C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

This particular minion, though, hung there in midair with rage contorting her papery face as she snarled, “Firstborn daughter, blooded child, Master’s slave is driven wild!”

Oh, hell. I’d forgotten about that. The damned banshees spoke in terrible poems. Last time I’d faced one I was afraid I’d be rhymed to death. Cryptic was bad enough. Cryptic rhymes were rubbing salt in the wound.

But slave was an interesting choice of word. I stayed huddled, trying to remember if the last banshee had responded when I didn’t speak in rhyme. I hoped so, because under pressure like this I couldn’t come up with even a bad poem to save my life. “I don’t mean to go all Spartacus on you, but there’s one sure way out of slavery. If you want to come down here and talk it out I’ll…” Rip your head off with my bare hands was kind of how that sentence ended, but I didn’t think that would go over so well. “…help you.”

Rather than take me up on my generous offer, she screamed and came at me again. Fingernails on chalkboards and metal tearing and hysterical babies and every other hideous, piercing, reverberating sound in the history of mankind rang through that scream, and it tried to shiver my skin off. It actually did get through my shields, not entirely, but enough to crack them. I yelped, as much startled as afraid, then clenched my belly and strengthened the idea of pearlescent shields shimmering around me, Star Trek -like.

It was too late. Somehow she was under the shields, her scream seeping through to suck up against my skin and worm its way deeper. My vulnerabilities were exposed, all the spiderweb cracks in my windshield. She went for them like she knew they were there, endless shrieks wresting them apart. Gary’s disappearance was the newest crack in my facade, and my fear for him grew with each new banshee cry.

I wondered if that was how banshees killed people when they weren’t eviscerating them. Death by screaming. Death by prying at all the cracks that made up a persona until they shattered and the few really unbearable things in a life were exposed and remembered. In that case, they weren’t harbingers of death at all, regardless of what the legends said. They were murderers through and through.

She pushed past my worries about Gary and latched onto a deeper concern. An older one: Morrison. The Almighty Morrison, with his silvering hair and ice-blue eyes and his strong, competent hands. Morrison, who had been so utterly gorgeous the first time I’d laid eyes on him I’d gotten all fourth grade and hit him—metaphorically if not physically—to show him how much I liked him. Morrison with his frustrated grace in deciding to use my powers, powers neither of us understood, to solve cases that had no rational explanation. Morrison with his expectations of me, expectations I desperately wanted to live up to without admitting that to either of us. Morrison in the wilderness of a mountain forest, with the shadow of a tattoo on his shoulder. A tattoo that didn’t really exist. Yet.

I bristled, fingernails digging into the dirt as I shoved back. Morrison was my territory, and I wasn’t about to give him up to a shrieking she-demon from the world beyond. Glee shot through her hideous voice like she’d made a palpable hit, and a vision of Morrison going down under a banshee’s attack swept me.

A vision of Morrison unloading his gun into the banshee’s belly swept me, too. It wouldn’t stop her. Supernatural creatures usually didn’t die from mundane weapons. But it would sure as hell slow her down, and once I got done with this jaunt to Ireland it was my goal in life to never be so far from Morrison’s side that slowing down a monster wouldn’t buy enough time for me to get there and go medieval on its ass.

I snapped my teeth at the banshee in my own sort of savage glee, and somewhere way down at the back of my brain I started worrying that all this snapping and bristling was starting to get very lupine. I had to haul myself back. My arm didn’t itch anymore. It felt like it was on fire instead, and the fire was spreading through my whole body. The very cells were crying out to change, and I was just barely staying on this side of self-aware enough to fight it.

The banshee’s voice went high and almost sweet, and drove right through my skull down to my most buried and most vulnerable concerns. “What’s this, what’s this, she remembers a kiss!” Delicious spite brightened her voice, making it sound like swords scraping. “The Master’s meal was a little wild, bore herself a wee boy child!”

I whispered, “Oh, come on, that’s twice in a row you’ve used wild/child. You can do better than that,” but the mockery wasn’t enough to keep rage from rising as silver in my gaze. I’d given Aidan up for adoption so he could have a better life than my fifteen-year-old self was prepared to offer him. Letting banshees know about his existence and come hunting him did not in any way qualify as better. Maybe fighting to the death to protect a child was stereotypical, but right there, right then, I was okay with that. I sounded raw and cracked as the banshee as I grated, “You will not touch my son.”

I stopped fighting it and let the werewolf take me.

Pure savagery rose in my bones, contorting them with snaps and stretches. The boiling heat within me expanded outward, sudden rush of kinetic energy released. It hurt like scratching a bad itch did: it hurt good. That was wrong, because according to Coyote, shapeshifting was supposed to be a seamless and painless transition, but I’d spent so much time itching and being unable to scratch that it was just a relief. I didn’t care if it was wrong.

I was in motion before the shift even finished, four feet grasping the earth more certainly than two could ever do. The animal was angry, not my protective fury, but a deep rage that drove its every move. A banshee was as good a target as any to unleash that anger on, though a whiff of scent told my hind brain that it and I—me the werewolf, not me the shaman—were probably on the same side. It was a familiar scent of decay, of dark magic, a thing I hadn’t even known had a scent, and it said we were born of the same master. There was another smell, too, one that caught at the back of my throat for just a moment, and which the werewolf couldn’t put a name to. I disregarded it, hell-bent on the banshee. It was free, and I was bound to the moon—full tonight, last of the three full moons, and it seemed a werewolf didn’t change only at night after all—and its freedom was reason enough for it to die whether we served the same master or not. I sprang upward, tooth and claw reaching for the banshee with glorious, furious power.

The whole thing, from beginning to end, lasted about fifteen seconds. Then fresh magic slammed into me so hard I collapsed, and when I woke up I’d been buried alive.

Stone curved so close to my face I began to hyperventilate. I hadn’t noticed a dislike of enclosed rocky spaces until just this past weekend, when I’d gone traipsing around an awful lot of caverns that weren’t supposed to be beneath Seattle. The weight of the world pressing down turned out to be more than I could handle. Panicked, I rolled sideways in search of escape, and crashed into a woman eight inches taller than I.

She was made of granite, and lay serenely on the tomb we shared. I sat up a few inches, clobbered my head and fell back down with a whimper. My granite friend held an actual sword in her stone hands. She wore an all-too-familiar necklace, too, though it was carved of stone, not made of silver. An effigy, that’s what she was. A remarkable amount of curly stone hair lay around her shoulders, and for a second I wondered if she was an effigy of a comic-book character, since real people hardly ever had that much hair.