Kate Daniels 02 - Magic Burns

out praying to Morrigan, and then fumbled just enough to give Morfran an opening. Maybe Morfran managed to make a deal with Esmeralda. She wanted knowledge and he offered it to her. Taliesin, Morfran’s half brother, served as a druid for King Arthur after Merlin. It follows that Morfran was probably also a druid. Who else would’ve taught Esmeralda druidic rites?”
    Andrea leaned forward. “Okay but to what purpose? Why go through all that trouble?”
    â€œI don’t know. If you were a god, what would you want?”
    I refilled Aunt B’s teacup and then my own.
    â€œLife,” Raphael said.
    â€œI’m sorry?”
    â€œI would want life. All they do is look down on us from wherever they exist but they never get to take part. Never get to play.”
    â€œIt doesn’t work like that,” Andrea said. “Post-Shift theory says a true deity can’t manifest in our world.”
    â€œYou see reports of deities all the time,” Raphael said. He was kneading her shoulders again.
    She shook her head. “Those aren’t actual true deities. They’re conjurer’s constructs, wicker men for their imagination. Basically magic molded into a certain shape. They have no sense of self.”
    My brain had difficulty wrapping around the fact that deities actually existed. I knew the theory as well as anybody: magic had the potential to give thought and will substance. Faith was both will and thought, and prayer served as the mechanism to merge them and to catalyze the magic, defining it much like a spoken incantation defined the will of the in-cantor. Practically, it meant if many people had a specific enough image of their deity and prayed hard to it, the magic might oblige and deliver the deity into existence. The Christian God or the neo-Wiccan “goddess” would probably never gain an actual form, because the beliefs of their faithful were too varied and their power was too nebulous, too encompassing. But something specific like Thor or Pan could theoretically come to life.
    I held that “theoretically” like a shield between me and Morrigan and Morfran. Few things are more frightening than the thought of your god coming to life. There is no such thing as privacy between a deity and his worshipper. There are no secrets, no glossed-over failures. Only promises kept and abandoned, sins committed and imagined, and raw emotion. Love, fear, reverence. How many of us are ready to have our lives judged? What would happen if we were found wanting?
    Andrea’s voice penetrated my thoughts. “First, most people imagine their deity within some magical realm. I mean, what worshipper pictures Zeus strolling down the street with a thunderbolt under his arm? To manifest on Earth would require independent will on the part of the deity. That’s a pretty big hurdle right there. Second, deities run on the faith of their congregations like cars run on gasoline. The moment the magic ebbs, the flow of faith cuts off. No juice, no powers. Who knows what would happen to a god? They could hibernate, they could die, they could be jerked out of existence…”
    In my head Saiman’s voice said, It’s magic time. Time of the gods.
    â€œThe magic is simply not that strong and the shifts are too frequent for a deity to appear…”
    â€œUnless she does it during a flare,” I said.
    Andrea opened her mouth and closed it with a click.
    â€œDuring the flare, when the magic is at its peak for several hours, a deity could manifest and vanish back to its hiding place before the tech hits.”
    Aunt B set her cup on the table. “If that’s so, nothing good will come of it. Gods aren’t meant to meddle in our business. Good or bad, we’re running things our own way.”
    I looked at Andrea. “You said something really smart a couple of minutes ago, about the boy being reborn through the cauldron. Manifestation is a rebirth, in a sense. What if the cauldron is Morrigan’s way into our world? A cauldron is missing from the Sisters of the Crow’s gathering place. I saw the imprints of its legs and it was huge. I don’t think even Curran could lift it. Who would bother to take a giant cauldron unless it was really important?”
    Andrea sighed. “It makes sense, I suppose.”
    â€œOne big problem with this theory. I have no clue how the Shepherd and Red’s necklace fit into it. Everybody wants the