Blood War Page 9

  And I push. Forward. Enveloping, seeping, forward, until…

  I am with my father. Inside him. One with him.

  It is nothing but white light and pain like knives in the eyes. I can see nothing to strike at, cannot see Arj. I feel everything my father feels, all the pain of this instant—which is more pain than any being should ever have to bear. And I feel the earth shake even harder, as I scream louder than the fiery birth of Earth itself.

  And I push. Further forward, further forward, further, further…

  Until I hear the luscious sound of Arj’s voice screaming, echoing all around me.

  I am inside Arj.

  I see through his eyes as he lets go of my father, who drops to his knees, covering his face with his hands. I am not even astonished at what is happening here, only purposeful.

  I see the whole world spinning wildly as Arj thrashes and bucks and runs and claws at himself to get to me, which is a waste of his last breaths. He looks up to the sky, the roof, the ceiling, the mirror above us, and I catch a glimpse of him, of us. It is the most incredible sight ever imagined.

  I see the hatred and the terror in his face as he feels me burning him from inside. I hear his screams as though they were music, and I watch his tortured face as though it were art.

  I see, briefly, my eyes through his, and I cannot believe the power and the anger they hold.

  “This is what happens,” I am saying to Arj from the inside, “to whoever touches those I love.”

  I finish him then; I feel him hit his knees. And I slither out like smoke, at the moment before his face smacks the cold, hard ground.

  I don’t even gather myself, reorient myself to my own body, before I turn to attend to my father.

  And am stopped cold by what I see.

  “No,” I shout, but she doesn’t notice or care.

  Eartha, standing like an executioner behind my kneeling, blind, disoriented father, has her long, retractable claws out and is poised.

  “No,” I scream, and lunge in her direction.

  But not before she has the chance to bury the claws deep in the back of his neck, on both sides.

  He screams, reaches up behind him, and seizes her neck in his hands. He snaps it in one direction—I hear the crack as they are falling forward, hear a scream, the likes of which I have never heard, echo from far off, deep within the forest cave. And then I see him snap it once more as the two of them thud to the ground together.

  It all stops. The movement, the attack. Everyone—the whole lot of them, still as numerous as when we began—is frozen and wide-eyed, watching. I can hear myself breathing. I am the only thing that moves.

  Sick with rage and fear, I scrabble over to my father. When I get there, I lift Eartha’s lifeless body and I throw it far. My gaze follows it as she bounces to a halt at the feet of some of the others, and I feel, momentarily and despite all, a stabbing sense of loss.

  Then I turn to where my father is lying, small sounds coming out of him. They are not groans of pain or complaint or lament. He is trying to talk and failing.

  I pick him up and rise with him cradled in my arms like a child.

  I look back across the field to where we saw Eleanor, but she and the horses are no longer there.

  My heart is bleeding. For what I hold in my hands. For what I do not hold. For our defeat. My heart is bleeding.

  I look all around me, to where more and more of them have come creeping out of the darkness, out of the atmosphere.

  Still, nobody moves. I stand flat-footed and defiant, with my father draped across my arms, and I make sure that I make eye contact with as many of them as possible.

  I must take my father away from here. That is what he needs, and that is what I do.

  CHAPTER 7

  The boat pulls up to the seashell-strewn beach that now feels like a sad sort of home.

  We run aground, the tide nudging us right up onto dry land. He has made barely a move during the trip, drawn hardly a noticeable breath, but he is still with me as I lift him gently out of the boat and walk him up the beach, around the bend in the island.

  I walk up to the mouth of the cave above the rocky, splashing shore, and I take him inside.

  I lay him down, finally, on the raised platform where I first found him. His chest rises once, hugely, falling heavily as he settles.

  I drop my head onto his chest.

  “I am so sorry,” I say. “I never learn. I should not have spared her. I will never learn. There is no hope.”

  “Please,” he says in a whisper that sounds almost indistinguishable from the swishing sea outside, “stop apologizing. It won’t do to have the leader of a whole people keep saying he is sorry all the time.”

  “I am no leader of anybody. I am a fool. I turned my back. Despite everything. Despite everything I have experienced, everything I have seen with my own eyes, despite all you have been telling me, I still allowed myself to feel something for Eartha, to see her as something other than the pure evil she’s been all along. And now you have to pay for it.”

  He takes an extra long time to respond to me now, long enough that I have to raise my head to check to see that he is still with me. But it is only the weakness—and maybe the tiredness of having to teach me the same simple lessons over and over—that makes him so slow.

  “What happened there was irrelevant. Today was my last day. Regardless of what happened, today was to be my last day.” I am shaking my head as he says this, as if I can stop him from dying by stopping his voice. “I knew this when I arose this morning. Cernunnos will have me back now. Do not worry about me.

  “And as for Eartha, you were right. She is not pure evil. It does not exist. If you saw something else in her, son, then that something was there somewhere. There is no such force as pure evil, and if you lose your ability to know that, then not only will you be a failure as a leader, you will be a failure as a man.”

  I look down again and allow my head to rest fully on his chest. I am bursting inside with sadness, and it is compounded by the finality of almost every word he says.

  He reaches a hand up and strokes my head with it, and that does it. Tears flow so freely that I am soaking him. His own eyes are white and weepy, burned away.

  “The unfortunate thing is that it never becomes easy to sort out in what measure each individual possesses fineness and evil. That is why doubt will need to be your constant. And with your power and responsibility, it is more important for you than for anyone else in the world to be able to sort it all out. A leader must see—and do—many deeply distasteful things and yet return to compassion.

  “You have had to go through all you have gone through, Marcus—from the time you were born, to the time I left you, to the time I came back, to the time I leave you again—in order that you become the man you are, to know the world as you now know it. You could not have merely been told these things.

  “Now you are ready. I am at peace that you are ready. Spence is waiting for you, and it will not do to linger here. He is a man of vengeance. He has Eleanor, and his daughter is dead, and there is no telling what he will do. I am at peace here, and you must go.”

  I cannot bear it. I don’t want him at peace. I am not at peace. And I do not feel ready for the role he is leaving me.

  I am not ready for him leaving me. This is not how it was supposed to be. There was supposed to be a payoff for all of it, a reassembly of my family—a father and a mother and a dog.

  And now I have none of it. I have none of it. He cannot go. I am not prepared to let him go.

  “You owe me, old man,” I say, raising my head and looking him up and down desperately, like I am looking for the switches, levers, gears that make his body work.

  I look at his eyes, which are open and moving slightly from side to side. But it does not matter. He is blind, burnt out. His killer gray-green eyes, the eyes like mine, the irrefutable sign that I belong to him and he to me—they are gone.

  No. I am not ready. If I can do an
ything, I can do this. If any of this is worth a goddamn, then I can do this.

  I reach out and touch his eyeballs with the fingertips of one hand, one of his throat wounds with the other.

  “Heal, damn you,” I say, and as I say it, small white kite tails of smoke float up from his sad, dead eyes. My fingertips are hot, scorching, even to me. He moves, slightly, from side to side in an almost pathetic attempt to get away from me, but he does not protest, does not speak at all.

  Tears of pain roll out of his eyes, and I stop. I am doing nothing but hurting him.

  I drop my head, my whole upper body over him, and I hold him, and I use all my strength to not repeat “I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry” enough times to enrage him back to his feet. I lie across him, let him dream his last dream.

  “This is what I want,” I say, when I find the scene in all its rightness.

  My father is looking strong and hearty and scary-happy, wearing his rings but otherwise looking like any ordinary, content man. He is on the back porch of our house in Blackwater, and the water is streaming by, making that “all’s well” water sound as he tips back a plain wooden chair. He rests his feet on the railing that in real life, in my life, was all the time spongy and ready to give and toss you into the drink. He is tanned. My father is tanned.

  Eleanor is just stepping out onto the porch, coming up alongside him and taking the seat next to him. She hands him a can of A& W root beer and sips from one herself. A breeze comes up and blows her hair half across her face and into her mouth just as she removes the can, and she laughs.

  Chuck lies spread like a mat on the floor between them.

  “This is what I want,” I say again pleadingly.

  I am standing beneath the porch on the slope, with the house in front of me and the stream at my back. I speak up to them like Romeo at Juliet’s balcony.

  My father smiles down at me, my mother smiles down at me, my dog smiles down at me. My father kisses my mother on her cheek.

  I am nearly knocked into the water with the force of it. I have never seen that, not once in my life.

  She reaches a hand up to his cheek and holds him there for just a little bit longer before letting him go. But then she has to. Chuck raises his head for a pat and gets one. But he is required to stay too, to let him go.

  “Stay with Eleanor, Chuck,” my father says.

  Poor Chuck lays his sad head back on the floorboards.

  My father walks around to the end of the porch, comes on down, and takes me by the arm.

  I keep looking back at the incomplete scene behind us.

  “But that is what I want,” I say to him again as we approach the burbling clear water. “That is all I want.”

  “I know,” he says, and we walk into the water, up to our knees, and then walk downstream.

  It is a powerful old trick that we have pulled off before. We are in the water but not in the water, walking knee-deep but not getting wet.

  “Why can’t I just have you back?” I say, as if this is the most reasonable of requests. “If there is any magic to this magic, if boulders can fly and wounds can be healed with the touch of a finger, if I can step inside people’s dreams, if I can step inside someone’s body…” I turn and jab at him for emphasis, but my finger passes right through him. “If I can kill from within a person or without—”

  “Because you cannot, son,” he says, getting there before I do. “I told you at the beginning. This power will make you feel like you control the entire universe at times. But you do not. With very few exceptions, what is done cannot be undone. So your decisions will always be your decisions, and your gift, your power above all your other powers, will be your wisdom. The pain of your mistakes, the frustration of what cannot be changed, will be your greatest teacher.”

  There are birds of all descriptions flitting about above us and singing. The stream is filled to teeming with fish. They follow us, leaping and squiggling along through the rocks with the current.

  My father stops me under a massive willow tree, its drippy green fingers sweeping the surface of the passing water. He takes me by the shoulders.

  “I am not your task, Marcus Aurelius. You have other, more pressing, responsibilities. What you are capable of you have not yet begun to imagine—your power is as close as it is possible to get to the limitless power of the gods. Now you must concentrate on finding it and on saving the people you are here to save.”

  He looks very fatherly and understanding and gives my shoulders a reassuring squeeze. “When you do, you will be rewarded. The gods are very forgiving and understanding. And you are Cernunnos’s favorite.”

  He takes a breath here and gives me an extra hard, startling shake before speaking his last words to me.

  “Once you have done what you must do, Marcus, you will be allowed one thing more. You will be allowed to do what you cannot do. You will be allowed to undo what your soul knows you must undo.”

  I stare into his eyes, his once-more startling mismatched gray-green eyes, and I wait for the rest. I grab his shoulders the way he is grabbing mine.

  “I don’t understand,” I say.

  The words are not out of my mouth before I hear the screaming, a screaming to boil the blood, coming from downstream.

  “Eleanor,” I say to him, but he does not move.

  I cannot wait. I shake loose of him and tear back in the direction of the house. Another scream comes, louder, and it seems to me like every person, every creature within miles must hear this and should be running toward that sound—but I am the only one. Not even the birds are with me anymore.

  I am not winded by the time I get back to the house. I don’t even feel like I’ve been running. I stand there in the same spot as before, looking up.

  At the empty porch. No family. No father, no mother. No dog. The railing is rotted and ready to topple down the bank and into the water.

  Far, far, far away, I hear Eleanor screaming still.

  I wake up, still draped across my father’s chest. I look into his face without any illusions about what I might find.

  He is gone. His eyes are closed, and I am thankful for that. There is no warmth in his body now, no beat in his chest, and his wounds do not weep any longer.

  My head is massive with sadness, and I look down. There I see his hand lying at his side.

  And the ring. It is sitting loosely around his finger, where it has already untangled from his bones.

  I take the ring, as I have no doubt I should. I slide it over my middle finger, right beside the space, the gaping absence where so much has been cut right out of me. There is no shock, no pain—at least none that I notice.

  I kiss my father’s cheek and walk out to the sea and my waiting boat.

  When I am halfway across the bay, I turn back to look. I watch as the sea, the accelerated tide, rushes in, penetrates the great sheer cliff face of the island. I watch as the sea goes right inside, into the cave, all the way in to my father, to meet him, to embrace him, and to reclaim him.

  CHAPTER 8

  I am standing at the grass-capped, sleep-eyed entrance to the catacomb that is the coven’s lair, and I am still stuck thinking on my father’s words.

  What was he telling me? I know I have a task, an obligation, a duty. I know I need to get Eleanor back. I know I need to put an end to this whole insane, wretched blood war business, and that means eliminating them, which means eliminating Spence.

  But what beyond that? What more is there? What “one thing more”? I don’t want one thing more. I want peace. I want to be left alone. I don’t want anything beyond that. I don’t want to be allowed to do what I cannot do. I wouldn’t even be here now if I didn’t have to do what I have to do.

  I plunge through the entrance and feel things start to happen the instant I do. I stop, shuddering, frightened. I feel it clearly now, that he—the leader, the head—feels my presence as I feel his. There are no secrets here. We are both coming to the inevitable.

  I march on down, down
through the night-black path from before, only this time it feels different. No one is leading me, but I feel I know these steps, these tunnels, these twists and switchbacks and straightaways like I was born to the knowledge. I know it as if I were my father.

  Something else is happening as I sniff and listen and sense my way to the center of this wretched place.

  I feel my strength building, emanating out from my father’s ring—from both rings now. And I feel my protection grow on the outside of me as well.

  I cannot see, but I feel a breastplate of organic armor actually growing around my front, covering my ribs, then my back. I reach to touch it with my hand and it is cool, strong, light, and fitted to me as if it were molded from my own body. I feel something also on my head, and I barely have to touch it to recognize it as the carved, horned helmet that I last saw thousands of miles away in the house in Blackwater. My father’s armor.

  I feel not only protected but ornamented by this warrior gear, this protective regalia that should tell the world—his world, our world—just who they are dealing with. Right up to the magnificent, twisted gold torque that once rested at my father’s throat and now rests at mine.

  And I feel it now. I cannot fail.

  I am running at a gallop, brimming with invincibility as I enter the innermost, deepest region of the caverns. I burst out of the darkness into the relative glare of the stone circle.

  And am caught by the throat, shaken like a doll, and thrown twenty feet onto my back.

  I hit the ground with a smash that sends a shock in every direction from my spine.

  From where I land on my back, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror above. It shows me how tiny I really am.

  “What is this?” a voice roars at me.

  I raise myself up on my elbows to look, and see Spence himself. He is different in a way I can’t grasp at first. He is standing in front of a giant stone, in front of which is a raised platform, on which is lying the body of his daughter. There is no sign of Eleanor or the rest of the coven anywhere.