Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi by John Grant Page A

Joanna had some difficulty keeping track of the conversation, because she'd been belting into the bottle in the kitchen ever since she'd got back, and Ronnie had to repeat the information two or three times before it registered properly on her. What she really wanted to do was yell, You're the mother of a shapeshifter, you stupid cunt! And you know you are, but you don't seem to realize just how desperately, desperately important it is that you denounce him, denounce him to the world!
    Or would denunciation be enough? The telephone conversation had finished some while ago without Joanna having been aware of the fact, and she was now sitting in the drawing-room, hauling deeply on a cigarette. Her throat hurt, and she knew smoking was making it worse in the long term; but in the short term each inhalation brought a few moments of blessed relief from the pain.
    The thing that had initially attracted her to Steve Gilmour – what she'd at first interpreted as his elemental vitality, his unabashed masculinity – had not been an illusion. What had been at fault was the gloss she'd put on her perception. He was indeed something elemental, and he was indeed rippling with the raw stuff and potency of life; but he was more powerful than any human being should rightly be. She hadn't any proper idea of where he might be drawing his energies from, but she suspected that he had some kind of direct connection with the earth itself: no mere animal could be as stuffed full of the élan vital as he was. When she'd been thinking of him just now as a shapeshifter she'd been grossly undervaluing him in her own estimation: yes, he was a shapeshifter, but that was only one small fraction of the whole of him. He had transformed himself – she now fully credited this – into not just a single wolf but a whole, huge host of them. Dracula, according to the stories, had been able to transmute at will into a plague of rats; but rats were small creatures, not powerful carnivores that weighed each as much as a grown man.
    And now Steve had manifested himself to her as a bearded policeman. She hadn't looked closely at the man's face as he'd preceded her into the Blue Horse and looked around the gloomy bar, but she was sure he hadn't been Steve then – not at first. Even while he'd been kneeling beside Jas's lifeless form he'd still been just another bobby on patrol. But at some time immediately after that the spirit of Steve – did Steve have a spirit, or was he a spirit? – had come into him, transforming him, overwhelming him.
    She had three more bottles left untouched in the kitchen, and was worried that wouldn't be enough to see her through until the morning.
    Oh, shit, she'd just remembered: Jas's funeral. That was what, ostensibly, Ronnie had been phoning her about. There seemed something vaguely wrong with the fact that he was being bundled into the ground so very rapidly after his death, but for the moment Joanna couldn't work out what it was. Her mind probed once or twice at its own unease, but each time retreated almost immediately. It made sense to bury him as fast as possible, she rationalized wretchedly, before the body began to decompose; that must be why.
    She couldn't remember what time Ronnie had said the service was going to be – if indeed Ronnie had given her a time at all – but she gaped at her watch and saw that it was four o'clock already. Four pm sounded like a respectable sort of a time to be holding a funeral; and as if she'd cued them the Bloody Bells started up their doleful chorus in the steeple of St Leonard's across the way. Getting to her unsteady legs, Joanna slowly moved to the window and pulled back the curtain. There was already a double line of mourners moving slowly up the path towards the church door.
    She ought to be among them. Jas had known her aunt, hadn't he? And he'd been kind to Joanna herself after Aunt Jill's death, refusing to accept any money for those two pints of Royal Oak, to symbolize his