C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

The stone rolled in, bounced off the sides a couple times, and fell a long, long way. For a hole that didn’t exist, it was a very convincing fall. I cleared my throat and glanced at my companions. “Either of you do this?”

They obviously hadn’t. They also looked like I felt, which was to say, they suspected that in a few short minutes we would all be going down the rabbit hole, because rabbit holes did not appear in our lives for absolutely no reason at all. Tentative, I called on the Sight, and gave a rushed laugh of relief.

The pit glowed with white magic, with the power that had so recently scrubbed the mountain clean. It smelled, as my coat did, of stardust, and as a result I found myself trusting it.

“It looks safe,” Caitríona said dubiously, which suggested she was feeling the same effect I was. Méabh frowned at us both, but the expression lightened when she looked into the hole. Apparently she thought it looked safe, too.

“Isn’t that what Alice thought before she went down the rabbit hole?”

Caitríona, sounding very nineteen, said, “Oh, what the hell,” and dove in headfirst.

Tuesday, March 21, 11:00 a.m.

I was not normally blessed with lightning-quick reflexes, but I snagged the back of Cat’s shirt just before she disappeared into the hole. Méabh, thank goodness, snagged the back of mine, preventing us both from tumbling headlong into its depths. Cat came up flush with disappointment, and I wagged a finger at her without being able to work myself up to a real scolding. Truth was, I wanted to dive right after her. All that stopped me was the dire uncertainty of whether we’d be coming back. That in and of itself didn’t bother me so much. I’d kind of gotten used to not knowing if I was coming back. But I’d never had somebody to say goodbye to before, not for real. I stopped wagging a finger at Caitríona, and walked a little distance away to call Morrison.

His phone rang while I tried to subtract time zones. It was something like four in the morning again, another totally uncivilized time to call, but he picked up fast, with a gruff, “I haven’t heard from him. Are you okay?”

I bit my lip, which made speaking clearly difficult, but I managed to say, “Not dead yet, anyway. How’s things there?”

“The usual.” He sounded very awake for a man I’d presumably woken up. “Baxter wonders if you quit because of the shooting, Ray Campbell is stomping around glaring at me like it’s all my fault and Holliday is preparing a lecture for when you get home. He’s used it on about half of Homicide already. He made one of them cry.”

The guys I worked with were generally a bunch of tough mooks. I gawked at the view, trying to imagine which of them might have been brought to tears, then heard Morrison’s faint breath of laughter. “Not really, Walker. He is ready to read you the riot act, though.”

“You’re probably first in line to do that.”

“Not as long as you come home safe. Why’re you calling?”

Sadly for me, those two sentences were clearly connected. I sighed. “Because I’m off to do something stupid again, and I wanted to say…” My throat swelled up and I had a hard time swallowing.

Three little words. Not that hard to say, except in the sense of never having said them to somebody before, which somehow made them unbearably scary. There was a momentary pause before Morrison said, “Yeah, I know, Walker,” like he understood the tongue-tied-ness. “Be careful, okay? I’ll talk to you soon.”

“No!” Panic sharpened the word and I could all but hear Morrison bring the phone back to his ear. “No,” I said again. “I mean it, Morrison. I love you.”

“Yeah,” he said, and this time I was sure I could hear him smile. “Yeah, I know, Walker. I love you, too. Talk to you later.”

It sounded so easy for him to say. I hung up, folded the phone against my chest and turned to find Méabh and Caitríona both standing there with dippy yet knowledgeable smiles. The pit Áine had dug—I assumed she was behind it, since it glowed with her power—glimmered behind them, somehow as dippily pleased as they were. I muttered, “All right, all right, the show’s over, let’s get this wagon train rolling,” and together we all jumped into the rabbit hole.

The world inverted, went black and spat us out the other side into sunlight. It was weirdly familiar: I’d entered my garden that way more than once, and overall it reassured me.

Or it did, anyway, until I recognized where we’d been spat.

Méabh’s tomb stood on a near-distant hilltop. Forests lay between us and it, which was not true in my time. Cold rushed me and I turned around slowly, afraid of what I would see.

A bleak black hole lay in the mountainside right behind us. I knew that hole. It wasn’t infested with Áine’s light. It was much more the other end of the spectrum, dark and scary and dank. Werewolves had come rolling out of that hole once upon a time, mutated monsters made at the Master’s bidding. Three of them. Three women, in fact.

Stiff, afraid, barely breathing, I lifted my hands to look at them.

They were my hands, unchanged, including the bite on my forearm, which was picking up in the itching department again. Sick relief soured my stomach. I’d had the ugly idea that we’d been twisted into monsters and regurgitated into Ireland’s history. And maybe we had been, but if so, at least we weren’t the wolves. I’d seen them when they came out of the earth, mewling black slicks of evil, and all three of us looked perfectly normal. I sat down, looped my arms around my knees and exhaled squeakily. “Not really what I was expecting. Where are we? Or maybe when are we, I know where we are. But—”

“The cairns are as I knew them as a child,” Méabh said to the distant hilltops. To the cairn that bore her own name, specifically. I glanced toward it, squinted and decided maybe it was smaller than it was in my day. “There’s something about the land, Joanne,” she said uncertainly before Caitríona interrupted in delight.

“Are we time traveling?”

“I’m not sure.” I leaned forward to take a handful of earth, wishing it could tell me where Áine had sent us.

As it happened, the fact I was leaning forward saved my life.

In my vision, the werewolves had come boiling from the cave at night, black on black, as writhing hideous little beasts that got larger and more dangerous as they rolled and wriggled from the cave mouth. But then, in my vision, Méabh had built her power circle in the northwest of the island, where she’d been born and had reigned as queen, and the Ring of Kerry was in the southwest. Visions, I was learning, were a bit on the symbolic side, and not so much with the accurate details.

Three long-legged, full-grown beasts raced from the cave, two of them leaping over my head to attack Méabh and Caitríona. The third slung itself low, coming for me, and in a moment of grace worthy of my own usual antics, tripped over its own feet and went crashing halfway down the mountain. It yelped as it bounced off rocks and bumps. I had no doubt it would whip around and come back again, but in the instant the fight was met, I was given respite, and it probably saved us all.

Méabh, who I was beginning to think of as an unstoppable killing machine, managed to draw her sword before her wolf tackled her. She didn’t get it up, didn’t make a killing blow, but she had it out, and blocked the creature’s gnashy teeth with the sword’s edge. Silver shot from the blade, leaping to the wolf as if the metal had a life and will of its own. Streaks raced back from the wolf’s mouth, etching along its fur until it had racing stripes. Still too close to use the sword, Méabh strong-armed the animal, grabbing its throat and throwing it off her. Half a breath later she was chasing it, but it skittered and leapt away, able to cover far more distance in a step with its four legs than she could with her two.