Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [17]
And then She peered down. “Can that be you?” She said in an accent more of the Gaiety Theatre than anything else. “Jimmy, you son of a bitch, my love, my great and only love, what the F are you doing here? You were at peace this long while, I thought, after they put you in the ground far from home, thanks to that F ing deValera—”
She went on for some minutes, splendidly, but ran down at last.
“You didn’t wake me up for nothing, James my love,” She said at last. “What’s to do?”
“There is a tiger eating our people,” Joyce said. “A Celtic one. It preys on the Old Ones and tries to kill Old Ireland—”
She was looking around Her at the skyline. Not much had changed in terms of tall buildings—the Irish don’t approve of skyscrapers—but much,much else was different, and we were all watching Her face with varying degrees of nervousness.
“Sure I can smell it,” She said. “Nasty tomcat stink, they’ll always be spraying all over everything. Marking their territory. Their territory indeed!”
For a long moment more She stood there, head raised against the blue-milk sky, sniffing the air. “Lady,” the Eldest Leprechaun said, “it only comes out at night—”
“It lies up by day,” She said. “Aye, can’t I just smell it. Hiding won’t help it today. Come on—”
Anna Livia strode on down the river, slowly, looking from side to side at Her city, while we pursued Her on land as best we could. She was looking increasingly annoyed as She went.Maybe it was the traffic on the Quays, or the pollution, or the new one-way system, which drove everybody insane: or maybe it was some of the newer architecture. One glance She gave the Millennium Spire, erected at last three years late. That glance worried me—Dubliners are sufficiently divided on the Spire that they haven’t yet decided which rude name is best for it—but Anna Livia then turned Her attention elsewhere, looking over the intervening rooftops, southward. Four or five blocks inland stood the International Financial Services Centre, next to one of the city’s two main train stations. It was an ugly building, a green-glass-and-white-marble chimera, dwarfing everything around it—a monument to money, built during the height of the Tiger time.
“Yes,” She said softly, “there it is, I’ll be bound. Kitty, kitty, kitty!”
She came up out of the river, then, and started to head crosstown. What other Unsighted mortals were able to make of the sudden flood that leapt up out of the Liffey, I don’t know: but the water got into the underground wiring and immediately made the traffic lights go on the blink, bringing traffic on the Quays to a halt. Maybe it’s a blessing, I thought, as I ran after the others, trying to keep out of the flood of water that followed the colossal shape up out of the river.
Anna Livia came up to the IFSC and looked it over, peering in through the windows. Then She stood up straight.
“Gods bless all here save the cat!” she said in a voice of thunder.
At the sound of Her raised voice, glass exploded out of the IFSC in every possible direction, as if Spielberg had come back to town and said, “Buy all the sugar glass on Earth, and trash it.” From the spraying, glittering chaos, at least one clandestine billionaire plunged in a shrieking, flailing trajectory toward the parking lot of Tara Street Station, missed, and made a most terminal sound on impact: apparently blessings weren’t enough.He was followed by his chef, who had fallen on hard times (only recently acquitted of stealing a Titian from his signature restaurant’s host hotel) and now fell on something much harder, ruining the no-claims bonuses of numerous Mercedes and BMW sedans parked below.
And in their wake, something else came out—growling, not that low, pleased growl we’d heard the other night, but something far more threatened, and more threatening.
Through the wall, or one of the openings left by the broken glass, out it came. It slunk, at first,