Shapechanger's Birth Page 11

  A cold rifle-barrel poked her in the face and Mary looked up to stare at one of the robbers sitting his horse beside the coach.

  "Come down from there, Missy."

  As she took in the details of his outfit — stained shirt, raggedy pants, belt, cross-strap for a powder horn and a leather pouch — she knew that Barbara and Bridget had made it to a stand of willow that sided the miniscule river at her back and were hiding in it. Good.

  The knowledge that the girls in the willows were staring at her kept her from launching herself off the coach and ripping the life out of the man with her invisible razor claws, then go raging through the men and horses like a hurricane of slashing invisible glass.

  They were just four stupid men who were not very competent robbers if their clothes and equipment was any indication. The fourth man, who had hung back and was just now trotting his horse up to his companions, was actually a boy barely fifteen, if that.

  Though old enough to fire a rifle and murder, she thought.

  The oldest of them, the man in front, looked very like the dead guard and the boy driver. She glanced down at the driver. He would live, though he was unconscious now. Good.

  Mary nodded at the driver. "Family?"

  "The gutless twig. Yes."

  Mary shook her head, face pale with apparent fear. Actually it was because her body had automatically reshaped her skin to leather-like hardness and pushed all her surface blood out of it. A knife would be hard-put to cut her now.

  The man on the horse on the other side of the leader leered at her, said, "I've got first dibs on her."

  The leader shook his head impatiently, obviously intending to be the first to rape her.

  She scrambled down from the driver's seat, deliberately awkward, on the side of the coach with the riders, which was opposite the riverlet and the willows. Protected from the view of the girls in the willows she could now deal with the robbers without revealing too much about herself to her friends.

  "Please don't hurt me. Please. I'll do anything you want. Please. "

  As she spoke she was walking with apparently trembling legs toward the horseman. The idiot was not even pointing his rifle at her.

  She laid one hand beseechingly on his leg. An automatic esoteric body probe told her that he was starving. And sick.

  Neither lessened her anger. She casually reached up to grasp the barrel of the rifle. With a quick twist of her extrahuman muscles she captured his hand with a finger in the trigger guard and broke his wrist and several fingers.

  As he gasped in shock and pain she grabbed his belt with her other hand and hauled him off his horse toward her. As he fell Mary released his belt and fisted her hand. Before he struck the ground her fist struck his temple like a pile-driver, exploding the brain inside it, the motion lightning fast even to her speeded-up senses that made the world seem to move in slow motion.

  Which gave her all the more time to feel the pain as the flesh over her knuckles split. "Shit!" she screamed, shaking the hurt hand. As she did so her body sucked the blood back inside her skin, zipped the wound closed, and switched the pain to numbness.

  As this was happening, however, her other hand — still grasping the rifle — jerked on the rifle so hard and fast that it snapped off the trigger finger of the man on the ground. She whacked the horse with the gun and it crow-hopped sideways, ramming into the second robber's horse. That horse reared, then took off at a dead run, the body of its rider bouncing along behind with a foot caught in a stirrup.

  The third rider was leveling his rifle at her. She drew the rifle in her hand back over her shoulder and whipped it toward the rider. The rifle flew from her hand, windmilling end over end with a WHICK-Whick-whickering sound. It narrowly missed the gunman's head, who ducked as it passed. The motion was arrested as his head exploded sideways. Edward and his revolver had not gone far.

  She danced out of the way of the third man's horse, and turned her attention to the last of the men.

  He was off his horse, apparently smart enough to realize that an untrained farm horse was not a stable platform for a shot. He had his rifle pointed toward her but was not aiming and had not pulled the trigger.

  He was backing up instead, crying, shaking his head, and saying something. She advanced on him like a tigress gliding toward prey, eyes locked on him, unable in her anger to hear what plea he was making.

  She grabbed the barrel of the rifle and it fired straight into her heart. She had time enough to step back, see a bullet strike him from Edward's gun, and fall backward, dying. The world went away.

  ... dying, she found, was easy.... She relaxed, fell away into darkness, with no down, only away....

  In that infinite comforting sea floated a ghostly cloud, lit within by an invisible moon. Seeing better as her vision adjusted to the dark, she saw fuzzy cloud-shape resolve into delicate misty leaves and evanescent branches leading down to a ghostly trunk.

  As the view brightened more she saw that the tree was a construct of darting fireflies. Fairy-glass threads floated out from the tree, one of them pointing toward her.

  The view was brighter still — and she saw that at the end of every thread was an infinitesimal eye. Her viewpoint was in one of those eyes, turned back toward herself. She was her own mirror.

  She wanted another view, and instantly her viewpoint switched to another eye, in another instant its focus switched back toward herself. From this viewpoint the trunk was pointing not down but away and down. She was above herself — if directions meant anything in this infinite ocean.

  Within the tree she saw a darker twin tree perfectly contiguous with the its brighter self except for the threads and their eyes. The bright tree had grown from the darker like vines from a trellis....

  She was sitting in the coach, slouched against one side. There was a shawl over her head. Of course. The others thought she was dead. No, she had been dead, as far as they could tell, anyway.

  The others ... There they were, visible in some new esoteric vision — soul vision? — as bright trees of light. To one side of her was Bridget. In the seat across from her was Barbara and ... the driver. Hmm. The young boy and Barbarous were awfully close together.

  Have to be gentle about coming alive again. Didn't want to scare them.

  Mary shifted her body ever so slightly. Then again. Then again, a little more vigorously .

  No one noticed.

  "Damn it!" she said, sitting up and pulling the shawl off her. "Don't you people pay attention to what's going on around you?"

  Bridget gave a little scream and clapped a hand over her mouth. She stared at Mary, her face pale. Barbara — looked at her with great interest. A smile bloomed on her face. "You're alive!"

  Barbara paused. "Aren't you?" The interested look came back.

  Mary sat up. She looked down at her chest. It was still bloody — dried, of course — and the dress was torn, but she knew without looking that her body was perfectly whole again.

  "Yes. I'm fine. Better than fine actually. But I'm really hungry. Where's Edward?"

  As she asked the question she knew the answer. She sensed another soul, though the sensation was very weak. Her new soul-sense was going to sleep.

  Whups! What was this? There was another soul up there. Very weak, though.

  She thought of what had happened to the five would-be robbers. The one still alive could only be the last one killed.

  She could just let him drift away. He had tried to kill Edward and collaborated to rob her and her friends.

  Though come to think of it, he had not succeeded, had he? Had he deliberately missed when he fired at Edward? And he had not wanted to kill her. It had been her own stupidity that had done that. By jerking on the gun in his hands she had inadvertently committed suicide.

  "Warn Edward that I'm alive and coming up," she told Barbara. Bridget obviously was not yet up to the task. Her paleness was gone but she still acted stunned.

  Barbara grinned and turned her head to shout out the wi
ndow.

  "Edward?"

  "Yeah," came back the shouted answer.

  "Stop the coach. Mary is alive!"

  "What!" The couch slowed to an abrupt stop. Mary heard Edward's boots strike the ground and a moment later he appeared at the door closest to her and looked in.

  "You are alive!"

  "Yes. And I'm in perfect health. Look, I don't want to be abrupt. But I have to do something up top. "

  She pushed the door open, forcing him to back up. She leaped upward, landed on the roof, saw a body sprawled there. A quick glance showed the four robber's horses trailing behind on ropes, a body folded over each saddle and no doubt tied there.

  She quickly knelt and put her hands on each temple of the young robber. And dropped into his body space.

  Yes. There was his soul, contiguous with the dark mirror image of his brain. But it was very dim, fading and loosening its hold on his body. Mary swooped like a hawk in the vast vault that was his body.

  Quickly she found the problem. Edward's bullet had missed his heart but plowed through his chest, struck a rib, bounced, and exited. She quickly set to giving his body instructions on how to fix the problems.

  While his body did its repairs she "flew" around inside it finding other problems. None needed immediate attention. In fact, after his body had healed his gunshot wound it would be able to fix all the other health problems without further intervention from her.

  Except one. This boy was almost starved to death. No wonder the robbers had been plying this trade. Perhaps they had no other.

  She came back to her own body and looked around. The young driver lay in the grass beside the road, Barbara sitting beside him, and Bridget was standing nearby. Edward was back in the driver's seat where he was keeping the horses controlled — though they did not appear particularly unruly. They were munching on the grass on the side of the road.

  "Let's park and fix some food. I need to eat right away. And so will this young man." She nodded at the boy robber, who was still unconscious. He would stay that way until she woke him up.

  A half hour later Mary and the boy robber were finishing devouring the last of the provisions the passengers had brought with them, bread and cheese and dried meat, washed down with water from the riverlet beside them.

  "Now," she said to the robber and the driver — still glued to Barbara's side, she noticed. "Tell us everything."

  The two young men told the same story, from different viewpoints, and with various corrections of the other along the way. The guard and the leader of the robbers were brothers, uncles to the driver and the boy robber. Though the two young men looked to be brothers, they were actually cousins. The three other men in the gang were friends of the two older men.

  All of them had been out of work off and on for a long time, and taken up robbery to survive. Some of them had taken to the life readily, adding a little rape and torture to the mix when they wanted to have fun. The two younger men had been sickened but trapped by the older men. They had not the slightest doubt they would be murdered if they resisted in any way.

  Which is what had happened with the driver. When the young man had balked about the robbery — his glance at Barbara revealed why — and tried to change the guard's mind about the robbery, he had been stabbed.

  Mary drank another swig of the water — really quite delicious, she thought, idly teasing out the several tastes blended into it.

  "I think," she said, "that we're going to change our story a little bit. You," she pointed at the young robber, "are going to become the guard. When we get to Cork you will collect his pay. And I'll give you a 'bonus' for your bravery in fighting off the robbers. It will be generous one." She could well afford that, what with the money she had saved over the two years and the money she had had before coming to the orphanage.

  She looked around the group. "Agreed?"

  There were no real objections, though Barbara pointed out that the story needed some work. Mary suggested that Mary and Edward ride the rest of the way to Cork City on the driver's seat, while those inside rehearsed their story.

  "Don't try to get it perfect. And for God's sake don't practice so much you sound like you're reciting it."

  A little while later the coach topped a rise and it was obvious that they had reached the highest point of the slowly rising land through which they had been traveling. On each side a green hill rose. Ahead, dropping quickly away before them, was the side of a green valley. At the bottom was a city, Cork, buildings like toy blocks strewn almost at random at first sight.

  A second later the jumble resolved itself into squares separated by streets, with a two-stranded river — the Lee — winding from right to left, from west to east, and then twisting away south toward the sea and Ireland's third-largest sea port .

  "I thought you were dead," Edward said. It was the first thing he had said in a long while.

  "I was," Mary said. She grinned at him. "But a werecat can't be killed. At least, not permanently."

  Of course she was not a werecat. A bullet through the brain, among other things, would kill her. She was Granny McCarthy who, if she could avoid getting killed once too often, might just have quite a nice life ahead.

  She looked at the panorama before her. A quite nice life. There.

  Enter the Cat Lady

  Spring, 1857

  Oh, bother. She was in trouble again. Try not to lose your temper this time , she admonished herself. Even for a master laundress with extranatural powers, blood was hard to get out of silk taffeta. Resignedly she watched the tall strong-looking man approach her through the abandoned botanical garden.

  All but every fifth gas light in the street lamps of downtown Cork City had been turned off at midnight, so he was a faceless hulk on this moonless night. The lonely streetlights reflected off the waters of the North Channel of the Lee River as they slid smoothly toward the sea.

  The day had begun well and, as usual, before sunup, at least for her and Bridget. Barbara got to sleep later, because her work was here at the home of Elizabeth and her husband, retired English Army major Denis Leckie. It was in a middle-class residential area in tree-shrouded south Cork City. Elizabeth and Denis had recently had the youngest of their big family leave the roost. The addition of the three young women filled up the empty rooms and added a modest but welcome amount of money. Major Leckie's pension was not large.

  Unseasonable warmth had moved through the area in the night so that the light frost that usually laid delicate lace on the streets during February was missing. Spring had sprung early this year, 1857, on the south edge of Ireland.

  In loose company with three or four neighbors, the two young women walked several blocks to Bandon Street, their breath puffing white in the cold air, arms around their bodies and hunched over to keep warm. Or at least that's what Bridget did. Mary imitated her so as not to seem odd. In actuality Mary adjusted her skin so that it let only a little of the cold through it, just enough to remind her that ordinary humans would be uncomfortably cold and cue her to imitate them.

  The "bus" that soon lumbered into view was a four-wheeled cargo wagon that had been filled with bench seats and a canvas cover. When she and Bridget had first begun riding the bus it had been a weathered grey, but recently the outside had been painted red.

  Four big horses, each two-by-two, drew the vehicle. It rumbled northeast into the city, slowly enough so that the two young women and the people behind them could swing up and into it easily and proffer their few pence to the driver.

  "Good morning, Mrs. Ahern," Mary said. "How's your back?"

  "Just fine, dearie, those hands of yours are magic." Mary's smile at that was amused as well as friendly. The grey-haired woman was just using an expression, but had unknowingly spoken the truth.

  The previous day Mary had massaged her sore back on the bus into downtown Cork and probed into the old woman's body with her invisible extranatural hands. She had found the problem there — a bone sickness — and instructed Hester Ahern
's body to fight off the sickness. The woman's body had echoed Mary's command back to her strongly, so she knew that Mrs. Ahern's body would do a good job.

  Most people's bodies could repair themselves, and better when Mary commanded them to. A very few could not; they did not echo Mary's commands back to her. To cure illness in those people she had to intervene more directly.

  Bridget was chattering away with a woman near her own age — nineteen — and was unusually animated. Normally she appeared serene and almost majestic, but since coming to Cork and becoming a successful businesswoman she seemed to be becoming younger, not older.

  Over the rumble and clip-clop of the horses' hooves the two chatted with other passengers who got onto and off of the bus. After ten months in their new home they had gotten to know quite a number of other people. It was a welcome difference from the years before when they had known only the other orphans in the Quaker mission-and-orphanage in faraway Kilrush.

  They dropped off the bus, at Oliver Plunkett Street, while it trundled down Grand Parade near the very center of Cork City's downtown. The sun was a half-hour or so into the sky but they could only see its red rays bathing the tiptop of the buildings on their left as they walked one block east on Plunkett, then turned left and north into Princes Street.

  Their laundry was near a block further on, facing onto wide, busy Patrick Street. They had leased an entire building of four stories, though it was so narrow and jammed against its neighbors that all the buildings on the block looked like one long building. They had a good deal on it from a Unitarian businessman who had been recommended to them by the local Society of Friends church, of which they were nominal members.

  Bridget unlocked the front door and flipped the warning bells into place so that they would jingle to announce anyone following her. Mary slipped in past her to open a box of matches on the countertop and strike one alight. It gave an initial orange flare and a sulfurous stench not quite blocked from Mary's nose as she held her breath and moved to light the first gas lamp.