by C. E. Murphy
Had I not met Cernunnos, though, I’d think I was facing a god. He was small and slender and the very air he exhaled was charged with energy. Power crawled over his skin, glittering white in the close morning sunlight. He was human, but only just. The hairs on my arms stood up, and I held my ground through conscious effort. “Thank you for answering our call,” I said. He turned to smile at me.
Was there a rule that otherworldly beings had to be gorgeous? He was dark-skinned and black-eyed, his broad features full of passion. “Joanne Walker.” His voice washed over me, a warm tenor that ought to have been filling concert halls. It raised the hairs on my arms just like Caruso’s voice might’ve, making me feel as if I might take wing and be transported somewhere else entirely by their lift.
“It is a very great pleasure to know you.” His voice dropped on the “know,” and I felt myself blush as I got all Biblical about it. I clearly needed a real-world relationship.
“It’s nice to meet you, too. I, um…”
“Had questions for me,” Virissong put in. I smiled crookedly, relieved I didn’t actually have to say that myself. It seemed presumptuous. “Will you walk with me?” he asked. I glanced at Judy, who spread her hands slightly.
“I think I should stay inside the power circle,” I said apologetically. His eyebrows lifted fractionally and he put his hand against the invisible wall between us. It bowed slightly under the pressure, but it held.
“Are you always so cautious?” he asked, not bothering to hide a smile. Great. I was being teased by three-thousand-year-old Indian witches. I wrinkled my nose.
“No, but it’s never too late to learn.” I’d been hanging out with Gary too much. Any minute now I was going to start calling myself an old dog.
He chuckled, liquid musical sound. My arm hairs gave up trying to escape and lay down flat, like a cat’s ears, and I rubbed my hands over them. My right hand didn’t hurt anymore. I turned it up to find the bone-deep slice across my palm had healed over entirely. “Very well,” Virissong said. “I’ll stay. Ask your questions, Joanne Walker.”
“I need to know your purpose.” Even as I said it, the sheer arrogance of it came back and hit me in the teeth. Virissong’s eyebrows shot up and he looked beyond me at Judy. She said nothing, though I saw her shrug from the corner of my eye. Virissong looked back at me.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever been quite that bald-faced about it,” he said. “My purpose, you say.”
I twisted my shoulders uncomfortably and let them fall again. “I’ve met some people who believe they can bring you back into our world, and that to do so will help restore a balance of life. They think they need my help to do it, and I need to know what I’m getting into before I commit to it.”
“Wise of you.” I got the impression he was teasing me again, but that there was also some small degree of respect in it.
“I’ve had a little experience with this sort of thing.”
“Yessss.” He drew the word out, and suddenly I recognized his voice as the same one that had come out of the light the night before. I relaxed and tensed all at once, it was good to know I was dealing with the right demi-deity, but the exultation of power that had hit me the night before made me cautious. “Yes,” he repeated. “We have some knowledge of that.”
“We?” I looked around. “Royal we?”
“Universal consciousness we,” he said, straight-faced. “A step above royal.”
He was like Coyote, only more so. I thought one was enough. “I’m also trying to find out about a girl who died suddenly. One of the group that’s trying to bring you across.”
Virissong’s black eyes darkened further. “Cassandra Tucker. Her poor daughter, left without a mother so young.”
It took active effort to keep my jaw from dropping open. “You know about her?”
He lifted his eyebrows. “The coven has been working toward bringing me back into the Middle World for months, Joanne. I’ve tried to participate in it as much as possible.” He made a moue, then shrugged. “My ability to do so is limited, but I certainly know who’s involved. I had always sensed Cassandra had a weak heart. I was concerned being the Mother might worsen the damage, but she laughed off my warnings. I lacked the power to strengthen her while still trapped in the Lower World. It’s a loss I’ll regret for a long time.”
“She had a heart attack?” I lost the battle and my jaw fell somewhere around my ribs. “And the coven never noticed anything was wrong?” To be fair, I wasn’t sure how I would tell if someone’s heart was defective, so maybe I couldn’t blame the coven. “Why didn’t you tell them? Magic can do that to somebody?”
“Magic,” Virissong said, rather sternly, “has its price, just as everything else does. It can become as much a burden as physical labor, with the same results.”
Having been pleased only minutes earlier about my lack of sleep deprivation, I felt a little chastised. I should’ve known that, or at least put it together on my own. Virissong gave me a brief understanding smile, then added, “I did try to warn Faye. I gathered they were close. But as much as I want to, my ability to communicate with those in the Middle World is limited. She may never have heard my warning.”
I thought of Faye’s quivering sorrow and anger over Cassie’s death, and nodded. “Guess not.”
“As to the other, though. As to my purpose.” Virissong folded himself down suddenly, with much the same grace Judy had displayed when she arrived in my garden, and gestured for me to do the same. My shoulder brushed the shield as I sat, glimmers wavering around the circle. Judy sat behind me, half-visible from the corner of my eye. The sun crept higher in the sky, and no one said anything. Just before my patience gave out, Virissong lifted his head and began to speak, more to the too-close horizon than to me.
“I was born, as men reckon it, some three thousand years ago, south of what you now call Seattle.”
I refrained from comment on his grasp of colloquial English in favor of listening, and he gave me a look like he’d heard what I was thinking.
“Things were different then. Not perfect, as some people of your age want to believe, but different.” He saw the wryness of my smile and gave me a quick grin in return. “My people were generally at peace, both with each other and with the world. But there came a time of great darkness and great coldness. We starved and grew cold and died, and nothing we did seemed to appease our gods and ancestors. We became desperate. We made offerings of everything—what little we had, and still our people died and froze and starved. I was very young then, a youth of less than twenty summers.”
He hesitated, then put out his hand toward me. “Are you sure you will not cross the power circle, Joanne Walker? If I could take your hand I could show you these things, rather than only tell them.”
I looked at Judy. Her forehead wrinkled with uncertainty and she shook her head. “The decision isn’t one I can make for you, Joanne. I can’t forbid you to take risks.”
“Do you think it would help?” I asked. “To be able to see it?”
“It might,” she said reluctantly. “It’s always easier to believe, when you’ve seen.”
I thought of the black-eyed Horse spirit, ordering me to try, and curled my fingernails against my palm. The healed skin opened again, easily. I put my hand against the barrier, bringing the shield down with a shudder. Virissong’s eyes glittered. “Thank you,” he said. “Your trust will not go unforgotten.”
“I hope it goes unregretted, too,” I said, and put my bloody hand in his.
* * * *
Hunger bit through my belly like a knife, embarrassingly sharp. Part of me knew I had to have eaten recently: otherwise the need for food would have been reduced to a dull ache, ignorable. It was only after a feast that the famine struck so hard. Another part of me knew my twenty-first century self had never known the real meaning of the word “starving,” and that was where the embarrassment came from. I knew, back home and safe in my own time and body, that I’d still claim to be starving f
rom time to time.
The cold cut in then, daggers slicing through the tough, warm leathers I wore, ignoring the flesh and setting up shop in my bones. I looked to my left, chill stiffening my neck. Virissong sat beside me, young and handsome and with his jaw thrust out like a petulant child’s.
“They are wrong, Nakaytah,” he said. The body I was in reached its hand out and put it on his arm. Apparently I was Nakaytah. Good to know.
“They’re the elders, beloved,” I replied. “You must trust them.”
“No! It isn’t right that we starve and freeze and do nothing. I’ve found a way,” he said, suddenly eager, and turned to me. He wasn’t, I realized, all that handsome after all. His features were lighted by a fierce zealotry, and that gave the wide bones of his face and the darkness of his eyes a compulsion that was easily mistaken for good looks. “I can make the spirits come to me.”
Horror drained down my throat in an icy sluice, colder than the wind, and pooled in my belly. “But you’re not a shaman. Not called, not trained—”
“But I am called,” he protested. “How else could I make the spirits come? I am called, Nakaytah. It is only that my family is not a favorite, not born to the shaman line—”
Reluctant agreement thawed the horror inside me. Virissong’s father and grandfather had both pleaded to study with the shamans, convinced that they, too, carried within them the power to visit the spirit world. Their pleas had been denied; no true shaman, the elders said, would have to struggle so hard to prove his position. A spirit journey would show their true paths, and the journeys hadn’t led Virissong’s family to the powerful shaman spirits. Now they were shunned and a little ridiculed, for their delusions of grandeur. My hand crept out and wrapped itself around Virissong’s. “What do the spirits tell you?”
Virissong sat back, relief sagging his shoulders. He tightened his fingers around mine, then withdrew them. I tucked mine back inside my leathers; it was too cold to hold hands in the frozen wind. “They say there is a great and terrible battle raging in the spirit world. They say that the monsters the spirits fight are so strong the battle spills into the Middle World, and this is why it’s so cold, and why game is so scarce. Only we are stubborn—” Virissong broke off with a crooked little grin, adding, “—or foolish enough to stay.”
Disbelief bubbled up in my stomach. “You can’t mean the spirits want us to leave here!”
Comic dismay popped Virissong’s eyes wide. He shook his head, reaching to catch my hand again. “No, no. The spirits admire our stubbornness a little, I think. No. They say that to end the cold and bring the game back, we must end the battle that’s being fought in the spirit world.”
My chin dropped to my chest, cold leather tucking against the warmth of my neck as I stared at Virissong. “We have to bring the monsters to this world,” he said enthusiastically. “Here, men can hunt and slay their bodies, weakening them so that in the spirit world they can be defeated.”
Slow admiration began to course through my veins, warming me despite the freezing air. “Like in the stories of the First People,” I said wonderingly. Virissong did his best to look modest, but excitement burned in his eyes. “You’ll be remembered forever as a great hero!”
Virissong ducked his head, smiling. “That isn’t why I do this,” he said. Not even my host entirely believed him, so when he lifted his head, expression bright and hopeful, to say, “Perhaps a little of why,” it made us both laugh. “I want to prove myself,” he went on in a low voice, when the laughter had faded. “I want to show them that even if the family is not a long line of shamans, our power should not be denied. But I also want to help our people, Nakaytah. We freeze and starve and die, and I do not want this to be the end of us.”
“Then we will.” I put my hand in his again, still warmed from laughter and admiration. “Even the elders will see that they were wrong, and warmth and food will come back to us. I’ll help you, if I can.”
* * * *
In the Lower World, Virissong took his hand from mine. I startled awake, blood sticky in my palm, to find him looking away, tightness around his mouth. “If you must see the rest I will show you,” he said in a low voice. He’d lost the familiar colloquial speech patterns and was more cautious now, formality masking distress. “It is…painful. Nakaytah died, helping me.”
“Oh my God. What happened?”
“Something I didn’t anticipate. The monsters were more cunning than I thought. We built a power circle,” he said, idly drawing one in the earth in front of him. “We called the spirits to protect us, and we drummed to catch the monsters’ attention. We wanted to draw them into the circle, where we could slay them and free our people.”
I nodded, clutching my hand closed over the wound in it. “What went wrong?”
“The monsters tried to become us,” Virissong said. “They tried to take the places of our own souls. My spirit protectors were strong, and rejected the monster that tried to take me. But Nakaytah…”
“She wasn’t strong enough.” I felt dizzy, as if I’d lost far more blood from the cut than I thought I had. “What happened?”
“She leaped at me with tooth and nail,” Virissong said. “She took my knife from my belt as we struggled, cutting me here, and here.” He pushed up a sleeve, showing a strong white scar across his forearm, and then another across his belly as he pulled his shirt out of the way. “I carry these scars forever, to remember her by.”
My fingers found their way to my cheek, brushing over a thin scar that ran from my eye socket to the corner of my mouth. “I understand,” I said. Virissong nodded, letting his clothes fall back into place.
“I took the knife from her,” he went on after a few seconds. “I was stronger and larger and trained in hunting, if not war. She… ran forward. Onto the knife. I pulled it away, but it was already inside her. Blood went everywhere. It brought down the power circle, as you did a little while ago.” He nodded at me, an acknowledgment of repeating patterns. “I saw the monster that had infected her fly free, beyond the power circle and into the world. I vowed that day I would never rest until I had brought it to its death.”
“And three thousand years later you’re still trying.” My voice was tight and choked. Virissong inclined his head.
“I chose to spend many lifetimes in the Lower World, waiting for a time when I had a chance against the monster again. I think the tide of the Middle World is changing, now. I think there are many who look to embrace a better way of life. I think now is the time I must make my final challenge. But I’ve grown weak, being away from the Middle World for so long. It’s why I need your help, and the coven’s help. With the power you lend me, I can become whole again, joining spirit and body together as they are meant to be.”
“And the monster?”
“Together we’ll track it down and destroy it,” Virissong said, voice flat with ancient emotion. “And from that, I hope a new world will be born. A better one.”
I nodded slowly. “What happened to your people, Virissong? Did the cold end?”
“It did. The spirits were right. With the battle no longer shaking the Lower and Upper Worlds, the Middle World became safe and normal again.”
“That’s good. But—” Something nagged at me, a prickle at the base of my neck. I frowned vaguely at Virissong, then at Judy, who sat quietly beside me.
Virissong’s eyebrows rose. “But?”
“But what—” Another tickle ran down my spine, like an elementary school fire alarm buzzing in the distance. I frowned less vaguely and rubbed the back of my neck. “What happ—”
The tickle turned into a shrill that broke through my trance, finally recognizable as the phone ringing. I stumbled to my feet and picked up the receiver, my voice groggy with disuse. “Hello?”
“Joanne Walker?” The voice was unfamiliar, even if I wasn’t half-asleep.
“Yeah?”
“Do you know a Gary Muldoon?”
I woke all the way up inside of an instant, cold
making an ugly burp of nervousness in my stomach. “Yeah. What’s wrong?”
“This is Dr. Wood at Northwest Hospital. We’d like you to come down right away. Mr. Muldoon has had a heart attack.”
Chapter Twelve
Saturday, June 18, 6:33 a.m.
I didn’t know how I got to the hospital. I didn’t know if I even hung up the phone. All I could hear was my heartbeat and the memory of the day I’d met Gary, when a human banshee called Marie told us both that Gary wasn’t going to die any time soon. Soon. What was soon? Was six months soon? It seemed soon to me. How far in advance had her ability to see death coming worked? She hadn’t said, and it was much too late to ask her. I remembered her body, lying across her living room floor, the heart torn out, and I wondered if six months was soon.
The doctor I’d spoken to on the phone met me in the waiting room. She was short, with dark sympathetic eyes and a quick reassuring smile that I didn’t buy for a minute.
I felt like I was watching myself from a safe distance of several feet. From out there, the pain and fear couldn’t really get to me. All I could really feel from out there was the itch in my nose that made me want to sneeze, something that happened every time I went into a hospital.
In there, inside my body, everything was tunnel-visioned and I kept asking, “A heart attack? Not a stroke? A heart attack?” as if it were important, but I couldn’t figure out why it would be. In there, there wasn’t enough room to breathe, like someone’d sat on my lungs. I wanted to stay out here, distant, where it was easier to breathe. The doctor—I had to look at her name tag to remember it was Wood—sat me down and put her hands on my shoulders.
“A heart attack. He’s very weak right now,” she told me. “He’s weak, but he’s awake,” she said. “He wanted to see you, Ms. Walker. Can you do that?”
I snapped back into my body so hard it made me cry out loud, a sharp high whimper. Blood flow tingled through my fingertips, painfully, but the pain gave me something to focus on. “Yeah.” My voice was all rough again. “Yeah, of course. Is he gonna be okay, doctor?”
