by C. E. Murphy
Boy, the Master had to hate me right down to the black burned bones of his rotten soul.
That made me happy. More than happy. Absofreakinglutely joyful, and with that joy came a spike of gunmetal magic that shot skyward, spiking through the vortex.
Its pull faltered and a sense of shock washed through me, as if the vortex itself hadn’t expected me to fight back at all. As if the thing on its other side hadn’t imagined I had it in me. I pressed a finger against Annie’s cocoon, near where her own hand had tried to reach for me. “You hang out here a minute. I’m going to go spit in death’s eye.”
Two minutes earlier I’d have said getting to my feet would be asking to be sucked into the netherworld the Master commanded. Two minutes earlier I might have been right, but things had changed since then. Annie Muldoon was alive and, as far as I could tell, human through and through. A god had bet the rent on me and won. My best friend had traveled through time to save the woman he loved, and the man I loved believed in me.
If I ever needed grounding, those things would always be there. I stood up, digging my toes into the shimmering green softness that contained Annie. It was cool and earthy, centering me in my world and in Tir na nOg. I thrust my left hand toward the sucking vortex and shouted.
My rapier, the aos sí–crafted blade of silver that I’d taken from Cernunnos the first time we met, materialized in my hand. Shamanic power poured into it, healer and warrior no longer at odds with each other. It gathered, strengthened, readied itself, and when I shouted again and thrust the sword skyward, a burst of magic cracked forth like lightning from a bottle. The vortex sucked it in, encouraging it to run faster, until the first splinter of power touched it. Then the vortex shied back, rejecting the shamanic magic. I stabbed upward again, sending another shock upward.
I felt like Conan. I felt like Red Sonja in white leather instead of a chain-mail bikini. I felt like a match for the dark side of the Force, and I was going to take one more toy from the Master right now, because I could. “This one’s mine, you bleak bastard! The gods chose this one, you mean son of a bitch, and you can’t do a thing about it. I choose this one,” I said more softly, “and you’re not taking her away.”
I knelt, still with power pouring through the sword. The Master wasn’t going to let us go easily, once he got over his surprise at my audacity, so I dug my fingers into Annie’s cocoon, working my way through its ferociously green threads. Cernunnos’s strength was a lover twining around my hand, clinging to my arm, searching for a way into my heart.
I let it in. I had to: I could never shield myself against the horned god. He was too primal and too enticing, and had etched himself in my soul the first time I’d laid eyes on him.
But neither was I his. He’d offered me a place at his side time and again, and three times, I’d taken it. I’d ridden with him and his Wild Hunt, and I knew in my core that if I rode with him again I would lose my humanity, and want nothing but the god. For all my fears and uncertainties, I still wanted my human life. I wanted Morrison. I wanted the future we could share, if we were that lucky. If we survived this. So no matter how deeply Cernunnos’s power ran or how eagerly it prodded, I wouldn’t let it steal me away. Annie needed his strength more than I did right now, and I intended to leave her everything I could.
Thread by thread, Annie’s features came clearer as Cernunnos’s magic recognized mine and released its prize to me. Here, under the god’s care, in the heart of his magic and at the center of her garden, she was young and lovely, with humor and spark in her face. My fingers touched hers, then wrapped around her hand. I pulled her to her feet, surprised at how tiny she was: nearly a foot shorter than me, and dressed in a full-skirted 1950s dress that made the most of her small waist. She reminded me of Gary in his own garden, a young man in his prime, handsome, fit, confident. They were a beautiful couple, and I was going to see them back together in the Middle World.
The last of Cernunnos’s green power unwound, releasing Annie from the cocoon. Some of the unwinding magic swirled around my own, joining the blended silver and blue that raced upward. With that green haze sweeping around my power, the two of us, shaman and god, in it together, it seemed only appropriate to cry, “From hell’s heart, I stab at thee,” to the cringing vortex above.
That, of course, was a mistake.
The vortex lost cohesion, which sounded like it should be a positive development. Except instead of falling apart, it became a spidery black thing, thin piercing legs breaking apart from the core and slamming downward. Not even at me, not really. At Annie, who was weak on her feet, barely learning to move again after being cocooned for years on end.
Her hand was still in mine. My shields slid around her as snugly as a hug. Her presence within them solidified, as if she took comfort from the metaphysical embrace. I felt the first spark of her aura, burnished copper with streaks of red, reasserting itself after the cushion of Cernunnos’s magic. The thinnest threads of green still sparkled through it, just as I imagined I felt them in mine: Cernunnos was within us, not quite apart from this battle, but not quite there, either. That was okay. His moral support was enough.
Spider legs tapped against our shields, prickling and prying. The sound settled behind my ears and made hairs rise on my arms. Annie’s breath was sharp and rough now that she was out of the cocoon, like the emphysema was coming on full bore.
Like thinking it gave the spidery attack an opening, a chink appeared in our armor. Annie’s hand clenched on mine. “It’s me. I can’t hold it back. It’s still in me.”
“I can hold it back.” Even as I spoke, one of the skinny legs wriggled its way through, making the thinnest stain of black on the inside of my shields. My lip curled and I strengthened them, cutting off the darkness. No more seeped through, but what was there leaped from the shields into Annie, blackening the copper of her spirit and coating her lungs.
My hands were full, one with Annie’s grip, the other with my sword, as power continued to roar toward the shattering vortex. I still tried to move to fight the infection, and instead spasmed violently to check myself from my first impulse.
Annie’s attention snapped from the emerging spider to me. “What was that?”
“A really bad idea.”
She glanced back at the sky, at the killing cloud that had spent years trying to dig her out of Cernunnos’s protective tomb, then gave me an arch look. “Worse than that?”
“Yeah.” I looked skyward, too, then drew a sharp breath through my nostrils. “Unless you trust me completely.”
“With my life,” Annie Muldoon said with such simple clarity that I nearly wept.
Then I drove my sword into her heart.
It was hard to tell who was more surprised, Annie or the evil thing hungering for her soul. Her mouth and eyes turned to enormous circles, but she remained silent. Silent, when somebody had just stuffed a sword into her. Silent, which told me it probably didn’t hurt, which was what I’d expected. We were in the much-depleted garden of her soul, but it was her soul. I wasn’t attacking her physical body, but the sickness inside it. Still, being stabbed was the sort of thing that might instinctively cause a person to scream, and she didn’t.
Nor did the vortex, not yet. I clenched my stomach, wondering why, wondering what I had missed, and it came to me with absurd clarity. Of course there are vampires, Annie had just said to me, and everybody knew you didn’t kill a vampire just with silver. It took wood, too.
I reached inside my coat and took out the hair stick I’d discovered over New Orleans, clasping it against the hilt of my rapier and infusing the silver with ash.
The vortex became a sound of pain and rage so great I could barely comprehend it. Tornadoes and tearing metal, cats fighting and fingernails on chalkboard, on and on in outrage and fear. A breath escaped me, not quite as triumphant as laughter. Just a breath that acknowledged my stupid-ass idea had some merit, if the howling darkness was so angry at the action.
Because swords—my sword in
particular—cut both ways. It was a weapon, by its very nature meant to kill, and there was something here to kill, a creeping illness that ate and tore at Annie’s life. I saw that sickness punch downward, gathered by the rapier and stretched, rather than torn, by the complex weave of ash wood inside the silver blade. It came out beside her spine, the rapier driving it through and then out of Annie’s body. Mostly out: threads, scraps, still clung inside her, hooked ends catching in the bronchi and alveoli and holding on. Annie shuddered, though she still said nothing, wildfire-green eyes intent on me. Trusting me, which was so brave as to be madness. But her father had dreamed me, Gary loved me, and she had spent years wrapped in Cernunnos’s land, protected by a god who knew and coveted me. I was a stranger, but not unknown. I gave her my best smile and a confident nod, and released the sword’s other edge within her.
Killing, yes. That was what a blade like this was made for. But scalpels saved lives, too, and my sword, like myself, had accepted its destiny and heritage. A killing thrust to pierce the sickness, but also to drive healing magic through Annie’s center. Silver and blue split apart, burning through her veins faster than any heart could send it. It lit her up from within, racing back and forth, up and down, crashing into itself and splashing waves of gunmetal where it merged. Sizzling heat turned to flashes of silver fire where it encountered the Master’s invading power. As fast as I saw it, it was gone again, leaving only my magic in its place. My power split again, chasing the sickness and glowing with heat of its own, like molten silver.
Molten silver. I had watched Nuada, the sword’s maker, turn his own living silver flesh into this blade, and for the first time I wondered if some part of the elf king was part of this battle, too. If he reached through time in his own way, lending a whisper of elfin immortality to the fight against the Master. It would never make a mortal live forever, but its inexorable age might lend a little more light to the path Annie had to tread.
Because I couldn’t get it all. I should be able to, in the heart of Annie’s garden, in the lingering warmth of Cernunnos’s cocoon. I’d fought so many battles in spirit realms that I’d almost thought it was going to be that easy. That I was going to save Annie Muldoon here in the heart of her garden, and cast the Master out forever.
But from here, watching and feeling the threads of his power burn and hiss, I could tell they reached back into the Middle World. He’d had his fingers dug into Annie’s ordinary human life so deeply and for so long in the Middle World that maybe I could never have won this fight purely in the spiritual planes. More than that, though, the Master finally had a host in the real world: Raven Mocker was out there somewhere, anchoring him. That meant the Master was more strongly entrenched in the world now than he had ever been in my encounters with him, and I was pretty sure winning a real-world throw-down would tie him to the world far more strongly than any kind of spiritual battle could. After all this time and effort, he wasn’t going to settle for second best.
And the truth was, the body he’d taken for Raven Maker was second best. I wasn’t kidding myself. Odds of the Master sticking with Raven Mocker’s original host body, a guy named Danny whom I’d known as a kid, were vanishingly rare. Annie had called him a vampire, and there were two things I was certain vampires did: kill people, and make more like themselves.
And into that, Annie Muldoon had shown up. Honestly, on every level, I knew the smart thing to do would be to cut the last threads holding Annie to life, and to let her go free. I was pretty certain her soul, if not her body, could escape the Master’s claws now. There were shadows inside her, thrown into sharp relief by the sword’s brilliance, but they were nothing like the weight of sickness that had brought her to—and beyond—death’s door. They were a toehold, a place to start again, not something to forever condemn her soul. I should, on any kind of smart bet, let her go now.
I was demonstrably not the type to take a smart bet. Not when faced with the woman Gary and Cernunnos had bent time to bring to me for healing. Not, when I got down to the crux of the matter, when faced with any kind of impossible odds and the slightest chance of setting them right.
“We have to go up,” I said quietly. “Right into the maw. It’s been chewing its way down through your garden—your soul—to the core of your being. Cernunnos has been protecting you, and that gave me a chance to burn most of the sickness out. But we’ve got to take it back, Annie. We’ve got to take your garden back. We have to go through the darkness to come out the other side.”
Annie took the shallowest breath possible around the rapier’s blade, just enough for a weak question. “How?”
“With this.” I nodded at the sword, not wanting to wiggle it and hurt her. Not that it should hurt, but wiggling it just seemed cruel. “It’ll be just as much of a shock coming out as it was going in, but it’s going to be carrying some of your essence, too, when it comes out. Between you, me and it, we’re going to punch right through to the Middle World. We’re going home, Annie. I’m bringing you back to Gary.”
I yanked the sword out before she had time to brace herself.
Power cracked open the sky. My power, Annie’s power, Cernunnos’s, maybe a touch of Nuada’s, too. Cumulative white magic for the second time in a morning, this time born from within. Far above us, far beyond the edge of the cliff I’d dived off—a cliff now illuminated by roaring magic—far up there, the blackened and corrupt roof of Annie’s garden suddenly shone, sloughing off the first sheen of dark magic. I wrapped my arm around Annie’s waist like I was Errol Flynn and she was Olivia de Havilland, snugging her against my body. The roaring power focused by the sword contracted, swinging us in a cinematic arc toward the breaking sky.
Annie finally did shriek, laughter coming out as a high-pitched shout. That had to be a good way to start back on the road home, with laughter and excitement. I focused on it, adding it to the upswelling of magic, and chunks of blackened sky started to fall away. We leaned together, swinging around them, always climbing, scrambling, hurrying upward. There was no vortex left, its spidery legs withdrawn or so quashed within Annie’s body and soul that it had no strength to stop us. Part of me thought, It can’t be this easy, and the rest of me, sounding rather like that little voice that had recently slipped away, said, What the hell about any of the past year has been easy?
We ricocheted past the cliff edge I’d leaped off, still careening upward. Above us, not nearly so far above us anymore, the sky split the width of a hair, then broke apart to let a torrent of white magic come pounding in.
It fell around us like rain, bringing Annie’s garden back to life where it touched down. It streamed across our bodies, pounding at the wealth of green power that Cernunnos had left around Annie. Her own aura began to emerge, rich with age and deep copper in color. It complemented the remaining green wonderfully, but it complemented something else even more: the silver that began shivering out of the falling magic. Gary’s silver, the solid rumbling V8-engine strength of his soul coming to help his wife find her way home again.
Annie’s aura went from emergent to radiant in a heartbeat, pouring the warmth of life up and out. It caught in the rain of white magic and spilled back down again, reviving her garden further, until we rushed through the crack in the sky back into the Middle World.
We actually slammed into the hospital room ceiling before bouncing back to our bodies again. I sat up straight, rubbing my nose. Just within my vision, beyond the shadow of my fingertips, Annie took a sharp, soft breath of her own, not dictated by the ventilator’s steady rhythm. Everything else in the room went silent, even the beeping of the monitors. Or maybe not; maybe the next moment happened fast and only seemed to stretch an impossibly long time. It didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter, because Annie Marie Muldoon opened her eyes and smiled at her husband. “Hello, sweetheart.”
Chapter Five
Color drained from Gary’s face. From his hands, too: I could see them whiten around where they held Annie’s, and I bet they were sudd
enly icy to the touch. Annie squeezed his fingers gently, still smiling. “It’s me. I think it’s me. I think your Joanne wouldn’t have let me come back, if I wasn’t me anymore.”
Gary shot me a harder look than he’d ever given me before, like for a moment he couldn’t forgive me for the idea of not bringing her back. I kind of couldn’t blame him, even though his protectiveness came after the fact. He caught up to that realization a moment later and turned his attention back to Annie. His hands were shaking as he lifted her fingers to his mouth, and though he tried a couple of times, he couldn’t make it all the way to words.
That was okay, because Annie seemed to have some. Her voice was warm and steady, comforting, even though she was the one newly back from the dead and could be expected to be at loose ends. But then, she’d been a nurse. Maybe that helped. Or maybe it was easier to come back from the dead than to have mourned and moved on, only then to be presented with a bona fide miracle. “It’s still there. I can still feel it inside me, making my lungs feel heavy. It wants out. I won’t let it,” she said with perfect equanimity. “I’ll die first. I already did once.”
“You won’t have to.” I sounded just as calm, just as resolved. Annie gave me a brief smile. Gary didn’t. I wasn’t even certain he was breathing.
“I’m sure you’re right, Joanne. Now.” Her smile turned stern, though there was a suspicious spark of brightness behind her emerald eyes. She turned all of that stern amusement on her husband, and flicked one eyebrow high up on her forehead. “Imelda, Gary? Is there something I should know about Imelda Welch from Kansas?”
Gary’s mouth fell open, a blush curdling his face. His jaw flapped a few times and a wheeze emerged. I peered between them, nigh unto bursting with curiosity. Finally his wheeze became a breathless grunt, which he followed up by seizing Annie in his arms and burying his face in her shoulder.
