C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

Later. Later, assuming there was a later. I inhaled through my nose, trying to breathe away some of the pain slicing my stomach. This was a family neighborhood: the Sight showed me sparks of high-energy life in the houses along the road. I imagined a lot of them to be kids too wired on sugar to be sleeping yet, and some of the more sedentary spots to be parents willing to put up with a houseful of kids on a school night just to hold an appropriately spooky party.

Cernunnos had to be in there somewhere. Maybe not one of these houses specifically, but it’d been the boy who’d come to me, not the god. If the boy had been removed from the Hunt, if he was dead, as the sudden cessation of starlight from him suggested he might be, then Cernunnos was no longer bound to the mortal wheel of life and death. I’d nearly blinded myself looking on him with the Sight once. I wasn’t sure what he’d look like unbound, but I bet I’d be able to see it blazing, no matter where he was in the city.

I’d gotten out of Petite and left her several steps behind without noticing it. My keys were in my hand, suggesting I’d locked her up safely, and either I’d be dead or I’d move her before anybody tried leaving the driveway I’d blocked. That, or a never-around-when-you-need-one cop would impound her while I was out fighting bad guys.

None of which really mattered. This was classic Joanne Walker-style dilly-dallying. I took a deep breath, held it until determined air sluiced away the rest of the cramps in my belly, and asked the Sight to find me a god.

Most of the world faded away. The black bands of human-built streets became translucent, then clear, and the purposeful rigid forms of buildings melted into mist and disappeared. Even natural things like trees and moonlight became cut-away simulacra of themselves, then bleached away. Only living things were left, sparks of brilliance that turned to dust as the Sight discarded them as insufficient to be a god. The smallest things went first, bugs and birds and squirrels. Their disappearance reminded me too much of the undead critters I’d fought, and for a few seconds my concentration wavered as I hoped there were no graveyards nearby.

If I lost my focus there would be zombies all over the damn place. My hands turned to firsts and I leaned into my efforts, looking at a world growing increasingly dark, in hopes of finding a single point of radiance.

Cernunnos’s wildfire green hit me between the eyes, and the cauldron’s black mass took me down for the count.

Monday, October 31, 11:37 p.m.

All the blood in my body had come to live in my head. My skull was so swollen with it my eyes felt puffy and my nose was stuffed. I was pretty sure it was blood and not, say, a sudden-onset head cold, because of the throbbing in my temples and the general ferocious itching of my face. I’d dangled upside down often enough as a kid to recognize the symptoms. Furthermore, the rest of my body had the opposite kind of itch, the kind that comes on from being cold due to a lack of blood flow. My hands were pretty much numb, in fact. My brain sent signals that my fingers should wiggle, but didn’t get any feedback on whether that was happening.

I really didn’t want to open my eyes, but I had to try anyway. Try was the operative word: for some reason they wouldn’t open, and my psyche was of two minds about what I thought of that. The first mind was just as happy, since it didn’t really want to look around anyway. The second mind was reasonably certain not being able to open my eyes was bad. I had to agree with the second one, and for all that my body was already cold, its core temperature dropped another couple degrees as low-grade panic set in. My face became a sticky, sweaty mess and bile came to make friends with already-worn enamel. My heart jumped into triple time, which made my face itch more, which was the only reason my panic stayed low grade instead of racheting up to top level. I was just too damn physically uncomfortable to give terror more than its basic due.

Beyond the thudding in my ears I could hear a whisper of leaves, the lapping of water and a man’s voice mumbling in a language I didn’t know. It wasn’t any of the easy ones I didn’t know, like Russian or Spanish or Latin. I decided I needed a smaller repertoire of ignorance, and made a note to get right on that. As soon as I figured out what had happened to me.

Well, said my sarcastic little voice, you could use the Sight to take a look around. Or would that be too easy?

I was going to start therapy and get rid of that voice as soon as I got out of wherever I was. Before reducing my general ignorance, even. Because if I didn’t, one of these days I was going to take a rock and bash my own head in so I didn’t sarcasm myself to death.

There was, as usual, a flaw in my logic, but I didn’t want anybody, not me and not my smart-ass back-talking brain, to point that out. Teeth set together against peanut-gallery commentary and bile, I reached for my magic, and had the sudden hideous idea that it wasn’t going to respond.

For once sensationalism didn’t win out. Brilliant, unearthly vision spilled through the darkness, and I came to terms with an ugly truth: there were probably more humiliating things than being a shaman who awakens to discover herself trussed up, blindfolded and hanging inverted over a death cauldron, but right then I really couldn’t think of any.

The goddamn cauldron was enormous. I’d seen pictures, and I’d known how much space it took up at the museum, but that was a whole different perspective than staring into its deadly gaping maw. Intellectually I knew it couldn’t be more than five or six feet deep, but looking into it with the Sight was worse than looking across the Dead Zone. There, I had a sense of perspective. Granted, it was a perspective that told me how very very small I was, but that was better than staring into the cauldron. It was full of empty nothingness, and it went on forever.

Black magic rolled out of it, seductive and cool. Black didn’t mean evil, just black: that was its color, but it didn’t feel dreadful and wrong. It felt inviting, and it was much, much more powerful than its remnants had been at the museum. It whispered that I could relax, give up my cares, be comfortable and quiet, undisturbed for eternity. All I had to do was accept that all life came to an end, and slip within its hungry mouth.

For all that being dangled like a worm on a line was mortifying, it was a hell of a lot better than being free to fall into the thing beneath me. I scrabbled for healing magic, slamming up a barrier between myself and the cauldron. Shale blue wrapped around me, all the silvers and blues mixed together to create the most cohesive shield I’d ever built, but it didn’t release me from pig-squealing terror. The magic wasn’t afraid of death, not in the least. What it did and what the cauldron offered were two sides of a coin.

In no way did that make me feel better. I clenched my eyes shut, even if they were, technically, already closed. I wanted to breathe through my teeth, slow tense breaths to calm my heartbeat, but trying made me realize a gag was stuffed between them. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but noticing it also made me notice it tasted like the bile I’d spat up. I gagged again and tears leaked out from under my blindfold to trickle down my forehead. My face reminded me that it itched, then took the itch up to a whole new level, like rubbing poison ivy on chicken pox.

I’d been wrong. Writhing around, sobbing and trying to scratch my face with my shoulder while being suspended above a death cauldron trumped just being suspended above the cauldron any day. I had a miserable feeling I’d be adding to that list of mortification before I got out of there.