Raven Calls

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 moss-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.”

“And a girl.” I still hadn’t looked at her. I wasn’t sure I would, as long as we were in here. I already felt