Just what I always wanted. My own personal savior. “Now what?”
“Now the offering.” Judy looked expectant. I looked around.
“Of what?” I asked after a while, when nothing seemed to be happening.
“Didn’t you bring a gift?”
“Gosh, no. Fresh out of gifts. Nobody left me a memo.”
“No cornmeal? No water or tobacco?”
I shifted uncomfortably. Judy twisted her mouth in disapproval. “I thought you wanted to meet Virissong.”
“I do,” I protested.
“But you came without gifts?”
“I didn’t know I was supposed to bring any!”
Judy sighed. “I’m surprised you’ve lived this long. All right. We’ll have to make do. Give me your hand.”
Chagrined, I gave her my hand. “The point of the gift is to make an offering connected with the earth, so Virissong knows we respect him and will listen to our call,” she said. “Do you understand that?”
“Yeah.” Grumpy Jo. I sounded like a sullen teenager. “Yes, I do,” I said more politely.
“There’s one thing you carry within you at all times that’s connected to the earth and holds great power.”
“There is?” I asked, but instead of answering, Judy took a knife from the small of her back and laid my palm open to the bone.
CHAPTER 11
“Jesus motherfucking Christ!” I yanked my hand back, but Judy held it with a painfully solid grip, twisting my wrist so the blood pooling between my fingers dripped to the earth.
“Careful!” she snapped. “If it splashes onto the power circle, the shields will come down. Blood is power, Joanne Walker. Blood is the most precious gift that can be given. Now think of Virissong, and ask for him to visit us!”
“JesusChrist,” I said again. Judy let my hand go and I turned it up, curling my fingers around the wound. It hurt, but not as badly as I thought it should. It was a dull, thick pain, like my joints were tired instead of the clear sharpness I associated with a blade cut. I wrapped my other hand around it, trying to cut off the blood flow, but even as I watched, it began to heal, the blood congealing between my fingers. “Jesus Christ.” I thrust my jaw out and turned away from Judy, anger hunching my shoulders as I tried to clear my mind and think of England. Or Virissong.
An unexpected feeling of well-being swept over me. The ache faded from my hand and the air around me cleared, brightening in a way that had nothing to do with the rising sun. “Virissong,” Judy said in a warm voice. “We welcome and greet you.”
My anger couldn’t stand up under the onslaught of warm fuzzies. I turned, still clutching my injured hand, to face—
Well, it wasn’t a god. That much I knew. It was powerful, much more powerful than any person I’d met, but it didn’t carry with it the raw, primal forces of chaos that Cernunnos had.
Had I not met Cernunnos, though, I’d think I was facing a god. He was small and slender and the very air he exhaled was charged with energy. Power crawled over his skin, glittering white in the close morning sunlight. He was human, but only just. The hairs on my arms stood up, and I held my ground through conscious effort. “Thank you for answering our call,” I said. He turned to smile at me.
Was there a rule that otherworldly beings had to be gorgeous? He was dark-skinned and black-eyed, his broad features full of passion. “Joanne Walker.” His voice washed over me, a warm tenor that ought to have been filling concert halls. It raised the hairs on my arms just like Caruso’s voice might’ve, making me feel as if I might take wing and be transported somewhere else entirely by their lift.
“It is a very great pleasure to know you.” His voice dropped on the “know,” and I felt myself blush as I got all Biblical about it. I clearly needed a real-world relationship.
“It’s nice to meet you, too. I, um…”
“Had questions for me,” Virissong put in. I smiled crookedly, relieved I didn’t actually have to say that myself. It seemed presumptuous. “Will you walk with me?” he asked. I glanced at Judy, who spread her hands slightly.
“I think I should stay inside the power circle,” I said apologetically. His eyebrows lifted fractionally and he put his hand against the invisible wall between us. It bowed slightly under the pressure, but it held.
“Are you always so cautious?” he asked, not bothering to hide a smile. Great. I was being teased by three-thousand-year-old Indian witches. I wrinkled my nose.
“No, but it’s never too late to learn.” I’d been hanging out with Gary too much. Any minute now I was going to start calling myself an old dog.
He chuckled, liquid musical sound. My arm hairs gave up trying to escape and lay down flat, like a cat’s ears, and I rubbed my hands over them. My right hand didn’t hurt anymore. I turned it up to find the bone-deep slice across my palm had healed over entirely. “Very well,” Virissong said. “I’ll stay. Ask your questions, Joanne Walker.”
“I need to know your purpose.” Even as I said it, the sheer arrogance of it came back and hit me in the teeth. Virissong’s eyebrows shot up and he looked beyond me at Judy. She said nothing, though I saw her shrug from the corner of my eye. Virissong looked back at me.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever been quite that bald-faced about it,” he said. “My purpose, you say.”
I twisted my shoulders uncomfortably and let them fall again. “I’ve met some people who believe they can bring you back into our world, and that to do so will help restore a balance of life. They think they need my help to do it, and I need to know what I’m getting into before I commit to it.”
“Wise of you.” I got the impression he was teasing me again, but that there was also some small degree of respect in it.
“I’ve had a little experience with this sort of thing.”
“Yessss.” He drew the word out, and suddenly I recognized his voice as the same one that had come out of the light the night before. I relaxed and tensed all at once, it was good to know I was dealing with the right demi-deity, but the exultation of power that had hit me the night before made me cautious. “Yes,” he repeated. “We have some knowledge of that.”
“We?” I looked around. “Royal we?”
“Universal consciousness we,” he said, straight-faced. “A step above royal.”
He was like Coyote, only more so. I thought one was enough. “I’m also trying to find out about a girl who died suddenly. One of the group that’s trying to bring you across.”
Virissong’s black eyes darkened further. “Cassandra Tucker. Her poor daughter, left without a mother so young.”
It took active effort to keep my jaw from dropping open. “You know about her?”
He lifted his eyebrows. “The coven has been working toward bringing me back into the Middle World for months, Joanne. I’ve tried to participate in it as much as possible.” He made a moue, then shrugged. “My ability to do so is limited, but I certainly know who’s involved. I had always sensed Cassandra had a weak heart. I was concerned being the Mother might worsen the damage, but she laughed off my warnings. I lacked the power to strengthen her while still trapped in the Lower World. It’s a loss I’ll regret for a long time.”
“She had a heart attack?” I lost the battle and my jaw fell somewhere around my ribs. “And the coven never noticed anything was wrong?” To be fair, I wasn’t sure how I would tell if someone’s heart was defective, so maybe I couldn’t blame the coven. “Why didn’t you tell them? Magic can do that to somebody?”
“Magic,” Virissong said, rather sternly, “has its price, just as everything else does. It can become as much a burden as physical labor, with the same results.”
Having been pleased only minutes earlier about my lack of sleep deprivation, I felt a little chastised. I should’ve known that, or at least put it together on my own. Virissong gave me a brief understanding smile, then added, “I did try to warn Faye. I gathered they were close. But as much as I want to, my ability to communicate with those in the Middle World is limited. She may never have heard my warning.”