“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
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.
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
“That,” Sheila MacNamarra said a little wryly, “that you got from me.”
