C.E. Murphy – Shaman Rises (страница 9)
Well. It meant we’d barely timed this right. If Morrison and I had been half a day later in arriving from North Carolina, the vortex would’ve gotten to Annie before I did. As it stood, I was afraid to dig her out for fear we’d both go flying up into the great mouth of darkness in the sky. I was going to have to go down to her.
Goose bumps stood on the back of my neck and swept down my arms, sending a chill into my belly, where it churned around a little bit. I had never had a problem with enclosed spaces until two weeks ago, when I’d had to make a mad run out of a collapsing cave system. Since then, I’d discovered a growing tendency toward heebie-jeebies when presented with squeezing myself into tight spaces, which had happened more often than seemed reasonable in a mere two weeks. The upshot was a quick internal lecture about tough luck and the lesson therein, not that I could think of any useful lessons beyond “Stop getting embroiled in mystical altercations that squish you into crevasses and cracks,” which seemed like sound, but possibly unfollowable, advice.
I knocked some of the thinning pit floor away with my elbows and knees while ruminating over all of that, and fell five feet onto Annie Muldoon’s crypt.
This had all started with a crypt, or darned near, anyway. Me and Gary, we’d gone hunting for a lady I’d seen from an airplane, and we’d shoved the top off a church altar that we’d started thinking of as a crypt as soon as Gary had wondered out loud if maybe a vampire was in it. I had sworn up and down that there was no such thing as vampires, and indeed, there had been no vampire, only a screaming woman who ejected herself from the altar-cum-crypt at a high velocity.
“You can scream,” I told Annie through my teeth, “but if you turn out to be a vampire I am going to be really pissed off. Vampires don’t exist.”
Annie, sleepily, murmured, “Of course they do.”
I screeched and bucked backward. The vortex howled delight and tried to seize me. Swearing, I dug my fingers into Annie’s cocoon and hauled myself closer to it. Her lashes untangled, revealing eyes that were vividly green in the cocoon’s light. I wondered what color they were supposed to be and muttered, “There are. No. Vampires.”
Annie’s gaze and voice both grew clearer, as if she was just learning to focus. “What on earth do you imagine the Master is, Joanne? Oh! Joanne!” Even caught in the cocoon, she reached for me like a mother might, fingertips trying to graze my cheekbone. “I know you,” she whispered in astonishment. “You’re my Gary’s Joanne. My father painted you.”
I gave myself a quick look to see if I’d been war-painted recently without noticing. I hadn’t, or at least not on any body parts that were easily visible. A couple seconds later I realized that probably wasn’t what she’d meant, and turned red enough that I could see my skin turn a sickly brown in the sarcophagus’s green glow.
“Am I dreaming?” Annie asked, then looked pained. “How many patients have I heard say that, but...I remember...I remember...I was dying. The god came. The god.” Her eyes widened in a breathless admiration I knew all too well. “The horned god. Did he really come? There was the stag and the cat,” and she took a moment out of her admiration to look exasperated at the very idea, which made me absolutely adore her. I was going to bring her home not just for Gary, but for me, because I couldn’t help but love anybody whose estimation of a big-cat spirit animal was in league with mine. “The cat,” she repeated, “the cat and the light. The white—oh. Oh. I am dead, aren’t I. I was a nurse too long, young lady. Don’t imagine I haven’t heard people talk about the white light.”
“You’re not dead.” My voice cracked. “And I’m going to keep you that way. I’ve looked into that white light more than once. Usually it’s just the sun trying to burn out my retinas.”
Perplexity slid across her face, then turned to a smile. Probably she hadn’t imagined death to involve people muttering about burned-out eyeballs, which probably gave her some hope that I was telling the truth. “But then what’s happened to me? To Gary?”
“Gary’s waiting for you, sweetheart. Cernunnos stole you out of time, put you to sleep in Tir na nOg, until I could come help out. You know me.” My voice cracked again and tears stung my nose. “And I’m going to. I’m going to save you, Annie.”
“No, I wasn’t sleeping. I dreamed...I dreamed I was...” She trailed off like the dream had escaped her, as they do, and seriousness rose in Cernunnos-green eyes. “You can’t save everyone, Joanne. Sometimes we make sacrifices so others can live. Don’t imagine you can’t sacrifice me, if you need to.”
“Sacrifices are what the bad guys make,” I whispered. “Sacrifices are—”
Realizations tumbled together in my mind, pieces crashing into place, making a picture I’d never even known I was supposed to see. Cernunnos and Tir na nOg had come so close to death with the cauldron. All of a sudden I thought it hadn’t just been the Master taking advantage of the cauldron’s bindings breaking. It had been his move against Cernunnos for stealing Annie from him. Kill Tir na nOg and Annie would die, too. Cernunnos had nearly sacrificed everything, betting on me. And he’d won. There had been no sacrifice of his godhood, of his world. I’d thwarted it, even if I hadn’t known it at the time. Things kept coming together, circles closing.
Boy, the Master had to hate me right down to the black burned bones of his rotten soul.
That made me happy. More than happy. Absofreakinglutely joyful, and with that joy came a spike of gunmetal magic that shot skyward, spiking through the vortex.
Its pull faltered and a sense of shock washed through me, as if the vortex itself hadn’t expected me to fight back at all. As if the thing on its other side hadn’t imagined I had it in me. I pressed a finger against Annie’s cocoon, near where her own hand had tried to reach for me. “You hang out here a minute. I’m going to go spit in death’s eye.”
Two minutes earlier I’d have said getting to my feet would be asking to be sucked into the netherworld the Master commanded. Two minutes earlier I might have been right, but things had changed since then. Annie Muldoon was alive and, as far as I could tell, human through and through. A god had bet the rent on me and won. My best friend had traveled through time to save the woman he loved, and the man I loved believed in me.
If I ever needed grounding, those things would always be there. I stood up, digging my toes into the shimmering green softness that contained Annie. It was cool and earthy, centering me in my world and in Tir na nOg. I thrust my left hand toward the sucking vortex and shouted.
My rapier, the aos sí–crafted blade of silver that I’d taken from Cernunnos the first time we met, materialized in my hand. Shamanic power poured into it, healer and warrior no longer at odds with each other. It gathered, strengthened, readied itself, and when I shouted again and thrust the sword skyward, a burst of magic cracked forth like lightning from a bottle. The vortex sucked it in, encouraging it to run faster, until the first splinter of power touched it. Then the vortex shied back, rejecting the shamanic magic. I stabbed upward again, sending another shock upward.
I felt like Conan. I felt like Red Sonja in white leather instead of a chain-mail bikini. I felt like a match for the dark side of the Force, and I was going to take one more toy from the Master right now, because I could. “This one’s mine, you bleak bastard! The gods chose this one, you mean son of a bitch, and you can’t do a thing about it. I choose this one,” I said more softly, “and you’re not taking her away.”
I knelt, still with power pouring through the sword. The Master wasn’t going to let us go easily, once he got over his surprise at my audacity, so I dug my fingers into Annie’s cocoon, working my way through its ferociously green threads. Cernunnos’s strength was a lover twining around my hand, clinging to my arm, searching for a way into my heart.
I let it in. I had to: I could never shield myself against the horned god. He was too primal and too enticing, and had etched himself in my soul the first time I’d laid eyes on him.
But neither was I his. He’d offered me a place at his side time and again, and three times, I’d taken it. I’d ridden with him and his Wild Hunt, and I knew in my core that if I rode with him again I would lose my humanity, and want nothing but the god. For all my fears and uncertainties, I still wanted my human life. I wanted Morrison. I wanted the future we could share, if we were that lucky. If we survived this. So no matter how deeply Cernunnos’s power ran or how eagerly it prodded, I wouldn’t let it steal me away. Annie needed his strength more than I did right now, and I intended to leave her everything I could.
Thread by thread, Annie’s features came clearer as Cernunnos’s magic recognized mine and released its prize to me. Here, under the god’s care, in the heart of his magic and at the center of her garden, she was young and lovely, with humor and spark in her face. My fingers touched hers, then wrapped around her hand. I pulled her to her feet, surprised at how tiny she was: nearly a foot shorter than me, and dressed in a full-skirted 1950s dress that made the most of her small waist. She reminded me of Gary in his own garden, a young man in his prime, handsome, fit, confident. They were a beautiful couple, and I was going to see them back together in the Middle World.