Raven Calls

I saw Morrison, or someone very like him, walking into the face of danger. She, the banshee, saw…something else entirely. She stopped, horror and hope written on a face that might have at one time been lovely. For the first time I heard a banshee speak not in rhyme, but then, it was only a single word: “Aidan?”

My heart stopped. My blood stopped. Everything in me went cold, just for a split second. Then I knew she was seeing an old lover in Gancanagh, not my son—my son, whose name probably wasn’t actually Aidan, since somebody had adopted him and probably given him a new name—but for that hideous instant I thought it was going to all be about me and her and keeping a little boy I didn’t even know safe from devils he didn’t need to dance with.

“Sure and it’s me, alanna,” Gancanagh whispered. “I’ve missed ye so, me love. Come to me, my girl, for all our troubles are behind us now.” He extended a hand, and although he was in front of me, talking to someone else, I wanted to run to him myself.

Banshees weren’t immune to his charm, either. Some of the film cleared from her eyes, like tears were rising to moisten paper, and she stepped forward, reaching out to him as she did.

He took her hands tenderly and drew her close, the whole of his attitude warm with welcome. He lifted a hand to her jaw, the other tracing her collarbone. She smiled, terrible expression of joy in a face too long dead to show emotion as other than a skeletal grin.

Gancanagh, who looked like Morrison, ripped her head off and threw it away.

The air went out of my lungs. He glanced back at me and smiled that come-hither smile, and even with a dead woman’s dusty blood staining his hands, even with sickness in the pit of my stomach, I still wanted to go to him. Dangerous, Méabh had said. Gancanagh is dangerous. “Fight,” he said, and I felt a compulsion in my bones to do just that. To do anything he asked, in hopes of winning his love.

This was going to be a problem, later. But now I only nodded once and turned away, heart beating too fast, to do as he’d asked me. To fight, because the odds were still about fifteen to four, and we had yet to meet Aibhill. I flung another net, wishing I dared to catch more than one banshee at a time in it, but the first one had put up enough of a struggle. I didn’t want to find out two was more than I could handle. I wished I had a weapon, and then with bell-like clarity, an idea came to me. Hoping everybody else would continue to keep up their end of the bargain, I ducked out of the fight for a second time, and fell into my garden.

I’d never been in such a hurry before when I crossed into the gardens. I tore through my own territory to fling open the ivy-hidden door, and raced out into the crater that I’d always found my garden at the bottom of. I scrambled up the sides, heading for the greater gestalt of souls and bellowing, “Coyote! Coyote! Wake up, wake up, I need your help! Get the spear!”

A few ginormously long strides later I rushed into the arid, beautiful desertscape that was Coyote’s garden. He wasn’t there. I started picking up stones, desperately trying to find some kind of access point that would let me deeper into his soul, and shouting all the time. I finally hauled a rock nearly as big as I was aside, revealing a cool little cave, but before I could dash into it, Coyote emerged in his coyote form. He looked sleepy and bewildered, his ears at half-mast, but he was carrying the spear I’d asked for, his teeth full of it. I dropped to my knees, hugged him one-armed and blurted, “Bless you,” with a fervency largely unfamiliar to me.

He shifted mid-hug, and though logically he’d have still held the spear in his mouth, it was instead in one hand as he hugged me with the other arm and said, “What’s going on?” in confusion. “Take this, I can’t stand it.”

I seized the spear, wood cool in my fingers, even where he’d been holding it. It was a piece of art, a weapon grown, not made. The haft was polished white birch, and the head black ironwood, and though they were nominally bound together by leather strips and feathers at the neck, I had no doubt the entire weapon was a seamless single piece of wood. That was what happened when demigods of the forest offered gifts: magic. The demigod in question, Herne, had given it to Coyote as custodian, but my mentor was a healer. Even carrying the weapon gave him the creeps, so I’d been the one to use it. “I need this. We’re in a fight. I lost my sword.” And Gary, but this was not the time to go into that, even if the reminder made me swallow a sob.

“What—where are you?” He wasn’t going to stop me from taking it, but I could see him gathering himself, waking up, preparing to jump on the next flight to Seattle to help pick up the pieces.

“I think I’m in the Irish version of the Lower World. Ireland, anyway, look, I can’t talk, but the sword, Coyote, I can pull the sword from anywhere in the world, and you’ve just given the spear to me here, that means you’ve relinquished custodianship again, right? So I should be able to pull it to me, too. And even if it doesn’t work in the Middle World I’m in the Lower so it should work. Right?”

He interjected, “Ire—Low—lost—cust—?” through my panicked response, but gave up halfway through, golden eyes growing increasingly round as I reached the end of the rushed explanation. Then he said, “Yes,” with utter certainty, which was all I needed. I wanted my idea to work, but I wasn’t quite sure I believed it would. He did, though. He believed, and shamanism was belief, and I believed him, so I believed me and whispered, “Thank you,” with all the heartfelt gratitude I could manage, and surged back to the fight.

Almost nothing had changed. Another banshee was down, a second was failing to fall to Gancanagh’s wiles the way the first had—a woman scorned, I thought—and as I steadied myself Caitríona went down under two of the screaming monsters. She was the only one of us who was genuinely defenseless, though her warbling song kept shields flickering in and out around her. It wasn’t enough. I was not going to go to her mother in the Middle World and explain how I’d lost her daughter, my cousin, to a host of banshees in the Lower. I took two running steps, planted the spear’s butt in the earth and managed a clumsy, one-armed vault over a low-flying banshee to crash onto one of the two that had toppled Caitríona. The other I seized with a net, and for a minute we were a tumbling, screaming, rolling mass of furious women.

I had no leverage to use the spear and roared, “Caitríona!” as I flung the thing sideways, hoping she would catch it. Then I had my fingers in a banshee’s pointy mouth and was trying to pull the top of her head off while another one scrabbled and spat at the net winding ever tighter around her. I’d never fought such a physical battle with as focused a mental aspect. Either I was getting better at this, or fighting in the Lower World helped integrate my talents at a level I despaired of reaching in the real world. The banshee I was fighting exploded into magic-filled dust, and for the second time that day, Caitríona O’Reilly stood over me with a weapon and the remains of a fallen enemy at her feet.

The spear had hit my shields, or it might have gone straight through me, too. A good shot, too: right over my heart. I had a sick lurch of appreciation for Laurie Corvallis’s sheer nerve after I’d done the same thing to her with exactly the same weapon, and then Cat was offering her hand and pulling me to my feet. I came up ready to fight, or as ready as I could be with one arm dangling uselessly.

Evidently it was enough. The remaining banshees took a look at the four of us, turned tail and fled.

Chapter Twenty-Six

A much more ferocious warrior than I probably would have given chase. Méabh started to, in fact, though to my eyes it looked less like she planned to catch them than as if she was giving them an all-out “Yeah, take that! Run, you scared little girls! Run!” boost on their way. She stopped after a few yards and turned back to the rest of us. Gancanagh was dusting off his Morrison-like suit and slacks, having taken out the woman scorned after all. Caitríona held the spear like she’d never let it go. She was banged up worse than the rest of us, but she looked like she’d just come to life, color high and eyes bright. I was equal parts envious and proud of her.

“What,” I said to her, “were you singing?”

A blush of laugher crept up her cheeks. “The old Star Trek theme song. You said Trek shields…”

“You’re a genius.” I totally meant it, and gave her a sloppy hug. “Holy crap. We kicked their asses. Damn, we’re good.”