He let me go after verifying I really was a cop. Gary was waiting on the station stairs for me. We stood there watching splats of rain hit the sidewalk.
“You think it was Cernunnos?” Gary asked after a while.
“I don’t think his horse would fit in that apartment.” I sat down hard on the steps. Gary looked down at me in surprise. I smiled up at him weakly. “I haven’t eaten this week.” I didn’t think I was even exaggerating.
“You could eat?” he asked in horror.
“Either that or I could pass out.” I gave him my hand to pull me up. He did, and put a steadying hand at my waist when I wobbled. I smiled dizzily at him. “You know, Gary, if you were forty years younger I could get to like you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what all the girls say. Where we going? My cab’s at Marie’s.”
“There’s a Denny’s right around the corner.”
“No doughnut shop?”
I grinned a little. “Down the street. But I need real food.”
“You could eat,” he said again, sort of admiringly. I nodded and teetered down the street.
A plate of mozza sticks, a grilled chicken-with-cheese-and-bacon sandwich, a copious number of fries and a chocolate milkshake later I could think again. Gary watched me eat with silent fascination and didn’t so much as steal a fry. When I ordered a hot-fudge brownie sundae and sat back to wait for it, Gary judged it safe to speak again. “So do you think it was Cernunnos?”
I pulled my glasses off and chewed on the earpiece. “I don’t know. Do ancient Celtic gods go around murdering people in their apartments?”
“Dunno. Never met any before. Don’t know why they wouldn’t.”
I looked up and squinted, trying to resolve his fuzzy edges into something more solid. My vision wasn’t that bad—I could drive without my contacts, if I had to—but I’m nearsighted and things more than about three feet away took on the Christmas tree-light effect. “I think maybe we should start with something a little less esoteric.”
“Sure,” Gary said, “like a jealous rival in the anthropology department.” He stared at me until I wrinkled my nose and put my glasses back on.
“It could happen,” I mumbled.
“Could,” Gary agreed. “You think it did?”
“No,” I said reluctantly. “I think Marie was into something weirder than that.”
Gary nodded, satisfied. The waitress came back with my sundae and I poked at it with a fork, no longer hungry enough to eat it. “It was too clean to be Cernunnos.”
“Whaddaya mean, too clean? Didn’t you look at her?”
“Yeah, but.” I waved the fork around. “Think about his host. Dogs and birds and guys on horses. Do you think he goes around killing people all by himself? What if it was that other guy?”
“What other guy?”
“The one with the knife. She said it wasn’t Cernunnos, but she’d thought it was up until the diner this morning.” I frowned at my brownie, and took a bite. It was pretty good. I took another bite.
“The human guy?”
“I donno. I wonder if there are any humans associated with Cernunnos. Maybe we should find out.”
“I don’t think the library’s open this late, Jo.”
My eyebrows went up. “Doesn’t matter. I’ve got a computer at home.” The brownie really was pretty good. I ate some more.
“Never touch the things,” Gary said disdainfully.
I grinned. “Try it. You’ll like it.” I finished my dessert, paid the bill and we went home.
I have a little sign on my computer that says: On The Internet, Nobody Knows You’re A Dog. I dusted it off while the computer booted up. Gary stood back about four feet, looking wary. “It isn’t going to bite you, Gary.”
“That don’t look like the ones on TV,” Gary announced.
I shook my head. “I’m running Linux.”
Gary squinted at me. I inhaled to explain, and gave it up as a bad job before I even started. “It means I’m a computer geek.”
“Right.” Gary edged closer. I opened up a Web browser while he watched curiously. “And you know what you’re doing?”
I grinned over my shoulder at him. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Gary. Anything you want, you can find it on the Net. It takes hardly any effort to find one hundred percent right answers, and one hundred percent wrong answers.”
He leaned over and planted a hand against the corner of my desk, peering at the screen. “How do you tell which is which?”
“Personal prejudice, sometimes. But for this kind of stuff—” I waggled my fingers at the screen “—you can check through half a dozen sites or so and pick up the information that’s common to all of them. That’s pretty close to being true. I mean, we’re talking about Celtic gods here, Gary. I don’t think there’s a real unquestionable expert on the topic, you know?” I clicked through to one of the sites. Gary dragged a chair over and we both read the screen.
There were a lot of origin stories for the Hunt. Some of it was what Marie had told us already, though some of them mentioned someone called Herne the Hunter. Those ones said the Hunt was made up of mortal hunters who had worked for Richard II of England. The rest suggested it was either of “faerie,” which looked like an obnoxious way to spell “fairy” to me, or made up of great warriors from the past. Even King Arthur was listed among the riders.
“His punishment for killing the children,” Gary said when we got to that bit.
“What?” I pushed my glasses up, peering at him.
“Arthur had hundreds of kids killed.”
I stared at him. “I never heard anything like that.”
Gary shrugged. “It’s one of the stories. Sort of like the Pharaoh killing all the kids trying to get to Moses. Except Arthur was trying to destroy Mordred. Maybe he’s riding with Cernunnos as his punishment for killing them.”
“Where’d you learn all that?”
Gary cocked an eyebrow at me. “I’m an old dog, lady. You pick up a few tricks along the way.”
Great. Apparently I was the only nonbeliever in Seattle. Well, me and Morrison. Somehow that didn’t make me feel any better. Gary reached out and clicked back to the search engine, and through to another site. I half smiled.
“I thought you never touched these things.”
“Don’t tell anybody. You’ll ruin my rep.” He leaned forward, jutting his jaw at the screen while we waited for a slow-loading page to resolve. “So the only mortal mentioned with Cernunnos is this guy Herne. Is he our guy?”
I slid down in my chair, sighing. “I don’t know. Some of the descriptions sound like they might just be the same person. Which doesn’t do us any good. Dammit.”
“What’s that?” Gary leaned forward, examining the screen. Badly rhyming nonsense filled the page in a painstaking handwritten font.
I call on the East Gate to close and bind thee I call on the gods who would listen to me I call on the wind and the earth and the sea I call on fire to help bind thee In this god’s name I set my geas That this binding cannot be broken By my will and by these words By these powers and by my skill I bind thee for eternity
“In Cernunnos’s name I set this geas?” Gary asked, grinning. I reached out and clapped a hand over his mouth, startling even myself. Above my fingers, his eyes widened. “Wwwf wng?”
I looked back at the chant. It still looked like nonsense, but I shivered anyway, discomfited. “I don’t think we should read that out loud.”
Gary’s eyebrows went up a little and he glanced at the computer before shrugging. “Okay.”
What, that was it? Just “okay” ? My surprise must have shown on my face, because he shook his head, smiling. “Jeez, lady, don’t you ever go on gut feelings?”
I spread my hands. “No.”
“Well, that’s what you been goin’ on since I met you. Better get used to it.”
“God, I have been, haven’t I?” I looked around for my glasses and put them back on. “Tomorrow,” I said firmly, “I will wake up normal and rational again.”