"Please don't go," she said, so close she could feel his faltering breath on her cheek. "Not yet.
Not yet
."
With impossible effort he brought his eyes into focus, and then his hand did tighten down on hers, somehow the trigger for tears to spill over her eyelids, one after another and each holding unvoiced misery. He said something—a few words, but no sound behind them, and she had no idea what they were. "I know," she told him anyway. "I'm here." She kissed him, carefully, and said into his mouth over and over again, "I'm here. I'm with you. I'm here," and at some point his breathing grew strange and erratic and then suddenly eased.
Gone
.
She looked up, blinked, looked around.
Gone
. All of them. No sign of the pit bulls. No evidence that Parker had lived a last few frantic moments by the side of the creek, trying to escape his own darkness. Druid, gone; no sign of his furry body anywhere. And the shining silver of Nuadha's light had been replaced by the wash of a gentle rose-dawn.
Nothing but Brenna and a knapsack and a bloody vest, surrounded by a circle of marching silver—some lurching, some flattened, all gleaming with an odd sheen in the morning light.
It was as she sat numbly, contemplating what do to next, coming to terms with the fact that there was no sturdy little Cardigan to bury, to say good-bye to, that she realized the implications of it all.
The dead, gone.
Masera, by her side.
Nuadha, the healing god.
~~~
She threw herself back down beside Masera, frantic for signs of life.
Let me be right, oh please let me be right
—running her hands up and down his chest, seeing for the first time that the horrifying wounds at his throat were closed and healed, the scars there shiny but already fading to white, the broken arm still mangled but not bleeding as it once had been. And his good hand, twitching around a fistful of air as though he expected to find something else there.
She slid her own hand into it, and neither of them were alone anymore.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
CHAPTER 19
RAIDO
Union & Reunion
From the crest of the hill under the oak, the pasture presented an interesting sight, these days after god and darkness had fought their battles through mere flesh.
On the far side of the creek, the bottom pasture—lush and green and crying out for horses—looked virtually untouched by the events of the past week.
This side of the creek was a different story.
The hillside around the spring was scoured clear of grass and thatch; barren, Brenna would have called it, if the persistent green tips of recovering grasses weren't already poking their way into the light. The time since their struggle on the hill didn't lessen the impact of what had happened here. Nor had it eliminated the thrum of life that came up through her bare soles and through her bottom planted firmly on the ground.
Just below marched the disrupted circle of silverware, looking more like a strange child's game than the crucial border of safety it had been. Brenna had already determined to replace the silver with rocks, and to replace the rocks with gradually acquired but more seriously interesting rocks and mineral chunks.
Supposing she still lived here. She'd given her mother a week, and most of those days had tumbled by; she might let it go to two. And then she'd leave. After all, it wasn't as if she had a job here, holding her down. Not anymore.
Just this blessed spring. And the protected circle, within which the grass was as green and happy as that below and showed no signs of the dark blood that had soaked the ground.
As hard as it would be to leave the farm, it would be even harder to leave this circle.
But she could make another. Somewhere.
And, she hoped, not alone.
She leaned over to rub her nose on Masera's shoulder. The good one, the right one, although the padded sling straps passed over it, holding his arm with its cast and its wrappings up at a high angle. Hours and hours in the emergency room, that's what that cast represented. Another day in the hospital, recovering from surgery as the doctors tried to understand how he'd lost so much blood from the arm injury. Brenna kept the truth to herself; when they asked about the silvered scars on his neck, she said airily, "Oh, old dog bite," and left it at that. She'd stayed by his bed with Eztebe, who wormed the whole story out of her in bits and pieces and now treated her like one of the family.
Masera rested his cheek against the top of her head, which of course was what she'd wanted. He had new glasses, matched to the old ones as closely as she'd been able. They still softened his face, easing its hard edges and changing the scruffiness to appear urbanely ruffled. The rest of him was hard to fix—bones and bruises, wrought by Parker's bat as well as pit bull jaws; that, too, showed in his face—as well as a certain muzziness wrought by pain-killers.
"You okay?" she said, now that she had his attention.
"Just thinking," he said. "Still have a few brain cells up to the task. Just then, for instance, I was being grateful that you chose the only safe place to rub your nose on. Just an itch, right? I've got a handkerchief if you need it."
"I
will
smack you," she warned him, though of course she wouldn't. Not on his first day out and about, on Beltane no less—or so Masera called May Day, and seemed to think it was a big deal—with Eztebe waiting for them at Masera's place.
It just seemed right to come here first.
Besides, she knew what he was thinking, and it wasn't about her nose. "You're not still worried about the rabies, are you?"
He gave her the barest of shrugs.
"I'm not," she told him.
"That's quite some confidence."
She smiled serenely, knowing it would annoy him enough so he'd really listen to her instead of barging ahead with his own thoughts. "Maybe I have inside information."
He snorted, then stiffened. "Ow. Don't do that to me. So old Nuadha's dropping messages at your door now, is he?"
"It's not a difficult code," she said. "Look at you. You're a mess. You're not going to work for months—"
"—
Weeks
—"
"—and maybe in a week or so you might even put on a shirt without help. But the injury that would have killed you—" and she traced a finger down the scars on his neck—" is so completely healed that no one can tell it was more than a surface wound."
He caught her finger with his good hand. "Kindly don't do that until I can do something
about
it, would you?"
"Don't duck the point. Druid sacrificed himself for me. Nuadha took that gift, and gave me one in return.
You
. That bite on your neck didn't just
go away
, it was
healed
. You may have had the shedding rabies in your system, but it was healed before I ever got you to the hospital."
He didn't answer. Looking out over the hill, his face drawn and his eyes confused, he didn't answer. She thought maybe it was simply all a little too much, too intense to deal with. After all, she'd had days to think about it. He'd spent that time drugged and just trying to muddle through.
But he surprised her, because once he worked it all through, he said, "If you're right...my blood..."
"Just like Druid's!" Brenna said, sitting straight up. One of her greatest regrets of the past days was that she hadn't done anything with that blood sample, hadn't even thought about it until it had spent far too much time sitting in her anything-but-sterile refrigerator. "But there's no way we could explain it."
"Maybe we don't even try," Masera said. "I'll use the contacts I made when I was working with animal control. The authorities take anonymous tips all the time."
"I doubt they get many with blood samples attached," Brenna said, but not in argument. "Still...if only one person took it seriously..."
"We'll try," Masera said, which was about all that could be said. It left them sitting in the afternoon sunshine again, while Brenna tried to think of all the pleasant times she'd shared this hill with Druid, instead of the last few moments of his life.
Russell to the rescue.
She heard him calling from quite a distance, though he'd never quite gotten the knack of bellowing across pasture distances. Not enough time spent calling in the boarding horses, just like he'd never spent much time with chores on the farm. What he wanted, she knew, was for her to come to him so he wouldn't have to walk all the way out to the oak. She just twisted around to wave to him.
He was puffing by the time he reached them, and whatever greeting he might have had was lost in his shock. "What the hell happened here? What—is that Mother's
silver
?"
"No," Brenna said, having decided that indeed her mother had abandoned it. Which didn't exactly make it Brenna's silver, but neither, strictly, was it her mother's.
Though at that moment she suddenly realized she would have lied to him without qualm, just so she wouldn't have to deal with his reaction. It was a surprising revelation.
"You must be Russell," Masera said, a distinctly cold note in his voice—though not one Russell was likely to notice. It surprised Brenna, who had said little about her family, good or bad. Then again, Masera had never been one to restrict his knowledge of her to what she told him. "Have a seat?"
I'm not getting up
, that's what that meant. Brenna brushed Masera's shoulder with hers and said, "It's a nice day, Russell, and the ground's dry." She patted the grass beside her.
After a hesitation, he realized that she wasn't going to get up to talk to him, but he couldn't bring himself to sit; instead he came down the hill to stand before her, more or less at eye level. It was then she saw his fury, and his irritation at having to suppress it for a stranger. But it showed, to one who knew him—the high color on his cheeks and throat, the set of his shoulders, the way his full eyebrows somehow looked even thicker.
And hope flickered in her throat, fluttering all the way down through her chest and legs and through the soles of her feet into Nuadha's earth.
"I just spoke to Mother," he said, somehow making it a demand. "What have you said to her?"
"Nothing, recently." It was his stage; let him play it out. "I've been busy. Gil Masera, this is my brother Russell. Russell—Gil."
Russell nodded at Masera, a token thing meant to look polite but not the least so; Brenna felt Masera shift into predatory mode, through the drugs and the pain and his distraction. She brushed against him again, murmuring, "It's okay."
So Masera only said, "Brenna's been helping me since I was hurt."