He poked at the coals with a long stick.
I finished my meat and lay on my back, stretching my feet to the fire. It’d been a long day. I lost Julie and I still had no clue where her mom had gone. At least Andrea didn’t die.
I became aware of Bran watching me. Our stares connected and he went down for a kiss, but I put my hand onto his lips. “I don’t want to headbutt you a third time. Trust me, if I change my mind, you’ll be the first to know.”
He sat up, picked up a twig and snapped small pieces off of it, throwing them into the fire one by one. “I don’t understand you. I used to be good at this. Good at women. Now…You have a forward manner about you.”
I frowned. “I don’t think I’m that forward.”
“You are. Most women are now. Used to be that if a woman sat next to you like this and you fed her, it was understood she would lie on her back for you. Otherwise, why bother? Women now, they are brazen. Forward. They will sit there and they wear tight clothes, but they won’t sleep with you. They want to talk. What is there to talk about?”
I sat up and hugged my knees. “Bran, I don’t do anything for you, do I? Kind of like my friend doesn’t do anything for me.”
He stared. “Why would you think that?”
“A feeling I get. Like you’re trying to get into my pants because I’m a woman and you don’t know what else to do with me. You don’t think I’m all that.”
He sighed and looked at me. Really looked at me. “No,” he said. “I don’t. Don’t get me wrong, you’ve got a nice body and all. I wouldn’t turn you down if you wanted to spread your legs, but yeah I’ve bedded better.”
I nodded. “I thought so.”
“What gave me away?”
“The kiss.”
He reared back. “I kiss like a madman!”
“It was a kiss of a frustrated man with injured pride. There was no fire in it.” I handed him another twig. “Just talk to me. Pretend I’m a traveler who stopped by your fire. I bet you don’t get many visitors. You stay in the mist all the time?”
“I come out to play during the flares.” He encompassed the lake and forest with a wide wave of his hand. “I fish, I hunt. Never run out of game. It’s the good life.”
“So you don’t get to enter the real world unless the flare is up?”
“Yeah.”
“But the flare only comes every seven years or so. In between years, you’re here, by yourself, with no company?”
He whistled. A shaggy shape trotted from the dark and flopped at his feet. A huge, black dog. “Got Conri here.”
The dog raised his paws into the air, turning to get his belly scratched. Bran obliged. “If I get bored, I sleep. For years sometimes, until she wakes me up.”
I offered my bone to the dog. He took it out of my hands very gently and settled to gnaw it at my feet. I thought I was alone. At least I could go out and talk to other people. “You must’ve been here awhile, but you speak with no accent.”
“The Gift of Gab. One of three gifts she gave me. Gift of Gab: I speak any language I wish. Gift of Health: my wounds are healed fast. And Gift of Aim: I hit what I see. The fourth gift is my own. I was born with it.”
“What is it?”
“Admit it was the best kiss you’ve ever had and I’ll tell you.”
“Sorry, I can think of a couple better.” Or at least one…
“Then why do I waste time with you?”
I shook my head. He wasn’t a real person. Just a shadow of one with no memories, no ties, nothing but a sex drive, good aim, and wild eyes.
“Where are you from?”
He shrugged. “Don’t remember.”
“Okay, when are you from? How long have you been here?”
“I don’t remember.”
I grappled for something, some sort of marker that any person would know. “What’s your mother’s name?”
“I don’t remember.”
I looked at the stars. This mission was doomed to failure from the start. Who was I kidding?
“Blathin,” he said. “Her name was Blathin.”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. “Come! I’m going to show you something.”
We ran along the edge of the lake into the trees. Ahead a wooden cabin rose, nestled among the greenery, connected to the lake by a long dock. Bran dragged me inside.
A fire burned in the fireplace. To the right a simple bed stood against the wall, to the left a row of chests sat. Carvings decorated the walls: a tree, runes, and warriors. Many, many fighters twisted by the battle spasm and carved with exquisite detail. Under them on the table lay a scroll, depicting a man with a long staff wearing a monk’s cassock. He sat on a rock. Beside him mermaids played in sea waves. The Shepherd…
Bran grabbed my hand, pulled me to a chest, and swung the heavy lid open. A white cloth covered the contents. He jerked it aside. Human heads filled the chest.
“Oh God.”
He scooped a mummified head from the chest by a scalp lock and thrust it at me. “All of them are mine.”
This was officially the weirdest version of “come down to my place and I’ll show you some etchings” I’ve ever been hit with.
He threw open another chest. I saw a World War I Kaiser helm next to a black motorcycle helmet splashed with painted flames. How old was he, exactly?
The third chest: blades. Turkish yataghan, a katana, a marine officer’s saber with Semper Fi engraved in Old English…
“That’s nothing!” He tossed the head into the chest, snatched my hand, and pulled me to the back door. It flew open from his kick and he drew me onto the porch.
Behind the house rose a spire of skulls. Taller than me, bleached white by the elements, it bristled with spears thrust through the bone. “See!” He waved his arms, triumphant. “There is more to me. Nobody has that many! My father would shit himself if he saw this!”
No kidding.
“I’m a great warrior. A hero. Each one of those was a fight I won.” His face shone with pride. “You’re a warrior. You understand, yes?”
So many lives…The pile of skulls towered above me. “How old are you?” I whispered.
He leaped over the rail, took a skull from the pile, and put it in front of me. “My first.”
The skull wore a Roman helmet.
I sat down. It was too much to take.
He came to sit next to me. We looked at the skulls. Bran hung his head.
I touched his forearm. “What is it?”
“Nobody will ever know. Nobody but you has seen this. Nobody will ever know what I’ve accomplished. When I finally die, the only one who’ll remember me and all this will be Morrigan.”
“She’s not the sentimental sort?” I guessed.
He shook his head. “It was a fool’s bargain we made. I saved her bird, and she told me to choose my reward.”
“What did you ask for?”
“Some would’ve asked for long life, strong sons. I asked to be a hero. To always have plenty to drink, plenty to fight, plenty of women.”
The skulls glared at us with empty sockets in eerie silence.
“If you asked for strong sons, she would’ve arranged for them to eventually kill you,” I said. “You can’t win.”
“Small solace.”
“Yeah.
I touched the Roman helmet. The metal felt ice-cold under my fingers. “The magic wasn’t in the world when they were around.”
“It was dying,” he said. “There was just a trickle left. I slept through its death. When I awoke and fell through the mist, the world was on fire.”
The first flare…So many people had died during that week.
“The little girl, Mouse, you called her…I’m trying to protect her and to find her mother. The witches said they would help me but their Oracle needs your blood to heal one of them. It would be a very good thing for her to survive. She means much to many people.”
He took the skull away from me and brought it to his face,
eyes to eye sockets, teeth to teeth. “What do I care?”
“The Witch Oracle lives through the ages, its members reborn, again and again. If you were to give them your blood, the covens would cherish your memory. Always. You would endure. You would be a hero and you would be known.”
He turned to me, his eyes bottomless.
“It would cost you nothing. It would mean everything.”
Chapter 22
The mist vanished and Bran and I popped out onto the stone floor of the Oracle’s dome. Teleportation was overrated. Sure it got you where you needed to go fast, but hanging weightless in the mist gave me a nasty case of vertigo. On top of that, I had to cling tenaciously to Bran to be teleported, and he had trouble keeping his hands to himself.
Torches and feylanterns lit the dome. I hadn’t expected anyone to be here but despite the late hour, the three witches of the Oracle waited on the platform, alert and awake. They didn’t even blink, when we materialized in the middle of the floor. Apparently, we were expected.
To the left of the Oracle stood four other witches, two about my age and two older. Some of them wore the distinct blue tattoos that matched the swirls on Bran’s chest. Witches from Morrigan’s covens?
Bran bent over and sneezed. “I hate this fucking turtle.” He raised his head and grinned at the group on the side. “Ladies.”
The two younger witches went from bewildered to flirtatious in the blink of an eye.
I walked up to the platform and handed the still warm tube to the mother-witch. She took it. “He gives the blood in good faith,” I said. “He doesn’t expect anything. But I hope the memory of his gift will endure.”
The Oracle rose. As one, the three witches bowed.
“See?” Bran jerked his thumb at the three women. “That’s how a woman should treat a man. Next time you see me, I want you to do just like them.”
“Hell will freeze over first,” I told him.
The witches sank to their seats.
“We had a bargain,” I said.
The crone glared at me. “A bargain with the likes of you means nothing.”
“This might be a hunch, but I think you don’t like me,” I told her.
Her fingers curled into claws on the armrests of her chair.
“Maria,” the youngest Oracle whispered. “Violence isn’t necessary. The Oracle never goes back on its word.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
She pointed to the four witches on the side. “They speak for the senior covens of Morrigan. They are here as witnesses. Tell us what you want to know and I will open your eyes.”
“Here is what I suspect: Esmeralda wanted power and formed her coven, but she lacked education and training. The coven probably began by worshipping Morrigan, but whether by accident or on purpose, Esmeralda permitted Morfran to insert himself into their rites and take over.”
The seven witches focused on me. The atmosphere in the dome grew tense. I plowed on.
“I suspect that Morrigan has the ability to manifest during the flare, when the magic is at its deepest. She does it by using a magic cauldron. Morfran wanted life just as much and either taught Esmeralda how to duplicate the cauldron or had her steal the cauldron that had been in the possession of legitimate Morrigan covens.”
Either I had hit the nail on the head or the four representatives of Morrigan got a simultaneous case of serious constipation, because their faces turned red and strained.
“I think that Morfran is in cahoots with the Fomorians, but I don’t know why. I need to know what happened after the rite was performed, what happened to Julie’s mother, and what’s the significance of the necklace the little shaman boy named Red carried.”
“Where is the necklace?” Bran suddenly came to life.
“I’m not telling you.”
He spread his arms. “Why not? I’m the good guy here!”
“I don’t know that. It’s a trust issue. Until somebody explains this mess to me, nobody gets the necklace.”
“I’ll explain.” The middle witch of the Oracle leaned back. Above her, the mural shifted. The black lines crawled. The outlines of Hekate grew faint while the cauldron before her solidified.
“Two generations ago at the start of the Shift, Morrigan entrusted her covens with a magic cauldron.”
“They did a bang-up job taking care of it,” Bran said.
The mother-witch pinned him down with her stare. “Hush.”
“We didn’t know,” one of Morrigan’s witches said. “And she hasn’t spoken to us since the last flare.”
The middle witch silenced her with a wave of her hand. “Now then, the cauldron is her way into our world. Its magic only manifests during a flare. Morfran wanted the cauldron so that he too could experience life. He made a deal with Morrigan’s enemies, the Fomorians, the sea-demons. In exchange for their help, he would release them, through the cauldron, from the Otherworld. They’re not gods. They need little magic to exist here. They will become his first worshippers in this world.”
“But I killed at least ten of them. How many came through?”
“You don’t kill them,” Bran said. “They don’t stay dead unless I leave one of my shafts in them. As long as the cauldron feeds on the magic of the flare, they continue to return to life. The closer they are to the cauldron, the harder it is to disable them.”
Great. Fantastic. “Couldn’t you have told me this sooner?”
“It’s a trust issue,” he told me, mimicking my voice. I felt like smacking him.
“Okay, but how did the Fomorians get the cauldron in the first place?”
The witch sighed, folding her hands on her lap. “Through the ages Morrigan’s Hounds have protected the cauldron, and only they have power over it.”
On the walls the hounds raised their muzzles in a silent howl. Men, just like Bran, stolen from humanity through a fool’s bargain.
“The covens of Morrigan thought the cauldron was secure, because nobody but a hound could move it from their gathering place. But they didn’t know that years ago one of Morrigan’s Hounds strayed.”
On the left a drawing of the hound stretched and became a man.
“He left Morrigan for a woman and the terms of his bargain forced her to let him and his progeny live.”
Things snapped together in my head. “Red. That little bastard is a descendant of the hound who got away.”
The witch nodded.
“That means he can carry the cauldron. He stole the cauldron?”
The four witches of Morrigan looked like they wanted to be anywhere but here.
“I saw the imprints of the cauldron’s legs. It’s huge. Red’s arms are this big around.” I touched my index finger to my thumb. “How in the world did he carry it? And how could you not notice the giant cauldron being dragged away?”
“We were so used to it sitting there, it took a little while to realize it was gone,” one of the witches said.
“You can shrink it,” Bran said. “Small enough to fit in your pocket.”
“Or slide onto a necklace. Oh crap. Wait, you said the cauldron is keeping the Fomorians alive, so they have the cauldron. What’s on the necklace then?”
Bran shrugged his shoulders. “The lid. The boy stole the cauldron for the witch, but I crashed the party just as they finished the rite and the first Fomorian crawled out. While I was busy being the hero, he took off with the lid.”
“What does the lid do?”
“It controls the cauldron.”
I fought an urge to grab him and shake him until the whole story fell out. “How?”
“You put the lid on one way and it’s the cauldron of plenty. You put the lid on the other way and it’s a gateway to the world of the dead. Right after the first batch of Fomorians came through I closed the cauldron, turning it into the cauldron of plenty. It still keeps them alive, but unless they can get ahold of the lid, they can’t open the gateway again to let Morfran out.”
“What happens if Morfran get
s to appear instead of Morrigan?”
He grimaced. “It’s a simple bargain, woman. He gets life and the cauldron. They get life and freedom. If he appears, he will release the horde of sea-demons into your city. They want revenge on Man. Use your head to imagine what will happen next.”
I looked to the Oracle. “Is he telling the truth?”
The youngest Oracle nodded. “He is.”
“One last thing. Why did you keep stealing the maps?”
He sighed. “The cauldron must sit on the crossing of three roads. It won’t shrink for the Fomorians, so they had to physically drag it somewhere. There are only so many places where three roads cross. The cauldron of plenty doesn’t shine with magic the way the cauldron of rebirth does. Hard to sense where it is. I was misting to each crossing of the roads near the pit, trying to find the cauldron.”
That made sense. “Okay. The Pack has the lid,” I told him.
He grinned. “This shouldn’t be too hard.”
Thin tongues of mist swirled around his feet and dissipated into the air. Leaving him standing in the same spot.
“You’re still here.”
“I know that!” He rocked forward. Mist puffed and vanished. Again. Again. “Something is wrong. You!” Bran pointed at the youngest Oracle. “Find the Shepherd!”
A hint of a smile brightened the youngest Oracle’s face, highlighting her fragility. At first I thought she was laughing at the absurdity of Bran’s order, but her eyes glazed over, gazing somewhere far, past us, into the horizon only she could see, and I realized that using her gift filled her with joy. She leaned forward, focused, smiling wider and wider, until she laughed. The music of her voice filled the dome, exuberant and sweet. “Found him.”
The dome quaked. Steam rose and the far wall faded into early dawn. Under the gray sky, mist drifted, caught on familiar steel spikes that thrust from the ground littered with metal refuse. A Stymphalean bird perched on a twisted spire of railroad rails, crushed and knotted together, as if some giant had tried to tie them in an angler’s knot. The Honeycomb Gap.
The mist parted and I saw Bolgor the Shepherd perched on a mound of rusty barrels. A faint breeze stirred the cloth of his monk’s habit. A huge hulking silhouette towered behind him, still shrouded in mist, holding a cross. Ugad, fully regenerated. How nice, I could kill him again.
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