cars, and I was happy with both labels. But my mother had taken her time dying, they had hired Thor as my replacement, and now I was a cop.
His name wasn’t really Thor. It was Ed or Ted or something of that nature. He just looked like Thor, big and blond with muscles on his muscles. He was working on Mark Rodriguez’s car, which was forever having the wheels pulled out of alignment. I had a suspicion that Rodriguez went home and beat the axles with a hammer, but I couldn’t prove it. Thor wasn’t working on the wheels right now, though. He was under the hood, his convict-orange jumpsuit and blond hair bright against the shadows cast by the overhead lights. I put my chin on my knees, watching silently from the shadows. It wasn’t as good as being up to my elbows in grease myself, but the smell of oil and gasoline was as soothing to me as mother’s milk.
Not that anything about my mother was soothing. I stifled a groan and put my forehead against my knees, listening to the muffled cursing and good-natured banter that went on over the rumbles and squeaks of fixing cars. Tension ebbed out of my shoulders as the comfort sounds and smells vied with my mother’s memory for priority in my thought process.
Sheila won out. The image of her pregnant kept invading the backs of my eyelids. She was prettier than I was, and looked serenely confident as she stared back at me from behind my eyes. I could all but see the wind picking up her hair, long black strands that whisked back from her face with a life of their own, but no matter how hard I tried to meet her eyes, I couldn’t read any emotion in them. “Come on.” I didn’t think I was speaking aloud. I was talking to a memory of someone I’d never known. “Tell me what’s going on, can’t you? What’s this guy want? You stopped him once, O Mystical Mother. Give me something to work with here.”
She didn’t. Evidently not even the memory of her responded well to sarcasm. I sighed and dropped my head farther against my knees. In the garage, metal bit into metal with a high-pitched squeal, a shriek that should have lifted hairs on my arms and made me shiver with discomfort. It had exactly the opposite effect, draining away tension from my neck and making my grip on my own arms slip a little, so that I slumped even more on the stairs. I’d spent far too much time in shops, listening to that sound, to find it uncomfortable. At least, not when I heard it someplace like the garage, where it belonged.
“It’s a strange way you have of belonging.”
Sheila MacNamarra, my very own mother, stood a few feet away, wearing the cable-knit sweater and jeans she’d worn in the photograph taken almost twenty-seven years ago. A silver necklace glinted in the hollow of her throat, all but hidden by the sweater. Her hair was lifted on the wind, moving slowly, as if time was being stretched thin and we were slipping between moments of it.
“Sure, and that’s what’s happening, now, isn’t it?” She took a step forward, the blustery gray sky behind her superimposed over the shop’s girders and lights. “Siobhan Grania MacNamarra.” My name sounded liquid and lovely in her accent, if I overlooked the fact that none of it was the name I considered mine. “You grew up so tall, my girl.” Sheila curved her hand over her tummy and smiled at me. “Your father was tall.”
“He still is.” My voice was hoarse. I could see blowing grass around her knees, and a white two-story house in the middle of a field. I could also see, with a little more effort, the shop behind her. This was not like any of my limited experiences with worlds that were Other. As much as I wasn’t crazy about those, at least I kind of knew what to expect from them. This was a whole new ball game. “Are you real?”
“That I am.” Sheila crouched so that she was looking up at me on my stair. “So it’s come ’round again, has it? We’re back to where we began, you and I. How’ve we been, girl? Have we had a good life together?”
Cold shocked against my skin from the inside, making my cheeks burn. “What are you talking about? We haven’t had any life together at all. You’re dead.”
Sheila’s shoulders pulled back, her face blanching. “Am I now.” She stood, hands pressed against her thighs, and took a few steps away. Her shoulder ended up lodged in the stairwell corner, which bothered the hell out of me and didn’t seem to phase her at all. “And how long have I been dead?”
“About three months. What, you don’t kn—” Wire contracted around my lungs, forcing air out as surely as a sword could. I rubbed the heel of my hand against my breastbone and tried to pull in a breath deep enough to snap the feeling of suffocation. “You don’t know.” My words had no strength behind them. “I’m talking to the you from thirty years ago.”
“I told you, now, didn’t I? That we were between moments of time.” Sheila turned back to me, sudden urgency crackling in her movements. “And here I thought this was something done on purpose, but it’s not, lass, is it? You’ve fallen through time and don’t even know how you’ve done it. Have I been such a poor mother to you, then? Taught you nothing of the old ways? Ah, Siobhan, what’s gone on?”
“My name is Joanne.” Even as I spoke I saw the words cut her, something I hadn’t intended. Her eyes lost some of their light and she fell back a step, lowering her gaze.
“I see. Joanne, then. It’s a fine name, and isn’t it though. Now tell me, girl. You called me, but I think it’s my own skill that’s brought me here, not yours.” She frowned at me, faint and censuring. “I can see the power in you, but it’s raw and untempered. I don’t understand. You’re a woman grown. You should be at the height of your skill by now.”
“There’s not really time to go into it right now, Mother. You stopped someone, a killer, right?” It was all coming out much more sharply than I meant it to, but I had no idea how to deal with this woman. There was softness in her, kindness. Love. It didn’t fit with the mother I’d known, and I was afraid distraction would keep me from ever understanding what was going on. She was already dead. It seemed a little late for her to be getting the answers she needed. “He’s back, or somebody like him is back. What’s going on?”
I watched it happen. The gentleness drained from her, leaving behind something much colder and more stark. Lines that I hadn’t seen in her face a second earlier now etched themselves around her mouth and between her eyebrows. The serenity washed away, leaving behind nothing more than resolution.
A wave of sickness and sorrow hit me in the stomach and overtook my whole body, making tears sting at the back of my eyes. My throat tightened up and my hands cramped from cold. The girl in the photograph was gone, and the woman I’d known as my mother had replaced her. I wanted to say I was sorry, to take the words back, because I’d liked the confused, light-voiced young woman from the photo, and I’d made her leave.
I was never going to escape that. With a handful of sentences, I’d taken the joy out of my own mother’s heart and turned her into someone whose focus was so strong that she could will herself to death while I sat by her side and watched. The shriek of metal penetrated my awareness again, combining with the wind to scream in banshee cries that I thought would wake me up every night for the rest of my life.
“I’ve yet to fight the Blade. Those poor women, their lives lost and to no avail.” Sheila curved both her hands over her belly now, then made fists of her hands. “Damn him, damn them both to Hell.”
“Me?” There was something about an Irishman cursing someone to hell that carried far more conviction than an American making the same damnation. My voice came out a childish squeak, betraying a fear I thought should be absurd, but which seemed very real at that moment. Sheila jerked her head up, then yanked her hands away from her pregnant tummy.
“No.” The softness was gone from the Irish lilt, leaving cold edges. “Not you, Siobhan. Joanne. I thought I had the strength to banish him and lock away his master forever, but there are things I will not risk.”
“Me,” I squeaked again. Sheila flattened her hand against the curve of her belly again, the gesture more than answer enough. My head began to pound, a throb that fit into the beats between the rise and fall of the wind and tearing metal. “You didn’t stop this guy who rips out people’s entrails for fun and profit because you were protecting me?”
“Sure and I thought I’d be stopping him, girl.” Hard, dissonant notes sounded in my mother’s voice. “I’d thought this plan through for so long. Break his power circle and push him so far out of time he’ll be lost for good. But I can’t follow him to the ends of the earth to make certain, for the life within me can’t withstand the journey, my fragile Siobhan.”
Time blurred with a squeal of sound, a too-fast babbling of voices being sped up. The light changed, winter sun dropping and darkening into night. Clouds whisking above Sheila faded to an ominous red, as if the shadow of an eclipse was slipping over them. Even the prosaic flourescent lights burning behind the memory of clouds began bleeding. I twisted in my stair seat, looking behind me at a low red moon. Dread prickled up through the soles of my feet, itching like bee stings, and spread higher into my body. The bleat of time fast-forwarding slowed, and
