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By Root 551 0

still glowing, and found Rhys and Galen the only ones still in the room. Galen was shielding his eyes, as the rest of us had done in that night that had brought power back to the sluagh. The night that Doyle had said, “Don’t look, Merry, don’t look.” I had a moment to think of him, carried away from me. He was somewhere in this hospital, maybe fighting for his life. I started to lose my purpose, then I looked up at the writhing nightmares. I remembered that even a glimpse of what had boiled in the ceiling of the cavern had been madness. Tonight I could look into the center of that shining, writhing mass, and understand that it was raw magic. It was only a nightmare if that was what you thought it would be. Raw magic forms in the mind before it forms to the touch.

I stared into it, and knew that until I finished this hunt there was no way to do anything else. It was like starting an avalanche—you have to ride it to its end. Only then could I embrace my Darkness once more. I prayed the Goddess would keep him safe for me until the magic freed me of its power.

Rhys gazed at it all with wonder in his face. He saw what I saw: beauty. But then he had been a god of bloodshed and war, and before that a deity of death. Galen, my sweet Galen, would never be anything so harsh. This was not a magic for the faint of heart. My heart wasn’t faint; it felt as if my heart were missing. Whatever it was that allowed me to feel was gone. I looked at Gran’s body, and there was a roaring emptiness inside me. I felt nothing but vengeance, as if vengeance could be its own emotion cut free of hate, anger, or sorrow. Vengeance as if it were a force of its own, something, almost, alive.

Rhys walked to the circle of nightflyers, gazing up into the writhing mass of white light and shifting shapes. He stopped at the glowing edge of the circle. He looked at me now. “Let me go with you.”

It was Sholto who answered. “She has her huntsman for tonight.”

Galen spoke, still staring at the floor. “Where is Merry going?” He still didn’t understand. He was too young. The thought came to me that he was older than I, by decades, but the Goddess whispered through my head, “I am older than all.” I understood; in this moment I was she, and that made me old enough.

“Take care of her, Galen,” I said.

He glanced up at me, and saw the horse with its flashing eyes and white skin. For a moment, he wasn’t afraid, he was simply amazed. He, like me, was too young to remember when the sidhe still had their shining horses. We had only had stories before this moment.

The circle of nightflyers parted and Rhys and Galen both reached upward, as if it were planned. The white shapes above us reached out toward them. Galen’s reach was longer, so the horse that formed for him was as white and pure as mine. It turned flashing eyes that glowed golden to my red. There was no smoke from this one’s nostrils, and the sparks from the hooves were as golden as its eyes. Only the size and the sense of strength let me know that they were kin.

Rhys’s hand also brought a white horse, but it was like an illusion, or a trick of the eye. One moment white and solid and very real, the next skeletal, like the proverbial steed of death.

Rhys spoke quietly and happily as he rubbed its nose. He spoke in Welsh, but a dialect I could barely follow. I could understand that he was happy to see the horse, and that it had been too long.

Galen touched his horse, as if he were certain that it would vanish, but it didn’t. It butted him gently in the shoulder, and made a high, happy whinny. Galen smiled, because you couldn’t help but smile at that sound.

Sholto held Gran’s body out to Galen, and he took her gently in his arms. His smile was gone, and there was nothing but sorrow. I let him have the sorrow, let him grieve for me, because my own grief could wait; tonight there would be blood.

A shape from above touched Sholto’s shoulder, as if it could not wait for him to touch it, like an overeager lover. The moment it touched him, it formed into something white and shining, but it was not exactly a horse.