C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

Cernunnos slammed by at top speed, twitching at the last second to knee me in the jaw.

From the outside it must’ve been fantastic to watch. I felt my whole body stretch out in slow motion, head thrown back with the impact. My hands flew up like a backstroker off the block, and for an instant my body traced a perfect arch in the air.

Then, as it was wont to do, gravity called me home with a vengeance.

I just barely broke my fall with my hands, and more or less crumpled down on myself like an accordion. Astonishment kept me in a lump on the ground; astonishment, and the distant idea that the moment I moved I was going to start hurting an awful lot. I was pretty sure I should be hurting already, but surprise held it at bay. Cernunnos and I had parted on good terms, if you called him kissing me until my knees went wobbly good terms. I certainly had. Maybe gods judged these things differently.

Hooves smashed around me and I coiled up with my hands over my head, yelling wordlessly. Yeah, that hurt: pain exploded through my skull in piercing shards. In fact, I thought it was likely my skull was indeed made up of piercing shards, and that all the king’s doctors and all the king’s men weren’t going to put Jo back together again. Oh, God. That was worse than the banshee. It had been going to rhyme me to death. Now I was going to rhyme myself to death. That was so unfair.

Worse, I was clearly about a million mental miles away from the calm that might help me heal myself. I stopped yelling and just groaned, then gave that up as a bad job, too, and went right for pathetic whimpering. I hoped I’d at least chipped the bastard’s kneecap with my thick head, but I was reasonably certain I’d gotten the raw end of the deal.

The hoof beats had faded into the distance. The tiny part of me that wasn’t busy being impressed with how my brain ricocheted around inside its casing informed me that they were now returning, and that I might want to do something about it. In a supreme effort of will, I rolled over in time to watch Cernunnos’s stallion skid to a stop above me. It reared up, front feet pawing, and it was clear that for the second time in my life, the majestic beast had every intention of killing me.

It was probably a dumb-ass time to leave my body behind, but that’s what I did.

My garden was mind-blowingly peaceful after the cacophony of the Hunt. My head didn’t hurt any less, but the silence felt like a pillow around my bruises. It took a few seconds to pull myself together and tentatively probe my face. Astonishingly, there was nothing broken, just a point of swollen flesh that I bet would bleed like a stuck pig if I poked a pin in it. It was just as well I didn’t have a pin. My brain thought gallons of blood squirting out of my jaw sounded kind of cool.

I wrested my mind away from that image and searched for one that would help me fix my head. What leaped to mind were bubbles in the paint job, but I was hardly going to sand the bruise off my head and paint over it. My car metaphor didn’t always work smoothly. Draining the oil would have to do, though that led back to the squirting. I gritted my teeth and imagined working a clog out of the oil filter so it could flow smoothly through the engine again. I didn’t want blood clotting up my head. It needed to move away from the injury, get back into the rest of my system. Then I could do a touchup on the paint job, bruise and swollen flesh smoothing away.

With the ache in my skull considerably reduced, I took the shielding I’d so poorly protected my garden with, and brought it back with me to the real world.

The stallion’s hooves smashed down on shimmering silver-blue magic, clanging like steel on steel. I watched reverberations shoot up the poor animal’s legs—how it had gone from trying to kill me to poor animal, I didn’t know—and gave a relieved meep at not being crushed to death. The horse slipped off my shields to the ground and pranced uncomfortably. Cernunnos, about a thousand feet above me, bared his teeth and drew blade.

This was all starting to seem strangely familiar.

Sadly for me, last time I’d had a steel butterfly knife in hand, and all I had right now was a whole bunch of diddly and a big lump of squat. More, this time I had a passionate amount of really truly swear-to-God cross-my-heart hope-to-die not wanting to impale myself again. Or be impaled, for that matter, but there was a short sharp sword on its way down to do just that. I closed my eyes, put my hand out and hoped like hell that I was right about being able to pull a rapier through inconveniently intervening space when I needed it.

It was even money on who was more surprised, me or Cernunnos, when I did. The god’s jaw dropped open in as human an expression as I’d ever seen on anything, and my face split with a relieved, foolish grin. The sword was there, as solidly, as reliably, as it had been in the astral plane. Moreover, my armor came with it: a copper bracelet on my wrist, silver necklace settling in the hollow of my throat and a small round shield decorating my arm. Those four items together spun a circle of brilliance around me, and their connection to one another quartered the circle with me in its center. The psychic shields I could build had nothing on what gifts of love and spoils of war offered. I knew I wasn’t invincible, but in that armor, carrying that sword, I thought I might be the best me possible.

That other Joanne, the one who called herself Siobhán, could never have had all of these things because she’d never met Gary, not the way I knew him, and she never would have fought Cernunnos the way I did the first time I faced him.

Something very like joy surged through me, and I slammed my rapier into the god’s sword, knocking it aside. Then, because I was an idiot and suddenly full of piss and vinegar, I scrambled to my feet. I didn’t know what the hell his problem was, but he’d started it. That was fine. I’d finish it. I did the classic “c’mon, buster” hand thing, with my palm turned toward myself and my fingers crooking in invitation.

And the master of the Hunt, who wasn’t any brighter than I was, drove his heels into the silver stallion’s sides, accepting the challenge. The animal leaped at me with an outraged scream. I shrieked and flung myself to the side as Cernunnos’s sword went whistling over my head. Next time I pick a fight with a god, remind me to make sure he gets off his horse first.

Cernunnos wheeled the stallion and charged at me again. There was no possible way I was anything other than totally screwed, but this time I did my best to stand my ground, letting his blow smash into my shield and send me spinning. On the full circle I lashed out at the stallion’s flanks, feeling that it wasn’t quite fair to pick on the horse, but that it was distinctly less fair to get trampled. Ol’ Silver clearly wasn’t accustomed to taking hits for the home team, because he bucked with a violence that surprised even Cernunnos. There was no chance the Horned God would come unseated, but it took long seconds for him to get the stallion back under control.

In the meantime, the child who led the Hunt, the pale boy Rider who was Cernunnos’s only immortal son, who bound the god to a mortal cycle of life and death, and whose life I’d saved once upon a time, tapped me on the shoulder and offered me the reins to his own golden mare.

I said, “Oh hell yeah,” and swung up on the gorgeous beast like I knew what I was doing. The young Rider stepped back with a smile on his face, the same feral thing his father could wear, then fell back farther still, to stand side by side with his niece. Suzanne’s screams had long since fallen silent, and now she had both hands over her mouth and her eyes were wide and green with either astonishment or fear.