Raven Calls

Otherwise my mother spent the rest of eternity in thrall to the monster she’d fought against her whole life, and in general the good guys lost a round. I didn’t want to say that aloud, so I drifted into, “…banshees usually haunt their families, right? That’s their thing when they’re not performing ritual murders for the Master?”

“It is.” The Irish I’d met never said “Yes” or “No” if two or more words would do, because their English was heavily informed by the Irish language’s structure. I kind of liked that Méabh sounded that way, too. It made a nice connection between the island’s history and its present, even if I was pretty sure she wasn’t speaking English any more than Cernunnos usually did.

“It is,” I repeated under my breath, then got to my feet and pointed down the mountain. “Okay. That’s the only possible lead we’ve got, so we’re going back to the farm, Junior. My family’s in Westport. Let’s go.”

“Not without the bones.” Méabh crouched and began to collect them while I watched in macabre fascination. That was my mother she was picking up. I hadn’t even known my mother had false teeth. I wondered if they counted as bones, and decided not. “Have ye a sack?” Méabh wondered, and I looked in dismay toward my distant car. There was a suitcase in there, anyway, but I didn’t want to traipse down and up the mountain.

I sighed, shucked my new, expensive, damaged leather coat and made a sack of it. Méabh, approving, started tossing bones in. I couldn’t quite bring myself to help. “Why are we doing this?”

“To burn them or bury them in holy ground. To break the link between body and soul. It’ll weaken the wailing woman, and her weakness will be our advantage.”

Burn or bury. I thought I could handle that. I knelt, but I didn’t start picking bones up. “She was buried once already. I was at the funeral. The coffin cost a fortune.”

Méabh paused to give me an uncertain look, and I wondered what magic translations did with words like coffin, which probably hadn’t existed in her time. I imagined something like “black box of death,” which sounded a lot more impressive. “Was she in this ‘coffin’?” Méabh asked.

“Well, of course she was! People don’t go around burying empty co—” The coffin had been closed, actually. There’d been no viewing, apparently at my mother’s vehement insistence in her will. The Irish aunts and cousins and things had tutted over it, but nobody had been quite willing to ignore the last wishes of a dead woman. And I, bitter, closed-off, angry adult daughter that I was, had refused to help carry the coffin. I had no idea if a body’s weight had been within it. I cleared my throat and, more mildly, said, “Now that you mention it I’m not sure. I assumed so.”

Méabh gave me a look that said a lot about people who made assumptions, then loaded the last of my mother’s bones into my beleaguered leather coat and stood. “Now it’s to Westport we’ll go.”

I hopped to it, and only remembered halfway down the hill that I was supposed to be in charge.

Chapter Fourteen

Tuesday, March 21, 7:56 a.m.

Westport, as advertised, was a western port in the County Mayo. Basically there was nothing between it and Canada except a stray whale or two. That didn’t do the town justice, though. It was gorgeous, with a cool little octagonal town, er, square, and wide streets, which meant two cars almost fit past each other on them. A river ran through it, there were charming back alleys that opened into unexpected shopping streets, and one of the town pubs was owned and run by somebody in the Chieftains. On the whole it didn’t look like the sort of place to go burn bones and battle banshees. But then, I didn’t have a long list of places I thought did look like a girl ought to be doing those things there, so Westport was as good a scene as any. I nearly said as much to Méabh, but then like almost everything else I’d been inclined to say during the drive down, I bit it back.

In all fairness, she was handling the modern world very, very well. She’d stared at the car with interest and hardly seized up at all when I turned the engine on. She’d been wide-eyed and delighted as a kid when we hit the open road, or she had been until the first oncoming traffic came on. I was probably grateful the magic hadn’t seen fit to translate what she’d said then. She’d craned her neck to gawk at the towns we drove through, especially when we hit a bigger one a few miles outside of Westport and there were several-story buildings towering above us. She’d turned a little gray then, and only when we’d left its outskirts had she said, “How many people live in this land?”

“What, in Ireland? I don’t know, I think it’s like four million.” I’d glanced her way, seen total incomprehension slide over her features and wondered what had constituted a large town in her time. Hundreds or thousands, probably. Not tens of thousands. Millions was beyond her scope, and realistically, beyond mine. A million was pretty abstract, somewhere in the “One, two, many” range as far as my ability to really comprehend it went.

She took a breath, but let it go again after a long few seconds and murmured, “It wouldn’t be mattering.” I imagined she’d just decided not to pursue a whole litany of questions, trusting that the modern world’s fascinating ways required no approval or understanding on her part. If she could accept them on any level at all, she was doing very well. I nodded and kept my mouth shut as I drove us to the graveyard. Méabh didn’t need any of my smart-ass side commentary to distract her from coping.

We got out of the car and I said, “Hey, wait up,” before we headed in. She glanced at me and I gestured at her clothes. “You sort of stand out. Maybe you should…”

Wear some of my clothes was the only way that sentence could end, but Méabh was the tallest woman I’d ever met. My shirts would stop halfway down her rib cage. My jeans would look like pedal pushers on her. There was no chance any of my shoes would fit her at all, so she’d have to leave the leather boots and greaves in place anyway. I gave up before I’d really begun, and dug the carry-on suitcase out of the car’s backseat as I said, “You should just keep right on standing out.”

Méabh, legendary warrior queen of Ireland, gave me a wink and a smile and strode past me into the graveyard.

Past a young woman on her way out, too. The girl lifted her eyes, gawked, tripped over her own feet and kept herself upright with a hand on a gravestone. I winced an apologetic greeting as I scurried by in Méabh’s wake.

A few seconds later, the girl called an incredulous, “Joanne?”

Méabh and I both stopped. She turned toward me curiously, and domino-like, I turned toward the girl, though not so much curiously as with a sinking heart. She was probably a decade my junior, had fire-engine-red hair as short as mine and a slightly too-chubby-for-hourglass figure. Probably baby fat. She’d grow out of it in another year or two and be very attractive.

As far as I was concerned I’d never seen her before. Her gaze flickered from Méabh to me, back to Méabh and then, with a Herculean effort, back to me, where it stayed. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

“Um. Well, no. Sorry.” She almost had to be related. I hadn’t met anybody in Ireland I wasn’t related to, which was more commentary on my limited social circle than the interconnected families on a tiny island. But I was pretty sure I’d remember that hair, and none of my cousins had worn that style or color.

“Caitríona,” she said. “Caitríona O’Reilly? Sheila’s oldest niece?”

Caitríona was one of those names a bit like Siobhán. To my English- language eyes, it looked like Cat-ree-OH-nah. It was in fact pronounced Katrina, which was most of why I remembered her at all. I blurted, “Oh! I didn’t recognize you! Your hair was—” I waved at the middle of my back. “And you were—”

“Shorter,” she supplied, which probably kind of covered the same ground I’d been going to cover with “rounder.” “Yeh.” She brushed a hand over her shorn locks. “Forgot that, so I did. I liked yours.”

I clutched my own hair, as if it had changed colors without warning. “I’ve never dyed mine.”

“Sure and I couldn’t have them all sayin’ I was trying to be like the American cousin, could I. Especially after—” Her jaw snapped shut, but I could fill in the blanks easily enough. Especially after I’d cold-shouldered everybody. Especially after I’d left on the next flight after the funeral.

Especially after, and this was the part they didn’t know, I’d been in large part responsible for my own