He went down with a surfeit of grace, sword flying in an elegant arc as his arms lifted toward the sky. I pounced on him, grabbed his throat with my one good hand and poured healing power into his desiccated shell. Like his brothers, he simply exploded, spattering bits of dried-up viscera all over the yard. I could get to like that. Triumphant, I jumped to my feet, snatched up my sword—and toppled as the entire world came rushing in at my head like a planet-bashing asteroid.
I stuffed the rapier into the ground so I had something to lean on. There were body parts all around me, black and smoking with their severed ends glowing silver-blue. Pride, and then mind-boggling agony, bloomed in my chest. I fumbled my utterly useless left hand toward the hole in my shoulder, which was way too much to ask of my injured body. I tried for the other hole, the one in my gut, and couldn’t manage that, either. Stymied, I dropped to my knees, right hand wrapped around the rapier’s pommel, and looked up.
I’d thought berserker rages were supposed to ignore all injury and wait until the battle was over to give way to hurting. Apparently mine hadn’t gone to Berserker Rage Finishing School, because I had nothing, not one single goddamn thing, left. I couldn’t even muster up a whimper: it took too much energy. Blasting Cernunnos had wiped me out, too. Maybe I was paying for using healing magic offensively, after all.
On the other hand, maybe I was just paying for having a bunch of holes in my previously unperforated body. My left hand was doing something worse than throbbing. Hot wetness drained from it without any particular surcease or increase as accorded by the beat of my heart. Blood leaked from my shoulder, too, a semi-enthusiastic drizzle that I doubted could keep up the enthusiasm much longer. Finding out what my belly was doing meant looking down. I was reasonably certain I would never look up again if I did that, so I kept my gaze resolutely fixed on Redding and his bodyguards.
The latter four stepped away from Redding and moved toward me, loosening their swords in their sheathes. A groan tried to break free, but gave it up as a bad job somewhere around my esophagus. If I didn’t have the energy to groan, I was pretty sure I didn’t have the strength to fight off four more undead warriors. I set my teeth together carefully, mimicry of a clenched jaw that I hoped would inspire resolution within me.
It didn’t, really. It didn’t even inspire a rally of healing magic, which was apparently as exhausted as I was. I held on to my sword, dug deep in my gut for power, and took the one choice I thought still lay open to me.
I waited until they were close enough to flash-fry with my shields, and let loose with everything I had left.
Magic made the fssht! sound of a candle being doused with water and collapsed inside of me without even the faintest external flare. I went after it in a slow luxurious fall, the rapier no longer enough to hold me up.
The last clear thing I saw was four blades rising to take my life, and the Wild Hunt, accompanied by Suzanne Quinley, Gary Muldoon, Billy Holliday and Captain Michael Morrison, pouring out of the sky to override Redding’s backyard like a bunch of kids playing at cowboys.
When I stepped between planes of existence, the one I was in tended to be all-consuming, whether it was my garden or the Dead Zone or a visit to the Upper and Lower Worlds that made up the trifecta of which the earth was the center. I had, once or twice, stepped out of my body and remained in the normal world, but my consciousness had gone with the spiritual version of myself, rather than the physical. I hadn’t ever learned to see in two versions of reality at once, maybe because it had never been necessary.
I learned real goddamn quick right then, because there was no way I was gonna miss this.
My garden was by far the clearer of the two realities I stood in. It was like the diner all over again, with my disembodied emotional self kneeling above a mangled idea of my body. I knew what I was doing this time, which was both good and awfuclass="underline" a girl shouldn’t have to patch up god-awful wounds like the ones I’d sustained once in a lifetime, much less two or three times. We were talking major bodywork, and to my huge relief, the magic wasn’t gone. It just apparently didn’t think blasting zombies was as important as surviving. It responded easily to my garden-self’s ministrations, and on a distant level I felt the screaming pain in my hand ease.
All of that was secondary in my interests to watching the home team kick the hell out of a zombie army.
Okay, it was a very small army, what with only four of them being left standing, but the Hunt itself wheeled away once it had deposited my friends across Redding’s back lawn. Even though I thought it’d be helpful to have a god on Morrison’s side, if Redding or that cauldron had drawn the Hunt in, I really couldn’t blame them for getting out of there as fast as they could. We puny mortals would only lose a lifetime, if we were thrown in the cauldron. A god and his Riders would lose eternity. Even if I wanted Cernunnos to help my friends, I could easily see how that price would be too high.
Besides, it wasn’t like I was in any condition to stop him.
Morrison had ridden with the god himself, both of them on the liquid-silver stallion and both of them wearing near-identical grins of fury. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what had convinced Morrison to ride with the Hunt, but he looked comfortable on the stallion right up until the moment he dived off its wide back. He hit the ground in a roll and came to his feet less than a yard from one of the zombies, his duty weapon at the fore. I saw six flashes of light from the gun’s muzzle, though I didn’t hear a thing, and the undead monster collapsed with a skull full of lead.
Gary’d ridden with the bearded king, and Billy with the archer. Suzy was with her uncle, the boy Rider, and all three of the mortal passengers flung themselves away from their inhuman hosts in the brief space of time it took Morrison to wipe out the warrior he’d faced. Gary smashed into another one with a flying tackle. This time I heard something: bone popping and cracking as his weight made a ruin of an already ancient body. He rolled to his feet as easily as Morrison had, breaking into a run, and skidded to a stop beside me.
Love and joy and all sorts of other gooshy things welled up in my chest. My God, I had good friends. I’d have never expected him to take time to check on me, not in the midst of chaotic battle. Tears blurred my already-poor vision and fell over the bridge of my nose to seep into the ground. I wanted to smile, but I was still too tired. That didn’t matter: the up-swell of emotion actually breathed new life into my power, and the garden version of myself sparked with relief and grim triumph. My breathing eased. I could still feel wrongness in my belly, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been.
Gary, my savior, my friend, my hero and my protector, yanked my still-glowing rapier from the earth, thundered back to the zombie he’d broken and began hacking it to pieces.
Every drop of romanticism and foolhardy joy went flat and wry within me. I mean, I had to hand it to him, that was a smart move, but it shot the shit out of my sails. A snicker bubbled up from somewhere inside me, which seemed like a positive sign, and I moved my head a little to get a better view of the rest of the fight. That I could was an even better sign.
Billy’d gone the same route Morrison had: he’d emptied a clip into one of the zombies, and stood over it with his gun at the ready, daring the thing to move again. It was normal, it was human, it was the expected response.