No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,94
you coulda known her, Annie. She’s just a kid, and she was a real mess when I met her, but you wouldn’t believe the woman she’s growing up into. She’s our girl, Annie. She’s the girl we shoulda had. So brave she’s stupid sometimes, but her heart’s in the right place.”
“If we’d had a girl of our own all of this would be different, and you might never have met her. I don’t know if things happen for a reason, but I think perhaps all of it comes around to where it’s supposed to be, in the end. Tell me more. Tell me how you got the tortoise spirit animal. I can still feel this ridiculous cat in my mind, you know. It’s getting ready to run. Gathering itself. I can’t see its prey, but I suppose something must be out there for it to hunt. I don’t think cheetahs run just for fun…”
She quieted down, an’ I told her all about being witched, and how I’d known sorcery was eating away at Myles ‘cause I’d seen it happen to another kid. “She didn’t want anything to do with magic, Jo didn’t. Not up ‘til then. She just wanted a regular life.”
“Not so much like us, then,” Annie murmured.
I nodded. “She had a harder time taking it in. She was determined not to believe, but she had reasons. I ain’t told you about her babies yet. Shh, I’ll get to it. Anyway, she stepped up after the mess with the sorcerer, an’ from there on out she’s been…the only other person I was ever so proud to know is you, Annie. An’ I gotta say, even with what we’ve seen an’ what we did, it was small peanuts compared ta the ruckus I been getting up to with Jo. She looks just like that painting your Pop did, ‘cept it don’t show you how big she is. She’s six feet tall, an’ don’t tell her I told you, but she hits like a brick wall. Not that she’s been hitting me, but we shoved the top off a crypt once—”
“Was there a vampire inside?”
I laughed right out loud and kissed my girl’s white hair. “No, but we both thought there was gonna be.” That got me back to the beginning, and I tried keeping the story more or less in order, but Annie kept having questions and I kept remembering bits I hadn’t said before, until it was closing in on midnight an’ I was finishing up the last details, telling her about the quiet ride I’d been taking through our own lives for the past fifty years.
“All that time,” she whispered. “All that time and you never changed a thing.”
“Couldn’t risk it, sweetheart. I was bettin’ everything on this last fight.”
“And we’re losing it. At the last minute, we’re losing it. Oh! That silly cat just started running. Inside my head, Gary. I can feel it—pulling me. Oh. Oh no, Gary, it’s hunting the stag. My stag!”
I looked for the clock. Seven minutes til twelve. That was the last minute. That was the time burned into my memory forever, ‘cause that was when Annie had died. An’ then the clock ticked over, six minutes to midnight, and all of a sudden we were living on borrowed time.
A shot of pain smacked me between the eyes. The same shot that the kid had taken, burning another hole through my brain, and everything started slipping away.
All the memories that had been brought back to life, the terrible gift of magic that had been part of me and Annie since the beginning. If I was stealing Annie from him, stealing time, then the Master was stealing something back. Maybe that was the whole damned reason for the kid showing up at our house a week ago at all, so he could take that shot, set some magic in my mind that would start erasing everything if somehow we held on longer than we were s’posed to.
He couldn’t take the memories that were still on the way, the ones about Annie’s funeral, the ones about Joanne and Cernunnos and all the other things still lying in my future, but he could take everything up ‘til this minute. He could steal everything about my life that had made it something other than ordinary. My memories unraveled faster an’ faster, re-weaving themselves into a life a lot like my own, except without the touches of magic. I clawed at ‘em, tryin’ ta hold on, knowing