The Devil Dances (21 page)

I, on the other hand, sank down against the trunk of the massive elm. My head was spinning, I felt weak and exhausted, and there was this irritating whirring noise going on around me, like a soft buzzing in my head. I started worrying about brain damage. I said, “Ughk,” or something to that effect, as a wave of nausea overtook me and I leaned forward and threw up in the singed crab grass between my feet.

When I finally had the willpower to lift my head, I saw scorch marks everywhere, like someone had taken an industrial-sized flamethrower to the whole vale. The once-flowering trees and bushes were bare, black and twig-like for a hundred yards in every direction, the formerly electric green grass was a patchy brown-black, depending on how it had faired, and the altar, once made of pristine, white, Greek-inspired stone, was a burning pile of black rubble. The flames were slowly smothering themselves—but they had left their mark.

And that whirring noise…

Something large, dark, and feathery closed around me and I jolted in surprise, swore, and slid in the burned grass, landing hard on my back and hitting my skull. My arms flailed and hit the big, feathery masses to either side of me.

Jesus Hopping Christ
, I thought deliriously. I had wings… big, fucking blackbird wings. I spent the next few minutes trying to settle down, working on getting my panic under control, and just lying there in the smoldering grass. The big wings settled down around me, shushing slowly back and forth in the dirt and weeds. For some time—I don’t know how long—I just lay there, making grass angels.

“Wings,” I said. “Fucking goddamn wings,” I told no one in particularly. Then I looked up to the sky, like there was going to be someone there to listen to my complaints. “Come
on
!” I screamed. “You’ve got to be shitting me!”

I took myself—and my wings—back to the Knapp farm.

According to my watch, it was a little after 5:30 in the morning. The Knapp household would already be up. As I walked back to the farmhouse, I yanked on my yellow trench coat, but it wasn’t much help. The wings would not stop shifting around and the coat only reached the back of my knees. The tips of the goddamn wings were sticking out. I confiscated Daisy and drove a few miles down the road, finally pulling over on the shoulder.

I sat there in the pre-morning chill, trying to decide what to do. My first instinct was to call Morgana, but I couldn’t see what good that would do. Call her and ask her what? How to get rid of a pair of wings? How they got there in the first place? I didn’t need a witch right now. I needed a fucking plastic surgeon.

I gripped the steering wheel and rested my forehead against it. Okay, first things first, I had to do something to fix this massive fuck-up of mine. I couldn’t go running about the countryside looking like a birdman, scaring the locals. I started the jeep and drove a few miles down the highway to where I’d spotted a Wal-Mart on the way to Lancaster. I got lucky. It was a 24-hour superstore and there wasn’t much foot traffic at this hour. The first thing I did was find the longest, most voluminous trench coat in the big and tall section of the men’s department, slid it on, belted it tight, and ripped the tags off. It was an ugly, smoky, pea-green color, but at least it covered my new accessories adequately.

I gave the cashier the tags, along with the Dr. Pepper and Snickers bars I’d bought for breakfast. She gave me back my change and a disapproving look. “You’re not supposed to rip the tags off until you buy it,” she said.

“I loved it so much I couldn’t control myself.”

“Freak.”

I thought about crashing her terminal, then decided that would be petty.

Back in the jeep, I sat for some time in the parking lot, filling up on calories and caffeine, shifting around uncomfortably in the car seat, and wondering what the hell I was going to do next. I admit I considered walking away. I hadn’t killed the god, but I had pissed him off a good deal. That meant if I went back to the Knapp farm, he’d likely lash out at me twice as hard—or, rather, at someone else.

“Awesome work, Nick, you made things worse, not better, you fucking moron,” I said as I finished the soda off and angrily threw the empty liter bottle out the open window. Another driver gave me a sour look in response to my littering.

Just leave
, I thought.
Drive back to Blackwater and forget all this bullshit.
I mean, Dad was right, of course. I wasn’t some god-killer. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. And besides, I didn’t know why this was my responsibility in the first place. Aren’t you supposed to hire a hero to do this type of shit? I mean, let’s face it, I wasn’t exactly the hero type.

“I can’t leave without Vivian,” I told the voice—that traitorous voice that tempted me to save my own sorry ass. It would be so easy to just drive.

Most of my life, decisions had come easy because I’d only ever been looking out for myself. The day I put my foster father in the hospital, I hit the road and didn’t look back. I’d told myself that my work there was done, that Sheila and the other girls would be safe from then on. But were they? I mean, eventually the evil bastard was discharged, went home… and likely took his rage out on the girls—the victims—I’d left behind.

No, I decided, I wasn’t going to just blithely walk away. I wasn’t going to allow something like
that
thing to prey on the women of the colony.

I’d grown up some since those long-ago days in New York.

When my cell went off, I almost jumped. You’d think I’d get used to my own phone ringing at this point. I slid it out of my jeans pocket and saw it was Morgana. “Yeah. Did you and Anton find out anything?”

“No good morning? Hello? Not even a fuck you, Scratch?”

“Believe it or not, Morgana, I’m having a truly rotten fucking day. I hope you have some good news for me. I don’t think I can handle any more crap this morning.”

Morgana hesitated, and I could tell she was trying hard to read my vibes, and failing. If it’s one thing I know how to do, it’s shield against her. Finally, she said, “Did something happen? Nick…?”

My wings were moving again, sort of shushing under the coat and getting tangled in the jeep’s seatbelt. Jesus, these were a royal pain in the ass. “Not now,” I told her as I transferred the cell to my other hand so I could untangle myself. “I don’t want to talk about it now. What did you find out about the altar?”

“Do you know the name Cernunnos?”

“Sounds Celtic.”

“It is. It’s the conventional name given to the horned god in Celtic polytheism.”

“So what’s his shtick?”

“You make him sound like a super villain in the Legion of Doom.”

“If it’s nasty, colorful, and potentially life-threatening, it probably hates my guts. Story of my life. What do you have?”

Morgana sighed and I heard her flipping the pages of a book. “Nothing is known about him from literary sources, and details about his name, cult, or significance in Celtic religion are virtually unknown. His name only ever turns up once, on a pillar from the first century in Gaul—what’s known today as France.”

I mentally waved her on. I know my world history. I’m not exactly stupid, though a lot of people seemed to assume that about me.

“Anyway, his image does turn up, frequently, and most pagans identify him as a god of nature or fertility. He represents the never-ending spiral of life and death. Actually, he’s regarded as more of a popular pagan archetype…”

“He’s real.”

“What?”

“Cernunnos is real. He’s an Old One-…”

“How do you know…?”

“Because a popular pagan archetype tried to kick my ass less than an hour ago.”

Morgana muttered a curse. “Are you all right?”

“I’ll live. I set the bastard on fire. Impressed the hell out of me. He didn’t like that. FYI, he’s no longer my biggest fan.”

“You do have a way with people, Nick.”

I thought about telling her about the wings, then thought better of it. If I told her, she’d likely drive out here to try and take care of me. I didn’t need any more women in my life putting themselves in danger because of me. I forced my wings to stop shifting. “So how in hell do I stop this Cernunnos?”

“I’m not sure you can, frankly. He’s not a demon, Nick. He’s a god…”

“A god who doesn’t like seeing his altar set on fire.”

“Nick…”

“Let me save you some time. I’m impetuous, stubborn, and do stupid things when I’m upset. That about cover everything?”

“I suppose you are what you are.”

“Not a very good god-killer, obviously,” I said as I twisted in my seat. One of my wings clunked against the glass on the driver’s side and I muffled a curse. “What else can you tell me about him?”

“Cernunnos is called ‘The Lord of Wild Things,’ according to one of Anton’s books, and his antlers represent ‘aggressive power, genetic vigor, and fecundity.’”

“That definitely sounds like him.”

“Anton and I also came across some disturbing practices by the ancient Celts during the Roman conquest of Gaul around 50 B.C. During that time, Julius Cesar waged a number of military campaigns against several Gallic tribes in an attempt to expand the Roman Republic. The tribes responded by holding at least one ceremony every spring that they called a ‘frolic’. The purpose of it was to summon the greatest deity they could find to help them survive the Roman expansion. During these ‘frolics,’ they would feast, drink, and dance, then sacrifice a number of chosen young men and women—usually the ‘best of breed,’ if you know what I mean. The young men would be stripped and burned alive as sacrifices, and the young women bound to altars from which this Cernunnos supposedly arose. He would then impregnate the women and they would give birth to monstrous warrior offspring that were intended to drive the Romans out of their lands.”

“Frolic or Rumspringa,” I said. “You say tomato, I say tomatah.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Never mind, tell me more about Cernunnos. Since the Roman Empire did conquer most of Gaul in the end, I’m assuming this brilliant plan of the Celts was a dismal failure?” I ran a hand through my hair as I took all this in. “Were these ‘warrior offspring’ ever born?”

“Not according to the records that Anton has. It would seem the offspring weren’t viable, or some other disaster took them. Either way, they disappeared—assuming they were ever born to begin with. There is no historical record of any such creature.”

“Or there is, but we just have another name for them.”

“What are you saying?”

“Antlered demi-gods running all over the forests? Sound familiar?”

“Are you saying this is the origin of your familiars? The satyrs and fauns?”

“You have to admit, it fits pretty well.”

She thought a long moment. “All right. Assuming you’re right, and your familiars are these… half-things that come from this god… does that mean you have some measure of control over Cernunnos? I mean, if you can control the little ones, the minions, maybe you can control the big boss?”

“Now you make it sound like some video game. But yeah, that makes sense. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t the fire specifically that hurt Cernunnos. Maybe it was the fact that
I
cast the fire. I hurt him, and he acted like that had never happened before. He called me by name.”

“Nick?”

“No, the other one.”

She thought a moment. “He knows who you are. He’s afraid of you, Nick. That’s got to be the reason he hates you as much as he does. According to Anton’s book, Cernunnos does not manifest himself for
anyone
except the female he plans to impregnate. Only a female can tempt him to enter the flesh. The fact that you were able to call him forth at all is a miracle in itself.”

“Yeah, but I’m not the only exception. Obviously, someone else has called him forth, or he wouldn’t be here now.”

“Another witch, one with some form of dominion over Cernunnos,” she mused.

I tapped the steering wheel and watched dawn come full on over the mountaintops. “The Celts used runes to summon forth divine intervention, didn’t they?”

“Yes, but runes are just symbols. They can be written down and used in virtually any form. Paper, clay, bone, anything. The one you’re looking for likely has some form of grimoire or summoning book, maybe even a Book of Shadows.”

I nodded to myself. My wing dilemma seemed like a minor issue suddenly. “Thanks, Morgana. At least I know what to look for now.”

“A summoning book?”

“A fucking witch with a summoning book. And when I find who that is, we’re going to have a nice, long talk.”