C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

He chuckled against my hair, then drew a deep breath. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

I wrapped my arm over his ribs and hugged him as hard as I could. “I’d say ‘anytime,’ except if you ever do something like that again I’ll kill you myself.”

“Nah, you wouldn’t. Who’d go on all these crazy adventures with you then?”

“Billy. Morrison, the poor bastard. Random strangers getting swept up in my wake. Ha—” The last sound wasn’t a word, just an inhaled breath that Gary rumbled a laugh over.

“Yeah yeah yeah. Look, I hate to break our quality time up, Jo, but wasn’t there a bad guy here a minute ago?”

We both pushed up on our elbows. The Morrígan’s disappearing act had left no trace of where she’d gone. Brigid, though, sat against the bloodstained Lia Fáil, one hand pressed to her chest. I whispered, “Shit,” and scrambled to her on hands and knees, then stopped with my hands hovering above her, half-afraid to touch her, totally afraid to try healing her after the disaster with Lugh. “Jesus, are you okay?”

“Well enough.” Her voice was faint, and her overflowing aura weak. I bit my lower lip, waking healing power, but she shook her head. “Not in this time and place, I fear. My sister’s strength is the greater here. Do not expose yourself to her any more than you must.”

“You look like you could use some must.”

She smiled, but it faded. “Do not concern yourself with me. Concern yourself instead with my sister. I had meant to follow her to her master’s lair, to the cauldron’s seat—”

“But instead you took one for the team. Um, thanks for that. I think you might have saved my life there. That was a lot of power she threw at me.”

“Yes. Her success would have been unparalleled, had she taken your life so far out of your time. I could not allow that, even—” She sighed and I finished for her:

“Even if it meant losing her and the cauldron? I dunno, Bridge. Magic’s damned hard to track. Unless you’re better at it than I am.”

Brigid shook her head. I nodded and glanced at the sky. Raven had been up there somewhere, fighting with the Morrígan’s ravens. “I don’t suppose you know where they all went, do you?” I asked him, and he flew down out of the sunlight to whack me on the head with a wing. “Yeah, sorry, I didn’t think so. Next time I’ll try not to lose the bad guy. You did a good job kicking her ravens’ asses, though. Shiny food in your future.”

Raven cawed with pleasure and faded away. Gary came to crouch beside me looking big-eyed and happy as a kid in a candy store. “I saw him, Jo. Your raven. I saw him.”

I smiled, then leaned over to hug him again, hard. “Welcome to having the Sight, Mr. Muldoon. All right, let’s head for Knocknaree so we can kill that bitch. Look what she did to my coat. ”

Gary grinned a little. “You’re gonna kill her over a coat, Jo?”

For some reason it wasn’t as funny as it should be. I shook my head. “I’m going to kill her for cutting your throat. The coat was just petty.”

“Good to know I’m loved.”

“You are,” I said, still solemn. “You are.” Then in a rush of delight, I smacked his shoulder. “Dude! Dude, you totally busted her nose, you know that, right? How many people get to say they head-butted a goddess?”

Gary chortled, then tried to disguise his pleasure by saying, “Thought you said she wasn’t a goddess.”

“Oh, ffssht. Close enough for government work. Okay, Knockna…” We were several thousand years in the past. There were no itty bitty Irish cars to drive on the itty bitty Irish roads. In fact, I bet there weren’t even many itty bitty roads to drive on. “…just where is this Knocknaree place?”

“In the West.” Brigid sounded like Galadriel, except I was pretty sure she only meant the west of Ireland, not some far-off land of everlasting peace and calm.

From our perspective, however, the difference was negligible. Ireland wasn’t a big island, but a couple hundred miles was a long way when you were traveling on foot. I exhaled noisily. “I don’t suppose we can go home, drive over and meet you there in a few thousand years, huh? You oughta be able to make it there by then.”

“I think not,” a brand-new voice said, and Brigid faded away.

I refused to flinch. It took every last bit of willpower, but I refused to flinch. Instead, with all the panache at my command—which wasn’t much—I said, “I’m getting tired of mysterious voices and people disappearing,” to Gary before I allowed myself to look around.

The air had changed quality: mist sparkled more, like bits of ice rode on it, and my breath steamed as another of the annoyingly beautiful, slightly inhuman aos sí came up on us. This one looked like he’d been dipped in silver from his hair to his boots. I’d never seen genuinely silver hair before; even Cernunnos’s was really brown and ashy. This guy’s actually shone like the metal. My gaze fell to his left hand.

It was silver, the knuckles gleaming and flexing like molten metal as they moved. I stared at it, mesmerized, then shook myself. “You’d be Nuada, then.” I gave myself bonus points for pronouncing it correctly. He didn’t have to know I’d only just learned how.

“I would be. And you would be…” He was silent a long time, then cleared his throat uncertainly. “You would be my bride? The Morrígan?”

My jaw fell open and my eyes went googly while Gary had a good laugh. While it was nice to know having his throat cut hadn’t changed his laughter, it was also clear Nuada wasn’t keen on being the butt of a joke. I elbowed Gary, who manned up and stopped laughing as I said, “No, my name’s Joanne. The Morrígan’s stepped out for a bite to eat.”

Gary snorted laughter again. I elbowed him harder, to no avail. “Look, no, sorry. She just took off with Lugh, and Brigid disapp—”

“Lugh?” Nuada’s eyebrows made a heavy silver line across his forehead. “Lugh is half a year gone. How else might I be here, ready to wed the Morrígan?”

“What?” I’d thought the days of me saying “What?” all the time were past. Apparently not. “No, he just died not ten min—”

“Died?”

Oh yeah. The aos sí weren’t hip to the actual goings-on with the Morrígan. I started to cast my gaze heavenward, as if to gather strength for an explanation, but it got only about as high as the horizon before Nuada’s sword was at my throat. He repeated, “Died?” and it didn’t take a super genius to grasp that I was up next on the list of dead people.

Panic was clearly the right response. Panic, some flailing, a frantic explanation; all the sorts of things I’d done before. They’d gotten old, though. This time I just sighed and said, “The Morrígan killed him, your royal nitwitness, not me.”

His sword poked half an inch closer, which was enough to part the skin on my throat.

Or it would have been, if I hadn’t finally learned the habit Coyote had been trying to hammer into me my entire shamanic career: shields up, Captain. Shields up at all times.

Nuada’s sword rubbed against the glimmer of power layering my body, and didn’t so much as leave a scratch. The Morrígan hadn’t drawn blood, either. I had the damned werewolf to thank for that: she had driven home what Coyote had failed to. Unfortunately, she’d only done so after she’d bitten me. There was an argument for better late than never, but I probably wasn’t the person to be making it.

The silver-handed elf king’s forehead wrinkled ever so slightly. He pushed a little harder and the sword, rather than sticking in my gullet, began sliding sideways. Chagrined, he pulled it back into place, but stopped leaning into it. “What are you?”