Raven Calls (The Walker Papers Book 8), page 19
It was not Wings lighting them up. It was a soft glow from a pit lying beneath the bones in a physically impossible manner. It looked like it went straight to China, or to whatever was opposite Ireland on the globe, and the ashy remains were resting quietly on the air above it, as if it didn’t really quite exist. I nudged a stone toward its edge.
The stone rolled in, bounced off the sides a couple times, and fell a long, long way. For a hole that didn’t exist, it was a very convincing fall. I cleared my throat and glanced at my companions. "Either of you do this?"
They obviously hadn’t. They also looked like I felt, which was to say, they suspected that in a few short minutes we would all be going down the rabbit hole, because rabbit holes did not appear in our lives for absolutely no reason at all. Tentative, I called on the Sight, and gave a rushed laugh of relief.
The pit glowed with white magic, with the power that had so recently scrubbed the mountain clean. It smelled, as my coat did, of stardust, and as a result I found myself trusting it.
"It looks safe," Caitríona said dubiously, suggesting she was feeling the same effect I was. Méabh frowned at us both, but the expression lightened when she looked into the hole. Apparently she thought it looked safe, too.
"Isn’t that what Alice thought before she went down the rabbit hole?"
Caitríona, sounding very nineteen, said, "Oh, what the hell," and dove in head first.
Chapter 21
TUESDAY, MARCH 21, 11:00 A.M.
Iwas not normally blessed with lightning-quick reflexes, but I snagged the back of Cat’s shirt just before she disappeared into the hole. Méabh, thank goodness, snagged the back of mine, preventing us both from tumbling headlong into its depths. Cat came up flush with disappointment, and I wagged a finger at her without being able to work myself up to a real scolding. Truth was, I wanted to dive right after her. All that stopped me was the dire uncertainty of whether we’d be coming back. That in and of itself didn’t bother me so much. I’d kind of gotten used to not knowing if I was coming back. But I’d never had somebody to say goodbye to before, not for real. I stopped wagging a finger at Caitríona, and walked a little distance away to call Morrison.
His phone rang while I tried to subtract time zones. It was something like four in the morning again, another totally uncivilized time to call, but he picked up fast, with a gruff, "I haven’t heard from him. Are you okay?"
I bit my lip, which made speaking clearly difficult, but I managed to say, "Not dead yet, anyway. How’s things there?"
"The usual." He sounded very awake for a man I’d presumably woken up. "Baxter wonders if you quit because of the shooting, Ray Campbell is stomping around glaring at me like it’s all my fault and Holliday is preparing a lecture for when you get home. He’s used it on about half of Homicide already. He made one of them cry."
The guys I worked with were generally a bunch of tough mooks. I gawked at the view, trying to imagine which of them might have been brought to tears, then heard Morrison’s faint breath of laughter. "Not really, Walker. He is ready to read you the riot act, though."
"You’re probably first in line to do that."
"Not as long as you come home safe. Why’re you calling?"
Sadly for me, those two sentences were clearly connected. I sighed. "Because I’m off to do something stupid again, and I wanted to say…" My throat swelled up and I had a hard time swallowing.
Three little words. Not that hard to say, except in the sense of never having said them to somebody before, which somehow made them unbearably scary. There was a momentary pause before Morrison said, "Yeah, I know, Walker," like he understood the tongue-tied-ness. "Be careful, okay? I’ll talk to you soon."
"No!" Panic sharpened the word and I could all but hear Morrison bring the phone back to his ear. "No," I said again. "I mean it, Morrison. I love you."
"Yeah," he said, and this time I was sure I could hear him smile. "Yeah, I know, Walker. I love you, too. Talk to you later."
It sounded so easy for him to say. I hung up, folded the phone against my chest and turned to find Méabh and Caitríona both standing there with dippy yet knowledgeable smiles. The pit Áine had dug—I assumed she was behind it, since it glowed with her power—glimmered behind them, somehow as dippily pleased as they were. I muttered, "All right, all right, the show’s over, let’s get this wagon train rolling," and together we all jumped into the rabbit hole.
The world inverted, went black and spat us out the other side into sunlight. It was weirdly familiar: I’d entered my garden that way more than once, and overall it reassured me.
Or it did, anyway, until I recognized where we’d been spat.
Méabh’s tomb stood on a near-distant hilltop. Forests lay between us and it, which was not true in my time. Cold rushed me and I turned around slowly, afraid of what I would see.
A bleak black hole lay in the mountainside right behind us. I knew that hole. It wasn’t infested with Áine’s light. It was much more the other end of the spectrum, dark and scary and dank. Werewolves had come rolling out of that hole once upon a time, mutated monsters made at the Master’s bidding. Three of them. Three women, in fact.
Stiff, afraid, barely breathing, I lifted my hands to look at them.
They were my hands, unchanged, including the bite on my forearm, which was picking up in the itching department again. Sick relief soured my stomach. I’d had the ugly idea that we’d been twisted into monsters and regurgitated into Ireland’s history. And maybe we had been, but if so, at least we weren’t the wolves. I’d seen them when they came out of the earth, mewling black slicks of evil, and all three of us looked perfectly normal. I sat down, looped my arms around my knees and exhaled squeakily. "Not really what I was expecting. Where are we? Or maybe when are we, I know where we are. But—"
"The cairns are as I knew them as a child," Méabh said to the distant hilltops. To the cairn that bore her own name, specifically. I glanced toward it, squinted and decided maybe it was smaller than it was in my day. "There’s something about the land, Joanne," she said uncertainly before Caitríona interrupted in delight.
"Are we time traveling?"
"I’m not sure." I leaned forward to take a handful of earth, wishing it could tell me where Áine had sent us.
As it happened, the fact I was leaning forward saved my life.
In my vision, the werewolves had come boiling from the cave at night, black on black, as writhing hideous little beasts that got larger and more dangerous as they rolled and wriggled from the cave mouth. But then, in my vision, Méabh had built her power circle in the northwest of the island, where she’d been born and had reigned as queen, and the Ring of Kerry was in the southwest. Visions, I was learning, were a bit on the symbolic side, and not so much with the accurate details.
Three long-legged, full-grown beasts raced from the cave, two of them leaping over my head to attack Méabh and Caitríona. The third slung itself low, coming for me, and in a moment of grace worthy of my own usual antics, tripped over its own feet and went crashing halfway down the mountain. It yelped as it bounced off rocks and bumps. I had no doubt it would whip around and come back again, but in the instant the fight was met, I was given respite, and it probably saved us all.
Méabh, who I was beginning to think of as an unstoppable killing machine, managed to draw her sword before her wolf tackled her. She didn’t get it up, didn’t make a killing blow, but she had it out, and blocked the creature’s gnashy teeth with the sword’s edge. Silver shot from the blade, leaping to the wolf as if the metal had a life and will of its own. Streaks raced back from the wolf’s mouth, etching along its fur until it had racing stripes. Still too close to use the sword, Méabh strong-armed the animal, grabbing its throat and throwing it off her. Half a breath later she was chasing it, but it skittered and leapt away, able to cover far more distance in a step with its four legs than she could with her two.
At the same time, Cat’s wolf dragged her to the ground, teeth shredding her sweater. I threw a shield at her, forcing it against her skin so she glimmered with power, and the wolf’s next tearing bite scraped off the magic and saved her from the same fate I was currently facing.
That gave me a bright idea, and for the second time in two days I gave myself up to the bite burning my arm.
This was not proper shifting. The pain began in the bite and exploded outward relentlessly, twisting my bones, stretching and compressing them, breaking them until I was made anew. The smart thing would’ve been to call on Rattler and try to push my way to a shape of my own, but my magic wasn’t working so well internally. I felt pretty sure it was this or nothing, and right now I needed a something.
Besides, it felt so good. Not the shift itself, but the utter abandon that came with success. All of a sudden I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care who won or who lost, just as long as I came out on top. I didn’t care what the price of power was on myself or on my friends. I didn’t worry about Gary, about my mother, about Méabh or Caitríona, about anything at all except the hunt. And there were three glorious bitches just asking for somebody to take them down. I scrambled free of my pants—the shirt was less constricting—and went after the wolf on Caitríona. It yelped—so did Cat—as I knocked it off her, and we rolled, snarling and snapping, a few yards away.
I was bigger than she was. Whether it was a woman of the modern era versus a person of an older age or whether I’d just gotten lucky, I was bigger, and I felt her struggling for breath beneath my weight. She writhed, paws scrabbling, then heaved a mighty heave that got her out from under me. I crashed into her again, but all of a sudden she had two heads and an awful lot of claws, plus she’d grown some shining silver streaks.
Ah. Méabh’s wolf had come to play. I flung myself backward and got out of reach, shoulders hunched within my shirt. I needed to learn to undress before shifting. Especially before a fight: the cloth might give my enemies extra purchase to hold me with. The thought angered me and I snarled, ready for the battle to be on again.
But the small pack scented of confusion. I was one of them, impossible as that was. They were new, fresh-born, and they were three. I was a fourth, larger, by physical definition more dominant, and moreover, unexpected, which made them weak. I snarled and stepped forward one pace, and Streaks, the larger of the two facing me, flinched. My growl was made of triumph.
Except my wolf, the clumsy one, hadn’t gotten the memo, and came tearing back up the hill to slam into my side. Smaller or not, she had momentum, and I hit the dirt with a deep grunt.
All three of them were on me in a heartbeat. I twisted, snapping everywhere, and saw flashes of snarling white teeth in response. Fury blinded me. I was bigger, I was dominant, I would win. I reached for my power, ready to use it offensively if I had to.
There was no response. No hint of magic waiting to be called on. No healing power, no sense of the earth offering strength for me to lean on, no nothing. I hadn’t come up that dry since I’d come half an inch from sacrificing myself on a sorcerer’s altar.
A very dim idea of oh, shit wafted after that realization, and with bone-wrenching intensity, I shifted back to my own form and waited to die.
Instead the smallest wolf yelped and fell, revealing Caitríona standing over it with a knobbly tree branch. It surged to its feet again, but it did so shaking its head like it was concussed. For a peculiar instant I felt sorry for the beast. Then Méabh’s silver-greaved foot lashed out and caught Streaks in the ribs, and I gathered myself to roll onto all fours and snarl just as convincingly as a human as I had as a wolf. I hoped.
They didn’t look scared, the wolves. They looked discomfited, and possibly like an idea had been put into their heads. They glanced at one another, then backed away, the dizzy one moving slowly and the other two refusing to abandon it. They got a good distance away—a safe distance—then looked at each other again.
Streaks curled her lips back from her teeth, and I heard the popping and grinding of bone as she forced herself from a lupine form into a human one. Horror caught me in the gut as the other two did the same, all of them becoming strong, healthy, naked, scary ladies. Streaks still had silver in her hair, and she gave me an approximation of a smile. Bared her teeth, anyway, and ran her tongue over them before shifting again, back to wolf form, and leading her also-changing sisters away.
I collapsed onto my forearms, panting into the earth as I tried to count the number of ways in which I’d been phenomenally stupid. I lacked my sword, but there were always nets. I was good at nets, and the werewolves weren’t like the wendigo. They were, for lack of a better term, real magic. Solid magic. Corporeal magic. They didn’t slip between the Middle and Lower Worlds at a whim, which meant I could have netted them and then delivered them tidily to Méabh for her binding spell. But, oh no, I had to go all Gunga Din and embrace the animal. And even that might have been okay, except I’d managed to teach werewolves how to shift shape, which had to be the ugliest damned time loop I’d opened and closed so far. And just to add a cherry on top, I was pretty damned sure of one other thing: "I’m guessing he knows we’re here now."
"He does," said a grim and weirdly familiar male voice, "but if we hurry, you might just live."
Chapter 22
Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I didn’t move. I was half-naked and just this side of wolf—crazy, but I couldn’t quite make myself move, because there was no way Morrison was standing behind me. It had been unlikely in the extreme that Gary could catch me at Dublin airport, but it was sheerly impossible that Morrison, to whom I’d just spoken on the phone, had transported himself halfway around the world. I turned my head about three-quarters of an inch, just far enough to see Caitríona. "What does the man behind me look like?"
Her forehead was as wrinkled as mine felt. "Like me da. Only not quite."
My shoulders dropped in a sort of relief. It wasn’t Morrison. I knew that, and still it was good—and bad—to have it verified. I kinda wished he had transported halfway around the world. It would make my life that much stranger, but that much happier, too. I seized my pants—the fight hadn’t taken me far away from them—and yanked them on as Méabh said, "Your da? Sure and it’s Ailill I see before me," in a surprisingly soft voice.
I did my best side whisper to Caitríona as I finished dressing: "Al-yil?"
"Ailill Mac Mata. The love of Méabh of Connacht’s life, so they say. Of course, she killed him in the end."
"He was unfaithful," Méabh said with utmost serenity.
I stopped worrying about the guy behind me and gaped at her. "So you killed him? This from the woman who married every high king in Irish history?"
Just as serenely, she said, "That was duty." Then she smiled, and I remembered that this was also a woman who had by all appearances held half the country together for millennia on end. Mostly I’d been finding her a bit condescending. All of a sudden I found her just a little scary instead. That was the kind of smile it was. I decided not to pursue the matter any further, and very sensibly turned to address the issue of the Man Who Wasn’t Morrison.
He looked an awful lot like Morrison. Not exactly like him, but a lot like him. Like somebody had sanded Morrison’s rough edges off, maybe, and polished him up a bit. His hair was more gold than silver, but Morrison had apparently been a blond back in the day. His eyes were too green for Morrison, but the height, the breadth, the smile, were all eerily similar. It made me want to trust him, an impulse I didn’t trust at all. "I think you’d better show us your true form."
True form. Nobody said things like that. Mucking with magic really did rearrange the speech patterns laid down over a lifetime. I sighed, ready to give it another shot—something like "Show me what you really look like"—but he shrugged before I spoke. "I don’t have one, not the way you mean. I’m shaped by desire."
Caitríona, horrified, blurted, "I don’t desire me da!"
He gave her Morrison’s best reassuring smile, which was pretty damned reassuring. Or would have been, if he’d been Morrison. Even so, I was reassured as he explained, "Not necessarily sexual desire. Safety, reassurance, stability. I answer whatever need is utmost in your mind."
"Gancanagh," Méabh said. I resisted the urge to say "Bless you," and the handsome devil-may-care fellow turned to give Méabh an acknowledging nod. "You’re dangerous," she said without sounding like she meant it. "A woman should never trust her heart’s desire. He seduces," she told us. Me, perhaps, since presumably Caitríona was in fact not hot for her daddy. "He is one of the fae, like the fear darrig. We cannot trust him."
"Of course you can’t. But I can lead you to evil’s lair."
My voice shot up. "Why would we want you to do that?"
All three of them, Gancanagh, Méabh and Caitríona, said, "Aibhill," which still sounded like "Evil" to me, but this time I recognized they probably meant the O’Brien banshee. "To Aibhill and her host of wailing women," Gancanagh went on. "Four and twenty of them."
"Twenty-five," Cat said obstinately, but Gancanagh clicked his tongue and winked at me. "Twenty-four now. She lost one recently, you know."
I did know, having kind of ripped a banshee’s head off a year ago. "Twenty-four isn’t really an improvement in the odds."
Gancanagh smiled and shrugged. I caught a scent of Morrison’s cologne and ground my teeth together. This was not my boss. It was not the man I’d fallen in love with. It was not even, according to what Méabh had just said, technically a man at all. I could accept that intellectually, but on a gut level I was just relieved as hell to see Morrison here and ready to fight at my side. Fists knotted until my nails stung my palms, I grated, "Never mind the odds. Why would you lead us there?"
