He came to life with a surge. I clicked with pleasure and flipped over. He grabbed my fin. We went to shore. No beach, just deep water and then land. He grabbed for land and missed. I dove. Came up under him, between his lower fins. Rose all the way out of the water on my tail. Flung us both forward—
—Gary hit the earth and I smashed down beside him, landing on my belly with my arms sprawled wide and Rattler hissing horrified amusement at the back of my skull. Dolphins weren’t desert animals. Not, in his opinion, the sort of thing I should be turning into. I was just grateful I hadn’t turned into a flounder, and flopped onto my back, heaving for breath.
My stomach cramped, not with the need to pursue magic, but with simple hunger. I caught a sob between my teeth and Gary, gasping for air himself, sat up in a panic. “Jo? You okay?”
“I’m so hungry I could cry.” It was such a pathetic complaint in the face of almost drowning I laughed, except it turned into another sob. I was a child of the first world. I used the phrase “I’m starving” lightly, because I could. But right then I swore I could feel my body turning on its own resources to fuel itself. My extra five pounds had to be history. My muscles felt like they were going that way, too, shriveling under a healing magic’s desperate need to find something to survive on.
“Joanie, you look bad. Where’s your clothes?” Gary started patting his pockets, like he’d find a stash of airport candy in one of them.
I croaked laughter. “Guess so, if you’re calling me Joanie. Look, I’ll be fine.” In a show of bravado, I pushed up.
My arms collapsed and I fell down again. Gary pulled his shirt off—he was wearing a T-shirt beneath it, as perhaps only a man of his age would be—and covered me with it. It, like him and me, was wet, but it was very slightly better than being naked and starving. Then he put a hand on my shoulder, eyebrows beetled with real concern. “Seriously, Jo, you look bad.”
I lifted a shaking hand to examine it. I did look bad. My skin was drawn over ropy muscles, like I’d been exercising too much and not eating enough. “Shapeshifting,” I said after a groggy minute. “I’ve done it four or five times today. I guess it takes it out of me. Literally. I’m starving.” I struggled to sit up and struggled just as hard to get into Gary’s shirt—plaid cotton, long enough to come to my thighs—and sat there shivering. I’d have been shivering after a dip in the cold water anyway, never mind burning my own body up with magic.
Gary said, “Hah!” triumphantly and withdrew a mashed bag of peanut M&M’s from his jeans pocket. I ate them so fast I barely tasted them, and they made no dent in my hunger, but somehow they helped restore my equilibrium. I crawled to the water, hoping my clothes would come zooming by on the current, but they didn’t. Instead the sound of rushing water faded beneath what I thought was blood in my ears, then sounded more like wings in the air. Gary scootched over to me and put an arm around my shoulders. Shared body heat was definitely better than freezing on the moat bank by myself. Probably I could warm us both up with healing magic, if I could only focus, but even my glasses had been swept away on the current, so focusing was hard.
The stupid joke made me giggle, and although it remained uncomfortably close to tears, it also made me feel a little better. “Well, look at us. Half-naked and wet on a riverbank. Nobody’s going to believe you’re not my sugar daddy now.”
“Don’t tell Mike.” There was a grin in Gary’s voice, but I thought it might be a sound suggestion anyway.
“I won’t. Gary, can you hear them?” I turned my head against his shoulder, then without looking put one hand on top of his head and tucked the other below his feet and whispered, “See.”
He started with, “Can I see wha—” and drew in a sharp breath that ended the question as power whispered out of me.
I wasn’t even using the Sight, and didn’t much know what he might be Seeing now, but whatever was coming our way, I wanted us both to be as prepared as we could be. My eyes remained closed, but by then I was certain of what I’d been hearing for a long time now: the beat of a thousand wings. “Can you hear them?” I asked again, but now I was sure he could.
I knew them. I knew all the ravens, all of them in their glossy blue-black feathers, in their wise and wicked eyes, in their prattling beaks and bouncing steps. Mine was foremost, my beloved spirit animal, half again the size of his brethren. But I knew them alclass="underline" I knew the ancient bird whose wings had turned to white and whose black eyes were patient where all the others were anticipatory. That was Sheila’s friend, and I could see in him—See in him—the long stretch of Irish mages he had served over the millennia.
There were the Morrígan’s ravens, three of them again, as if the fight at the Lia Fáil had never occurred. There was another pair I recognized instinctively as Huginn and Muninn, and then there were dozens, hundreds, thousands of others: Tower Ravens and Quoth The Ravens and trickster ravens and battlefield ravens, and they all, all, all, spun into a madness of birds in the sky, blocking out the misty stars themselves.
The Morrígan came from their darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Two
She was crystal-hard, vivid against the black mist of birds. Her blue robes were crisp and the tattoos encircling her biceps were sharp and clear, as if new. Her hair was bound in a thick black braid woven with blue, and the sword she carried was so sharp it looked as though it could cut the very air in slices. She stopped about a dozen feet away and sneered, not that I could blame her. I mean, there I sat on the river’s edge, weaponless, barefoot, trembling with hunger and wearing a wet plaid cotton shirt. My hair, far from being so thick and long it could be a weapon of its own, was plastered against my skull. I was not exactly the most terrifying sight of the ages, and the Morrígan had seen plenty of ages to be terrified in.
“A Red Cap,” I said without getting up. “Sorry, fear darrig, right? Werewolves, and the Aileen Trechard.” I knew I’d bungled the pronunciation on that one, but it was the best I could do. “The banshee queen, and maybe even Gancanagh, although that one kind of backfired, eh? You sent them all after me, or put them between me and you in one way or another. So it doesn’t really matter if I don’t look like much, does it? You’re already afraid I’ve got it all over you, and a lot of what’s left is posturing. It’s okay if you just want to give up now. I’m not going to tell on you, and it might save your life.”
I knew there was no real chance she’d agree, but I had to try. My younger self had reminded me that not everything had to end in a fight. Also, while Lugh and Brigid needed avenging, I wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. I didn’t know how well I would handle facing the Morrígan in a battle to the death when I had to enter that battle not already in a panic for my life.
A third and much more immediate reason was I was freezing my ass off, half-naked, and shaking with hunger. Not, in other words, at the top of my fighting form. Even if I had been, I would still be toast. But none of that mattered, because from where she was standing, it was face down me or face down her master. I was the far easier target.
She came at me in a cloud of black birds. Rushed me, sword a shining line across the ravens, and she swung with all her considerable strength.
Swung, and instead of parting my head from my neck, crashed into my shields. Gary drew in a breath so sharp it sounded like an attack all by itself, but I didn’t even move. They were magic shields, solid as my confidence in them, and today, that was legendary.