Magic Burns (26 page)

“Guns.”

“Guns?”

“Yep.”

The bouda frowned. “I don’t know anything about guns. This isn’t going to be work, is it? Bummer.

Now I don’t know if I want to bother.”

She made me think of Curran again. “Men are dumb bastards,” I said.

She nodded. “Women aren’t much better. Whiny bitches, most of them.” She thought about it. “Guys can be fun. I recommend Raphael. He’s the most patient one we’ve got, so he gets lucky more than the others. Although I think your chickie has his complete attention at the moment.”

I found Andrea and Aunt B in the kitchen at a small round table, drinking tea. The sight of Andrea bringing the teacup to her hyena muzzle struck me as hilarious. I clamped my mouth shut and tried not to laugh. It had to be nerves.

If she asked for biscuits, I’d lose it.

Andrea saw me and visibly stiffened. “How did it go?”

“With what?”

Aunt B sighed. “She wants to know if Curran’s coming to kill her.”

“Oh. No, he isn’t interested in murdering you. Believe me, right now you’re the least of his problems.”

Andrea exhaled.

“Please tell me there is coffee.”

Aunt B grimaced. “They’re already crazy. If I let them have coffee, they’d be bouncing off the walls. We have herbal tea.”

I put my books on the table.

“You look like you need some sleep.” Andrea put a steaming cup before me.

I needed to find Julie, find her mom, convince a sociopath to donate some blood for the good of mankind, and deal with a tentacled atrocity swaddled in cloth and his rabid mermaids. I needed coffee.

A male bouda sauntered into the kitchen. He wore black leather pants and a leather vest baring a chiseled chest. He wasn’t conventionally handsome, the opposite actually: his nose was too long and his face was too narrow, but he had intense blue eyes and black hair combed to shiny perfection, and he used what he had to his best advantage. You knew by some sort of natural female instinct that he would be good in bed, and when he looked at you, you thought about sex.

He glanced at Andrea with an odd longing on his face, switched his attention to me, and offered me his hand. “Sorry about our…altercation in the buggy. I was only playing. I’m Raphael.”

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“The one who likes the hurting.” I moved to shake his hand and he reversed it and kissed my fingers instead, singeing me with a look that was pure smolder.

I took my hand back. “That woke me up.”

He smiled a picture-perfect smile. “Been a while?”

For some reason, I felt like answering. “Two years. And if you could tone down that smile, I’d appreciate it. Getting weak in the knees.”

Raphael took a step back. His face took on the same concerned look I saw on Doolittle when I assured him I was fine. “Two years? That’s entirely too long. If you want, we can take care of that. After two years, it’s pure therapy.”

“No thank you. Curran already offered to help me with that problem, and since I turned him down, I wouldn’t want to cause any friction between you two.” The last thing I needed was to set Curran and the hyenas on a collision course.

Raphael backed away with his hands in the air, strategically positioning himself behind Andrea. “No offense.”

“None taken.”

“Is Curran serious?” Aunt B asked.

She wanted to know if she now had to walk on eggshells around me. For once, I was happy to disappoint. “No, he’s just being an asshole. Apparently every time he calls me ‘baby,’ I look like a red-hot poker is stuck up my butt. Causes him no end of fun.” I drank my tea.

Aunt B gave me an odd look. “You know,” she said, stirring her tea, “the fastest way to get him off your back is to sleep with him. And tell him you love him. Preferably while in bed.”

I smirked and the tea almost came out of my nose. “He’d run like he was on fire.”

Raphael rested his hands on Andrea’s shoulders. “Still a bit tense?” His fingers began to gently knead her muscles.

“Will you do it?” Aunt B gazed at me over the rim of her cup.

“Not while I’m alive, no. Wait, I take it back. That should be ‘hell no.’”

“Has he invited you to dinner, dear? Gifts, flowers, the usual?”

I had to put my cup down, because my hand was shaking too much. When I stopped laughing, I said,

“Curran? He isn’t exactly Mr. Smooth. He handed me a bowl of soup, that’s as far as we got.”

“He fed you?” Raphael stopped rubbing Andrea.

“How did this happen?” Aunt B stared at me. “Be very precise, this is important.”

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“He didn’t actually feed me. I was injured and he handed me a bowl of chicken soup. Actually I think he handed me two or three. And he called me an idiot.”

“Did you accept?” Aunt B asked.

“Yes. I was starving. Why are the three of you looking at me like that?”

“For crying out loud.” Andrea set her cup down, spilling some tea. “The Beast Lord’s feeding you soup.

Think about that for a second.”

Raphael coughed. Aunt B leaned forward. “Was there anybody else in the room?”

“No. He chased everyone out.”

Raphael nodded. “At least he hasn’t gone public yet.”

“He might never,” Andrea said. “It would jeopardize her position with the Order.”

Aunt B’s face was grave. “It doesn’t go past this room. You hear me, Raphael? No gossip, no pillow talk, not a word. We don’t want any trouble with Curran.”

“If you don’t explain it all to me, I will strangle somebody.” Of course, Raphael might like that…

“Food has a special significance,” Aunt B said.

I nodded. “Food indicates hierarchy. Nobody eats before the alpha, unless permission is given, and no alpha eats in Curran’s presence until Curran takes a bite.”

“There is more,” Aunt B said. “Animals express love through food. When a cat loves you, he’ll leave dead mice on your porch, because you’re a lousy hunter and he wants to take care of you. When a shapeshifter boy likes a girl, he’ll bring her food and if she likes him back, she might make him lunch.

When Curran wants to show interest in a woman, he buys her dinner.”

“In public,” Raphael added, “the shapeshifter fathers always put the first bite on the plates of their wives and children. It signals that if someone wants to challenge the wife or the child, they would have to challenge the male first.”

“If you put all of Curran’s girls together, you could have a parade,” Aunt B said. “But I’ve never seen him physically put food into a woman’s hands. He’s a very private man, so he might have done it in an intimate moment, but I would’ve found out eventually. Something like that doesn’t stay hidden in the Keep. Do you understand now? That’s a sign of a very serious interest, dear.”

“But I didn’t know what it meant!”

Aunt B frowned. “Doesn’t matter. You need to be very careful right now. When Curran wants something, he doesn’t become distracted. He goes after it and he doesn’t stop until he obtains his goal no matter what it takes. That tenacity is what makes him an alpha.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Scared might be too strong a word, but in your place, I would definitely be concerned.”

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I wished I were back home, where I could get to my bottle of sangria. This clearly counted as a dire emergency.

As if reading my thoughts, Aunt B rose, took a small bottle from a cabinet, and poured me a shot. I took it, and drained it in one gulp, letting tequila slide down my throat like liquid fire.

“Feel better?”

“It helped.” Curran had driven me to drinking. At least I wasn’t contemplating suicide.

I SLID THE BEAT-UP VOLUME OF MYTHS AND LEGENDSclose and flipped to the index. If I was going to see Bran, it was best to go prepared. I needed a better grasp on this situation.

Unfortunately my brain insisted on replaying the memory of Curran offering me soup.

Raphael wrinkled his nose. “Your books smell like chicken.”

“They’re not mine.”

“If you’re going to look for Julie, I’ll help.” Andrea brushed Raphael’s hands off her shoulders. “She’s my responpsibility.”

I shook my head. “No, she’s mine. There is nothing I can do for her right now. But I can find Morrigan’s bowman.” I explained the coven and Esmeralda’s books, and reeves, and needing Bran’s blood, although I didn’t go into what it was for. “When the reeves attacked us, the Shepherd mentioned the Great Crow. Let’s see…”

I ran my finger down the index. No Great Crows. Loads of Fomorians but no Bolgors or Shepherds.

What else? Something had to connect them all. Let’s see, what did I have? A Hound of Morrigan, bow, covens, missing cauldron…

I found the entry on cauldron: “Cauldron of Plenty, see Dagda.” Dagda was Morrigan’s main squeeze for a while. “Cauldron of Rebirth, see Branwen.” I flipped to the right page. “I will give you a cauldron, with the property that if one of your men is killed today, and be placed in the cauldron, then tomorrow he will be as well as he was at his best, except that he will not regain his speech.”

“Any luck?” Raphael asked.

“Not yet.”

That was certainly interesting. The reeves were partially undead…Maybe they came out of the cauldron of rebirth, somehow. I went back to the index. “Cauldron of Wisdom, see Birth of Taliesin.” Anybody with a drop of education on Celtic mythology knew of Taliesin, the great bard of ancient Ireland, the druid who succeeded Merlin. I knew the myth as well as anybody but found the right page anyway just to be thorough. Blah-blah-blah, Goddess Ceridwen, blah-blah…

If it was a cobra, it would’ve struck me.

“What?” Andrea wanted to know.

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I turned the page and showed them the illustration. “Birth of Taliesin. The goddess Ceridwen had a son of incredible ugliness. She felt sorry for him and brewed a potion of wisdom in a huge cauldron to make him wise. A servant boy stirred the potion and accidentally tasted it, stealing the gift of wisdom.

Ceridwen chased him. He turned into a grain of wheat to hide but Ceridwen turned into a chicken, swallowed him, and gave birth to Taliesin, the greatest poet, bard, and druid of his time.”

Andrea frowned. “Yes, I see that the boy was reborn through the cauldron, but so what?”

“The name of the Goddess’s ugly son. Morfran: from the Welshmawr , ‘big,’ andbran , ‘crow.’ The Great Crow.”

“This is the guy?” Raphael asked. “The guy in charge of the Fomorians?”

“Looks that way. And more, he is a crow just like Morrigan. Very similar names plus very uneducated witches equals…”

“Disaster,” Raphael supplied.

The Sisters of the Crow. It was a terrible name for a coven.

Andrea shook her head. “Those idiot Sisters couldn’t actually be that ignorant. Fumbling spells—yes, but screwing up enough to accidentally pray to the wrong deity? Morfran and Morrigan aren’t even of the same gender.”

“Maybe they started out praying to Morrigan, and then fumbled just enough to give Morfran an opening.

Maybe Morfran managed to make a deal with Esmeralda. She wanted knowledge and he offered it to her. Taliesin, Morfran’s half brother, served as a druid for King Arthur after Merlin. It follows that Morfran was probably also a druid. Who else would’ve taught Esmeralda druidic rites?”

Andrea leaned forward. “Okay but to what purpose? Why go through all that trouble?”

“I don’t know. If you were a god, what would you want?”

I refilled Aunt B’s teacup and then my own.

“Life,” Raphael said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I would want life. All they do is look down on us from wherever they exist but they never get to take part. Never get to play.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Andrea said. “Post-Shift theory says a true deity can’t manifest in our world.”

“You see reports of deities all the time,” Raphael said. He was kneading her shoulders again.

She shook her head. “Those aren’t actual true deities. They’re conjurer’s constructs, wicker men for their imagination. Basically magic molded into a certain shape. They have no sense of self.”

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My brain had difficulty wrapping around the fact that deities actually existed. I knew the theory as well as anybody: magic had the potential to give thought and will substance. Faith was both will and thought, and prayer served as the mechanism to merge them and to catalyze the magic, defining it much like a spoken incantation defined the will of the in-cantor. Practically, it meant if many people had a specific enough image of their deity and prayed hard to it, the magic might oblige and deliver the deity into existence. The Christian God or the neo-Wiccan “goddess” would probably never gain an actual form, because the beliefs of their faithful were too varied and their power was too nebulous, too encompassing.

But something specific like Thor or Pan could theoretically come to life.

I held that “theoretically” like a shield between me and Morrigan and Morfran. Few things are more frightening than the thought of your god coming to life. There is no such thing as privacy between a deity and his worshipper. There are no secrets, no glossed-over failures. Only promises kept and abandoned, sins committed and imagined, and raw emotion. Love, fear, reverence. How many of us are ready to have our lives judged? What would happen if we were found wanting?

Andrea’s voice penetrated my thoughts. “First, most people imagine their deity within some magical realm. I mean, what worshipper pictures Zeus strolling down the street with a thunderbolt under his arm?

To manifest on Earth would require independent will on the part of the deity. That’s a pretty big hurdle right there. Second, deities run on the faith of their congregations like cars run on gasoline. The moment the magic ebbs, the flow of faith cuts off. No juice, no powers. Who knows what would happen to a god? They could hibernate, they could die, they could be jerked out of existence…”

In my head Saiman’s voice said,It’s magic time. Time of the gods.

“The magic is simply not that strong and the shifts are too frequent for a deity to appear…”

“Unless she does it during a flare,” I said.

Andrea opened her mouth and closed it with a click.