There was no response. No hint of magic waiting to be called on. No healing power, no sense of the earth offering strength for me to lean on, no nothing. I hadn’t come up that dry since I’d come half an inch from sacrificing myself on a sorcerer’s altar.
A very dim idea of oh, shit wafted after that realization, and with bone-wrenching intensity, I shifted back to my own form and waited to die.
Instead the smallest wolf yelped and fell, revealing Caitríona standing over it with a knobbly tree branch. It surged to its feet again, but it did so shaking its head like it was concussed. For a peculiar instant I felt sorry for the beast. Then Méabh’s silver-greaved foot lashed out and caught Streaks in the ribs, and I gathered myself to roll onto all fours and snarl just as convincingly as a human as I had as a wolf. I hoped.
They didn’t look scared, the wolves. They looked discomfited, and possibly like an idea had been put into their heads. They glanced at one another, then backed away, the dizzy one moving slowly and the other two refusing to abandon it. They got a good distance away—a safe distance—then looked at each other again.
Streaks curled her lips back from her teeth, and I heard the popping and grinding of bone as she forced herself from a lupine form into a human one. Horror caught me in the gut as the other two did the same, all of them becoming strong, healthy, naked, scary ladies. Streaks still had silver in her hair, and she gave me an approximation of a smile. Bared her teeth, anyway, and ran her tongue over them before shifting again, back to wolf form, and leading her also-changing sisters away.
I collapsed onto my forearms, panting into the earth as I tried to count the number of ways in which I’d been phenomenally stupid. I lacked my sword, but there were always nets. I was good at nets, and the werewolves weren’t like the wendigo. They were, for lack of a better term, real magic. Solid magic. Corporeal magic. They didn’t slip between the Middle and Lower Worlds at a whim, which meant I could have netted them and then delivered them tidily to Méabh for her binding spell. But, oh no, I had to go all Gunga Din and embrace the animal. And even that might have been okay, except I’d managed to teach werewolves how to shift shape, which had to be the ugliest damned time loop I’d opened and closed so far. And just to add a cherry on top, I was pretty damned sure of one other thing: “I’m guessing he knows we’re here now.”
“He does,” said a grim and weirdly familiar male voice, “but if we hurry, you might just live.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I didn’t move. I was half-naked and just this side of wolf—crazy, but I couldn’t quite make myself move, because there was no way Morrison was standing behind me. It had been unlikely in the extreme that Gary could catch me at Dublin airport, but it was sheerly impossible that Morrison, to whom I’d just spoken on the phone, had transported himself halfway around the world. I turned my head about three-quarters of an inch, just far enough to see Caitríona. “What does the man behind me look like?”
Her forehead was as wrinkled as mine felt. “Like me da. Only not quite.”
My shoulders dropped in a sort of relief. It wasn’t Morrison. I knew that, and still it was good—and bad—to have it verified. I kinda wished he had transported halfway around the world. It would make my life that much stranger, but that much happier, too. I seized my pants—the fight hadn’t taken me far away from them—and yanked them on as Méabh said, “Your da? Sure and it’s Ailill I see before me,” in a surprisingly soft voice.
I did my best side whisper to Caitríona as I finished dressing: “Al-yil?”
“Ailill Mac Mata. The love of Méabh of Connacht’s life, so they say. Of course, she killed him in the end.”
“He was unfaithful,” Méabh said with utmost serenity.
I stopped worrying about the guy behind me and gaped at her. “So you killed him? This from the woman who married every high king in Irish history?”
Just as serenely, she said, “That was duty.” Then she smiled, and I remembered that this was also a woman who had by all appearances held half the country together for millennia on end. Mostly I’d been finding her a bit condescending. All of a sudden I found her just a little scary instead. That was the kind of smile it was. I decided not to pursue the matter any further, and very sensibly turned to address the issue of the Man Who Wasn’t Morrison.
He looked an awful lot like Morrison. Not exactly like him, but a lot like him. Like somebody had sanded Morrison’s rough edges off, maybe, and polished him up a bit. His hair was more gold than silver, but Morrison had apparently been a blond back in the day. His eyes were too green for Morrison, but the height, the breadth, the smile, were all eerily similar. It made me want to trust him, an impulse I didn’t trust at all. “I think you’d better show us your true form.”
True form. Nobody said things like that. Mucking with magic really did rearrange the speech patterns laid down over a lifetime. I sighed, ready to give it another shot—something like “Show me what you really look like”—but he shrugged before I spoke. “I don’t have one, not the way you mean. I’m shaped by desire.”
Caitríona, horrified, blurted, “I don’t desire me da!”
He gave her Morrison’s best reassuring smile, which was pretty damned reassuring. Or would have been, if he’d been Morrison. Even so, I was reassured as he explained, “Not necessarily sexual desire. Safety, reassurance, stability. I answer whatever need is utmost in your mind.”
“Gancanagh,” Méabh said. I resisted the urge to say “Bless you,” and the handsome devil-may-care fellow turned to give Méabh an acknowledging nod. “You’re dangerous,” she said without sounding like she meant it. “A woman should never trust her heart’s desire. He seduces,” she told us. Me, perhaps, since presumably Caitríona was in fact not hot for her daddy. “He is one of the fae, like the fear darrig. We cannot trust him.”
“Of course you can’t. But I can lead you to evil’s lair.”
My voice shot up. “Why would we want you to do that?”
All three of them, Gancanagh, Méabh and Caitríona, said, “Aibhill,” which still sounded like “Evil” to me, but this time I recognized they probably meant the O’Brien banshee. “To Aibhill and her host of wailing women,” Gancanagh went on. “Four and twenty of them.”
“Twenty-five,” Cat said obstinately, but Gancanagh clicked his tongue and winked at me. “Twenty-four now. She lost one recently, you know.”
I did know, having kind of ripped a banshee’s head off a year ago. “Twenty-four isn’t really an improvement in the odds.”
Gancanagh smiled and shrugged. I caught a scent of Morrison’s cologne and ground my teeth together. This was not my boss. It was not the man I’d fallen in love with. It was not even, according to what Méabh had just said, technically a man at all. I could accept that intellectually, but on a gut level I was just relieved as hell to see Morrison here and ready to fight at my side. Fists knotted until my nails stung my palms, I grated, “Never mind the odds. Why would you lead us there?”
“Because I don’t want to see the world end, Walker. Aibhill’s master doesn’t have a place in his lineup for someone like me. I’m about life and love, not death and loathing, so if he wins a major victory I’m left out in the cold.” He shivered delicately, which Morrison would never do, and murmured, “I don’t like being cold.”
Morrison would probably never say that, either, but something about the way he said it made Méabh and me both take a step toward him, ready to warm him up in any way his little heart desired. Only Caitríona’s squawk of dismay stopped us, and for a few seconds we glared at each other while Cat said, “Jaysus and they’re going to be all over me da if this doesn’t end quickly. I can’t take it. We’re going with you, but don’t say a word to them, d’ye hear me?”