C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

“C’mere, let her see herself in your sword. It’s the only reflective surface we’ve got.” The polished silver was in fact remarkably reflective, and Caitríona’s eyes filled with tears as the visual component added insult to injury.

“It’ll scar so it will.”

Under normal circumstances, she’d be right. There was a nice little puncture seeping blood at a remarkable rate, and since it had been made by a rock, it was likely dirty. But I was there, so it wasn’t normal circumstances by very definition. Fully aware of how much facial wounds hurt, I touched her cheek very gently and said, “Well, no, it probably won’t.”

Healing, now that I could do it without all the vehicle metaphors, felt fairly awesome. It was like putting the last lug nut onto a wheel, the absolute finishing touch to a restoration. It carried a little click of satisfaction, of a job well done, of something brought back to rightness. It wasn’t effortless: the power to make something change had to come from somewhere, and largely it came from me. I’d learned the hard way that big diseases like cancer really needed a power circle to spread the power draw around so I didn’t kill myself trying to make somebody else healthy. But Caitríona’s cheek wasn’t anything like that magnitude, and it took only a moment of envisioning it as whole, complete, right, for that change to happen. The bruise faded, round cut at its center disappearing into unblemished skin. Her eyes got bigger and she clapped her hand over her cheek when I released her and sat back. I’d healed Gary yesterday. I’d thrown shields around. I’d just healed Caitríona. The only person I couldn’t fix was myself. There was probably a lesson in that, but before I figured out what it was, Cat’s eyes narrowed and she pointed at my cheek. “You didn’t have that when you were here before.”

I touched the thin scar on my right cheek. “Nope.”

“So how come you’ve got it? You shouldn’t have any scars.”

“I got it the day I became a shaman. It’s a reminder. I like it.” Not that facial scars were generally high on my list of favorite things, but I did like the little cheekbone scar. It kept me balanced, somehow.

Cat had gone back to prodding her own cheek. “It’s healed? I can’t feel it at all anymore. Aunt Sheila never did that.”

“Did she not?” I was turning Irish with my phrasing. I shook myself and tried again. “Paper cuts and scrapes never went away when she was around? I kind of do that a lot. My precinct’s jumped to the head of the class for fewest sick days called in.”

“She had—” Caitríona broke off, comprehension dawning. “She had magic plasters. Put them on and don’t take them off for three days, three days, d’ye hear me so? Sure and we’d take them off sooner, but the cuts and bruises were always healed. She magicked us!”

I couldn’t help grinning. “Yeah, she did. She totally magicked you.” A shiver ran over me and I straightened. “And now we’re going to magic her in return. Méabh? Um, Méabh?”

The warrior queen stood at the mountain’s edge, looking into a rising mist. “Do ye’s not see it, Granddaughters? Do ye’s not see the coming storm?”

We both crept to where she stood, me trying not to look down. I didn’t generally have a problem with heights, but the magic mountain creeped me out. I didn’t want to get too close to the two-thousand-foot drop, just in case. “Sure and it’s black on the horizon,” Méabh whispered. “Coming for my children, hungry as only the dark can be. Do ye’s not see it?”

Caitríona and I exchanged glances, then eyed the horizon cautiously. She let me be the one to say, “All I see is mist in the valley. Do you see the future a lot, Méabh?”

Memory swept me as soon as I spoke. Premonitions fed to me by a coyote in a hard white desert, dreams of futures yet to be. A few of them had come to pass. More were no doubt pending. I wasn’t especially keen on that, but there wasn’t much I could do but man up and take it on the chin. But Méabh shivered and shook her head. “My power’s in the heat of battle, not in foresight and forewarning. If it’s my sight that sees what’s coming, then it’s a bloody road indeed. I’ll stand at your side to fight it if I may, but there’s none so clear as that in the signs I see.”

“What do you see?”

“Blood of my blood lost to me. Lost to time, sure and so. A people gone. A dying world. It’s black as night, Joanne. There’s no future for us here.”

There were moments I really hated pioneering a new exciting path through the unexplored wildernesses of magic. Warrior and healer, future-tripper, past-visitor, accidental end-times-sign, bearer of bad news. I wanted that Shaman’s Handbook, damn it, and nobody was ever going to give me one. I clapped Méabh on the shoulder and put on my best hail men and hearty voice. “The future’s mutable, Grandmother. If we can’t see one past the storm, then we’ll by God make one we can see.”

She startled, then smiled, which was precisely why I’d chosen to use the nomenclature. “You’re a bold one, aren’t you, Granddaughter?”

“It’s part of my charm.” Worry lanced through me, depleting any hope of actual charm rolling off me. Gary used that phrase all the time, and Gary wasn’t here. Much more subdued, I said, “Look, let’s get this thing done before the Morrígan notices we axed her go-to guy and sends something scarier. Like herself. Why would she not come herself? It’s just past the equinox, the banshees should be at full strength, the Master must be hungry....”

“Sure and you stepped through time to stop her sacrifice, sent a warrior and the Wild Hunt to do battle with her in your name, set a goddess to bind her deathless cauldron and caused the forging of a wedding gift that broke her power and which only a child of her own blood could remove from her throat. It is possible,” Méabh said, oh so dryly, “that my mother has learned caution. The fear darrig is no idle threat, Joanne Walker. They torture and trick the strongest men, and yet you were slowed not at all.”

I wasn’t sure which astonished me more, the approval behind her litany or the revelation that Méabh, Warrior Queen of Connacht, considered a Red Cap to be a significant threat. I’d gotten so used to having my ass handed to me that I kind of figured anything I could dispatch without much effort—albeit with the help of an awesome magic shield—probably didn’t rate on the scale of nasty monsters. Caitríona gave me a distinct “I told you so” look, although she hadn’t actually told me how scary Red Caps were because the attempt had left her spluttering. Still, I kind of wanted to pat myself on the back. In fact, I almost did, which made my arm start itching again, which did a dandy job of deflating me. Nothing like the threat of turning into a werewolf to make a girl reconsider just how swell she thought she was.

“And there’s the magic flooding this mountain, too,” Méabh said thoughtfully, as if I hadn’t been going through mental gymnastics while she took a breath. “Life magic, anathema to the Master and his chosen few. It may be this place is too steeped in white magic for her and her kind to safely come.”

“Not likely. There’s all that residual death magic here. Black magic stains. I don’t know how long it takes for white magic to bleach the really bad stuff away.” Back at home, my friend Melinda Holliday had done a fantastic job of cleaning up after some very ugly ritual magic had made a mess around her house, so it was possible. Hundreds of sacrificial murders just evidently took more than Saint Patrick hanging out on the mountain for forty days, or my mother coming up here several times a year to lend a helping hand.