by C. E. Murphy
“There’s me lass!” my mother said in delight. “I knew it couldn’t keep ye down. Now to—” Now to notice my expression, apparently, because her gaiety fell away into concern. “Joanne?”
“I’m fine. What’s so funny?”
Gary lumbered to his feet and came to offer me a hand up. “I was just tellin’ her some stories about me and Annie back in the day. I wish you coulda met her, Jo. You’da liked her.”
Annie, Gary’s wife, who had died on their forty-eighth wedding anniversary, three years before I’d met Gary. Annie, who’d been a nurse and whose bout of illness had left her unable to bear children. Annie, who had largely kept them together financially for years, allowing Gary to pursue a love of saxophone playing that had never quite turned professional. Annie, who would have, according to Gary, approved of me. I wished I’d known her, too, and I felt like a complete jerk for assuming they’d been laughing at me. I took Gary’s hand and let him pull me up, then stepped out of my dust circle to hug him. He grunted, surprised, but returned the embrace, and when I let go, my mother looked suspiciously misty-eyed. “He’s a charmer,” she said to me. “I might want to steal this one away from you.”
Great. Even my dead mother, who had been told better, thought I possibly had something going on with Gary. I said, “You can’t. You’re dead,” which wasn’t very charming or even daughterly, and given what little I knew of my mother, also might not have been true. If anybody could come back from the grave to steal a guy, it would probably be her. The idea sent another whisper of wings over me, a shiver up and down my spine. It wasn’t that I lusted after Gary, but the idea of my mother going after him was creepy.
Sheila MacNamarra gave a cheerful shrug and finally, as far as I could tell, turned her attention to the banshees she’d inherited. She didn’t say anything, but they came floating down from the rafters like recalcitrant schoolgirls, all eyeing one another to see who’d caused the trouble.
“There’ll be no more of the murderin’ and sacrificin’,” Sheila announced. “This is your chance, lasses. Your chance to lay down arms and an eternity of lament, if that’s what you want. Too much was asked of you already, and I’ll not ask more if it’s ready to rest you are.”
Half—more than half—of the wailing women faded almost instantly, like just the offer was such a relief they could now let go of whatever held them to the afterlife. I was sure it couldn’t be that simple, not after all the hoopla we’d gone through to make sure Sheila got free of the Master’s clutches, but it was probably a start.
Sheila smiled and stepped toward the ones who’d faded. Lifted her hands, as if in benediction, and all of them came forward eagerly. I wasn’t using the Sight, but just then I didn’t need to be: power suddenly roared in my mother, flame erupting from her palms. Papery banshees barely had time to burn, mostly turning from wraiths to ash inside an instant.
But the fire still burned, and I triggered the Sight half knowing what I’d see.
Lifelines, if that’s what they could be called. Lifelines alight with flames that rushed their length, growing ever-hotter as they spread from the Lower World into the Middle, all the way to Knocknaree and its many cairns, only the largest of which was Méabh’s. Flames burst from half a dozen or more of the smaller cairns, abrupt explosions that faded as quickly as they’d begun. Old bones immolated, releasing the women who’d lived in them to a gentler sort of death than the one they’d known so far. I reeled the Sight in, not yet prepared to follow it back to the Middle World, and heard a familiar klok klok klok! I smiled, comforted by the idea that the banshees would be guided into the great beyond, and looked at those who were left.
Six of them. Six out of twenty-four, which seemed like both a lot and not many at all to me. My mother looked pleased. “Spoiling for a fight, are the rest of you? That’s grand so, for I’ve one waiting. All these years you were meant to be harbingers, not bringers, of death. What say you we warn a witch of her coming demise? The Morrígan awaits us, lasses, and after her, her master. I’ve been preparing for this fight a lifetime and longer. Will ye’s join me?”
I wondered briefly what she would do if they said no, but before I really had time to worry about it, the five of them spun together in a gleeful shrieking whirlwind, then broke apart, seized Gary and me and carried us into the night.
It struck me a little late that perhaps this had all gone terribly wrong. That I had trusted my dead banshee mother because she was my mother, and had foolishly overlooked the dead and banshee parts. In retrospect, it almost certainly wasn’t a good thing that she’d risen from Aibhill’s silvery-white ashes. I hoped, as we got whisked across the Lower World’s Irish landscape, that I would have a chance to rectify my increasingly obvious error.
Sheila was nowhere to be seen, no matter how I twisted and turned in my banshees’ grasps. I didn’t want to writhe too much, as I had no idea how high we were or how, exactly, a fall to earth in the Lower World might affect me. Or worse, how it might affect Gary, since I, as a shaman, might get a free pass on being dropped from unknowable heights in magic realms.
The banshees apparently couldn’t fly without screaming bloody murder. I raised my voice, then raised it again, and ended up shouting futilely into the wall of sound they made: “Gary? Gary, can you hear me? Are you okay? Gary?”
Of course he couldn’t hear me, and it was too damned dark to see him. As soon as we landed somewhere I was going to get positively medieval on somebody’s ass. I thought about taking a quick trip to my garden and once more shrieking for Coyote’s help, but having just broken his heart into a zillion pieces I wasn’t sure that was such a great idea. Especially when I couldn’t think of anything he could do: battles were not his strong suit, and we weren’t in a good position to distract our captors anyway.
Around about that thought, I noticed a distant light in the east. My stomach, which had plenty of height to do it from, plummeted. Maybe there’d been a chance to save my mother, but if dawn was coming on, we’d blown it. It was without a doubt past the year-and-a-day marker, if the sun was rising.
For a hazy minute I wondered why the Master had used the equinoxes instead of the solstices to bind Sheila. She’d died the evening of the winter solstice. Maybe the Master had been concerned about the niceties of stealing her body from a mortuary slab, but probably not. Maybe he just hadn’t gotten the memo about her death in time. Or maybe he’d realized even I, the prodigal daughter, would have been upset about Sheila’s body disappearing from the mortuary. Fifteen months ago he’d known more about my potential than I had. Possibly wisdom had been the better part of valor, even for the high and mighty bad guy.
The high and mighty bad guy who had won one, this time around. I sagged in my banshees’ grips, then bared my teeth at the white dawn. To hell with that. I’d give him half a victory at most. I still had the Morrígan to deal with, and I had every intention of taking her out. Lugh deserved as much. Lugh and all the kings who had come before him, right up to Eochaidh, the first of the cauldron born. Born and borne: borne across time and oceans and continents, all the way to Seattle, where Suzanne Quinley could unmake a zombie and change the course of history. That girl and I had a serious talk coming, as soon as I got home.
Sunrise, I thought idly, wasn’t usually white.
A few seconds later I straightened in my banshees’ grasps, gaping at the distant earth. Sunrise wasn’t white. Tara was white, a bastion of power glowing so brilliantly I didn’t need the Sight to see it. Like the spotlights after the twin towers fell, its circle of light shot straight up into the darkness, only gradually dissipating into mist and soft stars.
My shout of glee silenced even the banshees. Gary’s voice came suddenly clear: “Joanne? Jo? Jo! What’s goin’ on? Where are we? Are you arright?”
I bellowed, “I’m fine! I dunno what’s happening, but we’re not out of time yet!” and only belatedly realized that might not make a whole lot of sense. I started to explain, but the banshees got over their surprise
and began wailing again, which left me effectively voiceless. But at least I knew Gary was still with me, and relatively safe. For the value of safe that meant “being hauled through the air by banshees,” of course, but it was better than, say, being dashed to the ground by banshees.
Tara grew more impressive as we flew closer. I’d seen it in its ancient glory, but an aerial view gave me a whole new appreciation for just how much territory the age-old holy site encompassed. It had to be half a mile or more across, and its Lower World replica had never been desecrated or destroyed. In fact, I suspected the Lower World version was in all ways more impressive than the Middle World’s original.
This one had a moat between the double row of oak henges that marked the site’s boundaries, just like the Middle World one had had thousands of years ago. But this moat had the smooth look of a deadly undercurrent, and I had the impression it ran much deeper than the Middle World’s moat had. This one was a captured—or coaxed—river, cutting Tara away from the rest of the world.
Inside the moat’s borders, ancient buildings still stood. The Hall of Kings, the Mound of Hostages, which in my time was a lumpy hill, and here, now, was a cairn with a narrow birthing canal that I bet looked out at a rising or setting sun on some important day of the year. Forts sprang up within the site’s boundaries, forts and temples and food halls and forges, the last of which made me smile. Maybe there’d been no forge in the Middle World, but the idea of it had stamped itself onto the Lower World’s copy of Tara. I glanced south, finding the distant tower at Troim, and saw it, too, glimmered with power. The other three towers, marking the outermost sphere of Tara’s influence, also stood squat and strong in the Lower World.
And at the heart of it all, at the center of the light, was the Lia Fáil. I wondered if it had ever glowed so brilliantly in the Middle World. It should not, I thought, be so pure here, where the Master’s power had reigned for so long. But so many little things had gone wrong for him: the Morrígan had sacrificed only a dozen or so aos sí kings to their cauldron before she and it were bound; the banshees had failed repeatedly to offer him sustenance over the past few decades. Moreover, the Tara of the Middle World had remained a place of human worship for generations after the sí had slipped away. Maybe that, too, had made it less the Master’s ground than mine. Something had, certainly, because at the heart of the Irish Lower World, Tara had held off corruption and its centerpiece, the Lia Fáil, was a bastion of hope and light. Elation stung me for about half a moment. If Tara could hold its own against the dark, maybe I could hold my own against the Morrígan.
The banshees dropped suddenly, bringing us closer to the power circle. I shrieked and tried to duck as we rushed the double row of oak henges. I’d passed under them with Nuada in his era, and they’d been easily twice my height, unquestionably impressive.
These ones, though, were massive. Twice my height ceased to be a useful term of measurement. They stood stories in height, two modern-building stories, pushing twenty-five or thirty feet. Every henge post was a tree unto itself, so large Gary and I wouldn’t be able to reach around and touch hands. The adjoining slabs were equally huge, six or eight feet thick. Different-colored wood blended together in the top slabs, and I had the impression that each of them was made from the two trees upon which they rested. It was beautifully sympathetic magic.
The banshees bounced off its sympathy like ping-pong balls.
Gary and I didn’t.
Momentum kept us going, but not nearly far enough. We hit the swiftly flowing moat—which probably wasn’t a moat if it had a current—about two-thirds of the way across its twenty-foot breadth, and the current whisked us away. I caught a glimpse of the banshees all but rubbing their noses in offense at having hit a wall, and then I was too busy trying to keep my head above water and worrying about Gary to think about the banshees.
The current was impossibly strong. I wondered if there was a river beneath Tara in the Middle World, one ready to suck down unwary travelers, but I wondered it with my head underwater and panic building in my chest. I was an okay swimmer, but not in stompy boots and a leather coat and besides, I’d need to be a damned dolphin to keep ahead of the current, and I was forty-seven years younger than Gary, which meant he was probably in twice as bad trouble as me. I couldn’t lose him. Not again. I kicked up, broke the surface and went down again without a whimper. All that splashing and screaming that went on in films when people were drowning was bullshit. Real drownings happened silently and fast, the body too concerned with surviving to flail or shout. I knew that. I didn’t think I’d ever experience it firsthand. My lungs already hurt, and any second I was going to gasp for air where there wasn’t any. I couldn’t even see Gary.
I would need to be a dolphin to survive the current.
The last thing I remembered clearly was screaming Rattler! inside my head. After that it turned into impressions, the way being a wolf had been, except there was no burst of excruciating pain as I gave in to the change. I lost my clothes, suddenly free and comfortable with my skin naked, to the water. The current was exciting, fast, throwing me around. I leapt into the air, chattering with delight. Hit the water again and my squeaks bounced off a familiar shape. A man. A man in trouble. Dolphins rather liked humans, a shared affinity between big-brained mammals. Darting against the current was easy.
The man was cold, clumsy. I slipped away from him and returned, trying to get his useless long flippers over my back. Failed. The man was like a drowning baby. It took many to keep a baby afloat, but there was only me. I pushed him up with my nose. He broke the surface. I rolled, putting a flipper under him while I breathed. Dove again, nose poking his back. Push push push. Toward the shore, where men were supposed to be.
He came to life with a surge. I clicked with pleasure and flipped over. He grabbed my fin. We went to shore. No beach, just deep water and then land. He grabbed for land and missed. I dove. Came up under him, between his lower fins. Rose all the way out of the water on my tail. Flung us both forward—
—Gary hit the earth and I smashed down beside him, landing on my belly with my arms sprawled wide and Rattler hissing horrified amusement at the back of my skull. Dolphins weren’t desert animals. Not, in his opinion, the sort of thing I should be turning into. I was just grateful I hadn’t turned into a flounder, and flopped onto my back, heaving for breath.
My stomach cramped, not with the need to pursue magic, but with simple hunger. I caught a sob between my teeth and Gary, gasping for air himself, sat up in a panic. “Jo? You okay?”
“I’m so hungry I could cry.” It was such a pathetic complaint in the face of almost drowning I laughed, except it turned into another sob. I was a child of the first world. I used the phrase “I’m starving” lightly, because I could. But right then I swore I could feel my body turning on its own resources to fuel itself. My extra five pounds had to be history. My muscles felt like they were going that way, too, shriveling under a healing magic’s desperate need to find something to survive on.
“Joanie, you look bad. Where’s your clothes?” Gary started patting his pockets, like he’d find a stash of airport candy in one of them.
I croaked laughter. “Guess so, if you’re calling me Joanie. Look, I’ll be fine.” In a show of bravado, I pushed up.
My arms collapsed and I fell down again. Gary pulled his shirt off—he was wearing a T-shirt beneath it, as perhaps only a man of his age would be—and covered me with it. It, like him and me, was wet, but it was very slightly better than being naked and starving. Then he put a hand on my shoulder, eyebrows beetled with real concern. “Seriously, Jo, you look bad.”
I lifted a shaking hand to examine it. I did look bad. My skin was drawn over ropy muscles, like I’d been exercising too much and not eating enough. “Shapeshifting,” I said after a groggy minute. “I’ve done it four or five times today. I guess it takes it out of me. Literally. I’m starving.” I struggled to sit up and struggled just as hard to get into Gary’s shirt—plaid cotton,
long enough to come to my thighs—and sat there shivering. I’d have been shivering after a dip in the cold water anyway, never mind burning my own body up with magic.
Gary said, “Hah!” triumphantly and withdrew a mashed bag of peanut M&M’s from his jeans pocket. I ate them so fast I barely tasted them, and they made no dent in my hunger, but somehow they helped restore my equilibrium. I crawled to the water, hoping my clothes would come zooming by on the current, but they didn’t. Instead the sound of rushing water faded beneath what I thought was blood in my ears, then sounded more like wings in the air. Gary scootched over to me and put an arm around my shoulders. Shared body heat was definitely better than freezing on the moat bank by myself. Probably I could warm us both up with healing magic, if I could only focus, but even my glasses had been swept away on the current, so focusing was hard.
The stupid joke made me giggle, and although it remained uncomfortably close to tears, it also made me feel a little better. “Well, look at us. Half-naked and wet on a riverbank. Nobody’s going to believe you’re not my sugar daddy now.”
“Don’t tell Mike.” There was a grin in Gary’s voice, but I thought it might be a sound suggestion anyway.
“I won’t. Gary, can you hear them?” I turned my head against his shoulder, then without looking put one hand on top of his head and tucked the other below his feet and whispered, “See.”
He started with, “Can I see wha—” and drew in a sharp breath that ended the question as power whispered out of me.
I wasn’t even using the Sight, and didn’t much know what he might be Seeing now, but whatever was coming our way, I wanted us both to be as prepared as we could be. My eyes remained closed, but by then I was certain of what I’d been hearing for a long time now: the beat of a thousand wings. “Can you hear them?” I asked again, but now I was sure he could.