by C. E. Murphy
“You sure as fuck should.” I wasn’t talking about Coyote. I wasn’t ready to talk about Coyote. “The Master, Cernunnos. The frigging Master. You could have told me.”
“The Devourer.” Cernunnos had the grace to look away from Coyote and pay full attention to me. “For that, too, yes. What would I have told thee, gwyld? That the thing you feared and hated most was half of me? Wouldst thou have trusted me e’er again? No,” he said very softly, “and without trust between us we could never have wrought this day.”
“The cauldron,” I said in despair. “You almost dying in Tir na nOg. You bet everything on me and lied to me about it.”
“I did not lie.” Cernunnos sounded very slightly affronted. “I withheld truth, but I did not lie.”
“Tomayto, tomahto. And you would have killed me back in Ireland, rather than let me become a werewolf. One of his monsters. Only because then your brother might have ended up on equal footing with you.”
The silence was very long indeed, before the green god breathed, “Not only.”
He couldn’t have hit me harder if he’d shoved an iron sword through my gut. All my breath went away and left a hollow in my stomach that felt echoed in my gaze. I couldn’t look away from him. Two little words, two words of promise and regret, and every part of me except my vocal cords wanted to demand that he explain himself, that he make that hint absolutely, undeniably clear.
My vocal cords, though, were in rebellion, too tight to speak, and in the end it was Cernunnos who looked away. Looked back toward Coyote’s body, and murmured, once more, “I am sorry. I could not save him.”
“Neither could I.” There it was, raw and broken. The tears started again, wrenching through me in a shudder I felt to the bone. Cernunnos drew me up with his touch. I followed blindly, tears too thick to see through, until he stopped and I bumped into the solid shoulder of a silver stallion.
The beast bent his neck around and shoved his forehead against my arm. I stumbled and he caught me, hooking his big head beneath my arm so I leaned on him. Then he shook me off and pressed his face against my torso. All of my torso: his head went from my collarbones to my thighs, a reminder of how preposterously massive the god’s horse was. I supposed he had to be, to carry Cernunnos in his fully fleshed, broad-shouldered and antlered form.
Mostly when I’d been this close to the stallion, he’d been trying to kill me. This was nicer. I put my forehead between his ears and mumbled something idiotic. He snorted down my pants, then pushed me away and tossed his head. I blinked away tears in time to catch an expressive eye roll before he looked pointedly at his own back.
“We would offer thee a gift,” Cernunnos said quietly, “and ask a boon of thee all at once. Ride with us a final time, my shaman. Not to the stars and not between worlds, but here in this place, through this city. Thou hast made thy people mine, and I thine. I would not leave them broken and ravaged where I can help. The earth is mine as it was my son’s, and it will be soothed by my presence. But the gift of healing is thine, and so I ask thee: ride with me, and help me heal this land.”
“Cernunnos...” I wanted to. I always wanted to, when he asked me, and on this occasion he was asking something different. Usually he was asking for something that would bind me to him irrevocably, and that wasn’t a ride I was willing to take. Not yet. This, though, wasn’t a ride through the stars or time or space. It was a sharing of a world that had become ours, instead of belonging to one of us or the other. I wanted to, and just this once, I thought I might be able to get away with it.
But my father was here. Billy and Melinda were here. Gary and Annie were here, and Suzy, who should not be left alone with strangers right now, was here.
Morrison was here. And we all had a hell of a lot to work through, and I had finally grown up enough not to walk out on a difficult moment like this. I couldn’t abandon them, much as I might want to go with the horned god.
I was still struggling to find a way to explain that when Morrison said, “Go on, Walker. We’ll manage here. We’ll...” He didn’t quite look at Coyote’s body. “I’ll call someone.”
“Cindy. Heather Fagan’s niece. She works for the coroner and she...understands.” I wasn’t sure how understanding would help explain the death of an apparently healthy and undamaged young man, but it wouldn’t hurt.
“All right. I’ll call you when we’re settled somewhere.”
I lifted my eyebrows, but closed my eyes as I said, “My cell phone is lying somewhere in the middle of Woodland baseball field,” because I didn’t want to see Morrison’s expression at the reminder.
I didn’t need to. The volume of his silence expressed it just fine. “Then we’ll be at your apartment,” he said after a while, then came over to wrap his arms around me.
I startled a little, then buried my face in his shoulder for a minute before mumbling, “Gary’s got a key. Wait. You have my keys.” Of course he did. That was how he’d gotten in to clean up. Either that or he was an expert at breaking and entering, which was too strange a thought to contemplate.
“I have your keys,” he agreed. “Go on, Walker.” He kissed me, then nudged me on my way. I turned back to find Cernunnos watching both of us thoughtfully, and for once was grateful that my powers didn’t include telepathy. I really didn’t want to know what he thought of my relationship with Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department.
Lucky for me, he didn’t volunteer his opinion. He merely leaped onto the stallion’s back with absurd and impossible grace, as if the earth itself had shrugged a little and thrown him skyward.
Or not. I’d watched the earth shrug and throw a lot of people around today, and it wasn’t nearly as pretty as Cernunnos getting on his horse. He offered me a hand. I took it and he pulled me up like I weighed nothing at all, settling me behind him on the stallion’s broad back. The big animal pranced a time or two before looking at Cernunnos, obviously waiting for his cue.
Cernunnos, though, waited on me, his head lowered and turned in profile so I could see the sweep of his bone crown through the tangle of his ashy hair. It swirled and spiked from his temples, protruding horns dangerously sharp. They came together at the back of his head, then spilled downward to strengthen his neck and broaden his shoulders. His scent was musky, more animal than I remembered it being, and I couldn’t help thinking of the first time I’d ridden with him. He’d offered to take away my pain, then. Right now, with my arm around his waist and the line of my body against his, the world I’d just stepped away from, the world the horse still stood on, seemed very far away, and very full of pain. All I had to do was not get off this ride.
I made myself look away from Cernunnos. Made myself look at Morrison, and despite the sudden distance from the world that I felt, I smiled when I saw him. He smiled in return, sad, relaxed, tired, and as abruptly as I’d considered staying with Cernunnos, I considered throwing myself off the horse and back into Morrison’s arms. I didn’t, but it was good to know he had every bit as much pull as the horned god. I gave him a little nod, said, “Okay,” to Cernunnos, and glanced over the rest of my friends as the stallion stretched his legs to take us away. “Wait!”
Cernunnos sat deeper into the stallion’s back, stopping him, and I got the impression both of them, god and beast, verged on snapping, “What now?”
“Dad.” I cleared my throat and tried again. “I need Dad. I can heal people. I can heal a lot of people. But Dad can... He does this magic thing,” I said lamely. “He turns blood into roses.”
Cernunnos’s silence briefly matched one of Morrison’s better ones for thunderous. I tried again. “There are people out there, people who are trapped and too badly hurt for me to try healing them. Or there were last night. Yesterday. Whenever that was.” I honestly had no idea how much time had passed. It had been at least a day since I got back to Seattle, but if somebody’d told me it’d been a year and a day, I wouldn’t have doubted them. “If Dad can convert the buildings into...roses...I can heal them.�
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“Joanne, I can’t. I don’t have...I don’t have that kind of raw power. Your kind of power.” Dad came up to me, Cernunnos and the horse, and managed not to look too awed by the latter two. Possibly hanging out all night while I threw down with an elemental had taken the edge off, or—more likely, judging from the haggard lines across his face and shadows under his eyes—he was just too damned tired to be awed right now. We all were.
“This once,” Cernunnos said, more than a little dryly, “I think power will not be a problem...” He cast a sideways glance at me and finished with, “Master Walkingstick,” rather than whatever variant of little shaman or puny mortal had first crossed his mind. He flicked his fingers and the Boy Rider joined us, golden mare dazzling in the rising sunlight. The Boy had always been especially ethereal, even among the Hunt, but today—now, after all of this—he looked somehow as though he’d come into his own. There was new power in the slim lines of his body, and a presence that felt more rooted in this world than he ever had before.
Dad, staring at him, paled visibly. I snorted. “What, afraid of a horse, Injun?”
“Hey,” Gary rumbled. “Perpetuating stereotypes through joking isn’t funny, doll.”
I laughed, even if it was a little watery. “Long time since I said that to you.”
“Long time. Good times.”
“You’re crazy, Gary.”
Dad looked between us like he’d glare if he could get up the energy, and instead took the Boy Rider’s hand, allowing himself to be pulled onto the mare’s back. “I’m not afraid of horses,” he muttered at me as they passed by us. “Riding with gods, though...”
“That one’s only a half god,” I offered helpfully, and got a withering look in response. It lifted my spirits a little and I mashed my face against Cernunnos’s shoulder, rather like he might be a more godly version of Morrison, as I mumbled, “Okay, we can go now.”
He said nothing, because I suspected he wanted to say, “Hnf,” and regarded that as being insufficiently godly, so I was smiling as I turned my head again and waved goodbye to Morrison and the others.
I’d ridden with the Hunt before, but it had always been a hunt. It had always been fast, busy, breathless. This time we walked, long-legged horses picking their way carefully over broken ground. Cernunnos didn’t speak, but I felt vast power rolling from and through him: green power. Earth magic. The land didn’t exactly stitch itself back together as we passed over it, but it didn’t exactly not, either. Dirt and stone shivered and settled, sometimes swallowing shattered concrete and ruined buildings, sometimes just smoothing them until they were passable.
Time and again we paused when I could feel lives struggling to hang on inside the walls of fallen structures. I wasn’t exactly tired anymore, or empty. I still felt remote, but that was a blessing, something I owed Cernunnos for. Viewing Seattle’s wreckage from within the Hunt was just within the limits of bearable. I would have fallen apart on my own, on foot, and this was exactly the wrong time for me to do that.
The first crushed buildings lay not that far from the Seattle Center. Cernunnos settled the stallion there without me asking, and I sent threads of magic into the twisted girders and torn concrete, searching for lives to save. Some were easy; others, like Manny, were complicated. I’d never felt spread so thin as I concentrated on one, then another, of the broken bodies, preparing for the moment to unleash full healing magic. Only when I was absolutely certain I held every thread in hand did I whisper, “Okay, Dad.”
I got a wild-eyed stare in return, though it took me a full minute or so to look his way when it became apparent he wasn’t doing anything. “Just...turn it all to roses, Dad. Or air. Air would be better. I don’t want rose petals inside of wounds.”
“Joanne, it’s half a city block. I can’t change half a block of anything into anything.”
I expected Cernunnos to answer. Instead, it was the Boy Rider, who shared his mount with my father, who turned and touched a fingertip to Dad’s forehead.
Most of the adepts I knew went gold-eyed when they used magic. Dad had, back on the Qualla. But beneath the Boy’s touch, his eyes turned fiery white, power visibly curling away from the corners like a thing with life of its own. He gave a raw gasp like he’d sipped flame, and without warning a block’s worth of rubble became air.
It had a sound, which I didn’t expect. Soft, surprised, not unlike the gasp Dad had just uttered. Buildings did not, it seemed, expect to become something else. But a thrill of power rushed through the change, too, as all the broken windows and walls gave up their sorrow at having failed in their duty, and became something other. Something freed.
In the same moment, under the white power of Dad’s make-it-vanish act, I poured magic through the threads I’d built, healing those who had survived this long. The threads flexed, reaching for one another and becoming a net that briefly united the survivors. Maybe more than briefly: I heard voices cry out in astonishment and relieved pain, in confusion and hope, and then people who seconds earlier had been trapped began scrambling toward one another, tears of joy and disbelief and loss streaking their faces.
My head went wobbly, but Cernunnos touched my knee and the world straightened out again. He nudged the stallion into a walk, and we went on to the next stretch of devastated city. Over and over we stopped and changed and healed, and left believers behind when we rode on. They were tied together now, all of the survivors, the strands of my healing magic touching them and reminding them we were all in the same boat together. They were tied together because they stood as one, watching a new-old god walk the earth, and watching magic happen in his wake. Their awe and hope and love—and their fear and hatred and despair—built a massive wave of power throughout the city, helping to replenish me and my father long after we should have collapsed.
We rode all day, never going very fast and never stopping for more than a few minutes. I was distantly aware that sooner or later I was going to become the Joanne Who Ate Seattle, since the Chinese food of the day before was a distant memory, but for the nonce I seemed to be existing on universal love and magic. Occasionally universal love and magic announced I really needed to pee, but the need kept fading into inconsequentiality. I bet I would regret that a lot, later on, unless some hind brain part of my magic was keeping everything in working order.
By the end of the day all I could really remember was that a lot of people had died, a lot had been saved, and that Seattle was going to have to be rebuilt from the ground up. The worst of it was clearly the downtown area, but I had no idea how far the damage ranged. Even hopped up on god-power, I couldn’t fix it all. We’d smoothed a lot of streets and vanished a lot of buildings, which meant the more mundane emergency services could do their jobs. I would come back out and help tomorrow.
I must’ve said the last word aloud, because Cernunnos turned his head, then slipped his hand over mine at his waist. “At last you weaken? I wondered if we might ride together forever after all, from this day onward. Thou hast done far more than any might expect of you, and then gave more still. For my part, I thank you. For theirs, they lack the words.”
“S’okay.” I hadn’t noticed that I was leaning against him, my cheek against his shoulder and my eyes so heavy they pressed my jaw into slackness. “Can you bring me home?”
“We are there.”
I pried my eyes open and stared, befuddled, at my apartment. Not my apartment building, but my apartment. The inside of it. I knew Cernunnos could walk through walls, but I still couldn’t wrap my exhausted mind around being inside the apartment. The stallion stood very, very still, as if fully aware one misstep would break my furniture to bits and tangle him in a most undignified way.
Cernunnos slid from the beast’s back and caught me as I, no longer supported by him, fell. I curled into his arms, too tired to even be surprised that he carried me into my bedroom and settled me on the bed as if he’d done it a thousand times. My eyes were already closed again as he drew the covers up, and his
whisper was a benediction. “Fare thee well, Siobhán Walkingstick. I’ll see thee anon.”
I felt a silver kiss press against my forehead, and slept.
Chapter Thirty
Monday, April 3, 11:22 a.m.
I awoke to the smell of pancakes and maple syrup.
It was so incongruous I just lay there for a while in the warm dark, wondering if I’d lost my mind. A lost mind that provided heavenly olfactory illusions didn’t sound half bad. My covers weighed a ton, preventing me from throwing them off and getting up. In fact, it was a struggle to not allow them to just sink me back into sleep, but I heard the occasional clank and bang in the kitchen, suggesting someone else was here. I probably hadn’t lost my mind, then. That was probably good.
I still didn’t get up, because as long as there was clanking, someone was presumably still cooking, which meant breakfast wasn’t quite ready yet. Voices roses and fell, quietly, but enough to suggest there was more than one person out there. Mostly men, but Annie’s soprano was easy to distinguish, even if I couldn’t understand the words. Morrison. Gary.
But not Coyote. My eyes got hot and I pressed them closed even harder, trying not to cry. Trying not to think, honestly, because I was too tired and, I suspected, still far too overwhelmed to think about what had happened over the past couple of days.
The scent of bacon, and then after a bit, eggs fried in bacon grease, joined the pancakes and syrup. My stomach growled, but I wasn’t really all that sure I could move. The covers were heavy and I felt weak as water, like I’d used up every last bit of energy within me and then wrung myself out for more.
Which was more or less what had happened, even if I’d been given a great deal of power that wasn’t my own to work with. Raven, I said inside my head, tiredly. Rattler. Renee?
Raven didn’t respond. Rattler didn’t respond. Renee, very quietly, appeared at the back of my mind, but she had nothing to say. That was okay. I didn’t really have any goddamned words for her, either. Maybe she could take the long view. Maybe she could see a necessity in their deaths that I couldn’t, because I sure as hell couldn’t. I would have found a way. I always found a way.
