Dark Vision (32 page)

Even to my own ears, my voice resembled that of a lab rat being tortured: I was squeaking several octaves higher than usual, and felt like all the air had been punched out of my lungs. Jesus. So, I had to agree to be Gabriel’s mate, or the world as I knew it ended, and he topped himself? Wow. No pressure there, then.

‘I do not understand, girl, why you squeak so?’ said the Morrigan, frowning in confusion. ‘If you do not care for him enough to take him as mate, why would it cause you concern to see him dead?’

That, I decided, was the kind of question only a centuries-old otherworldly being could ask. And there wasn’t enough time left to try and explain it all to her now.

‘Anyway,’ she continued, seeing that I was too busy hyperventilating to reply, ‘I still do not understand why you would choose not to mate him, when so much rests upon your answer. I have been wanting to ask this of you since we met in my other form.’

I dragged myself out of puffabilly land long enough to stare at her again. We’d never met before, in this form or any other. She wasn’t the kind of woman you easily forgot.

‘Look closer,’ she said quietly, reading my reaction, and smiling spookily with one side of her mouth.

I did as I was told and looked harder at her, trying to recall if she was one of those faces from the past that Gabriel had mentioned. Someone who’d been lurking on the edge of my life without me even knowing it.

When that failed, I tried half squinting my eyes, as though distorting the angle to get a different picture would help. But no – she was still a ginger-haired behemoth, squatting in the corner, looking amused.

I drew in a breath, suspecting this was one of those occasions when looking with my eyes wouldn’t be enough. I closed them, as they were useless, and instead called up the power that Fionnula had told me I had. I started with the white – I do like my routines – and blanked out everything else, scooping it all to one side as though there was a moving wall that bulldozed the present away. It was, as she’d predicted, getting easier. Maybe I’d even be able to experiment with different colour schemes soon.

When my mind was clear, I opened my eyes again – and that’s when I saw it. A flickering around the edges of her body; a dark juddering atop her shoulders. The fluttering got stronger, and the colours coalesced into an iridescent black. Shining, oil-dark wings unfurled and haloed around her, swooping up and down, fanning tendrils of red-and-white hair up around her face. Her human shape was still there – but the wings surrounded her, like a moving curtain of black satin.

It was lucky I was already on the floor, or I’d have been crash landing on my backside any minute now.

She was the crow. The crow from the hospital. The crow Coleen said had come for her.

My fists clenched so hard a spike of pain shot up from my damaged finger, and my concentration shattered. The wings disappeared, leaving nothing but a smirk on the Morrigan’s face, and confusion on mine.

‘You?’ I spluttered. ‘You took Coleen?’

‘I didn’t take her, you fool – it was her time. She knew that, and so do you – surely you had foreseen it? Her miserable existence had come to an end, and that was nothing to do with me. I was there only to share the moment with you, Goddess. But other times … yes, other times I take people, and I
relish
it,’ she said, her lips twisting into a joyous grin.

‘That’s why they’re all so scared of me – why they grovel so. They fear that, one day, I may land on their shoulder during battle. Is it not so, Champion?’

Carmel had gone pale – which is quite an achievement for someone with her colouring. The black cotton stitches stood out even more starkly as she gulped in air, and struggled even to nod. I was a bit freaked out, but Carmel seemed to be in the grip of a genuine, voice-stealing terror. I had no idea if she’d seen what I’d seen, but she was quaking like a very shocked blancmange.

I felt magic crackling in the air, and the Morrigan seemed to shimmer with energy – her body floated a few inches up from the ground as she smiled, apparently reliving glorious moments from battles gone by. Her hair was lifting with her, streaks of red and silver reaching out to the corners of the room as she laughed quietly away to herself. Death, disaster, mayhem. Such jolly times. Meet Mentor Number Two – a sociopathic crow to follow Fionnula the alcoholic dolly bird. No wonder I wasn’t exactly rocking out in goddess school.

The shimmer faded, and she hovered back on to her substantial haunches, muscular thighs swelling through leather that crackled and groaned as she resettled herself.

‘I still cannot grasp it, though, child,’ she continued, as though nothing at all out of the ordinary had happened, ignoring or simply not noticing the fact that Carmel and I were cowering out of reach.

‘Erm … what?’ I asked, hoping it wouldn’t be anything that was likely to get her all happy and excited again. She was hard enough to deal with when she wasn’t levitating and laughing like an evil genius.

‘I cannot grasp why you cling to your objections. Is Cormac Mor repellent to you? Do you find his physique not sufficient for your demands?’

‘No! There’s nothing wrong with his … physique!’ I gasped out, so not liking the way this conversation was going. I wanted to put my hands over my ears and sing out loud to avoid what I suspected was coming next.

‘Indeed there is not,’ she said emphatically. ‘Many women have lusted after him over the decades – he is much younger than I, but still I find he incites desire within me. Is it that you doubt his sexual prowess, then? You need not fear on that front – he was been well trained, and shared his bed with thousands of willing partners during his short life.’

Eek, yuck, and poo. His
short
life? And
thousands
of partners? Was this really supposed to be convincing me? I saw from the Morrigan’s serious expression that the answer to that was a resounding ‘yes’, and realised we were experiencing what you might call a mild culture clash. I’d grown up in the era of safe sex and condoms, and in my particular case, latent Catholic indoctrination – never mind my own problems with skin-to-skin contact. I was feeling a slight roiling sensation in my stomach, and had no words to express what I wanted to say. They simply didn’t exist.

Carmel looked at me, at my mouth flapping and skin flaming, and managed to find her voice again. Ever the Champion.

‘It’s like this, Morrigan,’ she said. ‘Lily doesn’t do men. Not so far, at least.’

‘You mean she prefers women?’ the Morrigan replied. ‘Because that is not the impression I formed when she tried to couple with both the vampire and the High King this evening …’

‘No!’ replied Carmel, nipping that train of thought in the bud. ‘I mean she doesn’t do
sex
, full stop. Her visions have left her … a little behind on that front. She’s playing a big game of catch-up, and, well, being forced to choose a mate when she’s only just started snogging is a bit of a head fuck for her.’

Eloquently put, I thought. Couldn’t have said it better myself – mainly because I was still guppy-gulping.

The Morrigan stared over at me, and narrowed her glittering eyes.

‘You mean you have lived without touch for all these years?’

I nodded, and met her gaze as brazenly as I could, considering that I was about to poo my pants. It’s not my fault that I’ve lived the way I have, and I wasn’t going to start apologising for it. That was someone else’s job.

‘Then I better understand your worries,’ she said. ‘You are but a child in the ways of man and woman, and deserve more kindness than I have shown you thus far.’

She went silent, screwing the top off her bottle and casually crushing the plastic cap with her fist, and I wondered if she’d finished. She downed the water in one, then crushed the bottle too. Maybe all the crushing helped her concentrate.

‘You should know, Goddess, right now,’ she continued, just when I was starting to think it was safe to breathe again, ‘that nobody will be forcing you to do anything. If you choose Cormac as your mate, it can be ceremonial to begin with – a ritual that needs not be followed with the carnal act until you are ready. Until you have more … experience? And accepting him as your mate also does not mean that you must take him and him alone to your bed – that is not our way. You will always be free to take more – even the vampire, if that is what pleases you.’

I couldn’t see Gabriel being less than pissed off about that one, but hey, it was good to know. Maybe subconsciously my whole reluctance was based on wanting to get out there and slut around a bit – and from what the Morrigan was saying, I could still do that. I could have my beefcake and eat it. Yay.

She crawled across to me, and I instinctively shied away. Because, you know, she was huge and terrifying and could turn into a crow that ate people.

When my back reached the wall, and there was nowhere else to run to, she reached out and took my hand. Hers was half as big again, and her skin was cold and calloused and ridged with scar tissue.

‘Look at me, girl,’ she said, in her best
or-else
voice.

I looked at her.

‘Now, we will sleep. Tomorrow, we will learn. And when night falls, we go to Tara, where you will choose your fate. But hear me, and remember this: I am your protector, and your servant. If any man – mortal, High King or god – lays a hand upon you that you did not invite, I will slay him where he stands, crush his bones beneath my feet, and feed his entrails to the dogs.’

Huge. Terrifying. And on my side.

You see a lot of interesting things on a late-night bus in Liverpool. I’ve spent years riding them, people-watching, huddled on my own by the window, dreading the inevitably huge woman with seventeen shopping bags who usually wants to sit next to me and share her life story over a packet of custard creams.

There was the man who smelled of wee and read
The Economist
upside down; the woman from Haiti who muttered sinister-sounding curses under her breath every time the bus stopped to let someone on. And – my personal favourite – the old lady who had to be, like, a hundred and counting, with a carrier bag full of brochures for 18-30-style holidays, flicking through them, gnashing her bare gums and cackling, all the way to Aigburth.

This time, I suspected we were the weirdest people on there, and we were getting the surreptitious glances to prove it. The Morrigan loomed large behind us, her sheer bulk – and the battle-ready glint in her eyes – deterring even the most hard-faced scallies from daring to sit next to her. Carmel looked almost like a normal girl, until you noticed the jagged, fresh scar across her face with its stylish shabby-chic stitches.

And me?

I had my new hairdo. I’d woken up that morning channelling Morticia Addams, with a huge dazzlingly white streak in my hair. It ran from root to tip on the left side of my face, and no matter how much I tried to mix it in with the rest of the red, I kept catching sight of it from the corner of my eye. I looked like the Morrigan’s wannabe little sister.

It wasn’t that it was unattractive – it had a certain Goth pizazz, to be honest. But the fact that my life was now so weird that my hair had spontaneously started to change colour overnight was right up there on the freakity-doo-dah scale. I’d yelped when I’d first seen it draped over my face as I emerged from the shockingly warm cocoon of my army-issue sleeping bag.

Both the Morrigan and Carmel had leaped into action to do some heavy-duty laying-down-of-souls on my behalf – which was very sweet of them – but there was nothing they could do to help, unless they happened to have a bottle of Casting Creme Gloss about their person, and knew how to use it.

‘It is nothing – merely the sign that you have given life, as you are meant to do,’ pronounced the Morrigan, inspecting the snow-white streak with complete indifference.

‘What do you mean, “given life”?’ I shrieked, wondering if I’d accidentally gone through labour in my sleep. Immaculate conception and then some.

‘The vampire,’ she sneered, obviously laughing it up inside big time at the way I was reacting. And I got that – I mean, in the ultimate scheme of things, my hair really didn’t matter. Except, you know, I
am
still a girl – and hair always matters.

‘You gave him your blood, and with that you gave him life. This is what happens,’ she said, back to her you-are-a-mental-patient voice, and then added, ‘Look at my hair, child – see how it glows!’

She shook her mane around in an unintentional parody of a shampoo advert, sunlight filtering through the white-and-red tresses.

‘You … you’ve given a lot of life,’ I muttered as I looked. It was hard to tell whether it was red striped with white, or the other way round.

She laughed so hard I felt the floor vibrate through the sleeping bag; she held her stomach as if to stop her sides from literally splitting. It was the kind of laugh that could cause tsunamis and earthquakes, and wild horses to stampede across the prairie. I must be
so
funny.

‘No, child,’ she said, once she’d got herself under control, wiping tears from beneath her eyes. ‘Death! I have given a lot of death! And every one is marked here, on my head … I carry them all as marks of honour.’

Carmel was looking at her in sheer admiration while absently running her fingers through her own hair. I hadn’t asked, but I was guessing she had dispatched a few the night before. Guess we’re not all lucky enough to get the Supernatural Barbie makeover.

We’d spent some time in the flat talking – well, mainly listening, in my case. It’s fair to say the Morrigan had been around the block a few times, before possibly going on to demolish it. She knew a lot of stuff – about Gabriel, about Fintan, about Tara and what would happen there – that I was glad to know.

She also taught me some useful things about my own powers, puny as they seemed to her, and how to better harness them. As if that wasn’t enough, I now had logged in my brain several quick ways to gouge out an eye with my thumb, and stop a man in his tracks by crushing his windpipe.

‘Ignore the genitals,’ she’d said, snarling. ‘They are always the first to be guarded. The fools leave far more important flesh exposed to attack every time. Oh, I could tell you so many tales of men I have killed, ripping out their throats as they stand there cupping their hairy balls!’