No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,30
the master of them all. They’ll guide him there, whether they mean to or not.”
“And his fragile male ego is soothed by taking point?”
She gave me a perplexed glance that turned into laughter. “Something like that, aye. Is that a turn of phrase from your time? The ‘fragile male ego’? It seems appropriate.”
“Shh. We hear it alla time, but we don’t like to believe it. Ain’t good for our egos to think they’re fragile.”
“And yet,” she said, and I said “Shh” again. She smiled and nodded, but her smile faded faster than an old man wanted to see. “I had counted on Joanne Walker. Not that your presence isn’t appreciated…”
“But I’m no magic man.” I shrugged and nodded toward Horns, up at the front of the host. “He says I’m the next best thing. ‘course, I coulda told him that anyway.” I winked, and she laughed, quick as her smile had come. Least I could still get that out of a pretty girl, even if it was mercurial. “Jo put a whammy on me,” I said a bit more seriously. “Gave me her Second Sight, an’ it ain’t faded yet. Dunno why, ‘cause I thought it was only gonna work til sunset, but I’m still seeing straight into the bones of the world if I try to.”
“And what do you see when you look at me?” Brigid wondered.
I glanced at her, tryin’ ta will the depth of sight back on. Glimmers shone all around her edges. Then it was like falling into a pool: her aura, all red and gold, splashed deep inside her, but when it hit her core it turned black an’ blue like somebody’d been beating on her. I blinked an’ the colors got clearer, until I could see the blackness was eating her away from the inside. I took a sharp breath, and she lifted her hand to stop me from talkin’. “So you do See,” she said like she’d been verifying it for herself.
“Darlin’…”
“Have no fear, Master Muldoon. I have the strength for what must be done.”
“But not more.”
“It will be enough.”
“You saved Jo’s life, didn’t you. By taking that hit.” The longer I looked, the easier it was to see how the magic inside her belonged to the Morrígan. It was death magic, dark an’ ugly, and I didn’t think an ordinary human, even one with Jo’s skills, coulda survived it. “Saved mine, too, by keeping her alive. Thanks.”
Brigid nodded an’ changed the subject. Guess I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t like thinking about my own mortality, an’ I was damned certain she had a lot more years to regret losing than I ever would. “You have the Sight,” she said, “and I see within you the strength of a spirit protector. You may not work magic, but you are imbued with it. What else might you know that will serve us in binding the cauldron? You know its eventual fate, but do you know how it comes to its end? How it is bound? How we might ourselves cast a spell to last through the aeons?”
I rubbed a hand through my hair and thought about it. Cernunnos looked over his shoulder at us, green fire magic pounding into my skull when his eyes met mine. I flinched up straight in the saddle, scowling hard at him. “Damned if I don’t. Jo and me came across a binding spell way back when this started. She don’t use magic like that, no spells and chants and stuff, but I think it’s ‘cause she don’t, not ‘cause she can’t. Anyway, this one…” Cernunnos turned away, shoulders thick like he was becomin’ the stag already. “This one we set in his name.”
“In his—in his name?” Brigid clawed her voice back from sounding like a fishwife and cleared her throat. “In Cernunnos’s name? You know a binding spell that calls on the god of the Wild Hunt?”
“No. I mean, yeah, it does ‘cause he’s the one we called on. Jo told me not to say it, not even joking, but—well, hell, darlin’, he was the only god I’d ever met. Who else was I gonna mention?”
“Was he there? At the breaking of the cauldron, was he there?”
“’a’course he was.” It took a couple seconds to catch up on why that might matter, an’ then I sat back into the saddle deep enough that Imelda pranced sideways. I said, “’a’course he was,” again, except this time I wasn’t feeling quite so pat. “Not when the binding was broken an’