No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,97
been hoping for, but at the back of my head I’d always known I wasn’t gonna get that one. Even if my older memories were a mess, I trusted the ones since her death. I didn’t really figure time had been gonna rewrite itself and give me those years back with her. I let that hope go, real careful-like, then let some of that laughter come up and smooth things over a little. “You tellin’ me love conquers all, Horns?”
“I am.”
There wasn’t a trace of humor in the horned god’s eyes, an’ my own kinda fell away for another minute. My girl, my other girl, Joanne, she was out there, an’ sometimes I was pretty certain it was love that was getting her through the day. Truth was, for the past year and some, a lotta that love had been mine. Joanne needed somebody to love her, warts and all, as much as I’d been wanting someone to love again. It wasn’t ever gonna be like Annie, but I didn’t want it to be. Jo needed somethin’ different from me, just like I needed somethin’ different from her. I guessed there were worse things to think than believin’ that love conquered all.
“All right. All right, then. I guess…I guess we did all right, then. She’s…Annie, I mean. She’s…she’s all right? Guess if I’ve learned anything this last year, I’ve learned the wheel keeps coming around. Annie’s back on the merry-go-round, right? She’s gonna get another chance, somewhere down the road? Old soul born to new parents? That’s how it works, ain’t it?”
“That is how it works, and I will guide her to her resting place when her incarnation is ended. You’ve done well, Master Muldoon. You have made space for hope, and that is never a bad thing.”
“Okay. All right. So we go home now.” I was pushing an awful lot of thoughts an’ emotions back, knowing they were gonna come back to be dealt with later. But I’d left Jo bouncing around through the wrong end of time, an’ I hated ta think what kinda trouble she was getting in without me. “You figured out how to get us home yet? Back ta Jo, I mean?”
Cernunnos’s lip curled. “Best you first trade your steed with one of the others. Yours has ridden a long while with us now, but she will not know Joanne’s pull, when it comes. The others have met her in and out of time.”
Regret caught me harder’n I expected as I slid off Imelda’s back an’ patted her neck. “You’re a good girl, sweetheart. Hope I see you again.”
She put her forehead against mine an’ drooled down my shirt. I figured that was her way of saying she hoped so too, and patted her a couple more times before walking away. The rider on the brown mare—I knew his name, but there was something about the Hunt that made usin’ it seem rude—he dismounted an’ handed me the reins on his way to Imelda. I swung up on the mare, patted her neck too, and watched the big bearded fella ride Imelda toward the stars.
Then I looked at the house. It was starting to get that faded look, while the Hunt was getting more real around me. There was a faint trace of light through one of the dark windows, saying somebody at the back of the house was home. “I’m still in there, ain’t I? Holden’ her, and remembering…rememberin’ somethin’ that ain’t quite real. Why do I remember her dying at the hospital, Horns? What the hell’d he do to me?”
“All he could.” Cernunnos turned the stallion away from the house while he was talkin’, and the Hunt followed him into the sky, the boy on his right an’ me at his left. “I once said to Joanne that perhaps the past I remembered best, you had not come to Tara with her.”
“Yeah. I remember that. So?” I looked back once more, not sure what I was hoping to see. It wasn’t there, anyway: just a quiet ol’ house fulla memories that I had to leave behind. Or maybe that was what I was looking for after all, ‘cause after a few seconds I felt something go outta me, some kinda regret I’d been holding on to, and then I started listenin’ to Horns again.
“That past is no longer the one I remember best. Now in almost all memories, you came to Tara and we fought together at Knocknaree.”