Horse is such a limited word. The beast in the diner had the grace and delicacy of an Arabian and the size of a Clydesdale, multiplied by two. It shimmered a watery gray, bordering on silver, the color so fluid I thought I might be able to dip my hand in it. Despite myself, my gaze jerked up to its forehead. There was no spiral horn sprouting there, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been. It was Plato’s horse, the ideal upon which all others are based.
It was trying to kill me, and all I could do was admire it.
Then it screamed, shrill and deep all at once. The blonde behind the counter shut up, but I screamed back, a sort of primal response without any thought behind it.
Just for a moment, everything stopped.
There was a rider astride the gray, arrested in motion by my scream. He wore gray himself, so close to the color of the horse I could barely tell where one ended and the other began. The reputed Native American belief that white men on horseback were one exotic creature suddenly seemed very plausible.
The rider turned his head slowly and looked at me. His hair was brown, peppered with starlight, and crackled with life, as if touching it would bring an electric shock. It swept back from a massively sharp widow’s peak, and was held in place by a circlet. His face was a pale narrow line, all high cheekbones and deep-set eyes and a long straight nose.
The impression he left was of living silver. I locked eyes with him, expecting to see that liquid silver again. Instead I met wildfire green, a vicious, inhuman color, promising violence.
He smiled and reached out a hand, inviting me toward him. His mouth was beautiful, thin and expressive, the curve of teeth unnervingly sharp, like a predator’s. I pushed up the counter, using it to brace myself, and wet my lips. Marie was right. I was going to die. The rider wanted my soul and I was going to give it to him without a fight because of that smile and those inhuman eyes. I took a step toward him.
The second SCUD of the morning hit me in the ribs and everything started to move again. I slammed into the floor under Gary’s weight, sliding across linoleum and a zillion sharp pieces of glass. We stopped when my head hit the far wall. I opened my eyes to find the butterfly knife lying against the wall a few inches away from my nose. The horse screamed again and reared back, missing my head by half an inch as he crashed back to the floor.
Gary’s breath smelled like syrup and bacon. “Are you outta your mind?” He popped up onto his knees and hauled me to mine by a fistful of shirt at the back of my neck. I snatched up the knife as the horse smashed down again, right where my head had been. I looked up at the rider, and the horse kicked me in the ribs with a toe. I felt the bone crack inward, and didn’t even manage a scream, just a pathetic little grunt.
From a very long way away, I heard Marie scream a warning, in English this time. Before I could react, Gary hauled me over backward. A tip of silver glittered through the air where my throat had been. The rider looked genuinely startled before his eyes narrowed and he urged the horse farther into the diner. They were huge, taking up all the room, all the air. I gasped and scrambled to my feet, clutching Gary’s arm with one hand and my ribs with the other. Breathing hurt.
“Leave them alone.” Marie sounded thin and tired and at the end of her bravery, but there she was at my side, looking up at the rider with a set chin. “I’ll go with you. Just leave them alone. They were only trying to help.”
I let go of Gary’s arm and shouldered forward. The rider watched me. Neither Gary nor Marie moved. Behind me I heard the blond waitress fumbling with the phone, and her panicked, “Hello? Police? Hello?”
“He’ll kill us anyway,” I said, very low. I couldn’t get enough breath to do anything else. “Because it’s what you do, isn’t it? It’s nothing personal. You’re the Hunt, and when the Hunt is loosed, you kill until someone binds you away again. Cernunnos.” Terrifying conviction gave my voice strength. Twenty minutes ago I’d never heard of the thing standing in front of me; now the knowledge of who and what he was felt like the only thing I’d ever been certain of in my whole life. I didn’t like that at all.
The rider’s eyes widened, and then he smiled, inclining his head.
“The Horned God.” I lifted my eyes to his circlet again, which wasn’t a circlet at all. It was more like Caesar’s crown, but it was part of him. It began at his temples and swept back in an elegant bone pattern, horns curved to the sides of his head and meeting at the back, woven together there. Very practical. No catching your head on tree branches that way. I wondered if he shed them yearly and grew them again, or if they were as eternal as he was.
“They grow with my power,” he replied. Chills ran through me. It wasn’t that he responded to an unasked question. That seemed perfectly normal from this being. It was his voice, dark and rich and earthy, deep enough that a roar from him would shake the world. That, and I was quite certain he hadn’t spoken English or any other language I knew.
“What’d he say?” Gary whispered. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Marie shake her head fractionally.
“You cannot stop me,” Cernunnos said, little more than a murmur.
“What do you want?” I still couldn’t breathe enough to get a real voice out. He laughed, and it took everything I had to not run away.
“To ride free and hunt,” he answered. “That is what we all want.”
“All?”
“My host.” He flicked his hand casually at the parking lot. I knew I shouldn’t, but I looked anyway.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Gary said.
“Not exactly,” Cernunnos said, and that time Gary understood him. He flinched, jerking his eyes from the parking lot back to Cernunnos. I couldn’t have looked away from the lot if someone paid me to. Everything I didn’t believe in had come to roost there, things that just hadn’t been there a moment earlier. It was like someone pulled the bandage off in one swift rip, exposing a world I didn’t believe existed in full Technicolor glory.
The riders moved too quickly, or maybe not enough in this world, for me to get an accurate count. There were close to a dozen, though, and one magnificent pale gold horse with no rider. Animals and riders alike faded at the edges, sunlight draining through them. Around their knees crept enormous sleek white dogs, with lowered heads and reddened ear tips and violent red eyes. They avoided the few cars in the parking lot, milling around them but never touching them. Settled on the cars were narrow, long-beaked birds I’d never seen before, whose cries sounded like lost children. The dogs growled and snapped, every once in a while one baying at the sunrise. I could hear the horse’s hooves against the asphalt, but the bridles made no sound, and neither did the riders as they drifted, waiting for their master.
“That isn’t possible,” I whispered. Cernunnos laughed again.
“You name me the Horned God and yet say my host is impossible? What are you, little mortal?” He put the silver sword against my chin, and turned my face toward him. I held very still, meeting his eyes.
Apparently I do not learn quickly. Meeting his eyes was a terrible mistake the second time, too. They were phenomenal, promising power and passion and eternity. All I wanted was to be with him, part of his ancient world. His blade caressed my cheek, opposite the cut Marie had made earlier. It felt like a lover’s touch, and I wanted all the more to be with him.
“You could be,” he murmured to the unspoken desire, “but then you would interfere, little mortal, and I am very tired of being interfered with. A shame, to end all your unrealized power, but more of a shame to be closed into the night again.”
They say watch the eyes, when you’re about to get into a fight. There are some people who can hide the telegraph of their actions from their eyes. Cernunnos wasn’t one of them: he had no need to be. It just took a flicker, before he drew the sword back and punched it forward. It was all I needed.