laughing so hard they had tears running down their faces. My mother had Gary’s forearm in one hand as she wheezed, “She didn’t, she didn’t!” and wiped tears away with the other, and Gary nodded so merrily it appeared his head would go bobbling off.
It was so completely incongruous with the farewell I’d just experienced I just sat there, offended on general principles, and waited for them to notice I’d woken up. Instead my mother threw her head back and shrieked like a delighted banshee, laughter bouncing off the crumbling walls.
I looked upward. The surviving banshees still sat in the oak rafters, many of them with expressions of accusation. This was not how things were done, and it was clearly all my fault. I shrugged a protestation of innocence, and when Gary started in with, “That’s nothing, you should’ve seen her when—” I decided I’d better take matters into my own hands before I found out for sure they were in hysterics over me.
I cleared my throat. Loudly. Gary, without the slightest hint of guilt, looked up, beamed and said, “There you are, darlin’. You never told me your old lady was so much fun,” which made my solemn, reserved, Altoids-loving mother whack his shoulder.
“Auld me foot,” said she, “sure and you’re old enough to be me own father, so let’s hear none of this auld lady nonsense. How’s your arm, Joanne?”
I couldn’t think of anything I’d done half so funny as to bring people to such gales of laughter, but I couldn’t shake the feeling they were laughing at me, so I extended my arm petulantly without speaking. The action sounded like wings whispering together, which made my skin crawl, but there was no sign of bite or infection under the shredded remains of my coat sleeve.
“There’s me lass!” my mother said in delight. “I knew it couldn’t keep ye down. Now to—” Now to notice my expression, apparently, because her gaiety fell away into concern. “Joanne?”
“I’m fine. What’s so funny?”
Gary lumbered to his feet and came to offer me a hand up. “I was just tellin’ her some stories about me and Annie back in the day. I wish you coulda met her, Jo. You’da liked her.”
Annie, Gary’s wife, who had died on their forty-eighth wedding anniversary, three years before I’d met Gary. Annie, who’d been a nurse and whose bout of illness had left her unable to bear children. Annie, who had largely kept them together financially for years, allowing Gary to pursue a love of saxophone playing that had never quite turned professional. Annie, who would have, according to Gary, approved of me. I wished I’d known her, too, and I felt like a complete jerk for assuming they’d been laughing at me. I took Gary’s hand and let him pull me up, then stepped out of my dust circle to hug him. He grunted, surprised, but returned the embrace, and when I let go, my mother looked suspiciously misty-eyed. “He’s a charmer,” she said to me. “I might want to steal this one away from you.”
Great. Even my dead mother, who had been told better, thought I possibly had something going on with Gary. I said, “You can’t. You’re dead,” which wasn’t very charming or even daughterly, and given what little I knew of my mother, also might not have been true. If anybody could come back from the grave to steal a guy, it would probably be her. The idea sent another whisper of wings over me, a shiver up and down my spine. It wasn’t that I lusted after Gary, but the idea of my mother going after him was creepy.
Sheila MacNamarra gave a cheerful shrug and finally, as far as I could tell, turned her attention to the banshees she’d inherited. She didn’t say anything, but they came floating down from the rafters like recalcitrant schoolgirls, all eyeing one another to see who’d caused the trouble.
“There’ll be no more of the murderin’ and sacrificin’,” Sheila announced. “This is your chance, lasses. Your chance to lay down arms and an eternity of lament, if that’s what you want. Too much was asked of you already, and I’ll not ask more if it’s ready to rest you are.”
Half—more than half—of the wailing women faded almost instantly, like just the offer was such a relief they could now let go of whatever held them to the afterlife. I was sure it couldn’t be that simple, not after all the hoopla we’d gone through to make sure Sheila got free of the Master’s clutches, but it was probably a start.
Sheila smiled and stepped toward the ones who’d faded. Lifted her hands, as if in benediction, and all of them came forward eagerly. I wasn’t using the Sight, but just then I didn’t need to be: power suddenly roared in my mother, flame erupting from her palms. Papery banshees barely had time to burn, mostly turning from wraiths to ash inside an instant.
But the fire still burned, and I triggered the Sight half knowing what I’d see.
Lifelines, if that’s what they could be called. Lifelines alight with flames that rushed their length, growing ever-hotter as they spread from the Lower World into the Middle, all the way to Knocknaree and its many cairns, only the largest of which was Méabh’s. Flames burst from half a dozen or more of the smaller cairns, abrupt explosions that faded as quickly as they’d begun. Old bones immolated, releasing the women who’d lived in them to a gentler sort of death than the one they’d known so far. I reeled the Sight in, not yet prepared to follow it back to the Middle World, and heard a familiar
Six of them. Six out of twenty-four, which seemed like both a lot and not many at all to me. My mother looked pleased. “Spoiling for a fight, are the rest of you? That’s grand so, for I’ve one waiting. All these years you were meant to be harbingers, not bringers, of death. What say you we warn a witch of her coming demise? The Morrígan awaits us, lasses, and after her, her master. I’ve been preparing for this fight a lifetime and longer. Will ye’s join me?”
I wondered briefly what she would do if they said no, but before I really had time to worry about it, the five of them spun together in a gleeful shrieking whirlwind, then broke apart, seized Gary and me and carried us into the night.
It struck me a little late that perhaps this had all gone terribly wrong. That I had trusted my dead banshee mother because she was my mother, and had foolishly overlooked the dead and banshee parts. In retrospect, it almost certainly wasn’t a good thing that she’d risen from Aibhill’s silvery-white ashes. I hoped, as we got whisked across the Lower World’s Irish landscape, that I would have a chance to rectify my increasingly obvious error.
Sheila was nowhere to be seen, no matter how I twisted and turned in my banshees’ grasps. I didn’t want to writhe too much, as I had no idea how high we were or how, exactly, a fall to earth in the Lower World might affect me. Or worse, how it might affect Gary, since I, as a shaman, might get a free pass on being dropped from unknowable heights in magic realms.
The banshees apparently couldn’t fly without screaming bloody murder. I raised my voice, then raised it again, and ended up shouting futilely into the wall of sound they made: “Gary? Gary, can you hear me? Are you okay?
Of course he couldn’t hear me, and it was too damned dark to see him. As soon as we landed somewhere I was going to get positively medieval on somebody’s ass. I thought about taking a quick trip to my garden and once more shrieking for Coyote’s help, but having just broken his heart into a zillion pieces I wasn’t sure that was such a great idea. Especially when I couldn’t think of anything he could do: battles were not his strong suit, and we weren’t in a good position to distract our captors anyway.
Around about that thought, I noticed a distant light in the east. My stomach, which had plenty of height to do it from, plummeted. Maybe there’d been a chance to save my mother, but if dawn was coming on, we’d blown it. It was without a doubt past the year-and-a-day marker, if the sun was rising.
For a hazy minute I wondered why the Master had used the equinoxes instead of the solstices to bind Sheila. She’d died the evening of the winter solstice. Maybe the Master had been concerned about the niceties of stealing her body from a mortuary slab, but probably not. Maybe he just hadn’t gotten the memo about her death in time. Or maybe he’d realized even I, the prodigal daughter, would have been upset about Sheila’s body disappearing from the mortuary. Fifteen months ago he’d known more about my potential than I had. Possibly wisdom had been the better part of valor, even for the high and mighty bad guy.
The high and mighty bad guy who had won one, this time around. I sagged in my banshees’ grips, then bared my teeth at the white dawn. To hell with that. I’d give him half a victory at most. I still had the Morrígan to deal with, and I had every intention of taking her out. Lugh deserved as much. Lugh and all the kings who had come before him, right up to Eochaidh, the first of the cauldron born. Born and borne: borne across time and oceans and continents, all the way to Seattle, where Suzanne Quinley could unmake a zombie and change the course of history. That girl and I had a serious talk coming, as soon as I got home.
Sunrise, I thought idly, wasn’t usually white.
