C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

Or it had been up until Áine’s power slammed into the magic that actually was trying to rewrite me from the DNA on up, because then things got down to some serious pain. Intellectually I knew there’d probably been barely a second between the first intense burst of agony from the bite when Áine touched me, the cushioning effect of her magic rushing through me and the infection’s response, but the moment of respite had seemed wonderfully drawn-out.

At least, it seemed drawn-out in comparison to the railroad spikes now being driven through my arm. I pried one eye open to make sure that wasn’t really happening. It wasn’t. That was good enough for me. I closed my eyes again and tried not to snivel.

My own power had been going great guns holding the infection in place. I kind of thought Áine’s should just smack it aside like a pesky bug, but I could feel her crashing against it, waves against the shore, neither giving way to the other. I didn’t dare trigger the Sight, not with a goddess using her power full tilt. I’d go blind, or possibly burn my brain out. Neither would be any fun. So I just held on, teeth gritted against relentless surges of magic battling it out under my skin, until Áine suddenly released me and stepped back.

The bite still hurt like blue blazes, and I didn’t really need to look to know it wasn’t one bit more healed than it had been. I looked anyway.

It wasn’t one bit more healed than it had been. Some of the inflammation that had erupted when Áine touched me was already fading, but the bite itself was just as dark, infected and nasty as it had been since I’d received it. All I could think was, holy crap, the Master was powerful. Or the werewolves were powerful. Somebody, anyway, was powerful, because if a goddess was stymied by the shapechanging magic running through my bloodstream, then I was infected with something so absurdly far out of my league I didn’t even know where to begin. I’d thought Méabh had had power in spades when I’d seen her bind the werewolves to the lunar cycle. But she’d just told me that had taken a lifetime of preparation, so while it had been an astounding performance, it didn’t seem to be something she was in a position to repeat.

I took a moment—just a moment—to really hate being the go-to girl who could pull out the repeat performances, and then I got over myself, because Áine looked genuinely dismayed that my arm still shone with red, superheated infection. Offhand, I guessed she’d never run into something she couldn’t heal, either. That was considerably more of a come-uppance for a goddess than it was for snot-nosed little me. “It’s okay. I’m gonna figure it out. And I know it means I bear his mark and all, but don’t let that stop you from helping my mother, okay? Please? I’ll bow out of the circle if I need to, so there’s no taint, but man, she really doesn’t deserve this.”

Áine got an expression I suspected had crossed my own face more than once in the past several months. Petulance was not an emotion I would typically expect to ascribe to a goddess, but if there was a better word for the pouty lower lip, the set jaw and the slightly drawn-down eyebrows, I didn’t know what it was. She did something peculiar: scooped her hands at her shoulder, then spread them palms-down over mine in a kind of splashing, throwaway gesture, then whipped away from me. Dramatically, with all that white leather swooping around, even if the coat was much too large for her—and raised her hands like the world’s tiniest conductor calling an orchestra to attention.

I’d regret for the rest of my life that I only dared see, and not See, what she did next.

There was a fair amount of magic already flying around the mountaintop. Méabh and I had plenty of power to unleash individually, and together it made for an impressive show, especially when Raven was throwing his whole black-winged little soul into helping out. Sight or no Sight, I heard him shrieking in utter delight, and bet a bird’s-eye view of Áine’s antics was a delight to see.

I felt her bring my power into line with hers while at the same time excising my heart. Excising the part of me closest to the werewolf bite, and, to be fair, probably the least important part of my power in terms of saving my mother went. I had barely known the woman. I hadn’t much liked her, much less loved her. I had learned enough now to regret all three of those things, but it was a little late now. So my intellectual good intent went into Áine’s weaving, if not my heart-wrenching loss and sorrow, and I was okay with that.

I felt her gathering up Méabh’s magic, too, both the connection to the earth that the aos sís’ long lives offered, and, as I’d thought was important, the connection of past and present. Not that a goddess didn’t encompass all that time frame herself, but despite Áine coming to lend a hand, this was still a working of power of and for mortals. Méabh might barely qualify as mortal, but elves could and did die, so in my book, that counted.

I knew without having to See that Caitríona lent the heart I lacked. I wanted very badly to view the conjuring she’d dreamed up of who and what my mother had been, but even if this succeeded and we broke the bond of bones and spirit, we still had to hunt down Sheila-the-banshee and rescue her, whatever that took. I couldn’t afford to be blinded or burned out no matter how much I wanted to See what was going on. It was a crying shame, because Cat had loved my mother, and it would’ve been nice to see the woman through those eyes. Still, I felt the surge of emotion build up and become part of Áine’s working, and that was something.

Then, unexpectedly, I felt one more addition to the circle. Áine reached back to all the days my mother had spent on Croagh Patrick working toward healing it, and wrenched all those years of power forward. I knew that was what she was doing: I had mucked with time enough myself, both today and over the past year, to recognize the sensation. Two things became obvious. One, the mountain was so parched because Áine had pulled forty or fifty years of magic away from it so it could be invested here, today, all at once. Yet another closed time loop. I hated them, but they were probably better than open ones.

Two—not that I hadn’t already known this, but still—my mother’s willpower was staggering. Literally. I staggered as Áine yanked all that magic forward, its weight pressing down on me as heavily as if Mother was there herself, guiding a lifetime’s worth of power into a healing ritual meant to change the landscape forever. No adept would stand to have her home overlooked by a shadowed magic, not if she could help it, and my mom could by God help it.

It no longer mattered that I wasn’t using the Sight. As occasionally happened, the power had taken on real-world visibility, white magic sheeting down around us in waves of extraordinary beauty. I bet half of Ireland could see the mountaintop glowing, and I started thinking we’d better get the show on the road before people came bounding up to find out what was going on. Not that right now I could have the slightest effect on whether the show got on the road or not, so I decided I’d better stand back and enjoy it.

I could almost see my mother stepping through the curtains of magic. Kneeling here and there—always somewhere different—to invest the mountain with magic. Covering so much ground over the decades, so many times a year, that she became multiples of herself, crouched side by side by side, until she had knelt and touched virtually the whole of the mountaintop. There were spaces between handprints—finger-width spaces—but they touched the curve of a different year’s thumb or hand, heel or fingertips, so there was a continuous net of power built up, glimmering with her distinctive magic. It sank into the earth in her time, and burst upward in mine.