Butterflies, it turned out, were across-the-board erotic little things. Mythologically and legendarily, they were associated with all sorts of sexiness. Mark and Barb fit that bill very nicely. Of course, butterflies were also associated with insanity, which didn’t make me particularly happy, as well as rebirth and, in fact, sleep. None of it, though, suggested that butterfly demons flapped around the psychic ether putting people to sleep and draining their life forces. I sucked on my teeth and tried another search, adding in the end of the world and some of the elements of my visiondreams. My hands grew cold as I began to get hits.
By the time my door banged open half an hour later, I had an unfortunately clear idea of what I was facing. Gary came in red-faced and huffing, and looked startled to see me there. I got up and went to hug him hard, not caring where he’d gone as long as he’d come back safely. He grunted with surprise and returned the hug. “You okay, doll?”
“I’ve been better.” I spoke into his shoulder, muffled. “I was worried when you didn’t answer the phone. You’re okay?”
“’Course I am. What’s wrong, Jo?”
I breathed a little laugh and held on tighter. “I think I really blew it this time, Gary. I woke up a god.”
Gary extracted himself from my hug and leaned back, looking at me. “You’ve gone up against gods before.”
“Yeah. Except the last one just wanted free of his constraints.” I managed a smile and stepped away. “This one thinks I heralded the end of the world, and he doesn’t like it. Is that interesting enough for you?”
To my never-ending surprise, Gary cracked a grin. “Just about. What are you, crazy, lady?”
“You tell me. I mean, you’ve got to admit, as the pinnacle of half a year’s screwups, bringing the world to an end is hard to beat. I start with the Wild Hunt, I move on to unleashing earthquakes and demons on suburban Seattle, and I wrap it up with signaling a god that it’s time to end the world. I think I’ve got the escalation about right.”
“Yeah,” Gary said, “but what’re you gonna do for an encore?”
Laughter caught me out. “I hope to God,” and for a moment there I wasn’t sure if I should be pluralizing that, or if I had a specific deity in mind, “that when we get through this I’ll have laid all the ashes of my spectacular opening act to rest, and that anything else I get to deal with isn’t quite as cosmic in nature.”
A thread of cold warning slithered down my spine, bringing with it a vivid image: a cave in the lit-up astral realm, a place of real beauty and unending life. That cave was blocked off, its depths cut away from me by my mother’s will, but beyond it lay something that thought of me as a tasty morsel. It knew I was out here, and every time I tripped through that part of the Other worlds, it taunted and teased me. I’d resisted it once, and been forbidden that path by Sheila MacNamarra’s power, but moonlit blue darkness waited for me. I didn’t think it would prove to be a puff of dust to be blown away, not when it was so well buried, so deep in the astral planes.
As if thinking of it—him; I had a sense of maleness about the thing, and if I was right in my summation of connections, the banshee I defeated had called it Master—as if thinking of him brought me to his attention, a soft wave of rich, malign amusement danced over my skin, raising goose bumps. I shuddered off thoughts of that particular monster in the dark. I had others to deal with.
“The visions I’ve been having. The waking visions?” Gary nodded, reassuring me that I’d told him about them. I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight anymore. I was so tired I wanted to cry on general principles. “I thought I was supposed to be fighting those dreams. I mean, the world kept coming to an end. It flooded, it burned, it… kept ending. And there I was trying to fling everything I had against that, to stop the destruction of the world. And I couldn’t. They were Navajo history, Gary.” I looked at him in unhappy exhaustion. “I finally had enough pieces to do research.”
“So what’re we up against, Jo?” That was something else I loved about the old man. He meant it when he said
“A god,” I said again. “Begochidi. He led the Navajo from one world to the next. And now he’s come back to do it again. I think I just told him it was time. I think a bunch of physicists working on wormhole theory accidentally set him loose. Like I did with the Lower World demons. I think they made the walls of the worlds thin enough to pass through, and Begochidi was just waiting to step through.” I caught Gary’s expression and shook my head. “The point is he’s here now, to deal with the threat and lead his people to the next world. To deal with me.”
I let out a hoarse laugh and looked away, like I could see through the walls of the apartment. Actually, I could, but I didn’t want to right now, so they were solid and normal. “Begochidi’s not just a minor character in Navajo legend. He’s the Maker of the world, both male and female. Mark and Barbara,” I heard myself add wearily. Gary made a sound of dismay and I couldn’t bring myself to look at him or explain that particular misfortune any further. “Twins, male and female, to carry his spirit toward the blight that endangered his people. Only I think I freed Mark from his hold, so now it’s just Barb out there someplace and I’ve got to fight her.”
I was used to running behind, trying desperately to catch up. It turned out being ahead of the curve sucked just as much as not knowing what I was getting myself into. Maybe more. There was a certain blind hope associated with playing catch-up. Having a clear idea of what I was up against made me feel pretty damn grim.
“You sure ’bout this, Jo?”
I nodded. I didn’t have the impression that shamans went through quite such dramatic trials by fire under usual circumstances, but nothing about my life had been much in the way of normal for a long time now. Longer than I’d thought, really, looking back to my Coyote dreams. Longer than that, even, if I’d really been mixed up by the Makers of the world. Not Begochidi. He wasn’t one of the ones responsible for me, or he’d recognize me. But even the Navajo had more than one creation myth, and from what I’d read, Begochidi didn’t feature as powerfully in all of them. The Makers, it seemed, weren’t necessarily in on the Making together. I’d have to give them a scolding about that, if I ever got the chance.
“Arright, Jo. So what do we do now?”
I shook my head, taking a deep breath. “You don’t do anything.
Nothing in my dreams of Coyote or in any other experience in my life had taught me how to say “I’m going to sleep” as a declaration of war. Consequently, it sounded nothing like one, which disappointed me. I wanted it to be dramatic and world-shaking, but it just sounded like exhausted relief. I wanted to sleep so badly I could taste it. Gary’s bushy eyebrows went up.
“You’re goin’ to sleep? Are you nuts? You just said this guy’s power is comin’ from everybody who’s asleep!”
“I know. Dreams are his domain, Gary. If I don’t meet him on his own ground I’m not going to be able to fight him at all. Barb keeps running away from me.” That made me laugh, huff of sound. “At least that’s something.”
Gary took another breath in protest, then exhaled and slumped his broad shoulders. “You sure,” he said again, but it wasn’t a question this time. “Arright. Lissen to me, Jo. You stay right there.” He got up from the couch and went into my bedroom while I wondered where exactly he thought I would go. I didn’t think dreamland was a place to be entered physically.
He came out of my bedroom with a sword. “Under the bed’s a lousy place to keep a sword, Jo.”
I blinked, getting up to meet him. “It’s a perfectly good place to keep a sword. It’s not like I use it a lot.” He offered to me, so I took it, surprised as always at its heft. The weight hadn’t meant anything to me when I’d first seen it in Cernunnos’s hand, silver metal gleaming beneath prosaic fluorescent lights, but it’d meant a lot later on when the damned thing got shoved through my lung. I’d struck back with iron-based steel, and Cernunnos had fled without his silver blade. It was only considerably after the fact that I brought it to a dealer to have it appraised and found out it really
The dealer had almost literally drooled over the blade. Its swept-silver handle protected the hand easily, the rapier blade impossibly sharp, holding its edge flawlessly despite the metal it was forged of. And that was something else: the forging was unlike anything he’d ever seen. Almost as if it had been cast, like a sculpture. He’d offered me such a ridiculous sum of money for it I hadn’t believed him, and I’d gone home to read up on the Internet about Celtic magic and silver. I’d learned about somebody named Nuada, whose hand, lost in battle, was re-made in silver by a god. I’d tapped a finger on the blade cautiously and wondered.
