Walking Dead

are a few every year you don’t get to take home just yet. It turned out differently in some other future, some other past. That’s going to have to be your consolation prize. Now.” I wet my lips. “I’m sure it’s arrogant to make demands of a god, but can we stop dancing around and get to the main event?”

“So far from home, and still so bold.” Cernunnos rose from his oaken throne and walked a lazy circle around me, taking in the necklace and bracelet and shield I wore. The latter had retreated to its natural form sometime during the wild ride to Tir na nOg, and was simply a purple heart medal pinned to my sweater. The rapier was on my hip, worn like it belonged there, and the god’s gaze lingered on it. “I’ll have that back from thee, shaman, should you lose this battle.”

“If I lose I’ll have bigger problems than you wanting your pointy stick back.”

He quirked an ashy eyebrow and shrugged agreement. “Put these things aside, Siobhán. Here, in my home, in my court, you’re far removed from the magic of your world, and the threads that bind you to your lifeless doll are thin. They must be severed, and that I cannot do when you carry tokens of battle.”

My hand fell to the rapier’s hilt and tightened there. “What exactly are you going to do?” That would’ve been a good question to ask before I joined the Hunt. Someday I’d learn to do these things in the right order. Today, however, was not that day.

Cernunnos made a broad circle with his sword, encompassing himself but clearly meaning me. “Cut a hole in this dying earth, and tear what little power it holds away. It will become a null place, a void, with you at its heart.”

“That sounds…” My skin turned to ice and the cold sank inward, strangling my words. It took a couple of tries to manage, “That sounds incredibly dangerous.”

Cernunnos smiled. His canines had been curved the first time I saw him, mark of the beast within. They weren’t now, no more than subtle bone horn marred his temples. I wondered if this flawless figure was how he always appeared in Tir na nOg, or if having torn him out of time and place left its mark on his form even at the seat of his power. He leaned in, a silver creature of promise and threat, and breathed, “Not for me,” by my ear. Then he straightened, more serious, and added, “It will be, but I know no other way to sever links between the undead and the living. Thou’rt a dead thing in thy world, gwyld, should you let these bonds remain.”

“Why do you do that? Use thee and thou, I mean.” I used the flippant question to hide my nerves as I palmed the bracelet, preparing to set it aside. Cernunnos opened his hand, and I fought the urge to refuse him and put my belongings in a tidy pile beside me. I was on his territory. It was a bad time to stop trusting him, if that’s what I was doing.

He turned the bracelet in his hand, examining the ring of stylized animals that chased each other around it. “A gift from a man, but not a lover. Your father? Mortals.” The last word turned sibilant, breathed out over a long while. “You put such stock and such strength into your blood ties, and are still so easily wounded by them.”

“You should talk.” I unclipped my necklace and handed it over with less reluctance. “Any esoteric commentary about this one?”

I wasn’t even Looking at him, so to speak. The Sight had lain quiet since we’d left my world, and yet when he took the necklace, power and astonishment flared through him brightly enough to leave afterimages dancing through my vision. I rubbed one eye and blinked the other as Cernunnos gaped at the silver choker dangling from his fingers.

To the best of my ability to tell, it hadn’t changed any. Tubes of silver slid over a short chain, held apart from one another by delicate triskelions. The pendant, a simple circle quartered by a cross, rocked between his fingers, like he’d let go for fear it would burn him. “It’s just silver,” I said in bewilderment. “It shouldn’t hurt you.”

“Just silver.” Cernunnos lifted vivid green eyes to me, and that time I thought I saw a hint of curving canine in his smile. “It is ‘just silver’ no more than that rapier you carry is, no more than my own blade might be.”

“Cernunnos, my mother gave it to m-m-muh. Me. Uh. Rapier?” My fingers drifted to the sword again. “You mean my mother gave me a necklace made by an elf king? How the hell did she get —”

“A question I, too, would like to learn the answer to.” Cernunnos curved his fingers around the necklace like he’d been given something precious. I had an unholy urge to snatch it back, and, trying to quell the urge, handed over the rapier with a bit more ferocity than necessary.

“And the shield.” Cernunnos extended his hand a last time, and I unpinned Gary’s medal reluctantly. Of everything in my arsenal, it was the closest to my heart, both physically and emotionally. Cernunnos’s fingers danced above it, then closed without touching it. “Iron. Thou has brought iron here, into my realm. Iron given to thee by one who should have died under my sword, almost a year since. Dost thou seek to outrage me, little shaman, or—”

“Oh, for pity’s sake. Yes, that’s exactly it, Cernunnos. Ooh, I thought, I know! I’ll ride across a void between worlds, put myself entirely into the power of a god whose edges are made up of the beginnings of the universe, and then I’ll piss him off. That was exactly my plan. I’m amazed it took you this long to figure it out.” Somewhere in there I’d begun waving my arms with exasperation, and now I shook the medal under his nose. “Where the hell do you need me to put this thing? Is it going to burn the earth where it lies? Because if it is I’ll, I’ll” Struck by inspiration, I pulled my sweater off, planted the medal on top of nice soft wool, and dropped the whole bundle at Cernunnos’s feet. “Here, already. For crying out loud.”

Tir na nOg, it turned out, was kind of chilly. I was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt under the sweater, but without the thick warm wool, I might as well have stripped to the skin. Cold and grumpy, I folded my arms under my breasts and glared at the god.

Who said, mildly, “I use thee and thou, little shaman, because thy scattered human mind thinks it intimate, and there is a certain delicious delight in conveying intimacies to thee.”

Then he drew his sword and cut a swath of darkness around me.

Alone in the dark wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar feeling. It was the stuff of nightmares, for one, and the stuff of too many clumsy spirit journeys and esoteric battles for two. That said, none of those encounters had been quite like this. Cernunnos’s teasing still rang in my mind, but when it faded, not even my breath disturbed the black.

I had an uncontrollable urge to fire a magic missile at the dark, which only went to prove I spent way, way too many hours on the Internet. Lucky for me, or maybe not so lucky, magic missile wasn’t in my repertoire, and besides, when I reached for my magic, it was gone.

Panic isn’t pretty, not even when you can’t actually see it taking place. I’d whined, bitched and complained about the gifts I’d been saddled with, but I was also kind of accustomed to them now, and finding a void inside me as black as the one surrounding me did nothing at all for my peace of mind. I bit back a scream, not wanting to feel it in my throat but be unable to hear it, and spun around in the darkness, trying to find any source of light or life.

And from a very far distance, something came. It was weak: fragile, even, crawling inch by inch toward me. I knew what it was long before it reached me, but misery and guilt and the human ability to look away kept me from going to it. I didn’t look away; that much I could give myself credit for, but I didn’t move, and wasn’t sure if it was weakness or strength that kept me from doing so.

Matilda Whitehead’s scrawny thought-form clawed its way through the dark, finally resting at my feet and twisting its neck to look up at me. It said, I’m dying, in words that only echoed in my ears, and I said, “I know,” out loud, not knowing if either of us would hear it.

Help me.

“I can’t.” Can’t, won’t, what’s the difference? The words tasted like ash in my mouth either way. “You’re feeding off my energy. We can’t both do that, and you’re already dead. How did you get here? I thought Cernunnos cut me off from everything.”

I’m part of you.

Presumably that was supposed to make sense. I looked down at the ghost-given-body, seeing her—its— scalp through too-thin hair. I was as exhausted standing over her as I’d been fighting her, but it was she who seemed to become smaller and more miserable as the minutes went on. After a while, that made sense. I closed my hands in loose fists, wishing I could undo all the things in the past few days that’d brought me to where I was