Unfallen Dead

“Can you point me in the right direction?” I asked.

The golden-cloaked king shuddered into view. “The Wheel of the World turns as It will. It is not mine to lead even a sliver of It.”

The wild man returned. “The wielder wheels and is wheeled but chooses his own path. We are the Wheel and Its instrument.”

The robed man towered up. “The Ways seal and unseal. A needle binds even as it pierces.”

A great wind rose. The figure pulsated as its forms sought to dominate each other, then spun outward in a flash of white. It vanished. He vanished. They. Whatever the hell it was. The mist wall wavered and dissipated.

The dagger in my right boot twisted in its sheath, digging into my ankle. A spell maintained it as a short fighting knife most of the time, but it changed shape through some means I didn’t understand. Heat emanated from the hilt as I withdrew it. It squirmed in my hand and stretched into the full length of a sword. The last time it did that, I was in a fight for my life.

I faced an opening in a wall of standing stones. A brief glimpse of Nigel leaning over Ceridwen flashed by. The scene slid to a vision of the Civil War monument on the Common, then another of the townhouses on Beacon Hill. The perspective never remained for long, as if the opening itself was in constant motion. My stomach did a little flip. I was looking at Boston through the perspective of the fairy ring. I was in the hazy column of essence, really and truly beyond the veil. I had entered TirNaNog.

CHAPTER 31

An enormous circle of standing stones surrounded me, enclosing several acres of beaten grass. Granite lintels ran along the tops of the standing stones except for a single break in the circle opposite my position. In the center, nine trilithons stood, arches formed of two standing stones with a lintel across their tops. They made a crescent around a towering pillar stone tapering to a height of several meters. I had seen paintings of such places, fantasies I thought, of what an active stone circle would look like. It was Stonehenge on steroids.

A woman in an ancient druidic robe brushed past me and approached the portal to Boston. When she stepped between the standing stones, gray spots of essence materialized like a barrier. She pressed forward, muttering, and melted through to the other side. A perplexed look came over her face as she stared at a Boston police officer, and her body shield activated as the scene swept away from me. However she made it through, it looked a lot less painful than when I had done it.

Around the circle, the other portals between the standing stones showed a steep grass embankment outside the circle. A few standing stones framed an opalescent haze of essence that resonated the same way as the fairy ring back on Boston Common. Across the i

I paused by a trilithon in the center. The lone breach in the outer circle of lintel stones aligned with the back of the crescent-shaped arrangement of center stones. A long line of standing stones marched off into the wide field beyond the stone circle. Stone circles have a causeway approach and an entry portal, and this one was no different. Bigger by a factor of ten, but classic.

The place resonated essence in a pale shadow of what I knew, except for two things. The pillar stone at the center shone stark blue-white, an intense concentration of Power. And a trailing streak of two body signatures — Powell’s and Meryl’s. Their trail led from the Boston portal, around the center of the henge, and out the entrance portal. Powell had come to find one of the Dead and taken Meryl with her outside the circle. I followed them to the gap in the circle.

Beyond the two large stones that flanked the entrance, an earthen embankment surrounded the entire stone circle, rising higher than my head. A ditch lay beyond that, then another embankment, not as high as the first, but still taller than I was. And another ditch beyond it, and another embankment, and on and on with each embankment becoming progressively smaller, while each ditch became shallower. The causeway itself ran straight and flat, lined with paired standing stones for nearly a quarter mile. As the embankments to either side became low enough to see over, a green field came into view and spread for miles outside the standing stones of the avenue. A breeze danced over the grass, sending flowing waves over the surface that caught afternoon sunlight and tossed it back.

At the end of the causeway, the hope that I would find Meryl and leave quickly faded. A few scattered people roamed the field. They had essence signatures with the distinct edge of TirNaNog about them like the Dead within the circle. On the edge of sight, a forest line crouched in several places, dark and motionless. Except for the Dead moving toward me, the only other movement was a dark smudge on the horizon. It was too far off to make out details, but the essence within it shone brighter than everything around it. Whoever was out there was alive.

I hesitated. It would take me hours to reach them. If it was Powell, I could wait until she returned to the circle. One of the few things I knew about the land of the Dead was that time moved at a different pace, sometimes slower, sometimes faster. I had no idea how much time had passed there between Meryl and Powell going in and my arrival. In Boston, it was late evening and still was when scenes from the Common flashed by the portal. In TirNaNog, it felt like late afternoon. Maybe Meryl didn’t have hours. Maybe she didn’t have minutes. My chest hurt at the thought that I might be too late.

The spear flickered with essence. The landscape blurred, and I had a strange falling sensation. The feeling passed as quickly as it came. I didn’t know what caused it, unless the mass in my head had started causing physical damage to my brain. A faint sound of thunder rolled toward me. I didn’t have time to worry about it. I started jogging, keeping my eyes on the movement along the horizon.

Essence lit up the spear again, and the landscape blurred roughly. I stumbled, uncertain where my feet were landing, feeling light-headed. Recovering my balance, I started ru

Somehow I was jumping through the landscape. I froze. Disappearing from one spot and appearing in another wasn’t just jumping. It was teleporting. I was teleporting. The spear vibrated in my hand as I stared down at it.

Joe once told me that when he teleported, he looked for the thing he wanted until he found it, thought about going to it, then he just went. It was a typical Joe explanation. It sounded too simple, so I dismissed it as pointless. When I was standing at the end of the entrance avenue, the spear had flashed when I thought of reaching the horizon. When it did, I was closer to my destination.

Taking a deep breath, I pointed the spear and concentrated on the dark line of travelers. The spear spiked with essence. My sensing ability opened like it never had, my i