C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

That was the second or third time she’d said that. I frowned at her, niggling bits of information refusing to come fully to mind. “What do you mean, one of your own?”

“It’s a great victory for him,” Méabh said grimly. “To dig his claws into one of our lineage so deeply she is his thrall after death. It’s her we must stop, Joanne, for so long as she fights for him I think we’ve no hope of winning.”

“There’s a jillion generations of this family line. How is it that one person is weak enough to fall? You’d think it would be either dozens or none.”

She shook her head. “It’s bargains made and sacrifices accepted. My daughters are all children of the aos sí. Perhaps every banshee that ever wailed is one of us, and perhaps he draws power from that even as we lose it. I only know that this one now is one of ours, and only newly risen as the wailing woman. We must hunt and destroy her, or we stand no hope at all.”

“Guess that answers why you’re here, then. How do you know she’s a recent convert? A new banshee, I mean?”

“Her bones lie outside my cairn.” My blank look conveyed incomprehension and Méabh continued like I wasn’t the slow kid in the class. “To become a wailing woman, the banshee’s bones must lie undisturbed for a year and a day, from one high holy day to another. The first light to fall on them wakens the beast, and it’s the Master’s they are from that day onward.”

I turned my gaze to the unseen sky and said, a bit numbly, “But it’s the twentieth. The equinox is tomorrow.”

Méabh shook her head once, firmly. “You called me on the quarter day, to be sure. I felt the balance in my bones.”

“I thought the equinoxes and solstices were on the twenty-firsts of the months.”

I got a peculiar glance, and wondered if they’d numbered the days of the month in Méabh’s time. It suddenly seemed not only unnecessary but possibly dangerous. Slow dread climbed in me. Of all the things I should be confident of, equinoxes and the like seemed pretty high on the list. If I’d misjudged by a day, trusting the calendar instead of the actual sun, that meant Tia Carley’s attempt to line up the power of the full moon with the equinox had come a lot closer to succeeding than I’d realized.

I rubbed my arm nervously, winced and rubbed it again, feeling vaguely that if I sat to give it a good scratch, doglike, it would improve. Only the need to respond stopped me, and even that was only a half-focused reply. “Look, either way it doesn’t matter. If she was buried here on the last spring equinox, a year and a day isn’t until tomorrow or even the next day, because the equinox last year was on the twenty-first.” Way at the back of my mind, pieces were falling into place, and I was afraid to think too hard for fear of jostling them and losing the oncoming epiphany forever.

“Then you’ve disturbed her early,” Méabh said with vicious pleasure. “That makes her weaker, and us all the stronger. We’ve a day and a night to find her, Granddaughter. A day and a night to fight together and protect this world.”

I nodded, but I was hardly listening. A year ago tomorrow I’d fought a banshee myself, a fight that had taken place not just in my own time, but almost thirty years earlier, on another equinox, as well. I’d almost died, but a woman called Sheila MacNamarra had gone to great lengths to keep me alive, both in the womb and as an adult.

And it had been peppermint. That was the smell that had caught at the back of my throat as I’d shifted into a wolf. Curiously strong peppermint.

The banshee was my mother.

“We can’t just…” My throat hurt. I cleared it and tried again. “We can’t just destroy her. We need to free her. To rescue her. ‘Master’s slave is driven wild,’” I whispered. “That’s what that was about. ‘Firstborn daughter, blooded child.’ She meant me. She knew me. And oh, Jesus Christ, she knows about Aidan now. I never told her. I never told anybody.”

Méabh had the look of polite incomprehension people tended to get around me these days. Actually, on reflection, it was more a look of irritated incomprehension. “Sure and we’ll destroy her, Granddaughter. There’s nothing to be done for it. That’s wh—”

“We will not!” I sprang to my feet, narrowly missing cracking my head on the cairn’s low roof. No wonder Méabh had remained seated throughout our exchange. She tensed as I leapt up, her fingers closing on a sword held only by her effigy, but she stayed sitting as I snarled, “We will not destroy her. We will find another way. I don’t give a damn if I have to go back to the beginning of time and rewrite history from day one. We are going to rescue her from slavery to the Master, and then we are going to kick. His. Ass. ”

Rage-induced tears filled my eyes. God, I hated that part of being a girl. It was worse now because I’d only just told Gary to go kick the Master’s ass and now I’d lost him for maybe ever. Méabh drew breath to speak and I jammed a finger at her like it was a blade itself. “Don’t even think about arguing with me, or so help me God I will leave you here in this stone tomb to rot. ”

“You,” Méabh said very, very mildly, “wouldn’t be knowing the way out, now, would ye, me fine girl.”

Logic was puny in the face of my wrath. Logic was puny and magic was mighty: I had just gotten rebirthed, refilled and renewed, and was fast on my way to resentful. The Sight flooded on full bore, showing me the ancient green serenity of the cairn’s protective nature as well as the stress points within the stacked stones. My own skin shimmered with rage. I could blast the goddamned cairn away, leave Knocknaree as flat as it had been when Gary’s legendary battle here came to an end, and at that shining moment in time I didn’t think anything could stop me.

Yeah, sure, it’d be an act of wanton destruction. Yeah, sure, it would probably make the power clam up and refuse to play along as punishment. But just then I was pretty much willing to take the Master on in barehanded combat, because for the second time in half an hour I had had enough. First Gary, now my mother. It was unbearable, and I had goddamned well had enough of bearing it.

Of course, the magic crackling through me also showed me the tunnel leading into the cairn’s heart, so in fact I knew how to get out of there, which took an itty bitty edge off my outrage. The detail that if I obliterated the cairn I would by definition not be leaving Méabh there to rot also came into play, but I ignored it with the fierceness of an ignoring thing. And finally it did work its way through my tiny brain that possibly Méabh would be on my side if she knew what the source of my discontent was.

It took every ounce of focus and willpower I had to grate, “She’s my mother. And I woke her up early, so what we have is a day and a goddamned night to save her, and that is what we are going to do. ”

A genuine and terrible pity colored Méabh’s green eyes to almost brown. “Oh, my dear wee lass. My dear girl. Sure and that’s a terrible thing for ye to face. But she’s of the devil himself now, and there’ll be only one way to stop her. We must destroy her.”

“No.” All of a sudden my rage vanished. Not the good kind of cathartic burning out, but the subsumed fury that powered people through the most hideous scenarios and saw them triumphant on the other side. Mentally disturbed, of course, and wrung out til there was nothing left, but triumphant. “Let’s get something straight, Méabh. You may be aos sí and ard rí… ess … of all Ireland. You may be a legendary queen and a hero to the masses. But what you are not is in charge here. This is my time, you’re here at my invitation, and by your own admission you’re a warrior, not a healer. I’m both, and we will do things my way. Either that or you’re going home right now and I’m doing this myself.”