by C. E. Murphy
My father, what was my father doing here, his forest green and earthy browns stepping up to meet my own silver and blue, earth and sky together to make the world. I hadn’t even known I was part of the circle, had thought it was coming into place around me, not with me, until he placed himself opposite me. Tradition and madcap methods, tied together by blood.
Annie, no longer burning green, but wholly and fully mortal again, her colors copper and flame. There were seven of us, almost the strongest circle I had ever known, and then came the god.
How fair, I thought, how perfect. How perfect that the god he had sought to unmake would instead be part of the unmaking of the Master, that the brother of spirit he had tried to conquer would instead conquer him. Cernunnos was each of the things we brought to the circle, all in one. He was a voice to the dead, who served the living. He was eternal, age and youth encompassed in him. He was tradition, born of long cold nights and ancient needs, and he was fresh and newly made, given to the modern world. He was mortal, bound to this world by his son, the Boy Rider, and he was immortal, an undying god.
Morrison. I looked up, eyes blind to the world around me, only seeing the power that flowed and burned in everything. Morrison had not joined the circle.
“I’m here, Walker.” He stepped through, a blaze of purple and blue, and in his hands was a round thing of white magic. My drum. Scalding tears rolled down my cheeks and I nodded once. He knelt across from me, on the Master’s far side, and began to beat the drum.
Power ignited.
I had been fighting the wrong fight all along. Up until these past few moments, I had been making a terrible, fundamental mistake. I had seen the Master as the villain, and he was. Unquestionably. But he was also broken. He’d fought to be embodied, to be a thing that could walk the earth, and had lost that fight an impossibly long time ago. Now he finally had the body he’d always craved, and with it, he might take its inherent magic and climb it until he rivaled Cernunnos. Until the lord of the Hunt, the new god of my world, was as endangered as he had ever been.
I could kill the Master. I could end it that way. But that would never satisfy me, and my vengeance could run as deep as any god’s.
I didn’t want to kill him. I wanted to heal him.
To help his spirit not to die, but to finally be born. To take on the physical aspect of life without being more than that. I had blunted him already, by setting life in his dead garden. By sowing love there, a punishment I would never regret. But there was more to be done. I had to give him some kind of real life, something that could hold him in place.
I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to give him peace of any kind. I was not that good a person. Unfortunately for me, I also wasn’t—quite—that stupid a person. If I didn’t finish the job, it would come back to bite me on the ass. It might anyway, but it was sure to if I didn’t finish.
The garden inside him was beginning to bloom. It was white fire, burning away the darkness that had bound him for so awfully long. Some part of it shook loose, a small part that modeled consciousness, and met my eyes.
It was dead, it said. It had never really lived. It could not be born now just because I insisted it would be.
“Don’t bet on it, buddy.” It was right, of course. Under normal circumstances, it certainly couldn’t. But I’d left normal behind months ago, and today I had the help of a free god. There had, I thought, never been a person on this earth as stupidly, painfully full of magic as I was right now, and all I wanted to do was get rid of it. I put one hand on the thrashing body’s forehead and the other over its heart, and whispered, “Live.”
Once. Twice. A third time, because three was a lucky number. Then the fire within, the garden I had sown, leaped for the life magic, the healing power, that I now offered it. Love was an unconquerable power, and life called to life. I answered, pouring the borrowed strength of the human heart and the endless power of a god into the birthing of a thing that had gone long unknown, unborn, unloved. It would be known, it would be born, it would know love every day until the day it died, and I hoped it would hurt for every single one of those days.
I had no sense at all of the time it took. It could have been mere seconds or it could have been all of forever, and I wasn’t at all certain it wasn’t both. Whenever it happened, it began slowly and picked up speed, until one of my beloved vehicle metaphors turned the entire process into speeding down a highway, Petite’s windows rolled down, wind in my hair and the needle buried. It was the very fastest thing of all, and yet so slow. Making life, refusing death, was complicated like that.
Slender, delicate hands settled themselves over mine, and the life I had been trying to give this broken form leaped upward, sinking into pale skin. I yelled, clawing at it, but Suzanne Quinley pressed my hands harder against the collapsing body, and challenged me with a gaze of unearthly green.
“He’s my father.”
“He’s not—!”
She curled her hands, taking the Master’s shattered miasma into them. “No. He’s not. But he is, or was, and you need something that can contain him.”
“Suzy, this is what he wanted, he wanted your body—”
“He wanted,” she said, and her emphasis was so slight as to make mine seem hyperbolic, “to destroy the world. I can See what you’re doing, Joanne. You’ve made life inside a thing that feeds on death. You’ve put love there, and now he loves the world, and that hurts him more than anything else. But if you just let him have this body and then let him go, he’ll go crazy just like Herne did, and then you’ll have a crazy half god to hunt down, just like Herne.
“But right now he’s just a spirit, Jo. He’s not bound to the body yet, not with love. Not the way you want him to be. So if I take him, he’s going to suffer exactly what you want him to. He’s going to understand love and loss and all of it, and he’s never going to be able to break away. I’m the granddaughter of a god, Joanne. I’m pretty sure I’m going to live forever, or close enough to count. You want him to be punished? Let me take him. He killed my parents. He killed my father. He’s tried to kill everybody I know and love. He’s going to have to live with all that human pain, forever. And it’s never going to make him stronger.” Power streamed off her so brilliantly my eyes watered. “You told me everybody who has power has a choice to make. This is my choice. I’m going to be his jailer, and you’re not going to stop me.”
I looked away once, through tears, at Cernunnos. His face was as terrible as Suzy’s, as stern and as still, but he dropped his head in a single nod.
“Okay.” I hardly heard my own whisper as I turned my palms up beneath Suzy’s, releasing the magic I’d built into her.
It coalesced and resolved, becoming smaller and denser and full of light. Darkness streaked through it, making shadows that tried and failed to dominate. In Suzanne’s palms, it looked like a diamond that had come to life, glittering and surging.
It was beautiful, and frankly, I hated it. I leaned in, speaking to it. “Go away from here. Go with Suzanne, and don’t imagine for a moment that this is a gift. You’ll live. You’ll survive. You’ll feel all the pain you ever wanted, and it will hurt you, the way you’ve hurt us. Your only chance of not going mad is learning to live with it, just like we do, and you’ve got this girl here whose heart is a lot bigger—” and a lot crueler, I didn’t say “—than mine. She may be your prison, but she’s your savior, too. You should understand this: stay quiet. Stay very, very quiet. I never. Want. To see you. Again. If you cross my path, if you show your face, I will tear you apart. I will end you. I will...”
I was reaching the “tear up the bits of you and jump on them” stage of threats, and since I had even less chance against a god within a god than I’d had against, well, the Master, it seemed foolish to continue. I lifted my eyes to Suzanne and whispered, “Be careful, Suzy. That thing is dangerous. You be careful, you be smart, and if you ever even think you need my help with it, you come running. You hear me?”
She nodded, pale ha
ir cascading over her shoulders as she folded the spark of godhood to her chest. “I promise.”
“Good girl.” I closed my eyes. “Just take it away.”
I didn’t wait to see if she did. I just went inside, went back to the hard white desert with its impossible heat and the flat blue sky pressing down on me.
There was no one else there, just me and the hanging tree.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I waited. I waited a long time, hoping against hope that Coyote, Big or Little, would come back to me. I knew neither of them would, but I still couldn’t bring myself to leave the painfully hot desert. Breathing hurt, but fighting for sips of scalding air made it almost impossible to think about Raven or Rattler, or about Gary’s tortoise, or about Coyote himself. Every inhalation was an agonizing little hiccup, and I was grateful to face that pain, and hide from the rest of it. Sunlight beat through my clothes, bronzing my skin so fast it stung, but that was okay, too. I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay forever, because here it was hot and awful, but it was also silent and a barrier to the ramifications of the past hours.
I didn’t know how long it was until I felt Morrison’s hand on my shoulder in the Middle World, and heard his quiet, concerned voice. “C’mon, Walker. Come back to me. C’mon, Joanie.”
My eyes opened reluctantly. I wasn’t at all certain I’d be able to see, but the obliterating Sight that had burned my vision earlier was now gone. The world was made up of Morrison’s worried smile, and the relief in his blue eyes when mine opened. “There you are. There you are, Jo. You came back to me.”
I leaned forward—the Master’s body that had lain in front of me was gone—and put my arms around Morrison’s neck. Buried my face in his shoulder, and held on. I would have been happy to stay there forever, not letting the world intrude at all, but eventually he mumbled, “I’m sorry, Walker, but there’s a rock digging into my patella. If I don’t move we’re going to have to amputate my knee.”
To my surprise, I laughed. A muffled little sound, but a laugh. I hugged him tighter for one more instant, then let go enough that we could both shift and start to get up.
Finding the Muldoons, the Hollidays, two gods and my father looking down on us was something of a shock. I’d known they were there, but I hadn’t really seen all of them, and I stared from one face to another uncertainly. Finally I focused on my father. “Dad?”
“Jo. Anne. Joanne.” Dad paused, then whispered, “Joanie,” and, despite the broken glass and concrete-riddled ground, dropped to his knees to pull me into a hug.
“Dad. Daddy, what are you... How did you even get here? It’s only been, like, a day...a day?” I took my face from his shoulder and looked in bewilderment to the pinkening eastern horizon. “Was it only a day?”
“Shamans can go quite a while without sleep. And that invisibility trick of yours turned out to be pretty helpful on long stretches of speed-trapped highway in the badlands.”
I stared at him. I’d never thought of that. Invisible driving. It would be awesome, except if a semi came out of nowhere. I started to say something like that, wanting to scold him, but it was a little hard to scold a man who’d just driven twenty-four hours straight to be at my side in the nick of time. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Petite’s in the parking garage. She’s fine,” Dad said as my spine straightened.
I was sure she was. I just had the irrational desire to see her. Everything had been turned upside down in the past day, all changed utterly. Seeing Petite would reassure me that something hadn’t changed. “Where’s Coyote?”
Morrison’s face went bleak in preparation for giving me the dreadful news. I shook my head, stopping him. “No. I know. I just... I want to see him. I need to see him.”
“Over here, doll.” Gary’s voice was solemn. More than solemn. I let Dad and Morrison help me to my feet. I felt oddly light as they did, like some heavy weight had burned out of me. Everyone, even the gods, stood aside as I walked slowly past them to where Coyote lay on a bier of concrete.
He wasn’t burned or blackened anymore. A small favor, a gift to me, though from whom I didn’t know. His beautiful hair lay quietly, no wind to disturb it, and someone had folded his hands neatly over his breast.
His eyes were closed, but he didn’t look like he was sleeping. His color was wrong, his face too still. I knelt beside him and unfolded one of his hands, hating that it was already cool to the touch, and pressed my forehead against the back of it. After a minute or so, I heard the others slowly move away, for which I was grateful. I heard them shifting, taking seats, speaking quietly among one another as the light gradually changed, but they stayed away, giving me space for things I couldn’t even name. I wasn’t at mourning yet. My rage was burned out, poured into the Master’s punishment and release. I was too tired for anything else, too emptied of emotion. Sooner or later it would come back, but right now, later sounded okay.
I had been sitting there maybe half an hour when a scream like the thunderbird’s tore the air far above me. I flinched out of my solitude and threw shields around my friends, wondering if shields would even protect from a thunderbird’s claws and wondering what a thunderbird was doing hunting us at this late stage of the game anyway, and if the thunderbird even existed anymore, after the fight in the Upper World. We all looked up, hands cupped around our eyes to block out an incongruously brilliant sunrise.
The Space Needle’s restaurant, already at a dramatic cant that tilted opposite of the direction the Needle itself listed, let go of another few yards of height with another metal-rending scream. It jolted to a stop just long enough to notice, then dropped again, and again, glass and concrete and metal shattering with each collapse.
After the fourth, it gave up all hope of retaining integrity and slammed, crashed and bashed its way down the Needle’s slender spire in deafening roars. Dust and debris flew, clouding the clean air. Chunks of metal bounced off my shields repeatedly, and we all shrieked with each impact, so our screams made shrill counterpoints to the impossible noise of the restaurant’s collapse.
The fall itself lasted only a few seconds. The debris took longer to settle. All nine of us, even Cernunnos, just sat there, staring upward through the shimmer of my shield, like Moses on the mountain waiting for the commandments. Bit by bit the ruins came clear as wind swept the dust away to reveal the restaurant caught about halfway down the spire, where it began to flare toward the earth. It looked like somebody had been playing horseshoes with a UFO.
“Well, shit,” I finally croaked. “Somebody’s gonna have to clean that up.”
Then I put my face in my hands and began to cry.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sunday, April 2, 6:59 a.m.
Cernunnos, unexpectedly, was the one who came to me. He put one hand on my shoulder, turning my sobs to a gasp, then crouched beside me, long and elegant fingers dangling just above the earth. I drew a shuddering breath and dashed tears from my eyes, though they rolled down my cheeks again without a moment’s hesitation. Still, I could see him. Or See him, more accurately.
As somber as he’d ever been, he was also glorious in the rising sun. His fire, the power that so easily blinded me, had new depth to it. It was still green, but it had always been emerald wildfire, a color so rich it had edges. Now there were shades to it, from that pure hard emerald into new leaves and from there into fading grass, with all the subtle differences in between reaching deep into the earth. That was it: when he moved now, it was with a sense of belonging. Like the green of this earth had claimed him. Not that he’d lost the green of Tir na nOg, but looking at him now, I felt like I’d always been seeing only half of what he was supposed to be. Now he was whole.
Whole, but at huge cost. I closed my eyes against his beauty, wondering what had happened to Herne’s body. I wondered what the hell he’d been doing here at all. He had not been part of my plan. Not that I’d had much of a plan, but insofar as I had, it hadn’t included gods dying.
My s
tomach clenched, ice sheeting over my skin as hot tears scalded my cheeks. I’d been wrong. It hadn’t taken a god to defeat the Master.
It had taken three. One freed, one dead, and one...changed. The truth was, I didn’t know what had happened to, or with, Suzy yet. I was a little afraid to find out. So there were a lot of things behind my apology when I whispered, “I’m sorry, Cernunnos.”
“Thou’rt difficult, little shaman.”
I opened my eyes again to stare at him, waited until it was clear I had to speak next, then said, “I thought we’d settled that ‘little shaman’ thing a while back.”
“We had, and yet in the light of this new day, I find I do not wish to speak thy name quite yet, my shaman. Thou hast done...much, this day.”
“Yes.” We’d also settled the thee-ing and thou-ing thing, but for once I thought maybe the god’s formality—sensual and shivery as it was—might be more appropriate than the more common language I’d become accustomed to from him. My shoulder was against Coyote’s bier, a cold hard reminder of what had changed. As if I needed one. “Sorry for the summoning.”
“No.” Cernunnos barely whispered the word, then took my hand in his. His touch was gossamer, so light that if I didn’t see our fingers intertwining I wouldn’t be certain it was happening. My heart missed a beat and heat rose in my cheeks. I tried hard not to look at Morrison, who was studiously looking the other way.
“Be thou not sorry, my shaman. I might have refused thy call had thy casting not made so clear thy intentions.” A note of doubt lingered deep in the claim: he wasn’t certain he could have refused it, but I wasn’t about to call him on that. He shifted a few inches, turning himself toward me. Toward Coyote, to whom he lifted his gaze before he spoke. “It is I, mayhap, who should offer an apology to thee.”
