{And here we'd thought we could let the suicide watch stand down.}
Stand down. That was a Brian phrase, military-speak. But it was the fox. Her brain conjured up a red fox vixen whenever she deluded herself into thinking she could talk to the forest. The vixen sat in front of Maureen, prim and cat-like on her haunches, dry in spite of the raging storm and with every hair and whisker perfect like she'd just come from the groomer's bench at some goddamn poodle salon.
{Poodle? For that, I should just let you drown yourself in your yellow poison.}
"Get the fuck out of my brain. I've got enough problems without having to take shit from a sarcastic hallucination."
{And who started with the insults, already? Delusions? Hallucinations? A perfectly innocent numenon for the magic wildwood, and you compare me to a poodle?}
"I don't need this crap."
The fox stood up, stretching fore and aft like a cat making sure that her spine was the correct length, and stepped daintily over wet rocks and roots and leaves until she stood by Maureen's right hand. She brought her sphere of dry air with her through the pounding rain. Delusion or not, Maureen smelled the faint skunky fox-musk of her, felt her warmth close enough to touch.
{I'll tell you what you don't need. You don't need that bottle. The FDA has never approved ethanol for the treatment of clinical depression or paranoid schizophrenia or any other psychosis. Besides which, you aren't crazy. You're just lazy. Get off your butt and quit whining. You've got work to do.}
Then the fox turned her head slightly, snapped, and pain lanced through Maureen's wrist. She stared at the blood welling up where the vixen's teeth had slashed the skin. The bottle lay next to her foot, glugging quietly to itself as the sharp fumes of Black Bush spread through the wet furry earthiness of the forest.
Maureen was too shocked to rescue her booze. She just crouched there staring at the blood twisting into thin ribbons mingling with the rain, too shocked even to stop the bleeding and bring her Power to heal the punctures.
"You bit me."
{Damn straight. Hey, if you weren't sitting on it, I'd do the same number on your ass.}
"You bit me!"
{I work with what I've got. If I had hands, I'd try to slap some sense into your pointy little head.}
"Get fucked! Who appointed you God for the day?"
{You did. You bound yourself to the good of the forest. You gave us your memories and speech when you smeared your blood on the tree and threatened to burn this land bare of life if we didn't let your sister go. I'm just doing the job you gave me.}
"Jesus Christ, now I've got a four-legged shrink nagging me into AA! As if Brian wasn't enough." And then she stopped and swallowed. Brian . . .
{Exactly.} The vixen wrinkled her nose at the reek of whisky, stepped daintily around the polluted earth, and walked away. Bone dry. She looked back over her shoulder. {And you might spend some time thinking about whose storm this was, and just where all the lightning struck.}
The storm had subsided into thin rain while they talked, with only a few rumbled memories high in the clouds. Maureen's clothing and hair were dry again, her magical subconscious handling little details like fending off hypothermia while she was busy elsewhere. Where had the lightning struck? She'd been outside for the entire storm, shivering with the claustrophobia of the dungeons, the stone walls closing in around her and the cold burn of iron binding her neck and wrists and ankles.
Most of the fireworks had flashed from cloud to cloud, as usual. She turned to the beech and laid her palm against its smooth bark, sending her thoughts into the forest, asking. Nothing had struck the trees. No list of killed or wounded from her tantrum.
She played back the Frankenstein memory of dark sky and black castle ruins on a high hill, strobed by lightning flashes. All the ground strokes had hit her keep. Hit the burned stones of Dougal's tower. Sure, it was the highest point for miles around, but that was carrying things a little far.
Jeezum. She hadn't realized how much she loathed that pile of stone and all the pain that oozed from it. Only Brian and whisky had made it bearable. And now he had left.
Brian had taken it for granted that they'd move into the castle and live there. She owned the place, right? Feudal fort main shit, right? And he thought of walls as defenses, a way to keep threats outside and at arm's length.
She guessed that he'd never been a prisoner. Sometimes people built walls to keep things in.
The bottle of Irish ambrosia still lay at her feet, nearly half full. Or half empty. She bent down and picked it up. The smooth sharp tang of its golden liquid pulled at her. She lifted it to the paling sky and dissipating clouds, toasting whatever gods ruled this land.
Then she tilted the bottle and poured the whisky out in a slow deliberate stream that gave her hand plenty of chance to argue with her head. Her body shuddered with longing as each drop splattered and sank into the deep forest duff at her feet.
She started to heave the empty bottle against a rock, sort of like christening her ship of tentative sobriety, but her environmental conscience intervened. She set it down unbroken against the tree-trunk, stared at it for a moment, and then inverted it. Sort of like flying a flag upside down.
And that was that. She turned her back on the keep. I'd rather drink muddy water, and sleep in a hollowed-out log . . . She wondered what song that line came from. David would know. David, back in Naskeag Falls with Jo and with a normal life to
