anyway. I did look Indian. My coloring was wrong, but in black-and-white photos I looked like I didn’t have a drop of Irish blood in me. I’d changed my last name to Walker when I turned eighteen and graduated from high school. Nowhere official. I just filled out every piece of paperwork, even the diploma application, with Walker. My birth certificate was the only piece of paper I owned that had Walkingstick as my official last name.
“My name is Marie D’Ambra,” the woman said.
“You don’t look Italia—” I nearly bit my tongue off.
“Adopted,” she replied, amusement sparkling in her eyes.
Oh. “My mother was black Irish,” I said after a moment. “I got her coloring.” It seemed like a fair exchange of information. “Why was that guy after you? What was chasing you? It didn’t look like a dog pack. Exactly.”
Marie inclined her head. It looked gracious. How did she do that? “It wasn’t. His name is Cernunnos, and he is the leader of the Wild Hunt. It was the Hunt who chased me. Why did you come to help me?”
I looked sideways at Gary, who shrugged almost imperceptibly. I wouldn’t think a guy with shoulders that wide could shrug imperceptibly. It should be more like plate tectonics. I hoped I was in that kind of shape when I was seventy-something. Marie waited patiently, and I shrugged more perceptibly. I really didn’t want to say, “I felt like I was going to puke if I didn’t,” but I heard myself saying it anyway. I curled a lip, shook my head, and added, “You looked like you needed help. I felt like I had to try to find you.”
One half of her mouth curved up in a smile. I stopped hating her. I couldn’t hate a smile like that. Her smile made the world seem like it would all be okay. “A gwyld at the crossroads,” she murmured, and I frowned at her.
“A what?”
She shook her head and did the wonderful half smile again. “Nothing. I’m sorry for cutting you. I thought you had to be one of Cernunnos’s people. I couldn’t imagine why anyone else would be looking for me.”
“One of his people? Not him himself?” That sounded wrong. “He himself.”
Marie shook her head. “Christian earth. Even Cernunnos can only stand on it a few minutes. None of the Hunt can at all.”
I looked at Gary. Gary looked at me. We both looked at Marie. She smiled the tight little smile of someone who knows she sounds crazy. It made me feel better. “This isn’t the best place to talk about this,” she said.
“Why not? You just said the guy who was after you can’t come here,” Gary said.
“No, but he can send people who can,” I said before Marie could. She nodded. “If he couldn’t, she wouldn’t have thought we might be trouble.” I touched my cheek gingerly. It was still bleeding. “An emergency room might be a good place to go. This is going to need stitches, and you should get looked at, too.”
Marie extended her arms, palms up. Half a dozen cuts still oozed red as she looked at them. She looked like a clumsy suicide attempt. “They’ll heal,” she said dismissively. “He knows I was hurt. I’d rather not go somewhere so obvious.”
“You’d rather bleed?” I demanded. Gary cleared his throat.
“I got a first-aid kit in the car.”
I glared at him. He smiled and shrugged. “Sure,” I said, “the pretty one whose face isn’t cut up gets her way. Fine.” I stomped off the dais, picking the butterfly knife up off the pulpit. It made a satisfying series of clicks as the blade and handles slapped against each other when I closed it.
“Hey. That’s mine.” Marie had to take two steps to every one of mine, even after she ran to catch up with me.
“Not anymore, it isn’t. Call it a finder’s fee.”
“You didn’t find it.”
“I found you.” I shoved the knife into my waistband. Two steps later the elastic shifted and the knife slid down my leg and out of my pants, clattering to the floor. Gary choked back a guffaw and Marie grinned broadly.
I picked up the knife with as much dignity as I could muster and stalked out of the church.
I thought going into a diner all bloody and bandaged was more conspicuous than going to an emergency room, but Marie insisted. Gary butterfly-bandaged my cheek and wrapped up Marie’s arms while I sulked. As a gesture of peace he turned the meter off, but my face hurt too much for me to be grateful.
I dragged a coat out of my carry-on and pulled it on over my bloody T-shirt as we went into the diner. Marie walked in like she was daring the world to comment on her bloodstains. No one did. We sat down, silent until the waitress brought us our drinks. I didn’t know what it was about food, but it always seemed to make it easier to talk.
Marie folded her hands around an enormous glass of orange juice. I had a coffee. Actually, this being Seattle, I didn’t have just a coffee, even at a cheap diner. I had a grande double-shot latte with a shot of amaretto. Just the smell of the stuff got me high.
“Cernunnos leads the Wild Hunt,” Marie said to her orange juice. “They ride to collect the souls of the dead.” She looked up to see if that cleared things up for us. Gary just waited. He really was having a regular black coffee. I didn’t even know they made that anymore. He’d ordered breakfast, too. I was hungry, but between adrenaline and no sleep, I was pretty sure food would just come back up again. Now that I thought about it, the injection of caffeine probably wasn’t such a great idea on that combination. Food would have been better.
“You ain’t dead,” Gary pointed out. Marie winced, producing a pained smile.
“An oversight.”
“Fill in us dumb ones,” I said. “What’s a wild hunt?”
“The Wild Hunt,” she corrected.
“Okay, the wild hunt. What is it?”
She sat back, her hands still wrapped around the orange juice glass. She hadn’t drunk any yet. “Cernunnos was an old Celtic god,” she said slowly. “When Christianity came to Ireland and Britain, his cult was so powerful that it took a while for it to die out. And it never entirely faded.”
“Like any pagan religion,” I interrupted. Marie lifted her eyes to look at me. The muscle in my shoulder blade twitched again and I shrugged, trying to loosen it. “The Peop—the Cherokee still practice their old ways, too. Faith is hard to stomp out.” The People. Walkingstick. What was wrong with me?
“Like any pagan religion,” she agreed. “Cernunnos is the Celtic Horned God, essentially a fertility figure but with very deep ties to death as well. There are Norse and German counterparts, Woden, Anwyn, rooted in a common ancestry.” She waved her hand absently, brushing aside the trivia.
“And he’s after you.” I infused my voice with as much sarcasm as I could. It was pathetically little. She was too pretty to be sarcastic at, even if she was crazy.
“Yes.” Marie nodded and dragged her orange juice to the edge of the table.
“You seriously think you got some kind of god after you?” Gary asked. Marie nodded.
