“When did you start calling him Mike?”
“After the zombies,” Gary said with aplomb.
I cast a glance heavenward and nearly missed our exit. Gary grabbed his door’s armrest as I yanked us into the right—which was to say, correct, which in on Irish roads meant left—lane, and muttered, “After the zombies. Of course. Normal people don’t say things like that, Gary.”
“Normal people don’t fight zombies.”
That line of conversation wasn’t going to end anywhere happy, either. I let out an explosive breath and tried again. “The woman in my mother’s necklace had some kind of pull with me. Maybe it was just that she looked all sneery and challenging, but there was some kind of connection. I have to find out who she was.”
Gary, cautiously, said, “It wasn’t your mother, was it?”
“No. She kind of looked like her, dark hair, pale skin, but no. My mother was sort of restrained and prim. She liked Altoids. This woman was more of a kick ass and take names type.” Only it had turned out my mother was exactly that kind of person, too. I just hadn’t known it until after she died.
I hadn’t known much of anything about my mother until after she died, except that she’d flown to America and left me with my father when I was six months old. I hadn’t seen her again until I was twenty-six. That kind of thing leaves a mark. In my case, it was an entirely unjustified mark, as Mother had been trying to protect me from a bad guy bigger and nastier than I ever wanted to deal with. But again, I hadn’t known that until after she died. Nothing like a little “I was trying to save your life” to take the wind out of sails puffed up with childish abandonment issues. I wished I’d had the opportunity to tell her I finally understood.
But that was spilt milk, and I was getting better about not crying over it. I turned down the road leading to Tara and Gary frowned as a tour bus taking up two-thirds of the road came the other direction. “You sure this is the right way?”
“Yeah. Only in Ireland do they put cultural heritage monuments at the end of one-track roads.” I couldn’t decide if I liked the idea or not. It certainly gave the impression the heritage site had been there forever, which was true. On the other hand, I had to hold my breath as I pulled over to let the bus pass, for fear we’d be broadsided if I didn’t. Gary let his breath out in a rush when the bigger vehicle rambled by, and we grinned sheepishly at each other as I pulled forward again. “Glad it’s not just me. At least we’re not on a mountainside with roads this narrow. The landscape kind of reminds me of North Carolina.”
“Never been out there,” Gary said. “I kept getting stuck in St. Louis. Annie and I used to go to the jazz festival.”
“Did you play?” Gary’s wife had died before I met him, but he’d mentioned once or twice that he’d been an itinerant sax player for a few years after the Korean War, while Annie, a nurse, had brought home the bacon.
“Nah. Left that to the guys who were really good.” Gary leaned into the window as we went up the hill leading to the, er, Hill, and frowned. “Thought there’d be more cars.”
“Me, too.” The parking lot—small and graveled and graced at one end by gift shops and at the other by a switchback path—was completely empty of vehicles besides our own. I got out of the car and turned in a slow circle, taking in the view—there was a tower in the distance, soft with misty air—and finally came back to Gary, who stood on the other side of our car with a befuddled expression. “You remember that night at the Seattle Center?”
“You mean the night somebody stuffed a broadsword through me? Nah. Why would I?”
“Remember how quiet it was?” The parking garage had been empty. There’d been no late-night tourists wandering, nobody from the monorail hurrying one way or the other, no joggers making their way across the closed grounds.
Gary, very firmly, said, “Jo, no matter how much I love you, I ain’t gettin’ stuck with another sword.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got mine now.” I patted my hip like I wore a sword there, which of course I didn’t, because I lived in the early twenty-first century, not the early seventeenth. Not that as a woman I’d have been able to carry a sword in the seventeenth century anyway, but that wasn’t the point. The point was I had an honest-to-God magic sword that I’d taken off an ancient Celtic god, and I’d spent a good chunk of the past fifteen months learning how to use it properly. If anybody tried skewering Gary—or me, for that matter—I had defenses.
“Your sword’s in Seattle.”
I put on my very best mysterious magic user voice: “A detail which is nothing to one such as I.” Gary snorted and I laughed, then waved at the path. “Come on, if we’ve got the place to ourselves we might as well take advantage of it. Busloads of tourists will probably show up any minute.”
Gary fell in behind me dubiously. “You really think so?”
“No. I think something’s conspiring to keep the place quiet awhile, and that we’ll probably regret finding out why. But I’m trying to keep a positive mind-set.” The path up to Tara was foot-worn but not paved. Nothing suggested “tourist attraction” except for the gift shops, and even they weren’t particularly in-your-face about it. Gary and I kept pace with one another, both stealing glimpses at each other from the corners of our eyes like we expected something to jump out at us but if the other was cool, we weren’t going to show our nerves. After the third or fourth time we caught gazes, Gary actually giggled, which was unnerving in itself. Six-foot-one former linebackers in their seventies weren’t supposed to giggle.
A woman said, “There’ll be nothing to worry about,” out of nowhere, and we both shrieked like little girls. I regained my equilibrium first. Gary, after all, had already been giggling, which was bad enough with me as an audience, never mind with a complete stranger looking on. We turned together, though, to find a lovely woman of indeterminate age smiling at us. She wore a white eyelet-lace sundress with gold scarves wrapped around her hips and shoulders, and sandals on her feet. On most people I would call it a hippy-dippy look, but somehow she imbued it with more elegance than that. Her hair was the color of sunrise shot with clouds. She wasn’t young, even if I couldn’t tell how old she was.
“You’ll be Siobhán Walkingstick,” she said to me.
Hairs stood up on my arms. The bite itched, and I rubbed it surreptitiously, resulting in a wave of oh god, scratching feels so good I may never be able to stop that sometimes happens. I wondered suddenly if that was why dogs would go thumpa-thumpa-thump with a hind leg when a human got a good itchy spot, and then I wondered if, as a werewolf, I would do the same thing.
I stopped scratching and muttered, “People don’t normally use that name for me. Who’re you?”
“Am I wrong to think until very recently it wouldn’t have been you at all?”
Another chill ran over me. I made fists to keep from scratching again. “…you’re not wrong.” The name she’d used, Siobhán Walkingstick, was technically the one I’d been born to. Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick. Dad had taken one look at that mess and nicknamed me Joanne. I’d dropped the Walkingstick myself, taking Walker as my mostly official last name when I graduated high school. Joanne Walker and Siobhán Walkingstick had almost nothing in common, at least not up until the past year. More specifically, up until two nights earlier, when I’d been reborn under a rattlesnake shapeshifter’s guidance. That had a lot to do with why my powers were out-of-control wonky. Joanne had had a handle on her skill set. Siobhán apparently resided in another league. And I was going to have to stop thinking of them as separate or I’d become a headcase in no time flat.
“But you’ll prefer Joanne,” the woman said with a nod, then looked to Gary. “And you come with a companion.”
Gary, who