Something Magic This Way Comes (27 page)

“Oh. My. God.” George breathed.

“Yes, well,” the young man said, his black eyes flashing. “Don’t make a big deal of it, George.”

“What’s your name,” Harry asked. George shot him a deadly look.

“Raven, Johnny Raven,” the young man replied, smirking at George.

Harry stared. “You’re not . . .”

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Why are you here?” George wanted to know.

“Did you or did you not spend all night calling for help? Now you want to know what I’m doing here? What kind of shaman are you, George? Don’t you think you might have gotten it right?”

“No, I didn’t think I had gotten it right.”

“Well, you very nearly didn’t. That was some big hound that almost got me as I fell into the world, there in Harry’s back yard. Good thing you had those dogs, Harry. They are spirit warriors too.”

“Why did you land in Harry’s back yard, instead of mine?”

“Because Harry needed more help believing than you did, George.”

Just then Beth arrived.

“Did any of you idiots think to get him some clothes?” she demanded, as soon as she saw what was going on. “Harry is a lot bigger than you, but we’ll find you something. Come with me, young Raven.”

She hustled him upstairs to the bedrooms with a nonchalance that belied her awareness of who, or what, the young man actually was. Harry and George stood gaping at her, then stared at each other, and then broke into unstoppable laughter.

Beth and Raven came downstairs. She’d found him some sweats and a pair of sandals that weren’t too huge on him.

“What are you two snickering about? Don’t you know that my Goddess is a Mother?” Beth demanded, with her hands on her hips, as if she was daring them to make something of it.

“Nothing, Beth,” Harry said. “It just was a remarkable sight.”

The young man looked puzzled. “Everybody has a Mother,” he said. “I don’t know what the big deal is.”

Beth said, “I think I know where they’re going to do what they think will be a summoning ritual. My phone calls worked. There’s a big meadow below Snoqualmie Falls. That’s what I hear.”

“That’s what I hear, too,” Raven smirked.

“Well, what can we do?” Harry asked.

“Darryl’s going to be using some type of Wiccan or backward Christian ritual, and I can stick a spoke in that,” Beth said, “if I can get close enough.”

“And I can keep anything else from happening,” Raven said.

“And us?” George asked.

“Strong backs and weak minds,” Raven said. “You get us there, and keep us safe while we do what we do.”

* * *

They all slept for a while, during the day, and started preparing for whatever was going to happen in the late afternoon.

“It isn’t going to happen until the stroke of midnight,” Beth said. “They will be waiting in the meadow. We’ll need to get there early and make sure they can’t find us.”

Harry opened his bottom desk drawer and took out his gun. He checked it, and loaded it, and put the holster under his jacket.

George went out to his car and came back carrying a carved and painted staff that looked like a miniature totem pole. At the top of the staff was a carving of Raven.

“Hey, that’s nice,” Johnny Raven said, preening as he looked at it. “It’s a good likeness!”

Beth snorted. She had made her preparations before she arrived. They all piled into Harry’s green Volvo and headed up over Tiger Mountain.

They parked well away from the falls and took their time walking down toward the meadow. They found a small copse of aspen trees and settled in to wait. No one said much. The moon rose, full and bright. Harry’s watch showed very close to midnight when Darryl and his cohorts arrived. Darryl was wearing a cassock, like a priest. There were an even dozen of them, and one that seemed to be a prisoner. In the moonlight, as they came closer, Harry could see it was a young girl, twelve or thirteen. A virgin, most likely, he thought to himself. Great.

Darryl’s group arranged themselves in a rough circle around him, and two of them held the girl in the center of the circle, in front of their priest. Darryl’s voice rose and fell as he began to chant something.

Suddenly, Beth stood up and moved out of the trees. Darryl stopped speaking and stared at her.

“Darryl, stop this now,” Beth said, “before someone gets hurt. You don’t know what you are doing.”

“And you do, big sister?” Darryl had a large dagger and he was holding it loosely in one hand.

“Yes, I do. What you are doing is evil and dangerous, and you are going to get yourself, all your friends here, and lots of innocent bystanders killed. You cannot release the Wild Hunt on this world.”

“Yes, I can.” Darryl grabbed the girl by the hair, and cut her throat from ear to ear before anyone could move. He held up the bloody dagger and made a cutting motion in front of himself. “By this sacrifice, I cut the veil between the worlds!” he screamed.

“Come to me! Dark ones, come!”

Lightning strobed again and again. Snoqualmie Falls could be seen in all its magnificence, and off to the south, it looked as though Mt. Rainier were illuminated, as if it were full day. Thunder drummed.

Suddenly the meadow was filled with horses and riders. Some of the riders looked human, others hideously eldritch.

The column of riders was stopped in the center of the meadow, facing a young man. Somehow, Johnny had gotten from the aspen grove to the center of the meadow with no one noticing. The lead riders were what appeared to be a woman and a man.

Harry looked a question at Beth. “They’re not
my
Lord and Lady,” she said quietly.

“Oh, but if we are not, Bethany Jones,” the woman creature said staring straight at Beth, “then what are we?”

“You are the dark ones, that have hated men from the time the Goddess created us. I know you for who and what you are, Lady.” Beth stood, defiant.

“You will not be allowed to pass,” Johnny Raven said, into the stillness.

“By you?”

“By me.”

The dark lord spoke for the first time. Harry wished he had never spent so much time reading Tolkien.

“You and what army rides with you?” the voice rasped.

“Me.” George stood next to Johnny, his carved totem staff raised. “The land here belongs to us, not to you. This is not your land. The land itself will resist your passage.”

“You are a fat middle-aged fraud.”

“Perhaps I am,” George nodded. “But you will still not pass while I live.”

The dark lord raised his hand, and George’s staff burst into white hot flame. George was knocked flat on his back, and he didn’t move.

“I defy you, too,” Beth said, with a little bit of a quaver in her voice. She took half a step forward. Half a step because the lady’s upraised hand halted her, frozen, in mid step.

“You had better go home, little bird, and let your betters play,” the dark lord rumbled, with subsonics rolling off each word he said, and each word hit Harry like a punch.

“I guess I’m it,” Harry said.

“You don’t even believe,” the dark lady said. “How can you expect to defeat me?”

“I have always had trouble believing. Now all I can do is ask.” Harry said simply. “Lord help my unbelief, Lord, I am not worthy! Help me now, a sinner, I pray you!”

Johnny Raven’s body began to shimmer, and change. Instead of a slim dark youth, in his place stood a shining figure in some sort of armor, holding a spear.

“You should call more often, Harry!” the figure said. “Now, I think, we have to end this. You,” he pointed at the dark lord and lady and all their host, “shall not pass. You don’t think to argue about it with
me
, do you?”

“No, we will not argue the point with you, Michael. We will go.” The lady turned her mount in the direction of the rent in the sky. She turned back.

“Darryl. Come.” She motioned and he literally flew to the back of her mount and grabbed on behind. The rest of his coven were trying to run through the meadow, but riders ran them down and grabbed each of them in turn.

“And as for the rest of you,” she said, somehow staring at George, and Beth, and Harry directly simultaneously, “this will
not
be forgotten. And I have a very long memory.”

With that, the Hunt turned and rode away slowly across the meadow, picking up speed and then riding up some sort of invisible bridge into the sky; and as they passed through, Michael made a motion with his spear, and the rent Darryl had caused was sealed.

Michael turned and, like really good computer animation, morphed back into the slender young man they’d known as Johnny Raven.

“I thought you were Raven,” George said.

“Who told you that all those traditions were mutually exclusive, George? I can be whoever I need to be.” The young man walked over to where the dead girl lay.

“No matter what, she didn’t deserve this.” He drew his finger across her throat, sealing the cut. “Here, you come back now,” he said, with his hand on her chest. He pushed. She shuddered and gasped.

Beth ran to her and enfolded her. “It’s okay,” she repeated over and over.

Harry looked at Raven or Michael, or whoever he was.

“So now what?”

“We seem to be done here,” the youth replied.

“Will I ever see you again?” George asked.

“Hard to say. Maybe. Then again, maybe not.” The young man cocked his head and his black eyes flashed in the moonlight.

“So what will you do now?” Harry asked.

“Oh, I’ll be around, Harry, I’ll be around.”

The young man turned and walked away. As he walked, he became smaller, and his walk became jerkier and more and more birdlike until he was a very large black bird, walking away through the meadow.

He croaked, flapped his sudden wings, and was gone.

M
ARTHA Jane stood in the cornfield with her face to the sky and her blue eyes closed. Surrounded by the half-grown, green stalks and hearing the insects buzz, she concentrated on the warm wind around her. She called it to her with whispers of promise.

Come to me, be part of me, live through me, as I will live through you. I will grant you my breath as you grant me your strength. Come to me, be part of me . . .”

Martha Jane repeated the chant several more times even as she felt the light breeze stiffen. She reached her hands above her head and beckoned to unseen forces.

The magic rushed to encircle her slight, misshapen body with an invisible yet undeniable power. The dirt devil danced around Martha Jane, straining against her bonds so it could run amok through the vulnerable fields. She silently compelled the power to stay with her and to bring the mini-twister in tighter.

Her sun-bleached hair whipped around her head, and Martha Jane laughed. She reveled in this power for a few seconds. So much of her life was beyond her will, especially her humped shoulder and her mother’s recent death. These tragedies seemed so often to define her life that she sometimes needed to be the one who birthed creation or destruction.

But now it was time to go. Martha Jane needed to finish supper before Daddy and Jediah came in from the fields. She took a breath and pulled the dirt devil even closer. Now was the most critical point of control.

“Magic is a living, breathing thing,” Mama had counseled during Martha Jane’s first lesson. “It always wants to be free, and you can’t ever whip it up so big that you lose it.”

Martha Jane took a steadying breath. She envisioned the unseen forces as her friends, the friends she would have if she weren’t so deformed. She smiled and blew them a kiss from her heart as she wished them well. The dirt devil died at Martha Jane’s feet.

Martha Jane turned and started across the cornfield.

The stalks were at the early stages of wither, and if rain didn’t come soon, they would die. She knew her family couldn’t withstand the loss of even one crop.

Their savings had all been spent on Mama’s and her own medical bills.

As Martha Jane stepped into their dirt road, she heard and then spotted a pickup truck coming around the bend.

“Wonderful,” she said with a heavy sigh. “The Barnetts.”

As they pulled up next to her, Mrs. Barnett looked at Martha Jane with a mix of pity and curiosity. Martha Jane knew that look well. It said, “You should be in an institution. You shouldn’t be walking around like normal folks.” But Mrs. Barnett didn’t say it out loud.

It wouldn’t be polite.

“Is your daddy home, dear?” Mrs. Barnett asked.

“And would you like a ride to your house?”

Mrs. Barnett wore a blue traveling dress which looked hot for the Florida June sun. Her husband was still in field clothes, fresh from working his tobacco crop.

“Yes, ma’am,” Martha Jane replied. “Thank you. Daddy might be back already.”

“Do you need help?”

“No, ma’am.” Martha Jane hurried to the back of the truck and, with a combination move of jump and twist, managed to position herself on the open tailgate.

The ride in the back was pleasant. Martha Jane preferred it to riding in the cab with the couple. True, they only reflected what most of what Brookland thought, but she still didn’t want to talk to them.

Martha Jane had survived one of the nation’s deadliest diseases of the early twentieth century, polio. She was grateful for her life, but she wasn’t grateful for the medical quackery afterward. For instance, the doctors insisted she lie on her wooden floor for four hours a day in the dark to help straighten her spine. It was one of the many stupid things that hadn’t worked.

Now at fifteen, Martha Jane’s left shoulder was bigger than her right, and late at night, when no one could see her sobbing, she swore to avenge the injustice.

Knowing marriage was unlikely for Martha Jane, Mama taught her to call the wind. It wasn’t entirely a proper profession for women, but neither was it forbidden.

Only men were socially acceptable as rainmakers, but calling the wind was such a rare talent there weren’t many mores attached to it yet. Mama had learned both skills in secret from her own father, and they had kept it family business all these years.

She started rainmaking lessons with Jediah, but because of his field work schedule, he didn’t practice much. He always thought he could train later, but he was wrong. Mama died.