by C. E. Murphy
“Says the man who left an annual shindig to fly last-minute to Ireland.”
“I couldn’t risk missin’ something else, now, could I?” Gary peered out the window. In theory there were green rolling hills out there. In reality, there were concrete walls fifteen feet high that blocked off the countryside. “Where we goin’, anyway?”
“The Hill of Tara.” I knew almost as much about Irish history as I’d known about shamanism a year ago, which was to say nothing, but even I’d heard of Tara. I scowled at the road, trying to remember if I’d gotten that far in what I’d told Gary. “It’s in County Meath, which is sort of the wrong way, more north than west, and I keep feeling like I need to go west. But I had a vision last night. Or the night before. Saturday night. Anyway, I saw a hill in the vision, so Tara seems like a good place to start.”
“What with bein’ a hill and all,” Gary agreed solemnly.
I said, “Exactly,” even though I knew perfectly well I was being mocked. Gary laughed and I gave him a dirty look. “Besides, starting with a known cultural and spiritual center probably isn’t a bad idea, even if it’s the wrong one. Did I tell you about the woman wearing my mother’s necklace?”
Gary arched his bushy eyebrows, which I took as a no, and I asked, “You ever get the feeling your life is a string festooned with bells and tied to hundreds of others you don’t know anything about? And that sometimes somebody pulls their string, and your bells ring?”
Gary looked at me a long moment before rather gently saying, “Yes and no, darlin’. We all get that feeling from time to time. Difference is, with you, it could be real.”
“But Coyote said I was a new soul. Mixed up fresh.” I wasn’t sure I’d ever mentioned that to Gary. Or to anybody else, for that matter. There were, according to my mentor, old souls and new souls. Mostly people were old souls, with all the baggage and all the wisdom from previous incarnations resting somewhere in the hind brain, there to draw on or drown in. I was something of a rarity, mixed up fresh and new by Somebody or Something responsible for those aspects of the universe. The positive side of being a new soul was a lack of baggage and the potential for great power. The negative side was the corresponding lack of accumulated wisdom with which to wield that power. I’d certainly demonstrated that lack time and again the past fifteen months.
Either I’d mentioned the whole new-soul thing to Gary, or he thought it didn’t matter, because he snorted. “So what if you are? New soul don’t mean no ties. You still got parents, right? Grandparents? Cousins? And friends or lovers can tug your strings, too. No man’s an island, Jo.”
That was not the first time Gary had gone philosophical on me, nor was it the first time I was surprised by it. Properly chastened, I swallowed and continued my original line of thought: “The woman with my mother’s necklace rang my be…” That sentence could not end anywhere happy. Gary guffawed and I grinned despite myself. “You know what I mean.”
“I know Mike’s gonna be real disappointed if some woman’s ringing your bells, darlin’.”
“When did you start calling him Mike?”
“After the zombies,” Gary said with aplomb.
I cast a glance heavenward and nearly missed our exit. Gary grabbed his door’s armrest as I yanked us into the right��which was to say, correct, which in on Irish roads meant left—lane, and muttered, “After the zombies. Of course. Normal people don’t say things like that, Gary.”
“Normal people don’t fight zombies.”
That line of conversation wasn’t going to end anywhere happy, either. I let out an explosive breath and tried again. “The woman in my mother’s necklace had some kind of pull with me. Maybe it was just that she looked all sneery and challenging, but there was some kind of connection. I have to find out who she was.”
Gary, cautiously, said, “It wasn’t your mother, was it?”
“No. She kind of looked like her, dark hair, pale skin, but no. My mother was sort of restrained and prim. She liked Altoids. This woman was more of a kick ass and take names type.” Only it had turned out my mother was exactly that kind of person, too. I just hadn’t known it until after she died.
I hadn’t known much of anything about my mother until after she died, except that she’d flown to America and left me with my father when I was six months old. I hadn’t seen her again until I was twenty-six. That kind of thing leaves a mark. In my case, it was an entirely unjustified mark, as Mother had been trying to protect me from a bad guy bigger and nastier than I ever wanted to deal with. But again, I hadn’t known that until after she died. Nothing like a little “I was trying to save your life” to take the wind out of sails puffed up with childish abandonment issues. I wished I’d had the opportunity to tell her I finally understood.
But that was spilt milk, and I was getting better about not crying over it. I turned down the road leading to Tara and Gary frowned as a tour bus taking up two-thirds of the road came the other direction. “You sure this is the right way?”
“Yeah. Only in Ireland do they put cultural heritage monuments at the end of one-track roads.” I couldn’t decide if I liked the idea or not. It certainly gave the impression the heritage site had been there forever, which was true. On the other hand, I had to hold my breath as I pulled over to let the bus pass, for fear we’d be broadsided if I didn’t. Gary let his breath out in a rush when the bigger vehicle rambled by, and we grinned sheepishly at each other as I pulled forward again. “Glad it’s not just me. At least we’re not on a mountainside with roads this narrow. The landscape kind of reminds me of North Carolina.”
“Never been out there,” Gary said. “I kept getting stuck in St. Louis. Annie and I used to go to the jazz festival.”
“Did you play?” Gary’s wife had died before I met him, but he’d mentioned once or twice that he’d been an itinerant sax player for a few years after the Korean War, while Annie, a nurse, had brought home the bacon.
“Nah. Left that to the guys who were really good.” Gary leaned into the window as we went up the hill leading to the, er, Hill, and frowned. “Thought there’d be more cars.”
“Me, too.” The parking lot—small and graveled and graced at one end by gift shops and at the other by a switchback path—was completely empty of vehicles besides our own. I got out of the car and turned in a slow circle, taking in the view—there was a tower in the distance, soft with misty air—and finally came back to Gary, who stood on the other side of our car with a befuddled expression. “You remember that night at the Seattle Center?”
“You mean the night somebody stuffed a broadsword through me? Nah. Why would I?”
“Remember how quiet it was?” The parking garage had been empty. There’d been no late-night tourists wandering, nobody from the monorail hurrying one way or the other, no joggers making their way across the closed grounds.
Gary, very firmly, said, “Jo, no matter how much I love you, I ain’t gettin’ stuck with another sword.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got mine now.” I patted my hip like I wore a sword there, which of course I didn’t, because I lived in the early twenty-first century, not the early seventeenth. Not that as a woman I’d have been able to carry a sword in the seventeenth century anyway, but that wasn’t the point. The point was I had an honest-to-God magic sword that I’d taken off an ancient Celtic god, and I’d spent a good chunk of the past fifteen months learning how to use it properly. If anybody tried skewering Gary—or me, for that matter—I had defenses.
“Your sword’s in Seattle.”
I put on my very best mysterious magic user voice: “A detail which is nothing to one such as I.” Gary snorted and I laughed, then waved at the path. “Come on, if we’ve got the place to ourselves we might as well take advantage of it. Busloads of tourists will probably show up any minute.”
Gary fell in behind me dubiously. “You really think so?”
“No. I think something’s conspiring to keep the place quiet awhile, and that we’ll probably regret fin
ding out why. But I’m trying to keep a positive mind-set.” The path up to Tara was foot-worn but not paved. Nothing suggested “tourist attraction” except for the gift shops, and even they weren’t particularly in-your-face about it. Gary and I kept pace with one another, both stealing glimpses at each other from the corners of our eyes like we expected something to jump out at us but if the other was cool, we weren’t going to show our nerves. After the third or fourth time we caught gazes, Gary actually giggled, which was unnerving in itself. Six-foot-one former linebackers in their seventies weren’t supposed to giggle.
A woman said, “There’ll be nothing to worry about,” out of nowhere, and we both shrieked like little girls. I regained my equilibrium first. Gary, after all, had already been giggling, which was bad enough with me as an audience, never mind with a complete stranger looking on. We turned together, though, to find a lovely woman of indeterminate age smiling at us. She wore a white eyelet-lace sundress with gold scarves wrapped around her hips and shoulders, and sandals on her feet. On most people I would call it a hippy-dippy look, but somehow she imbued it with more elegance than that. Her hair was the color of sunrise shot with clouds. She wasn’t young, even if I couldn’t tell how old she was.
“You’ll be Siobhán Walkingstick,” she said to me.
Hairs stood up on my arms. The bite itched, and I rubbed it surreptitiously, resulting in a wave of oh god, scratching feels so good I may never be able to stop that sometimes happens. I wondered suddenly if that was why dogs would go thumpa-thumpa-thump with a hind leg when a human got a good itchy spot, and then I wondered if, as a werewolf, I would do the same thing.
I stopped scratching and muttered, “People don’t normally use that name for me. Who’re you?”
“Am I wrong to think until very recently it wouldn’t have been you at all?”
Another chill ran over me. I made fists to keep from scratching again. “…you’re not wrong.” The name she’d used, Siobhán Walkingstick, was technically the one I’d been born to. Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick. Dad had taken one look at that mess and nicknamed me Joanne. I’d dropped the Walkingstick myself, taking Walker as my mostly official last name when I graduated high school. Joanne Walker and Siobhán Walkingstick had almost nothing in common, at least not up until the past year. More specifically, up until two nights earlier, when I’d been reborn under a rattlesnake shapeshifter’s guidance. That had a lot to do with why my powers were out-of-control wonky. Joanne had had a handle on her skill set. Siobhán apparently resided in another league. And I was going to have to stop thinking of them as separate or I’d become a headcase in no time flat.
“But you’ll prefer Joanne,” the woman said with a nod, then looked to Gary. “And you come with a companion.”
Gary, who was rarely gruff, said, “Muldoon. Gary Muldoon,” gruffly, and she inclined her head toward him.
“Are you here of your own free will, Mr. Muldoon? Will you be traveling the roads Joanne travels, walking beside her, or will you stand aside and let her pass where she must go alone?”
“I’m here, ain’t I?”
The woman smiled. “So you are. Now there’re two ways to approach the Hill. You might go the way everyone does, and see what they all see. Perhaps more,” she added, giving me a significant look. “Perhaps not.”
I was pretty sure I would See more than most people, assuming the Sight didn’t knock me for another loop. I was equally sure strange women didn’t show up to make portentous comments if they expected me to take the path more traveled by. It hadn’t passed me by that she’d failed to say who she was, but I’d lay long odds she wouldn’t even if I asked her again, so I just said, “What’s the other way?” like a good little stage player.
She gestured to the rise of green grass behind her. “Pass through the Hall of Kings, and hear what secrets they might share with you.”
“I didn’t even know there was a Hall of Kings. I thought Tara was…” For once I shut up before I made a total fool of myself. Truth was, I hadn’t really thought much at all about what Tara was or wasn’t. I figured it was mystical. Druidic. Stuff like that. I hadn’t considered that ordinary mortals might have passed this way, too, not that kings were exactly ordinary.
The woman’s mouth quirked, which was nicer than her outright laughing at me. “Tara is where the ancient kings were crowned, Joanne. Temair na Rí, Hill of the Kings. Here they wedded Méabh to become ard rí, the high kings.”
“What, all of them? Liberal sorts, weren’t they?” That time my mouth should have shut up before it did.
The woman gave me a sort of weary look, the kind mothers bestow on precocious but irritating children. “Symbolically, Joanne. Symbolically. Méabh was—”
“No, wait, I know this one! She was a high queen, right? Kind of a warrior princess?”
There was a certain expression I tended to engender in people more mystically apt than I. It started under the eyes with a slight tensing of fine skin, and went both up and down, making lips thinner and foreheads wrinklier. As a rule, I interpreted it as the pain of one whose cherished childhood dreams have just been spat upon, and it always made me feel guilty. The woman got that expression, suggesting that “warrior princess” was not how she thought of Méabh, but it was too late. I couldn’t take the words back. I put on a pathetic hangdog smile of apology instead, and the look faded into resignation, which was generally how people ended up responding to me. At length she said, “Something like that. Queen of Connacht and of Ulster, descended from or perhaps incarnated of the Morrígan herself, and any man who would be king of Ireland needed the blessing of the trifold goddess.”
“I thought that was Brigid,” I said nervously. Brigid was the only deity I knew anything about—well, besides Cernunnos, but I had a close personal relationship with him—and what I knew about her fit in a nutshell. “Trifold goddess” was stamped on the nutshell, in fact, and that was the sum total of my knowledge.
A little of the dismay left the woman’s face. Apparently I’d gotten something right. “Brigid would be the Morrígan’s other face, perhaps. The coin turned upward instead of down. Maiden, mother, crone, to the Morrígan’s warrior, witch and death.”
I swallowed. “Right. Um. We’re not going to meet her, are we?”
The woman stepped aside with another smile, gesturing us up the hill. “There’ll be one way and one way only to find out.”
Gary was halfway up the hill before the woman finished speaking. I jolted after him, vaguely ashamed that even now, he was more enthusiastic for my adventures than I was. I caught his shoulder as he reached the low crest and tugged him back. “Hey, hang on a second, wait up.”
He glanced at me with elevated bushy eyebrows, and I found myself mimicking the woman’s gesture, waving at the low stretch of land beyond our hill. Annoyed that I’d done so, I glanced back to glower at her, but she was gone. I stared down the deserted pathway a moment, then passed a hand over my eyes and said, “Hang on a sec,” again.
“I’m hangin’, doll. What’s up?”
“Obviously there’s something down there for us to see. I’m just thinking it might be helpful if you could…See.”
“I see just fine,” Gary said in mild offense. “I wear reading glasses, but who doesn’t?”
“No, not see. See. With a capital ess. With the Sight. Like I do.”
Gary looked down his nose at me. It wasn’t very far down—he was only a couple inches taller than I—but it was far enough. “Last I checked you were the one with the magic mojo, Jo.” A glitter came into his gray eyes and I pointed a warning finger at him.
“You are not calling me Mojojo. Ever. I refuse it as a nickname.”
The glitter turned into a grin. “Sure…Jo.”
I turned my pointy finger from him toward the green below us. “Do you or do you not want a chance to See what we’re facing?”
“’Course I do!”
“Then no Mojojojo.” I bit my tongue on getting carried away w
ith the jojos, then exhaled. “Okay. I know this works because I’ve done it with Morrison and Billy.” Billy, my police detective partner—former partner, which he didn’t even know yet. He was going to kill me. Anyway, Billy was an adept himself, able to speak with the recently dead, but Morrison had the magical aptitude of a turnip. If I could make the Sight ritual work on him, I had no doubt it would work on Gary. “But I’ve only done it while stationary, which is no help.”
Gary’s eyebrows shot up, dancing with mad glee. I threatened to whack his shoulder and he laughed out loud, which made me laugh. “You’re good for me,” I informed him. “I laugh more when you’re around.”
“You need some laughter in your life, darlin’. Speakin’ of which, how’s things with Mike now that he ain’t the boss?”
“Of all the awkward segues. I’ll let you know. Stop distracting me.”
“From what? You don’t look like you’re doing much.”
“I’m trying to think!” Which wasn’t my strong point even when I hadn’t flown all night. I walked a few steps away, squinting at Tara. I’d never awakened second Sight in someone when I wasn’t already using it. Quite certain it wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had, I held my breath and triggered the Sight.
Time revved up a Roto-Rooter and tunneled through a thousand years of history.
Chapter Three
The landscape changed. Hills reshaped, stone walls rose where none currently stood and in the distance a double row of wooden henges spread out in an unbelievably large circle, containing vastly more area than I expected. I could see modern-day shadows of the new highway cutting through what had once been sacred land, its effect so significant as to mar the world even in retrospect. Mist-softened sunlight caught a hollow between the sets of henges where it had been dug out, and dug deep, to create a true barrier around Tara.
