No Dominion (The Walker Papers: A Garrison Report) (7 page)

Stiff with embarrassment, I said, “I was never really in to cars,” and she choked a laugh. “Dude, apparently not even enough to get laid. Didn’t you ever get it on in the back seat of one of these things?”

“How old do you think I
am
?”

Her eyes narrowed in the instant before she blurted, “Oh, God, I don’t know, like forty-five?” She didn’t think I was anywhere near that old, or she wouldn’t have invited me to sit on the Mustang’s hood in the first place, but she’d put herself on the spot with her own question, and had to upwardly revise whatever she thought the answer really was. And probably downwardly revise it as well, because I’d asked, and I wondered if she’d mentally come up with an answer anywhere close to the truth.

It still stung, which wasn’t any more appropriate than the smugness I’d felt a few minutes ago. “Not quite.”

“I guess
not
, if you don’t know a ‘69 Mustang from ‘63 Stingray. I didn’t think that was actually possible for people with Y chromosomes. Ar—oh, hey, Captain.”

Nichols walked up, a bowl of potato salad in one hand and a hot dog in the other, and smiled genially around at the Motor Pool crew. “Hi, folks. I see you’ve met Captain Morrison already. What do you think of him?”

“What do we
think
of him?” Walker crowed

Nichols, as if oblivious to the tone of her voice, went on pleasantly: “I’ve been introducing him around. I thought it would be good for the precinct to meet my replacement before his first day of work in August.”

Blood drained from Walker’s face. She looked at me, white with accusation, which was fair enough: I’d all but introduced myself under false pretenses, and I was just about ashamed enough to look away. Just about, but not quite, and she had just enough pride and anger to drown out her horror. We glared at each other, neither willing to back down, long enough to make not just the Motor crew, but even Captain Nichols, uncomfortable.

Walker finally broke the stalemate with a tight smile and a low harsh voice. “Well. Live long and prosper, Captain Morrison.”

She looked pointedly at my seat on her Mustang. I got up, stepped through the crew, and walked away thinking I’d never been told to go fuck myself so politely in my life.

NOW

Somehow she’d found a taxi in my quiet residential neighborhood after all. By the time I followed her, she was gone, the street empty but my driveway filled with not just my Toyota Avalon, but the 1969 Mustang Boss that had been the source of years of contention between myself and Joanne Walker.

The car had had a rough year. Almost as bad as Joanne, and unquestionably worse than my own. An arrow had been shot through the gas tank, an ax dragged through the roof, and then a helicopter had winched the vehicle out of an earthquake fissure that had crumpled the back end. Joanne had spent every spare moment and all her spare cash re-restoring the car, even finally putting in the manual transmission she had always wanted to.

As far as I knew, no one but Joanne had driven the car since she’d found it in a barn a dozen years earlier and started the restoration work on it. I unlocked and opened the driver’s side door slowly and sat down. The seat didn’t need adjustment. Walker and I had proved to be exactly the same height, in the end. I put the keys in the ignition and my hands on the wheel, feeling the shape of Walker’s body in the seat and the soft worn spots in the leather from her hands. Faint scent lingered: mostly Irish Spring soap, but with a hint of oil and grease that would always remind me of Walker.

“It’s all right, old girl,” I finally whispered to the car. “She’ll come back to us as soon as she can.”

We sat together, two things that loved her, and I fell asleep a little while before dawn.

No Dominion

“No Dominion” begins and ends in the middle of RAVEN CALLS (Book Seven of the Walker Papers).

The author feels strongly that you should read RAVEN CALLS first.

CHAPTER ONE

A god, an elf and a shaman walked into a bar.

All right, no, they didn’t. They’d walked backward through time, an’ so had I, but if I didn’t make some kinda joke about it, I was gonna get nervous. A joke was usually enough to throw off oncoming alarm, and it made me figure maybe standing at the Hill of Tara in ancient Ireland, watching the sun start to fall in the west maybe wasn’t so strange. Not after a year that included tackling gods and line-blocking demons, not to mention fighting zombies and hunting banshees.

And besides, the whole damned world was lit up with what Joanne Walker called the Second Sight. She was the shaman. Me, I was the cab driver who’d ended up her sidekick. I reckoned most folks would think it oughta be the other way around, what with her being twenty-seven and me seventy-four, but I didn’t have magic, just enthusiasm. Not that long ago I hadn’t even had that, but Jo had reawakened a sense of adventure I’d thought died along with my wife.

Funny thing was, as soon as I started living again I couldn’t remember how to stop anymore. The three years I’d spent being a grumpy old man after Annie’s death had faded like they’d happened to somebody else. Good thing, too, ‘cause a grumpy old man couldn’t appreciate the world the way I was seeing it right now.

I didn’t know what the colors meant, only that I could see ‘em pouring through the land. Giant pillars like Stonehenge—only wood—made a boundary around Tara. Everything inside ‘em glowed blue, the same shade of blue I’d seen Jo call up time and again when she was healing somebody. Here an there, yellow shot up, making for green bursts where it blended with the blue. It all pulsed with life, even down into the ground, where browns and blacks wriggled together like worms and bugs. Right smack in the middle, just a couple dozen feet from where we were standing, shone the whitest magic I’d ever seen. It blasted up from a chest-high stone that had been there in our time, too: the
Lia Fáil
, the Stone of Destiny. Legend had it that when the true king of Ireland touched it, it would scream so the whole country could hear. I reckoned most folks didn’t look at it with the Sight, ‘cause with Jo’s magic flowing through me I could hear the damned thing shrieking inside my head. It was enough to drive a guy crazy.

Or it might be if the elf, the god an’ the shaman weren’t there to break up the monotony. Truth was, I couldn’t hardly look at the god. Cernunnos blazed emerald green against the setting sun’s gold, and left a reverse-color imprint on my eyeballs if I looked at him for more than half a second. There were others with him, a few riders of the Hunt on the ground nearby, and more milling about on horses that pranced on streaks of sunset gold in the sky. I recognized one of ‘em: a boy who looked about twelve, even though I knew he had to be older than dirt. He was Cernunnos’s half-human son, and blazed with the same kinda power, just less intense.

The elf was easier to look at than the kid, even. Nuada of the Silver Hand. I’d read about him, but reading didn’t prepare me for a living being who looked like he’d been dipped in molten silver. His left hand was silver, actual living silver metal, and it had some of Cernunnos’s green fire to it. The rest of his—his
aura
, that’s what Jo would call it—the rest of his aura was earthier, like precious metal veins running through hard stone. He seemed connected to the world in a way even Jo didn’t, like he couldn’t be uprooted. He also looked kinda flummoxed, but that was his own damned fault. He’d asked Jo to prove herself as a shaman by summoning the god, and she’d done it.

She was easiest to look at, and also kinda the most amazing. She was my best girl, had been for over a year now, and I knew her pretty well. I’d seen her working magic any number of times, and I’d seen how it filled her up and spilled out. Still, that wasn’t quite the same as looking at her with the Sight and seeing how gunmetal blue healing magic washed through her like it was her blood.

Blood that was up, right now. The first time I’d met Cernunnos he’d been tryin’ ta kill Jo, who’d gotten in my cab for the first time that morning. Second time I met him was when we went zombie-hunting. This morning was the third time. Best I could count, it was the third time Jo had met him, too, but maybe it was more than that, though, ‘cause their connection seemed to run wilder than just a few meetings could account for. Looking at the two of ‘em together was like looking into the sun. They burned my eyes, but I couldn’t stop watching. I rubbed my eyes, and some of the magic Jo had put on me faded, making it easier to focus on Cernunnos.

The god was on his silver stallion, which was about the size of a draft horse with lines carved down to the delicacy of a race horse. Cernunnos was like that too: power pared down to slim limbs an’ delicate bones. You could almost think he wasn’t much to look at, if you weren’t too bright. If you didn’t notice how his shoulders thickened an’ how the bone pushed at the thin skin of his temples, antlers tryin’ ta get out. If you never met his eyes, you might think he was just some poor sap with some kinda genetic misfortune to his name. Me, I couldn’t hold his gaze.

My Joanne, though, she couldn’t look away. She was six feet of intensity, leaning in toward Cernunnos like they were drawn together by invisible wire. Most folks looking up at a god like that would seem like supplicants. Even Jo had, first time she saw him. Now it was more like she was holding herself back from pouncing. I knew the man in Joanne’s life, the man she was in love with. Looking at
them
together, I saw her love running deep, keeping her tied to the earth. Looking at her with Cernunnos, I saw how high she could fly.

An’ prolly how fast she could burn, too, ‘cause mortals ain’t meant to soar with the gods. But nobody blamed Icarus for trying, and I thought it prob’ly took everything Jo had to say, “I can’t,” when Cernunnos said to her, “Come with me. Ride with me to Knocknaree and fight by my side. Let us change the future that you know. Let us defeat death in these backward days of history, and see what new world awaits us.”

Joanne pressed her eyes shut like it was killing her to say no, but she shook her head. “I can’t. You know I can’t, Cernunnos. I’ve ridden with you three times already. Once more and…”

Cernunnos got a hunter’s smile and leaned down toward her. “And thou’rt mine,” he said softly enough I shouldna been able to hear, but I could. “Be mine, young shaman. Be mine, for thou hast
no idea
what we shall become.”

I looked away, uncomfortable. I didn’t belong watching these two doing their dance, and neither did Nuada.  

Jo shook her head again and Cernunnos straightened in his saddle, making a face as if ta say, “
Women
.” But instead of saying it aloud he only said, “A pity,” not just to Jo, but to the rest of us too. “It would have been good to challenge the troublesome one so early in his bid for earthly power, but even I will not ride against death without a force for life at my side.”

Without quite meaning to, I opened my mouth and said, “I could go.”

All three of ‘em said, “What?”, and for a couple seconds I wondered that myself. Thing was, though, it needed doing. We’d gotten thrown to the wrong end of time, me an’ Jo, an’ a whole lot of things had gone wrong since we’d gotten here. A king had died, an avatar of evil called the Morrígan had cut my throat, and an avatar of good named Brigid had taken a hit for Joanne that woulda dropped her. To top it off, Brigid had realized Jo was the key to binding a death cauldron made by a guy we called the Master: somebody, or something, whose only purpose in existing was to corrupt and kill. We weren’t fooling ourselves. Binding the cauldron was gonna get his attention, and that meant there was gonna be a fight. We’d been planning to get ourselves to the other side of Ireland in order to do the binding and face the fight, but our only way across was Cernunnos.

An’ Jo had just made it real clear she couldn’t ride with him. But we were coming from the other end of time, so we knew the cauldron got bound. It got destroyed, too, eventually. On our end of time, after the binding spell started coming loose. So the binding happened, an’ that meant somebody had to go do the heavy lifting. I figured I was that somebody.

Jo, though, wasn’t having any of that, from how she looked. She came right at me, like being up close would make her extra clear. “No way. Not a chance. Are you nuts? We’re a million years out of time, Gary, and you want to go riding off with the Wild Hunt without me at your back? Are you crazy? Are you
nuts
?”

I shoved my hands in my pockets. “Ain’t like I haven’t done it before.”

Joanne waved her hands in the air, voice rising as fast as they did. “With Morrison! And Suzy! And Billy! And that was in our own time! And—”

“And I didn’t have the Sight,” I interrupted. “And somebody’s gotta go, right? There’s a big fight brewing, and Brigid’s gonna be waiting for us, and we got no way to get there except Cernunnos. And you can’t ride with him.”

I was asking a question there, and she knew it. She gave the god a desperate glance, then shook her head as she looked back at me. “I can’t. I really can’t. Not if I want to live my life, Gary. Not if I want to go home to Morrison. If I ride with Cernunnos again I’ll never come back. He’s…” She swallowed, and that time I didn’t have to ask. Cernunnos was god of the Wild Hunt, master of beasts. I hated to say it, but Jo was suffering a case of genuine animal magnetism.

“All right, so you can’t go, so who knows, maybe it ain’t you the cauldron spell got bound to. Maybe it’s me. Besides.” I jerked my chin at Cernunnos, whose pointy face was smug. “Horns here ain’t gonna let anything happen to me, are you? ‘cause if he does, he’s gonna have you to reckon with, and I don’t figure that’s the kind of reckoning he’s looking for with you, Jo.”