by C. E. Murphy
“Sure and we won’t,” I said cheerfully. “She’s coming with us. I dunno where we’re going, but it can’t hurt to have new phenomenal cosmic power tagging along.”
Caitríona squeaked, “Really?” and I started to nod before she finished with, “Phenomenal cosmic power? Am I that grand?”
I said, “Time will tell,” in my very best intonation of wisdom voice, but Cat didn’t look impressed. Kids these days, I tell ya. “If you’re really going to step into Sheila’s shoes, you’ve probably got some fairly significant power. But it may take a while to access it all. Méabh’s right. These things usually do come up in bits and pieces, through lots of training, rather than being all Hammer time.”
She stared at me, a firm reminder that people born a decade later than I’d been were not versed in the same popular lingo. “Never mind. Just try not to set anything else on fire, okay?”
“I wouldn’t know how to.” Her eyes, though, were big and interested, and I caught her eyeing the chapel again.
“Don’t even think about it. I need to do some important stuff.” I really wished I’d had specifics to put in there, but I was coming up short on them. “I wish Billy was here. Or Sonata. A medium, anyway. I don’t know how to tell if Mother’s spirit has been…loosened.”
“Can ye not tell?” Méabh asked incredulously. “With all the power here, can ye not tell?”
“Speaking with the dead is way out of my skill set. Cat, did you feel anything from Sheila during that whole…” I waved my hand. “Thing?”
“Joy,” she said without missing a beat. “She was here, Joanne. I’m sure of it. She knows what was done here, and it’s gladdened her heart.”
“Go us.” I picked up my coat and mashed it against my mouth while I thought. It smelled faintly of stardust. Don’t ask how I knew what stardust smelled like. It just smelled of stardust. Clear and thin and distant and crisp. “Okay. The body is destroyed. That means the spirit’s attachment to the world is weaker, but it also means if she was attached to the bones, then the spirit hasn’t crossed over. Whatever’s on the other side, it ain’t there yet.” I did my best to sound like Gary, which was a mistake. Fortunately I already had the coat covering half my face and could wipe at tears without being too obvious about it. Not that leather was any good for absorbing tears, but at least they weren’t leaking down my face. I had to get him back. I had to do about a million things, all by sunset tonight.
“That’s right,” Méabh said while I wiped my face and glanced at the sky. Midmorning, if not a little later. We had six or eight hours to stage all the rescues in. I clung to that and turned my attention back to Méabh, who was saying, “He’ll have wanted her bound by her bones to this earth for all time. No spirit in his grasp can cross if he holds her bones.”
“Okay. Okay. So what do we do next? How do we free her spirit?”
Méabh, font of all knowledge, dried up. I waited, then waited some more, and finally realized she wasn’t going to come through with an answer. Desperate, I glanced at Caitríona, but she only shrugged apologetically. I stomped in a small circle, swore, reversed the whole thing, swore again and said, “Okay, fine. Then I’m going to go try to talk to her, because maybe she’ll know. I don’t know what else to do.”
“Talk to who?” Caitríona and Méabh asked with varying degrees of wariness and suspicion.
I spread my hands and sat to sketch a circle around myself. “My mother, who else?”
They exchanged glances, making me feel ganged up on. Méabh was voted spokesperson by silent ballot, and said, in a purely accusational tone, “I thought ye said speaking with the dead wasn’t a skill ye had.”
“It’s not, but apparently her spirit’s been tied to her bones all this time, which means if we’ve shaken her spirit loose at all we’ve only just done it, so maybe she hasn’t gotten that far into the great beyond. If she hasn’t, then I’ve got an inside man for the job.”
Raven dove down out of the sky.
Typically, my avian friend was pretty enthusiastic about—well, everything. The slightest opportunity to explore regions unknown was generally greeted by quarking and kloking and an admirable tattoo of wings. This time, though, he landed in a poof of feathers, then tucked his wings around himself and cocked his head to give me an unmistakably concerned look. I didn’t think of birds as having a lot of emotive capability, but Raven was happy to prove me wrong. Or unhappy, as the case happened to be.
My shoulders slumped. “What? Do you have a better idea? We’ve gotten off pretty lucky so far, and any day that includes accidental time travel, losing a friend in the annals of history and setting a mountaintop on fire doesn’t exactly rise high on my list of lucky days. If Mom can give us any guidance at all, we need it.”
He gave a low, drawn-out “quaa-aaa-aaar-k-k-k” of dismay. I slumped further. “Yeah, I know, but like I said, do you have a better idea?”
How I knew his hopeful hop and perky look around meant “We could go look for shiny food!” I don’t know, but I was absolutely certain that was his better idea. I chuckled and put my hands out to him. He hopped in, even though his expression said quite clearly that he knew I was assuaging his dashed hopes. “I meant a better idea with regards to how to find Mom before she becomes a hundred-percent banshee, get Gary back and kick the Morrígan’s ass, because I promise I’m not going home until I’ve gotten a piece of that bitch.”
What there was of Raven’s shoulders drooped. I kissed his head and said, “Yeah, I thought not. So will you guide me, Raven? Can we go into the Dead Zone and see if we can connect with Sheila MacNamarra before the Master takes her for his own?”
He sighed a heartfelt birdy sigh, hopped back out of my hands and stretched his wings until they touched both sides of the power circle. I twisted and touched it at opposite points, and magic rose with soothing, gentle ease to usher Raven and myself into the Dead Zone.
There was a weight on my shoulder. Slight, not like Raven’s heft. I turned my head to find myself nose to beak with the ancient, white-winged raven that had been my mother’s spirit companion. Raven, my Raven, still in my palms, made a sound of astonishment and hopped onto my other shoulder to peer around my head at the new arrival. White Wings peered the other way, and in no time at all they were playing a game, trying to catch the other out as they ducked back and forth around my head. I swore they were laughing, their rapid-fire kloks sounding like joyful, long-overdue greetings.
Me, I couldn’t actually see them. Partly because it was hard to focus on things on my shoulders, but mostly because my eyes prickled with tears. I hardly had a voice to say, “Hey, Wings,” to the white raven. “That’s what Áine was doing. She gave you to me before she burned the bones. I am so glad to meet you.”
Wings stopped playing hide-and-seek in my hair and pressed his head against my cheek. He didn’t even seem to mind that doing so spilled the tears from my eyes and made wet spots on top of his white head. Raven, a little jealous, pressed against me from the other side, and I put my hands up to cover both of them in a gentle embrace. “I have never been so glad to see anybody as I am to see you two right now. Wings, we’ve got to look for my mother. Raven’s amazing at guiding me through the Dead Zone, but you know her better than anybody, huh? With both of you helping I can’t go wrong, can I?”
I probably could, but there was no need to say that to them. Neither was willing to leave my shoulders, but they both hopped on them, evidently happy with the arrangement. My vision finally cleared enough to see, and for a moment I was too astonished to do anything but look.
I was accustomed to the Dead Zone being a black expanse a hairsbreadth smaller than infinity. It was featureless, unnavigable and generally scary in the sense of being implacably large to my infinitesimal smallness, which smallness I had no doubt the Dead Zone could crush like a bug at its faintest whim. It didn’t help that I had occasionally met giant murderous snakes and the occasional ferryman while here, neither of which was reassuring.
&nbs
p; Raven’s presence made the whole place just slightly less dreadful. Just slightly, but sometimes that was enough. With him on my shoulder, I got a sense of landscape, though it changed with every breath. With him, I could see the rivers that carried the dead, the reapers that collected souls, takers-of-the-dead from different cultures all over the world. None of them saw each other, all traveling through the same idea—space without ever impinging on one another’s territory. I was the only one who did that.
Viewed with the help of two ravens, the Dead Zone became navigable. More than that: it became a real landscape, a countryside that misted around the edges but no longer stretched over intimidating distances. No longer threatening, though I had no doubt it remained dangerous. But it had a sense of comfort about it now, a sense of recognition of history that my travails from Seattle hadn’t shared. More of a reverence for the dead, less fear and more acceptance, maybe, than I was accustomed to. I still didn’t want to wander the green rolling hills, knowing they only tempered the Dead Zone’s dangers, but at least I wasn’t a mote in a vast nothingness.
I shivered, then exhaled quietly. I had blood ties to the spirit I was looking for this time, and her raven on my shoulder. That ought to help. I hoped. I called up a picture of my mother and said, “You’re not the Master’s yet,” to the darkness. “And God knows you were the most willful woman I’ve ever met, so I’m guessing if you want to you can break away from whatever hold he’s got on you, and come say hi.”
Wings kloked in dismay and I shrugged. “Look, we didn’t get along all that brilliantly, okay? I could be all mushy and squishy and sob story, but I don’t think she’d even know who I was if I did that. I might as well call it like I see it.”
“That,” Sheila MacNamarra said a little wryly, “that you got from me.”
Chapter Nineteen
Someday I was going to be cool enough to not shriek and fall over when things like that happened, but today was not that day. My raven dug his claws in, and Wings flew up into the air to go land on Sheila’s shoulder as I sat up again clutching my heart. She forgot me for an instant and turned her face against Wings’s wing, the small motion replete with joy. They communed a little while, until she finally looked toward me again, the corner of her mouth turning up. “Thank you for bringing him to see me, Siobhán. No,” she added without hesitation. “You didn’t like that. Joanne, then.”
Feeling like I was giving one up for the team, I took a deep breath and said, “Siobhán’s all right. I’ve gotten a little more used to it the past year.”
“Is that so.” I’d almost never seen my mother smile. It warmed her eyes considerably. I thought she was quite pretty in that clear-complexioned Irish way. It was even clearer now that she was dead, her freckles faded from lack of sunlight, so her dark hair was all the more striking around her pale face. I didn’t look like her, but I didn’t not, either. That was a revelation, since I’d thought we didn’t look anything at all alike.
She’d been studying me while I studied her, and broke the silence. “You’ll still prefer Joanne, I think.”
“I will. I mean, I do. Yes. But, y’know, whatever works.”
“The past year, is it? A year since when, Joanne? Since I died?”
“Since you saved my ass from the Blade.” That banshee had had a name. I didn’t know why it rated and the others were just nameless banshees, but probably the opportunity to earn a name was not something I wanted for my mother’s undead soul. “Look, um, I’m not sure I said thanks for that. Or…a lot of things. So let me just get this out of the way, okay? I understand a lot more than I did then, and I’m really sorry I was such a dick. Although to be fair you could’ve at least tried to explain why you’d brought me to America.” That was not exactly high up there in the ranks of graceful apologies. I cringed.
Sheila, however, looked ever so faintly amused. “Would you have listened?”
“No, but it might have seeped through eventually. Once I started learning about all…this.” I gestured to the complete and total emptiness around us, which didn’t really go very far in impressing a this on me.
“It seems to have seeped through anyway.”
I couldn’t tell if she was being funny or superior. My lips peeled back from my teeth in one of those telling microexpressions, and she looked away with a sigh. “A warm and loving family we are not, Siobhán MacNamarra. How bad has it gotten, then, that you come seeking me?”
“Did you know?” My voice broke on the three little words and I cleared my throat, trying to sound stronger. “When you came back from the dead to help me fight the Blade, did you know it was going to put you in thrall to…him?”
“For Heaven’s sake, Joanne,” my mother said crisply, “he’s not Voldemort. You can say his name.”
“I don’t…” I couldn’t get past my mother knowing who Voldemort was. It took a minute to finish the sentence. “I don’t know his name. All I’ve got for him is a title. The Master,” I said in my best portentous voice. “It gets old. So what’s his name?”
Sheila had the grace to look ever so slightly abashed. “I know him by the title, as well. The name itself is a secret well-guarded.”
“What, would the Rumpelstiltskin thing work on him? It didn’t on Rumpelstiltskin.”
“…you met Rumpelstiltskin?”
“A horrible little gnome creature, anyway. Caitríona said he was a frog derek. Something like that. A Red Cap. He was wearing one. Look, that’s not the point. Did you know you were going to end up his slave?”
“Rumpelstiltskin’s?” Sheila asked archly, and Raven, the betraying little bastard, laughed. So did Wings, which made it worse.
Ravens laughing would usually be awesome enough to undermine my irritation, but I wanted to throttle them both. All. Mostly because I had the sudden dismaying suspicion that I did exactly that same kind of verbal game. I put another bullet point on the endless list of things I really needed to change about myself, and grated, “No. The Master’s. I don’t know how long we’ve got here, Mom. Should we really be screwing around with semantics and unclear pronouns?”
Her humor fell away. “I suppose these are bridges that ought to have been crossed while I lived, not now. And I’m not enslaved yet, Joanne. Not yet. You’ve burned my bones, haven’t you? All that’s left is to destroy the banshee queen. I’m too small, too far removed from the Master for him to catch me with his own long fingers. He needs her, and so without her I’m free.”
“The banshee queen.” I pressed my eyes shut. “Great. I’ll get right on that. You’re not answering the question.”
Tension came into Sheila’s presence, and when I opened my eyes she spoke through compressed lips. “Very well. Yes. I knew.”
A double prong of guilt and horror stabbed me in the gut. If my dead mother was reaching out from beyond the grave, I should probably make some effort to meet her halfway and try building a meaningful emotional relationship. But we were on a tight schedule, and really, shock obliterated the guilt pretty fast.
Despite asking, I hadn’t in a million years really thought she’d have known what she was getting into. That added a whole new level of guilt to the trip I was busy burying. Voice rising, I demanded, “Then what the hell’d you do it for!” even though the answer was terribly, terribly obvious.
Sheila said, “You,” and my world fell down.
The Dead Zone dissolved, which it had never done before. Soft green landscape melted like sugar in rain to reveal the black nothingness I was more familiar with. Then that softened, too, gray bleeding down to bubble against earth that slowly turned green with grass. Rigidly cut grass, millimeter-exact in height, but at least it was no longer so short the earth could be seen between individual blades. Elsewhere the Dead Zone’s matter began to burble, the sound of a small waterfall falling into a pool. There were paving stones leading hither and yon through the greening garden, and benches that had softened from concrete to slatted wood. I had a momentary vision of a day when they might just be mo
ss-covered hillocks, cool and prickly to snuggle into, but the idea faded before the reality of my inner sanctuary.
I hadn’t been here in a while, truth be told. The tall ivy-covered walls were more fragile than they had been, time wearing away at them so they were lived-in and comfortable rather than imprisoning. A single bird twittered like mad, and I smiled. I couldn’t see him, but it was a robin. An American one, because it had twisted my brain inside-out the first time I saw an Irish robin and realized Mary Lennox’s key-finding companion had been a completely different kind of bird than I’d always thought. In my secret garden, the robins were like the North Carolina birds of my teen years.
“It’s not what I’d have expected of you,” Sheila said gently, and I closed my eyes. Her garden would have the sparrow-like robins, if it had birds at all. We were creations of completely different cultures, my mother and I.
“It’s a lot better than it was. The first time I came here it was almost dead. Not exactly the most spiritually competent kid on the block, me.”
“What happened?”
God. There was so much we hadn’t talked about. A whole lifetime, neither of us able to breach the chasm of my resentment in the few months we’d had. But I couldn’t just answer, oh no. That would be easy. Instead I said, “Don’t you know?”
She was silent a long time. So long I’d have thought she’d disappeared, except I had invited her here when I’d left the Dead Zone, and she wouldn’t leave without my permission. I wasn’t sure she couldn’t, but she wouldn’t, because this was the closest I’d ever come to opening up to my mother. This place was the center of my soul, with all the faults and flaws and strengths and wisdom exposed and on display. She’d have to be a real ass to walk out, and mostly that title belonged to me.
“Mother’s daughter was a little wild,” she whispered eventually. “Had herself a wee boy child.”