C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

At the same time, Cat’s wolf dragged her to the ground, teeth shredding her sweater. I threw a shield at her, forcing it against her skin so she glimmered with power, and the wolf’s next tearing bite scraped off the magic and saved her from the same fate I was currently facing.

That gave me a bright idea, and for the second time in two days I gave myself up to the bite burning my arm.

This was not proper shifting. The pain began in the bite and exploded outward relentlessly, twisting my bones, stretching and compressing them, breaking them until I was made anew. The smart thing would’ve been to call on Rattler and try to push my way to a shape of my own, but my magic wasn’t working so well internally. I felt pretty sure it was this or nothing, and right now I needed a something.

Besides, it felt so good. Not the shift itself, but the utter abandon that came with success. All of a sudden I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care who won or who lost, just as long as I came out on top. I didn’t care what the price of power was on myself or on my friends. I didn’t worry about Gary, about my mother, about Méabh or Caitríona, about anything at all except the hunt. And there were three glorious bitches just asking for somebody to take them down. I scrambled free of my pants—the shirt was less constricting—and went after the wolf on Caitríona. It yelped—so did Cat—as I knocked it off her, and we rolled, snarling and snapping, a few yards away.

I was bigger than she was. Whether it was a woman of the modern era versus a person of an older age or whether I’d just gotten lucky, I was bigger, and I felt her struggling for breath beneath my weight. She writhed, paws scrabbling, then heaved a mighty heave that got her out from under me. I crashed into her again, but all of a sudden she had two heads and an awful lot of claws, plus she’d grown some shining silver streaks.

Ah. Méabh’s wolf had come to play. I flung myself backward and got out of reach, shoulders hunched within my shirt. I needed to learn to undress before shifting. Especially before a fight: the cloth might give my enemies extra purchase to hold me with. The thought angered me and I snarled, ready for the battle to be on again.

But the small pack scented of confusion. I was one of them, impossible as that was. They were new, fresh-born, and they were three. I was a fourth, larger, by physical definition more dominant, and moreover, unexpected, which made them weak. I snarled and stepped forward one pace, and Streaks, the larger of the two facing me, flinched. My growl was made of triumph.

Except my wolf, the clumsy one, hadn’t gotten the memo, and came tearing back up the hill to slam into my side. Smaller or not, she had momentum, and I hit the dirt with a deep grunt.

All three of them were on me in a heartbeat. I twisted, snapping everywhere, and saw flashes of snarling white teeth in response. Fury blinded me. I was bigger, I was dominant, I would win. I reached for my power, ready to use it offensively if I had to.

There was no response. No hint of magic waiting to be called on. No healing power, no sense of the earth offering strength for me to lean on, no nothing. I hadn’t come up that dry since I’d come half an inch from sacrificing myself on a sorcerer’s altar.

A very dim idea of oh, shit wafted after that realization, and with bone-wrenching intensity, I shifted back to my own form and waited to die.

Instead the smallest wolf yelped and fell, revealing Caitríona standing over it with a knobbly tree branch. It surged to its feet again, but it did so shaking its head like it was concussed. For a peculiar instant I felt sorry for the beast. Then Méabh’s silver-greaved foot lashed out and caught Streaks in the ribs, and I gathered myself to roll onto all fours and snarl just as convincingly as a human as I had as a wolf. I hoped.

They didn’t look scared, the wolves. They looked discomfited, and possibly like an idea had been put into their heads. They glanced at one another, then backed away, the dizzy one moving slowly and the other two refusing to abandon it. They got a good distance away—a safe distance—then looked at each other again.

Streaks curled her lips back from her teeth, and I heard the popping and grinding of bone as she forced herself from a lupine form into a human one. Horror caught me in the gut as the other two did the same, all of them becoming strong, healthy, naked, scary ladies. Streaks still had silver in her hair, and she gave me an approximation of a smile. Bared her teeth, anyway, and ran her tongue over them before shifting again, back to wolf form, and leading her also-changing sisters away.

I collapsed onto my forearms, panting into the earth as I tried to count the number of ways in which I’d been phenomenally stupid. I lacked my sword, but there were always nets. I was good at nets, and the werewolves weren’t like the wendigo. They were, for lack of a better term, real magic. Solid magic. Corporeal magic. They didn’t slip between the Middle and Lower Worlds at a whim, which meant I could have netted them and then delivered them tidily to Méabh for her binding spell. But, oh no, I had to go all Gunga Din and embrace the animal. And even that might have been okay, except I’d managed to teach werewolves how to shift shape, which had to be the ugliest damned time loop I’d opened and closed so far. And just to add a cherry on top, I was pretty damned sure of one other thing: “I’m guessing he knows we’re here now.”

“He does,” said a grim and weirdly familiar male voice, “but if we hurry, you might just live.”

Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I didn’t move. I was half-naked and just this side of wolf—crazy, but I couldn’t quite make myself move, because there was no way Morrison was standing behind me. It had been unlikely in the extreme that Gary could catch me at Dublin airport, but it was sheerly impossible that Morrison, to whom I’d just spoken on the phone, had transported himself halfway around the world. I turned my head about three-quarters of an inch, just far enough to see Caitríona. “What does the man behind me look like?”

Her forehead was as wrinkled as mine felt. “Like me da. Only not quite.”

My shoulders dropped in a sort of relief. It wasn’t Morrison. I knew that, and still it was good—and bad—to have it verified. I kinda wished he had transported halfway around the world. It would make my life that much stranger, but that much happier, too. I seized my pants—the fight hadn’t taken me far away from them—and yanked them on as Méabh said, “Your da? Sure and it’s Ailill I see before me,” in a surprisingly soft voice.

I did my best side whisper to Caitríona as I finished dressing: “Al-yil?”

“Ailill Mac Mata. The love of Méabh of Connacht’s life, so they say. Of course, she killed him in the end.”

“He was unfaithful,” Méabh said with utmost serenity.

I stopped worrying about the guy behind me and gaped at her. “So you killed him? This from the woman who married every high king in Irish history?”

Just as serenely, she said, “That was duty.” Then she smiled, and I remembered that this was also a woman who had by all appearances held half the country together for millennia on end. Mostly I’d been finding her a bit condescending. All of a sudden I found her just a little scary instead. That was the kind of smile it was. I decided not to pursue the matter any further, and very sensibly turned to address the issue of the Man Who Wasn’t Morrison.

He looked an awful lot like Morrison. Not exactly like him, but a lot like him. Like somebody had sanded Morrison’s rough edges off, maybe, and polished him up a bit. His hair was more gold than silver, but Morrison had apparently been a blond back in the day. His eyes were too green for Morrison, but the height, the breadth, the smile, were all eerily similar. It made me want to trust him, an impulse I didn’t trust at all. “I think you’d better show us your true form.”