nutcase who was murdering children. I’d told Kevin I’d find the guy who’d killed his wife. “I guess I don’t think people basically suck. I think…I don’t know what I think.” I put the coffee cup down and my head in my hands, trying to work my way through a thought. “I think we lost our sense of direction,” I finally said. “I think we need to…” I looked up. Casey’s eyes flashed emerald-green at me, like a reflected light was somewhere behind my head.
A thin trickle of cold followed the warmth of the coffee down the inside of my throat, spreading out through my stomach. “I think we need to heal the people who are hurt.” I picked up my coffee again and twisted around to look behind me. There was nothing green, not even as much as an exit sign. “Heal the ones who can do the most harm, first, and then work our way down through the ranks.” I turned back to him. “I think we should start with you.”
Casey’s eyes shifted. “Me? Since when did I become one of the bad guys?”
“I think you always were,” I whispered. “Herne, son of Cernunnos.” Names had power, I’d read that. Casey began to stand up and I reached across the table to knot my fist in his shirt, locking eyes with him.
“Give me my friend back. Now.”
Color bled out of Casey’s eyes, pale blue giving way to virulent green. A small numb part of me watched it and knew I should be scared, but after watching all the color drain from Marie’s eyes, after reliving the memory of the teenagers’ deaths, all that I could feel was rage replacing the fear that had chilled my belly. I saw surprise deepen the color of his eyes: he expected me to be afraid. I hauled him forward a few inches, and snarled, “Give me back my friend.”
“What if he was never here?” Casey’s voice tinged with a nasal, arrogant accent. Herne’s voice in his garden had been richer, fuller and far more heavily accented, but the intonations were the same.
“All the better,” I growled. “Then you’re the only casualty I’ll have to worry about.”
“You can’t,” he murmured with absolute confidence. “Healer.” The word was an epithet. I tightened my fingers in his shirt and moved around the table, until I was face-to-face with him. I could feel power again, the way I’d felt it earlier, roiling through me. It was free now, unlocked and ready to be used. There were other patrons in the restaurant, some of them watching us openly, a few of them pretending very hard not to see us. I didn’t want them to see us.
All I’d used the power inside me for was healing, so far, but my skin felt abused by the pressure of light on it. Invisibility was just a matter of bending light waves around something. I pushed the bubble of energy inside me out, expanding its surface so that it swallowed Herne and me whole. It felt silver-clear to me, ticklish, as if the rules of the universe had changed in the space I was standing in. I guessed they had: I could see, from the corners of my eyes, that the watchers were frowning faintly, then dismissing what they’d seen-or not seen-as impossible. In a few seconds no one was looking our way at all. My fingers tingled with the outpouring of energy.
Beyond the restaurant, the airport hummed with power, the energy of people leaving and returning home. I only had to redirect all that energy, and I could fry Herne right here where he stood, without any witnesses. I began pulling it in, as natural as breathing, even as the idea made me shudder.
Herne smiled, thin-lipped. “Healer,” he spat again. He looked nothing like Casey any longer, canines dangerously curved and build resuming its natural narrow-hipped shape. “You can do nothing here. What will happen to these people if you draw on the energy output here? How many planes will come down when the airport falls off the radar? How many children will you frighten with blackouts? Let me go, little healer. I know how to choose my battlegrounds.”
Like a heartbeat, the truth of his words pounded into me. Cause and effect. I could destroy him here, on the physical plane, and it would cost hundreds of lives. I would be as bad, worse, than he. I loosened my hold on the invisibility that wrapped around us, unsure if maintaining it might cause damage, too.
“Why didn’t I recognize you?” I didn’t release my grip on his shirt. “I was sure I would. After today. After the school. You don’t feel like Cernunnos. I thought I’d know you.”
He put his hands over mine, surprisingly cool and very large. His nails were thick and heavy, hinting of claws. “Because I can mask myself deeper than you know how to go, little healer. And you have no time to learn.”
“But I did better than you expected.” I hadn’t taken my eyes off his, depthless and green. His gaze had none of the drowning power that Cernunnos’s did, but like Cernunnos, it betrayed him. Under his confidence was a layer of concern. I worried him. Once I tasted that fear, the totality of his power swept over me, thundering, meant to drown me. I tightened my fingers in his shirt a little and lifted my chin, letting it wash all around me like Moses and the Red Sea.
Herne’s memories weighed heavily, a man caught in a position of something less than a god, but granted hundreds of years beyond a man’s lifespan. His mortal life had at least had purpose: he guarded his lands, and faint recollection told me the land had once responded to him. He’d been the Green Man, not a god, no, but at least a protective spirit. But he was too much between two worlds: a taint ran deep in him, all the way back to the half- shared moment where he’d lifted his sword and driven it into his king’s body instead of mine.
Real! It slammed through me like a shock. That moment had been real. His power had dragged me back through time, displacing me. If I had died there, I would have died here, too. Henrietta would have died.
And Richard the Second would never have hanged the Hunter. From the very beginning of his immortal life, Herne had been something less than he could have been. That knowledge poisoned him as much as-
He wrenched back from me, breaking eye contact and tearing loose from my grip on his shirt. The mem ories I’d delved in to shattered, losing me any further insight to the half god standing before me. “I’m stronger than you think I am,” I said.
“Not strong enough.” Herne’s eyes were glassy, with no more openings to his power or his soul. “Not strong enough,” he repeated. “You don’t have enough time.”
“I have a day,” I said calmly, and smiled as shock rose in his eyes. “See? I know more than you think I do, too.” It occurred to me that I’d just played my trump card by telling him that. I didn’t know half as much as I needed to. Shock faded from his gaze, replaced by wariness. Hell. If he thought I knew what he was doing, he’d be all the more cautious, and all the harder to track. Oh, yeah. I’d blown it. Good form, Joanne. I needed a neon pink shirt that read NOVICE in big fat letters. Just in case anybody had any doubts on the matter. Herne and I stared at each other another long moment. Then a rangy security guard materialized at my elbow.
“Everything all right here, folks?” he asked casually. As if by mutual agreement, Herne and I broke off from looking at one another to fix the guard with equally grim expressions.
“Fine,” I said shortly, then muttered, “was I speeding, officer?” The guard frowned at me. “Nevermind,” I said out loud. “We’re fine.”
“Maybe it’s time for you to go on and catch your plane, or head home, ma’am, sir. It’s late, and nobody wants any trouble.” The guard actually looked as if a little trouble might be welcome.
Herne and I looked at one another again. “Twenty-three hours, Siobhan Walkingstick,” Herne said, and I flinched. I didn’t like this thing where people were reading my birth name out of my mind. He hadn’t used it before. Had I given away as much in that memory link as he had? I was going to have to do something about this, about all of it. Assuming I survived the next day. Funny how making it through an hour or a day at a time had never been an issue before.
“Twenty-three hours, Hunter. Sorry for the fuss, officer.” I stepped past them both and went to pick up my luggage.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The desk attendant handed over my luggage with a perfunctory glance at my tickets and I was out of the airport and on the way home within ten minutes. It felt like a bad omen, that actually getting the luggage had gone so smoothly. It wasn’t good when things going easily seemed like a sure sign of doom. I was going to need some extensive therapy when this was all over.
Halfway home I passed a bad wreck, two cars and the freeway wall. Paramedics loaded a body bag into the back of an ambulance as I went by, and Herne’s pointer about the effects of using my new power stood out vividly in my mind. I slowed as I rounded a corner, then pulled over, shivering as I unpeeled my death grip from the steering wheel and shook my hands until blood started flowing again.
