. Tell me about the spring. All about it. You know damned well what I mean."

  From a sincere request to a demand within words. He was trying, she realized. Trying to keep the edge out of his voice, trying to be less of a...well, a hard-ass. That he failed so miserably gave her the feeling that she wasn't the only one having trouble—that he wasn't as in control as he liked to think.

  Not in a conversation about witches and unnamed powers in her pasture.

  "When I was nine," she said, carefully choosing her words, "I read about an ancient god named Mars Nodens."

  "One of the jainko," he said.

  "You know of him, then?"

  "Not specifically. I know the nature of those gods. Their names...they each had so many names. I doubt anyone today knows them all."

  "Well, I read that he was a god of healing, and one with a special liking for dogs. Ever heard of the Lydney Hound?"

  Wordlessly, he shook his head. Not daring to use words, now, in case the interruption made her change her mind about this conversation.

  "Doesn't matter. I wanted something, and I went to ask Mars Nodens for it. Like you said—the oak, t
he spring; they were in this article I read. I didn't know that they were sacred pagan things in general—I didn't know anything about it. I asked for what I wanted, and I left something important to me in return."

  "Your hair," he murmured.

  She looked at him askance, glad the night was bright enough so he'd see it. "Do you forget anything you hear?"

  "Not the important things. Did you get what you wanted?"

  "I suppose I did. And more. That's when the strays started showing up on our doorstep. It seems like back then, I always knew what to do for them. How to talk to them. That sucks something rotten, you know? When I was a girl, I would have known what to do for Druid."

  "You did know what to do for him," Masera said. "You just needed someone to tell you so."

  Maybe so.

  "That's it, then?" he said when she didn't respond out loud. "All you did with the spring?"

  "Kinda looks like it was enough, doesn't it?"

  He shook his head decisively. "Not entirely. The akelarre. What about Parker?"

  "Oh, that." Brenna scowled with the anger of it. "Four years ago, Parker and two of his buddies made a mess of the whole spring area. They had ATVs; they tore the place up. Made a fire, left their beer cans everywhere. And a dead rabbit. Just left it impaled on a stick, jammed it into the ground. It was sickening. I only just figured out it was him." The jerk.

  She wasn't sure, but she thought his eyes had gone hooded—his beware face. But not at her. "Who were the others?"

  She shifted in the grass, making Druid stir and sigh and mutter to himself. "Toby Ellis and Gary Rawlins. Both dead. Toby, shortly after that night. And Gary right before Parker came back to this area." She recalled the moments of sitting under the oak, wondering if Parker would return, would really make trouble. "I don't understand why the place is so important to him. He goes there nearly as often as I do, as far as I can tell. He said it draws him. But I'm not sure what I believe of anything he says, anymore."

  "I think you can believe that," Masera said in a low voice. He came off the porch, crouched before her. His hand rested on Druid's shoulder, his fingers brushing her ankle. "Brenna, listen. I don't know Mars Nodens, but I know what you did. You turned that spring into a sacred place. A powerful place. You made it a connection between you and him."

  "You're messing with my Christian philosophy of life," she said, trying to make it light and hating the shaky note in her voice. The one that said how much it mattered to her.

  He shook his head, short and sharp. "They're not mutually exclusive. And that's not the point right now. The point is, you made a place of power and you kept it up."

  "I was keeping up my dog's grave," she said, feeling stubborn again, and crowded.

  "It doesn't matter, Brenna—you kept it up. You went there and you maintained your connection with the place. With the power. You kept it living."

  "And that's bad?"

  "What's bad is that Parker and his friends went to a place of power and performed—no matter how inadvertently—the equivalent of akelarre. They threw raw emotion around the place, they sacrificed an animal. They created something of their own. They were angry, out-of-control young men. What do you suppose they created?"

  She gave him a defiant stare; at this range she could hardly fail to meet his eyes, even in the darkness. And she didn't squirm back, didn't put any more distance between them. To do that would mean that his closeness mattered. "A mess, that's what they created."

  He smacked his hand against the ground, making her jump; Druid sprang upright and warily inspected the area, only slowly relaxing; his ears stayed canted back at Masera's tone. "Stop it, dammit! This isn't about you and me, this is about something dark and dangerous that formed in the very place of power you created!"

  For an instant she was furious, and glared it at him. "If you're in my face, then it's about you and me!"

  He blinked, seemed to realize she had a point, and eased back to sit on one heel. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and it was his effort to regain composure that got to her, let her know just how important he considered this conversation. Much more quietly, he said, "Parker may not know what's dogging him, but he's going to figure it out soon enough. It'll use him, like it probably used his friends before him. And pretty soon he's going to figure out how to use it. Or he'll think he has—but that kind of thing never truly belongs to anyone. It goes feral the moment it's made."

  "Okay," she said slowly. "Okay." It occurred to her that a month ago she would have thought he was, if not nuts, at least full of crap. That she would have meant something entirely different when she said okay, something more like it's a free country, believe what you like. But here, now, with weeks of weird episodes and weird feelings behind her, with an inexplicable dog by her side and someone else's memories occasionally intruding upon her thoughts...

  She was inclined to take him seriously.

  "Okay," he repeated, and relaxed a little. "Good." He stood, unfolding in a way that took a certain amount of grace and strength but mainly had to do with the way he was built. He held out a hand to her, a hand she didn't need.

  Truce.

  She took it.

  And, on her feet and wiping off the seat of her jeans, sighing and wondering what, after all of that, they'd truly accomplished, she said, "What now, then? If what you've said is true..."

  "It's true enough," he told her. "But I can't tell you what now. I may have an understanding of what's happened...but how to deal with it? Not even my sorgin mother ever came up against this. But it strikes me that it would be a good thing to learn all you can about Mars Nodens. If we're going to get help, that's where it'll come from."

  She nodded; that made sense. And she shivered, suddenly and unexpectedly, for the first time struck with the reality of what she'd done. Brenna Lynn, nine years old and not ready to let go of an old canine friend, accompanied by both chance and determination, had touched a...

  She wouldn't think god. She wasn't ready for that. A force. A force that had made her what she was today—someone who'd always sheltered herself from her own lifelong sense of differentness. Different from other girls...different from what her family wanted of her. Devoted to dogs. And somehow now stuck in a job where if she and the dogs weren't at odds, she and her manager were at odds over the dogs' best interests—and her own health and safety.

  Somewhere along there, she'd taken a wrong turn.

  "What are you thinking?" Masera asked suddenly. Quietly. Close to her again.

  She shook her head, wondering when she'd gotten so tired. "Nothing," she said. "Or maybe something, but enough's enough." She put her hands over her face—the sweatshirt sleeves had fallen down again, and she pressed the soft material to her eyes—trying to straighten her thoughts out a little, to bring them to some conclusion. "What about Parker?" she said, sliding her hands down just enough to look over the tops of her fingers.

  That's when he went away—from her, from the conversation. When he drew within himself to the place where he knew things he wasn't sharing. "Never mind about Parker. Stay clear of him."

  She didn't let it go this time. "You know something you're not telling me."

  Caught, he hesitated, and gave a short nod. "Yes."

  Back to where they'd started, days ago. She could trust parts of him...and other parts of him, the parts that had been interested in Rob Parker all along, had been beaten up, had bought two pit bulls in back-lot transition...

  Those parts, she didn't trust in the least.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  CHAPTER 12

  HAGALAZ

  Destructive Forces

  Brenna grabbed a few minutes at the end of the day to look at the half-dozen groomer applications they'd received, sorting swiftly and setting all but one aside—and knowing that one was likely wishful thinking. Well. At least they'd had this many applications so quickly, although most of them were from high school students who wanted a quick summer job and thought that fooling with dog
s was a great thing for which to get paid.

  "No good, huh?" DaNise said, taking a noisy and well-earned slurp of her soda; she too was overdue to go off-shift. Elizabeth was already working in the back, with enough dogs left to finish so she'd be lucky even to grab a snack from the under-counter stash. Like Brenna, DaNise still wore her smock, but hers came down to her knees and looked pretty much soaked through from her shift of heavy bathing. From the neck up she was impeccable, with a complexly molded hairstyle that only African-American hair could accomplish.

  That was the secret between their easy amiability, Brenna had always thought—upon first introduction, DaNise had said, "Your hair is awesome!" and Brenna had said, "How do you do that?" and despite the difference in their ages—DaNise would still be in high school, if she hadn't qualified for early graduation and was now saving up tuition for the community college—and backgrounds, they'd formed an immediate connection.

  Brenna fanned the applications in the air. "No good," she confirmed. "You've got more qualifications to groom than any of 'em." She gave an automatic glance around the store front and said, "Don't tell Roger I said that. He'll decide I should train you, as if I can do that and carry a full grooming load."

  "No worries," said DaNise. "No offense, but I got plans."

  Brenna gave her a wistful look. "Smart you."

  DaNise shrugged. "Hey, girl, it's not too late."

  Brenna made a quick scrawl of a note on the borderline application. "Yeah, well," she said, as if that were saying anything at all. She let the pen drop into the plastic mug pen holder with a decisive clink. "I'm going to get while the getting's good." Half an hour over her shift as it was, but that was hardly worth noting. She shed the smock and tossed it on a hook in the grooming room; Elizabeth came breezing out of the tub room and followed her back out. She went straight to the schedule, flipping through it with a frown. "Gonna be even tighter tomorrow," she said. "Maybe I'll see if Roger'll let me clock in half an hour early."