The Morrigan: Damaged Deities (4 page)

A fearless warrior goddess who, through countless battles, had only failed once.  She had never failed since.

With rapid clicks, she deleted her words and instead wrote, “It will be my pleasure to help you.”

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

“She said that she would hinder the Fomorians, and she would sing spells against them…and she alone would take on a ninth part of the host.”

Cath Maige Tuired

The moon entered her next phase, growing fuller above.  The light shined against the beast’s sleek coat like the haunting skin of a lost ghost. 

Soon the moon would be full and he would have a small window to either stay on land for four weeks, the lunar cycle, or be held captive once more by the lake’s murky depths. 

The beast snorted, the air coming out of his flared nostrils like a puff of smoke and he stamped the wet earth, his hooves kicking up clumps of mud.

Like a vast shadow he moved between the trees along the lake’s shore. 

It was a clear night, one of the rare few in the rainy season.  But it was quiet.  The other predators of the forest fled from him, the night birds would not sing.  He stalked those woods like a wraith; soulless and dead.

A rustle among the leaves made his ears twitch, searching for the sound. 

The beast turned his head and stood facing a man on the other side of the lake.  Once again a sense of familiarity stirred within his breast, but no thought gave it voice.

The man looked angry, covered in leaves and mud from his wooded trek.  The beast sensed no fear from him.  Which was a good thing for the man; the beast loved the taste of fear. 

Instead the intruder had a fierce light behind his eyes as his gaze skipped between the horse and the lake itself.

Before that murderous hunger could enrage the beast, the man muttered to himself, shook his head, and turned away.

T
he Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” blared from Morrie’s cell phone as it sat singing and vibrating on her bed—a little trick her sister, Bev, had programmed on her phone knowing Morrie wouldn’t know how to fix it.  She glanced down at the device sunk into the floral quilt and made a face.

Flattening the stack of neatly folded white tank tops in her suitcase Morrie took her time before picking it up.  It wouldn’t go to voicemail.  Bev had never set that function up and Morrie hadn’t learned how to check it anyway. 

Before Don Henley could coo another chorus about flying high and having the moon in her eye, Morrie answered the phone.

“Hello, Bev,” she said to her sister on the other end.

“
How
much are you getting to break this horse?” Bev asked in the deep, sultry voice of an aged Vegas lounge singer rather than a young woman wrecking the streets of New Orleans. 

There was a hint of disbelief in the question.  She must have just received Morrie’s voicemail.

“A hundred thousand if I’m successful,” Morrie answered with little emotion.

Her sister whistled low on the other end.  “That’s a lot of dough…” Bev let the silence hang on the other line for a moment, probably lost in thought.  Morrie continued to pack, hearing faint music play in the background.

“A killer horse sounds a bit odd,” Bev finally said.

“I had the same thought.  We knew we weren’t alone.”

“Yeah, but it’s been a few centuries since we’ve encountered another legend,” her sister replied. “And kelpies were among the first to go.  What do you think of him?”

“MacLeod?” Morrie asked. “There’s little I know of him—he’s kept an impressively low profile.  Mega wealthy, mega eccentric, doesn’t get out much apparently.  And the way the stories read of K. MacLeod it’s like he’s two different men.  His estate is supposed to have been in his family for generations, but the family is as elusive as the man.  These kinds of horses tend to be territorial for a reason; they’re connected to the land.  So I don’t think MacLeod is necessarily innocent or just a victim of a trespassing killer horse.”

“Hm.”

Bev was silent again, back in thought or maybe lighting a cigarette.  With a raspy voice, she sounded like a smoker, cursed like a sailor, and looked like a supermodel. 

Morrie could picture her on the other end of the phone in her downtown loft, sitting on her bed or on the windowsill while twirling a short lock of her thick, shiny black hair, probably naked—Bev hated wearing clothes. 

“So you’re really doing it? You’re really going back to the scene of the crime?”

Morrie scowled at her sister’s insinuation.

“That’s ancient history!  Pre-Christian, in fact, and you know it,” her tempered flared as that ancient grudge continued to open old wounds. “It’s so old that they even have it completely wrong in their mythology books.”

One minor discretion!  

One moment of stupid trust in Dagda, the “good god,” and not only was her relationship with Chulainn ruined, but Morrie was forever labeled by that one deed.

“Dagda was a dick; the world’s better off with him bound up and locked away.  Besides, the myths aren’t completely wrong, sis,” Bev changed her tone and purred. “You do like taking it straddling things.  You know, position of power and all that dominatrix crap.”

Morrie felt the heat rush her face; her sister knew her too well.

“Why do you have to be so crass?”

“Christ, Mor, we’re goddesses of fucking and fighting.  How are we supposed to be?”

“We are the goddesses of Sex and War,” Morrie corrected her.  She caught her reflection in the mirror and certainly didn’t feel very goddess like. 

Since the dawn of man, both men and women found her attractive, she’d been told often enough through poems and songs that she was beautiful no matter what female form she chose, but now she dressed plain and simple, no adornments, no pageantry—maybe in penance for her indiscretions. 

Her old self wouldn’t recognize the human she’d become.  In fact, she’d probably run her through with her sword just for offending her senses.

“Tomato, tomahto.  Speaking of, I had a dream about you last night…” Bev let the sentence trail off, giving Morrie time to read between the lines. 

She turned away from the mirror and frowned.

“You foretell death…,” Morrie said.  Which made the statement odd since deities were very hard to kill off.

“Not all the time, sometimes I just foretell the future—you were doing the nasty with some tall, dark, and hard with big brown eyes.”

Morrie thought of her own dream; it still caused shockwaves between her thighs. 

He, too, was tall, dark and hard with big, brown eyes.  It was the rest of his face she couldn’t remember seeing.

Holding her phone with her shoulder, she picked up her brush and cosmetics bag, checking the room.  Drawers stood empty—everything she owned she had packed into the single suitcase.

“You were dreaming of the horse,” Morrie replied dryly, tucking the last items into her luggage before zipping it shut. 

Bev laughed, rich and throaty. “He was hung like a horse.  But last I checked, you weren’t into bestiality, right?”

“Bev!” Morrie cried and nearly dropped the phone. 

“He also had an ass like a shelf.  Seriously, I could line it with books.”

“You’re still thinking about the horse,” Morrie grumbled, but she recalled the man in her dream and remembered the way his back planed to a muscular backside, how it felt beneath her hands—like rock covered in velvet.

Her sister still laughed.  It stopped once Bev realized Morrie had grown silent. 

“What is it?”

Morrie tugged at her lip, debating on telling her that she, too, had the dream, which could only mean bad things. 

But like always when it came to her sisters, Morrie opted for the truth. “I had the same dream.”

“What?!” Bev cried.  Morrie winced away from the phone.  “Do you know what this means?”

“That it’s a coincidence?” Morrie offered without conviction.  She plopped down on the bed and buried her face in her hand.

“Bullshit, there’s no such thing as coincidence.  It means you may soon find your mate.”

Morrie looked up at the blank wall with a scowl.  “How did you get my mate from that?”

“I’d mate him,” Bev retorted, wistful. “I’d mate my pussy raw with him.”

Morrie sighed, shoulders slumping.  She knew a lot of what Bev said was just talk; her sister had her own share of old haunts. “We don’t mate, Bev.”

“
We
don’t mate, but that doesn’t mean someone doesn’t mate with us.  And fuck all, Mor, you’re in need of a good, deep mating.”

 Morrie chuckled, despite herself.

“How long has it been, anyway?” Bev asked.

“It’s…been awhile.”

“Tell me Dagda wasn’t the last time?”

Technically, he was.  

Morrie had made another attempt with a soldier in the Scottish-Norwegian War just to see if she still had it, but her tryst with Dagda and the consequences thereafter with Chulainn had been so damaging of her pride and desire that her next sexual conquest had left her…unfulfilled and therefore ended before it had even begun. 

“Unfortunately, he was,” Morrie conceded.

She was a sex goddess and as such, had once reveled in the act, brought both men and gods to their needs in want of it from her.  Songs were sung and poems written about the beauty of her breasts, that Valhalla lay between her milky thighs.  Hell, she even had her own page in Wikipedia. 

Morrie and her sisters were built to illicit the strongest sexual desires of men, to fulfill their libido’s every want and need.  How pathetic that she’d let one human and one god destroy her so?

But back when she and her sisters had graced the bloody skies of ancient battlefields, Morrie had been chosen to broker a deal for the Tuatha De’ Danaan because of her magic and cunning. 

There was a time that Bev, known then as Badb, would prophesize who would die and their sister, Macha, now going by Macy, would stir the humans into a frenzy for fight.  Morrie, her full name Morrigan, would sway the battle in whichever direction she chose. 

Back then Morrigan employed many guises, adopted many names—known in the lore as Nemain, Morrigu, the warrior woman, Scáthach, the Irish, Boand, the prophetess Fedelm.  She was the crone, Cailleach and the Faery Queen, Mab.

She had the ability to take her sisters into her body, to combine their powers, and then they would be known as The Morrigna. 

But the last time they had done that, in order to defeat Dagda once and for all, it had splintered the three of them.  Morrie and Macy’s relationship had never been the same.

Her sexual union with the god, Dagda, was supposed to unite the warring races of human immortals.  Her body’s nectar was to join his seed to fall on either side of the holy river—the channel dividing what was now Ireland and Scotland—as she stood one foot on each bank while he took her.  

It had instead ended with Dagda joining the armies of Queen Medb of Connacht and overtaking the Tuatha and Ulstermen, both ending in annihilation.

Without her knowing, Cú Chulainn had left Ulster to lead the Tuatha and when he found out about her union, Morrie lost the favor of the man she loved.  He had rebuffed her and entered the battle unprepared. 

Fatally wounded, Chulainn chained himself to a stone with the sole intent of dying. 

She had felt jilted, her pride hurt, and so she left him there to rot.

The shame of her betrayal and his, the sick feeling of learning she had been used had turned Morrie away from the salacious act she had once so enjoyed.

And if she had to admit it, only enjoyed it so much because it had been with Chulainn.

He had been a hard act to follow.