C.E. Murphy – Raven Calls (страница 5)

“What, all of them? Liberal sorts, weren’t they?” That time my mouth should have shut up before it did.

The woman gave me a sort of weary look, the kind mothers bestow on precocious but irritating children. “Symbolically, Joanne. Symbolically. Méabh was—”

“No, wait, I know this one! She was a high queen, right? Kind of a warrior princess?”

There was a certain expression I tended to engender in people more mystically apt than I. It started under the eyes with a slight tensing of fine skin, and went both up and down, making lips thinner and foreheads wrinklier. As a rule, I interpreted it as the pain of one whose cherished childhood dreams have just been spat upon, and it always made me feel guilty. The woman got that expression, suggesting that “warrior princess” was not how she thought of Méabh, but it was too late. I couldn’t take the words back. I put on a pathetic hangdog smile of apology instead, and the look faded into resignation, which was generally how people ended up responding to me. At length she said, “Something like that. Queen of Connacht and of Ulster, descended from or perhaps incarnated of the Morrígan herself, and any man who would be king of Ireland needed the blessing of the trifold goddess.”

“I thought that was Brigid,” I said nervously. Brigid was the only deity I knew anything about—well, besides Cernunnos, but I had a close personal relationship with him—and what I knew about her fit in a nutshell. “Trifold goddess” was stamped on the nutshell, in fact, and that was the sum total of my knowledge.

A little of the dismay left the woman’s face. Apparently I’d gotten something right. “Brigid would be the Morrígan’s other face, perhaps. The coin turned upward instead of down. Maiden, mother, crone, to the Morrígan’s warrior, witch and death.”

I swallowed. “Right. Um. We’re not going to meet her, are we?”

The woman stepped aside with another smile, gesturing us up the hill. “There’ll be one way and one way only to find out.”

Gary was halfway up the hill before the woman finished speaking. I jolted after him, vaguely ashamed that even now, he was more enthusiastic for my adventures than I was. I caught his shoulder as he reached the low crest and tugged him back. “Hey, hang on a second, wait up.”

He glanced at me with elevated bushy eyebrows, and I found myself mimicking the woman’s gesture, waving at the low stretch of land beyond our hill. Annoyed that I’d done so, I glanced back to glower at her, but she was gone. I stared down the deserted pathway a moment, then passed a hand over my eyes and said, “Hang on a sec,” again.

“I’m hangin’, doll. What’s up?”

“Obviously there’s something down there for us to see. I’m just thinking it might be helpful if you could…See.”

“I see just fine,” Gary said in mild offense. “I wear reading glasses, but who doesn’t?”

“No, not see. See. With a capital ess. With the Sight. Like I do.”

Gary looked down his nose at me. It wasn’t very far down—he was only a couple inches taller than I—but it was far enough. “Last I checked you were the one with the magic mojo, Jo.” A glitter came into his gray eyes and I pointed a warning finger at him.

“You are not calling me Mojojo. Ever. I refuse it as a nickname.”

The glitter turned into a grin. “Sure…Jo.”

I turned my pointy finger from him toward the green below us. “Do you or do you not want a chance to See what we’re facing?”

“’Course I do!”

“Then no Mojojojo.” I bit my tongue on getting carried away with the jojos, then exhaled. “Okay. I know this works because I’ve done it with Morrison and Billy.” Billy, my police detective partner—former partner, which he didn’t even know yet. He was going to kill me. Anyway, Billy was an adept himself, able to speak with the recently dead, but Morrison had the magical aptitude of a turnip. If I could make the Sight ritual work on him, I had no doubt it would work on Gary. “But I’ve only done it while stationary, which is no help.”

Gary’s eyebrows shot up, dancing with mad glee. I threatened to whack his shoulder and he laughed out loud, which made me laugh. “You’re good for me,” I informed him. “I laugh more when you’re around.”

“You need some laughter in your life, darlin’. Speakin’ of which, how’s things with Mike now that he ain’t the boss?”

“Of all the awkward segues. I’ll let you know. Stop distracting me.”

“From what? You don’t look like you’re doing much.”

“I’m trying to think!” Which wasn’t my strong point even when I hadn’t flown all night. I walked a few steps away, squinting at Tara. I’d never awakened second Sight in someone when I wasn’t already using it. Quite certain it wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had, I held my breath and triggered the Sight.

Time revved up a Roto-Rooter and tunneled through a thousand years of history.

Chapter Three

The landscape changed. Hills reshaped, stone walls rose where none currently stood and in the distance a double row of wooden henges spread out in an unbelievably large circle, containing vastly more area than I expected. I could see modern-day shadows of the new highway cutting through what had once been sacred land, its effect so significant as to mar the world even in retrospect. Mist-softened sunlight caught a hollow between the sets of henges where it had been dug out, and dug deep, to create a true barrier around Tara.

I was accustomed to Looking at Seattle, which wasn’t an old city even by the U.S.’s standards. The Native American settlements there had been so thoroughly bulldozed over that they left depressingly little mark on the modern city. I probably could See them if I needed to, but so far I hadn’t had to.

Tara, despite the highway, despite its long-ago abandonment as a spiritual center, despite the tourists that tromped through it daily, roared with ancient power. Everything within the henge barrier shone brilliant, healing blue, with spikes of yellow that spoke of a warrior heritage. Where they blended, they became adamant green, a color I’d long since associated with the protective, stolid quality of buildings that knew their business as shelters for those within. My vision shifted and shimmered, trying to accommodate the changes Tara had seen. Changes that were still living within the sacred earth: what had gone on here left its mark, year after year, until years turned into centuries and centuries to millennia.

Only one thing remained the same. A white standing stone poked up impudently, barely altered by time. There was life within that stone, more life than the usual shaman-recognized spirit which infested all things. Everything had purpose, but most inanimate objects were rooted and calm and patient.

The standing stone screamed with impatience, a hair-raising shriek that echoed under my skin. I was used to the Sight showing me things beyond the ordinary. It had never before given me the ability to listen in on something that I was certain reached out of this world. I wondered if that was part of the upgrade to the shiny new Siobhán Walkingstick package, or if I’d simply never faced an inanimate object old enough to have a voice of its own.

“What is that?” I had the impression I was walking, an impression confirmed when Gary’s hand closed around my biceps and stopped me from going any farther.

“Hold up, doll. Don’t forget about me.”

“Right.” I turned away from the standing stone, though its voice still shrieked against the small bones in my ears.

Something uncomfortable happened in Gary’s expression as I faced him. His voice dropped half an octave on one syllable: “Jo?”

“Yeah?”

“You look…” He circled one hand, and stopped, still discomfited. I waited for further explanation, which was not forthcoming. After a few seconds my eyebrows went up and I shrugged one shoulder. There was hardly any point in being magically adept if I couldn’t use it to figure out what was bugging my friends, so I stepped out of my body to take a look at me.

Gary was right. I looked “…” and my noncorporeal self made a hand circle just like he had.

I would not have recognized me, eighteen months earlier. Not on the levels that mattered. The height, yes; the spiky short black hair, sure. The slightly too-generous nose with its scattering of freckles: those things remained the same. But my eyes, to hear me tell it, were hazel, while the woman I was looking at had eyes of blaze-gold. A thin scar cut across her right cheekbone, breaking a few of those freckles apart, and she wore cuff earrings—a stylized raven on one ear, a rattlesnake on the other—which I’d never done. Nor did the me of a year and a half ago wear a silver choker necklace or the copper bracelet that barely glinted under the new leather coat, though I would have at least recognized the bracelet. My father had given it to me when I left for college. The necklace had been a gift from my dying mother, barely two weeks before I became a shaman. I didn’t need to see the last of my talismans, a Purple Heart medal given to me by Gary, to know it was there: it lay over my own heart, pinned discreetly inside my shirt. I would probably die of embarrassment if Gary ever found that out.