I walked across the ugly tiles silently, then up a sweeping Cinderella staircase, perfect for making an entrance. Glittering above the stairway was a silver Mylar sign, block letters spelling out Happy Birthday, Sweetie!
The hall the stairs led to was marble, too, the same ugly tile as the foyer, though the stairs themselves were white. This was a house for sneaking around in barefoot. Woe betide anyone in hard-soled shoes trying to make a silent getaway.
Upstairs was more oppressive than the foyer, the cold deeper. I stood in the hallway, trying to analyze the chill. Was it just that the house had never seen much love between its walls? That seemed so corny I rejected it, despite my crash course in the strange and unusual. It felt more complicated than that, and I was supposed to be paying attention to how things felt.
I exhaled, nevermind that my body was somewhere else. The sound was muffled, like I’d breathed into a blanket. That was it: the heavy lifelessness lay over the house like a blanket, like something someone else had put there.
Like something Herne had put there. I recognized the touch with a shock, the dark taint of the god’s son settled over Suzanne Quinley’s home.
“Call the police,” I said out loud. A small part of me was aware of Gary startling, and hurrying for the cab. I waited until I heard the static of the CB before steeling myself to walk forward. Past two doors on the right—linen closet, bathroom, my superconscious told me—and turned to the left, into a bedroom. Fear hit me like a wall as I stepped over the threshold. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Unfortunately, although screwing my metaphysical eyes shut had the peculiar effect of rendering me unable to see, it had no effect at all on the shattering agony that stained the room. Far more clearly than I could see with my eyes, I watched and felt everything that had happened here in history so recent it hadn’t really ended yet.
Rachel Quinley worked part-time as a lawyer, her mornings tied up in legalese. She was always home by midafternoon, though, so Suzanne wouldn’t come home to an empty house. She hadn’t gone to work today for a hundred reasons. First, it was Suzy’s birthday, though the Mylar sign seemed tacky in the face of yesterday’s horror at the school. Then there was that thing itself, so many of Suzy’s friends brutally murdered. Rachel had wanted Suzy to stay home today, but the girl—young woman, her mother thought with a combination of regret and pride—insisted on going. There were to be no classes. It was going to be a day of counseling and healing and talking. Suzy still wanted the cake for after dinner, too: she’d said it would make her feel more normal. How anyone could feel normal after yesterday—but Suzy’d been strange for months already. It was part of growing up. Rachel remembered the alienation she’d felt in high school, for all that she’d been popular. It was a universal feeling, she thought.
But she’d stayed home. To make the cake—chocolate with raspberry swirls, Suzy’s favorite—and to wait to see if Suzanne needed to come home early. She wanted to be home, so her daughter wouldn’t feel any distress over interrupting Mom at work. Just in case, she’d told herself. Just in case.
David Quinley came home at lunch, just in time to lick a cake beater. He was taking a half day off from his own law firm, to be home when Suzy got in. But she wasn’t home yet, and they both were…
I blushed my way through the next eternity. I really thought people only used kitchen counters for that in the movies. This being a shaman thing was very enlightening, in an embarrassing way. When the cake was done baking, they moved upstairs to the bedroom, and that’s where Herne found them.
I didn’t envy them what happened next. I stood there, eyes shut, a silent, screaming observer of a thing I was too late to stop. It was not as fast or as comparatively easy a death as Marie had suffered, or the Blanchet High students, or Mrs. Potter. I understood what he was doing, if not how: Herne was harnessing the last of the power he needed to complete his night’s task, and that took ritual.
I could feel him drawing in power in a way that felt like what I’d done with the police officers at the station. Where they’d offered goodwill and hope, though, Herne seemed to be taking from the darker things that man had to offer: lust and pain and greed. The coil of energy inside my belly spat and bubbled so fiercely my insides cramped, reacting physically to the dark power Herne called up.
The horrifying thing was how close it felt to the power inside me. The other side of the coin, a razor’s edge away. Yeah, so I was mixing metaphors again, but that’s how it felt: clearly the other side of the power I could access, so close it would be terribly easy to slip over the edge and call on it. It was a difference of motivation, the slender line between compassion and vengeance.
Even what he was doing wasn’t so far from what I’d done with Cernunnos. I’d bound the god to drag him back to a world he could be controlled in. Herne bound Suzanne’s parents in the same way, weaving a net of power. The difference was that he intended to take them all the way into himself, subsume them and use their power to strengthen himself without leaving anything for them to return to. They were the last piece of his power source, made a part of him, where I’d only held Cernunnos captive a brief while.
I couldn’t help but wonder if it would have been easier with more bodies, creating the same kind of power circle Henrietta Potter had disrupted in the classroom. I watched him—no longer obscured, at least for this task, although I could feel a gray blank-ness within the city where he was out there now—as he opened veins and drew a bloody circle, himself and the Quinleys inside. The gift of Babylon had left me, and he made no effort, as Cernunnos had done, to be understood. His invocation was in an old language, but not, I thought, the Gaelic Cernunnos spoke. It wasn’t Latin, either, but something harsher and uglier: a dead language, but more to the point, a death language. In the same way that I’d seen the energy offered up by the cops, I could see the life forces that Herne stole from the Quinleys. Where what I’d been given had been free and without fear, the Quinley’s spirits were streaked with pain and terror, the brightness of their lives swallowed whole by the darkness Herne carried within himself.
I realized I was throwing everything I had at the memories the room held, trying desperately to stop what was happening in front of me. Waves of silver power rolled off me, splashing uselessly into the apparitions. Had I been here earlier, I could have stopped this. I watched brilliance slowly rise up from the dying Quinleys, blackening like burning paper as Herne stole their life force for his own purposes.
A purpose you still don’t understand! a little panicked part of me screamed. How could I stop the child of a god when I didn’t know what he intended? How did he mean to protect himself against hurt?
By taking Cernunnos’s place in the Hunt. The thought struck me so hard I literally staggered. I didn’t know if I’d come on it myself or if it had slipped away from Herne in the midst of his intake of power, but that was it.
Holy God. Cernunnos might have been better off if I’d left him in Babylon. I shuddered. Herne, his head held triumphant, closed his fists in the memory of the room. The last of what had been David and Rachel Quinley became his, swallowed whole by his hatred. He smiled, thin and mocking, and looked directly at me. I clamped down on a useless scream as he crouched and dipped a hand into blood, then stepped to a wall.
Against my will, I opened my eyes to read the message he’d left me.
Too late, gwyld.