Mercedes Lackey: Wintermoon

“Joanie?”

“It’s Blade, dammit, it’s the full moon.” I twitched around to look at Billy, then twitched forward again. “I’m going to have to explain it to Morrison, I don’t want to explain it twice.” I leaned forward, as if my doing so would urge the cab to a faster pace. “Dammit, dammit, dammit, stupid stupid stupid Jo.”

“Hey,” Gary said, surprisingly quiet under my litany of abuse. “You got no reason to be callin’ yourself stupid, lady.”

Unexpected sniffles hit me right in the nose. “No right,” I mumbled. “Not no reason.”

“Close enough for this old dog.”

The cell phone rang and I nearly jumped out of my skin as I answered it. “God, I hate these things.”

“I assume you’re talking about the phone,” Morrison said. “The park’s clearing out. What the hell is going on, Walker? You’d better not be screwing with me.”

“I would not screw with you,” I promised fervently. “It’s the full moon, Morrison, my mother died on the full moon. It was the solstice, now it’s the equinox and the moon is full again. Check the records, I bet that’s what it was twenty-seven years ago, too.”

“How the hell am I supposed to check the records on the full moon from thirty years ago?”

“There’s this really cool Web site,” I started, then screwed up my face and grabbed the oh-shit handle as Gary took a corner by use of the Force, without looking where he was going and with no apparent regard to life or limb. “Look, it doesn’t matter, I know I’m right. He’s killing people on the full moons of winter. This is the last one. Tonight’s the equinox. I’m going to stop him.”

“How?”

“I have absolutely no idea.” I hung up, not wanting to hear Morrison’s response to that. To my utter surprise, the phone didn’t ring again. Less than two minutes later we pulled into the park’s lot. I tumbled out of the cab almost before it stopped moving and ran for the baseball diamond as fast as I could. Gary and Billy came after me, shouting.

I expected to slam into the Blade’s red barrier with such force that it’d throw me back. Instead I flung myself at it so hard that I skidded ten feet in the snow when I hit nothing at all. I said something witty and intelligent, like, “Da fuh?” around the mouthful of snow I got for my troubles, and scrambled to my feet, waiting for all hell to break loose.

Somehow, despite everything, I didn’t expect it to break loose by way of crimson falling down the face of the moon to cast a bloody shadow on the earth. Everything real seemed to go away: the bite of cold air, the shine of moonlight on fresh snow, my friends’ voices yelling somewhere behind me. I stood there with my jaw hanging open, staring up at the bleeding moon, while a sliver fell from it and tumbled all the way to earth.

Just before it hit the ground, it flared a cloak of blackness that cut the air with a banshee scream. Then the cloak settled, the Blade walking forward, tall and thin and hatchet faced. I could feel power rolling off it, heavy as the sea, and with as much concern for the threat I provided as the ocean itself might be.

Right about then it struck me that I was so low on power I’d been punch-drunk and giggling less than an hour earlier, and that out of all the days to pick a fight with something that looked like Morticia Addams’s incredibly evil older brother, today might well be the worst possible choice.

The Blade came toward me, faster than a run, without any visible means of locomotion. He simply glided over the blood-colored snow, picking up speed that was all the more eerie for its silence. I did a mental check over my list of available weapons.

There weren’t any.

I was going to die.

To my surprise, I discovered I could live with that. I let out the best war cry I could manage—it had nothing on Jacquie’s gleeful yelling, but it wasn’t bad—and flung myself at the Blade with everything I had.

Which was nothing.

The Blade wasn’t prepared for that.

I hit him in the stomach, a shoulder-first tackle Gary would’ve been proud of. It was like smashing into a flexible block of ice: cold split straight down into my bones and made the marrow into something that carried icy death. He screamed—for the first time I realized the metal-on-metal shriek I’d heard time and again was actually coming from the Blade, a banshee wail straight out of hell.

A banshee wail.

If I’d had time, I’d have stopped to beat my head on something. I’d called the haunting shrieks banshee cries without thinking it through all along. The Blade was a banshee. Harbinger of death.

My death, specifically, if I didn’t gain the upper hand. We rolled and thumped across the frozen field, struggling for sheer physical dominance. For a moment I had him, but he wrapped bony fingers around my wrist and cold seared into my skin again, numbing my arm all the way to the elbow. I was going to have a dandy case of frostbite if I got out of this alive.

He flung me backward over his head, using my arm like a fulcrum. I actually cartwheeled in the air, watching the blood moon zip by before I smashed into the snow and skidded. I staggered to my feet, turning just in time to catch the Blade’s shoulder with my gut, an excellent reversal of my tackle a moment earlier. All the air wheezed out of me and I hit the snow again, doing less skidding and more sinking with his weight on top of me. He was heavy for such a skinny thing, as if he’d been emptied of bone and muscle and had cold iron poured into his skin instead. His fingers wrapped around my throat, driving me further into the snow. It felt so warm compared to his hands that for a few seconds I stopped caring, cozy in my snow bed and ready to sleep.

A tiny, offended burst of power flared in my belly, reminding me what real warmth was.

I opened my eyes again, looking up into the Blade’s grimacing rictus. I couldn’t tell if it had ever been human. Skin stretched across its bones so tightly it might’ve been a mummy, eyes with bloody fire lighting them staring wide and empty at me. Its teeth— her teeth, I finally realized: it was, or had been at one time, female. Of course. Banshees were. Her teeth were bared, dry lips pulled back from them. I wasn’t sure she needed to breathe, but her chest was expanding.

Wait. I knew this part. This was where she screamed until my eardrums ruptured. I thought twice in one day was a little much, so I took what warmth the power inside me offered, forced it into my arm, and jabbed upward with two stiffened fingers. Right into her throat.

My fingers went all the way through to her spine with a horrible sound of flesh tearing as easily as paper. The scream turned into an aborted glerk and the banshee loosened her hold on me. I kicked her off and rolled away, clapping my hand to my throat, coughing through bruised muscle for air. For a few seconds we stayed there, both swaying, watching each other warily. The hole in her throat sealed up, not like human flesh would, but like paper was being stretched back to fit into a hole it’d been wrinkled away from.

She pounced again and I ducked, absurdly smug at the startled look that brightened her flame-colored eyes as she went flying over my head. Then she tackled me from behind, smashing my face into the snow. I thought, very clearly, damn, that thing really corners, and had a brief, irrational moment of wanting to try Petite out against her.

Instead I dragged in a lungful of snow and ice as I shoved so deep into the snow that I hit the earth below it. The banshee’s knee was in my back, bearing down with too much weight for me to move. I scrabbled for the worn-out center of power within myself, and came up dry. Apparently I’d blown my one chance when I didn’t finish ripping her head off a minute earlier. I pounded a fist in the snow, weak flailing as I tried to buck her off. It was about as effective as threatening to catch a storm in cotton candy.