Even as she threw up a hand in defense, she saw that he aimed the arrow not at her, but at the owl.
She didn’t think, only felt. Outrage, fear for another. And the feeling shot her ten feet in the air, slicing out her hand to deflect the arrow. The keen point grazed her palm before the arrow winged away and thudded into another tree. The shock of pain, the shock of rising, broke that feeling. She tumbled back down, landing with enough force to knock her breath away.
“Are you crazy?” The boy, tumbled bronze hair, furious eyes the color of spring leaves, leaped toward her. “I could’ve killed you.”
“Why would you kill the owl? Nobody eats owl.”
“You’re bleeding. Let me see how bad.”
“It’s nothing.” It hurt like fire, but she knocked his hand away. “You’ve got no business shooting an arrow in this place, or at the owl.”
“I live in this place.” He shook back his mop of hair with its single skinny braid falling over his right ear. “Sort of. And I wasn’t shooting at the owl.”
“Yes, you were!”
“No, I wasn’t. Taibhse is a god of the glade. I would never try to hurt him. I was aiming at the apple. You wanted the apple, didn’t you?”
“Why would you care?”
“Why not? You’d have the apple now if you hadn’t spoiled the shot, and I’d be the one who tricked Taibhse. That’s a deep cut. Mallick will have a healing balm. He’s a great sorcerer. You’re his student.”
“And I can take care of myself.”
“Whatever.” He pulled out a cloth, shoved it at her. “At least wrap it.”
Annoyed, she wrapped the cloth around the slice in her palm, pressed her hands hard together, then yanked off the bloodied cloth, tossed it back to him.
The wound had closed, begun to heal.
“Even if you were aiming for the apple, you could have missed, hit the owl.”
His chin jerked up. “I don’t miss.”
“You did miss.”
“You got in the way.” He shrugged it off. “They’re saying you’re The One, like some great warrior, witch, Savior. You just look like a girl to me.”
He wasn’t much older than she was, a year, maybe two at the most. Taller, yes, but hardly older. She bristled at having someone her own age so dismissively term her a girl.
“If I was just a girl, your arrow wouldn’t be stuck in that tree over there.”
Pride every bit as much as power had her flinging out a hand, yanking it out, floating it back until it dropped at the base of the owl’s tree.
She’d meant to drop it at the boy’s feet, but close enough.
“That’s pretty good.” He walked over to pick it up while the owl stared down at him with cold disdain.
“Look, I was just trying to do you a favor. You’ve been trying to get that apple for days.” Using the cloth, he wiped her blood from the arrow before slipping it back in his quiver.
“It’s none of your … How do you know?” Horror, instant and deeply female, flared through her. “You’ve been spying on me.”
He had the grace to look embarrassed, and it pinked up the tips of his ears. “I wouldn’t call it spying exactly. I just saw you come in here. Nobody outside knows about this place, and nobody who isn’t one of us can come into it. So when you could and did, I wanted to see what you were up to.”
“You’re a, you’re a—” She dug for the word. She’d heard it in a movie. “A Peeping Tom.”
“I’m Mick. My father’s Thomas, but I don’t even know any Tom.”
“It’s an expression.”
“What does it mean?”
“A spyer.”
“It’s not my fault you took your clothes off, and anyway, you’re skinny. And I was just trying to do you a favor. You left out sweet cakes.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you the one who leaves things at the cottage?”
“One of us does. It’s tribute, and no payment’s expected or needed. It was kind to leave the cakes—and they were good. My father says you repay kindness with kindness, then there’s more of it.”
“I bet your father wouldn’t like knowing you spied on me.” She strode to her horse. “Don’t do it again. I’ll know.” She swung onto Grace. “And don’t shoot arrows at the owl or the apple. It’s not the right way. It’s not fair.”
She looked down at him, as regally as she could manage after knowing he’d seen her naked. “We appreciate the tribute, so thank you, your father, and whoever else. Now go sneak around somewhere else.”
She nudged Grace into a trot.
“Are you coming back tomorrow?” he called out.
She sighed, thought, Boys, and declined to answer.
As she approached the edge of the clearing, she heard the whoosh of wings. She reined in Grace, looked up. Her eyes widened in awe as Taibhse swooped overhead, the stem of the apple in his beak.
Some instinct—Mallick would have termed it a call to her blood—had her lifting an arm. And still it stunned her when the owl glided down, landing on it as if on a branch.
She felt his weight—considerable—but not any bite from his talons. His gold eyes stared into hers, and she felt a connection forged.
Mallick stepped out of the cottage, watched her ride toward him, one hand on the reins, the magnificent owl on her other arm.
Hadn’t he dreamed that? Hadn’t he seen it? The owl, the ghost god, the hunter, would be hers now. As bound to her, Mallick thought, as he was himself.
“I found the apple. I didn’t hurt the owl. He’s Taibhse.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I didn’t climb the tree. I don’t want to take the apple from him. It’s like stealing. But you see I found it, and he can take it back. I want the bathroom, Mallick, but I’m not going to steal to get it.”
“You’ve fulfilled the first quest. The apple is another symbol, Fallon. There are many who would be blinded by the gold and not see the true prize. You’ve won the loyalty of Taibhse, hunter, guardian, wise spirit. He’s yours now as you are his.”
“I … I can keep him?”
“Girl, he’s not to be kept or owned. You belong, one to the other. Lift your arm to release him. He won’t go far.”
When she lifted her arm, Taibhse soared up, settled on a high branch. When he set the apple down, the stem attached as if the golden fruit had grown there.
“He’s beautiful, and brave. What’s the second quest?”
“We’ll discuss it over dinner. Tend to your horse.”
“Don’t you want to hear how I got the apple?”
“I do, yes. Over dinner.”
* * *
That night, she unpacked and hung Colin’s wind chime in her window. On the sill she placed a little jar and set the stem of Ethan’s flower in it along with her birth father’s book, and the photo of her with her family.
Looking out through the dark, through the dance of faerie lights, she saw the white flash of the great owl on the hunt.
Tomorrow, she thought, she’d hunt, too. After the chores, after the lessons and the practice and the studies, she and Grace would ride the woods on the second quest Mallick had
given her. She would find the gold collar, and the wolf who wore it.
* * *
While she dreamed, others hunted. Their fingers probing through the dark scratched at the surface of her dreams. She was the prey, had been since before her birth.
She tossed in sleep, fear urging her to turn away from the images, the voices just beyond reach. Run from them, hide, survive.
What she was pushed to see and hear was blurred and indistinct. To know what to fight.
The circling crows, a gleeful murder heralding death. The flashes of lightning, black for death, red for burning. A circle of stones swimming in fog, and a man wading through it to stand and stare at the scorched and broken earth within the old dance.
The hilt of the sword he carried glinted in a single beam from the moon. Suddenly, his gaze cut away from the stone, and darkly, fiercely green broke through the borders of dreams.
Here the first of seven shields, destroyed by treachery and dark magicks. Here the blood of a son of the gods shed, and here the blood of our blood poisoned. So raged the plague.
Now, Fallon Swift, I wait. We wait. It waits.
He lifted his sword. Lightning struck the lethal point, erupted so he held a blade of white, flashing flame.
Will you take up the sword and the shield of The One? Will you answer the call? Will you come? Will you be?
When he plunged the tip of the sword into the ground, the fog burned. In the stone circle something bubbled and churned.
Choose.
While she dreamed, while others hunted, still others prepared for blood sacrifice.
In what had been, before the Doom, a wealthy suburb in Virginia, a band of Purity Warriors established a base camp. There nearly a hundred men, women, and the children they made, captured, or indoctrinated lived in grand houses and held weekly public executions.
Some, true believers, followed the tenets of Jeremiah White, the cult’s founder and self-proclaimed commander. All Uncannys, any who had magickal abilities—or those who sympathized with them—were from hell. Demons and those who trucked with them must be destroyed.
Others joined, bore the symbol of the cult, because they enjoyed the freedom to rape, torture, kill, and a religious fervor baked in blood and bigotry offered the opportunity.