Awakenings

            “I’m sorry, Marin,” Kellin said one afternoon a couple days later.  She and I were out walking along the ward-lines, checking to make sure nothing had happened to them.  I startled, missing a step but covering it in a spin toward her.
            “For what?”
            Kellin shook her head.  “I know that I’ve been terrible lately.  Hard to deal with, general pain in the ass.  I’m just…I’m sorry.  I know I shouldn’t act like that, and I’m going to try to stop.  You guys are right.  I’m still alive and that’s what’s important.”
            What brought this on?  I was relieved that she’d finally started to screw her head on straight, but I was leery about what had brought on the shift.  Had it just been time, like Phelan had counseled?  “Did something else happen?”  I asked.
            “Not really,” she said, shaking her head and shoving her hands into the pockets of her jacket as she started to walk again.  “Not directly, anyway.”
            “Then what—?”  I ran directly into her back as she stopped dead, tilting her head slightly as she stared at Leah, who was struggling up from the ravine, a basket over one arm.
            “Leah?  What are you doing out here?”  Kellin asked, her voice a little strange as she kept watching her crest the top of the ridge.
            Leah’s head snapped up and for a moment she looked like a child who’s been caught with their hand in the cookie jar.  Then she smiled sheepishly and tugged a fistful of greenery out of her basket.  “Witch hazel.  There’s a patch down there and I was getting some more for the poultices for Phelan.  It wasn’t far, so I didn’t think it was a big deal to go alone.”
            I shook my head.  “We made that rule for a reason, Leah.  No one goes alone.”
            She gestured toward Kellin as she tucked the witch hazel back into her basket.  “She goes alone often enough.”
            Kellin winced as I turned my stare to her.  All she could do was shrug.  “It’s true, I’ve been wandering out a little to clear my head.”
            “After what happened to you?”  I whispered.  “What were you doing?  Hoping they’d show up and finish you off?”
            She met my gaze, eyes hard.  “Yes.”  She shook her head.  “I’m over that shit now, but for a little while, yeah, I kind of was.”  She looked away from me and toward Leah.  “But I was being stupid and suicidal, and you’re neither.”
            Leah shrugged.  “I just didn’t think it was that big of a deal.  There’s nothing out there that’s going to hurt me.  I know that something attacked you guys a few weeks ago, and then something else got Phelan the other night, but I haven’t seen any sign of anything like that when I’ve been out there.  Just trees and rocks and wet.  I think we could stand to ease up a little.”
            “No,” I said.  “No, we can’t ease up.  The minute we do is the minute we start to forget why we set the rules in the first place.  Don’t go down there alone again, Leah.  I know that it’s inconvenient, but drag someone along with you.  I don’t care who as long as it’s not Angie.”  Angie was too little to be of much good down there, other than her amazingly astute senses.
            Leah just stared at me for a second, then made a face and shook her head.  “Why the hell do you worry about it so much, Marin?”
            I touched the spot on my arm that  still was still ice-cold most of the time, where the Greys had hit me that afternoon in the ravine.  “Because I know there’s stuff out there that’s dangerous.  You should know it, too, you were on the receiving end like the rest of us.”
            “I really don’t know what happened.  All I know is that something hit me in the head.”  Leah crossed her arms.  “I just don’t see what the big deal is.”
            “You don’t have to see what the big deal is,” Kellin said quietly.  “You just have to follow the rules, Leah.  Like everyone else.”  She scuffed a toe in the dirt.  “Even me.  I was being stupid and doing things I shouldn’t have.  Almost dying has that effect on a person, and I wasn’t listening to other people the way I should’ve been.  It was dumb and I’m not doing it anymore.”  Kellin tugged on my sleeve.  “Come on, we’ve got three more wards to check before lunch.”
            Leah sighed and shook her head at the two of us as we kept walking and she headed back to camp.  I looked sidelong at Kellin.
            “Did you mean that?”
            “Every word,” she said, squinting up through the trees at the sun, as if trying to gauge what time it might have been.  “I’m better now, I think.”  She sighed and shook her head as we walked to the next ward in the ring.  “What happened to Phelan—hell, that whole attack the other night—kind of shocked me back to my senses.  I’m still here for a reason, even if I don’t know what it is.  I never should’ve begged Jac to just let me die.”
            “I didn’t realize you did,” I said softly.
            Her shoulders rose and fell in a shrug.  “It doesn’t matter anymore.  I’m here now, and I’m not going anywhere.”  She grinned.  “You guys are stuck with me, for better or worse.”
            I put my arm around her shoulders and squeezed.  “Glad to have you back.”
            “It’s good to be back.  Hopefully it’ll stay that way.”
            “We can only hope.”  I put my hands in my pockets.  “Phelan said she’d be back.”
            Kellin nodded slightly.  “What she said about it not being a victory kind of made me think she would be.  When did he tell you?”
            “Two nights ago, when he woke up.  He doesn’t know how long we’ve got before she shows her face again, but she’ll be back.”  I barely managed to suppress a shudder.  “I don’t know what we’re going to do when that happens.  I don’t even know what he did.”
            “None of us are sure of what he did, but we should be safe inside of these wards.  I have no idea what you were trying to keep out, but they’re insanely strong.”
            My nose wrinkled.  “Strong enough to keep something like her out?”
            Kellin shrugged.  “I guess we’ll see.”
            “Yeah,” I said.  “I guess we will.”

            He looked away, as if unable to meet my gaze.  I touched his shoulder gently, above the bandages that swathed the wound there. 
            “Who’s hunting you, Phelan?”  And why?
            He kept staring off into space, voice so quiet I almost couldn’t hear him over the normal evening sounds of camp.  “Remember a few weeks ago, when I told you that my being here could have drawn the camazotzi to you more quickly, that the attack could have come sooner?”
            “Yeah,” I said softly.  “But you really didn’t explain much more.”
            Phelan shook his head slightly.  “I should have, but I just didn’t expect what happened the other night.  I didn’t think…well.  I just didn’t think.”  He finally looked at me again and offered up a weak smile.  “I somehow kept thinking that maybe with everything broken, maybe I could be wrong, maybe they’d stop, maybe they’d just find places to be and build their own little fiefdoms and leave everyone else well enough alone.  I was a fool.”
            “You’re not making any sense,” I said gently.   I put my hand against his forehead and he flinched away.
            “Gods and monsters, your hands are cold,” he murmured, shivering.
            “You have a hell of a fever,” I countered.  “Who was she?  Vammatar?”
            Another shiver wracked him.  “What am I, Marin?”
            I couldn’t stop the little laugh that escaped me.  “Mortal.”
            A weak smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.  “She’s the same.  Different Otherworld, same idea.  We’ve been locking horns for a long time.”  He shifted, fidgeted with his blanket, then sighed.  “Help me sit up, will you?  I’ve got the worst crick in my back.”
            “Probably because she stabbed you with something there.”  I sighed and helped him sit up slowly, since he’d try even without my help.  He was as stubborn as Thom and then some.
            Phelan winced, hunching as he reached gingerly around to touch the second set of bandages.  “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” he mumbled.  “Though I’m surprised I didn’t feel that one.”  His eyes, clearer now that he’d been awake a bit longer, flicked toward me.  “Have you seen what they look like?”
            “Not infected or anything, if that’s what you’re asking.”
            He nodded slightly.  “In part, yeah.  Small favors, at least.”  He touched his injured shoulder again, almost unconsciously.  “Going to have to be careful,” he murmured, half to me and half to himself.
            “Do you think she’ll come back?”  I asked softly.
            He looked at me sidelong and shook his head.  “You already know the answer to that.”
            “How long do you think we have?”
            “After what happened?”  Phelan smiled humorlessly.  “We can hope for weeks, maybe months.  That wasn’t all me, you know.”
            Something twisted in my belly.  I’d suspected that there had been a little more going on that night than just Phelan’s work, but I wasn’t at all sure.  “The light, the brightness.  That wasn’t you, was it?”
            He shook his head slightly.  “No.  No it wasn’t.”
            “Then who was it?”  I asked the question a little more sharply than I intended to, staring at him intently.  He just shook his head.
            “I have my suspicions,” he said quietly, “but I don’t have facts in evidence.”  He rubbed a hand roughly over his face and shivered.  I wrapped an extra blanket around his shoulders.
            “I’m going to go get someone,” I said quietly.
            Phelan shook his head again.  “No, just sit a while.  Just sit a while with me so I can get my bearings.  Five days, you said?  Gods and monsters.”  He shook his head slightly.  “Turning into Teague,” he muttered, almost too quiet for me to hear.
            “What does he have to do with anything?”  I asked curiously.  Cousins, of course, with some kind of power as well, I know that much.  But how connected is all of this?  “Is he why you’re being hunted?”
            Phelan snorted softly.  “If we’re being hunted, it’s equally likely to be my fault, or Aoife’s fault, or anyone’s fault.”
            “You’re finally telling her?”  Thom stood behind me, leaning against his crutches as if his ribs weren’t bothering him at all, which either meant he was ignoring them or that our three-man medical squad had found something more potent to take the edges off.
            Wait a second.  I twisted to stare at Thom, though not before I caught sight of Phelan’s guilty look out of the corner of my eye.  “You knew?”  I blurted, blinking.  Thom knew and didn’t say anything?  Why?
            “We talked about a lot that day,” Thom said softly, limping forward a few steps before he slowly sat down with me next to Phelan, stretching his bad leg out with a slight wince.  “Including Kira, Teague, and some kind of war that’s been going on since well before we were even the barest glimmer of a glimmer in someone’s eye.  So yeah, I kind of knew.  I didn’t know what to expect, though.”
            “Wait, wait,” I said.  “Slow down.  A war?  We’ve suddenly been caught in the center of a war?”
            “I wouldn’t call it a war,” Phelan protested weakly, then stopped, frowned, and sighed.  “Okay, maybe I would.  But it’s the kind of war that you’d get caught up in no matter what, Marin.  The camazotzi were an opening salvo.  You were a target before I ever got here.”  His fingers tangled in the blanket across his legs, knuckles going white as he squeezed his hands into fists.  “The escalation is likely to be my fault, though.  I just didn’t—I didn’t expect her to show up.  Any of them to show up.  Not here, not when there’s so much power here to protect you.”
            “But you said that this area would be some kind of insane prize for anyone wanting that kind of power,” I reminded him softly, slowly starting to understand.  “She came for that instead of you, didn’t she?”
            Phelan stared at me for a moment, pain in his gaze.  He shook his head slowly.  “No, Marin.  She came because of me—and now she’ll come back because of all of us.  This is my fault, and I’m not sure how I can make it right.”
            Lord, but I wish he’d lied to me instead.  Thom wrapped his arm around my shoulders and shook his head grimly.
            “Well.  When the day comes, we’ll be ready.”
            A shiver wracked both Phelan and I.  Phelan managed a weak smile.  “Then we’ll drink to that, every day between now and that day, and pray with every spare moment in between.  I have faith in you.  All of you.”
            I was glad that someone did.

            Almost from the moment we got back to camp that night, Thom became near-on obsessed with getting walls up around our settlement.
            I suppose that none of us that had been out there that night could blame him, and seeing us bring Phelan back, battered and bloody, on a stretcher hadn’t done anything good for anyone else’s nerves, either.  So people worked with little complaint, breaking up concrete, mixing mortar, laying brick and stone and fill along the lines Thom and Rory had marked out so many weeks before.  Thom paced restlessly along the lines.  There was just too much wall.  We couldn’t build it fast enough.  Most of us fell onto our mattresses were asleep a few minutes later every night after dinner by the campfire, then were up in the waning minutes before dawn to eat and get back to work.
            As for me, I checked the wards with Kellin twice a day and helped Jacqueline and J.T. keep an eye on Phelan, who twisted and burned with a fever that they and Leah couldn’t explain.  The wounds didn’t look infected—they were meticulously cleaned three times a day and rebandaged.  After the first day, Leah started mixing poultices, just in case there was something deep in the wounds that they couldn’t see with the naked eye or feel by gently probing the wounds.  She used every trick from the little notebook she kept, a legacy from her hedge-witch auntie who she rarely spoke about.
            Nothing seemed to work.  Phelan’s fever raged and he slept, on and on, and they fretted about keeping him hydrated and talking about what they could do if this went on for much longer.  To hear them talk, things were turning bleaker than bleak with each passing moment of each passing day.
            Thom fretted about the walls, about defense and our collective safety.  Every day, Matt looked torn between screaming and crying, every day simply throwing himself into his work as if it was salve for some secret pain I was wholly unaware of.
            And me?  I just soldiered on, day after day, hoping and praying for some kind of insane miracle—or, at the very least, for some kind of understanding of what had happened that night by the burial mound.
            Evening on the fifth day, just as the sliver of a crescent moon began to rise, I was sitting next to Phelan, sewing a fleece patch over a hole in someone’s sweatshirt.  His eyes came open  slowly and he stared at nothing for a few long seconds before he coughed.
            “That bitch,” he mumbled, echoing his words of five days before, then closed his eyes again.  He started to take a deep breath but brought himself up short with a wince as he seemed to notice he was in pain.  “How many days this time, Brigid?”
            “It’s Marin, Phelan.”  I smoothed his hair back from his face.  His flesh was still hot, though it seemed a little cooler than it had been earlier.
            “Don’t play—not funny,” he mumbled, then opened his eyes again.  He had to stare at me for a moment before his eyes came into focus and he exhaled with a slight shudder.  “Marin.”
            I nodded a little.  “You’ve been out for days,” I said softly, groping around with my free hand for the canteen we’d been using to get water into him for the past few days.  He looked older and frailer, I realized as my hand closed around the bottle, his eyes all sunken and his color bad.  Part of that, of course, was thanks to the lamp flickering on a shelf above us, but part of that was the pallor brought on by fever, by illness.
            He tried to push away the bottle as I brought it to his lips to drink.  I wouldn’t let up until he’d had a few gulps and he seemed to realize that after a moment and gave up.  Once he’d had something to drink, he coughed again and repeated, “How many days?”
            “Almost five,” I said quietly.
            Phelan closed his eyes and sighed, shifting a little on the mattress as if he was about to try to push himself up on his elbow.  I touched his shoulder gently.
            “Please don’t,” I whispered.
            “Five days is too long,” he protested, but lay still.
            “You sound like Thom.”  I took his hand and put the canteen in it.  “Drink some more.  I’m going to get Jac or J.T.”
            His other hand snapped out from beneath the blankets and caught hold of my wrist as I started to get up.  “Not yet.  Stay a minute.  You have questions.”
            I stared at him.  “Of course I have questions!  But they can wait until one of them gets a look at you.”
            “There really isn’t much of anything they can do that they probably haven’t already done.  So just sit a minute and let me talk.”  His eyes slid shut again for a moment.  “Besides, if you bring Jameson to me now, I’m going to have an even harder time telling now from then.”
            Sitting back down slowly, I watched as he weakly popped the canteen open again and took a long swallow, wincing a little.
            “What’s in this?”
            “I think they dissolved some pills in it.  For the fever.”
            He shook his head slightly, a wry smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.  “Okay, so they did something I hadn’t thought of after all.”  He folded his hands on his belly and watched me for a moment in the flickering lamplight.
            “I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said softly after a few long moments of silence.  “I never meant to bring any of that down on you.  But since I did, since she followed me, I suppose you deserve to know the truth.
            “They’re hunting us, Marin.  Every single last one of us.”

            The incandescence died within seconds, leaving us all night-blind and gasping for breath.  I groped around in the darkness for the others.
            “Is everyone all right?”  Jacqueline’s voice called tremulously from the barrow.
            “Grab a lantern,” I croaked after swallowing a couple times.  “Come on over here and have a look.”  Had I screamed?  My throat felt like I had been, and for a long time.
            It had only taken a few seconds, hadn’t it?
            Hadn’t it?
            I leaned against the staff to stay upright.  It was still warm against my palms, almost comforting.  I felt like I could fall asleep right there, leaning against that staff.
            Thom’s voice shook me fully awake.  “Marin!  Get over here.”
            There was urgency interlaced with fear in his voice.  My heart began to thud at breakneck speed.
            My eyes began to adjust again as I got moving, toward the sound of Thom’s call, aided a few seconds later by Kellin, who snapped one of the battery operated lanterns on.  In its anemic light, I could see Phelan sprawled on the grass, breathing shallowly and staring at the sky.
            Shit.  Oh shit, oh shit.  “Jac!”  I crashed to my knees next to Thom, who’d balled up the stocking cap he’d worn out here tonight and had it pressed against a bloody gash in Phelan’s shoulder.
            Thom looked at me sidelong and shook his head slightly, looking as frightened as I’d ever seen him in these past few weeks since the end of everything.  Phelan’s shirt was soaked with blood.  When had this happened?
            Probably when she hit him that first time, I realized.  When he started sounding like he was trying to talk around steel wool caught in his throat.
            Jacqueline was there a few seconds later, taking Phelan’s pulse and checking his eyes.  He managed to glare at her for a moment before his expression slackened.
            “The bitch,” he mumbled, then his eyes slid closed.
            “Damnation, Phelan,” Jacqueline cursed softly.  “Don’t pass out on me yet.”
            “Is he all right?”  Rory asked from behind me.  I glanced over my shoulder.  He and Drew looked little worse for wear, though Rory had apparent grass stains all along one side of his body and was bleeding a little from a scrape above his eye that he didn’t seem to notice.  Beyond them, Carolyn was helping J.T. to his feet.  He moved gingerly, as if checking to make sure that he was in one piece.
            Jacqueline answered.  “No.  No, he’s not all right.  Keep that right where you’ve got it right now, Thom.”
            “Right,” Thom said in a murmur, head bobbing slightly.  His eyes were on her hands as she worked, moving deftly across Phelan’s prone body.
            “We can’t stay here,” Kellin said, shaking her head firmly.  “It’s not safe out here right now.”
            “Do you really think she’s going to come back after that?”  Jacqueline snapped, looking up at Kellin for a split second.
            “Without a goddamned doubt,” Kellin snapped back.  “Maybe not in the next ten minutes, but she’s not going to stay away for long.  We need to get back to camp, and fast.”
            Jacqueline glanced at me and I shook my head.  “I wish I didn’t think she was right, Jac.  We need to get back inside the wards before she comes back with friends.”
            “What the hell was that all about, anyway?”  Rory pressed, looking at me, then at Thom, then Kellin.  “Do you know?”
            “I think the only one who does is currently unconscious.”  I shook my head.  “We need some kind of stretcher or travois.”
            “We’ll handle it,” J.T. said with a grunt as he finished his self-assessment.  “Going to have to borrow your crutches, though, Thom.  Think you can manage to hobble and not hurt yourself?”
            Thom nodded.  “I’ll lean on someone.”
            Jacqueline looked at me.  “I need the cloth from my basket.  Tear a few strips off of it so we can tie that hat against his shoulder.”
            “On it,” I said, forcing myself up.  I paused, then eased the staff closer to Phelan and closed his limp hand around it.  It might have been my imagination, but I thought that his breathing eased for a second and his fingers tightened around the wood.
            My head started to throb as I was knotting two strips of cloth together to make  a makeshift bandage for Phelan’s shoulder.
            “Marin!  Tear a few more and knot them off.  He’s bleeding somewhere else.”
            Wonderful.  What the hell, Phelan?  I thought you were going to help us stay out of trouble, not bring down more on us.  My heart thudded against my breast and my head pounded in time with the beats.  I did as I was asked and brought the mess over to Jacqueline, who was making full use of Rory’s assistance to get Phelan bound up.  I saw the other spot of blood—Phelan’s lower back, above his hip on the left side. I hoped it wasn’t too deep, but his shirt was soaked with enough blood I began to wonder exactly how shallow it could be.
            I wavered a little on my feet and Thom touched my arm with a bloody hand, steadying me.  I stared at him for a moment.  There must have been something written in my gaze, on my face, because he reached out and drew me against his chest.  I leaned there for a moment, forgetting about his ribs and his bloody hands, squeezing my eyes shut and trying to calm down.

            Green fields stretched out before us, the wind sending the grass rippling in an endless, undulating wave except for where it broke against what was left of a burned down barn, against the rocks that were all that was left of a house’s foundation.  Thom’s hand closed around mine and squeezed as we stood on the hill, looking down over the ruins of a world that died years ago, a world slowly being swallowed up by the new world that had fought so hard to be born.
            “We’ll find it,” he whispered.  “Whatever it takes, however long it takes.  And then we’ll go home to them and never have to leave again for all the rest of our days.”
            I still wished I knew what it was we were looking for.

            I drew a shuddering breath and clung to him for a moment.  Thom kissed my temple, squeezed me, then let go.  “Time to walk,” he murmured.  “You okay?”
            “Yeah,” I whispered, fairly certain it was a lie.  “Yeah, I’m okay.  Let’s get back to the wards.”
            He nodded.  J.T. and Drew had gotten Phelan loaded onto a makeshift stretcher made of Thom’s crutches and sweatshirts.  Greg, Carolyn, and Kellin gathered up all the lanterns they could carry and I scrambled to help them.  Thom stooped gingerly to retrieve the drum and another lantern.
            We left the two remaining torches where they were, on the far side of the barrow, burning bright with a flame that was strangely more blue than they had been before.  I tried to ignore that as we walked away.

            She moved so quickly that none of us had any time to react.  Our boys went flying—Rory scythed through my legs at the knees, toppling both of us as Vammatar grasped Phelan by the collar of his shirt, pulling him close enough to whisper in his ear.  I fought to disentangle myself from Rory, watching Phelan’s expression go slack and his face pale.
            Then she lifted him like a rag doll.  She might have thrown him like one, too, if J.T. hadn’t plowed into her ribcage like some kind of deranged football player.  She uttered what I can only describe as a sound and dropped Phelan as J.T.’s momentum carried her past me and Rory, past Thom and into the gloom of the starlit night.
            Her voice carried in the stillness.  “So eager to fight and die for someone who could so easily discard you?  My, my, aren’t we the heroic fool?”
            “Shut up.”  J.T. cocked his arm back to punch her.
            She headbutted him before the blow ever landed.  He stumbled back with a grunt, holding his head.
            “Jay!”  Carolyn surged past me before I could get a grip on her sleeve.
            “Rory, grab a torch,” Thom was shouting.  Drew already had one in hand, holding it half as a talisman, half as a weapon.
            I could see J.T. setting himself for another rush before Carolyn eclipsed my view of him.  Vammatar’s eyes glowed menacingly in the light, catching hints of starlight and torchlight and throwing them back at us, like a predator’s eyes stalking prey by night.
            That’s what we were to her, I realized with a jolt.  Prey.
            Phelan grasped the leg of my jeans.
            “The staff,” he rasped.  “Hit her with the bloody staff!  I can do the rest.”
            I cast a dubious look at him as Drew and Rory ran toward the fight, where the sound of flesh meeting flesh with a wet smacking sound told me things were going poorly for one side or the other—or both.
            J.T.’s roar of pain confirmed that it was a bad night for him tonight.  Carolyn was yelling something I couldn’t quite make out.
            In the distance, will’o’wisps swarmed.
            “Do it, Mar,” Kellin said, suddenly at my shoulder, pale as death as she stared wide-eyed beyond me—maybe at the others, maybe at something I couldn’t see.
            There was a crunching sound followed by a soft woosh of flames catching, crackling against damp grass, catching on spilled oil from one of the torches.  My head snapped to the side, a sick feeling growing at the pit of my stomach as my eyes adjusted.
            J.T. was down on one knee and Drew was flat on his back a few feet away from Vammatar, whose hood had fallen back, cold, white-blonde hair wreathing her head and picking up ruddy, bloody highlights from the flames slowly curling to her side.  Rory held his tiki torch in a guard position, Carolyn half behind him.
            “No!”  Kellin shouted suddenly.  “Stay there!”
            I realized after half a second that she was talking to Greg and Jacqueline, who were still on top of the burial mounds.  They hadn’t broken the perimeter of lanterns.
            Oh god.  That didn’t take more than a few seconds, I realized.  They’d barely had time to react.
            All of us had barely had the time to react.
            Jacqueline looked helplessly at me, as if begging me for permission to move.  I gave her a quick head-shake.  No.  Stay there in case this goes even further south than it already has.  I looked at Thom, caught sight of the grim set to his jaw as he lifted the staff toward me.
            “Got a job to do, sweetheart,” he murmured.  The wood felt warm against my palm, warm and somehow right.
            “Thom,” Phelan said, his voice shaky.  “Start drumming.”
            Thom looked startled for a moment, then nodded, groping for the drum even as I slowly turned toward Vammatar in time to see her snap Rory’s torch in half.
            Never without an option, though, was our Rory.  He kicked her in the stomach as hard as he could.  She oofed, stumbling backwards, and I began to run.
            Just touch her with the staff, Phelan had said.  I was looking to do a little more than just touch her with the six-foot length of wood in my hands.
            She recovered from Rory’s blow, turning at the last second.  She caught the staff in one fist as I swung it as hard as I could at her head.  Her arm barely trembled with the effort to hold back the blow, but the muscles and tendons of her fingers were taut with the effort.
            Just touch her with the staff.
            What now, Phelan?
            The night began to scream.
            The will’o’wisps surged toward us, swirling like a cyclone, turning black night tinged with the glow of flames to incandescent day.  I was aware of Vammatar screaming in front of me as I fought to keep my grip on Phelan’s staff.
            It glowed the green of summer leaves in my hands, then mellowed to amber.  Vammatar jerked back, releasing her grip and howling.  Hate-filled eyes focused on me and she lunged forward.
            My eyes widened in horror as a dozen images of my face laid open by her sharp nails whirled through my head.  I stumbled back half a step, trying to lunge backwards and out of her reach.
            Then Rory was suddenly on her back, one arm wrapped around her throat.  She whirled, trying to dislodge him.  After two revolutions she shook him loose and he went flying somewhere off into the brightness.
            Vammatar, seeming disoriented, turned from one side to the other, her hair a wild frenzy, her fine-boned face drawn into a mask of hate.  “This was not a victory, Wandering One!”
            The earth swallowed her and she was gone.

            We set a cluster of lanterns at each of the four points of a compass.  Thom was tasked with the drumming that would lend rhythm to the ritual—one I still wasn’t sure I understood.  It seemed there was a lot of energy-dumping and singing involved with Phelan to lead it.  I wondered again, and not for the first time, what we’d have done without him.
            Been vulnerable, I guess.
            “We’re going to want to shut off those battery ones,” Phelan said as he and J.T. finished lighting the tiki torches.  “Going to be a lot of energy up, don’t want to short anything out.”
            “Or make it explode,” Thom murmured as he settled on an overturned bucket, settling the old drum against one knee.  I glanced at him sharply and he just shook his head.
            “Don’t ask, Mar,” he murmured, taking my hand and kissing my palm.  “Just go turn off the lanterns like he said.”
            I stared at him for a moment longer and shook my head.  “Why do I think there’s something that you’re not telling me?”
            He shrugged.  “Probably because you’re right.”
            “Marin?  Come on, let’s get started.”
            I gave Thom one last look and headed to answer Phelan’s call.  Jacqueline and Kellin worked their way around the burial, turning off the battery-operated lanterns.
            “It’s just like setting the wards,” Phelan said to me quietly, except for dumping energy into a ward, you’re all going to be channeling it toward the staff.  I’ll take it from there.”  In the strange light of dying day and the flickering flame of the torches and lanterns, he looked strange, almost worried.
            “Phelan…you’ve done this before, right?”
            “Never without some kind of sacrifice,” he muttered, cheeks flaming almost as bright as his hair.
            “What?”  My heart started to pound.  What the hell, Phelan?  Why are we out here if this isn’t going to work?
            “Calm down,” he said, waving a hand.  “Don’t panic, it’ll work.”
            “Are you sure?”
            He nodded, giving me that devil-may-care grin of his.  “I’m sure.”
            Screw me sideways.  I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
            “Trust me.”
            “All right,” I said quietly.  “I trust you.”  I just hope that this works.
            “It’ll work.”  He squeezed my elbow.  “Now quit worrying and let’s get to work.”

 •          •          •

             After the ritual was done, we all sat in the cold-dew-damp grass and watched as Greg and Jacqueline scattered seeds across the churned earth of the graves.  The torches guttered and flickered, the bright, cold light of the autumn stars shining down on us.
            “You know, I never realized how many more you can see when there’s no cities to stop you from seeing them,” I said softly, one arm wrapped around Thom’s shoulders.
            He smiled up at me.  “What, the stars?”
            I nodded slightly.  “They’re beautiful.”
            “There’s more of them these days than there were back then,” Phelan said from where he was stretched out a few feet away, flat on his back with his arms folded behind his head.  “Strange, isn’t it?”
            “A little,” Thom said.
            “Did you guys see that?”  Carolyn asked quietly, sitting between J.T.’s legs on the other side of us from Phelan.  She was leaning back against his broad chest, staring at the sky like Phelan, Thom, and I.
            “See what?”  I asked.
            “That shadow. Look, up by the tail of the dipper.”
            I scanned the sky, a chill going through me as I caught a glimmer of the shadow she was talking about, which winked out of sight abruptly a moment after I saw it.  I sat up straight, rubbing my eyes.
            It must just be a trick of the light.  My eyes are tired.  That’s all.  That’s got to be it.
            “I didn’t see anything,” Thom said.
            “I did,” I said quietly.
            For the first time since the ritual began, Kellin spoke softly, turning away from the grave and toward the rest of us in the grass.  “Something doesn’t feel right.”
            The Something landed in the eight feet of space between her and us and pounced on Phelan almost as soon as its feet touched the ground.  Phelan let out a shout of surprise.  Carolyn screamed.  Thom and I scrambled back.
            I felt cold, as if someone had just dumped a load of snow on me.
            In a voice as sensual as it was disconcerting, the figure on Phelan whispered, “Where are they, Wandering One?”
            “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Phelan said in a choked voice.
            “Don’t lie to me.  You know bad things happen when you lie to someone like me.”
            A chill shot down my spine.  Thom forced his way up onto one knee, staring across the figure’s back at J.T.  I saw J.T. gesture and my pounding heart began to sink.
            No, Thom.  No, you can’t.
            Rory whipped past Thom and I, head tucked and shoulder down.  He plowed into the figure like a linebacker.  She—I was fairly certain it was a she—cried out as Rory flipped her onto her back and with a little help from J.T. and Drew got her pinned.
            Thom nudged me.  “Help Phelan.”
            Even as I scrambled toward Phelan, I heard the strange figure laughing.
            “Who are these, Wandering One?  Your new little tribe?  More followers?  Are you going to get them killed, too, like the group two hundred years ago?”
            My hands found Phelan’s shoulders and I started to help him sit up again.  He was pale and shaky as I helped him to his feet, voice a rasp as he stared at her prone form.  “This time is different.  Leave, Vammatar.  You’ve got no power here.”
            Prone on her back, her lips peeled back in a cruel smile.  “That’s where you’re wrong, Wandering One.  But why tell, when I can simply show?”

            We lit lanterns—flame and battery operated both—and gathered up bundles of herbs, incense from our combined stashes, matches, and other items that Phelan insisted we might need.  Jacqueline added a few things to our list, blushing a little as she said that she’d be coming along with us.
            The lower edge of the sun was touching the horizon when we set out from camp toward the ravine bridge, a cluster of us using kinetic flashlights and the lanterns to light our way.  J.T. carried a set of tiki torches over his shoulder, another attempt to illuminate the burials a little more if we could.  The lanterns would only shed so much light when we set them on the ground, and this was going to be eerie enough as it was.  I walked with Thom, a few steps behind Phelan and ahead of J.T. and Carolyn, neither of whom were saying much on the way over.
            We crossed the bridge in pairs, and by the time we were all across the sun had slipped more than a third of the way down the horizon, casting long, golden shafts of light across the pavement in front of us.
            “Phelan,” I said as we gathered again on the plaza, “what exactly are we doing?”
            “I told you that,” he said with a wry smile.  He leaned against a gnarled staff of wood, one he’d been working on almost since his arrival here.  He’d claimed he wasn’t done with it yet, but it’d serve well enough for what we needed to do tonight.  “Bless the ground, the stronger the better.”  He nodded toward Jacqueline.  “She had some good ideas about that.”
            Jacqueline snorted softly.  “All I did was try to bless some bread.  I’m a laywoman, it might not have even taken.”
            I smothered a smile.  The light I saw in your hands when you saved Kel makes me think you’re touched a little more by the hand of some greater power than the average laywoman.
            “Still,” Phelan said as we started walking again, “it wasn’t a bad idea.  Breaking and burying the bread could have some beneficial effects.  And thank you for finding that wine.”
            She shrugged, carefully shifting the basket she was carrying.  “I still don’t know what you wanted it for.”
            “To drink, of course,” Phelan said, winking over his shoulder.
            Thom snorted a laugh.  “Do you really expect us to believe that?”
            He shrugged.  “No.  But it was a good joke.”  After a moment, he shook his head.  “We can’t spare the milk that we’ve got.  The wine will do instead for an offering to the earth and to the powers beyond.”
            “This sounds incredibly pagan.”
            Kellin’s voice drifted quietly from the rear of our party.  “Probably because it largely is.  It’ll be all right.”
            We passed into the library’s dark shadow, forging onward toward the ruined Shakespeare Garden and the burial grounds beyond.  Glimmers of light drifted above the remnant hedgerows of the garden and the burial site beyond.  I took a short, slight breath.  There was something haunting and beautiful about the lights.
            “Will’o’wisps,” Rory said, voice low.  “Are they really fragments of dead souls?”
            Looking sidelong as J.T., I saw a muscle in his jaw twitch slightly.  Phelan glanced back over his shoulder again as we started down the hill toward the turned earth that sheltered our dead.
            “Some say they are.  Not always, though, in my experience.” Phelan stared at J.T. for a moment.
            The bigger man pushed past him and headed down the hill.  “Let’s get on with this before we lose daylight completely.”
            Carolyn gave me a long, worried look and I shook my head slightly.  That was just another set of issues they’d work through at their own pace—forcing it wasn’t going to help, not yet.”
            Thom leaned close and murmured, “Was it something he said?”
            “Yeah,” I said quietly, watching J.T. start to savagely set the tiki torches around the perimeter of the burial mound.  “Or more to the point, something he didn’t say.”
            Thom frowned, following my gaze to J.T.  He shook his head slightly.  “And I thought I had problems.”
            I choked back a laugh and shook my head. “You don’t know the half of it.”
            “Maybe I should.”
            I looked at Thom for a long moment, then nodded.  “Maybe.”  I just hope you’ll be able to handle what he has to say.