by C. E. Murphy
My heart lurched. “This burning Mother’s bones thing, that’s a purifying ritual, right?”
Méabh nodded and my heart lurched a second time, heartbeat disrupted enough to make nausea rise again. If Melinda could wipe out the results of a suicide in her front yard, I could probably finish cleaning the ancient poison at a sacred site by means of a burning meant to purify. I croaked, “You’re right, Cat. Mother would like this to be done up here. It might even be what she always wanted. I just wish we had one more of our bloodline here to help.”
“We do,” Méabh said gently, and knelt by the suitcase full of Sheila’s bones.
The mountaintop was round, if I used my imagination vividly enough. Had I been arranging the universe, the chapel would have sat plunk in the middle of the vague roundness, but since someone else had arranged it, it was more toward the western slope, closer to the distant ocean and the nearby footpath than centered. I wibbled about it a bit, then decided to pretend the chapel wasn’t there at all, and built my power circle based on the mountaintop’s shape rather than the otherwise-obvious focal point that was the chapel. Besides, the chapel was locked up and I bet it wouldn’t go over well with anybody, either the locals or the powers that be, if we broke in to park in the power circle’s center.
Mother’s bones went at the north compass point of the circle, for the cold of death. I took the south, figuring the mother-daughter connection made as much of a power channel as could be asked for, and that living flesh and blood versus dead bones made a reasonable warmth of life contrast. I put Méabh in the west, for age represented by the setting sun, and Caitríona in the east for youth. I thought that made a nice channel, too: oldest of the bloodline to youngest. Or at least to the youngest available, since I knew there were younger cousins, never mind my own son, about whom I was trying hard not to think. It was too late, of course. Sheila the banshee knew about him now, and there was a good chance that she’d already passed the information on to her new master. But I was going to have to cross that bridge later. I had bones to burn now.
“I know you can call up a power circle, whether you can heal or not,” I shouted at Méabh. “I want your help here, okay? I want this circle to belong to both of us.”
“What about me?” Caitríona sounded less petulant than I would’ve in her shoes at her age. In fact, I might even label her tone hopeful, if I was feeling honest. It made me want to give her a meaningful task, whether she had the power or not. After a second I hit on something and answered swiftly enough to seem like I hadn’t hesitated at all.
“I want you to concentrate on Sheila. On everything you knew about her. Put that out there, focus it like you could call her up with your imagination. Put energy into it. The circle will pick up on that and your essence and your memories will become part of the power.”
“And what will it do?”
“The more people that weave power together the stronger the connection is. I’ve used other people’s energy before, but not for something like this. That’s why I want you to think about Sheila. You knew her a lot better than I did. We want to call as much of her spirit here as we can, to give her over to cleansing the mountain and also to breaking the bond between her bones and her soul.” I hadn’t been previously aware of bonds like that, but then, ghosts weren’t my specialty. That was my partner—former partner, which Morrison had probably told him by now, which was going to go down like a lead balloon—my former partner Billy Holliday’s forte. I also wasn’t absolutely certain my mother qualified as a ghost, but I was pretty sure she fell in the realm of undead, and for all I knew, the undead were deeply tied to their bones.
There was one potential snag in my plan. We might succeed in washing the mountain clean with all the heart and white magic Sheila had to offer, and that might leave nothing but the black-hearted banshee behind. I counted it a risk worth taking. In my judgment, the parts that counted as my mother would have been saved, and the rest, well. Everybody had a dark side, and there was a certain dramatic satisfaction in the idea of lopping the head off that dark side in a very literal fashion.
I decided it probably wasn’t necessary to explain the possible flaw in the plan, and instead called Raven to me. It wasn’t exactly that I needed his guidance in raising a power circle. More that I was heading into his realm, into the gray territory between life and death, and it was safer to do that with him nearby. He appeared, quarking curiously, and I scratched under his beak as he settled on my shoulder. “We have a big job, Raven. Life and death stuff. I need a circle that runs to the mountain’s roots, that’s how deep it has to go, and reaches up to where the air’s too thin to breathe. Earth and sky. I can be earth, you can be sky, huh?”
He quarked again, this time clearly delighted, and leapt off my shoulder to wheel above our heads, sketching an outline of the circle. For an instant I simply loved the silly animal, loved his enthusiasm and his opinions and his brashness, and I hoped like hell he knew that. He zipped around above us, dipping close to Méabh, then zooming around the top half of the circle to come around to Caitríona. I didn’t know if either of them could see him, though I saw Caitríona’s hair fliff as he caught a wing tip in it. Then he went back to the north again, this time climbing high before he turned his head to give me a birdy black eye in warning.
He dove, and magic fell down in a curtain with him. I squealed, as thoughtlessly delighted as he was, and yelled, “Now, Méabh!” as I pulled magic up from the earth.
Hers came from within, relying on the connection with the world that the aos sí shared. It linked Croagh Patrick with Cromm Crúaich, tying the present to the far-distant past, just as Méabh was currently tied. Even Caitríona reacted, throwing forth a burst of energy more solidly formulated than someone without mystical training had any business offering. Her strength and Méabh’s shot toward each other, making another link in the past/present rope, and for an instant their colors glimmered harmoniously.
Then my magic and Raven’s crashed together, top to bottom, in a blast of gunmetal blue. Méabh and Caitríona’s offerings, sandwiched between them, shone brilliantly for an instant, then exploded in rivulets through the ball of magic now encompassing Croagh Patrick.
It sounded like static, like the aurora was supposed to. It felt like laughter, a sheer primal joy in sympathetic magic. This was what wielding vast cosmic power was supposed to feel like: confident, strong, joyous, sharing. I’d thought once I could maybe heal Seattle. Maybe heal the world. All of a sudden I understood I was only part of a huge network of magic users, adepts, connected, whatever they wanted to be called, who could change the world if, and only if, they worked together like we were doing now. This was how my magic was meant to be used: as one of many. Nothing I could do on my own would ever feel so good.
Caitríona yelped, from which I ascertained she could either see or feel the power flowing. Méabh, far more stoic, stood her ground and mostly didn’t let a little smile get out of control. I stretched my power toward my mother’s bones, searching for the heat I’d once felt while healing. Fire shouldn’t be that difficult to call up; it was only a change of state, and shamanism was about change.
A hint of Mother’s red-gold power still clung to her bones. I dug into the marrow, reaching for every last whisper of that, ready to burn it out in a glorious, defiant blaze. Raven helped, settling on the bones with clenched claws, like he could snap and shake the last dregs of power from them. Between us, I felt her remaining magic gather, then lift, though neither Raven nor myself did the lifting. I tried to shutter the Sight on more deeply, and caught a glimpse of a much more fragile raven, so old his wings and beak had turned to white. Sheila’s raven: I knew it instantly, though I’d never even imagined she had spirit animals. But it made sense. Oh, it made sense, if we were the long-calendar descendants of the Morrígan. Ravens were part of us. They always would be.
And the faded streak that was Mother’s spirit raven held the fragments of her power in its claws, wings beating with a desperate, p
onderous slowness. Time was so short, so very short, and there was so much to do. I pitched my voice to carry, not wanting to shout within the confines of the power circle. It seemed disrespectful, and if we’d just eked a spirit raven back from beyond to finish this task, the last thing I wanted was to show disrespect. “Give your memories of Sheila everything you’ve got, Cat. Let’s wipe this place clean and give her the send-off she deserves.”
Caitríona lowered her chin to her chest, eyes closed in concentration, and all of us held our breath, waiting to see Sheila’s ghost break free of the white bones.
A goddess rose up instead.
Chapter Seventeen
I had met gods, demigods, semi-gods or whatever the grandchildren of gods should be called, archetypes, demons, elves and avatars. There were magnitudes of difference in the power each category blazed with, and I had not one single teeny tiny doubt that I was finally—finally!—in the presence of a genuine goddess. The utterly irreverent part of me thought it was about damned time. The rest of me tried not to fall down on my knees in gibbering worship.
Cernunnos had that effect on me, too, but their similarities mostly ended there. He was a creature of order, for all that I thought of death and its attending miseries to be chaotic. But he helped maintain the flow of life into death, while she was the chaos of new life. Power boiled off her incandescent skin, curls of magic licking life into existence with each molecule of air they touched. Chance exploded at every instance, random and frantic exploration of mutations pursuing survival. Happenstance and hope guided all the permutations, fractals of magic struggling to create sustainable life in a world already filled with it. My eyes burned from watching her for barely the space of an indrawn breath. Then I howled and clapped my hands over my face, shutting down the Sight.
It faded slowly instead of its usual on-off switch, the goddess’s afterimage burning my retinas for a shockingly long time. When I finally dared open my eyes again, she was merely unbelievably, inhumanly, immortally beautiful instead of eye-searingly powerful. Like Cernunnos—who had also nearly burned my eyes out when I looked at him with the Sight—her hair was scattered with light, though hers was molten sunlight instead of his starlight. Also like him, her features were chiseled, delicate, remote, flawless: high round cheekbones, large eyes, a small chin, all like she was just verging on womanhood instead of bearing a godhead.
Unlike Cernunnos, however, she was naked.
I had seen a lot more naked women the past few days than I was accustomed to. I scratched my ear, tried to find somewhere safer to look and discovered Caitríona gaping at either me or our new naked friend. It was hard to tell. I sighed, shrugged my leather coat off and offered it to the goddess. She took it curiously. After a minute I took it back and put it on her, which earned me a lightning-bolt smile of pure delight. She snuggled into it and I decided not to explain about the dead lambs whose skin it was. “Hi. I’m…” There was really only one name that would do here. “Siobhán. Siobhán Walkingstick. Is there a name we would know you by?”
“Áine,” she said, and it sounded like goddamned silver bells chiming.
It also meant nothing to me. I glanced at Méabh and Caitríona, both of whom looked impressed. I took it as writ that Áine was somebody important in Irish cosmology, and smiled at the little goddess. She was little, now that she wasn’t blasting my eyes out: she couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. Even Melinda was taller than that.
Melinda, who had a personal relationship with a goddess. I blurted, “Do you know my friend Melinda?”
Áine looked amused. I ducked my head, muttering, “Yeah, right, no reason you’d be her goddess, right, sorry. Hey. Wait. Did you know my mother?”
Ineffable sorrow came into her eyes. I couldn’t tell what color they were. Not white, because that would be creepy, but they shifted from gray to blue to green and back to gray with the passing of clouds and the ripple of wind. It made her seem that much more elemental, and she really didn’t need any help in that department. I got hold of myself, trying to focus on her expression rather than her inhuman gaze. “You did know her. Is that why you came? We’re trying to lay her to rest. If you want to help, we’d be…”
Words sort of didn’t encompass it. I settled on “Grateful,” trusting she’d get the idea despite its utter inadequacy, then cleared my throat and tried again. “I can’t, um. I can heal and I can fight, but I guess I can’t set things on fire with my mind. Would you…do the honors?”
Áine pursed her lips and wandered from me to Caitríona, who she studied for a long time before putting her hands on Cat’s shoulders and drawing her close to kiss her forehead. An imprint of lips shone there for a moment, and Caitríona looked starstruck as Áine wandered away. At Mother’s bones, she knelt with an air of regret, and although I couldn’t See it, when she lifted her cupped hands, I was sure it was to hold and comfort the ancient spirit raven. She put the raven on her shoulder, then, much more purposefully, went to Méabh, at whom she smiled. Méabh’s expression remained solemn, and Áine smiled even more broadly, reaching up—way, way up—to pat the warrior queen’s cheek before she came back to me.
“You’re Brigid’s goddess, aren’t you?” I said when she got to me. “The one who elevated her the way the Master elevated the Morrígan. What is he? He must be something more than a god, because he just about wiped Cernunnos out, and I’d think they’d be on a pretty level playing field if they were both gods. If you were all gods. Whatever. So what is he? Is he like Coyote? Big Coyote, I mean, the archetypical Trickster, not my Coyote. Cyrano. My teacher. Is he, like, I don’t know, the archetype of death?” God. I was talking and I couldn’t shut up. Still, I really wanted to know what I was up against, and Cernunnos hadn’t been inclined to talk about it.
Of course, Áine didn’t much seem inclined to talk at all, even when I finally managed to shut up. Which lasted only a few seconds, since no answers were forthcoming. “And if he’s on a different level from you guys, how come you were able to uplift Brigid the way he did the Morrígan? And why is she the Morrígan instead of just Morrígan? Never mind, that doesn’t matter. Or maybe you couldn’t. Maybe that’s why Brigid needed a link with the time the cauldron was destroyed in order to bind it. Maybe she’s not as high on the avatar echelon as the Morrígan is. Oh, God, please, somebody make me stop talking.”
Áine laughed. It was like a baby’s laughter, a sound I wanted to get her to make again. I didn’t, however, want to start babbling again, so I pressed my lips together and smiled hopefully.
Instead of speaking, she turned her palms up and stood there patiently. After a handful of uncertain seconds, I put my palms down, against hers.
The werewolf bite on my forearm turned venomous.
Shining, blistering red-hot pain rocketed through it, so fierce I went dizzy before I could even take a breath. The blast of gorgeous, ice-cool healing power that followed was even more dizzifying. Little Coyote, my Coyote, had healed me of some bumps and bruises once, but it had been nothing like Áine’s power coursing through me. Her magic was elemental, sensual, sexual, profound. I could bask in it for days, like a lizard under the hot sun. It was absolute reassurance that all would be right with the world, and it was the most comforting, loving embrace I’d ever encountered. It felt like someone giving me a good scrubbing from the DNA on up. I’d just been more or less rewritten from the DNA on up, but that had been a much less pleasant experience.
Or it had been up until Áine’s power slammed into the magic that actually was trying to rewrite me from the DNA on up, because then things got down to some serious pain. Intellectually I knew there’d probably been barely a second between the first intense burst of agony from the bite when Áine touched me, the cushioning effect of her magic rushing through me and the infection’s response, but the moment of respite had seemed wonderfully drawn-out.
At least, it seemed drawn-out in comparison to the railroad spikes now being driven through my arm. I pried one eye open to make su
re that wasn’t really happening. It wasn’t. That was good enough for me. I closed my eyes again and tried not to snivel.
My own power had been going great guns holding the infection in place. I kind of thought Áine’s should just smack it aside like a pesky bug, but I could feel her crashing against it, waves against the shore, neither giving way to the other. I didn’t dare trigger the Sight, not with a goddess using her power full tilt. I’d go blind, or possibly burn my brain out. Neither would be any fun. So I just held on, teeth gritted against relentless surges of magic battling it out under my skin, until Áine suddenly released me and stepped back.
The bite still hurt like blue blazes, and I didn’t really need to look to know it wasn’t one bit more healed than it had been. I looked anyway.
It wasn’t one bit more healed than it had been. Some of the inflammation that had erupted when Áine touched me was already fading, but the bite itself was just as dark, infected and nasty as it had been since I’d received it. All I could think was, holy crap, the Master was powerful. Or the werewolves were powerful. Somebody, anyway, was powerful, because if a goddess was stymied by the shapechanging magic running through my bloodstream, then I was infected with something so absurdly far out of my league I didn’t even know where to begin. I’d thought Méabh had had power in spades when I’d seen her bind the werewolves to the lunar cycle. But she’d just told me that had taken a lifetime of preparation, so while it had been an astounding performance, it didn’t seem to be something she was in a position to repeat.
I took a moment—just a moment—to really hate being the go-to girl who could pull out the repeat performances, and then I got over myself, because Áine looked genuinely dismayed that my arm still shone with red, superheated infection. Offhand, I guessed she’d never run into something she couldn’t heal, either. That was considerably more of a come-uppance for a goddess than it was for snot-nosed little me. “It’s okay. I’m gonna figure it out. And I know it means I bear his mark and all, but don’t let that stop you from helping my mother, okay? Please? I’ll bow out of the circle if I need to, so there’s no taint, but man, she really doesn’t deserve this.”
