Like I had a choice. I don’t know how long we made love, but I couldn’t get enough of her, and before we were done we’d explored every inch of each other with hands and mouths. I rolled her onto her stomach at one point, and as I took her from behind she hissed, “Lick my neck, Eddie. I love that.” I obliged.
During one intimate passage, I felt a rough patch of skin on the inside of her thigh. I touched the horseshoe- shaped, puckered design. “Is that a scar?”
She rose on her elbows and looked down between strands of tousled hair. “I do believe it is.”
I rose and met her eyes. “Now how would a goddess get a scar? ” I asked dubiously, and kissed it.
She laughed. “A goddess can get anything she wants, Eddie.” She ran her fingers through my hair as I continued to lick the crescent-shaped imperfection. “I wanted to mark this intoxicating flesh with something to remind me where I came from. It’s so easy to forget among all this… sensation.” Then she grabbed my hair and pulled my head up to look at her. “And I am, after all, the Queen of Horses.”
“Uh-huh,” I agreed with a doubtful smile. I was too intoxicated with her flesh myself to really pursue my skepticism, though. When we finished-or rather, when I finished-we lay together, her atop me, and I wondered if Cathy had actually occupied this same spot. It certainly explained her behavior when she returned to the village.
Finally Epona bent over the edge of the bed and retrieved a fresh bottle of wine. She pulled the cork with her teeth and said, “So did I finish telling you about Andrew Reese?”
“You said he finally found you, and that he was broken to pieces,” I said. “And he sent you an old horseshoe that meant something important.”
“It means the end. Of all this. It has to be this way, and even though I know it, I can’t help feeling sad. People see so little of the universe.” She held her thumb and forefinger slightly apart to indicate our narrow vision. “There’s always so much pain, so much fear before you realize how vast existence really is. I wish I could spare you that.”
“Can’t you? Aren’t you a goddess?”
She nodded, and to be honest, at the time I was ready to believe her. “But I tell ya, Eddie. It’s hard being a goddess and a woman. Maybe I should’ve picked one or the other.” She took a drink. “Next time, baby. Next time.”
I didn’t know what she meant, but I sure caught the ominous undertone. Suddenly I recognized that slight tang that permeated beneath all the other odors in the place, especially on Epona’s breath. I picked up the cork from the wine she’d just opened and sniffed it.
I sat up. “Eppie, this wine is poisoned.”
She sighed. “I know.”
When she turned up the bottle, I knocked it from her hands. It shattered on the floor. I grabbed her by her shoulders. She felt paper-thin, sandcastle-fragile. “Eppie, everyone in the village is drinking this!”
Again she sighed. “I know.”
I jumped off the bed and scrambled for my clothes. Eppie rolled onto her stomach and watched me. Her words rang in my ears: It’s too late for Cathy. It means the end of all this.
“You can’t help anybody,” she said. She sounded groggy now. “They’re all dead. I will be soon, too. We’ll pass through the veil together, my folk and I.”
The last thing I heard her say as I ran out the door was, “Such plans, Eddie. I had such plans! ”
TWENTY
I ran as hard as I could back down the trail. I heard neither horses nor birds over Epona’s words rolling around in my head.
A bright orange glow appeared above the treetops, far brighter than the torches had been. At last, so winded I could barely see, I reached the edge of the forest and beheld what was left of the village.
It looked like an efficient, brutal army had been at work. All the cottages were burning. Bodies lay on the ground, most unmarked, but some decapitated. There was no discrimination: women and children had been butchered as thoroughly as men.
I knelt beside the closest body and turned it over. It was a man of about forty, with short hair and a paunch. His face was contorted in pain, and black foam collected at the corners of his mouth. The poisoned wine had taken him.
The roof of Betty’s little not-a-tavern collapsed in a big puff of sparks. My chest was on fire, too, from all that running, and from the agony of realizing Cathy had to be among the dead.
Unless…
I had to know. I ran through the village, heedless of the heat and danger. “Cathy!” I yelled. I dodged chickens and goats, free of their pens and frantically seeking shelter or escape. I did not look at the other corpses except to make sure they weren’t her. I saw familiar faces-the red-haired girl who owed me a kiss had also died from poison-but sought only one. “Cathy!”
“Give it up, hoss,” a voice called.
I turned. Stan Carnahan, bare-chested and blood-spattered, stood between two burning buildings like he’d been molded from the flames. If he’d been intimidating before, now he was downright terrifying. He looked capable of ripping a bull in half with only his hands. He carried a sword- my sword-also stained with blood. And he was smiling.
“The ones the poison didn’t get, I’ve already seen to,” he continued casually. “There’s nobody left alive here.”
Despite the pain in my chest from running, I managed to say, “You couldn’t have killed everyone.”
“Yes, I could,” he said, propping the sword on his shoulder. Blood dripped from the blade and hissed when it hit a fallen burning crossbeam. “I’ve been planning this for months. Even made a list so I wouldn’t forget anyone. Every person in the village is accounted for.”
We looked at each other for a long moment. I couldn’t just ask him about Cathy, so I chose the next obvious question. “Why?”
“Same as you. Andrew Reese paid me.”
That name, and the insidious rhyme, whirled through my head.
“He told me a year ago to come here, become part of the community and wait for delivery messengers to show up. When that happened, kill everyone in town. Simple job, really. And the pay was unbelievable.”
He’d poisoned the wine, and on a night of celebration only the children and a few teetotalers would have been spared. They evidently posed no challenge, for Carnahan wasn’t even breathing hard. “Simple job,” I repeated.
Another building collapsed. Neither of us looked at it. My pulse returned to normal, then continued to slow, as panic and horror dissolved into cold soldierly professionalism. I saw no reason to delay any longer. “Did you kill Cathy, too?”
He nodded, almost contritely. “She was asleep in the bathtub. It was quick.”
Now I was on territory I knew well. He was bigger, and stronger, and better armed, with my own sword no less. But I’d taken on worse odds before.
I let my jacket fall to the ground. After Eppie’s hut, and my mad run, and the heat from the burning village, I was drenched in sweat. Yet inside I was solid ice.
Carnahan lowered the sword into a casual defensive stance. I wouldn’t catch him on overconfidence. “No reason you can’t walk away from here,” he said. “I told you being with Epona was the safest place. You weren’t in the village, so I got no beef with you. My job is done.”
I knelt and drew the knife from the side of my boot. It was only about seven inches long, but it would be enough. I flipped it casually in my hand. “Mine’s not.”
I threw the knife accurately at his heart. I was good, as our dart game would’ve warned him, so he was ready and batted it easily aside with the sword. But he never saw the second knife, a mere three inches long, that I had secretly slipped out of a second hidden sheath and threw a moment after the first.
He almost avoided it, though. I misjudged the strength of his parry, so he moved more than I thought. The
