by C. E. Murphy
They stood as far back as they could: Gary and Annie holding hands hard, Morrison standing alone with clenched fists, like he was preventing himself from throwing himself into the fray. Coyote’s hands were steepled in front of his mouth. Suzy stood over her grandfather, who knelt with empty, open arms, as if he cradled the ruined soul of his son. The half-wrecked shambles of the Seattle Center stood as their backdrop, a testimony to defeat.
It wasn’t exactly the tally-ho I might have hoped for, but in a way, the ruins and the wrecks of hope bolstered me. What destruction I saw now, what loss and anguish, what fears and worries I saw among my friends, would only be magnified across the world if we failed here.
If I failed here.
I looked back at the Master, whose attention had followed mine. Not for the attack, but out of what—had it actually been on my face, rather than a reflection of me—I would have called perplexity. As if he wondered why I would stop fighting and look to my friends, when the pause could easily kill me.
The fact that it hadn’t made me wonder if function followed form, and if in taking on my guise, he’d made a greater mistake than he’d known. It had been one thing sharing headspace with him. That had been of necessity, in both our opinions. Making himself in my image—
Well. That was what men did with gods.
I chuckled and swept my blade up, nearly touching it to my nose in a salute that would have done my fencing teacher proud. I wondered how Phoebe was doing, anyway, and whether she’d yet been affected by the tremors and troubles rolling through Seattle. I wondered—assuming we all survived this—if she would forgive me for being a magic-user, for being something that didn’t fit comfortably into her view of the world.
If we survived this, of course, there were a lot of people who were going to have to face things that didn’t fit comfortably into their view of the world.
I completed my salute, sweeping the sword out to the side, then lost myself in battle.
A rhythm came into the fight, flow and ebb. I hurt, I healed, I fell back and I struck again. The Master, time and again, took a wound he could not heal, blue fire sparking inside his body. Each time, he reached beyond himself for the power he’d once known, but I had the way of it now. He was of the earth, and I could shield and block things of the earth. His power reached out; mine knocked it aside, placed a wall before it, threw a net around it and hauled it back. Exhaustion burned in my body, muscles laden with lactic acid that, as the moon climbed higher in the sky, even healing magic couldn’t numb. We were matched, better matched, than I had ever imagined, and I thought again of function following form. Had he kept Herne’s shape, or given himself a god’s face, maybe I couldn’t have met him stroke for stroke and magic for magic.
Maybe I could have. Herne and I had danced once, too, and I’d changed him then. Maybe function would have followed that form, too—maybe, maybe, maybe. I moved across broken concrete, scaled shattered glass that should never have held my weight, and I fought on. The Master’s rage followed me, always burning red and black to my silver-blue. Moonlight reflected off water from the broken fountain until the light we struggled in was bright as day, and I became uncertain as to whether we fought in daytime or night. At times I caught glimpses of the watchers. There seemed to be more of them than there had been, but I hardly trusted my vision. I hardly trusted anything, not even the rise and fall of my sword arm, which ached until I didn’t know how I could lift it again. Magic rolled out of me so steadily I wasn’t certain I had anything left to keep my heart beating. The best I could hope for was that the Master was equally weakened, but I saw none of that in the attacks he constantly pressed, or in the defenses he rallied with when I gathered myself to go on the attack myself.
None of it felt real.
Ghosts began to visit me, and I didn’t see ghosts. That was Billy’s department. But ghosts they were: my mother, of whom there wasn’t enough left for a ghost. When I tripped and fell, it was the sight of her that brought me to my feet again. She stood as Morrison had in my last glimpse of him: leaning forward, intent, hands fisted as though she could fight this battle for me. I smiled at her, then thought maybe she was another of the Master’s false copies, here to taunt me.
Caroline Holliday came when Mother faded, a sweet-faced little girl whose love for life was written across her face. That was hard: tears flooded my eyes, making the battle impossible to see. It turned out I didn’t entirely need to: I Saw the Master even if my ordinary vision was blurred, and my sword or shield moved again and again to block him, even when my thoughts were turned to offering an apology to Caroline. She shook her head and smiled again, and then she, too, was gone, leaving the sound of a baby’s cries echoing in my ears. The newest Holliday, baby Caroline, who was her dead aunt’s namesake. Little Caro couldn’t possibly be here, but the memory of her cries helped ease the elder Caroline’s passing.
They came faster after that. Jason Chan, whose little sisters would never love Halloween again. Lugh, the aos sí whom the Irish remembered as a sun god. Barbara Bragg, who still looked angry, even after death. Mark Bragg didn’t appear. I hoped that meant he wasn’t dead. On and on, even up to Nakaytah, luckless girlfriend of a power-hungry sorcerer and dead three thousand years before I ever might have met her. More and more of them, coming more frantically, throwing themselves at me as the faces and names of people I had lost or who had died because of me.
They were the Master’s feint. I was certain of that now, but he had made another mistake. Maybe he thought they would weaken me, but instead they gave me more, always more, to fight for. He could give them form, but for too many of them I knew the thoughts that had really lain behind their visages, and I had made my heartbroken peace with almost all of them. It was exhausting, though, seeing each of them, and in the end, they were my undoing.
I knew they didn’t exist, but as they crowded me I became less and less willing to strike through them. Their faces were too real, and there were so many that I lost sight—even lost Sight—of the Master, of my other face. Only for a moment, but that was all it took. He slipped between the ghosts and seized my sword arm, sending black pain deep into the nerves. My hand spasmed and I lost the blade. Triumph blared over my own face, through the black eyes of the other me, and my own smile looked sharp enough to rip my throat out.
I couldn’t rally. I was too damned tired, too worn down with losses and failures. I braced my shields, fumbled for the sword that would not come to my hand when called, and chose my last word on this earth: “Morrison.”
The strike came as black lightning, faster than the eye could see. It hit me in the side, knocking me to the ground. An impressive weight pressed me down. Concrete scraped my cheekbone. I wondered that I could feel enough to care just before the scent of burning flesh filled my nose. But there was no pain, or none besides my banged-up face.
It took a terribly long time to understand that the weight on me was not the weight of crushed bones, but was instead Coyote’s body.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I fell. I wrapped my arms and legs around him, and I fell. I didn’t think. I just fell, fell right out of the Middle World and into Coyote’s garden. It was so hot there, desert sky almost white with heat, and when we landed—gently—on rolling sand, it all but burned me through my jeans.
Coyote was torn to pieces, blackened and burned. His beautiful hair was half gone, even here, in his garden, where he should be as complete as possible. Sobbing, I called for healing power, only to have it turn to dust in my hands. I screamed for Raven, for his ability to slip between life and death, and he didn’t answer. There was only emptiness where he was supposed to be, and terror turning my voice shrill as I clutched Coyote against me. “No, Coyote, no, please don’t, please...please don’t. Oh, god, Coyote...”
The Master had struck so fast. Nobody could have beaten him to the punch. Well, maybe I could have, when I had Rattler’s speed to boost me, or in extreme circumstances, Renee’s gift of bending time. I begged for
her help now, needing more than the difference in Middle and garden-world time to save my friend. I felt her inside me, folded in on herself, alone and sorrowful, but she didn’t respond. Rage cracked through me like lightning and I shoved the thought of her away, not wanting her help anymore even if she would give it. I could do it myself: I had since the beginning, and didn’t need a goddamned spirit animal to ease the way. Not unless it was Raven, and he was gone. Trembling and afraid, I called healing power a second time. Coyote rebuffed it again, sending it pooling into the golden desert sad.
“Stop that, Jo. There’s no time. You know there isn’t. Too much damage.” He was right. He was so badly hurt, his body burned and broken. I could hardly bear to look, could hardly stand to see the terrible damage of a mindfully cruel lightning strike. I tried again to call magic, and again it sluiced away, running over the hard desert sand and disappearing like water into thirsty earth. “Don’t worry. Doesn’t hurt. Burned out the pain receptors, I think.”
The air was impossibly hot around us, as if maybe it drew the pain from his poor tormented body. Whatever the reason, I was grateful, but my trembling hands called for power again and once more Coyote denied it. “Stop. Just glad I was fast enough. You aren’t the only one with a rattlesnake companion.” Coyote closed his eyes and smiled faintly. “Well, you weren’t. Guess you will be now. Had to use it all up, saving you.”
I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to again. But I tried to laugh, because I thought he wanted me to, and his smile grew a little when I managed a choked sound that might have been construed as laughter. “There’s my Jo. Laughter in the face of adversity. S’what I like about you.”
“Coyote, why...why?”
“Had to do something, Jo. Couldn’t let you die. Be bad...for the world. Sorry.” He fumbled for my hand and I wrapped both of mine around his, holding his knuckles to my lips.
“Don’t. Don’t be sorry. Just let me heal you.”
“No. No. Wanna say it. I blew it out there. Just got so jealous. We were so well matched, Jo.” He opened his eyes again, pure coyote gold in the fading color of his face. “Back when we started? We were a perfect match. The raven, the coyote, the snake. We were a holy triumvirate, twice. Two-spirited. I thought we were two-spirited. Only your spirit wasn’t shared with mine after all. Not in the end.”
“I’m sorry, Coyote. ’Yote. I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have...you shouldn’t have...” I bowed over his chest, hands helpless above him. “Won’t you let me heal you?”
The desert beneath me changed from dune waves to hard flat whiteness, and the heat became unbearable. I sucked in a shallow breath and looked up into Big Coyote’s starry eyes. He was solemn, even sad, his precious-metal fur dull for once. “Won’t you let me save him?”
“You shouldn’t even be here, Jo.” Coyote, Little Coyote, my ’yote, spoke so weakly I almost couldn’t hear him. “The fight’s out there. Save me, lose the world. Don’t do that. It would kinda...” He coughed, a fragile sound. “Kinda defeat the point.”
I bent over him, kissing his forehead and smoothing his hair back. “Hang on, okay, ’yote? Hang on. Just hold on and I’ll come back for you as fast as I can. I’ll beat this bastard and I’ll come back and bring you home. Just hold on. Don’t let him die,” I said desperately to Big Coyote. “Just don’t let him die, okay? Just don’t let him die.”
Big Coyote smashed his forehead against mine and sent me back to the real world.
So little time had passed that the Master was still standing above me figuring out what had gone wrong. Hardly even knowing something had gone wrong, until with a howl of hurt and fury I pushed my poor Coyote’s body off me and surged to my feet. Fire burned in me, so much fire I thought I would be consumed with it. My rage knew no bounds: the universe itself couldn’t contain the size of my loss. I came to my feet with my blade blazing blue in one hand and my shield a shining mass of silver on the other arm.
For the first time, I looked into the Master’s black eyes and I saw fear. Not enjoyment of it, not feeding on it, not thriving with it, but the same bone-deep, gut-level fear that drove humans to build fires against the night and stand watch against the creatures that hunted them.
I was a hunter, a warrior, a shaman, and I could not let this stand. Not this time. Not Coyote. Not my beloved friend, my teacher, my guide. He was not, in the end, my everything, but he had been my beginning, and I would not lose him. The very core of the earth was not so hot with power as I was; the moon itself was faint in the light of my magic.
The Master’s face contorted and he leaped at me, a desperate measure of a desperate creature. His meteoric blade rose and fell in a death blow.
I caught it on my shield. Power blazed. Iron fragmented, and I stood eye to eye with an unarmed monster.
Fear split his face again, then defiance so transparent that on another day it might have made me laugh. He had not spoken since the fight began, but now, with lifted chin, spat words: “Kill me if you can.”
“Oh, no.” I shook with rage, with hurt, and with determination. “Oh, no.”
I threw the sword away, released the shield. They became a part of me again, grew into the breastplate my mother’s necklace had become, until I was armored all over with a blaze of light. Copper bracers and arm guards. Gloves of flexible ash wood, fingertips glittering with silver. Purple laced the joints of armor so fluid it moved with my every breath. All the gifts I had ever been offered from family, from friends, from the inhuman to the unusual came together and made me into a thing of power, a thing as endless as the Master himself. I was what he had never understood, what he had struggled for and fought to attain for an existence longer than eternity.
I was love, honed to a blade by loss, and I thrust myself into the very heart of the Master himself.
We had danced it all together, me and Coyote and Annie. I took that dance with me into the Master’s garden, a place of cold and dark beyond comprehension. Even in the darkness, I could see the light of those things that had been born around him, and if those were two impossible things lying cheek by jowl, then in the depths and darkness of his garden it was not a conflict. There could be no shadow without light, and I did not deny that shadow must exist. But I would bring the light to the shadow if it was the last thing I did. He would know what he had taken: that would be his punishment for killing my friend. Not death. Death was too good for him. Death was an ending, death meant there was no more pain, and this was a pain upon which the Master could not thrive. He would feel it, feel it until the end of time, because now I would not let him die.
I danced in the darkness, pouring out the story of my life and the story of my love.
My mother’s love, misguided or brilliant as it had been, giving me up to my father to keep me safe. Such love there, and it had taken me so long, too long, to understand it. It was love, honed to a blade by loss, and I thrust it into the Master’s garden. Forced it to take root there with each step of my dance, driving it into barren earth that had only dreamed of life.
My father’s love, awkward and misguided, too, trying to protect me from the fate my mother had sent me away from. So many mistakes, muddying the path that I was always bound to walk, but done with such good intent. Not a road to hell at all, but love, laid down across the countryside to heal and strengthen it. I took that love and danced it into the garden, demanding that the garden accept it and become fruitful.
Gary’s love, running so deep. It became the soil, ready to grow. Morrison’s love, patient as only the earth could be. Coyote’s love, so bright it had burned him; it became the sunlight to warm the fields. Annie’s love, soft and unending, the rain to water the land. Billy, Melinda, their passel of amazing kids: I danced that love of family, of standing together, into this place. My crazy cousin with her fire-engine-red hair and her excitement over the magery burgeoning in her, I danced that, too, letting the idea of magic take root. I danced for my son, and for his sister, and the love I felt for them was somethin
g I threw into the Master’s teeth, making it a strong part of this new land so that he could never look on his garden without remembering the blade of loss. I danced and I built on everything my story had ever been, making it part of the Master’s story, too.
This was not what he wanted, a pain that lived inside him. The pain of love, much sharper than he could have imagined, the pain of loss when love failed—no. He had used that before, made slaves of those whose broken hearts made them vulnerable, and he feared that fate for himself. He did not want this, tried to throw it off, and I pulled him close to snarl in his ear: “I don’t care what you want.”
Love would grow here, the price of a life.
I left his garden.
The Master, my other self, fell with my soul-sword still piercing his body. Exhaustion swept me, but the battle wasn’t over yet. There was so much to do, too much to do, and I was so terribly tired. All I could do was ask as I’d asked once before, ask everything of everyone, and take what I was offered. I knelt over the shuddering, screaming, stolen body of the Master, and whispered, “Help me, help me, help me.”
I opened my soul to the world around me.
There was so much magic gathered in this place, in these moments before dawn. I had known there were others here now, more than those who had watched our battle begin, but I felt them now, bright and vivid marks on my soul as they came into a circle around me.
Fuchsia and orange: Billy, whose power gave the dead a voice. Across from him his wife, Melinda, in orange and yellow, blooming with the wise woman’s knowledge of life. Paired, a perfect complement. They were the west and the east, dying day and dawning sun.
Green and silver, fire without secondary attributes. Gary and Suzy, age and youth, standing north and south. The four of them, the four of them alone brought such strength to the circle that I cried out with it, hurting in my hands, my stomach, behind my eyes. Too much power already, and more were coming into place.
