Shaman Rises (The Walker Papers) (28 page)

The garden inside him was beginning to bloom. It was white fire, burning away the darkness that had bound him for so awfully long. Some part of it shook loose, a small part that modeled consciousness, and met my eyes.

It was dead, it said. It had never really lived. It could not be born now just because I insisted it would be.

“Don’t bet on it, buddy.” It was right, of course. Under normal circumstances, it certainly couldn’t. But I’d left normal behind months ago, and today I had the help of a free god. There had, I thought, never been a person on this earth as stupidly, painfully full of magic as I was right now, and all I wanted to do was get rid of it. I put one hand on the thrashing body’s forehead and the other over its heart, and whispered, “Live.”

Once. Twice. A third time, because three was a lucky number. Then the fire within, the garden I had sown, leaped for the life magic, the healing power, that I now offered it. Love was an unconquerable power, and life called to life. I answered, pouring the borrowed strength of the human heart and the endless power of a god into the birthing of a thing that had gone long unknown, unborn, unloved. It would be known, it would be born, it would know love every day until the day it died, and I hoped it would hurt for every single one of those days.

I had no sense at all of the time it took. It could have been mere seconds or it could have been all of forever, and I wasn’t at all certain it wasn’t both. Whenever it happened, it began slowly and picked up speed, until one of my beloved vehicle metaphors turned the entire process into speeding down a highway, Petite’s windows rolled down, wind in my hair and the needle buried. It was the very fastest thing of all, and yet so slow. Making life, refusing death, was complicated like that.

Slender, delicate hands settled themselves over mine, and the life I had been trying to give this broken form leaped upward, sinking into pale skin. I yelled, clawing at it, but Suzanne Quinley pressed my hands harder against the collapsing body, and challenged me with a gaze of unearthly green.

“He’s my father.”

“He’s not—!”

She curled her hands, taking the Master’s shattered miasma into them. “No. He’s not. But he is, or was, and you need something that can contain him.”

“Suzy, this is what he
wanted,
he
wanted
your body—”

“He wanted,” she said, and her emphasis was so slight as to make mine seem hyperbolic, “to destroy the world. I can See what you’re doing, Joanne. You’ve made life inside a thing that feeds on death. You’ve put love there, and now he loves the world, and that hurts him more than anything else. But if you just let him have this body and then let him go, he’ll go crazy just like Herne did, and then you’ll have a crazy half god to hunt down, just like Herne.

“But right now he’s just a spirit, Jo. He’s not bound to the body yet, not with love. Not the way you want him to be. So if
I
take him, he’s going to suffer exactly what you want him to. He’s going to understand love and loss and all of it, and he’s never going to be able to break away. I’m the granddaughter of a god, Joanne. I’m pretty sure I’m going to live forever, or close enough to count. You want him to be punished? Let me take him. He killed my parents. He killed my father. He’s tried to kill everybody I know and love. He’s going to have to live with all that human pain,
forever.
And it’s never going to make him stronger.” Power streamed off her so brilliantly my eyes watered. “You told me everybody who has power has a choice to make. This is my choice. I’m going to be his jailer, and you’re not going to stop me.”

I looked away once, through tears, at Cernunnos. His face was as terrible as Suzy’s, as stern and as still, but he dropped his head in a single nod.

“Okay.” I hardly heard my own whisper as I turned my palms up beneath Suzy’s, releasing the magic I’d built into her.

It coalesced and resolved, becoming smaller and denser and full of light. Darkness streaked through it, making shadows that tried and failed to dominate. In Suzanne’s palms, it looked like a diamond that had come to life, glittering and surging.

It was beautiful, and frankly, I hated it. I leaned in, speaking to it. “Go away from here. Go with Suzanne, and don’t imagine for a moment that this is a gift. You’ll live. You’ll survive. You’ll feel all the pain you ever wanted, and it will
hurt you,
the way you’ve hurt us. Your only chance of not going mad is learning to live with it, just like we do, and you’ve got this girl here whose heart is a lot bigger—” and a lot crueler, I didn’t say “—than mine. She may be your prison, but she’s your savior, too. You should understand this: stay quiet. Stay very, very quiet. I never. Want. To see you. Again. If you cross my path, if you show your face, I will tear you apart. I will end you. I will...”

I was reaching the “tear up the bits of you and jump on them” stage of threats, and since I had even less chance against a god within a god than I’d had against, well, the Master, it seemed foolish to continue. I lifted my eyes to Suzanne and whispered, “Be careful, Suzy. That thing is dangerous. You be careful, you be smart, and if you ever even
think
you need my help with it, you come running. You hear me?”

She nodded, pale hair cascading over her shoulders as she folded the spark of godhood to her chest. “I promise.”

“Good girl.” I closed my eyes. “Just take it away.”

I didn’t wait to see if she did. I just went inside, went back to the hard white desert with its impossible heat and the flat blue sky pressing down on me.

There was no one else there, just me and the hanging tree.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I waited. I waited a long time, hoping against hope that Coyote, Big or Little, would come back to me. I knew neither of them would, but I still couldn’t bring myself to leave the painfully hot desert. Breathing hurt, but fighting for sips of scalding air made it almost impossible to think about Raven or Rattler, or about Gary’s tortoise, or about Coyote himself. Every inhalation was an agonizing little hiccup, and I was grateful to face that pain, and hide from the rest of it. Sunlight beat through my clothes, bronzing my skin so fast it stung, but that was okay, too. I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay forever, because here it was hot and awful, but it was also silent and a barrier to the ramifications of the past hours.

I didn’t know how long it was until I felt Morrison’s hand on my shoulder in the Middle World, and heard his quiet, concerned voice. “C’mon, Walker. Come back to me. C’mon, Joanie.”

My eyes opened reluctantly. I wasn’t at all certain I’d be able to see, but the obliterating Sight that had burned my vision earlier was now gone. The world was made up of Morrison’s worried smile, and the relief in his blue eyes when mine opened. “There you are. There you are, Jo. You came back to me.”

I leaned forward—the Master’s body that had lain in front of me was gone—and put my arms around Morrison’s neck. Buried my face in his shoulder, and held on. I would have been happy to stay there forever, not letting the world intrude at all, but eventually he mumbled, “I’m sorry, Walker, but there’s a rock digging into my patella. If I don’t move we’re going to have to amputate my knee.”

To my surprise, I laughed. A muffled little sound, but a laugh. I hugged him tighter for one more instant, then let go enough that we could both shift and start to get up.

Finding the Muldoons, the Hollidays, two gods and my father looking down on us was something of a shock. I’d known they were there, but I hadn’t really
seen
all of them, and I stared from one face to another uncertainly. Finally I focused on my father. “Dad?”

“Jo. Anne. Joanne.” Dad paused, then whispered, “Joanie,” and, despite the broken glass and concrete-riddled ground, dropped to his knees to pull me into a hug.

“Dad. Daddy, what are you... How did you even get here? It’s only been, like, a day...a day?” I took my face from his shoulder and looked in bewilderment to the pinkening eastern horizon. “Was it only a day?”

“Shamans can go quite a while without sleep. And that invisibility trick of yours turned out to be pretty helpful on long stretches of speed-trapped highway in the badlands.”

I stared at him. I’d never thought of that. Invisible driving. It would be awesome, except if a semi came out of nowhere. I started to say something like that, wanting to scold him, but it was a little hard to scold a man who’d just driven twenty-four hours straight to be at my side in the nick of time. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Petite’s in the parking garage. She’s fine,” Dad said as my spine straightened.

I was sure she was. I just had the irrational desire to see her. Everything had been turned upside down in the past day, all changed utterly. Seeing Petite would reassure me that
something
hadn’t changed. “Where’s Coyote?”

Morrison’s face went bleak in preparation for giving me the dreadful news. I shook my head, stopping him. “No. I know. I just... I want to see him. I need to see him.”

“Over here, doll.” Gary’s voice was solemn. More than solemn. I let Dad and Morrison help me to my feet. I felt oddly light as they did, like some heavy weight had burned out of me. Everyone, even the gods, stood aside as I walked slowly past them to where Coyote lay on a bier of concrete.

He wasn’t burned or blackened anymore. A small favor, a gift to me, though from whom I didn’t know. His beautiful hair lay quietly, no wind to disturb it, and someone had folded his hands neatly over his breast.

His eyes were closed, but he didn’t look like he was sleeping. His color was wrong, his face too still. I knelt beside him and unfolded one of his hands, hating that it was already cool to the touch, and pressed my forehead against the back of it. After a minute or so, I heard the others slowly move away, for which I was grateful. I heard them shifting, taking seats, speaking quietly among one another as the light gradually changed, but they stayed away, giving me space for things I couldn’t even name. I wasn’t at mourning yet. My rage was burned out, poured into the Master’s punishment and release. I was too tired for anything else, too emptied of emotion. Sooner or later it would come back, but right now, later sounded okay.

I had been sitting there maybe half an hour when a scream like the thunderbird’s tore the air far above me. I flinched out of my solitude and threw shields around my friends, wondering if shields would even protect from a thunderbird’s claws and wondering what a thunderbird was doing hunting us at this late stage of the game anyway, and if the thunderbird even existed anymore, after the fight in the Upper World. We all looked up, hands cupped around our eyes to block out an incongruously brilliant sunrise.

The Space Needle’s restaurant, already at a dramatic cant that tilted opposite of the direction the Needle itself listed, let go of another few yards of height with another metal-rending scream. It jolted to a stop just long enough to notice, then dropped again, and again, glass and concrete and metal shattering with each collapse.

After the fourth, it gave up all hope of retaining integrity and slammed, crashed and bashed its way down the Needle’s slender spire in deafening roars. Dust and debris flew, clouding the clean air. Chunks of metal bounced off my shields repeatedly, and we all shrieked with each impact, so our screams made shrill counterpoints to the impossible noise of the restaurant’s collapse.

The fall itself lasted only a few seconds. The debris took longer to settle. All nine of us, even Cernunnos, just sat there, staring upward through the shimmer of my shield, like Moses on the mountain waiting for the commandments. Bit by bit the ruins came clear as wind swept the dust away to reveal the restaurant caught about halfway down the spire, where it began to flare toward the earth. It looked like somebody had been playing horseshoes with a UFO.

“Well, shit,” I finally croaked. “Somebody’s gonna have to clean that up.”

Then I put my face in my hands and began to cry.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Sunday, April 2, 6:59 a.m.

Cernunnos, unexpectedly, was the one who came to me. He put one hand on my shoulder, turning my sobs to a gasp, then crouched beside me, long and elegant fingers dangling just above the earth. I drew a shuddering breath and dashed tears from my eyes, though they rolled down my cheeks again without a moment’s hesitation. Still, I could see him. Or See him, more accurately.

As somber as he’d ever been, he was also glorious in the rising sun. His fire, the power that so easily blinded me, had new depth to it. It was still green, but it had always been emerald wildfire, a color so rich it had edges. Now there were shades to it, from that pure hard emerald into new leaves and from there into fading grass, with all the subtle differences in between reaching deep into the earth. That was it: when he moved now, it was with a sense of belonging. Like the green of this earth had claimed him. Not that he’d lost the green of Tir na nOg, but looking at him now, I felt like I’d always been seeing only half of what he was supposed to be. Now he was whole.

Whole, but at huge cost. I closed my eyes against his beauty, wondering what had happened to Herne’s body. I wondered what the hell he’d been doing here at all. He had not been part of my plan. Not that I’d had much of a plan, but insofar as I had, it hadn’t included gods dying.

My stomach clenched, ice sheeting over my skin as hot tears scalded my cheeks. I’d been wrong. It hadn’t taken a god to defeat the Master.

It had taken three. One freed, one dead, and one...changed. The truth was, I didn’t know what had happened to, or with, Suzy yet. I was a little afraid to find out. So there were a lot of things behind my apology when I whispered, “I’m sorry, Cernunnos.”

“Thou’rt difficult, little shaman.”

I opened my eyes again to stare at him, waited until it was clear I had to speak next, then said, “I thought we’d settled that ‘little shaman’ thing a while back.”

“We had, and yet in the light of this new day, I find I do not wish to speak thy name quite yet, my shaman. Thou hast done...much, this day.”

“Yes.” We’d also settled the thee-ing and thou-ing thing, but for once I thought maybe the god’s formality—sensual and shivery as it was—might be more appropriate than the more common language I’d become accustomed to from him. My shoulder was against Coyote’s bier, a cold hard reminder of what had changed. As if I needed one. “Sorry for the summoning.”

“No.” Cernunnos barely whispered the word, then took my hand in his. His touch was gossamer, so light that if I didn’t see our fingers intertwining I wouldn’t be certain it was happening. My heart missed a beat and heat rose in my cheeks. I tried hard not to look at Morrison, who was studiously looking the other way.

“Be thou not sorry, my shaman. I might have refused thy call had thy casting not made so clear thy intentions.” A note of doubt lingered deep in the claim: he wasn’t certain he
could
have refused it, but I wasn’t about to call him on that. He shifted a few inches, turning himself toward me. Toward Coyote, to whom he lifted his gaze before he spoke. “It is I, mayhap, who should offer an apology to thee.”

“You sure as fuck should.” I wasn’t talking about Coyote. I wasn’t ready to talk about Coyote. “The
Master,
Cernunnos. The frigging
Master.
You could have
told
me.”

“The Devourer.” Cernunnos had the grace to look away from Coyote and pay full attention to me. “For that, too, yes. What would I have told thee,
gwyld?
That the thing you feared and hated most was half of me? Wouldst thou have trusted me e’er again? No,” he said very softly, “and without trust between us we could never have wrought this day.”

“The
cauldron,
” I said in despair. “You almost dying in Tir na nOg. You bet everything on me and
lied
to me about it.”

“I did not lie.” Cernunnos sounded very slightly affronted. “I withheld truth, but I did not lie.”

“To
may
to, to
mah
to. And you would have killed me back in Ireland, rather than let me become a werewolf. One of his monsters. Only because then
your brother
might have ended up on equal footing with you.”

The silence was very long indeed, before the green god breathed, “Not only.”

He couldn’t have hit me harder if he’d shoved an iron sword through my gut. All my breath went away and left a hollow in my stomach that felt echoed in my gaze. I couldn’t look away from him. Two little words, two words of promise and regret, and every part of me except my vocal cords wanted to demand that he explain himself, that he make that hint absolutely, undeniably clear.

My vocal cords, though, were in rebellion, too tight to speak, and in the end it was Cernunnos who looked away. Looked back toward Coyote’s body, and murmured, once more, “I am sorry. I could not save him.”

“Neither could I.” There it was, raw and broken. The tears started again, wrenching through me in a shudder I felt to the bone. Cernunnos drew me up with his touch. I followed blindly, tears too thick to see through, until he stopped and I bumped into the solid shoulder of a silver stallion.

The beast bent his neck around and shoved his forehead against my arm. I stumbled and he caught me, hooking his big head beneath my arm so I leaned on him. Then he shook me off and pressed his face against my torso. All of my torso: his head went from my collarbones to my thighs, a reminder of how preposterously massive the god’s horse was. I supposed he had to be, to carry Cernunnos in his fully fleshed, broad-shouldered and antlered form.

Mostly when I’d been this close to the stallion, he’d been trying to kill me. This was nicer. I put my forehead between his ears and mumbled something idiotic. He snorted down my pants, then pushed me away and tossed his head. I blinked away tears in time to catch an expressive eye roll before he looked pointedly at his own back.

“We would offer thee a gift,” Cernunnos said quietly, “and ask a boon of thee all at once. Ride with us a final time, my shaman. Not to the stars and not between worlds, but here in this place, through this city. Thou hast made thy people mine, and I thine. I would not leave them broken and ravaged where I can help. The earth is mine as it was my son’s, and it will be soothed by my presence. But the gift of healing is thine, and so I ask thee: ride with me, and help me heal this land.”

“Cernunnos...” I wanted to. I always wanted to, when he asked me, and on this occasion he was asking something different. Usually he was asking for something that would bind me to him irrevocably, and that wasn’t a ride I was willing to take. Not yet. This, though, wasn’t a ride through the stars or time or space. It was a sharing of a world that had become ours, instead of belonging to one of us or the other. I wanted to, and just this once, I thought I might be able to get away with it.

But my father was here. Billy and Melinda were here. Gary and Annie were here, and Suzy, who should not be left alone with strangers right now, was here.

Morrison
was here. And we all had a hell of a lot to work through, and I had finally grown up enough not to walk out on a difficult moment like this. I couldn’t abandon them, much as I might want to go with the horned god.

I was still struggling to find a way to explain that when Morrison said, “Go on, Walker. We’ll manage here. We’ll...” He didn’t quite look at Coyote’s body. “I’ll call someone.”

“Cindy. Heather Fagan’s niece. She works for the coroner and she...understands.” I wasn’t sure how understanding would help explain the death of an apparently healthy and undamaged young man, but it wouldn’t hurt.

“All right. I’ll call you when we’re settled somewhere.”

I lifted my eyebrows, but closed my eyes as I said, “My cell phone is lying somewhere in the middle of Woodland baseball field,” because I didn’t want to see Morrison’s expression at the reminder.

I didn’t need to. The volume of his silence expressed it just fine. “Then we’ll be at your apartment,” he said after a while, then came over to wrap his arms around me.

I startled a little, then buried my face in his shoulder for a minute before mumbling, “Gary’s got a key. Wait. You have my keys.” Of course he did. That was how he’d gotten in to clean up. Either that or he was an expert at breaking and entering, which was too strange a thought to contemplate.

“I have your keys,” he agreed. “Go on, Walker.” He kissed me, then nudged me on my way. I turned back to find Cernunnos watching both of us thoughtfully, and for once was grateful that my powers didn’t include telepathy. I really didn’t want to know what he thought of my relationship with Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department.

Lucky for me, he didn’t volunteer his opinion. He merely leaped onto the stallion’s back with absurd and impossible grace, as if the earth itself had shrugged a little and thrown him skyward.

Or not. I’d watched the earth shrug and throw a lot of people around today, and it wasn’t nearly as pretty as Cernunnos getting on his horse. He offered me a hand. I took it and he pulled me up like I weighed nothing at all, settling me behind him on the stallion’s broad back. The big animal pranced a time or two before looking at Cernunnos, obviously waiting for his cue.

Cernunnos, though, waited on me, his head lowered and turned in profile so I could see the sweep of his bone crown through the tangle of his ashy hair. It swirled and spiked from his temples, protruding horns dangerously sharp. They came together at the back of his head, then spilled downward to strengthen his neck and broaden his shoulders. His scent was musky, more animal than I remembered it being, and I couldn’t help thinking of the first time I’d ridden with him. He’d offered to take away my pain, then. Right now, with my arm around his waist and the line of my body against his, the world I’d just stepped away from, the world the horse still stood on, seemed very far away, and very full of pain. All I had to do was not get off this ride.

I made myself look away from Cernunnos. Made myself look at Morrison, and despite the sudden distance from the world that I felt, I smiled when I saw him. He smiled in return, sad, relaxed, tired, and as abruptly as I’d considered staying with Cernunnos, I considered throwing myself off the horse and back into Morrison’s arms. I didn’t, but it was good to know he had every bit as much pull as the horned god. I gave him a little nod, said, “Okay,” to Cernunnos, and glanced over the rest of my friends as the stallion stretched his legs to take us away. “Wait!”

Cernunnos sat deeper into the stallion’s back, stopping him, and I got the impression both of them, god and beast, verged on snapping, “What
now?
”

“Dad.” I cleared my throat and tried again. “I need Dad. I can heal people. I can heal a lot of people. But Dad can... He does this magic thing,” I said lamely. “He turns blood into roses.”

Cernunnos’s silence briefly matched one of Morrison’s better ones for thunderous. I tried again. “There are people out there, people who are trapped and too badly hurt for me to try healing them. Or there were last night. Yesterday. Whenever that was.” I honestly had no idea how much time had passed. It had been at least a day since I got back to Seattle, but if somebody’d told me it’d been a year and a day, I wouldn’t have doubted them. “If Dad can convert the buildings into...roses...I can heal them.”

“Joanne, I can’t. I don’t have...I don’t have that kind of raw power. Your kind of power.” Dad came up to me, Cernunnos and the horse, and managed not to look too awed by the latter two. Possibly hanging out all night while I threw down with an elemental had taken the edge off, or—more likely, judging from the haggard lines across his face and shadows under his eyes—he was just too damned tired to be awed right now. We all were.

“This once,” Cernunnos said, more than a little dryly, “I think power will not be a problem...” He cast a sideways glance at me and finished with, “Master Walkingstick,” rather than whatever variant of
little shaman
or
puny mortal
had first crossed his mind. He flicked his fingers and the Boy Rider joined us, golden mare dazzling in the rising sunlight. The Boy had always been especially ethereal, even among the Hunt, but today—now, after all of this—he looked somehow as though he’d come into his own. There was new power in the slim lines of his body, and a presence that felt more rooted in this world than he ever had before.

Dad, staring at him, paled visibly. I snorted. “What, afraid of a horse, Injun?”

“Hey,” Gary rumbled. “Perpetuating stereotypes through joking isn’t funny, doll.”

I laughed, even if it was a little watery. “Long time since I said that to you.”

“Long time. Good times.”

“You’re crazy, Gary.”

Dad looked between us like he’d glare if he could get up the energy, and instead took the Boy Rider’s hand, allowing himself to be pulled onto the mare’s back. “I’m not afraid of horses,” he muttered at me as they passed by us. “Riding with gods, though...”

“That one’s only a half god,” I offered helpfully, and got a withering look in response. It lifted my spirits a little and I mashed my face against Cernunnos’s shoulder, rather like he might be a more godly version of Morrison, as I mumbled, “Okay, we can go now.”

He said nothing, because I suspected he wanted to say, “Hnf,” and regarded that as being insufficiently godly, so I was smiling as I turned my head again and waved goodbye to Morrison and the others.

I’d ridden with the Hunt before, but it had always
been
a hunt. It had always been fast, busy, breathless. This time we walked, long-legged horses picking their way carefully over broken ground. Cernunnos didn’t speak, but I felt vast power rolling from and through him: green power. Earth magic. The land didn’t exactly stitch itself back together as we passed over it, but it didn’t exactly
not,
either. Dirt and stone shivered and settled, sometimes swallowing shattered concrete and ruined buildings, sometimes just smoothing them until they were passable.

Time and again we paused when I could feel lives struggling to hang on inside the walls of fallen structures. I wasn’t exactly tired anymore, or empty. I still felt remote, but that was a blessing, something I owed Cernunnos for. Viewing Seattle’s wreckage from within the Hunt was just within the limits of bearable. I would have fallen apart on my own, on foot, and this was exactly the wrong time for me to do that.