A Banshee's Tale

by Veronica Breville

  It was a Thursday. As the queen bee herself pulled her car up on my passenger side, I had knelt down on the driver’s side to tie my shoe. Now, what possessed her to do what she did when she did, I will never truly understand. My only thought was that she was one of those people who figured their status could get them out of trouble if they were caught. That was something she had no experience with because she was quite good at evading authority. She was also not the brightest bulb in the box, if you know what I mean. As I prepared to stand up, I heard the most horrific screeching sound, like metal on metal and that was exactly what it was. Lacy Bleu was keying my brand new car.

  What a witch!

  I stood up, walked around to the back of my car, and planted myself squarely in her path. Just as I had figured, she wasn’t paying any attention and was looking down the entire time. When her head ran into my chest, she yelped and looked up at me with the most grotesque glare I had ever seen.

  “Lacy, you realize that’s vandalism, right?” I choked as I viewed the damage for the first time.

  “Whatever, freak! What are you going to do about it anyway?”

  “My first thought is to beat the crap out of you, and believe me, growing up with four brothers has prepared me for that. But I think leaving this up to the authorities is a much better idea.” I did a great job of keeping calm.

  “Right, Catherine, because they’re going to believe you over me. Don’t you know the entire staff loves me? My parents push a lot of money at the school, as well, so I don’t think telling anyone here is going to help you.”

  At precisely that moment, a light bulb went on inside my fuming brain, and I began concocting a plan to teach her a real lesson. I decided that if I was ever going to use my newfound skill, I might as well start now.

  “Oh, I’m not going to tell them... you are!”

  Guh, I hope this works. Otherwise I’m gonna look like an even bigger loser.

  “Psh, I’m not telling anyone anything, except that you were out here threatening to beat me up because you thought I hurt your brand new car. Why would anyone think I did that? I mean, look at my car.” She huffed, sweeping her hand over her black BMW.

  Just then, I made eye contact, and I heard how sure she was of herself and all the nasty names she was calling me. Someone should wash her head out with some seriously strong soap. I figured there was no time like the present, so I planted the thought. She would confess what she had done and to the fact that she had done it to get me in trouble. I filled the thought with a sense of urgency and purpose. As soon as I was done, I saw the light go on behind her cold green eyes.

  “I need to go to the principal... right now,” she said.

  Who am I to stand in her way?

  Later that day, I learned the results of my first attempt at my new power. Lacy had been suspended for keying my car, and because she had then gone on to recite all the reasons she hated me, as well as every dirty name she had ever called me, it was a three day out-of-school suspension. She was also required to pay for the damages and write a letter of apology. Well, my first attempt at using my skill was a success, but I decided I might have gone a bit overboard.

  Could a success also be a failure on some level?

  Oh well, at least I didn’t convince her to shave her head.

  Thinking I couldn’t fail at this new talent, I decided to unleash it on my unsuspecting family. The natural high I felt after my success with Lacy Bleu carried over and made me a bit overconfident. As my mom would say, I was counting my chickens before they had hatched.

  My first attempt at a surprise attack on my family failed because I didn’t think my plan through. I chose my oldest brother, Orin, as the guinea pig without taking into account his limited abilities in the kitchen.

  My brilliant plan took root when my dad mentioned my mother’s impending birthday. He thought part of her gift should be a day of total relaxation with each one of us taking a specific chore. Great idea. I offered to make breakfast and lunch, as well as vacuum. When I heard my dad talking to Orin on the phone—he was making a surprise visit for Mom’s birthday—I listened in. Orin offered to make dinner, which I was sure would consist of burgers, bratwursts, and possibly chicken cooked on the grill. My idea began to take shape as I quietly hung my phone up. Why not help him decide to do something a bit fancier? It was Mom’s birthday dinner, after all. It took the rest of the day to go over what thought I would plant; it seemed like the right thing to do. The morning of her birthday, while we were all eating, I looked at Orin and focused all my attention on getting that notion buried in his head: Mom’s birthday means a nice, fancy meal, something she would never expect.

  All I had to do now was sit back and wait for results... it was just too bad they were the wrong ones.

  My implanted thought in my brother’s very strong willed but culinary inept mind equaled a complete disaster. He had settled on the most difficult of game dishes, Turkerducken, which is a turkey breast wrapped around a goose breast, wrapped around a chicken breast, wrapped around a duck breast. Lots of one fowl wrapped around another. It wasn’t at all a pleasant sight. All I could see were Orin’s hands and elbows flying in every direction trying to keep the meat from slipping out of his grasp. I finally had to step in when he decided to shove one bird inside the next, whole! It looked like some kind of freaky, slimy telescope.

  “Orin! Mom will have your head if she sees what you’ve done to her kitchen.” I said.

  He glared and continued to shove the unwieldy pieces of poultry together.

  “Cat, if you’re not gonna help, then go away.”

  I was torn. In all fairness, this entire situation was my fault, but my brother took that little nugget of a thought I planted and ran with it like his backside was on fire. Now we were faced with a mess of epic proportions and possibly the grossest dinner ever. I started praying we would all make it out of this fiasco without having contracted salmonella.

  “Fine, I’ll help. First things first, unstick all the birds you have forced together.” I looked in our mom’s favorite cookbook and found a very similar recipe, in which you merely wrapped the deboned meat around one another.

  He began pulling apart the whole birds in his grasp and handing them to me. After an hour of carving, seasoning, and wrapping amazing amounts of uncooked poultry together, we put it in the oven to roast. As soon as we were finished, I cleaned up and saved the bones and scraps. My mom was a thrifty woman and would keel over dead if she saw that we had thrown away a single bone.

  If I never see another piece of raw chicken again, it’ll be too soon!

  Second attempt at thought gardening... unequivocal disaster.

  Current count: Successes = .5, Failures = 1.5

  I couldn’t count the Lacy Bleu ordeal as a complete success as I felt it got a bit extreme.

  I decided to wait a few weeks in between tries to regain my perspective and my courage; meanwhile, I formulated another plan. This time the intended, ahem, “helper” would be Aunt Lucie.

  The day of my brother’s botched culinary experiment, I had been found out. Now my entire immediate family refused to help me. When they realized exactly what I had been up to with Orin, they threatened all sorts of unseemly punishments if I ever tried using them to gain experience.

  I tried something a bit simpler this time, but because I tried to make the thought something only I would benefit from, it was doomed to fail right out of the gate. Needing a little bit of a breather from my constant studying, reading, and practicing, I decided to nurture the idea of a day off for me.

  Simple, right?

  If only.

  Nothing was simple when you’re dealing with another Guide. For instance, I didn’t account for my aunt’s sensitivity to my abilities. My not-so-subtle attempt to put a thought in her head ended up being as obvious as an elephant walking through a
room of metal pots. The result, as I would learn later, was a bit like a well-protected home being burglarized: instant alarms. Of course, to teach me a lesson, Aunt Lucie decided to play along for a bit before making me aware of my limitations.

  “Catherine, are you getting terribly tired of all this?” Aunt Lucie asked innocently as we perused yet another of her journals for information on shields.

  “What, reading? I suppose I’m a little bored. Why, what do you have in mind?” I asked slyly, anticipating her answer. It was going to work this time. I just knew it.

  “Well, I know we’ve been working really hard and sometimes the same four walls seem to just crash in on you, so I thought...”

  “Yeah?”

  “I just thought maybe we could do our practicing outside instead.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying not to sound too underwhelmed by what she seemed to think was a splendid idea.

  “What? Oh, did you think your little mind trick would work on me, and I would let you off the hook?”

  “I suppose I had hoped it would work.”

  “You listen here, Catherine Aislin, I am not to be played with.” Her hands went to her hips and she looked so very much like my mother that I shivered. Who knew aunts could perfect a mom face. “It was bad enough that I had to learn quickly how to keep you out of my head, so you wouldn’t cheat on your quizzes, now you are trying to use your abilities to get out of doing work altogether? No, you have to learn all of this and we only have a limited amount of time left. Leave the practicing alone for now, at least on that... that... that talent. Okay?”

  “I call it ‘thought gardening,’ and if I don’t practice then how will I ever be able to use it? Mom, Dad, and my brothers won’t let me try on them now and you were my only option.”

  How does she expect me to be all that I am meant to be if she continually tries to stop me?

  “I understand your frustration, but let’s take this a little at a time. There are no rules to lead me in helping you because you break every rule there is. Your talents are so unique that I can’t find anything to guide me. If you must practice, then make the thoughts benefit someone other than yourself, and try to keep them extremely simple! Got it?” she demanded.

  “Got it,” I replied, defeated.

  Third attempt at thought gardening? Don’t even want to talk about it.

  Current count: Successes = .5, Failures = 2.5

  So, the only option I had left was Will. I wouldn’t have to tell him what I was doing, although I didn’t like keeping things from him. If I planned my thought out properly, he would never figure it out, and only I would know if it was a success; ignorance is bliss and all that, right? Screwing up this time could cause my only friend to realize how good life was without me. I had to be sure of what I was doing, and Aunt Lucie’s comment about keeping it simple was the key.

  All of this would have to be done on the sly to keep Aunt Lucie and Mom from knowing about it until after the fact. They were sticklers for the ethics of the situation. Even though my aunt had given me permission as long as it benefited someone else, I was fairly sure she would find fault with this project, but I was running out of time to practice.

  Ethics be damned, I was going to practice on Will in the very near future.

  Failures aside, the world around me brightened a little when I finally came to terms with my changing body. I wasn’t comfortable enough to think myself attractive, but I could now take a peek every now and then in the mirror without turning bright red.

  There were still some issues, like my eyes. They were the most disturbing to me, although the change in them had occurred so subtly. I wasn’t sure anyone but me noticed. They had always been violet around the edges and sky blue toward the middle, but now the separation between the colors was more even. The violet extended past the rim of my iris and gradually became blue... almost like a tunnel. Even I had a hard time looking too deeply into them without feeling an icy shiver along my spine that raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

  My hair, too, had taken on an otherworldly look, although it wasn’t noticeable unless I was standing in the sunlight. The red had become so pronounced in the sun that I had taken to wearing hats daily. Living in the flint hills of Kansas where it was likely to be sunny often was becoming a real pain.

  The change I was going through was even affecting the love I had always had for my home.

  Was nothing sacred?

  Perhaps the most difficult thing for me to wrap my head around was my body.... Ugh, my body. While all the girls I went to school with were developing normally, I had always seemed to be a few years behind. I had felt like I was stuck with the body of a child—until the change. Now I was leaving everyone else in the dust. All of it was making my head spin at a rate that would make even a seasoned astronaut dizzy. I only scrutinized my appearance because my mom and aunt requested it. If it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have looked at myself past the shoulders, ever! Unfortunately, they needed to know what was happening because the change was not an exact science; it seemed that by the time the physical transformations were complete, there would be only a few months more to prepare me.

  I began to realize that everything I went through gave me a better view of who I was. This knowledge helped me learn how to cope with it all, though in the pain of the moment, it often seemed that my inability to embrace my new body would win out. I had felt that instead of being able to be the best Guide I could, I would become the world’s most curvy, fire-headed, freaky-eyed hermit.

  My mind accelerated at the same pace as my body. So, for all intents and purposes, I was about four years older than my birth date accounted for. At least I didn’t have to go through most of the awkward teenage stuff that everyone else did.

  Put another mark in the positive column.

  As my instruction drew to a close, Aunt Lucie spent more time looking into the two things she knew were my extra talents: my ability to tell what people were thinking when our eyes connected, and the talent I had been trying to cultivate on my own to no avail—my ability to focus my mind on someone else’s and plant a seed of a thought that I could help nurture into the right path. My thought gardening.

  The latter, as she told me often, would be a very convenient but dangerous thing for someone in my shoes. This was something I had the displeasure of knowing first hand already. She was speaking of mortal danger not “wounded ego” danger, however. If anyone, the Badbeh in particular, found out about that talent, they would try to use it against me or, worse yet, use me against my own kind.

  Aunt Lucie’s focus became helping me to build a protective wall in my mind and teaching me how to use this gift quietly.

  “Catherine,” she said, her voice wavering as she fought to find more patience than she possessed, “you must see it in your mind. Close your eyes.”

  I did as I was told.

  “Imagine a brick: solid, red, heavy. Now, imagine an entire store of them. Stack them up one at a time, creating a wall between you and everyone else. Can you do that?”

  “I’m trying.”

  I had closed my eyes so tight I was seeing nothing but white sparks behind my lids. The frustration of failing to protect myself was starting to wear on me, and I threw myself back onto my hardwood floor.

  “Shit!”

  “Language, Cat. Sit back up and breathe deep, just like we practiced,” Aunt Lucie said.

  A giggle escaped as she gave me her patented “calm down” line. Her mouth was saying one thing but her thoughts said, Shit is an understatement! I could add a few more expletives.

  “You know when you look at me like that I can read your thoughts, right?” I cocked my eyebrow at her.

  “Just do what I say, not what I think, and stay outta my head, niece.”

  I would have been worried she was upset, but her smile let me know she w
as fine with my little slip. Standing up, I did as she requested and began my deep breaths, feeling myself calm down from the top of my head to my toes.

  “Good. Now, try the bricks again. Just set one on top of the other, like you were playing with those wooden blocks you had when you were little.”

  I’m not sure if it was the reference to the blocks or the fact that what she said suddenly made it seem like I could play, but it worked. I began stacking the bricks, which resembled those play blocks now, on top of one another until I had a sturdy wall in front of me.

  “I did it! I have a wall.”

  “Thank God,” she murmured. “Now turn around and continue to build the walls all around you. The Badbeh will come at you from all sides, not just head on.”

  I continued building walls until I was enclosed on all sides. In reality, being so tightly housed would make me feel edgy and claustrophobic, but the effect in my mind was like being cocooned in warmth and love. It was amazing.

  “I’m surrounded and it feels... nice.”

  “That’s wonderful, Cat. It should feel nice and warm, if you’ve done it right. Your mind is your safe haven, as well as your gateway to the spiritual realm. Protect it, nurture it, and love it.”

  “Thanks, Aunt Lucie.” I walked across the room and gave her a hug, hoping that I conveyed all the love and admiration I felt for her.

  “How about we call it a night? I’m tired and this has been a breakthrough night for you. I think you deserve a little time to goof off.”

  “And to think I didn’t even have to plant that little nugget in your head!” We both laughed, knowing full well that Aunt Lucie would never let me forget my attempt to garden thoughts in her head. My laughter continued long after she left. As I settled down under my covers with a good book, I let myself get lost in someone else’s imagination for the remainder of the evening.