Urban Shaman

CHAPTER 29

The Space Needle is only the most famous structure in the Seattle Center. The whole Center covers something like seventy acres and has everything you can think of except a way to prevent people from wandering the grounds at any hour, day or night.

It was entirely empty. No bums, no skateboarding teens, no businessmen coming down from the monorail to catch a bus or to go to their cars. Coming out of the parking garage was like walking into a barbed wire fence: every step forward bit and nipped at me, trying to push me back. Gary, a step or two behind me, grunted. “It’s all in your mind,” I muttered.

Streetlamps discolored patches of snow into unhealthy yellows and lilacs. Bits of paper debris scattered across stretches of concrete, their rattling surprisingly loud without the sounds of people to muffle them. The desolation was uncomfortable, and that was just on the obvious side of things. With the brilliant colors of my other Sight distorted with gray, the Center looked a carnie’s particular view of Hell.

“Where we going, Jo?” Gary asked very quietly. He was spooked, his big shoulders hunched and his colors muted in a way that had nothing to do with Herne’s obscurement.

“It’s all right,” I said. “You don’t have to be here, you know.”

Gary straightened, offended. “You think I’m backin’ out now? After being along for the whole ride?”

I shifted my shoulders uncomfortably, but didn’t slow my pace. The thread between Herne and myself was contracting, drawing us closer together and getting stronger. I couldn’t see him yet, but I felt him. I wondered if he felt me. “You could get killed,” I said. “So far everybody else has.”

“Nah,” the cabby said. “I’m your good-luck charm.”

I laughed, the sound unexpectedly bright in the gray light and the frozen walls. “You’re a little big to put in my pocket.”

“Guess I better just tag along, then.” He straightened his shoulders again. I smiled.

“Gary?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

“Sure. Now, what’s the plan?”

“The plan? I’m supposed to have a plan?” The cord contracted again, a physical pull, and I stumbled. Gary put a hand out to steady me. “The plan is to rescue the princess, slay the dragon, kick some booty and be home in time for dinner. What time is it, anyway?”

“Couple minutes to six. You need a watch.”

“I have one.” I put out my wrist and discovered I was still wearing the bracelet, my watch abandoned at home where it presumably continued to tell the time in Moscow. “Nevermind.”

The cord contracted a third time. For a moment, the careful realignment I’d done of body to soul was pulled askew and I flashed forward through the park to the carousel.

It spun, its music turned down, not needing to compete with the sounds of other rides or people calling back and forth. On the outer ring, a slender blond girl rode a beautifully carved wooden horse, painted golden as sunlight. She stood up in the stirrups as I watched, leaning to make a laughing snatch at a brass ring.

“Almost,” Herne said, full of amusement. I looked past Suzanne to the inner ring of the carousel. The god’s son leaned against an intricate red dragon, watching the child of his blood settle back down into her saddle.

Kevin Sadler leaned against the red dragon, watching his daughter pout with laughter and get ready for another try.

I snapped back into my body, stumbling from shock. “Oh, my God, I am so stupid.” I spat bile and began to run. Gary startled, then fell into a run behind me.

We skidded over the threshold of the carousel together, just in time to see Suzy make another grab for the ring, and, with a triumphant shout, come away with it clenched in her fist.

With it came down the walls that separated one world from another. Cernunnos’s stallion screamed, the deep primal sound that kept making me want to scream in return. Suzanne did scream in response, clutching at the wooden horse’s spiral pole as the Wild Hunt burst from the sky to ride down at her, twelve riders strong and one lonely mare. Even as she screamed, Suzanne’s eyes went to the mare, longing. Cernunnos shifted in his saddle, leaning toward her like a hero in an old western, about to scoop up his beloved.

Herne stepped in front of her, the vestiges of his assumed human form shedding away.

I should have seen it before. Everything was there, the green eyes, the long jaw and high cheekbones. The man was slight where the demigod was broad, but the hair was the same ash-brown, albeit in different quantities. And I had known almost from the start that Herne wasn’t trapped in just one shape.

“Stop,” the god’s son said, really very softly. The host parted and swept around them like waves, galloping ethereally through the carousel. Only Cernunnos reined up with easy strength, no sign of the injury I’d done him a few days earlier. The stallion reared back to kick at Herne before prancing nervously to the ground again. In moments, the riders swung back around and gathered behind Cernunnos, stilling their horses. The red-eared hounds slunk under the horses and leaned against their forelegs, glaring toward Herne with angry red eyes.

Suzanne hung onto the wooden horse, crouched small, too frightened to make a sound. Now that I was closer, looking at her was difficult. The slender body seemed overfull, and my eyes slid off her like I was trying to follow the shape of a second person occupying her space.

“You’re much too late, Father,” Herne whispered. His voice carried across the silent grounds with the clarity of a sound studio, words clipped and edged. “I’ve worked for this. Can’t you feel it? The Rider’s almost lost to you. Only a few more minutes.”

Cernunnos looked beyond Herne to Suzanne. “Take her,” he murmured. “I have one to replace her.” He smiled, curved teeth bright in the ugly light, and looked from Suzanne to me. Herne turned, surprise filtering through his eyes. Greener eyes than they were as Kevin Sadler, but still unmistakably the same. How could I have missed it?

“You didn’t check your messages, Jo,” he said affably. Herne’s faint English accent was gone, replaced by Kevin’s Anywhere America accent. “You’d be halfway to Portland by now. I’m disappointed.”

“I didn’t have time,” I admitted. There didn’t seem much point in lying. “Lucky for me, I guess.” I wondered if they made dunce caps big enough to hide under. Forever. I shifted my gaze from Herne to Cernunnos, and added, “I beat you once already, my lord master of the Hunt. I don’t owe you anything.”

“I lost one challenge,” Cernunnos agreed, “and my word keeps me from Babylon forever. There was no caveat against a second reckoning, little shaman.”

Oops. Oh well. I’d deal with that later. Assuming there was a later. “What have you done to her, Herne?”

“Can’t you tell?” The touch of England was back in his voice. “Really, I knew you were a novice, but I thought it would be obvious even to you. Look closer, Joanne Walker. Siobhan Walkingstick. Gwyld.”

I didn’t want to. Looking at Suzanne with the second sight made my head hurt. Herne’s voice, though, was terrifyingly compelling. I shuddered, trying not to look, but against my own wishes, my head turned and I Saw.

Suzanne Quinley was overflowing, two bright souls battling for dominance in her slender body. One was so old I didn’t dare look at it for long, feeling the pull of its power even at a glance. I could drown in its strength, every bit as easily as I could drown in Cernunnos’s. That soul’s ties ran in bright silver threads to each of the riders and to Herne, and strongest of all to Cernunnos. It was also bound, by blood and darkness, to the far more fragile soul that was Suzanne’s, a mortal child buried under the weight of eternity. With every moment that passed, the immortal Rider’s soul became more firmly a part of Suzanne. It was a matter of minutes before the girl herself was gone forever.

The most terrible thing was that the Rider’s soul held no evil in it. It had been siphoned from its true host in fragments, stretched thin over many years, until there was so little left binding soul to body that the body could no longer keep its hold, and the soul abandoned it entirely, in need of a place to continue. And Suzanne Quinley had been primed as the new body.

“Her birthday’s in a few minutes.” I said softly. “I mean, the time of her birth. How did you lose her, Herne? Your own daughter. You must have tried for a very long time to father the perfect child. Was Adina her mother?” How had he hidden himself from Adina? Had she chosen not to see, or was his strength so much greater than hers that she never stood a chance? All I knew about her was that she’d tried to help me.

“Of course not. Her mother’s dead. It’s easy to lose children when you’ve fathered as many as I have. I only found her a few years ago.”

Memory, sharp and searing, cut through my mind, something I’d written off as a dream. A brick red boy, a few years older than I was, lifting startled golden eyes, to smile at me. Welcome, Siobhan, he’d said, offering me a hand. This is where it begins. Brightness of body, brightness of soul. I’d woken up with my first period staining my panties.

“When she hit puberty,” I said stupidly. I remembered the brick red boy from other dreams, here and there, until I was fifteen. I even remembered thinking that it seemed like he was visiting me on purpose. They stopped very suddenly. I hadn’t had one in twelve years. I was going to have to ask Coyote about that.

Later. Now there was too much to do. Herne looked ever so slightly impressed. Not, unfortunately, impressed enough to lie down and roll over for me, but a little impressed. “Very good. There were so many factors. Most important—”

“Was the birthday. Twelve days after Christmas. So that when you defeated Cernunnos, it was at the height of his power, and it was all yours. That much,” I said bitterly, “I figured out.”

“But too late.” Herne turned his back on me. Nice to know I was such a threat. Cernunnos watched Suzanne calculatingly and a bad feeling came into the pit of my stomach.

“Gary?”

“Yeah?”

“You still any good at the whole linebacker gig?”

The big man chuckled. “Not quite as limber as I used to be, but I can make do in a pinch.”

“Cernunnos is going to kill Suzanne at six-oh-seven. I may be busy. Stop him.”

Gary lifted a bushy eyebrow at me. “At six-oh-seven?”

“It’s when she was born,” I said softly. “Her soul and the Rider’s will be irrevocably bound at that moment. If he destroys her, he destroys the thing that keeps him from riding free.”

“‘M I supposed to understand what you’re talkin’ about?”

I shot him a dirty look. The other sight flashed red into the look, physical effect of a glare. I bet there were some people out there who could really kill with that kind of look. “Just be ready to play ball.”

Gary grinned, bright white. I jerked my head around, startled. While I’d been talking to Herne, the obscurity had failed. I wished I thought it was a sign of his power weakening. It was more likely it just wasn’t worth the bother, now that I’d found him and his moment was at hand.

“You have her,” Cernunnos said, “but you still have me to defeat, my son.”

I muttered, “I am your father, Luke,” and moved forward, stepping up onto the carousel platform. Suzanne was slumped over her carousel horse. The pale mare stood beside her, between worlds, her tail flickering through the red dragon Herne had leaned against. She nosed at Suzy’s sleeve, less than the wind in effect.

Just ahead of them, Herne drew a sword nearly identical to his father’s, and bowed without half the grace that Cernunnos returned the acknowledgment with. I could see why he was jealous.

The clash of swords had nothing on the roar of power that was released as the two came together. Unshielded either physically or psychically, I staggered under the onslaught of strength, green and brown and impossibly potent. Lightning slammed down from the sky, into both opponents. Neither flinched. Nor did Suzanne. This close, I felt her heartbeat faltering, uncertain under the insistent pressure of the Rider. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gary edging closer, watching Herne and Cernunnos intently. I nodded, relieved, and stepped behind a winged swan, coming up behind Suzanne to pull her off the carousel horse and into my arms.

Electricity slammed through me, endless painful voltage. My muscles locked up hard enough to make me tremble, and I dropped to my knees, but I kept Suzanne in my arms. The bright soul of the Rider swept over me without malice, only the simple determination to survive. Entangled with it, I felt the faintest slender thread back to the body it had once owned, fey and green-eyed and boyish. And dying.

Ironic, the Rider said, less words or coherent thought than a fleeting feeling. The child who housed the soul of Death itself was finally dying in turn. Hour by hour he had slipped away from his fragile body, guided by the only thing that could compel him: demands made by another of his bloodline. Herne called the young Rider’s spirit to him, binding it with blood and death, weakening him as Herne bided his own time.

Until now. Until this most recent of Rides, on All Hallow’s Eve, when the world walls were thinnest. The Rider had led the Hunt forth into the void between worlds, and Herne had struck a telling blow. Taking power stored from centuries of sacrifices, he smashed the link betwixt body and soul, sending the boy Rider’s body tumbling back through blackness to the world he called home. Binding the freed soul to a girl. His daughter. Suzy. Only the most tenuous connection still held the Rider’s soul to the body he’d once owned.

More than just sacrifices, the Rider murmured to me. Like Suzanne, those he killed to gain his power were blood of his blood. Little is as strong as blood magic.

“Blood—” I shook my head, confused, then understood: how many children had Herne fathered over the years? Half the world could share his bloodline by now. Hell, I could.

Except the Old Man had apparently made me from scratch, and it seemed like if you were going to bother to do that, you’d make sure you weren’t getting anybody else’s magic tangled up in your recipe.

Which was so not what I needed to be thinking about right now. I could still feel the Rider’s thoughts and memories, dispassionately shared with me. He’d been caught in my world, separated from the host body and terribly vulnerable. With Herne’s direction, he sought a new host. The child in—where was it? It was the silver misted world whose loss I had felt so keenly outside of Babylon, but what was it named?

Tir na nôg, the Rider replied, and for the first time there was longing in his thoughts. Herne’s bindings hadn’t yet wiped the need for home out of the Rider’s soul. Anwyn, Avalon, fairyland, Islands of the West, name it what you will. It is older by far than mankind and will continue when you and your names are ancient dust. There was no apology or sympathy in the telling, the Rider’s concerns too remote to be even neutral.

The dying body, the boy Rider in Tir na nôg, was Cernunnos’s first child, half-mortal and half-god. He no longer knew, if he ever had, who his mother was. Blood of the god’s blood, he’d taken a piece of the god’s power with his birth, and with it tied the Horned God to the mortal cycle of death and life. He rode with Cernunnos of his own free will, and doing so rendered himself immortal, untouchable by the god who might otherwise sacrifice his first-born child in favor of riding free. In all his terribly long life, no one had ever compelled him against his will.

Until Herne. Blood of the god’s blood, once more. Brother to the ancient Rider, but a lesser creature. There was no remorse in the Rider’s thoughts: for him there was, and there was not. Neither had any reason to carry emotion. Our father learned from me. To be cautious of what he gave the women he lay with. No other son of Cernunnos can bind him as I do; no other child has such power.

“But Suzy,” I whispered. I couldn’t tell if it was out loud or not, but it didn’t seem to matter. The Rider responded with the vast indifference of an immortal shrug.

She will change the bond. Blood magic is strong, and my brother has chosen well. He has sacrificed the one he loved.

Adina, I thought in despair. Had the other shamans been her friends before death? Had Herne gained his blood power through killing everyone closest to the ones closest to him?

The girl’s parents. Her friends. The Rider’s answer was an agreement. It changes the balance of power. My loyalty is Herne’s.

“But that’s wrong!”

I felt the surprise of the Rider’s soul as it seemed to turn and look at me for the first time, leaving off in its quest to take over Suzy’s body.

Human fallacies, he said. Right and wrong do not matter to me.

“What does?”

Suzanne herself turned her head to look for the pale mare. “Riding,” she whispered, the desire in her voice clear and pure. She was a fourteen-year-old girl. She didn’t even need the Rider’s soul to want that horse with everything she had, but the power of the immortal soul within her gave the single word such an ache that I felt tightness in my throat, tears stinging my eyes. It would be Herne whom the Rider would follow, and with this child’s innocent strength behind him, Herne would defeat Cernunnos and take his place. It made no difference at all to the Rider. His power and purpose were enough to rein in any god, and he would do so gladly until the end of time.

I wondered, very briefly, if Herne realized he wasn’t going to be obtaining ultimate power if he won the battle. Then the electricity of the Rider’s power left me and there was no time left at all in which to think.

I heard it like a chime, the clear moment of Suzanne Quinley’s birth, resonating down through fourteen years. I dove to the side, dragging Suzy with me. Cernunnos vaulted the wooden carousel horse, leaving a surprised and furious Herne behind. Gary bellowed a war-cry and flung himself at Cernunnos, crashing into the god with a braced shoulder. The Rider howled in delight and dove deep into Suzanne’s body, while the remaining fragments of the girl’s soul shrieked in desperation and fled.

I’d caught Cernunnos with a net, in Babylon. There was so little of Suzy left that she’d slip right through a net. Instead I reached inside myself for the weary coil of energy and shaped it into a ball, fragile and pearlescent as a soap bubble. There wasn’t enough time!

Except inside the little bubble of my shield, there was. The music of the chime held, a long thin sound vibrating the air. Nothing stopped, but what had been chaos almost too fast to see played out in elegant slow motion.

Cernunnos jolted to the side as Gary impacted him. His sword dragged a thin line of red across my shoulder blade as I rolled with Suzanne. I felt skin parting, and waited for it to hurt, but the pain came even more slowly than the attack. Stumbling, his features contorting with rage, Cernunnos drew the broadsword back as he turned to face Gary, the motions so precise it could have been a choreographed ballet.

No ballet I had ever seen, though, had the bad guy stick a real live four-foot long sword through the good guy’s rib cage. Surprise widened Gary’s eyes as he doubled and staggered back, sliding off the sword and crashing hard into the wooden horse. As easily as that, Cernunnos dismissed him, turning in slow motion back to Suzanne and myself.

My roll brought us up against the red dragon’s pole, my back to Cernunnos, protecting the girl as best I could. The chime that sounded her birth hour in my head was still loud and strong, her fragmented soul caught against the bubble of slow time. Knowing it was going to get me killed, I contracted the bubble, bringing the slowness and the shards of Suzanne’s soul closer and smaller until it was within her entirely, and time outside it sped back up.

I followed the bubble in.

The Rider’s soul was a parasite, rust on a car, captured in the last seconds before it destroyed its host entirely, no more able to free itself from the slow time bubble than Suzanne’s soul was able to wrest free from the Rider’s. In here, I had all the time in the world to do repairs. Out there, if I wasn’t careful and quick, I wouldn’t have a body to go home to.

Just like the Rider didn’t.

Your world, Cernunnos had said, and made one fist. My world. Another fist, not quite touching the first. And we are here. The blackness between the worlds. I could reach that. Could I take down the walls that held the two worlds apart?

I closed my fist around the bubble of slow time, reached for power, and threw myself into the void, dragging the Rider and Suzanne along. I didn’t know where the strength to do it came from: I was afraid to wonder, just then. It flooded through me, though, once more washing away all the exhaustion and pain of the past three days. I felt, quite literally, as if I were flying.

Flashes of other worlds, closer to mine, came and went in bright colors that moved too fast to imprint. For a painfully long moment there was nothing, not even the starscape, just an agonizing emptiness. I held on to the sound of the chime and dredged up my own memories of the silver mist world. I flung both those things into the emptiness, like sonar, hoping for them to be recognized and draw me to the right place.

Home. The longing in the Rider’s voice was so intent it hurt. Inside of an instant, I was the tagalong, no longer in control. The binding wound around the Rider shattered, my power replacing Herne’s as the Rider and I reached for a common goal.

My power replacing Herne’s. This would be a good time to instigate some control. The last thing I wanted was for the youthful Rider to leave Cernunnos behind on Earth, where he could wreak all the havoc he wanted without the controlling influence of the child.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a single goddamned clue how to do that. Stop! Or I’ll say stop again!

The Rider laughed at me, a sharp, bitter sound, and darkness exploded into a haven of deep green leaves and silver trees, wreathed by gentle cooling mists. Home, the Rider thought, and I echoed it, his need for refuge resonating deep in my own soul. His need overrode my purpose, and for a deadly moment I relaxed. Triumph, as palpable as with Cernunnos, leaped through the link we shared and I knew I was lost, unable to control the son of a god. Tir na nôg would be peace; it would be rest, after a very long journey. It was enough. I followed the Rider’s lead, content to have done with it.

Home, Suzanne whispered, like a memory. It stung me into remembering her, remembering the world we were leaving behind, and I groaned. “No.” My own voice was a whisper, too little power behind it to make the Rider take pause. I closed my eyes against the green misty world and said something I’d told Gary not to, about a million years earlier: “In Cernunnos’s name I set my geas.”

The Rider stopped so abruptly I flew ahead of him, my own journey not yet finished.

A boy slept in the silver woods, fey and slender and so pale it seemed like death must have already visited him. I knelt beside him, putting my hand on his chest. There was a heartbeat, so faint and irregular I might have imagined it, and his chest rose and fell very slowly, the last breaths of a dying child. I couldn’t remember the words to the spell I’d found on the Internet, but it hardly mattered. I had the idea of them in the back of my mind, and I bent over the child, whispering them.

“I call down the walls of the world to help free you. I call on the god who must listen to me. I call on wind and earth and sea. I call on fire to help free you. In Cernunnos’s name I set this geas. By my will and by these words I bind you to ride eternity.”

The coil of energy unleashed inside me as I spoke, weaving a net of silver mist and green power that wrapped itself around the boy’s sleeping body. I pulled it into my arms as I’d done with Cernunnos and stood, cradling the child. He weighed almost nothing, as if he were spun from air. I could feel the resistance from his soul, which wanted nothing more than to stay in Tir na nôg, in the silence and safety that had been torn from it. He struggled against the binding I’d wrought, but he’d told me himself: blood magic was strong, and I’d invoked the strongest blood link of all, that of the father and son.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I need you to send Cernunnos home. Just a few more hours and the ride will be done until next year. You’ll be able to go home. I’m sorry.”

I fled the compelling world of Tir na nôg, bringing the boy’s body back as a physical thing.