No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,20

alarm, and it made me figure maybe standing at the Hill of Tara in ancient Ireland, watching the sun start to fall in the west maybe wasn’t so strange. Not after a year that included tackling gods and line-blocking demons, not to mention fighting zombies and hunting banshees.

And besides, the whole damned world was lit up with what Joanne Walker called the Second Sight. She was the shaman. Me, I was the cab driver who’d ended up her sidekick. I reckoned most folks would think it oughta be the other way around, what with her being twenty-seven and me seventy-four, but I didn’t have magic, just enthusiasm. Not that long ago I hadn’t even had that, but Jo had reawakened a sense of adventure I’d thought died along with my wife.

Funny thing was, as soon as I started living again I couldn’t remember how to stop anymore. The three years I’d spent being a grumpy old man after Annie’s death had faded like they’d happened to somebody else. Good thing, too, ‘cause a grumpy old man couldn’t appreciate the world the way I was seeing it right now.

I didn’t know what the colors meant, only that I could see ‘em pouring through the land. Giant pillars like Stonehenge—only wood—made a boundary around Tara. Everything inside ‘em glowed blue, the same shade of blue I’d seen Jo call up time and again when she was healing somebody. Here an there, yellow shot up, making for green bursts where it blended with the blue. It all pulsed with life, even down into the ground, where browns and blacks wriggled together like worms and bugs. Right smack in the middle, just a couple dozen feet from where we were standing, shone the whitest magic I’d ever seen. It blasted up from a chest-high stone that had been there in our time, too: the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny. Legend had it that when the true king of Ireland touched it, it would scream so the whole country could hear. I reckoned most folks didn’t look at it with the Sight, ‘cause with Jo’s magic flowing through me I could hear the damned thing shrieking inside my head. It was enough to drive a guy crazy.

Or it might be if the elf, the god an’ the shaman weren’t there to break up the monotony. Truth was, I couldn’t hardly look at the god. Cernunnos blazed emerald green against the setting sun’s gold, and left a reverse-color imprint on my eyeballs if I looked at him for more than half a second. There were others with him, a few riders of the Hunt on the ground nearby, and more milling about on horses that pranced on streaks of sunset gold in the sky. I recognized one of ‘em: a boy who looked about twelve, even though I knew he had to be older than dirt. He was Cernunnos’s half-human son, and blazed with the same kinda power, just less intense.

The elf was easier to look at than the kid, even. Nuada of the Silver Hand. I’d read about him, but reading didn’t prepare me for a living being who looked like he’d been dipped in molten silver. His left hand was silver, actual living silver metal, and it had some of Cernunnos’s green fire to it. The rest of his—his aura, that’s what Jo would call it—the rest of his aura was earthier, like precious metal veins running through hard stone. He seemed connected to the world in a way even Jo didn’t, like he couldn’t be uprooted. He also looked kinda flummoxed, but that was his own damned fault. He’d asked Jo to prove herself as a shaman by summoning the god, and she’d done it.

She was easiest to look at, and also kinda the most amazing. She was my best girl, had been for over a year now, and I knew her pretty well. I’d seen her working magic any number of times, and I’d seen how it filled her up and spilled out. Still, that wasn’t quite the same as looking at her with the Sight and seeing how gunmetal blue healing magic washed through her like it was her blood.

Blood that was up, right now. The first time I’d met Cernunnos he’d been tryin’ ta kill Jo, who’d gotten in my cab for the first time that morning. Second time I met him was when we went zombie-hunting. This morning was the third time. Best I could count, it was