No Dominion (The Walker Papers: A Garrison Report) (29 page)

“No reason to, darlin’. Nothin’ wrong with home.”

“What did we do last time?”

“We went to the hospital three days ag—” I snapped my teeth together, tryin’ ta eat the words I’d already said, but Annie only smiled like she wasn’t surprised.

“So we’ve already changed it. Do you think the changes are enough? Is it going to make a difference, somehow? Will we win, Gary? Tell me what happens,” she said, real soft. “Please tell me what happens, Gary. I won’t be there to see it, so I want to know. We’ll stay home,” she promised, like promising would be the thing that would make me tell her. “We’ll stay home, we won’t go to the hospital, and you can tell me the future.”

An’ I did. It took all day, sittin’ in the bed with her, holding her like I couldn’t the last time through, and I told her about the next three or four years. Told her about picking up a mouthy fare one January morning, just a couple days after I turned seventy-three, an’ she got a notepad outta her nightstand and wrote that down, the time and date and SeaTac terminal, and she made me put it in my wallet. “Just to make sure you’ll be there,” she told me, an’ I smiled a bit.

“Like I could forget, sweetheart. I’d been kinda living on auto pilot up ‘til then, just kinda waitin’ to catch up with you. Jo…you gotta forgive me, darlin’. Jo gave me something else to live for, made me not wanna hurry dying up too much. I wish you coulda known her, Annie. She’s just a kid, and she was a real mess when I met her, but you wouldn’t believe the woman she’s growing up into. She’s our girl, Annie. She’s the girl we shoulda had. So brave she’s stupid sometimes, but her heart’s in the right place.”

“If we’d had a girl of our own all of this would be different, and you might never have met her. I don’t know if things happen for a reason, but I think perhaps all of it comes around to where it’s supposed to be, in the end. Tell me more. Tell me how you got the tortoise spirit animal. I can still feel this ridiculous cat in my mind, you know. It’s getting ready to run. Gathering itself. I can’t see its prey, but I suppose something must be out there for it to hunt. I don’t think cheetahs run just for fun…”

She quieted down, an’ I told her all about being witched, and how I’d known sorcery was eating away at Myles ‘cause I’d seen it happen to another kid. “She didn’t want anything to do with magic, Jo didn’t. Not up ‘til then. She just wanted a regular life.”

“Not so much like us, then,” Annie murmured.

I nodded. “She had a harder time taking it in. She was determined not to believe, but she had reasons. I ain’t told you about her babies yet. Shh, I’ll get to it. Anyway, she stepped up after the mess with the sorcerer, an’ from there on out she’s been…the only other person I was ever so proud to know is you, Annie. An’ I gotta say, even with what we’ve seen an’ what we did, it was small peanuts compared ta the ruckus I been getting up to with Jo. She looks just like that painting your Pop did, ‘cept it don’t show you how big she is. She’s six feet tall, an’ don’t tell her I told you, but she hits like a brick wall. Not that she’s been hitting me, but we shoved the top off a crypt once—”

“Was there a vampire inside?”

I laughed right out loud and kissed my girl’s white hair. “No, but we both thought there was gonna be.” That got me back to the beginning, and I tried keeping the story more or less in order, but Annie kept having questions and I kept remembering bits I hadn’t said before, until it was closing in on midnight an’ I was finishing up the last details, telling her about the quiet ride I’d been taking through our own lives for the past fifty years.

“All that time,” she whispered. “All that time and you never changed a thing.”

“Couldn’t risk it, sweetheart. I was bettin’ everything on this last fight.”

“And we’re losing it. At the last minute, we’re losing it. Oh! That silly cat just started running. Inside my head, Gary. I can feel it—
pulling
me. Oh. Oh no, Gary, it’s hunting the stag. My stag!”

I looked for the clock. Seven minutes til twelve. That was the last minute. That was the time burned into my memory forever, ‘cause that was when Annie had died. An’ then the clock ticked over, six minutes to midnight, and all of a sudden we were living on borrowed time.

A shot of pain smacked me between the eyes. The same shot that the kid had taken, burning another hole through my brain, and everything started slipping away.

All the memories that had been brought back to life, the terrible gift of magic that had been part of me and Annie since the beginning. If I was stealing Annie from him, stealing time, then the Master was stealing something back. Maybe that was the whole damned reason for the kid showing up at our house a week ago at all, so he could take that shot, set some magic in my mind that would start erasing everything if somehow we held on longer than we were s’posed to.

He couldn’t take the memories that were still on the way, the ones about Annie’s funeral, the ones about Joanne and Cernunnos and all the other things still lying in my future, but he could take everything up ‘til this minute. He could steal everything about my life that had made it something other than ordinary. My memories unraveled faster an’ faster, re-weaving themselves into a life a lot like my own, except without the touches of magic. I clawed at ‘em, tryin’ ta hold on,
knowing
it wasn’t right that Annie’s Pop had been a regular fella, but not able to remember what had made him different, an’ then losing hold of the idea that he’d been different at all.

It all fell apart, until the Korean War dreams were just nightmares like anybody got, until that trip we’d finally taken to Pamplona was only a vacation, and didn’t have nothing to do with chasing minotaurs through cobblestone alleys. Until the secret of Annie’s surviving almost being hit by a car was ‘cause she’d tripped over a stone, not ‘cause Cernunnos had knocked her aside, an’ until every last drop of magic had been squeezed outta my life.

Every last drop but Annie. He might be able to take her away from me, but he couldn’t take the magic we’d had together. Her kinda magic was the most ordinary, simple thing anybody ever had. She was the love of my life, and nothing could touch that. I held onta that as tight as I was holding her, and watched the clock click forward another minute.

The way my memory had it, she’d slipped into sleep a long while before death came knocking. But she was leaning forward, breathin’ hard—clear breaths, not coughing—and her muscles were bunching and loosing like she was running with that cheetah, or maybe with the stag. I got the idea the stag was gonna win, ‘cause cheetahs couldn’t keep up their top speed real long, but that was laying the limitations of a real animal on a spirit guide. Whatever was going on with the power animals, they were fighting for Annie, dragging her forward. That was my girl, holding on, making this whole thing her own fight, taking it on her own terms. A bright spark of hope crashed through me. Something was changing. At the last damned minute, just like Cernunnos had said. At the last chance. That was when to make the move.

I stood up, barely knowing I was doing it, and said, “Horns,” out loud, calling myself to his attention for the first time in fifty years. “Horns, I donno what’s gonna happen, I got nothin’, I got
nothin
’, but we’re in overtime on the clock and my memories are slipping away—”

I was losing what I was saying even as I said it, sometimes wondering who I was even talking to. I sat with Annie again, folding her into my arms and whispering another prayer to the only god I knew. Half the time I didn’t know what I was saying, except I knew I was holding on to hope the same way Annie was. An’ seven minutes after she was s’posed to have left me, a church bell started ringing, marking out the transition into a brand new day. I put my mouth against Annie’s hair, murmuring, “Tis the witching hour of night, doll. Everything changes in the witchin’ hours.”

And Cernunnos came riding, up to the old inn-door.

There was no door on this or any other earth that was gonna stop him from coming in. Truth was, I wasn’t sure how he’d gotten in, poetry or no, ‘cause the wall just kinda melted away as he came through. Him an’ that big silver stallion, filling up our bedroom. It stamped its feet, making the floor rattle, an’ I swear to God that for all of the size of the thing, all of the presence of the god, I couldn’t hardly see either of ‘em. They kept slipping and sliding in my vision like they were imaginary, like they were marching through a dream.

Annie saw him, though, an’ gave a cry that most guys might not want to hear their girls make when another fella is in the room. All kinds of relief was in that sound, and a sob caught in her throat. I couldn’t hear nothin’ beyond that, ‘cause a growl was rising all around, like a big cat with its back up. If Cernunnos was talking, I couldn’t see it, either. There was silver light playing everywhere, an’ the god’s green eyes burning like fire. It was early in the year for him to be riding at all, but his horns were full like a stag’s in its prime, and Annie put her hands out to him—

—and at one minute after midnight, Cernunnos pulled me outta the life I’d been leading, an’ dropped me back into the heart of the Wild Hunt.

epilogue

“What
happened
? What the hell
happened
?
Horns
!” I was back to myself, sitting on Imelda’s back and carryin’ Jo’s rapier at my side. I wasn’t wearing the mithrail armor anymore, but Horns had never planned on me keeping it anyway. The Hunt was gathered in what looked a lot like my front yard, though moonlight was shining through ‘em and neither the horses nor the hounds were making any kinda audible sound. Everything else was normal, except I couldn’t hardly remember the past couple minutes or make sense of the mess of memory that’d been my life. “There was light, goddamn it, Cernunnos, did Annie go into the damned
light
?”

“She did.” The whole Hunt was movin’ around us, riders I’d known for half of forever now. The boy was on his gold mare, the two of ‘em the only point of stillness in the yard. Even Cernunnos was moving, his big stallion edgy and eying me like I was something new. Horns himself was looking like the cat that got the canary, green fire burning in his eyes an’ a wicked little smile curving his mouth. “She went into the light, Master Muldoon, and I think we can be assured that was not the fate the Devourer intended for her.”

“
Well where the hell does the light come out
?” I sounded a lot like Jo, asking crazy questions that couldn’t have answers, but I could barely see through the silver rising in my eyes and the sickness boiling in my belly. I’d spent the past four years remembering my whole life wrong, an’ after all of it I still didn’t know if I’d saved the girl. There wasn’t a goddamned thing that mattered if I hadn’t.

Some of the wickedness left Horns’s face an’ he shook his head. “I could not bring you there even if I wished to. You are not yet ready to take the final ride with me, and when you are I may be able to offer you a different path than the one you might imagine yours to take. Once I led thousands through the darkness, Master Muldoon. Now there are few who call for me in the end, but so long as they burn as brightly as you and your woman have burned, I will never fade from mortal memory.”

“This ain’t
about
you, Horns. Annie—you mean, Annie—” I ran outta words, my hands going numb on Imelda’s reins.

“There were other spirits who might have helped her through the last days of her sickness. Others with an affinity for the sagebrush which helps to clear the lungs and is sacred to healers. But the stag is more than my creature. It is a part of my essence, and she rejected the others that came and waited for the stag instead. Of course I came for her myself, though I bent time to do it.”

“We ain’t supposed ta be able to mess with the time line that way.” I didn’t have much voice, but Horns heard me clear enough, an’ looked like he thought I was joking.

“You weren’t supposed to steal her a few extra minutes of life, either, Master Muldoon. We waited until the very end for just these reasons, did we not? To risk all, and to strike a blow against the Devourer just far enough out of time that he could not retaliate. She lies beyond your reach now, but that has been true as long as you have known me. You spoke words to her, earlier. A poet’s words, I think, as you prepared to journey into the spirit realms.”

I couldn’t think what he was talking about, not for a long minute or two. All that came outta my mouth was, “You were spyin’ on me?” in a voice that sounded like a sullen kid’s.

“I could hardly allow you to revisit your life without my presence nearby. I had no wish to explain myself to Joanne if something should go wrong. Though lovers be lost, you said to her.”

Air exploded outta me in a sigh. “Yeah. Dylan Thomas. He said—well, he said love was stronger than death, ‘cept he said it better. I guess that’s what poets do.”

“Hold tight to his wisdom, my friend. There is no greater power, and I have known many powers in my time.”

That was a little funny. Just enough funny ta start filling up the hole in my heart. I’d had a long time to mourn Annie already, after all, an’ I was sitting across from a fella who was promising me that in the end, she’d gone into the light. It wasn’t the ending I’d been hoping for, but at the back of my head I’d always known I wasn’t gonna get that one. Even if my older memories were a mess, I trusted the ones since her death. I didn’t really figure time had been gonna rewrite itself and give me those years back with her. I let that hope go, real careful-like, then let some of that laughter come up and smooth things over a little. “You tellin’ me love conquers all, Horns?”