Always Be My Banshee

by Molly White

  Cordelia thought about telling her about Brendan’s aggressive insistence that morning, but it felt like, well, tattling. He hadn’t insulted her or created a hostile work environment. He’d just been a jerk. Coworkers were allowed to be jerks to each other every so often as long as it didn’t become a pattern. And seeing her mother in her backyard? Well, how was she supposed to explain something that even she didn’t understand?

  Cordelia gave a small smile. “No.”

  Sonja poked her head in Jillian’s door. “Hey, Cordelia! Glad to see you up and around! Dr. Ramsay, Mr. Lancaster is here.”

  Cordelia froze in the face of such casual friendliness from Sonja. Meanwhile, Jillian went pale as she whispered, “Shit.”

  “You’re going to be fine,” Sonja told her quietly. “Deep breaths.”

  “I know I’m not in trouble. Why do I feel like I’m in trouble?” Jillian asked.

  Cordelia jerked her shoulders. “It’s the League. Making people feel like they’re being called into the principal’s office is their corporate culture.”

  “That’s very true,” Jillian said, rising from her chair. She smoothed her navy skirt over her hips. “How pregnant do I look right now?”

  “There is no safe way for me to answer that,” Cordelia said, rising to her feet. “Do you want me to leave?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Jillian muttered as Sonja stepped back into the office.

  “Dr. Jillian Ramsay, Mr. Lancaster,” she said as she motioned the tall, broad-shouldered man forward. Cordelia had to grip her chair to stay upright. She knew those shoulders—not to mention the sandy hair and tawny brown eyes. The well-tailored black suit was new. The last time she’d seen him, he was wearing a faded Chicago Bulls shirt and ripped jeans. But the smile was the same, bright and confident, like he was absolutely sure he could talk you into spending your last five dollars on a dart game.

  “Alex!” she exclaimed, her mouth agape. “What in the hell are you doing here?”

  That self-assured smile slid off of Alex Carver’s face as recognition dawned.

  “Cordy!” He stepped forward as if to touch her, but she took an instinctive step back. He glanced at Jillian and cleared his throat. “You work for the League?”

  “For years now,” she stammered. “I’m in artifact processing. And you—you work for the League? What in the world?”

  She felt as if she’d climbed out of the cart on a roller coaster and was trying to jog along behind it—nothing but free-falling nerves and shock and the inability to produce coherent sentences. Jillian and Sonja seemed to be watching this interchange like a tennis match. While Sonja looked confused, Cordelia thought she detected the tiniest hint of relief on Jillian’s face.

  “It’s a long story,” he said as a flicker of realization made him close his eyes. “I just can’t believe I’m in the same room with you after all these years…where have you been?”

  “Also, a long story,” she said, pasting on her best “show” smile. “I’m sorry, we’re being rude. Alex, this is Dr. Ramsay. She’s been an accommodating and fair supervisor so far. Jillian, this is Alex. Um, we grew up together.”

  Jillian’s brows rose. “Small world. Didn’t you see her name on the paperwork? We sent you…a lot of paperwork.”

  Alex shrugged. “I skimmed it, but you redacted the technicians’ names for security purposes.”

  “Skimmed it,” Jillian muttered.

  Alex was staring at Cordelia, his eyes wide, as if blinking would make her disappear. “I just can’t believe it.”

  She nodded. “My brain is having a lot of difficulty processing it, too.”

  Alex tugged at his tie, shooting discomfited glances towards Jillian and Sonja. “I was really hoping that I could come in here all composed and in-charge, but I’m completely thrown off my game right now. I must be making a terrible impression.”

  “Oh, we don’t stand much by poise or etiquette here in the bayou,” Jillian said, seeming much more at ease. “Cordelia, if you would excuse us, please? Mr. Lancaster, why don’t we have a seat and start from the beginning.”

  “It was…surreal to see you again,” Cordelia said.

  “Same. We’ll talk soon,” Alex replied.

  Despite being seated in one of Jillian’s comfy chairs, Alex stayed turned, watching her as she left the room. Jillian flashed her the thumbs up and mouthed, “Thank you.”

  Sonja pulled her out into the hallway. “What in the hell was that about?

  Cordelia buried her face in her hands and grumbled, “Insane, self-destructive teenage love.”

  Sonja moved to pat her back and then stopped herself. “Well, of course, it was.”

  8

  Cordelia

  Cordelia stumbled back to her trailer, ignoring Sonja’s requests that she just sit down.

  From his porch, Brendan’s face sparked with a warm, happy grin, and seeing it confused her. What was he doing, letting her believe that she was the one putting it on his face when he’d been so weird with her that morning? “Cordelia, darling, have you—”

  Cordelia held up a gloved finger in Brendan’s face and bared her teeth as she seethed, “No! I’m not ready to head back to work!”

  Brendan’s blue eyes went wide as he took several steps back from her. “Understood.”

  She practically hissed at him before she unlocked her trailer door and slammed it behind her. Flopping face-down on her couch, she forced herself to breathe deeply and not cry.

  “What are the freaking odds?” she whispered.

  Alex Carver was in Mystic Bayou. The maelstrom of shock and embarrassment and a dozen other warring emotions fighting for the surface of her mind broke free all at once and she couldn’t help the tears that leaked from the corners of her eyes. Less than a minute in Jillian’s office with Alex and she was back to that confused, vulnerable kid she’d been the last time she’d seen him.

  Suddenly, the possibility of her mother showing up in Mystic Bayou didn’t seem so remote, since everybody seemed to end up here sooner or later. And that didn’t exactly make her feel better.

  She wasn’t sure how long she laid there, letting the anxiety pull her under its dark weight. It was long enough for the corduroy throw pillow under her head to get soaked and the shadows to shift across the walls. A soft knock at her door startled her out of her daze-slash-doze.

  A few seconds later, another knock.

  “Go to hell!” she yelled, not even sure who was knocking in the first place.

  The voice on the other side of the door was muffled. “Um, Cordelia, it’s Sonja…and Jillian.”

  Holy hell, she’d yelled at her boss. And Sonja.

  She sprang up from the couch and pulled the door open. They had changed into slouchier clothes, or at least, Sonja’s version of slouchy clothes, which involved a cashmere sweater and jeans that looked like they were tailored to her. All while Cordelia was pretty sure she had corduroy marks embedded into her face.

  “I’ve declared an emergency girls’ night,” Jillian told her, her brows furrowed. Probably from the corduroy marks. “I get that this is very invasive, us coming over uninvited, but I saw the look on your face when you recognized Lancaster. And Sonja said you mentioned insane, self-destructive teenage romance, while turning multiple colors. You do not need to be alone right now.”

  Cordelia opened her mouth to protest. But she’d tried being alone. She’d perfected the art, really. It hadn’t done her a lot of good, when she thought about it. Also, she’d already yelled at her boss. Turning away a kind offer to spend an evening with Cordelia—instead of at home with her handsome dragon fiancé—would probably be worse.

  She opened the door and motioned them inside. She nodded to the large plastic tote Sonja was carrying, clear with a big red cross scribbled on it in Sharpie. “What’s all that?”

  “Emergency kit,” Sonja said, shaking the tote. “Hair masks. Belgian chocolate. The fanciest facial mask sheets in my arsenal. Calming herbal tea. And if that
doesn’t work, a bottle of indecently expensive vodka, which we should probably forgo for the sake of the fetus. And a bunch of early 1990s Keanu Reeves DVDs.”

  Cordelia shuddered. “It’s so…girly.”

  “Well, we promise to make the evening memorable,” Sonja told her.

  “I’m sure you will,” Cordelia replied. “Also, I appreciate that you kept the guest list to a minimum.”

  “Well, we invited Ingrid, but she said she preferred to stay home and have a lot of sex with Rob,” Jillian said.

  “That’s kind of blunt,” Cordelia observed.

  “That’s kind of Ingrid,” Sonja said, setting the kit on Cordelia’s cheap laminate coffee table. “We don’t have girls’ nights very often anymore, what with our grown-up relationships taking up our free time. But when we do, it’s usually because there’s some crisis going on. And who doesn’t feel better after watching pre-millennium Keanu Reeves?”

  “Except for Johnny Mnemonic,” said Jillian. “That one never made any damn sense to me.”

  “It was an outlier,” Sonja admitted. “I promised Dani we would start with Speed. She should be here with pizza any minute.”

  “So there’s pizza now?” Cordelia asked.

  “Yeah, didn’t you have sleepovers when you were a kid?” Jillian asked, grinning at her.

  Cordelia jerked her shoulders. “I think my mother was afraid I would give people too much information if I was out of her sight for an evening.”

  “What kind of information?” Jillian asked.

  “The fact that I was really psychic?” Cordelia said. “I mean, a lot of people claim to be the real thing and keep up the act full time, but real psychics working the circuit are pretty rare. Word would get around, and insecurities, billing, and money would come into play. It could have gotten ugly. Plus, I could tell them that I hadn’t been ‘home-schooled’ properly. That I was basically raising myself. That my mom skimmed quite a bit off the percentage she was supposed to be paying the owners. Or I could just repeat some of the stuff she said about the other acts, which wouldn’t have endeared her to anybody. So yeah, there were no real slumber party memories from my childhood.”

  Sonja looked more than a little chagrinned, so Cordelia added, “I swear, not every subject is a ticking timebomb.”

  “Honestly, I should be used to it by now, given some of Dani’s stories,” said Sonja.

  “What kind of stories?” Dani poked her head through the partially open door, juggling multiple pizza boxes from a place called Swampy’s Pies.

  “Stories from our largely unsupervised childhoods,” Jillian told her. Cordelia realized she had not been watching her boss for the last few minutes and in that time, Jillian had set the table, with napkins and a little candle Cordelia didn’t even know she owned.

  “You were way more unsupervised than I was. Gran ran a tight ship,” Dani said, dropping the pizza boxes on the table and shaking out her hands as if sloughing off the residual heat from the greasy cardboard. “And you’re lucky I was passing through Houma when you called. There is no decent pizza in this town.”

  “You got plain cheese?” Jillian asked.

  “Yes, you heathen,” Dani grumbled. “The pizza guy asked me if I wanted a bib to go with it.”

  “The baby hates pepperoni,” Jillian told Dani primly. “You don’t want me throwing up blue lava in Cordelia’s nice new trailer, do you? Everything is plasticky and super-flammable…which is something the League really should think about, considering all the fire-based shifters around here…”

  “You throw up blue lava?” Cordelia asked. “That was what I saw in your office?”

  “That’s the fire shifter version of morning sickness,” Jillian said. “We’ve lost a lot of furniture.”

  “You never liked that couch anyway,” Sonja insisted.

  “She only recently stopped throwing up blue lava,” Dani said, prying open a pizza box and helping herself to a slice. “And we are eternally grateful.”

  “Just you wait until Sonja is doing a tub birth for Will’s mermaid-seal babies,” Jillian told Sonja. “And then we’ll see who’s laughing.”

  “It will still be me, because I won’t be throwing up blue lava,” Sonja retorted, claiming her own pizza.

  Cordelia watched these bon mots bounce between the three of them with the practiced ease of people who were completely comfortable with each together. These were not just close friends, but people who had chosen to make a family of each other. What would it be like to have that bond with not just one person, but several? What would it be like to be able to trust like that?

  Jillian snorted. “Fair enough. By comparison, Zed’s bear cubs should be low maintenance.”

  Dani grinned at her and said, “So, not that I mind a good emergency girls’ night, but what’s all this about? What did I miss? Are we officially inducting Cordelia into our secret ‘League employees who fall for hot locals’ club? Who’d she pick? It wasn’t Balfour, was it?”

  From the disdainful expression on Dani’s face, Cordelia was oddly grateful she’d never met Balfour, whoever the hell he was.

  “This is what happens when you’re alone in the car for too long,” Sonja told her.

  “This is true,” Dani admitted.

  Jillian raised her hands in an almost ceremonial fashion. “We have gathered here today because Cordelia really seems to need some people to talk to and—Cordelia, honey, I don’t want to hurt your feelings here—but you seem ill at ease with, well, people in general?”

  “I would say you’re wrong, but…” Cordelia trailed off. “Yeah, I have nothing to follow up there.”

  “Which brings us to an Ingrid-level blunt transition into the conversation. What the hell is going on with you and Alex Lancaster?” Sonja asked. “You knew each other as kids? What was that like? I didn’t realize he had a childhood. I thought he was grown in a pod or something.”

  Jillian frowned. “I think the egg-fetus and I are offended by that.”

  Cordelia pressed her lips together, blowing a deep breath out of her nose. “You’ve got to understand, I’ve never talked about this with anyone. Not even my mother. I mean, she knew about it, in the end, but not the good stuff. She only knew what she wanted to know and what she wanted to know was…I’m rambling.”

  Sonja waggled her hand. “A little bit.”

  “So, you know that I grew up traveling around with carnivals,” Cordelia began.

  “I did not know that,” Dani exclaimed. “How—what—how?”

  “Long story, I’ll tell you later,” Jillian promised, waving at her in a shushing motion.

  “Alex and I met when I was sixteen and just desperately unhappy. I wanted a normal life, in a normal house, in one place, where I didn’t have to go on stage every night to earn the food in my belly, instead of, say, my mom getting a nine-to-five job. And Alex, he understood. In a way that no one else really could or would. His dad, Elliot, was a third-generation mender—a lawyer who fixed problems for the show as it traveled, and there were always problems for any show. Staff getting arrested, issues with the fire marshal, locals complaining because the games were rigged. And because Emerald City had been fading out for a while, Elliot also did the advance work—advertising, permits, easing the way with the local political types—which is really unusual because those are both very important jobs. So, he was under a lot of stress and didn’t appreciate his son being distracted from the incredibly thorough homeschooling he was getting from Mrs. Carver. Also, he didn’t like my mom, for good reason. She caused a lot of the problems he had to fix. And my mom wasn’t too fond of him either, because she didn’t like anyone who thought they had authority over her.

  “We knew neither one of our parents would approve, so we snuck around. We fell in love in that desperate way only two teenagers think is reasonable. All the way through the autumn, we spent every minute that we could together, sneaking around, protecting our secret—which is not easy, by the way, when you work with very observ
ant people. All-too-brief stolen kisses behind the Tilt-a-Whirl, running away for a night and laying in some field in Iowa, just so we could talk and look at the stars.”

  “Aw, it’s so cute that you refer to sex as ‘star-gazing,’” Dani teased.

  “No, I mean, we were technically married, but we never—even though Alex tried his best with the whole psychic thing, eventually, because he was touching me, I start seeing things and the experimentation phase ended very quickly.”

  Jillian gasped. “Married? You were married to Alex Lancaster?”

  Sonja looked stricken. “Oh, sweetie, if the League doesn’t know about that, I’m going to have so much paperwork on my hands.”

  Cordelia chuckled. “We were sixteen. We definitely didn’t have our parents’ consent. It wasn’t legal. It was a carnival marriage.”

  “Like at a kissing booth?” Jillian asked

  “No, it’s a sort of tradition with some carnivals—not all, just some. You go in front of all of your friends and you tell them you want to be married and you ride once around the carousel together. It’s in no way legally binding, and because we were sneaking around, we couldn’t even do that in front of the others. We had to sneak and turn the carousel on with no lights or sound.”

  “Aw, that’s so sweet.”

  “What do you do to get a divorce? Ride the carousel backward?” Jillian asked.

  “Also, in front of everybody,” Cordelia said, nodding.

  “That’s so interesting!” Jillian breathed, her eyes wide.

  “I know that look, and you are not following carnivals for research purposes,” Sonja told her. “You will have to content yourself with running your own personal League kingdom, having superpowers, and bearing the magical baby of the handsome, wealthy man who adores you.”

  “Fine,” Jillian grumbled, tearing a bite off of her pizza.

  “My mom wouldn’t stand for anything that stood between her and her meal ticket, so the minute she realized what was happening between us, she ‘arranged for our departure’ back to Florida.” Cordelia swallowed thickly. She’d told them enough. It wouldn’t do to tell them how Cordelia had cried across five states while Bernadette drove their trailer south, how she’d refused to speak to her mother for months. Their rental in Florida had been a war zone all winter, culminating in Cordelia threatening not to go out on the road at all. But then Bernadette had called her bluff, refusing to pay any of the bills, letting the power get shut off, letting the cupboards empty, letting the late notices pile up—until Cordelia had been so frightened that she’d agreed to join another carnival just to assure herself of her next meal. It wasn’t like she could go to a crowded mall and get a fast food job with her gift. That was the summer that she started forming an honest-to-God escape plan.