Raven Calls

it from her chest.

She screamed, and she died, and the Lia Fáil’s light went out.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The darkness was tremendous. Even with my sword still lit blue and bright and full of magic, there was nothing in the world but dark. I was a matchstick, not even a candle, just a firecracker popping sparks in the night. Even that light sputtered, my outrageous confidence suddenly cut down to size by the sheer intensity of black.

The silence was even worse. The stone’s scream had ended, hacked off as brutally as its light. If the fast- moving moat had whispered with water, it did no longer. My heartbeat echoed in my ears, each thump crisp and clear and clean, the only sound in the world.

Gary, somewhere in the near distance, inhaled to speak. My hand made a hatchet, cutting him off. I did not want whatever was out there in the dark—because something was out there, cold and malignant and so very, very angry—I did not want that thing’s attention brought to my friend. Bad enough to have caught its attention myself. I would not let it notice Gary. So we stood there, he and I, waiting in the failing light of my courage.

Ravens began to call.

A few of them at first, and from far away. Then more, closer, and more again. I’d thought the Morrígan had come on raven wings, but the blackness was filled with them now, their voices shrieking and their scent that of carrion. My blade’s blue light glittered on their feathers and reflected in shining black eyes, but could not distinguish between where they ended and the darkness began. My heartbeat was no longer loud enough to be heard over their screams of laughter and rage, and for a hollow moment I wondered if it was even still beating. I had been afraid dozens of times in the past year, but I had never been so cold with it. An hour ago I’d been ready to face the Master, but my confidence and resolution were bottled inside me, frozen by dark and raven calls. He was in there, my enemy. Somewhere in the blackness, and I was the only point of light. He could see me, and I could not see him.

The reckless impulse to extinguish the sword flickered through me and almost made me laugh. “Right,” I whispered beneath the ravens, “right. Turn off the light so I can’t see him coming. Good idea, Jo. Very smart.” Mocking myself made me feel ever so slightly better, which in comparison to numb, motion-stealing fear, was a huge improvement.

Claws tightened on my shoulders. A hard squeeze, neither warning nor teasing, but seeking comfort instead. My Raven, scared, which I’d never imagined he could be. And on my other shoulder, Wings, his aged feet flexing and loosening. He leaned forward, wings spread a few inches, and though when his mouth opened he made no sound, I had the impression he was—not laughing, but spitting. Spitting in the eye of the dark.

Because he had been here before, I realized. He had done this. He had faced the Master, even if Raven and I had not, and he’d lived to tell about it. “Yeah,” I said, very softly. “Yeah, okay, let’s do this thing.” I took a step past the Lia Fáil. Just one step, but it meant I could move, and that was enough to shore up my faltering confidence. Healing magic started to flow through me more freely, warming the chill, steadying the sick patter of my heart. “Your go-to girl is dead,” I whispered to the Master. “It’s finally just you and me. How ’bout I get a chance to see your ugly face?”

The thunder of wings ended, and I went cold again. I thought I should be braver, not running hot and cold with passions and panic, but maybe keeping going into the dark when I was terrified was what bravery was. My steps drifted left. Heart-side of the body, where the Master had always called to me from. Rattler, still weary, coiled at the base of my skull, waiting for me to need the speed he could offer. I didn’t know how to fight amorphous blackness, but hell, I hadn’t known how to fight most of what I’d faced. Learning on the job, that’s what they called it. I just needed to learn this one last lesson. Rattler’s speed wouldn’t hurt, nor the ravens on shoulders, nor the touch of Brigid’s fire still burning within me. I had my shields, my sword, my magic and I had Gary at my back. I knew I would die to protect him, and that was when my fear fell away.

The Master came to me as an old man, stepping free of the night all bent and broken with age. Thin hair drifted over his shoulders, white against a cloak of raven feathers, and his gaze was mild and blue. Tattoos banded the wasting flesh of his upper arms. He carried a walking stick and wore a shapeless white tunic and no shoes beneath the feathered cloak.

For one stupid moment I thought, that’s it?

And for that, I had hell to pay.

Power lanced toward me without warning. I mean, he did nothing, didn’t blink, didn’t nod, didn’t point his walking stick at me. Blackness just exploded from him, hit me in the sternum and knocked me halfway across Tara. I landed on my back, skidding, and came to rest with my head against a standing stone. My sword was somewhere else. Possibly back next to the Lia Fáil, since I thought my hand had opened when I’d been hit. I was going to have to do something about that, because without a weapon I was toast.

This was not a good time to admit, even to myself, that I was toast anyway. I had been stabbed in the gut more than once. The Master’s opening shot felt like that, only worse. Like this time I’d been stabbed with a barbed weapon and it was sawing back and forth inside me, black magic leaking ichor into my system. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t even breathe. All the air had left me and showed no inclination to come back in. I lifted my head about a quarter of an inch and looked down my body.

There was a gaping hole in my shields, a shattered, magic-oozing mess where cold raw death power had punched through. I tried wheezing out any last air inside me, knowing there was no other way to inhale again, but I couldn’t. Not around the ruins of my magic. I had the hideous idea that I had been broken in half, that even if I could inhale again I would find only my shoulders and head could still move. The fear was supported by excruciating pain that stopped somewhere around my sternum. I just couldn’t feel anything below that. Luckily, I hurt so much where I could feel that I had almost nothing left to be scared with about the rest of it.

One hit. He’d torn me in half with one hit, and I’d thought I’d been ready for him. He was coming my way now, his cold rage in no particular hurry. Gary was back there somewhere and I hoped like hell he was staying out of it like I’d told him to. Not following the death-making beast approaching me.

Oh, God, the Master was angry. I’d thwarted him in the past and now I’d pulled the heart from his favorite creation. His fury rolled through the dark, a palpable thing, and when it reached me again, it grabbed the bleeding wretched wreck of my magic and squeezed. I still couldn’t even scream, and the magic, trying frantically to make things better, wouldn’t let me pass out. I tried anyway.

The pain disappeared. As quickly as it had come, as profound as it had been, it was gone without a trace. I finally wheezed in a new breath. I could move again, hands and feet and legs and all, everything where it should be and working as well as it was meant to. I clutched my chest and sat up, hardening my shields against what I figured was the inevitable next blow.

It came just as fast as I expected it to, liquid nitrogen cold, freezing the air in my lungs, freezing my brain, my magic, everything. Pain erupted all over again, throbbing through me and leaving me scrambling for any kind of weapon against it. Nothing, I had nothing, and a bit late I realized the Master wasn’t trying to kill me. I was pretty sure I’d already be dead if he wanted me that way. He was playing with his food, punishing me for being a pain in his ass the past fifteen months.

I took one very brief moment to thank all the makers of the world for a bad guy who liked to get even instead of just getting it over with, and the next time the pain abated, I reached through the distance for my sword.

It jammed, refusing to come to my call. Incoherent with confusion, I screamed. The Master cackled, a proper wicked old man’s cackle, and hit me again. I waited it out, which sounds stoic but wasn’t, and in the instant’s respite between that attack and the next, I looked up.

By the light of my sword, way up there by the Lia Fáil, I saw Gary. Gary with my sword, finishing burying it hilt-down at an angle, so the Stone of Destiny helped