Part of his body, part of his flesh.
“I’ll give you a parting gift,” Scáthach tells him.
“Aye? What’s that?” he asks.
They are sitting outside the house with seven doors, on a carved stone bench, watching the sunset. His last sunset there, it would be.
“What you asked for.”
He cocks an eyebrow at her. “You’ve given me that already.”
She laughs. Her laugh is rare, but always deep and true. She laughed a great deal at him, at first. Less, of late, than she used to.
“How soon they forget.”
He waits. He’s learned more patience than he had.
“You told me you’d prefer to survive.”
“Aye,” he says.
“To keep one of your oaths, you need to survive,” she points out. “So I will make it possible. Likely, in fact. Unless you are very careless and very stupid.”
“I try to be neither,” he reminds her.
She looks delighted. As delighted as she can look, at least. He might have handed her a present. A child’s present. A pebble, a feather. A pretty shell found on the beach.
“So you do, Fiodh,” she says. “And mostly, you succeed.”
She values success, does Scáthach. One of the daughters, Uacthach, or perhaps it was Aoife—he can never keep them straight—told him one night that Scáthach would never have taken him at all, had she not thought he would succeed.
“So what is this gift?” he asks.
“The Battle Blessing.”
“Aye? And what might that be?”
Now, sitting on the floor of Caitlin’s house, the smell of old incense in his nose and the sword in his hand, he remembers. Resistance to harm, both physical and magical. A kind of armor. He’s not invulnerable. He can be damaged. But it will be difficult for anyone to do it.
Or so Scáthach said.
Perhaps he shouldn’t doubt the word of a goddess, particularly the goddess of his own place of birth. Still, he’s never been one to take a great deal on faith. He likes to experience truth for himself.
He still has his pocket knife on him, he finds. He flips it open, glances down at his left arm. He carries a scar, there, a recent one; he was wounded at one point, in some battle or other. Not badly. “Enough to make you pay attention,” one of the daughters had teased, one night.
Perhaps he’s about to scar himself again.
This could be a very stupid thing to be contemplating.
But he needs to know. He wouldn’t like to go hunting the Ring of Omicron, thinking he’s protected when in truth he is not. “Plan according to fact,” Scáthach told him. “Never take anything for granted.”
As if he would.
This could very well be another one of her tests.
Before he can think about it too much more, he cuts himself across the forearm with the pocket knife. Or, he tries to. The knife doesn’t penetrate; it just slides across his skin. He always keeps his knives sharp; a dull knife is no good to anyone. But he can’t remember sharpening this one, or even handling it, recently. So it might have dulled. He shaves some hair off his arm to test the edge. The hair falls away, leaving a bare spot just above his wrist. Aye, it’s sharp enough.
So he tries again, putting more force behind it. His skin parts, and closes. He doesn’t bleed.
He considers making another test. But what’s he going to do, fall on his sword? That would, perhaps, be pushing things a bit far. No, it’s true. Scáthach has made him resistant to physical harm.
And magical harm, too. He has no way of testing that one, not yet, anyway. But he believes if the first is a fact, the second must be also. A logical fallacy, perhaps. But he can only question the word of a goddess so far.
“When you must trust, trust wholly. You’ll find out if you’re wrong soon enough.”
Some time ago, he has no idea how long in the World-That-Is, he was thinking about the choice between life and death. Thinking that you have to keep choosing life every day.
That’s not true for him anymore. His choice has been ripped away.
He starts to laugh; he can’t help it. He falls backward to the floor, tears streaming from his eyes, and laughs and laughs and laughs until he cannot breathe.
He goes downstairs.
The house is silent, dusty, dim. The undisturbed displays in the shop stand like monoliths, memories of a previous age. He remembers voices. The rattle of runestones in a cup, the slap of cards. Her laugh. Her singing. Sunlight streaming in. But when She left, Caitlin drew the curtains on the windows and on the past; he’s never had cause to open them. When he’s come and gone, he’s used the back door.
He can’t tell, from the amount of dust, how long he’s been away. More than a week, perhaps. Less than a year. He hopes it’s been less than a year. He thinks of the Ring of Omicron going about their filthy business unchecked, of Caitlin alone in Gordarosa. Or perhaps not alone. Perhaps making a new life, one without him.
He can’t tell which thought troubles him more. It’s been so long, for him. Almost, the Ring of Omicron seems like a dream. Almost, Caitlin seems like a dream.
A dream of being whole.
He closes his eyes against a sudden surge of grief. It tells him She, at least, was no dream. All the time in Scáthach’s house, all the dalliance with Scáthach’s daughters, hasn’t wiped Her from his heart. He wants desperately to pick up the phone and call Her, although he remembers Her telling him not to. He wants to fire up the truck and drive across the mountains, and not stop until he comes to the place where She is.
Later, he will. He swore an oath he would. Even without the oath, he’d still do it.
But he left for a purpose, and he came back for a purpose. That comes first. It has to.
He has to get oriented. He has to plan.
“The first thing is to know your ground.”
He wanders into the kitchen, notices the light on the answering machine flashing. After a moment’s consideration, he presses the “playback” button. A dozen messages, all from Spruce, wondering where he is, wondering if he’s all right. After so long surrounded by Gaelic, her American speech is doubly strange. Her voice gets more and more shrill, until, at the end of the tape, she’s all but shrieking. Worried and angry. She probably thinks he’s fallen into his old ways. That he’s holed up somewhere, nothing but him and the white horse. And he has to admit, if anything could have driven him back to it after being clean so long, Caitlin’s going would have done it. It eases his mind, somewhat, to realize it didn’t happen.
He debates calling Spruce back, determines not to. Nothing in any of her messages gives him any idea when he is. And she’s better off, at this point, not knowing him. That way, his attending to the Ring of Omicron won’t rub off on her.
In the backyard, the air has a bite. The great old maple by the stoop has lost half its leaves; the rest linger halfway between yellow and brown. Late autumn, he decides. It reassures him. Caitlin left him soon after Mabon, the autumn equinox. Scáthach took him a week after that. So perhaps he’s not been gone more than a month. He lays a hand on the maple, but it doesn’t tell him much. Its thoughts are slow, sleepy. Cold coming, and dark. Time to pull back, time to rest. That’s all it knows. It cares nothing for the ways men mark time.
So, he’ll have to go out. He’d have to anyway, to get supplies, to collect information. He’ll have to do it sooner, is all.
Back upstairs, he checks himself out in the bathroom mirror. In the usual way of things, he’s not one to spend much time gazing at his own reflection. Enough to trim his beard when it needs trimming. To make sure his clothes suit him, sometimes. He knows he’s good to look at; he doesn’t need constant reassurance on that score. But he thinks he’d better make sure his experience hasn’t changed him too much, made him unrecognizable.
It hasn’t. His face is a bit thinner, his expression a bit more intense. Not something a person would notice, who didn’t know him well. He’s a scar on his temple
he didn’t have before, and a new ridge of tissue on the bridge of his nose from breaking it yet again. “Such a fine nose, too,” one of the daughters had lamented. “Stop sticking it where it doesn’t belong.”
His hair has grown past his shoulders; he’ll have to get a trim. A good thing the Battle Blessing only seems to keep things from penetrating his skin. If it affected his hair and beard, he’d end by looking like an Old Testament prophet.
He keeps himself from laughing anymore. To distract himself, he rummages in the vanity drawer for an elastic and ties his hair back.
His eyes frighten him. He can see the savage in them, just beneath the surface. Likely no one else will notice that, either.
He’s still cold. An extended Journey can do that, and he expects that an extended stay in the Otherworld can do the same. Remembering the bite in the air, he finds a coat, a long, blue thing he picked up at the Surplus store last year, with lieutenant’s stripes still on the arms. It’s tighter in the shoulders than it was; he’s put on muscle. But it will serve.
Out he goes, into the golden light of late afternoon, leaves crunching under his boots. He heads down to the Mall. After the spaces of the Otherworld, the buildings weigh on him. The people look wrong, small and soft, their clothing too well-made. He has to work at understanding the language; English has become a foreign tongue.
He’s walking down the block between Broadway and Thirteenth Street, thinking he should probably acquire some money somehow and find some food somewhere, when someone hails him.
“Yo, MacDuff! That you? When did you get back into town?”
He glances around to see a bald, black man in a camo jacket and a Detroit Tigers ball cap waving at him from his seat on the ground outside Peppercorn’s. Smaller than he is, but not by much. One of his sources, the man has been. He goes over to him.
“Eddie,” he says.
“Where you been?” Eddie asks him.
“Away.”
Eddie snorts. “Away, he says. Yeah, I knew that.” He looks him over. “Cop a squat, MacDuff. You look like a man with trouble in mind.”
So much for no one noticing he’s changed. He sits down beside the smaller man, draws his knees up, leans against the shop wall.
Eddie pulls a scarf-wrapped bundle out of his inside pocket and begins to unwrap it.
“I dinna have any cash on me,” he says, knowing what’s coming.
“You can pay me later. You need this,” the black man insists. He spreads out the scarf, a piece of dirty magenta fabric that might be silk or might not. On top of it, he places a deck of cards. He’s known as Three Card Eddie, or Eddie the Reader. The game is a three-card Tarot spread for five bucks, anywhere, anytime. At one time, he might have thought it a scam. But Caitlin respected Eddie. And Eddie always seems to know things he shouldn’t know. He says a bullet grazed his skull in Afghanistan, gave him special powers. It might be true.
“Shuffle,” Eddie tells him.
He picks up the cards. It’s one of the smaller decks, Caitlin would know which. The feel of them brings back a memory of being lost, a stranger in a strange town with a task he did not want to do. Caitlin had read for him. He’d still been fighting Her, then, fighting what he felt for Her. That reading changed everything.
“Eddie,” he says, cutting the deck in half. “May I ask ye a strange question?”
“Answers are my game, man.”
“What day is it?”
The reader glances at him sidelong. “It’s Tuesday.”
“No, I mean the date.”
“October twenty-third.”
He waits.
“Two Thousand and One. About five o’clock in the afternoon,” Eddie says, and adds, “Shit, man, what you on?”
“Nothing.” He starts to shuffle. “I’ve just been…away.”
Away. Absent. Gone. But only for a month. He breathes a little easier.
“Huh. Far away, I guess.”
He doesn’t reply. The reader watches him for a while.
“You see your lady when she was here?”
His breath catches; his hands pause on the cards. She’s been back while he was gone. Perhaps She’s been at the house, picking up Her things. He hadn’t thought to check. And he’d known nothing of it. He feels that even in the Otherworld, he should have known. Should have sensed Her presence, across worlds, across time.
“No,” he says.
“What up with that?” Eddie asks, indignant; something in this unstable world has come loose, something that should have been solid, and he resents it. “You two were like burgers and fries. Then she’s gone someplace out west, and you’re gone, somewhere, and you don’t even know she come back?” He pauses for a minute, then continues, a little softer. “I seen her walking down the Mall. About two weeks ago.”
“Aye?” He tries to keep the longing out of his voice. “How did She look?”
“You still got it bad for her, don’t you,” the reader remarks. “She looked all right. For someone with mojo pretending she ain’t got none. Why she doing that?”
He wishes he knew. He wedges the cards together, sets them down on the dirty scarf and cuts the deck in three.
“Deal,” he says.
Eddie slaps the cards into a pile and starts his spiel.
“Three cards. Past, present and future.” Callused brown hands turn the first. It shows a tower being struck by lightning. People falling. Flames at the windows.
Against his will, his lip twitches. Aye, that would be about right.
“A bolt from the blue done messed up your life in a big way,” the reader declares. He turns the second card. An armored man on a horse, sword raised.
The horse is white, and it makes him shudder. He wishes it weren’t white.
“So now you’re fighting mad and rushing off to kick ass and take names,” Eddie says.
“Tell me something I dinna ken,” he sighs.
“In a minute.” The reader hesitates over the cards he’s laid out, taps the first with his finger.
In his mind, he sees Caitlin do the same thing.
“Just ‘cause the lid got blowed off your world, that ain’t no reason to get dumb,” Eddie says. “This guy on the horse, he’s all set to save the world. But he can rush off half-cocked, with no back-up, no plan. And so will you, if you let this,” he taps the Tower again, “boss you around. You’re falling, your lady’s falling too, I guess. You got to catch yourself before you can catch her. You got to find a firm place to make a stand.”
“Shattered ground is no starting place,” Scáthach whispers in his mind.
“You got banged up some while you was gone,” Eddie observes, with a pointed glance at his oft-broken nose, at the new scar on his temple.
“Aye.”
“Was it worth it?”
He shrugs. “I dinna ken. Not yet.”
He wants the reader to turn the last card, so he can be finished with this and on his way. But the man just stares at him for what seems a long time, finally shaking his head and clicking his tongue.
“I know what you up against, MacDuff,” he says quietly.
He lifts an eyebrow. “Do ye, then?”
“It don’t take much. You and your lady start nosing around those thugs over on Walnut Street. Then she hightails it west and starts pretending she ain’t got nothing extra. And you show up with ‘search and destroy mission’ written in your eyes. No, it don’t take much.”
He’s impressed. Eddie’s come very close. It’s been there all along, in the back of his mind: the connection. The idea that Caitlin’s leaving was due, in some way he doesn’t understand, to the Ring. And because of that, his motives might not be strictly pure. He doesn’t like it, doesn’t like to think it of himself. It’s still true.
“Those guys play for keeps, MacDuff,” Eddie tells him, as if he didn’t know. “You don’t take care, you’re gonna get yourself killed.”
“I dinna think that will happen,” he says. “Get on with it, aye?”
> The reader turns the last card of the three. An angel with a trumpet, summoning the dead from their graves.
“Cheery,” he says.
“No, that’s good,” Eddie replies. “Means if you live through this, you start a new path in life. Get a second chance.”
He doesn’t want to ask, especially not Eddie. Eddie talks too much, to everyone. But Eddie’s reading the cards for him, and readers have rules. And he can’t help himself.
“With Caitlin?”
“With everything. But you got to live through it first.” Eddie sighs. “Man, I hope wherever you went, you brought back reinforcements.”
“Of a sort,” he says, thinking of Scáthach’s gift.
Eddie gathers up the cards.
“There’s a warehouse on Fifty-Fifth and Valmont. I’d check it out, if I were you.”
He nods, gets to his feet. Eddie gets up, too. They clasp wrists, clasp hands.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Stay cool, MacDuff,” Eddie tells him. “Stay cool.”
He thinks about those words over the next few days. About staying cool. It does not come naturally to him; he is not a cool man. His passions burn all the hotter for being difficult to rouse. In the past, this has gotten him into trouble.
“A fire contained is a tool,” Scáthach has told him, more than once. “Unchecked, it will consume those who set it.”
For the most part, he manages to bank his rage, telling himself he’ll have time enough, soon, to let it go. It still smolders deep at his core, fueling him as he walks the streets, visiting this one and that one. Picking up news of the Ring’s activity in bits and pieces. No one wants to speak of the organization too much or too directly. It’s always, someone saw someone who heard perhaps. Never anything firm, anything that could be traced back to its source. Still, the pieces start to form a picture.
His fury becomes much harder to contain. He thinks of the broken children, and of the men—and women; he must not forget there are also women—who make money off their misery. He’s seen too many broken children, and too many of the type who profit off them. Never any who broke children on purpose. With all his experience of the world, he had never imagined such a thing. He wishes he still could not.
And he thinks of Her. Of Caitlin. Of how something about this whole sordid business drove Her away from a life She’d lived for near on a decade. Away from the home She’d made. Away from him.
Away from Herself.
What could have had the power to do that? Even Her family, of whom he’s heard just enough to hate them unconditionally, did not have the power to do that.
Perhaps, after he defeats the Ring, She will come back to Herself.
He cannot allow himself to think about it. He swore if he lived he’d dedicate his life to Her, without holding back. No matter what Her choices. In that oath, there is no room for “perhaps.”
And it’s a distraction. He must keep a clear head, to attend to the Ring. He must not think of what happens after. If there is an after.
“Face your enemy in the present, not in the past, and especially not in the future.”
He checks out the warehouse, as Eddie suggested. It’s not hard to establish that the same man owns it as owns the Walnut Street import shop, a Christopher Fisher. A clerk at County Records shows him the title for a smile. Fisher, it seems, sees no need to cover his tracks. In the eyes of the Mundane world, Fisher isn’t doing anything illegal. The same clerk shows him another title, to a rental property on the Hill. That one could be innocent, but perhaps not. Worth sniffing around, in any case.
He parks in an alley between Broadway and Thirteenth, behind the CU bookstore, grabs a coffee at the Espresso Roma on the corner, and takes a walk up to Pleasant Street. The irony of the location doesn’t pass him by: a pleasant street housing an unpleasant business. He wonders if Fisher thought of that. Another reason to kill him, if so.
For a big man with a striking face, he can be inconspicuous when he needs to be. Not like Her, never invisible. But unremarkable. He can blend in, one of those predators who resemble their prey. Up here, he looks like a college student. Well, he’s a little old for a college student. He settles for a TA, perhaps a youngish professor. His own graduate studies haven’t ended long enough ago, in this-world time, for him altogether to have lost the way of it. He’d never get away with it downtown, but up here it’s different.
He puts it on like protective coloring. The shoulder held a touch low, as if from the perpetual weight of a backpack or briefcase. The somewhat hurried walk. The slightly distracted air, the aura of not being quite present in the material world.
It’s uncomfortable. It was always uncomfortable.
He strolls by the house, sipping his coffee, thinking of the thesis his adopted character is taking a break from writing in some dim apartment somewhere not far off. He decides it’s Sociology. One eye slides toward the property he’s casing. A middle-aged woman is deadheading roses, likely for the last time before a hard frost sets in. He sees nothing unusual about her, but he wouldn’t. He doesn’t have Caitlin’s Sight.
He wishes She were here.
A car pulls up in the drive, an older sedan. A middle-aged man gets out, the woman’s husband, perhaps. Not that it matters. The man goes to the passenger side, opens the door. Helps out a boy of about twelve. A lost boy, he knows at once; though he’s too far away to see the face, he can read it in the slack muscles, the lack of response, the way the man must lead the child by the arm, up to the door.
Not innocent.
How can nobody notice?
For a moment, he almost loses control. He catches himself tightening his hand on the paper cup of coffee and forces his fingers to relax. More than anything, he wants to storm across the street and confront the man. He wants to stab the woman with her own pruning shears.
He can’t do anything. He makes himself walk by, up to Tenth Street and around the block, back down to College, back to the truck. Stomach churning, heart pounding, jaw clenched.
His fists slam down on the truck hood. Gods, he wants to kill something.
Soon, he prays. Let it be soon.
Knowing it’s a bad idea right now, he drives out to the warehouse address. It’s unremarkable, brick and glass like most of the other buildings in the area. It shares a parking lot with a bike shop and a dance studio. He pulls in and parks, not too close, one vehicle among other vehicles. For an hour, he watches. Once, a delivery van comes and goes. Nothing else. He has no excuse to wander over for a closer look, no excuse even to get out of the truck. Not that he needs to. He’s mentioned the place to some people, since Eddie put him onto it. The rumor in the magical community is that the warehouse is a bad place where bad things happen. No one knows what.
He doesn’t know, but he can make an educated guess.
Tuesday rolls around again, and he’s been back in the World-That-Is a week, and he still has no plan. No way to proceed. If he has to, he’ll hunt down every one of the Ring of Omicron individually. It’s not his first choice. Too uncertain, too hard to keep quiet. But he can’t come up with another option. He feels the press of time. Only a week, he tells himself; some of Scáthach’s battle plans were months in the making. Patience, he tells himself.
He doesn’t have that much patience. He wants it over, finished. He wants no more broken children in this town. And he wants, so badly, to go Home. Home to Her.
He’s sitting in the back of a coffee shop on the Mall, brooding, when a lad he doesn’t know comes up to him. Not a street kid, he sees in a glance. Boulder doesn’t have many real street kids. Though the lad has put on some of the mannerisms, he doesn’t have the right brittle gloss. And he’s too clean. He has a couple of piercings, one in his eyebrow, one in his lip. They’ve healed too well. He had money to spend for a pro to do it.
“You MacDuff?” the lad says.
“Aye.” He doesn’t believe he has anything to fear from this one. Skinny, late teens. A skate punk, perhaps. He doesn?
??t smell suspicious. No furtive air of being a front for something bigger. Likely he’d be unable to hide it, if he were.
The lad sits down without being invited, crosses thin, flannel-clad arms on the table. Leans close.
“Word is you have it in for those Walnut Street thugs,” he whispers.
“Aye?” He lifts an eyebrow. He supposes it’s true. He hasn’t done a proper job of hiding what he’s about. In fact, he’s not done any job of it at all. Careless, but what could he have done? A man his size with an interest in the comings and goings of certain people isn’t invisible. And word gets around. No stopping it.
Scáthach would have flayed him for it, but Scáthach’s not here.
The lad leans closer, drops his voice even more.
“Word is you’d like to find them all in one place.”
“Aye?” he says again. He doesn’t think he’s been so specific, but he has no reason to deny it.
“Tomorrow night. At the warehouse. It’s their annual meeting.”
“Strange place for an annual meeting,” he remarks.
“There’s a conference room upstairs.”
“And ye ken this how?”
“My brother’s girlfriend works at the Walnut Street place, as a salesclerk. She overheard the bookkeeper talking.”
One of the Mundane employees, she would be. He and Caitlin counted three. Possibly four. He considers it, decides it’s not impossible. If the Ring has heard of him, which he must assume they have, and if they’re after him, which could be the case, their style is a knife or a bullet in the dark. Not a complicated setup. And not in their own place.
Still.
“Why d’ye care?” he asks outright.
“My girlfriend disappeared,” the lad says, equally blunt. “You saw her in August. You tried to heal her. You couldn’t. She’s dead, now.”
“Ah.” He leans back, stares at the lad for a long moment. It’s the exact thing someone might say, to be sure of his reaction. And, remembering that girl, he does react. She began this whole nightmare; he couldn’t do otherwise. But he keeps his reaction inside. He knows better than to show it.
He can’t see a lie on the lad’s face, though. It would be a difficult thing to lie about, too.
“No one’s done anything!” the lad declares bitterly, and that sounds like the truth, as well.
He chooses his next words with care.
“Your…common sort of person would have no idea what to do.” He needs the lad’s credentials, now. How did this one make the connection when so many others didn’t? He lifts the eyebrow again, asking. And waits.
“I don’t run in common circles all the time,” says the lad. “Less, since the thing with Julie went down.”
He waits some more.
“I hear stuff.”
And waits some more.
“I poked around, okay?” The lad, he’s glad to see, is angry with him, now. Angry at being questioned, angry at not being believed. That kind of anger is hard to fake. “I asked questions. When Dave, my brother, started dating Lucy, I asked more. I found out things I didn’t want to know.”
He doesn’t think the lad notices that he’s named names. His story could be checked, now.
“Eddie knows me,” the lad claims. “You can ask him.”
“Perhaps I will.” He gets up. “Ye’ve done something dangerous stupid, lad. Most people would take better care of their own skins.”
“I loved Julie.”
“Aye.” The lad seems young for it, but it’s been known to happen. He has no cause to judge, just because he came late to love himself. “I suppose ye did. In the future, though, dinna ask questions when ye canna be sure ye’ll like the answers.”
“Like you?” It’s a challenge.
“No,” he admits. “But ye dinna want to be like me.”