about the damage to my beautiful car. If I started crying, I didn’t think I was ever going to stop.
Gary wrinkled his eyebrows and looked at me for a while. When I didn’t find anything else to say, he asked, “You gonna be all right here alone, Jo?”
“Oh, sure. I was right. Today’s the day. So I just gotta live through it.” My words were slurred. I turned around and poured the rest of my water into the coffeemaker and dug around for fresh grounds and a filter. My coffee cup was already sitting under the drip. I didn’t remember putting it there.
“You’re sure today’s it?”
“Herne said so. No.” I shook my head, frowning as I tried to form enough coherent thoughts to elaborate. Gary scowled at me expectantly. “Verified it. Marie told me. Us. She was right. Herne was all upset I knew, so she had to have been right.” Gary didn’t look like I was clearing matters up any. I groaned.
“I’ll tell you on…” I looked at my fingers vacantly, like I had the date written on them. “It’s Wednesday? I’ll tell you Saturday.” That sounded like enough time for me to catch up on my sleep.
“It’s Thursday,” Gary said.
“Saturday,” I said firmly. Gary grinned.
“No, Thursday.”
I glared wearily at him. He laughed and held up his hands, Cernunnos’s sword dangling from his fingertips. “All right, I’ll stop giving you grief. Kids these days. No sense of humor.” He waggled the sword at me. “What should I do with this?”
I discarded the first two suggestions that leaped to mind as being unnecessarily rude. Gary grinned like he knew what I was thinking, and put the sword on the kitchen table. “I’ll just leave it there,” he suggested.
I nodded. “Good idea.” Gary stood by the table a moment, still looking expectant, and I dredged up a sleepy scowl. “I hate morning people,” I told him. He laughed and held up his hands again.
“Okay, okay, I know a hint when I hear one. Stay alive, why doncha?”
“I’m trying,” I promised, and let him find his own way to the door. It was only ten feet. I figured he could make it. The water turned slowly into coffee, dripping steadily into the coffee cup. It was a pink cup. I didn’t consider myself a very pink person, but it had my name on it, so I’d bought it. When it was three quarters full I stuck the usual pot under the drip, filled what was left of the cup with milk and sugar, and went to turn on the computer screen.
The Wild Hunt rode out of the screen at me, in such fine detail my first thought was that I wouldn’t put artwork that good up on the Net without degrading it some, to make it harder to copy. Then my hands began to shake and I had to put the coffee cup down as I stared at the painting.
It was good, maybe of professional caliber, but it was also terrifyingly accurate. Cernunnos’s eyes were filled with the unholy green light that would haunt my nightmares if I ever again got enough sleep to dream. The elegant bone horns swept back along his skull and he smiled as he urged his stallion onward. The silver animal’s broad chest so well rendered I half expected it to pull in its next deep breath as I watched.
Beside Cernunnos, almost in front of him, ran the pale gold mare who’d kept pace with me only an hour or two earlier. She wasn’t riderless, though: a feral-eyed child with hair as wheat-pale as Cernunnos’s rode high in the saddle, mouth open in a shout of joy at the speed his horse ran at.
Others of the Hunt poured down out of the fog, riding down from the sky, the dark shadows of rooks around their heads and the sleek white bodies of the hellhounds running at their heels. Even rendered indistinct by fog, I could pick out the shape of the thick-shouldered man, and the archer. I leaned back and picked up my coffee cup just to give my shaking hands something to do, and took a sip. Not enough sugar. I took another sip, staring at the painting. It was titled And A Child Shall Lead Them. Whoever had painted it had seen the Hunt.
In fact, he’d seen more than I had. There wasn’t any child riding with Cernunnos now. I found the artist’s e- mail address and scribbled out a note. Is it scribbling if it’s typing on a keyboard? It seemed like scribbling.
Hey. I just came across your painting of the Wild Hunt, and it’s incredible. Scared the hell out of me, in fact. It’s so real I’m gonna guess you’re not going to think I’m crazy when I tell you I’ve had a run-in with Cernunnos myself, that he almost killed me. But there was no kid riding with him. Can you fill me in on who the child is? It’s important. Please write back.-Joanne.
I sent it and immediately regretted it. For a couple of fruitless seconds I pounded the reply button, like it would somehow retrieve the message from the ether of cyberspace, then groaned and drank half my coffee. One more person would think I was nuts. Oh well. I wasn’t sure he’d be wrong.
I went through two more cups of coffee waiting for an answer, before slowly cluing in to the fact that it was going on six in the morning and no one in his right mind would be up, much less checking e-mail. Unless he was on the East Coast, in which case it was a perfectly reasonable time to be up. The more that I thought about it, the more logical it seemed that the artist was not only farther east than I was, but was in fact probably in Ireland itself, which meant it was nearly two in the afternoon and why the hell hadn’t he answered my e-mail yet? Did he want me to die?
I decided maybe I’d better take a shower and reintroduce reason to my brain.
Standing under the hot water and breathing in steam at least helped shut down the caffeine-inspired paranoia. I slid down to sit on the floor of the tub, trying to find a place to start making sense of the mess my life had become. When I lifted my head a moment later, Coyote sat under the stream of water in front of me, his ears twitching in an undignified manner every time a drop splashed onto them.
“You have terrible control.” His ears twitched, flattened out and went upright again.
“What are you doing in my shower?” I remembered thinking I needed to get a dog. Maybe he would do.
“I’m not a dog,” he repeated, “and I’m in your shower because you think you’re awake and you’re holding the pattern that was around you. I wish you’d stop.”
“I like showers.” I stubbornly clung to the idea that I was awake and sitting on the floor of my shower. With a dog. I grinned again, almost a giggle. Coyote sighed, deeply put-upon. “You could turn into a guy,” I suggested, sort of hopefully. “At least that way you could wash your metaphysical hair.” It wasn’t that I wanted a gorgeous man in my shower. Honest.
I hadn’t noticed before that Coyote had discernible eyebrows, but they went up at that. “Metaphysical?” he asked. I shrugged elaborately.
“This is all very metaphysical. Why are you in my shower, anyway?”
“You called me.”
I blinked at him uncertainly as water streamed down my face. “I did?”
For a moment I had the distinct impression he wished he had hands, so he could pinch the bridge of his nose. “Look,” I said, offended, “you’re the one who dragged me into all this. Left to my own devices I just would have died.”
Coyote lifted his head to look at me with astonishment. “Is that really what you think?”
“Well, of course. Ordinary people don’t go around having near-death out-of-body-experiences of their own free will.”
“Wow,” Coyote said, “have you got a lot to learn.”
I squinted at him. “Are spirit guides supposed to say ‘wow’?”
“Look,” he said impatiently, “spirit guides can say whatever the hell they feel like.” A drop of water hit him in the eye and he shook his entire body. When he stopped, he was completely dry, and the water rolled off the air above him like it was hitting an invisible umbrella. I lifted my finger and poked at the umbrella, encountering resistance. I jerked my hand back and shook it, blinking. “I came of my own free will,” he explained before I asked. “It gives me the ability to affect your world-form. Just like you did in Herne’s garden.”
“You know about that?”
He smiled an infuriatingly superior little smile. “There are some advantages to being a spirit guide.”
I suddenly felt very alone and very, very unknowledgeable. “So what are the advantages to being the new kid on the block?” I whispered. “People are dying, Coyote, and I don’t know how to stop it. I thought I was doing okay and then I found out I wasn’t nearly as cool as I thought I was.”
“You outgunned Herne once,” Coyote said reassuringly. “You’re going to make it through this.”
“I tricked him.”
Coyote smiled. How a dog smiles, I don’t know, but he smiled. “That’s what we do, Joanne. The first thing a healer has to do to heal is to shake up perceptions. To make the impossible, possible.”
“Am I really going to live through this?”
