"I didn't—" he hesitated, shook his head in frustration. "All right, I
did
. I didn't want to get into it then. It's a complicated issue—there are as many different kinds of paganism as there are Christianity, and none of them are really what people assume they are." He met her gaze in the darkness and repeated, "I didn't want to get into it. I didn't think it would come up again."
"You were wrong on both counts then, weren't you?" Brenna said, surprising herself with the faint tremor in her voice.
It shouldn't matter
. "Why should I bother to talk to you at all, if I never know when to believe you?"
He rubbed his forehead, as if it pained him. "That's up to you, I guess. My assurances that I've never lied to you probably won't mean much. And just because you ask a question doesn't mean I'm going to answer it."
And she still had too many unknowns orbiting around her. To many to spurn anything—any
one
—that could help her fill them in.
She'd have to pay closer attention to the questions he didn't quite answer.
Like the one she'd asked him moments ago. "
Are
you?" she said. "Sorgin?"
He laughed, a quiet sound. "No. I'm nosy, and I'm a hardass, but I'm not sorgin. I just know what I see and what I feel. Better than most, I suppose."
"Then just what was it that you saw and felt, and that put you on my porch without so much as a phone call?"
"I did call," he said. "You didn't answer. I left a message—go check it."
"In a moment." She leaned back on the heels of her hands and looked up at him, careful not to pull her own hair as it puddled on the ground around her.
He hesitated for so long she thought he was just going to get up and leave—there was a moment she thought he was on his way. Touch and go. Then he sighed, and said, "I felt power. And presence. More than one. The kind of thing that doesn't show up unless it's called. Or at least spoken to, and from the right place. The oak, the spring, the creek..."
"More than one
what
?" Brenna demanded, not about to be the first person to say
a god
. She'd see where he went with this on his own.
But Masera shook his head, the slightest of movements, not taking his eyes from her. "If I had all the facts, I wouldn't be here. You're the one who's got them. And that worries me, because part of what I felt was a dark power. The kind of power you don't want anything to do with."
"As if you know me so well," she said, bitingly sarcastic. From fear, maybe...and maybe because she didn't really want to think about what he was saying. What it meant. How it fit into the events of her life.
He let his breath hiss out through his teeth, a thoughtful sound rather than impatient. "I know you're unexpected," he said, as if it were some profound thing. And maybe, from the look he was giving her, it was.
"And we're having this conversation so I can reassure you that I'm not sacrificing small animals to a dark power?"
"Among other things."
"I'll leave that to Rob Parker." She stabbed the words at him with the anger she felt at Rob—anger she was only coming into, having so recently realized that he was the one who had wreaked such destruction at her private place. "He seems to have the knack."
He stiffened at that. "
Akelarre
," he said, to himself as much as to her, and then shook his head at her, rubbing that spot between his eyes with a finger. "I don't have a translation. Please. Tell me about the spring.
All
about it. You know damned well what I mean."
From a sincere request to a demand within words. He was trying, she realized. Trying to keep the edge out of his voice, trying to be less of a...well, a hard-ass. That he failed so miserably gave her the feeling that she wasn't the only one having trouble—that he wasn't as in control as he liked to think.
Not in a conversation about witches and unnamed powers in her pasture.
"When I was nine," she said, carefully choosing her words, "I read about an ancient god named Mars Nodens."
"One of the jainko," he said.
"You know of him, then?"
"Not specifically. I know the nature of those gods. Their names...they each had so many names. I doubt anyone today knows them all."
"Well, I read that he was a god of healing, and one with a special liking for dogs. Ever heard of the Lydney Hound?"
Wordlessly, he shook his head. Not daring to use words, now, in case the interruption made her change her mind about this conversation.
"Doesn't matter. I wanted something, and I went to ask Mars Nodens for it. Like you said—the oak, the spring; they were in this article I read. I didn't know that they were sacred pagan things in general—I didn't know anything about it. I asked for what I wanted, and I left something important to me in return."
"Your hair," he murmured.
She looked at him askance, glad the night was bright enough so he'd see it. "Do you forget
any
thing you hear?"
"Not the important things. Did you get what you wanted?"
"I suppose I did. And more. That's when the strays started showing up on our doorstep. It seems like back then, I always knew what to do for them. How to talk to them. That sucks something rotten, you know? When I was a girl, I would have known what to do for Druid."
"You
did
know what to do for him," Masera said. "You just needed someone to tell you so."
Maybe so.
"That's it, then?" he said when she didn't respond out loud. "All you did with the spring?"
"Kinda looks like it was enough, doesn't it?"
He shook his head decisively. "Not entirely. The
akelarre
. What about Parker?"
"Oh, that." Brenna scowled with the anger of it. "Four years ago, Parker and two of his buddies made a mess of the whole spring area. They had ATVs; they tore the place up. Made a fire, left their beer cans everywhere. And a dead rabbit. Just left it impaled on a stick, jammed it into the ground. It was sickening. I only just figured out it was him."
The jerk
.
She wasn't sure, but she thought his eyes had gone hooded—his
beware
face. But not at her. "Who were the others?"
She shifted in the grass, making Druid stir and sigh and mutter to himself. "Toby Ellis and Gary Rawlins. Both dead. Toby, shortly after that night. And Gary right before Parker came back to this area." She recalled the moments of sitting under the oak, wondering if Parker would return, would really make trouble. "I don't understand why the place is so important to him. He goes there nearly as often as I do, as far as I can tell. He said it draws him. But I'm not sure what I believe of anything he says, anymore."
"I think you can believe that," Masera said in a low voice. He came off the porch, crouched before her. His hand rested on Druid's shoulder, his fingers brushing her ankle. "Brenna, listen. I don't know Mars Nodens, but I know what you did. You turned that spring into a sacred place. A powerful place. You made it a connection between you and him."
"You're messing with my Christian philosophy of life," she said, trying to make it light and hating the shaky note in her voice. The one that said how much it mattered to her.
He shook his head, short and sharp. "They're not mutually exclusive. And that's not the point right now. The point is, you made a place of power and you kept it up."
"I was keeping up
my dog's grave
," she said, feeling stubborn again, and crowded.
"It doesn't
matter
, Brenna—you kept it up. You went there and you maintained your connection with the place. With the power. You kept it living."
"And that's
bad
?"
"What's bad is that Parker and his friends went to a place of power and performed—no matter how inadvertently—the equivalent of
akelarre
. They threw raw emotion around the place, they sacrificed an animal. They created something of their own. They were angry, out-of-control young men. What do
you
suppose they created?"
She gave him a defiant stare; at this range she could hardly fail to meet his eyes, even in the darkness. And she didn't squirm back, didn't put any more distance between them. To do that would mean that his closeness mattered. "A
mess
, that's what they created."
He smacked his hand against the ground, making her jump; Druid sprang upright and warily inspected the area, only slowly relaxing; his ears stayed canted back at Masera's tone. "
Stop
it, dammit! This isn't about you and me, this is about something dark and dangerous that formed in the very place of power you created!"
For an instant she was furious, and glared it at him. "If you're in my face, then it's about you and me!"
He blinked, seemed to realize she had a point, and eased back to sit on one heel. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and it was his effort to regain composure that got to her, let her know just how important he considered this conversation. Much more quietly, he said, "Parker may not know what's dogging him, but he's going to figure it out soon enough. It'll use him, like it probably used his friends before him. And pretty soon he's going to figure out how to use
it
. Or he'll
think
he has—but that kind of thing never truly belongs to anyone. It goes feral the moment it's made."
"Okay," she said slowly. "Okay." It occurred to her that a month ago she would have thought he was, if not nuts, at least full of crap. That she would have meant something entirely different when she said
okay
, something more like
it's a free country, believe what you like
. But here, now, with weeks of weird episodes and weird feelings behind her, with an inexplicable dog by her side and someone else's memories occasionally intruding upon her thoughts...