Banshee Cries

“Yeah?” Billy’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. “Can you do that?”

“Billy, I can’t even pick my nose without using a finger.” Sometimes my mouth should stop and consult my brain before it says anything. Billy got this wide-eyed look of admiration that belonged on a nine-year-old boy. It said, Wow, that was really gross, and, more important, How come I didn’t think of it? My mouth consulted my brain this time, and I asked, “I don’t suppose you could just forget I said that?”

“No,” Billy said, in a tone that matched the admiration still in his eyes. “I don’t think I can. I’m going to have to tell that one to Robert.”

“Melinda will kill you.”

Billy’s grin turned beatific. “Yeah,” he said happily. “Girls don’t get stuff like that. Except you,” he added hastily. “But you’re sort of not like a girl.”

I stared at him. After a while he realized he might have said something wrong, and backed up hastily. “I mean, you are—of course, you’re a girl, it’s just, you know, you’re one of the guys.”

“Billy,” I said. “Bear in mind that what you’re saying is coming from a man who wears nail polish. I’m not sure it’s helping.”

“See, that’s what I’m saying. Have you ever worn nail polish?”

“No,” I said slowly. “I started to put some on once, but it made my fingers feel heavy and I hated it.”

“Okay then. So what I’m saying is I bet more of the guys here have worn fingernail polish than you have.”

“So I’m more like a guy than one of the guys.” My tone was flat and dangerous. Well, I thought it was. Billy didn’t seem to feel threatened.

“Kind of, yeah. You’re like an überguy. You know everything about cars and you drink beer and shoot guns, only then you also clean up pretty good—”

“Billy.” I was a hundred-percent cranky, and this time he heard it. He looked up, surprise lifting his eyebrows.

“Solve your own damned case.” I turned on my heel and stalked away.

I stomped all the way down to the garage beneath the precinct building and peeked around the stairwell wall. Peeking wasn’t much in keeping with my stompy mood, but I wanted to see if my archnemesis, Thor the Thunder God, was in the garage before I went in.

He was, of course. I sat down in the shadow at the foot of the stairs—the last flourescent light in the row above the steps had never, to the best of my recollection, been functional—and wrapped my arms around my knees, watching the mechanics at work.

This was where I belonged. I’d gone to the academy because the department had paid my way, but I’d never wanted to be a cop. I was a mechanic and something of a computer geek. The two went hand in hand with modern cars, and I was happy with both labels. But my mother had taken her time dying, they had hired Thor as my replacement, and now I was a cop.

His name wasn’t really Thor. It was Ed or Ted or something of that nature. He just looked like Thor, big and blond with muscles on his muscles. He was working on Mark Rodriguez’s car, which was forever having the wheels pulled out of alignment. I had a suspicion that Rodriguez went home and beat the axles with a hammer, but I couldn’t prove it. Thor wasn’t working on the wheels right now, though. He was under the hood, his convict-orange jumpsuit and blond hair bright against the shadows cast by the overhead lights. I put my chin on my knees, watching silently from the shadows. It wasn’t as good as being up to my elbows in grease myself, but the smell of oil and gasoline was as soothing to me as mother’s milk.

Not that anything about my mother was soothing. I stifled a groan and put my forehead against my knees, listening to the muffled cursing and good-natured banter that went on over the rumbles and squeaks of fixing cars. Tension ebbed out of my shoulders as the comfort sounds and smells vied with my mother’s memory for priority in my thought process.

Sheila won out. The image of her pregnant kept invading the backs of my eyelids. She was prettier than I was, and looked serenely confident as she stared back at me from behind my eyes. I could all but see the wind picking up her hair, long black strands that whisked back from her face with a life of their own, but no matter how hard I tried to meet her eyes, I couldn’t read any emotion in them. “Come on.” I didn’t think I was speaking aloud. I was talking to a memory of someone I’d never known. “Tell me what’s going on, can’t you? What’s this guy want? You stopped him once, O Mystical Mother. Give me something to work with here.”

She didn’t. Evidently not even the memory of her responded well to sarcasm. I sighed and dropped my head farther against my knees. In the garage, metal bit into metal with a high-pitched squeal, a shriek that should have lifted hairs on my arms and made me shiver with discomfort. It had exactly the opposite effect, draining away tension from my neck and making my grip on my own arms slip a little, so that I slumped even more on the stairs. I’d spent far too much time in shops, listening to that sound, to find it uncomfortable. At least, not when I heard it someplace like the garage, where it belonged.

“It’s a strange way you have of belonging.”

That sound made me flinch, my fingers tightening around my arms again. I could still hear the scream of metal, although as I lifted my head it seemed to blend with a wuthering wind, no less eerie a sound.

Sheila MacNamarra, my very own mother, stood a few feet away, wearing the cable-knit sweater and jeans she’d worn in the photograph taken almost twenty-seven years ago. A silver necklace glinted in the hollow of her throat, all but hidden by the sweater. Her hair was lifted on the wind, moving slowly, as if time was being stretched thin and we were slipping between moments of it.

“Sure, and that’s what’s happening, now, isn’t it?” She took a step forward, the blustery gray sky behind her superimposed over the shop’s girders and lights. “Siobhán Grania MacNamarra.” My name sounded liquid and lovely in her accent, if I overlooked the fact that none of it was the name I considered mine. “You grew up so tall, my girl.” Sheila curved her hand over her tummy and smiled at me. “Your father was tall.”

“He still is.” My voice was hoarse. I could see blowing grass around her knees, and a white two-story house in the middle of a field. I could also see, with a little more effort, the shop behind her. This was not like any of my limited experiences with worlds that were Other. As much as I wasn’t crazy about those, at least I kind of knew what to expect from them. This was a whole new ball game. “Are you real?”

“That I am.” Sheila crouched so that she was looking up at me on my stair. “So it’s come ’round again, has it? We’re back to where we began, you and I. How’ve we been, girl? Have we had a good life together?”

Cold shocked against my skin from the inside, making my cheeks burn. “What are you talking about? We haven’t had any life together at all. You’re dead.”

Sheila’s shoulders pulled back, her face blanching. “Am I now.” She stood, hands pressed against her thighs, and took a few steps away. Her shoulder ended up lodged in the stairwell corner, which bothered the hell out of me and didn’t seem to phase her at all. “And how long have I been dead?”

“About three months. What, you don’t kn—” Wire contracted around my lungs, forcing air out as surely as a sword could. I rubbed the heel of my hand against my breastbone and tried to pull in a breath deep enough to snap the feeling of suffocation. “You don’t know.” My words had no strength behind them. “I’m talking to the you from thirty years ago.”