That’s what it felt like, anyway, and from the Morrígan’s expression that might have been what it looked like. Unlike Rattler, Raven wasn’t worn to a nub. Just the opposite, in fact. He hadn’t scraped me off a highway after I’d been hit by a truck, but he had partaken in the following spirit dance. It had brought Rattler and me from exhausted to functioning, and had taken the already-lively spirit bird from functioning to exuberant. This was his first chance since then to burn off some of that energy. He came swinging around my head in a sparkling display of brilliance and smacked the nearest normal raven with his wing.
Nominally normal, anyway. I wasn’t sure how normal any bird that helped fly a full-grown woman through the sky was, but it was black and glossy and looked like it belonged to the real world, whereas my Raven was made of fireworks. My Raven was also about two and a half feet long with a nearly five-foot wingspan, which made him gigantic in raven terms. The Morrígan’s were merely ordinary in comparison.
And they were totally unprepared to be buffeted by those great long wings. He’d hit me with them any number of times. It hurt. Apparently the Morrígan’s raven thought so, too, because it squawked in outrage and left off whacking me to claw at Raven. He did a lovely wing-tip pivot practically on top of my head and crashed into the other raven, then shot skyward with two black streaks of cawing anger chasing him. I said, “Thank you!” and got down to the serious business of having my ass handed to me.
I mean, really. I had strength, I had speed, but not in a hundred years would I have skill like the Morrígan’s. Hell, she even looked tougher than me, though I had a brief vision of how Gary probably saw us—her decked out in blue robes with long flying black hair, me with my short-cropped ’do and flowing white leather coat—and I decided we probably both looked pretty badass. Her more than me, though, because she was obviously the one taking her opponent apart bit by bit with her swordplay.
I parried like hell and tried every trick Phoebe’d taught me, plus a few I’d made up myself. I ducked. I jumped. I threw grass in her face. I kicked and almost got my foot cut off for my troubles. My left forearm throbbed worse with every passing moment, and the Morrígan smiled every time I fumbled on that side, like she knew exactly where my weakness was and only had to wait for me to give in.
Well, I was nothing if not stubborn. I might be bleeding, cursed with a dark mark and about to turn into a werewolf, but I wasn’t going to give the beautiful bitch the satisfaction of my failure. I retreated until I had the Stone of Destiny against my spine. Lugh and Gary weren’t there anymore, which I hoped was good.
What I really wanted was a minute to stop and think. What I got was a merry chase around the Stone, which was small enough to hug and therefore not really much use as an object to hide behind. Still, I ran around it, the Morrígan on my heels, while I tried to put it all together. It was obvious Lugh was fundamentally wrong about his Ireland being a place of balance and peace if the Morrígan recognized a werewolf bite as her master’s mark. I’d watched the werewolves being birthed from the mouth of a black hellhole. I knew their master, at least in passing. He was not one of the good guys.
In fact, he’d been trying to kill me since before I was born. My mother had thwarted him and sent me to America to keep me safe, but I’d regained his attention when my shamanic powers reawakened last year. If the Morrígan, mistress of death and war and doom, was under his command, then—
Then I tripped on the toes of my stompy boots, which were not meant for running circles in, and did a nosedive into the soft earth of ancient Tara.
Lugh, the goddamned fool, came up out of nowhere and took the blow that would have ended my life.
Chapter Six
Blood spattered me, the Stone, the green grass, everything, but I couldn’t even cry out. My voice was lodged in my throat, held there by horror. The Morrígan howled a mixture of delight and anger. She’d gotten her sacrifice, if not her target. Lugh slid off her sword and dropped to the earth. For an instant even the ravens ceased fighting and we all stared at the king’s prone form.
Then he dragged a shallow, shuddering breath, and hope seared me. I jammed my rapier upward, scoring the first blood I’d actually taken from the Morrígan, but not doing enough damage to take her down for the count. She shrieked and whirled, sword lifted to impale me.
Gary, hero of the revolution, bashed her on the back of the head with a rock.
There was something about watching the mighty fall ignominiously. Goddesses weren’t supposed to be taken down with a stone any more than Goliaths were. It lacked respect, and if I’d learned anything, it was that power demanded respect.
With that in mind, I bellowed, “Hot damn, you go, Gary!��� dropped my sword and scrambled across the Morrígan’s unconscious body to get at Lugh.
Blood bubbled at his lips, a fine deadly froth. I was pretty sure that meant she’d gotten him in the lung. That should bode ill for him, but I’d healed myself from a punctured lung once. Healing somebody else couldn’t be that hard, especially since he knew of and accepted the power shamans wielded. Nothing like a willing victim to ease things along. I reached for the healing magic within me, flexing it for the first time since I’d arrived in Lugh’s era.
The Stone of Destiny stopped screaming.
It had gotten to where I didn’t notice it anymore, so the cessation was very loud. My head jerked up and I scanned for danger, but the Morrígan was still out and there was no one else at Tara but me, Gary and the ghosts of sacrifices past.
One of which went pop! like a soap bubble. Disappeared like he’d been erased entirely, and a glimmer of brilliant emerald-green power filled the space his voice had been in.
Familiar power. The power of a teenage demigod, granddaughter to the Wild Hunt. Suzanne Quinley, who had, at Halloween, unraveled a thread of history, and wiped a man from existence.
A man who had been birthed from a legendary cauldron that raised the dead as zombies, bound to do the bidding of the living. The Master had made it. Somebody had bound it so it could do relatively little evil. And I had—with some help—destroyed it.
If an ancient king of Tara had been one of the unfortunates caught within the cauldron’s magic, there was more than a little bad magic going on here. It was like the entire history of the world was corrupt, although as soon as I thought it I didn’t know why I was surprised. Corruption was kind of civilization’s story of humanity, from Adam and Eve all the way down the line.
That didn’t mean I had to like it. It certainly didn’t mean that in the here and now, thousands of years before my own time, I had to sit back and let him have his way. There was no point in having great power if I didn’t sling it around a little bit. Lugh, ard rí of the aos sí—I bet that sounded much cooler if I said it all in Irish instead of pidgining it together—did not have to die today. Determined, I pulled my magic into line and turned it on the dying king.
And slammed headlong into Suzanne’s power, lush and green and implacable. My own silver-blue talent shorted out in a fizzle of sparks, gathered itself again and buzzed against Suzanne’s, searching for a way in.
I hit reverberations instead, shockwaves that came from the none-too-distant past. No matter how I tried to slither by, they caught me in their wake and tossed me back to the beginning. I had mad skills, but they didn’t add up to godlike power. Despite this accidental traipse into the past, I also didn’t make a habit of jumping around through time, and the more I pushed for a way through, the more I had the impression I was simply on the wrong side of time to change anything in the here and now. To heal Lugh, I needed to step even further back, back to before Suzy’s rewrite, and work my way forward. Too much had already changed. The old needed to be fixed before the new could be altered.