On the other hand, there wasn’t a lot of time to sit around agonizing over that fact, either. I cupped my hands, siphoning the unfocused power into a ball between my own palms, watching the startling colors spin and dance around one another without quite melding. Where they touched, flashes of gray and black and white blurred them together, making them cohesive without taking away any of the individuality. Mesmerizing patterns formed within the ball, all of them unique and yet still sounding a common theme. I watched a moment, then shook myself. If I was lucky, there’d be time later to study the universal similarities in man. If I wasn’t, I’d be dead and it wouldn’t be much of a worry for me anyway.
Calling the already-focused power that Billy and Jen offered was easier. Their energy flowed to me when I called them, dancing around the ball I held like electrons around an atom, almost too fast to see. All of the power I held traced thin lines back to its creators, bright snaps of color that wound around each other in intricate braids without ever tangling together.
I wasn’t taking anything at all from at least a quarter of the people in the room, the ones who weren’t able to offer it up as easily as the others. I could take it outright, borrow some of their life force, just as I’d intended to in the airport, but for now I left them.
Babylon. How did I get back? By candlelight, and back again. I closed my eyes and fell inward on myself, reaching backward and within for the starry void. My hands and feet and head sucked inward, collapsing into my belly button. My entire self shriveled and shrunk until with an audible pop I imploded entirely and exploded back out of my belly button again, exactly as I’d been, only facing the opposite direction and looking into the racing starscape instead of the garage break room.
“Hey,” I said out loud. “That was cool.” The energy I’d borrowed was no longer visible in a ball between my palms. Instead I could feel it settled in my abdomen, a life force there that was, and was not, part of myself. I shuddered and tried to shut myself away from recognizing the feeling. With a jarring shock, spiderweb cracks shot through me, deeper and sharper than anything before.
“Give me a break,” I whispered. “This isn’t the time.” I superimposed clarity over the cracks, and they faded out reluctantly. It occurred to me that all three times I’d found my way to the star scape, the past I’d tried so hard to leave behind had resurfaced. I wondered, very briefly, what exactly this place between the worlds was. Then the candle appeared and I wrapped my hands around it and whispered, “Babylon.”
A noise like the end of the world hit me, sending me staggering back a few steps. A huge knobby root caught me in the back of the knees. I sat down hard at the foot of a Joshua Spire, trying to make sense of the chaos that had become Babylon.
The sky had lost its blue-gray color, tinged now with deep, sickening red. The silver Joshua Spires twisted up into the bloody sky, hanging gardens torn and falling down the sides of the trees. They shifted restlessly, not pushed by the wind, but like dying creatures making a last desperate snatch at life before giving away to the inevitable end.
The restless, cheerful babble that had filled the air was gone, too, leaving lonely wind and cries of fear and pain in its place. For one crystalline moment, I saw a long view of human history, reaching far back to the first days of mankind. I saw a small woman with thick curves and dark eyes, recognizable as human, yet alien all the same. She met my eyes and performed a shrug, small, wry, fully understandable.
We came here once, she said, when we were few.
This was Babel, I said back. This is where we came to all speak together. To share and understand each other. When we bred too many… Babel was lost?
She nodded and smiled, warm and approving.
You’re Eve, I said. She threw her head back and laughed, a very human sound.
They called me Mother, when I was there. I was not the first in the way you think of Eve as being. It was not so easy as that. But—yes. Eve might do as a name. But go, she said, or all my children will lose the place we once had, forever.
Goodbye, Mother, I whispered. The roar of angry wind filled my ears. I had never left Babel, but I could see it again. The street cobbles were torn, chunks of stone flung at wild angles that suggested an earthquake of devastating magnitude. Where they’d been the warm color of rust before, they were splattered with red, the dangerous crimsons and dark shades that meant vital blood had been spilled. I rubbed my breastbone, feeling sick. There was too much to think about, too much to assimilate and far too little time.
People hid behind every cockeyed piece of street, some dead, some dying, others mourning and still others screaming out their defiance against the Hunt that rode through them. As I watched, a line of soldiers, arm in arm, stood up together and walked forward. Before them, the street shivered and reformed, cobbles lying back down under the force of their will. Behind them, it lay smooth, a gauntlet thrown in the face of the chaos that was the Wild Hunt.
And down the newly relaid road they came, a dozen too-solid riders and the lonely pale mare. Cernunnos rode at their lead, his elegant antlers sweeping back to tangle with his ashy hair. He carried the new double-edged sword. Beneath the blood, it gleamed as bright a silver as the rapier I’d taken from him. As I watched, his stallion leaped a still-broken section of road, and Cernunnos smiled brilliantly at a young woman scrambling to get out of the way. Her lips parted and she went still, fear replaced by the compulsion of the god’s green eyes. He laughed, like the music of breaking glass. His deadly bright blade swept down in a gleaming arch, and the girl stiffened, waiting for the blow.
I whispered, “No.”
The god’s sword smashed into my spoken word like it was a shield, and rebounded. Cernunnos jolted back, and for a moment the entire Hunt hesitated. The girl, freed from Cernunnos’s eyes, turned and ran. With precise slowness, Cernunnos transferred his sword from his left hand to his right. He curved the fingers of his left hand down, rubbing them against his palm, and stretched them wide again. Then he lifted his hand, palm up, and looked slowly around with the intent of a deadly, confident predator.
It was suddenly important that I face him before he called me out. I pushed away from my tree root and walked forward, coming into the street ahead of the line of soldiers, who stood still now, remaining arm in arm, waiting and watching. Their healing power still rolled off them, spreading out through the ruined city of Babylon. A wave of fierce protection wrapped around my heart. I would die before I let anyone else here die. Let him see nothing but me, I willed. Let him forget them.
Cernunnos watched me silently, fascination visible even in features only half-human. Behind him, the archer and the thick-shouldered rider exchanged glances. The thick-shouldered man smiled before returning his attention to me; the archer nocked an arrow, but didn’t draw. I thought it was rather unsporting of him anyway. I’d seen how fast he could nock an arrow, earlier. It wasn’t like he needed the extra time afforded by doing it now.
“Little shaman,” Cernunnos said. The beautiful voice was harsher now, distorted by the thickened neck and changed vocal cords.
“My lord master of the Hunt,” I replied. The thick-shouldered man did smile at that. Cernunnos did too, a twist of a mouth that had the fullness of the man’s lips pulled into a stunted muzzle, neither human nor animal. He bowed from the waist, a small gesture as impossibly elegant as anything I’d ever seen him do. It wasn’t enough, though, to wipe the blood from the blade he carried. The power I’d borrowed boiled in my belly, asking to be used.