C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

Except Sheila was my mother, and on some level I’d known that even when we’d had the little throw-down outside Méabh’s cairn. She had a lot more connection to me, a lot more reason and ability to break through my shields. Random banshees from Aibhill’s host didn’t so much. I dropped my own jaw, shouting back in defiance. My shields strengthened with the yell, and the banshee’s cry faltered. Buoyed, I pounced forward to dig my fingers through the net and throttle her.

Net or no, her dead skeletal arms were longer than mine, and her nails infinitely sharper and more dangerous. I barely escaped with both my eyes, and wouldn’t have if my glasses hadn’t still been precariously balanced on my nose. For things I rarely noticed, they certainly could alter between annoying and lifesaving.

The banshee looked like she was counting what I called lifesaving under the “annoying” banner. She opened her mouth to scream again and I slung a power-swollen strand of net into it. She gagged and I chortled, which was probably not good warrior etiquette and which I paid for with her fist in my gut. Apparently thickening one strand of net thinned some others. I doubled over, wheezing, and when I felt her come for me again decided against the whole mano a mano thing. I had a net, after all. I seized the ends nearest to me, wrapped it around my right wrist—my left arm was still all but useless, though the pain had disappeared thanks to the excitement—and spun to slam the banshee into the nearest wall as hard as I could.

It wasn’t hard enough. She didn’t quite bounce off, but she wasn’t out for the count, either. I grunted and did it again, then felt nails score marks along my shields at my spine. I’d gotten so busy with my banshee I’d forgotten there were about nineteen more to deal with. Méabh, however, had not, and while the banshee at my back was busy with my back, she shoved her sword through it and crumbled her to dust. Instinct told me to duck and she leapt over my head, gazellelike, to take out my netted screamer, too.

For the space of a breath we were back to back, ready to take all comers. Caitríona was a few yards away, wailing like one of the banshees herself, a weird wobbly tune with familiar notes I couldn’t quite place. Whatever she was singing obviously took a lot of concentration but put it to great effect: the darling girl had shields glimmering around her. Not very steady ones, as they rose and fell with the intensity of her humming, but they were enough to rebound the worst of clawed attacks. I wanted to applaud, but Gancanagh sauntered in front of me to face an oncoming banshee.

I saw Morrison, or someone very like him, walking into the face of danger. She, the banshee, saw…something else entirely. She stopped, horror and hope written on a face that might have at one time been lovely. For the first time I heard a banshee speak not in rhyme, but then, it was only a single word: “Aidan?”

My heart stopped. My blood stopped. Everything in me went cold, just for a split second. Then I knew she was seeing an old lover in Gancanagh, not my son—my son, whose name probably wasn’t actually Aidan, since somebody had adopted him and probably given him a new name—but for that hideous instant I thought it was going to all be about me and her and keeping a little boy I didn’t even know safe from devils he didn’t need to dance with.

“Sure and it’s me, alanna, ” Gancanagh whispered. “I’ve missed ye so, me love. Come to me, my girl, for all our troubles are behind us now.” He extended a hand, and although he was in front of me, talking to someone else, I wanted to run to him myself.

Banshees weren’t immune to his charm, either. Some of the film cleared from her eyes, like tears were rising to moisten paper, and she stepped forward, reaching out to him as she did.

He took her hands tenderly and drew her close, the whole of his attitude warm with welcome. He lifted a hand to her jaw, the other tracing her collarbone. She smiled, terrible expression of joy in a face too long dead to show emotion as other than a skeletal grin.

Gancanagh, who looked like Morrison, ripped her head off and threw it away.

The air went out of my lungs. He glanced back at me and smiled that come-hither smile, and even with a dead woman’s dusty blood staining his hands, even with sickness in the pit of my stomach, I still wanted to go to him. Dangerous, Méabh had said. Gancanagh is dangerous. “Fight,” he said, and I felt a compulsion in my bones to do just that. To do anything he asked, in hopes of winning his love.

This was going to be a problem, later. But now I only nodded once and turned away, heart beating too fast, to do as he’d asked me. To fight, because the odds were still about fifteen to four, and we had yet to meet Aibhill. I flung another net, wishing I dared to catch more than one banshee at a time in it, but the first one had put up enough of a struggle. I didn’t want to find out two was more than I could handle. I wished I had a weapon, and then with bell-like clarity, an idea came to me. Hoping everybody else would continue to keep up their end of the bargain, I ducked out of the fight for a second time, and fell into my garden.

I’d never been in such a hurry before when I crossed into the gardens. I tore through my own territory to fling open the ivy-hidden door, and raced out into the crater that I’d always found my garden at the bottom of. I scrambled up the sides, heading for the greater gestalt of souls and bellowing, “Coyote! Coyote! Wake up, wake up, I need your help! Get the spear! ”

A few ginormously long strides later I rushed into the arid, beautiful desertscape that was Coyote’s garden. He wasn’t there. I started picking up stones, desperately trying to find some kind of access point that would let me deeper into his soul, and shouting all the time. I finally hauled a rock nearly as big as I was aside, revealing a cool little cave, but before I could dash into it, Coyote emerged in his coyote form. He looked sleepy and bewildered, his ears at half-mast, but he was carrying the spear I’d asked for, his teeth full of it. I dropped to my knees, hugged him one-armed and blurted, “ Bless you,” with a fervency largely unfamiliar to me.

He shifted mid-hug, and though logically he’d have still held the spear in his mouth, it was instead in one hand as he hugged me with the other arm and said, “What’s going on?” in confusion. “Take this, I can’t stand it.”

I seized the spear, wood cool in my fingers, even where he’d been holding it. It was a piece of art, a weapon grown, not made. The haft was polished white birch, and the head black ironwood, and though they were nominally bound together by leather strips and feathers at the neck, I had no doubt the entire weapon was a seamless single piece of wood. That was what happened when demigods of the forest offered gifts: magic. The demigod in question, Herne, had given it to Coyote as custodian, but my mentor was a healer. Even carrying the weapon gave him the creeps, so I’d been the one to use it. “I need this. We’re in a fight. I lost my sword.” And Gary, but this was not the time to go into that, even if the reminder made me swallow a sob.

“What—where are you?” He wasn’t going to stop me from taking it, but I could see him gathering himself, waking up, preparing to jump on the next flight to Seattle to help pick up the pieces.

“I think I’m in the Irish version of the Lower World. Ireland, anyway, look, I can’t talk, but the sword, Coyote, I can pull the sword from anywhere in the world, and you’ve just given the spear to me here, that means you’ve relinquished custodianship again, right? So I should be able to pull it to me, too. And even if it doesn’t work in the Middle World I’m in the Lower so it should work. Right?”