The Walker Papers: Raven Calls Part 7

The skeleton really was in about two hundred and six pieces, and there were no markers-no clothes, no jewelry, no handy wallet-to indicate who it might once have been. I was no forensic anthropologist. I couldn't tell if the splayed hip bones were male or female. And ghosts were not my strong suit, which was to say, I couldn't call one up if my life depended on it. Even Billy wouldn't be much help this time, since he was good with the newly dead, and unless my friend here had been dumped in a vat of acid, he wasn't all that newly dead. So he was probably a murder victim, and I should probably call the local cops.

The question of whether or not to call was abruptly negated by a banshee rising out of the disturbed bones.

I'd met a banshee before. This one was...fresher. Skin drawn less tightly across her bones, black hair still thick and lush instead of scraggly. Clawed fingernails slightly less clawlike, as if she hadn't had centuries to hone them. And I guessed that answered the question of whether the skeleton was male or female. For an instant we stared at one another, me shocked and her-I don't know what she was thinking. It looked like she was a.s.sessing me as a potential threat. I started to reach for my sword, remembered it was lost somewhere in time with Gary and with that failure apparently came up lacking in the banshee's estimation. She dove at me, shrieking, and I fell a.s.s over teakettle trying to get out of the way. The bite on my arm flared, itch suddenly all-consuming as the urge to become other struck me again.

This time I was tempted. I hadn't come out so well fighting a banshee the first time around. It had taken my dead mother to pull my hiney out of the fire, and I didn't think she would be able to do it again. Being four-legged, furry and with vicious teeth sounded like a better bet than my own raggedy-a.s.s self. The only problem was I wanted to be in control of a change. The raging heat in my forearm a.s.sured me I wouldn't be.

The banshee overshot thanks to my display of gymnastic excellence. I scrambled to all fours, crouching on the mountaintop as she swung back around. Her aura shone black against the cloud-spattered skies, making my tight-to-skin s.h.i.+elds a bastion of light in comparison. She probably literally had the home field advantage, but I hadn't been in control of my magic when I'd last met a banshee. I repeated that to myself and tried not to look too hard at her nails. They were more than long enough to eviscerate me. s.h.i.+elds or not, I still wanted my tender underbelly well out of her reach. It wasn't killing season as far as ritualistically feeding the Master was concerned, but it also wasn't far off, and besides, I felt relatively certain he'd make a special exception if one of his minions managed to get me served up on a plate.

This particular minion, though, hung there in midair with rage contorting her papery face as she snarled, "Firstborn daughter, blooded child, Master's slave is driven wild!"

Oh, h.e.l.l. I'd forgotten about that. The d.a.m.ned banshees spoke in terrible poems. Last time I'd faced one I was afraid I'd be rhymed to death. Cryptic was bad enough. Cryptic rhymes were rubbing salt in the wound.

But slave was an interesting choice of word. I stayed huddled, trying to remember if the last banshee had responded when I didn't speak in rhyme. I hoped so, because under pressure like this I couldn't come up with even a bad poem to save my life. "I don't mean to go all Spartacus on you, but there's one sure way out of slavery. If you want to come down here and talk it out I'll..." Rip your head off with my bare hands was kind of how that sentence ended, but I didn't think that would go over so well. "...help you."

Rather than take me up on my generous offer, she screamed and came at me again. Fingernails on chalkboards and metal tearing and hysterical babies and every other hideous, piercing, reverberating sound in the history of mankind rang through that scream, and it tried to s.h.i.+ver my skin off. It actually did get through my s.h.i.+elds, not entirely, but enough to crack them. I yelped, as much startled as afraid, then clenched my belly and strengthened the idea of pearlescent s.h.i.+elds s.h.i.+mmering around me, Star Trek-like.

It was too late. Somehow she was under the s.h.i.+elds, her scream seeping through to suck up against my skin and worm its way deeper. My vulnerabilities were exposed, all the spiderweb cracks in my winds.h.i.+eld. She went for them like she knew they were there, endless shrieks wresting them apart. Gary's disappearance was the newest crack in my facade, and my fear for him grew with each new banshee cry.

I wondered if that was how banshees killed people when they weren't eviscerating them. Death by screaming. Death by prying at all the cracks that made up a persona until they shattered and the few really unbearable things in a life were exposed and remembered. In that case, they weren't harbingers of death at all, regardless of what the legends said. They were murderers through and through.

She pushed past my worries about Gary and latched onto a deeper concern. An older one: Morrison. The Almighty Morrison, with his silvering hair and ice-blue eyes and his strong, competent hands. Morrison, who had been so utterly gorgeous the first time I'd laid eyes on him I'd gotten all fourth grade and hit him-metaphorically if not physically-to show him how much I liked him. Morrison with his frustrated grace in deciding to use my powers, powers neither of us understood, to solve cases that had no rational explanation. Morrison with his expectations of me, expectations I desperately wanted to live up to without admitting that to either of us. Morrison in the wilderness of a mountain forest, with the shadow of a tattoo on his shoulder. A tattoo that didn't really exist. Yet.

I bristled, fingernails digging into the dirt as I shoved back. Morrison was my territory, and I wasn't about to give him up to a shrieking she-demon from the world beyond. Glee shot through her hideous voice like she'd made a palpable hit, and a vision of Morrison going down under a banshee's attack swept me.

A vision of Morrison unloading his gun into the banshee's belly swept me, too. It wouldn't stop her. Supernatural creatures usually didn't die from mundane weapons. But it would sure as h.e.l.l slow her down, and once I got done with this jaunt to Ireland it was my goal in life to never be so far from Morrison's side that slowing down a monster wouldn't buy enough time for me to get there and go medieval on its a.s.s.

I snapped my teeth at the banshee in my own sort of savage glee, and somewhere way down at the back of my brain I started worrying that all this snapping and bristling was starting to get very lupine. I had to haul myself back. My arm didn't itch anymore. It felt like it was on fire instead, and the fire was spreading through my whole body. The very cells were crying out to change, and I was just barely staying on this side of self-aware enough to fight it.

The banshee's voice went high and almost sweet, and drove right through my skull down to my most buried and most vulnerable concerns. "What's this, what's this, she remembers a kiss!" Delicious spite brightened her voice, making it sound like swords sc.r.a.ping. "The Master's meal was a little wild, bore herself a wee boy child!"

I whispered, "Oh, come on, that's twice in a row you've used wild/child. You can do better than that," but the mockery wasn't enough to keep rage from rising as silver in my gaze. I'd given Aidan up for adoption so he could have a better life than my fifteen-year-old self was prepared to offer him. Letting banshees know about his existence and come hunting him did not in any way qualify as better. Maybe fighting to the death to protect a child was stereotypical, but right there, right then, I was okay with that. I sounded raw and cracked as the banshee as I grated, "You will not touch my son."

I stopped fighting it and let the werewolf take me.

Pure savagery rose in my bones, contorting them with snaps and stretches. The boiling heat within me expanded outward, sudden rush of kinetic energy released. It hurt like scratching a bad itch did: it hurt good. That was wrong, because according to Coyote, shapes.h.i.+fting was supposed to be a seamless and painless transition, but I'd spent so much time itching and being unable to scratch that it was just a relief. I didn't care if it was wrong.

I was in motion before the s.h.i.+ft even finished, four feet grasping the earth more certainly than two could ever do. The animal was angry, not my protective fury, but a deep rage that drove its every move. A banshee was as good a target as any to unleash that anger on, though a whiff of scent told my hind brain that it and I-me the werewolf, not me the shaman-were probably on the same side. It was a familiar scent of decay, of dark magic, a thing I hadn't even known had a scent, and it said we were born of the same master. There was another smell, too, one that caught at the back of my throat for just a moment, and which the werewolf couldn't put a name to. I disregarded it, h.e.l.l-bent on the banshee. It was free, and I was bound to the moon-full tonight, last of the three full moons, and it seemed a werewolf didn't change only at night after all-and its freedom was reason enough for it to die whether we served the same master or not. I sprang upward, tooth and claw reaching for the banshee with glorious, furious power.

The whole thing, from beginning to end, lasted about fifteen seconds. Then fresh magic slammed into me so hard I collapsed, and when I woke up I'd been buried alive.

Chapter Twelve.

Stone curved so close to my face I began to hyperventilate. I hadn't noticed a dislike of enclosed rocky s.p.a.ces until just this past weekend, when I'd gone traipsing around an awful lot of caverns that weren't supposed to be beneath Seattle. The weight of the world pressing down turned out to be more than I could handle. Panicked, I rolled sideways in search of escape, and crashed into a woman eight inches taller than I.

She was made of granite, and lay serenely on the tomb we shared. I sat up a few inches, clobbered my head and fell back down with a whimper. My granite friend held an actual sword in her stone hands. She wore an all-too-familiar necklace, too, though it was carved of stone, not made of silver. An effigy, that's what she was. A remarkable amount of curly stone hair lay around her shoulders, and for a second I wondered if she was an effigy of a comic-book character, since real people hardly ever had that much hair.

It slowly dawned on me that for someone who'd been buried alive I could see very clearly. Not the glowy bright world visible through the Sight, but just ordinary ol' Joanne vision, slightly fuzzy because I'd lost my G.o.dd.a.m.ned gla.s.ses again when I shapechanged. I was still wearing my clothes, though, including the leather coat, which had apparently fit a wolf well enough not to entangle me while I jumped a banshee. Either that, or someone had thoughtfully dressed me before burying me.

I was clearly not dead if that was my major concern. I exhaled very, very carefully, and lifted my head to look for the source of the light.

It came from somewhere beyond my feet. I dug my heels in, bent my knees until they hit the low ceiling and hitched myself down a few inches. After a few repeats, I edged off the tomb's far end and landed on my a.s.s in a small round room covered in rubble.

"Sure and it's sorry I am for shoving ye in there," said the living embodiment of the granite woman, "but there was nowheres else to put ye so I could sit and wait on ye, too."

I did not say "What?" which I thought took a great deal of restraint. I didn't say anything else, either, not out of restraint but out of gaping astonishment.

She wasn't just the living color version of the effigy. She was the woman in my visions, the one who had bound the werewolves to the moon's cycle. Fair copper hair in as much quant.i.ty as the statue possessed, which made me touch my own short-cropped and stick-straight hair self-consciously. Light eyes, a strong build and an aura that sank down into the earth, anchoring her so it looked like nothing could possibly knock her from her feet. After many long seconds I managed what I thought was a pleasantly casual, "Meabh, I presume."

She bowed, which was pretty talented for someone sitting down. Coppery curls fell around her shoulders and she shook them back as she straightened again. I had hair envy. I'd never had hair envy in my life. I was so busy having hair envy I almost forgot to respond to her, "And you'll be Siobhan Walkingstick, I think."

"Yeah. Well, I mean, no. I like Joanne better. Jo." I'd never voluntarily suggested someone call me Jo, before. It had always been Joanie. But aside from being welcome in the midst of the occasional meltdown, Joanie was starting to sound like a little kid's name. I was finally clawing my way out of emotional immaturity, and I'd never been little. Sometime in the past year or so, I'd left Joanie behind. "Where are we?"

As soon as I asked I knew the answer. We were in Meabh's tomb, of course, and the more interesting question was, "How did I get here? What happened? I...was a wolf. And there was a banshee..." Really. Normal people did not find themselves saying things like that. I pinched the bridge of my nose, noticing again that my gla.s.ses had gone missing, and muttered, "Don't suppose you found my gla.s.ses out there."

To my surprise, she held them up between two fingertips. "You were a wolf," she agreed, "and there was a banshee. And I'll have none of that sort of thing contaminating my bones, not even when she's one of my own. What," she added, pointing my gla.s.ses at my forearm, "is that?"

I tried to hide the half-bandaged bites with my other arm. The itching was gone, leaving ordinary pain in its place. "It's a..." For a second I thought I could get away with "dog bite," but something in Meabh's expression suggested I would find my a.s.s kicked from here to breakfast if I tried that. I mumbled, "Werewolf bite. I got bit by a werewolf the other day. I can't heal it. Can you?"

Instead of helping she cast her gaze to the small room's ceiling. "A werewolf bite," she said to it. "Sure and I spend a lifetime building the stone circles, gathering the power, hunting the b.i.t.c.hes down, and all for what? For my daughter to come to me poisoned by the very blood I bound."

"I'm not your daughter." I hadn't liked my own mother very much in the short time I'd known her, but I'd be d.a.m.ned if somebody else would go around claiming me as hers. "I'm human, for G.o.d's sake. You're aos si."

"And Nuada was the last of the aos si kings so," she said with a shrug. "He wed my mother and broke the cycle of sacrifice, but the cost was the throne. It's men who've come to the seat of Tara since, and all of them my husbands, too. The children I've borne have married men time and again, until it comes to you, Siobhan Walkingstick, Joanne Walker, my child. You are human," she agreed. "There would be no trace of the si in your blood. But you're my child still, and heir to the power and the battle we fight."

I opened my mouth to argue about whether somebody could find traces of the aos si in my DNA if I was in fact genetically related to them, then remembered n.o.body had yet convincingly found Neanderthal blood in h.o.m.o sapiens even though I knew people who looked like immediate family had been straight out of that lineage. I shut my mouth again. Meabh c.o.c.ked an eyebrow and I shook my head, looking for something else to say. I came up with, "How about granddaughter, then," which wasn't brilliant but was a bearable alternative.

"Sure and that's a mouthful." She got a look at my expression and said, as if she'd always meant to, "Granddaughter it is. We've work to do, Grand- "

"Joanne. For G.o.d's sake, just call me Joanne. I don't need a d.a.m.ned t.i.tle. What happened out there? Wait." I sat bolt upright, sickness and hope both churning my stomach. "You've been around forever, right? Do you know what happened to Gary? Is he okay? Did he come back home? Did they fight the Master? Where is he?"

She couldn't possibly answer through the barrage of questions, which, as they became more repet.i.tive, I started to think was a deliberate delaying tactic on my part. There was only one answer I wanted, and if I kept asking questions she couldn't give the wrong one. But I had to breathe eventually, and she snapped a hand up to stop me from continuing when I gasped for air. "Your friend is a legend, Gran-Joanne. He rode with the hounds to this very place, and here they fought so long and so hard the mountaintop melted into a smooth and b.l.o.o.d.y field. The Morrigan and her ravens came to do battle and was met by her sister Brigid, who had never before been seen to make war. A sea of dead men rose from the cauldron and were struck down by Brigid's life magic. They say the necklace the Morrigan wore burned her then, like calling to like, and in that moment her master faltered, and she fell. It was a victory for the ages, Joanne. It set this world back on a path less dark than the one it had known."

"But what happened to Gary?"

"No one knows." Meabh's voice dropped with sympathy. "Some say he rides with the Hunt even still, while others claim it's the aos si who have taken him in."

"You're aos si," I snapped. "Did they? You? Whatever?"

"I would not know," Meabh murmured. "He fought before my time, and it's much more part of the mortal world that I am, than part of my father's people."

"Well, go find out!"

"I can't." Her implacability silenced me, and when it became clear I'd shut up for a moment, she went on. "I chose the Fir Bolg, Joanne. I chose humanity. It's unwelcome I am with my own kind. Every path has its price, does it not? If only the price of recognizing a life unled, but a price it is, and a price must be paid."

I had a startling amount of experience with recognizing lives unled, thanks to Suzanne Quinley. She'd once shown me a whole host of choices I might have made, and I'd seen all the lives I hadn't chosen. I regretted some of them right to the tips of my toes, though at the same time I couldn't say I was willing to give up the life I had in order to live one of the others. Meabh had probably never actually stood at a crossroads of possibilities, watching all her different lives unfold around her, but that didn't mean she wouldn't have an idea of what she'd lost.

And of what she'd gained. I finally spoke, focusing on a detail I'd noticed before but had been too busy envying her hair to comment on. "You're wearing my necklace."

A smile twitched her lips. "More I should say that you're wearing mine."

I closed my fingers over the necklace we both wore. "Well, whatever, but how can that be? Only one of us can have it at a time."

"Only one of us does. You asked what had happened, and here's what I know. Not an hour ago I stood ready to wed the next ard ri, and then an offensive magic shook my very bones. I could not leave it be, and in answering, found myself here. A banshee and a wolf fought over my grave, and I would have none of that. I called on the magic. The banshee was banished and you, Joanne, shed the wolf's clothes and lay at my feet an unconscious child. I knew the pa.s.sage into the cairn's inner sanctum, though sure and I'd never thought to see it alive, and brought you here to waken. And now I stand ready and waiting, Granddaughter, to see what battle you have drawn me forward in time to face."

"What?" I'd done it again. I clenched my teeth and my eyes, a hand held up for silence and patience. Really, if there was a way to excise that word from my vocabulary entirely, I'd do it. "That's the second time today somebody's told me I was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around with time. I wouldn't even know how to begin doing that, so color me just a little skeptical, okay? But just for hilarity's sake, let's say you're right. How do you know you came forward in time instead of me going back?"

"If you had come back," Meabh said patiently, and pointed at the effigy behind me, "then she would not yet exist. This cairn has stood longer even than I have lived, but it's here I'll be buried should I die. And die I must, for there's no other reason to stand a stone warrior so the world will remember my face."

"This tomb's never been excavated. I'm the only one who's ever seen it." Wow. I had a real skill for saying exactly the wrong thing.

Meabh shrugged. "Time is long. The chance still lies ahead. Tell me what trials lie ahead and offer me a chance to see some of your world so I might know what my daughters have wrought."

"You keep saying daughters. Don't boys count?"

Surprise lit her face. "Of course, but it's through the daughters that the line continues. A child can only be certain of her mother. Is that not so in your time, too?"

My mouth twitched. "Matriarchies have mostly been obliterated in my time. The idea of the king marrying the land for its blessings or power went out a few thousand years ago. It's mostly about might makes right, these days."

Her eyebrows pulled together. "Now, that's a terrible thing to hear. That's my mother's master's way of things, the very thing we're fighting against."

"Yeah, well, the fight's a long way from won, even in my time. Maybe especially in my time." Somehow I had accepted that Meabh was out of time. Part of me even thought she was probably right, that I was the one responsible. I was, after all, the commonality between this morning's historical adventure and the afternoon's time skip.

A handful of disjointed memories floated to the surface: the way time had stretched and snapped back into place when I'd gone into Morrison's house after Barbara Bragg. I'd gone in astrally first, examining the scene before coming in physically, but I still couldn't remember actually entering his house. It had seemed more like my physical body had simply stepped forward through time to catch up with where my spirit had gone.

Something not exactly similar but not exactly different had happened when I'd been hung upside-down over a cauldron. And I'd been in innumerable fights now where time had slowed down to an impossible degree. That was a common enough phrase that I'd never considered the possibility that time had actually slowed. And then there were all the d.a.m.ned time loops that even I could recognize, reaching back to take the studies and power my younger self had acc.u.mulated; saddling up with my mother to win a fight that had happened months before my birth, and h.e.l.l, just this morning trying to tidy up the mess Suzanne had set loose.

Nervousness churned my belly. I had a great big talk with Coyote-and with Raven and Rattler-coming on fast, if I was somehow capable of mucking with time. n.o.body had even hinted that was on my skills list, and I had no idea why anybody would be granted that kind of power. Especially since, presented with the idea that I potentially could step back and forth through time, I could think of about a hundred and sixty things I'd like to go back and change. Oddly enough, arranging to get the winning numbers for the lottery wasn't even high on that list.

It didn't matter. The nice thing about time travel was that if it hadn't already happened presumably it wasn't going to, so I didn't really have to worry about the temptation to go mucking about with my own timeline. With a degree of trepidation-ignoring things often made them worse, in my experience-I put aside the whole question of my ability to alter time so I could focus on what was going on around me right now.

"Okay. All right, let's just a.s.sume you're right and it's my fault you're here. There are at least three things you can probably help with. The first is this." I raised my arm to display the werewolf bite. "You bound them. You must be able to..." I waved my arm around, trusting random gesticulation to get the point across.

It obviously did, but Meabh shook her head. "It's a warrior's path I'm on, Joanne. I'm no healer, for all that ye might wish me to be."

Every time the woman opened her mouth she said something flummoxing. Everybody. Everybody I had met who had shamanic power was on the healer's path. Granted, there hadn't been that many of them, but thus far I was a survey sample of one in terms of being out there fighting the good fight with a sword and s.h.i.+eld instead of just healing hands. To come face-to-face with someone on the other end of the spectrum, so far to the fight that she didn't heal, was completely beyond my scope. "Wow. Wow. How do you do it? I mean, you called up a whole countryside's worth of power to bind the werewolves. And I know that wasn't healing. Believe me." Hairs rose on my arms and the bite started to itch again. I'd sanded Tia Carley's ability to transform to her lupine form away just minutes after she'd bitten me. It had probably been the cruelest thing I'd ever done. "Believe me, I know that wasn't an act of mercy. You'd have been kinder to kill them. So how do you juggle the power with the fight? Because my magic rebels if I use it offensively, and everybody else I know can't even pick up a sword. Literally or metaphorically."

"Then there's a balance in you," Meabh said with remarkable satisfaction. "There's none in me, Granddaughter. It's a reaction I am, a reaction to the dark path my mother walks. But I'm a warrior, too, just as she is, and there's no escaping that. It's better," she said more quietly. "I would say it's better, to have the balance."

All of a sudden I really, really wished I'd known my mother better, and what path she'd imagined herself to be on. I closed my eyes a moment, remembering her fondness for Altoids, then let it go. "Okay, if you can't help with the bite, maybe with the banshee. I didn't do so well against one on my own last time."

The softness escaped her expression, leaving her looking fully the part of a warrior queen. "Sure and there's trouble to be found there, when she's one of my own. That's a fight I can take on, sure enough."

That was the second or third time she'd said that. I frowned at her, niggling bits of information refusing to come fully to mind. "What do you mean, one of your own?"

"It's a great victory for him," Meabh said grimly. "To dig his claws into one of our lineage so deeply she is his thrall after death. It's her we must stop, Joanne, for so long as she fights for him I think we've no hope of winning."

"There's a jillion generations of this family line. How is it that one person is weak enough to fall? You'd think it would be either dozens or none."

She shook her head. "It's bargains made and sacrifices accepted. My daughters are all children of the aos si. Perhaps every banshee that ever wailed is one of us, and perhaps he draws power from that even as we lose it. I only know that this one now is one of ours, and only newly risen as the wailing woman. We must hunt and destroy her, or we stand no hope at all."

"Guess that answers why you're here, then. How do you know she's a recent convert? A new banshee, I mean?"

"Her bones lie outside my cairn." My blank look conveyed incomprehension and Meabh continued like I wasn't the slow kid in the cla.s.s. "To become a wailing woman, the banshee's bones must lie undisturbed for a year and a day, from one high holy day to another. The first light to fall on them wakens the beast, and it's the Master's they are from that day onward."

I turned my gaze to the unseen sky and said, a bit numbly, "But it's the twentieth. The equinox is tomorrow."

Meabh shook her head once, firmly. "You called me on the quarter day, to be sure. I felt the balance in my bones."

"I thought the equinoxes and solstices were on the twenty-firsts of the months."

I got a peculiar glance, and wondered if they'd numbered the days of the month in Meabh's time. It suddenly seemed not only unnecessary but possibly dangerous. Slow dread climbed in me. Of all the things I should be confident of, equinoxes and the like seemed pretty high on the list. If I'd misjudged by a day, trusting the calendar instead of the actual sun, that meant Tia Carley's attempt to line up the power of the full moon with the equinox had come a lot closer to succeeding than I'd realized.

I rubbed my arm nervously, winced and rubbed it again, feeling vaguely that if I sat to give it a good scratch, doglike, it would improve. Only the need to respond stopped me, and even that was only a half-focused reply. "Look, either way it doesn't matter. If she was buried here on the last spring equinox, a year and a day isn't until tomorrow or even the next day, because the equinox last year was on the twenty-first." Way at the back of my mind, pieces were falling into place, and I was afraid to think too hard for fear of jostling them and losing the oncoming epiphany forever.

"Then you've disturbed her early," Meabh said with vicious pleasure. "That makes her weaker, and us all the stronger. We've a day and a night to find her, Granddaughter. A day and a night to fight together and protect this world."

I nodded, but I was hardly listening. A year ago tomorrow I'd fought a banshee myself, a fight that had taken place not just in my own time, but almost thirty years earlier, on another equinox, as well. I'd almost died, but a woman called Sheila MacNamarra had gone to great lengths to keep me alive, both in the womb and as an adult.

And it had been peppermint. That was the smell that had caught at the back of my throat as I'd s.h.i.+fted into a wolf. Curiously strong peppermint.

The banshee was my mother.

Chapter Thirteen.

"We can't just..." My throat hurt. I cleared it and tried again. "We can't just destroy her. We need to free her. To rescue her. 'Master's slave is driven wild,'" I whispered. "That's what that was about. 'Firstborn daughter, blooded child.' She meant me. She knew me. And oh, Jesus Christ, she knows about Aidan now. I never told her. I never told anybody."

Meabh had the look of polite incomprehension people tended to get around me these days. Actually, on reflection, it was more a look of irritated incomprehension. "Sure and we'll destroy her, Granddaughter. There's nothing to be done for it. That's wh-"

"We will not!" I sprang to my feet, narrowly missing cracking my head on the cairn's low roof. No wonder Meabh had remained seated throughout our exchange. She tensed as I leapt up, her fingers closing on a sword held only by her effigy, but she stayed sitting as I snarled, "We will not destroy her. We will find another way. I don't give a d.a.m.n if I have to go back to the beginning of time and rewrite history from day one. We are going to rescue her from slavery to the Master, and then we are going to kick. His. a.s.s."

Rage-induced tears filled my eyes. G.o.d, I hated that part of being a girl. It was worse now because I'd only just told Gary to go kick the Master's a.s.s and now I'd lost him for maybe ever. Meabh drew breath to speak and I jammed a finger at her like it was a blade itself. "Don't even think about arguing with me, or so help me G.o.d I will leave you here in this stone tomb to rot."

"You," Meabh said very, very mildly, "wouldn't be knowing the way out, now, would ye, me fine girl."

Logic was puny in the face of my wrath. Logic was puny and magic was mighty: I had just gotten rebirthed, refilled and renewed, and was fast on my way to resentful. The Sight flooded on full bore, showing me the ancient green serenity of the cairn's protective nature as well as the stress points within the stacked stones. My own skin s.h.i.+mmered with rage. I could blast the G.o.dd.a.m.ned cairn away, leave Knocknaree as flat as it had been when Gary's legendary battle here came to an end, and at that s.h.i.+ning moment in time I didn't think anything could stop me.