Always Be My Banshee

by Molly White

  “Lancaster is Darwin Messina’s right-hand man,” Sonja added. “He’s a fixer. He goes into League projects, well, when they go off the rails.”

  “That seems a little harsh,” Jillian muttered.

  Sonja cleared her throat. “Sweetie, we were in charge when a great big hole got ripped in the dimension.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like we did it personally,” Jillian protested. “We were just dimension-hole adjacent.”

  “Is Lancaster a human or magie?” Dani asked.

  “I’m not really sure,” Sonja said, shrugging.

  “Who’s Darwin Messina?” Brendan asked.

  Cordelia said, “I’ve only heard the name a few times and it was generally whispered—or whimpered—in fear.”

  “Messina’s the director of strategic projects,” said Jillian. “You know those government conspiracy theories crazy people rant about on the internet until they slowly go crazy? Well, Darwin Messina inspired half of them. He’s the reason Snopes.com exists.”

  “Oh, is that all?” Brendan scoffed.

  “Look, I don’t want this to put you off the job,” Jillian said. “All you two have to do is your best. No one knows how this is going to turn out. And even if you fail to read the box, it’s not like you’re the ones who will answer for it. Now, if you feel up to it, Sonja will take you out to the rift site to show you your workspace. And I’m going to return about a dozen calls.”

  “Closer to two dozen,” Sonja told her. “And about thirty emails. That’s what you get for not shutting Adam McTeague down during the meeting.”

  “Well, Dani wasn’t around to Tase him with her brain,” Jillian grumbled, logging on to her computer.

  “I can only do that so many times before he starts to notice,” Dani said.

  “Your un-tampered-with pie is in the desk drawer,” Sonja told Jillian, as the rest of them rose to their feet. “And your vitamins. And the gross beef jerky you don’t think I know about.”

  “The baby likes teriyaki siracha!” Jillian informed her.

  “Dani, are you coming with us?” Sonja asked, shuddering at Jillian’s jerky preferences.

  “Actually, I already stopped by the site this morning to check on it,” Dani said. “Everything is as stable and normal as it can be. No changes. But it would take a lot out of me to go there twice in one day. You three take precautions. Don’t get too confident. If you start to feel dizzy, feel ear pain, or have trouble breathing, tell someone immediately. There are sensors in the trailer that will monitor your vitals. When you get a warning, listen to it. The pressure from the rift can cause internal damage if you stay out there too long, and—to put a crass spin on it—you being in a coma for weeks will cause setbacks we can’t afford. The minute you start to think maybe you should leave, go ahead and leave. Sonja, I’ll be in my office, if you need anything.”

  “Got it.” Sonja motioned them out of the administrative building and toward a sleek black SUV parked in the lot just outside. Cordelia reminded herself to bolster her shield as they approached the shared fleet vehicle. Brendan opened the front passenger door, but to Cordelia’s surprise, didn’t slide into the car himself.

  He jerked his head towards the front seat. “In you get.”

  “Your legs are longer than mine, you take the front seat,” Cordelia said.

  “Woman, you are all leg. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. And it sounds like this visit could be a lot harder on you than it is on me. I’ll be fine. In you get,” Brendan said.

  “That’s very nice of you,” she said, climbing into the car, ducking to hide the flush in her cheeks. It had been far too long since she’d received a compliment from an attractive man. Blushing like this was just embarrassing.

  “I think your standards are low,” Brendan replied.

  Sonja drove the car out of the town proper and into the swampier areas of the parish. She was wearing an expensive silk wrap dress the color of goldenrods, stockings, and exquisitely crafted cognac leather ankle boots—not exactly the sort of outfit you would wear on an outing into the backcountry.

  As if she could read Cordelia’s thoughts, Sonja said, “You two are lucky. We used to have to hike out to the rift site, but since we had to put up the temporary building anyway, we decided to put down a gravel road to make the approach easier. The locals weren’t thrilled, but we tried to make it as non-invasive as possible.”

  “I thought the briefing said that the artifact had been moved away from the rift site to an undisclosed location?” said Cordelia.

  “We thought it would be better to move the casket to Bael’s to prevent further fraying of the rift, but then Dani felt it starting to cause a gravitational anomaly near Bael’s cave. The last thing we needed was another rift,” Sonja said.

  They turned off the paved road and onto the gravel path. Cordelia noticed that the plants weren’t so much “interesting” as bigger. Everything seemed overgrown and thick, getting thicker the farther they got from civilization. And she could feel something rippling along her nerve endings, like a bow across violin strings. Whatever they were driving toward, it was big and scary, and she would need every bit of her shield. She closed her eyes, picturing it, a bubble made of Kevlar encasing her entire body, protecting her from whatever was making the hair on her arms stand on end. She appreciated that Sonja and Brendan seemed to recognize her need for quiet and remained silent as they crunched along the gravel.

  When the car rolled to a stop, Cordelia opened her eyes and saw a much more substantial-looking trailer parked with solar panels on the roof. Another gravel path led to the trailer and there was an older blonde woman standing outside the trailer with some piece of equipment that looked like a circa 1953 Geiger counter.

  Sonja hopped out of the SUV. “Mother! What are you doing out here alone?!”

  Cordelia climbed out of the car, watching Sonja travel the gravel with much more grace than Cordelia could manage in heels. It sounded like Sonja was lecturing the blonde, but Cordelia couldn’t make out what she was saying at the distance. Cordelia noticed a four-wheeler parked near the edge of the road and wondered if the stately looking lady had ridden out to the site on that contraption.

  “Did she say ‘mother?’” Brendan asked.

  “I believe she did,” Cordelia said.

  “Her mam just happened to be here, waiting for us? Is her mam psychic, too? Fecking weird, this whole town,” he sighed, making her snicker. “Are you sure you’re ready for this, then?”

  The soft, concerned nature of his voice was enough to make her knees a little weak. Or maybe that was just the rift. She could see it in the distance, a bright watercolor stain in the air, shifting constantly between blue and purple and green. She felt the pressure of it squeezing at her temples like a vise, a dull ache that alarmed more than it hurt.

  “I don’t know, but honestly, it doesn’t sound like I should wait around and twiddle my thumbs,” Cordelia said.

  “Remember what Dani said. When you think it might be time to go, we go. No stalling. No pushing yourself for a few more minutes,” Brendan said.

  By this time, Sonja and the blonde woman, resplendent in khakis and an elegant cranberry blouse, were walking back toward them. Sonja still looked very annoyed, but the older woman’s arm was wound through hers.

  “Honestly, darling, I was only getting some readings,” the woman exclaimed. “I was well behind even the safe distance line for humans. There’s no reason to get so commanding with your mother.”

  “I have every reason to be commanding when you have been told many times not to come out to the site alone,” Sonja lectured her. “It’s not safe. Multiple people have been either killed or almost killed out here. Your own daughter was nearly killed out here. There are snipers out here for a reason.”

  Cordelia’s eyebrows rose. “Did she say ‘snipers?’”

  Brendan pressed his lips together and nodded. “I believe she did.”

  The woman shot a soft look at her daughter, a remors
eful angle to her lips. She sighed. “I’m sorry, darling. I shouldn’t have come out here by myself—even if I did leave word with several people, including your father, where I was going and when I was expected back—and I shouldn’t have scared you. I was wrong.”

  Sonja looked at the others and told them, “I’m going to need you both to sign sworn statements that you witnessed those words.”

  Her mother snickered. “I blame your father for this overdeveloped sense of the dramatic.”

  “Brendan O’Connor and Cordelia Canton, this is renowned physicist, Dr. Yelena Fong, who happens to be my mother.” Yelena raised her hand to shake Cordelia’s, but Sonja deftly took it and held it, covering her mother’s unintentional gaffe. The two of them seemed completely at ease together. While Sonja was obviously exasperated with her mother, that irritation came from a place of love and fear that Yelena might come to harm. There were no long-brewing resentments showing in their eyes, only fondness and concern. For a moment, a pang of envy hit Cordelia so deep in her belly, she had to lean back on the car for support. “This is Brendan and Cordelia. They’ll be working here at the rift site and if they spot you out here by yourself again, they will tell me. And then I will tell Dad to stop making your favorite dumplings.”

  Yelena gasped, “You wouldn’t.”

  “Try me,” Sonja shot back.

  Brendan cleared his throat. “Pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”

  “You two, go on to the trailer. Your thumbprints should be programmed into the biometrics already. Speaking of which, you and only you have been programmed into the door locks and the locks to the casket storage case. Some of our best engineers built that thing to be bullet-proof, explosion-proof, and maybe even Zed-proof. It’s as comfortable as we could make it, climate-wise, which is important considering Cordelia’s vital signs will be constantly monitored. Be sure to remember to switch on the overhead cameras before you do anything. The League is asking for a complete record of interactions with the casket. Just hit the big red button on the wall that says ‘RECORD.’ Now if you don’t mind, I’m just going to wait here. Frankly, this place gives me the creeps, what with the aforementioned almost dying here. And I’m going to lecture my mother some more. She’s normally so reasonable and careful that I don’t get an opportunity like this very often,” Sonja said.

  “It was lovely to meet you two,” Yelena sighed in a resigned fashion.

  The closer they walked to the steel-sided trailer, and the rift by extension, the harder that pressure pushed at her head. Brendan placed his thumb on a scanner plate and after a few seconds of beeping, the door popped open. She’d expected some dark claustrophobic space inside, but it was brightly lit with LED panels on the countertops and walls. Even the worktable in the middle of the room was backlit, shining up through the thick, clear box surrounding the casket. A black digital panel under a large clock was labeled “vital signs,” and suddenly lit up with green numbers estimating Cordelia’s heart rate and blood pressure—which was a neat trick, without a blood pressure cuff. The walls were lined with white laminate cabinets and there was a desk with a rather fancy computer set-up off to the left.

  “So, this gift of yours,” Brendan said, trying far too hard to sound casual. She didn’t need her talent to see he was nervous. Given the way he was looking from her to the table and back again, he seemed to be nervous for her. And she found that she was oddly touched by that. She couldn’t remember the last time someone put concern for her ahead of what they wanted. “Couldn’t you have made more of it if you’re the real deal? Private consultations? Helping police solve murders? Doing talk shows?”

  “My grandmother tried that sort of thing, the private consultations, I mean,” Cordelia said. “The problem with long-term clients is that you have time to build up expectations and inevitably disappoint the client. No matter how hard you try, you’re going to miss something. There will be something you didn’t spot, an affair that wasn’t reflected in a memory, a tragedy no one could see coming. And when you stay in one place for a long time, you give people a place to find you when they’re disappointed, which can get really ugly. It wasn’t the retirement she’d hoped for.”

  Cordelia stepped forward to squint at the artifact through the clear storage box. The casket was…oddly beautiful. She’d expected an artifact that had been buried in a swamp for centuries to be covered in muck, but its surface was just as shiny as if it had been carved the day before. The glassy black surface seemed to reflect a rainbow of colors over its sharp lines, like oil across a puddle, slick and unnatural. The symbols etched into the ancient rock seemed to form patterns, but the moment her brain started to recognize them, they faded out of focus. She felt called forward, putting her hands on the surface of the Plexiglas. A cold pulse throbbed through her skin, making her shiver. To her surprise, no images accompanied these sensations, just a pulsating ripple of excitement along her nerves.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  She nodded and hit the large red button near the door marked Record. “Can you take it out for me?”

  Brendan pressed his thumb to the scan panel that kept the box locked. The lid swung open and Cordelia swallowed thickly at the drop in room temperature. She lowered her shield just enough to get a taste of what they were dealing with. Want. A wave of unadulterated desire washed over her, sucking the air from her lungs as surely as if she was drowning. But it wasn’t a sexual urge; no, it was hungrier than that. It was loneliness, despair for the lack of connection with someone, anyone willing to reach out. Cordelia’s eyes were hot and wet with this dejection.

  Brendan slipped on a pair of latex gloves and after a moment’s hesitation, he reached inside and picked it up.

  “Does it hurt or anything?” she asked.

  “No, it’s just cold,” he said, setting the casket down on the light table.

  It was so strange that such a fuss was being made over something no bigger than a boot box. She’d received Amazon packages bigger than something that could potentially rip the universe apart.

  “How are you doing?” Brendan asked.

  She shook her head, hoping to flick away the white noise filling her ears. Why wasn’t she seeing anything? She could only feel and what she felt was so awful she could hardly bear the weight of it. Want.

  As if through water, Cordelia heard an automated voice in the ceiling warn that her heart rate was increasing at an abnormal rate.

  Cordelia’s hands stayed poised over the casket. The stone itself vibrated with the deep desire to be seen and touched and worshipped. Cordelia realized she wasn’t feeling the emotions of the person who had handled the casket, she was feeling the emotions of the casket itself…how?

  “Cordelia, your blood pressure is spiking,” Brendan warned her. “The numbers on the wall are orange. That can’t be good.”

  Cordelia ignored him, taking a deep breath and cupping her hands inches over the casket’s surface. She dropped her shield just a little bit more. The heavy wave became a tide made of knives and she was pulled under with a shriek. The floor rose up to meet her and the last thing she saw before everything went dark was Brendan’s panicked face and his arms reaching for her.

  For once, she didn’t think she’d mind.

  4

  Brendan

  If he had a heartbeat, it would be pounding in his ears to the rhythm of that bloody monitor.

  He knew he barely knew Cordelia Canton, but everything he’d seen so far painted her as a rational, prudent woman, one to listen to instructions like, “Don’t drive while putting in contact lenses” or, “When several people tell you to step away from something the minute you start feeling unwell, step the fuck away from said article.”

  He felt like a pure idiot, watching her hurting herself like that. He hadn’t felt anything extraordinary from the rift or the casket, so he assumed that she was all right. Sure, she’d been pale and shaken, but he’d thought perhaps that was from the effort of holding up that shield she’d spoken of in Jil
lian’s office. But then she’d hovered her hands over that nightmare box and froze. He’d barely had time to reach for her before her eyes rolled up and she collapsed. He’d managed to catch her before she hit the floor, but he could only imagine how that tape from the surveillance camera was going to look—him pressing her against his chest as he hauled her up, sniffing her damned hair like some sort of pervert. It was just that she’d smelled so good, a mix of raspberries and crisp, sugary biscuits his ma used to bake. To his relief, when her face was pressed into the curve of his throat, he hadn’t felt anything from her death-wise. Just the sweet weight of the woman in his arms.

  He’d gently laid her in an office chair while he put the casket back in its clear storage unit. He scooped her into a fireman’s carry and walked out of the trailer. He was careful to make sure the box and the trailer were secured because he certainly wasn’t marching his arse back to lock up.

  He had to commend Sonja. She hadn’t panicked or even raised her voice when she saw Brendan carrying an unconscious Cordelia to the road. She’d simply turned to Yelena and told her to get home, then drove like a bat out of hell to get Cordelia to the community clinic. She’d barely spared a moment to kiss the town doctor, Will Carmody, before neatly summarizing the situation for him and commanding him to “fix it now, please.”

  When the shite hit the fan, he was going to call Sonja.

  Dr. Carmody was equally calm and competent, ushering Brendan out of the room while simultaneously positioning Cordelia on the hospital bed and checking her vitals. His orders were the only thing that had kept both Jillian and Sonja from camping out in Cordelia’s room. His official medical opinion was that she was fine, just knackered, and needed quiet and rest—neither of which she was likely to get with them beside her. Brendan had persuaded the good doctor that Cordelia would feel better if she woke up to someone she trusted.

  So now here Brendan was, sitting in the shiny, clean, freshly-painted room at the community clinic, watching over Cordelia as she slept…which was also starting to feel a mite creepy. But it pulled at his heart, seeing her so small and defenseless in the hospital bed, hooked to the monitors. He couldn’t leave.