C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

Somewhere in there I’d come around to accepting that the Morrígan was my great-to-the-umpteenth-grandmother. That Méabh, who had removed the necklace, basically had to be both the Morrígan’s daughter and some distant ancestor of mine. The blood demanded it. I still protested, albeit much less convincingly than I’d have liked. “I can’t possibly be the Morrígan’s granddaughter. We’re on totally opposite sides.”

“Like all children of power, Méabh had a choice. She chose the light, as have all her children in turn.”

For some reason I thought of Suzanne Quinley again. There was a kid with a whole lot of power. I wondered if she even knew she had a choice in front of her. I might have to talk to her about that someday. Because after all, I was so very, very good at choosing wisely when it came to great cosmic powers. Exasperated, afraid and unable to give in gracefully, I muttered, “Yeah, okay, fine, whatever. Didn’t Méabh have like twelve kids all named Finnoula or something? Maybe I’m one of their descendants, sure. I’m probably one of Genghis Khan’s, too. Everybody on the damned planet is. Or Charlemagne, or, I don’t know, Cleopatra. No, that’s reincarnated. Anyway, great, that’s dandy, but I’m not the heir to a defunct Irish throne.”

“You might be,” Brigid murmured, “if you were willing to accept that fate.”

I barked laughter, finding bitterness easier than acceptance. “Lady, you have no clue how much fate I’ve already taken in the teeth. I don’t need any more. All I want is to find my friend. And…” An obvious question finally surfaced. I straightened up, frowning. “Brigid, what are you doing here? Last I knew you’d…”

She hadn’t vanished, per se. Not the way the Morrígan had. Brigid had faded, becoming ephemeral beside the standing stone. “Last I knew you’d saved my life and then time shifted and you were gone. You obviously bound the cauldron, because all that happened to me back in October. So what are you doing here with a fritzed-out aura that looks like it only just now took the Morrígan’s best shot?”

“We are sides of a coin, she and I,” Brigid said. “My weakness is her strength, and I have been weak since that day. She might have slain me then, had you not been there, pulling time askew. Because of that, I have only touched time, where she has traveled through it.”

For a moment I just didn’t get it. Then my eyebrows pinched so hard my head hurt. “You mean you, like…you’ve been bouncing through time? Like a skipping stone?” I mimed throwing one. Brigid nodded and I blurted, “Why?”

“So that I might awaken again here, with you, at the place it both begins and ends. I have done less than I might have through the centuries, only acting when the balance was in the measure, rather than fighting to tip the scales toward the light. That, I think, is why the cauldron’s bindings failed before you reached it, and for that I apologize.”

“Forget it.” My voice cracked. “You bound it. That means it was one of the places, one of the times, you splashed down. You were there, Brigid. What happened to Gary?”

“A reckoning is upon us, Siobhán Walkingstick. What strength I have will be yours, but you must rid yourself of the infection or all is lost.” She sounded tireder than before, like she was slipping away. It took everything I had not to grab her and rattle the answers out of her. Her eyes closed, and for a moment I thought she’d died. Then she whispered, “He awaits you at Méabh’s final resting place.”

And then she did die. A rattling exhalation and her eyes half opened, looking sleepily at the world beyond. My heart lurched so hard I nearly threw up. Healing magic jerked through me, spasming toward Brigid, but the reawakened Sight gave it nothing to grasp on to. My hands slid to my sides and hung there uselessly as Brigid grew colder. I could have rushed off to the Dead Zone, trying to catch her spirit, but it seemed unlikely that aos sí souls took the same bus that human ones did. I probably could have done about a dozen things, but they all should’ve been done five minutes earlier, when she wasn’t dead yet. When she’d been telling me not yet. I bowed my head, eyes closed, and made a promise not to listen next time someone told me not yet.

The Morrígan, I thought after a while. The Morrígan had killed Brigid. It had taken her thousands of years to die, but the bleak web of poison within her—the web meant for me—had killed her, and that put me on strangely familiar ground. I’d dealt with a lot of mystical murders in the past year. They pretty much never ended well for the killer.

I got to my feet and straightened my coat. I was going to make damned good and sure this one didn’t end well, either.

Calm with anger, I left Brigid’s body behind and went to find Méabh’s tomb.

Monday, March 20, 1:17 p.m.

That would have been much more dramatic if the tomb in question didn’t turn out to be another heritage site. It’d be one thing to traipse the length and breadth of Ireland, seeking out dead life forms and ancient civilizations only to finally come upon the Lost Tomb of the Warrior Queen. It was something else to follow little brown-and-white road signs all the way to County Sligo, where I found a small mountain with a big pile of rocks on top of it.

This was not untraveled territory. There were signs saying “Please don’t take the cairn stones,” and well-worn paths going up and down the mountainside. I breathed, “Hope you were right, Bridge,” and started up one of them. I felt guilty for leaving her body like that. I sort of suspected it would do some kind of magic aos sí thing and fade into the earth or something, and it wasn’t like I could’ve stuffed her in the trunk, but I still felt badly.

The guilt faded into breathless wheezing and resentment by about halfway up the hill. She hadn’t warned me Méabh’s tomb was on top of a mountain. I wished I had a walking stick. The kind to support myself with, not the kind I was named after. Stick bugs would be singularly useless in getting me up a mountain. Unless they could fly me up, but bugs named for sticks weren’t really well known for their aviary skills.

That line of thought did nothing to disguise my heart rate’s elevation or how its quick beat made my arm itch like the devil. I stopped for a breather and cautiously unwound the bandages to take a peek at the bite.

And wished I hadn’t. Whether it was the fresh air against it or seeing how awful it looked, the itching redoubled and became hot red pain. The skin around the punctures emanated heat, shiny tight surface looking and feeling infected. An infected werewolf bite had to be worse than just a regular werewolf bite. I touched it gingerly and hissed at both its warmth and the bright flash of ow that pressure sent through it. I muttered, “C’mon, Jo, you’re supposed to be a healer,” and tried my magic on it again.

Maybe it was the sleep I’d had on the airplane. Maybe it was the soothing drive across the country. But this time when the magic didn’t respond, I went a little deeper, and Saw what was going on.

It was already going all-out trying to keep the infection from spreading. Viewed with the Sight, my arm looked like a petri dish swarm of antibodies attacking bacteria. The speed and activity made me dizzy, and watching made it itch even more, until I was about ready to rip my own arm off and beat myself to death with it just to escape the itch. I closed my eyes hard, shutting the Sight down, but it was too late. I knew what was going on. I felt genuinely worse than before, like viewing it had let the heat spread. My lips were parched, and I’d left my water bottle in the car. I swallowed, light-headed, and looked up the insurmountable hill.