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 it wasn’t right that Annie’s Pop had been a regular fella, but not able to remember what had made him different, an’ then losing hold of the idea that he’d been different at all.
It all fell apart, until the Korean War dreams were just nightmares like anybody got, until that trip we’d finally taken to Pamplona was only a vacation, and didn’t have nothing to do with chasing minotaurs through cobblestone alleys. Until the secret of Annie’s surviving almost being hit by a car was ‘cause she’d tripped over a stone, not ‘cause Cernunnos had knocked her aside, an’ until every last drop of magic had been squeezed outta my life.
Every last drop but Annie. He might be able to take her away from me, but he couldn’t take the magic we’d had together. Her kinda magic was the most ordinary, simple thing anybody ever had. She was the love of my life, and nothing could touch that. I held onta that as tight as I was holding her, and watched the clock click forward another minute.
The way my memory had it, she’d slipped into sleep a long while before death came knocking. But she was leaning forward, breathin’ hard—clear breaths, not coughing—and her muscles were bunching and loosing like she was running with that cheetah, or maybe with the stag. I got the idea the stag was gonna win, ‘cause cheetahs couldn’t keep up their top speed real long, but that was laying the limitations of a real animal on a spirit guide. Whatever was going on with the power animals, they were fighting for Annie, dragging her forward. That was my girl, holding on, making this whole thing her own fight, taking it on her own terms. A bright spark of hope crashed through me. Something was changing. At the last damned minute, just like Cernunnos had said. At the last chance. That was when to make the move.
I stood up, barely knowing I was doing it, and said, “Horns,” out loud, calling myself to his attention for the first time in fifty years. “Horns, I donno what’s gonna happen, I got nothin’, I got nothin’, but we’re in overtime on the clock and my memories are slipping away—”
I was losing what I was saying even as I said it, sometimes wondering who I was even talking to. I sat with Annie again, folding her into my arms and whispering another prayer to the only god I knew. Half the time I didn’t know what I was saying, except I knew I was holding on to hope the same way Annie was. An’ seven minutes after she was s’posed to have left me, a church bell started ringing, marking out the transition into a brand new day. I put my mouth against Annie’s hair, murmuring, “Tis the witching hour of night, doll. Everything changes in the witchin’ hours.”
And Cernunnos came riding, up to the old inn-door.
There was no door on this or any other earth that was gonna stop him from coming in. Truth was, I wasn’t sure how he’d gotten in, poetry or no, ‘cause the wall just kinda melted away as he came through. Him an’ that big silver stallion, filling up our bedroom. It stamped its feet, making the floor rattle, an’ I swear to God that for all of the size of the thing, all of the presence of the god, I couldn’t hardly see either of ‘em. They kept slipping and sliding in my vision like they were imaginary, like they were marching through a dream.
Annie saw him, though, an’ gave a cry that most guys might not want to hear their girls make when another fella is in the room. All kinds of relief was in that sound, and a sob caught in her throat. I couldn’t hear nothin’ beyond that, ‘cause a growl was rising all around, like a big cat with its back up. If Cernunnos was talking, I couldn’t see it, either. There was silver light playing everywhere, an’ the god’s green eyes burning like fire. It was early in the year for him to be riding at all, but his horns were full like a stag’s in its prime, and Annie put her hands out to him—
—and at one minute after midnight, Cernunnos pulled me outta the life I’d been leading, an’ dropped me back into the heart of the Wild Hunt.
EPILOGUE
“What happened? What the hell happened? Horns!” I was back to myself, sitting on Imelda’s back and carryin’ Jo’s rapier at my side. I wasn’t wearing the mithrail armor anymore, but Horns had never planned on me keeping it anyway. The Hunt was gathered in what looked a lot like my front yard, though moonlight was shining through ‘em and neither the horses nor the hounds were making any kinda audible sound. Everything else was normal, except I couldn’t hardly remember the past couple minutes or make sense of the mess of memory that’d been my life. “There was light, goddamn it, Cernunnos, did Annie go into the damned light?”