by C. E. Murphy
He picked up on the second ring, a too-crisp alertness in his voice. “Walker? What’s wrong?”
“It’s Gary. I lost him. Oh, fuck, it’s like three in the morning there. I’m sorry. Shit. I’m sorry, I’ll call back—” Not that I had any more idea what Morrison could do six hours from now than he could do now. He, after all, had the magical aptitude of a turnip. He would not be caught skipping merrily through time, with or without my assistance.
“Joanne. Joanie. What do you mean, you lost him? He caught up with you? Don’t hang up. What’s going on? Are you okay?”
Like Gary, Morrison never called me Joanie. I had to sound even worse than I felt if he’d gone that route. Either that or he was trying to reassure me, but it didn’t work even one little bit at all. “I’m not okay but I’m an idiot and there’s nothing you can do about it. Just—just keep trying to call him? Please? Like every hour? And if you get through have him call me right away?”
Morrison made a sound I was familiar with. Strangled frustration, like his tongue was trying to choke him. “He’s in Ireland with you?”
“He was. Maybe he still is. We went back in time. I came back. He might still be there. Or he might be dead, because he went to fight the Master or the Morrígan and I just don’t know.”
“You went back in time,” Morrison said in a slow deadly voice. I could imagine his expression, his whole posture. He’d be on his feet, because he wasn’t the sort of man who would answer the phone still in bed. He just wasn’t. I had no idea what he wore to bed—it was a subject I had some interest in—but maybe a tank top and cotton pants. Something dignified enough to run outside and chase bad guys in, if necessary. Always be prepared. That was Morrison. And he was dragging a hand over his face now, trying to decide where to start with we went back in time, because face it, that wasn’t the opening gambit you expected your almost-lover to use when she called from the other side of the world. “You went back in time,” he repeated, “and you expect his cell phone to work?”
“Well, no, I just, I mean, I came back and he hasn’t! Shouldn’t he have?”
Morrison, very steadily, said, “Were you together?”
“No! I just said he went to fight the Morrígan!”
“I see.” There was a pause. “The man is seventy-four years old, Joanie. He can take care of himself. If you were—” a great and patient pause filled the line before he went on “—time traveling. If you were time traveling and got separated, then I can’t think of any reason he would necessarily come back to the present at the same time you did.”
“Except I was the focal point, it was my fault, it—!”
“Joanne. Siobhán. Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick.”
I didn’t think anybody had ever said my name like that before. I gulped down a hysterical sob and whispered, “Yeah?”
Morrison, with gentle emphasis, said, “I love you. Now pull yourself together and go find the bad guy,” and hung up.
I stayed kneeling in the grass for a long time, blushing so hard I thought I’d fall over if I got up. Nobody in my adult life had ever said he loved me. Nobody but Gary, who I also loved, but in a whole different way. Morrison’s admonishment was the nicest thing anybody’d ever said to me, and I felt like a teenager, so embarrassed and happy I was in danger of crying. He didn’t just love me. He loved me and expected me to be able to catch the bad guys, even though I’d woken him up in the middle of the night just this side of hysterical.
By God if I wasn’t going to prove him right, too. I’d spent an awful lot of time dedicated to proving Morrison wrong, once upon a time. Proving him right sounded a lot nicer. And besides, it would either get Gary back or exact unholy vengeance on the bitch who’d taken him from me, so proving him right had multiple benefits.
I looked back at the Lia Fáil and at Brigid. Her eyes were closed, her breathing impossibly shallow. She was not going to be of any help, especially if she wouldn’t let me try to heal her. Sighing, I glanced toward the Hall of Kings. It lay off to the right now instead of straight ahead like it had been in Lugh’s time. I remembered the shock of power that had come from it being stationed right at Tara’s center. If worse came to worst, I would dig the damned stone up and put it back where it belonged in order to throw myself back in time so I could find Gary again.
It was a plan. It wasn’t necessarily a good plan, but it was a plan and I was satisfied with it. I crawled back to Brigid and took her hand in mine, whispering, “How about now?”
She said nothing, only slipped deeper into sleep. I didn’t want to go against her wishes by healing her, but I needed some answers, or at least some advice. I whispered, “C’mon, c’mon,” then, hoping one ancient thing might get the attention of another, put Brigid’s hand against the Stone of Destiny, and held it there.
The stone’s screaming leapt from inside my ears to outside them, and a woman appeared in my vision.
I knew her. Fair-haired and fair-skinned, I’d seen her work a magic well beyond any I could have imagined. She was the one who’d—centuries ago—lured the first three werewolves to her power circle and then bound them to the cycle of the moon. It had weakened them beyond measure: they had gone from creatures able to shift and kill at will to the traditional monsters as modern mythology knew them, only able to transform three nights out of the month. One of their descendants had tried very hard to make my magic her own in order to break that spell.
She’d failed, but she had managed to leave the bite in my arm. It flared up again, itching like a son of a bitch, and the fair-haired woman’s spine stiffened as she looked me over. Then her brow furrowed, confusion in gray-green eyes. “Tainted blood. You must be cleansed before you can survive this battle. Find me, daughter. Together we shall prevail.”
“Daughter? Wait! Hey! Wa—arghgl!” It was my turn for the tongue-trying-to-strangle-me sound as for the umpteenth time in recent hours, my mysterious visitor up and vanished. Next time somebody showed up like that I was going to cast a mystical net and hold on until I got some answers.
Like why she’d called me daughter. That woman was manifestly not my mother. She had been wearing my mother’s necklace, which probably meant a connection of some kind. That wasn’t good, since Nuada and I had just gone to the trouble of making the necklace for the Morrígan, who wasn’t supposed to be able to take it off. Of course, if she couldn’t take it off, then Sheila MacNamarra should not have been wearing it or giving it to me fifteen months ago in my own personal timeline. Which meant I shouldn’t have had it to show Nuada to commission it from him, which in turn meant that something had already gone horribly wrong.
I swore out loud, and pulled my hands from the standing stone. It went back to shouting only in my skull, which was an improvement.
“It only cries aloud when a scion of the true blood touches it,” Brigid whispered.
I knew she was there. I just about jumped out of my skin anyway. “The what? That’s ridiculous. I’m not an elf. Where’s Gary?”
“Not all the high kings of Ireland were aos sí, gwyld.”
I slid down the Lia Fáil and put my hands in my hair. “Okay. All right, fine, if you want to play it that way, I’ll play. Oh, gosh, Brigid, whatever do you mean? Lil’ ol’ me? The True Heir to Ireland? It cannot be so! I beg of you, tell me more!”
Brigid looked weary and for a moment I felt guilty. Then I remembered Gary hadn’t made it home with me. Anything resembling guilt went out the window. I genuinely did not give a rat’s ass about what my mystical or ethnic heritage might be. I wanted to fix the werewolf bite and get Gary back, not necessarily in that order, so when Brigid started up again I only half listened. “You already know of Méabh, Queen of Connacht—”
“Meabh,” I said under my breath. “That’s Maeve, right? You say it a little differently.”
As if I hadn’t interrupted, Brigid went on, “Méabh, Queen of Connacht, said by some to be the Morrígan herself. She was not. She was, though, the Morrígan’s first and only child, born to Nu
ada of the Silver Hand, High King of Ireland, who had gifted her with a necklace—”
My hand closed on the necklace in question and Brigid smiled faintly. “A necklace which would not come unclasped except by one of the blood of she who had commissioned it made. To be free of Nuada’s silver chains, the Morrígan had a daughter, and those daughters had daughters all through time, until it comes to you, Siobhán Walkingstick.”
My stomach dropped through the soles of my feet. “No. No, wait. The whole idea was she wasn’t supposed to be able to take it off. She was supposed to be bound until she faced me in my time. Blood to bloo—” My stomach would have started digging a hole, if it had the appendages. I stared at Brigid, hoping she would give me a different answer than the conclusion I was rapidly coming to.
Instead she gave my bandaged left arm a tired glance and used the same words the woman in my vision had: “Tainted blood.”
I hated cryptic statements. I hated them even more when they illuminated everything. I clutched my arm, teeth bared momentarily at the pain, then whispered a curse. The blood I’d dropped into the silver had been tainted. I’d been carrying the werewolf’s poison inside me, and I’d known the wolves belonged to the Master. The impulse to stop fighting the ache and the itch swept me again, and I raised my voice to deny it. “It made a window, didn’t it. A loophole, one she could get free of the necklace through. Blood to blood,” I said again. “Méabh was her way out. Blood of her blood, essence of Nuada’s essence. The same magics that bound her could free her. And I should have known that, because I had the necklace to show to Nuada, and if it had worked the Morrígan wouldn’t have been able to take it off and my mother never would have had it to give to me. Damn it.”
Somewhere in there I’d come around to accepting that the Morrígan was my great-to-the-umpteenth-grandmother. That Méabh, who had removed the necklace, basically had to be both the Morrígan’s daughter and some distant ancestor of mine. The blood demanded it. I still protested, albeit much less convincingly than I’d have liked. “I can’t possibly be the Morrígan’s granddaughter. We’re on totally opposite sides.”
“Like all children of power, Méabh had a choice. She chose the light, as have all her children in turn.”
For some reason I thought of Suzanne Quinley again. There was a kid with a whole lot of power. I wondered if she even knew she had a choice in front of her. I might have to talk to her about that someday. Because after all, I was so very, very good at choosing wisely when it came to great cosmic powers. Exasperated, afraid and unable to give in gracefully, I muttered, “Yeah, okay, fine, whatever. Didn’t Méabh have like twelve kids all named Finnoula or something? Maybe I’m one of their descendants, sure. I’m probably one of Genghis Khan’s, too. Everybody on the damned planet is. Or Charlemagne, or, I don’t know, Cleopatra. No, that’s reincarnated. Anyway, great, that’s dandy, but I’m not the heir to a defunct Irish throne.”
“You might be,” Brigid murmured, “if you were willing to accept that fate.”
I barked laughter, finding bitterness easier than acceptance. “Lady, you have no clue how much fate I’ve already taken in the teeth. I don’t need any more. All I want is to find my friend. And…” An obvious question finally surfaced. I straightened up, frowning. “Brigid, what are you doing here? Last I knew you’d…”
She hadn’t vanished, per se. Not the way the Morrígan had. Brigid had faded, becoming ephemeral beside the standing stone. “Last I knew you’d saved my life and then time shifted and you were gone. You obviously bound the cauldron, because all that happened to me back in October. So what are you doing here with a fritzed-out aura that looks like it only just now took the Morrígan’s best shot?”
“We are sides of a coin, she and I,” Brigid said. “My weakness is her strength, and I have been weak since that day. She might have slain me then, had you not been there, pulling time askew. Because of that, I have only touched time, where she has traveled through it.”
For a moment I just didn’t get it. Then my eyebrows pinched so hard my head hurt. “You mean you, like…you’ve been bouncing through time? Like a skipping stone?” I mimed throwing one. Brigid nodded and I blurted, “Why?”
“So that I might awaken again here, with you, at the place it both begins and ends. I have done less than I might have through the centuries, only acting when the balance was in the measure, rather than fighting to tip the scales toward the light. That, I think, is why the cauldron’s bindings failed before you reached it, and for that I apologize.”
“Forget it.” My voice cracked. “You bound it. That means it was one of the places, one of the times, you splashed down. You were there, Brigid. What happened to Gary?”
“A reckoning is upon us, Siobhán Walkingstick. What strength I have will be yours, but you must rid yourself of the infection or all is lost.” She sounded tireder than before, like she was slipping away. It took everything I had not to grab her and rattle the answers out of her. Her eyes closed, and for a moment I thought she’d died. Then she whispered, “He awaits you at Méabh’s final resting place.”
And then she did die. A rattling exhalation and her eyes half opened, looking sleepily at the world beyond. My heart lurched so hard I nearly threw up. Healing magic jerked through me, spasming toward Brigid, but the reawakened Sight gave it nothing to grasp on to. My hands slid to my sides and hung there uselessly as Brigid grew colder. I could have rushed off to the Dead Zone, trying to catch her spirit, but it seemed unlikely that aos sí souls took the same bus that human ones did. I probably could have done about a dozen things, but they all should’ve been done five minutes earlier, when she wasn’t dead yet. When she’d been telling me not yet. I bowed my head, eyes closed, and made a promise not to listen next time someone told me not yet.
The Morrígan, I thought after a while. The Morrígan had killed Brigid. It had taken her thousands of years to die, but the bleak web of poison within her—the web meant for me—had killed her, and that put me on strangely familiar ground. I’d dealt with a lot of mystical murders in the past year. They pretty much never ended well for the killer.
I got to my feet and straightened my coat. I was going to make damned good and sure this one didn’t end well, either.
Calm with anger, I left Brigid’s body behind and went to find Méabh’s tomb.
Monday, March 20, 1:17 p.m.
That would have been much more dramatic if the tomb in question didn’t turn out to be another heritage site. It’d be one thing to traipse the length and breadth of Ireland, seeking out dead life forms and ancient civilizations only to finally come upon the Lost Tomb of the Warrior Queen. It was something else to follow little brown-and-white road signs all the way to County Sligo, where I found a small mountain with a big pile of rocks on top of it.
This was not untraveled territory. There were signs saying “Please don’t take the cairn stones,” and well-worn paths going up and down the mountainside. I breathed, “Hope you were right, Bridge,” and started up one of them. I felt guilty for leaving her body like that. I sort of suspected it would do some kind of magic aos sí thing and fade into the earth or something, and it wasn’t like I could’ve stuffed her in the trunk, but I still felt badly.
The guilt faded into breathless wheezing and resentment by about halfway up the hill. She hadn’t warned me Méabh’s tomb was on top of a mountain. I wished I had a walking stick. The kind to support myself with, not the kind I was named after. Stick bugs would be singularly useless in getting me up a mountain. Unless they could fly me up, but bugs named for sticks weren’t really well known for their aviary skills.
That line of thought did nothing to disguise my heart rate’s elevation or how its quick beat made my arm itch like the devil. I stopped for a breather and cautiously unwound the bandages to take a peek at the bite.
And wished I hadn’t. Whether it was the fresh air against it or seeing how awful it looked, the itching redoubled and became hot red pain. The skin around the punctures eman
ated heat, shiny tight surface looking and feeling infected. An infected werewolf bite had to be worse than just a regular werewolf bite. I touched it gingerly and hissed at both its warmth and the bright flash of ow that pressure sent through it. I muttered, “C’mon, Jo, you’re supposed to be a healer,” and tried my magic on it again.
Maybe it was the sleep I’d had on the airplane. Maybe it was the soothing drive across the country. But this time when the magic didn’t respond, I went a little deeper, and Saw what was going on.
It was already going all-out trying to keep the infection from spreading. Viewed with the Sight, my arm looked like a petri dish swarm of antibodies attacking bacteria. The speed and activity made me dizzy, and watching made it itch even more, until I was about ready to rip my own arm off and beat myself to death with it just to escape the itch. I closed my eyes hard, shutting the Sight down, but it was too late. I knew what was going on. I felt genuinely worse than before, like viewing it had let the heat spread. My lips were parched, and I’d left my water bottle in the car. I swallowed, light-headed, and looked up the insurmountable hill.
Gary had my sword. If he was in Méabh’s tomb, he could chop my arm off for me. That would be easier than tearing it off. Buoyed by that unlikely, feverish logic, I staggered to my feet and lurched toward the cairn above.
The view from the top of Knocknaree was magnificent. I could see half of Ireland, even if it was doing a wavy little dance. Everybody needed to dance now and again. I wobbled around the whole cairn, which was a fancy word for “big pile of rocks,” for about twenty minutes. There was no entrance anywhere, and when I came around to the front again I noticed a sign I’d missed while admiring the wobbly view. It said Méabh’s “tomb,” quotation marks theirs, was a Neolithic structure and had never been excavated. Also, it said, please don’t take any rocks. I nodded solemnly, spun back to the big piles of rocks and started pitching stones away.
Three minutes later a grinning skeleton toppled out of the cairn and spat its false teeth at me.
