She hadn’t vanished, per se. Not the way the Morrígan had. Brigid had faded, becoming ephemeral beside the standing stone. “Last I knew you’d saved my life and then time shifted and you were gone. You obviously bound the cauldron, because all that happened to me back in October. So what are you doing here with a fritzed-out aura that looks like it only just now took the Morrígan’s best shot?”
“We are sides of a coin, she and I,” Brigid said. “My weakness is her strength, and I have been weak since that day. She might have slain me then, had you not been there, pulling time askew. Because of that, I have only touched time, where she has traveled through it.”
For a moment I just didn’t get it. Then my eyebrows pinched so hard my head hurt. “You mean you, like…you’ve been bouncing through time? Like a skipping stone?” I mimed throwing one. Brigid nodded and I blurted, “Why?”
“So that I might awaken again here, with you, at the place it both begins and ends. I have done less than I might have through the centuries, only acting when the balance was in the measure, rather than fighting to tip the scales toward the light. That, I think, is why the cauldron’s bindings failed before you reached it, and for that I apologize.”
“Forget it.” My voice cracked. “You bound it. That means it was one of the places, one of the times, you splashed down. You were there, Brigid. What happened to Gary?”
“A reckoning is upon us, Siobhán Walkingstick. What strength I have will be yours, but you must rid yourself of the infection or all is lost.” She sounded tireder than before, like she was slipping away. It took everything I had not to grab her and rattle the answers out of her. Her eyes closed, and for a moment I thought she’d died. Then she whispered, “He awaits you at Méabh’s final resting place.”
And then she did die. A rattling exhalation and her eyes half opened, looking sleepily at the world beyond. My heart lurched so hard I nearly threw up. Healing magic jerked through me, spasming toward Brigid, but the reawakened Sight gave it nothing to grasp on to. My hands slid to my sides and hung there uselessly as Brigid grew colder. I could have rushed off to the Dead Zone, trying to catch her spirit, but it seemed unlikely that aos sí souls took the same bus that human ones did. I probably could have done about a dozen things, but they all should’ve been done five minutes earlier, when she wasn’t dead yet. When she’d been telling me not yet. I bowed my head, eyes closed, and made a promise not to listen next time someone told me not yet.
The Morrígan, I thought after a while. The Morrígan had killed Brigid. It had taken her thousands of years to die, but the bleak web of poison within her—the web meant for me—had killed her, and that put me on strangely familiar ground. I’d dealt with a lot of mystical murders in the past year. They pretty much never ended well for the killer.
I got to my feet and straightened my coat. I was going to make damned good and sure this one didn’t end well, either.
Calm with anger, I left Brigid’s body behind and went to find Méabh’s tomb.
Monday, March 20, 1:17 p.m.
That would have been much more dramatic if the tomb in question didn’t turn out to be another heritage site. It’d be one thing to traipse the length and breadth of Ireland, seeking out dead life forms and ancient civilizations only to finally come upon the Lost Tomb of the Warrior Queen. It was something else to follow little brown-and-white road signs all the way to County Sligo, where I found a small mountain with a big pile of rocks on top of it.
This was not untraveled territory. There were signs saying “Please don’t take the cairn stones,” and well-worn paths going up and down the mountainside. I breathed, “Hope you were right, Bridge,” and started up one of them. I felt guilty for leaving her body like that. I sort of suspected it would do some kind of magic aos sí thing and fade into the earth or something, and it wasn’t like I could’ve stuffed her in the trunk, but I still felt badly.
The guilt faded into breathless wheezing and resentment by about halfway up the hill. She hadn’t warned me Méabh’s tomb was on top of a mountain. I wished I had a walking stick. The kind to support myself with, not the kind I was named after. Stick bugs would be singularly useless in getting me up a mountain. Unless they could fly me up, but bugs named for sticks weren’t really well known for their aviary skills.
That line of thought did nothing to disguise my heart rate’s elevation or how its quick beat made my arm itch like the devil. I stopped for a breather and cautiously unwound the bandages to take a peek at the bite.
And wished I hadn’t. Whether it was the fresh air against it or seeing how awful it looked, the itching redoubled and became hot red pain. The skin around the punctures emanated heat, shiny tight surface looking and feeling infected. An infected werewolf bite had to be worse than just a regular werewolf bite. I touched it gingerly and hissed at both its warmth and the bright flash of ow that pressure sent through it. I muttered, “C’mon, Jo, you’re supposed to be a healer,” and tried my magic on it again.
Maybe it was the sleep I’d had on the airplane. Maybe it was the soothing drive across the country. But this time when the magic didn’t respond, I went a little deeper, and Saw what was going on.
It was already going all-out trying to keep the infection from spreading. Viewed with the Sight, my arm looked like a petri dish swarm of antibodies attacking bacteria. The speed and activity made me dizzy, and watching made it itch even more, until I was about ready to rip my own arm off and beat myself to death with it just to escape the itch. I closed my eyes hard, shutting the Sight down, but it was too late. I knew what was going on. I felt genuinely worse than before, like viewing it had let the heat spread. My lips were parched, and I’d left my water bottle in the car. I swallowed, light-headed, and looked up the insurmountable hill.
Gary had my sword. If he was in Méabh’s tomb, he could chop my arm off for me. That would be easier than tearing it off. Buoyed by that unlikely, feverish logic, I staggered to my feet and lurched toward the cairn above.
The view from the top of Knocknaree was magnificent. I could see half of Ireland, even if it was doing a wavy little dance. Everybody needed to dance now and again. I wobbled around the whole cairn, which was a fancy word for “big pile of rocks,” for about twenty minutes. There was no entrance anywhere, and when I came around to the front again I noticed a sign I’d missed while admiring the wobbly view. It said Méabh’s “tomb,” quotation marks theirs, was a Neolithic structure and had never been excavated. Also, it said, please don’t take any rocks. I nodded solemnly, spun back to the big piles of rocks and started pitching stones away.
Three minutes later a grinning skeleton toppled out of the cairn and spat its false teeth at me.
Chapter Eleven
I screamed in genuine horror-movie terror. The skeleton fell apart into about eleventy million pieces, or at least two hundred and six. Seven, counting the teeth. I dropped to my knees and scooped them up, already blinded by tears. Finding Gary’s bones might technically qualify as him waiting for me in the tomb, but it was not the answer I was looking for. The teeth were heavy and sharp, a snaggle catching my palm as I turned them over and over. If this was going to be my legacy, I didn’t want it. To hell with phenomenal cosmic power, to hell with saving the world, to hell with all the lessons I’d learned clawing my way to where I was now. I’d stepped up. I’d done everything I could to be the hero, and all I’d gotten for it was a view to literally die for.