Banshee Cries

CHAPTER 10

I didn’t actually get my boots all the way on until Gary had us halfway to the park. I kept fumbling my stupid damned cell phone as I tried to call Morrison. Finally, on the fourth try, I got the right number punched in and he answered in with a worn-out hello.

“Morrison? You’ve got to get everybody out of the park, right now. Do we have anybody there? Call them out. He’s going to be there. The Blade. It’s the full moon. Mother said the moon was changing. Can you call them out?”

Gary gave me a sideways glance of concern. Billy leaned over the front seat of the cab, hanging on my every word. I had no idea what Mel must think. I hadn’t managed to say anything coherent between grabbing my boots and running for the cab.

Apparently I still wasn’t saying anything coherent. Morrison was silent on the other end of the line for a few moments, then exhaled heavily. “Walker?”

“Of course it’s Walker! Does anybody else do this kind of shit to you? Can you empty the park? They’re never going to see him coming, Morrison, they’re just going to get killed. You’ve got to move now!”

Another moment’s silence, and then, “I will call you back in two minutes. Do not do anything until you hear back from me.” Morrison hung up. I finally pulled my second boot on, wishing my foot weren’t soaking wet and cold from melting snow.

“Hurry-hurry-hurry-hurry, Gary, hurry.”

“If I hurry any more we’ll be dead.” It was true. The roads were coated in black ice, and he was driving as fast as I would have, which didn’t bode well for anybody.

“Joanie?”

“It’s Blade, dammit, it’s the full moon.” I twitched around to look at Billy, then twitched forward again. “I’m going to have to explain it to Morrison, I don’t want to explain it twice.” I leaned forward, as if my doing so would urge the cab to a faster pace. “Dammit, dammit, dammit, stupid stupid stupid Jo.”

“Hey,” Gary said, surprisingly quiet under my litany of abuse. “You got no reason to be callin’ yourself stupid, lady.”

Unexpected sniffles hit me right in the nose. “No right,” I mumbled. “Not no reason.”

“Close enough for this old dog.”

The cell phone rang and I nearly jumped out of my skin as I answered it. “God, I hate these things.”

“I assume you’re talking about the phone,” Morrison said. “The park’s clearing out. What the hell is going on, Walker? You’d better not be screwing with me.”

“I would not screw with you,” I promised fervently. “It’s the full moon, Morrison, my mother died on the full moon. It was the solstice, now it’s the equinox and the moon is full again. Check the records, I bet that’s what it was twenty-seven years ago, too.”

“How the hell am I supposed to check the records on the full moon from thirty years ago?”

“There’s this really cool Web site,” I started, then screwed up my face and grabbed the oh-shit handle as Gary took a corner by use of the Force, without looking where he was going and with no apparent regard to life or limb. “Look, it doesn’t matter, I know I’m right. He’s killing people on the full moons of winter. This is the last one. Tonight’s the equinox. I’m going to stop him.”

“How?”

“I have absolutely no idea.” I hung up, not wanting to hear Morrison’s response to that. To my utter surprise, the phone didn’t ring again. Less than two minutes later we pulled into the park’s lot. I tumbled out of the cab almost before it stopped moving and ran for the baseball diamond as fast as I could. Gary and Billy came after me, shouting.

I expected to slam into the Blade’s red barrier with such force that it’d throw me back. Instead I flung myself at it so hard that I skidded ten feet in the snow when I hit nothing at all. I said something witty and intelligent, like, “Da fuh?” around the mouthful of snow I got for my troubles, and scrambled to my feet, waiting for all hell to break loose.

Somehow, despite everything, I didn’t expect it to break loose by way of crimson falling down the face of the moon to cast a bloody shadow on the earth. Everything real seemed to go away: the bite of cold air, the shine of moonlight on fresh snow, my friends’ voices yelling somewhere behind me. I stood there with my jaw hanging open, staring up at the bleeding moon, while a sliver fell from it and tumbled all the way to earth.

Just before it hit the ground, it flared a cloak of blackness that cut the air with a banshee scream. Then the cloak settled, the Blade walking forward, tall and thin and hatchet faced. I could feel power rolling off it, heavy as the sea, and with as much concern for the threat I provided as the ocean itself might be.

Right about then it struck me that I was so low on power I’d been punch-drunk and giggling less than an hour earlier, and that out of all the days to pick a fight with something that looked like Morticia Addams’s incredibly evil older brother, today might well be the worst possible choice.

The Blade came toward me, faster than a run, without any visible means of locomotion. He simply glided over the blood-colored snow, picking up speed that was all the more eerie for its silence. I did a mental check over my list of available weapons.

There weren’t any.

I was going to die.

To my surprise, I discovered I could live with that. I let out the best war cry I could manage—it had nothing on Jacquie’s gleeful yelling, but it wasn’t bad—and flung myself at the Blade with everything I had.

Which was nothing.

The Blade wasn’t prepared for that.

I hit him in the stomach, a shoulder-first tackle Gary would’ve been proud of. It was like smashing into a flexible block of ice: cold split straight down into my bones and made the marrow into something that carried icy death. He screamed—for the first time I realized the metal-on-metal shriek I’d heard time and again was actually coming from the Blade, a banshee wail straight out of hell.

A banshee wail.

If I’d had time, I’d have stopped to beat my head on something. I’d called the haunting shrieks banshee cries without thinking it through all along. The Blade was a banshee. Harbinger of death.

My death, specifically, if I didn’t gain the upper hand. We rolled and thumped across the frozen field, struggling for sheer physical dominance. For a moment I had him, but he wrapped bony fingers around my wrist and cold seared into my skin again, numbing my arm all the way to the elbow. I was going to have a dandy case of frostbite if I got out of this alive.

He flung me backward over his head, using my arm like a fulcrum. I actually cartwheeled in the air, watching the blood moon zip by before I smashed into the snow and skidded. I staggered to my feet, turning just in time to catch the Blade’s shoulder with my gut, an excellent reversal of my tackle a moment earlier. All the air wheezed out of me and I hit the snow again, doing less skidding and more sinking with his weight on top of me. He was heavy for such a skinny thing, as if he’d been emptied of bone and muscle and had cold iron poured into his skin instead. His fingers wrapped around my throat, driving me further into the snow. It felt so warm compared to his hands that for a few seconds I stopped caring, cozy in my snow bed and ready to sleep.

A tiny, offended burst of power flared in my belly, reminding me what real warmth was.

I opened my eyes again, looking up into the Blade’s grimacing rictus. I couldn’t tell if it had ever been human. Skin stretched across its bones so tightly it might’ve been a mummy, eyes with bloody fire lighting them staring wide and empty at me. Its teeth—her teeth, I finally realized: it was, or had been at one time, female. Of course. Banshees were. Her teeth were bared, dry lips pulled back from them. I wasn’t sure she needed to breathe, but her chest was expanding.

Wait. I knew this part. This was where she screamed until my eardrums ruptured. I thought twice in one day was a little much, so I took what warmth the power inside me offered, forced it into my arm, and jabbed upward with two stiffened fingers. Right into her throat.

My fingers went all the way through to her spine with a horrible sound of flesh tearing as easily as paper. The scream turned into an aborted glerk and the banshee loosened her hold on me. I kicked her off and rolled away, clapping my hand to my throat, coughing through bruised muscle for air. For a few seconds we stayed there, both swaying, watching each other warily. The hole in her throat sealed up, not like human flesh would, but like paper was being stretched back to fit into a hole it’d been wrinkled away from.

She pounced again and I ducked, absurdly smug at the startled look that brightened her flame-colored eyes as she went flying over my head. Then she tackled me from behind, smashing my face into the snow. I thought, very clearly, damn, that thing really corners, and had a brief, irrational moment of wanting to try Petite out against her.

Instead I dragged in a lungful of snow and ice as I shoved so deep into the snow that I hit the earth below it. The banshee’s knee was in my back, bearing down with too much weight for me to move. I scrabbled for the worn-out center of power within myself, and came up dry. Apparently I’d blown my one chance when I didn’t finish ripping her head off a minute earlier. I pounded a fist in the snow, weak flailing as I tried to buck her off. It was about as effective as threatening to catch a storm in cotton candy.

She bent forward, bony knee pressing into my spine between my shoulder blades. I thought about screaming, but I couldn’t get enough air to. She hissed, right there behind my ear, and I had the horrible idea she was spitting maggots into my hair. Why maggots were a problem when I was about to be dead, I didn’t know, but the idea completely grossed me out. “In the womb I heard you die, for no one lives when a banshee cries.”

I wasn’t just going to die. I was going to be rhymed to death. That simply wasn’t fair. I flailed again, wishing my arms didn’t feel so heavy. Wishing my legs would kick, instead of lying there getting colder. Wishing I could wake up enough energy inside me to reach out for more. I didn’t even have enough to ask the city to hit me with its best shot, a tactic I’d tried once before and had sworn I wouldn’t do again. That I even thought about trying told me I was in dire straits.

“The pregnant gwyld was clever and wise, took you away from prying eyes. Should have known it couldn’t last, power like yours can’t be passed.” Her voice was singsong and scaly, grating against the ringing in my ears. I tried jerking my head back. Not even a banshee could like a head butt to the bridge of the nose, right? But the weight of her hand was too much to move. I considered giving up and dying. It was pretty clearly in the books. On the other hand, she was saying something interesting, if I could get enough oxygen to my brain to work my way through her bad poetry. “Master sees and Master hears, gains his strength through bloodred tears. Thirty years he’s gone unfed, shaman’s gifts protect the dead.”

The words burrowed into my brain, extracting details about my life in exchange for my fumbling grasp of what the banshee was telling me. I whimpered into the snow and tried hard to hang on to the idea of my name wrapped safely up in airbags and seat belts. I felt the scrape of her voice slide off that thought, and nearly laughed with relief. I could keep her away from the most important things. At least if I was going to die, I wasn’t going to die with my soul eaten.

Power erupted in my belly like molten gold being poured into me. I straightened my arms, suddenly filled with strength, and shoved up, lifting the Blade’s weight as if it were inconsequential. I whipped around, flinging her off me, and she landed yards away, skidding through the snow on hands and knees, back arched like an angry cat. For an instant, the banshee cries stopped, leaving a silence so profound it hurt me in my bones.

I had no time to wonder where the new strength was coming from. I drew on the memory of my mother, throwing up a jail cell made of her own will, and copied it. Bars of blazing silver flashed up out of the snow, slamming closed around the banshee. She threw her head back and keened, a high piercing note that shivered all the way to the bloody moon. My bars wavered under the onslaught, and her voice strengthened, the moon itself seeming to hang lower in the sky the longer she wailed.

Black threads of power, the sacrificed lives of three women, wound together and responded to the banshee’s cries. They leaped through the bars I’d built, piercing her bony body. She grew in size and in power, feeding from the blood lines, which throbbed and pulsed like arteries as they spread across the snow. I dug deeper into the fresh power I’d found, discovering an ocean’s depth of energy waiting to be tapped. It ran deeper than I did, the same kind of power that Billy had tapped into earlier that day. The love of family, the protective streak that went beyond what a single person could encompass. I could use it, but I doubted I’d live through it.

It didn’t matter.

The ocean of blue crushed down upon the banshee, pressing down to sever the blood lines. They flattened, carrying less sustenance but refusing to shatter. I felt half-moon cuts opening up on my palms, my hands fisted so tightly that blood couldn’t escape the tiny slices my fingernails made. The banshee kept screaming, her voice muffled by the weight of my power, but not yet broken. I set my teeth together and reached deeper into the core of power I’d tapped, willing to die as long as I took the other bitch with me.

Sheila MacNamarra put her hand in mine, pale and wraithlike in the bloody moonlight. There was no substance to her, only a terrible force of will, and with her touch a heart of coldness broke inside me. I gave her one shocked look and she returned it with a smile as warm as the summer sun.

“We started this nearly thirty years ago, now didn’t we?” The lilt in her voice turned thirty into tarty. “Let’s put an end to it, shall we?”

That morning, and almost thirty years ago, I’d thrown her a fastball of my own power. Now she made good on the gift, returning it threefold. The depth I’d reached, the unexpected strength, wasn’t mine at all, and it wouldn’t, in the end, tap me out. It was my mother who would die for it. My mother who had already died for it.

Golden strength and red temper flowed into me, blending with my own silvers and blues in a way I hadn’t seen before. She shored up the silver bars of the cage I’d built, added her weight to that of the deep blue sea. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her nod, and found myself walking forward, my fingers trailing in the golden depth of her strength.

I slipped between the bars of the cage I’d built, putting my hand all the way into Sheila’s power, and withdrawing a sword made of fire. I recognized the shape of it: a rapier with a sweeping guard that flickered and warmed my hand without burning me. Flames shimmered to a deadly edge along the slender blade. The Banshee’s screams erupted all over again, but the power bearing down on her muffled them and left my beleaguered ears in no real danger.

The black lines of blood magic that fed her parted under the sword’s blade where they’d refused to disintegrate under raw force. A scalpel, I thought. My mother was a scalpel. And I came so close to never knowing that. To not understanding.

The banshee stopped screaming when the lines were cut, her gaze fixed on the red moon, as if waiting for rescue to come. I glanced up at it, then shook my head. “He’s still locked behind bars.” Not bars. Behind a fallen cave mouth, the broken stones held in place by my mother’s will. My mother, who, with my help, had disrupted the sacrifice that would feed him, almost thirty years ago. And with her help I’d done it again tonight. “Still hungry, too.” I leaned in, my hands shaking. “Too weak to help you, bitch.”

Surprise creased the Blade’s narrow face as I took her head, the fiery rapier ripping through her neck with the sound of paper tearing, loud in the absence of her cries. I caught her falling head with a grace that bewildered me, fingers knotted in her thin hair, and walked away from the dusty bones with a spot of emptiness building inside me. All the power that had been brought to bear, both mine and the dark stuff birthed by the banshee’s murders, faded, clear moonlight reestablishing itself over the frozen fields. My mother, wearing the cable-knit sweater and jeans she’d worn in her youth, folded her arms beneath her breasts and smiled at me.

“Mom…” I hadn’t ever called her that before. It made my throat tight, and her smile fragile. “You brought me to America to protect me from that thing, didn’t you?” The banshee’s rhymes finally made sense. “So it couldn’t find me.”

Her smile flickered, still fragile, and she lifted her chin. I saw, quite clearly, the silver Celtic cross of a necklace that rested against her collarbone, momentarily exposed by the shift of her sweater. I pressed my fingers against my throat, where the same necklace now rested.

“I thought it was for the best, lass. You told me, you see. Before you were born, you told me I hadn’t succeeded in destroying the Blade. It was all I could think of to do, to protect you.”

I closed my eyes briefly, remembering the way joy had bled from her expression and left resolution in its place. I nodded in a jerky motion, and made myself open my eyes again. “Thank you.”

“I thought I could explain when you were grown. When you came to see me. But you weren’t ready.” Grief colored the shadow of her smile. “So closed off, Siobhán. Whatever happened to you, that turned you away from the wonders of the world?” She lifted her hand, staying my answer before I had a chance to give it. “There’s no time, not anymore. There hasn’t been since the beginning. Bitter ashes, isn’t it, but that’s the price of Gaelic blood, my Siobhán. For all their wars are merry.”

“And all their songs are sad,” I whispered. Surprise brought out her smile and let it fade into pleasure at my recognition of the quote.

“It was all I could think of to do, loose myself from the world. I could see it in you, Siobhán. Joanne. My Joanne. That the moment was coming when you’d have to choose. I thought if I could hold on in spirit, I might protect you for a little while. Distract the darker things while you grew to understand your gifts.”

“You did.” My throat was still tight. I tried swallowing against it, but came up dry. “You were here. I would have died tonight. Thank you. I…will I see you again?” She was fading around the edges now, like the Cheshire Cat. I knew the answer even before she shook her head, and looked away to hide the shock of loneliness I felt stab through me.

“The space of the winter moons was all I could bargain for. I was afraid even it might not be enough.”

“Bargain?” I looked back at her, what was left to see. She looked younger somehow, the smile that curved her mouth belonging to a woman I’d hardly known.

“Goodbye, Siobhán. Know that I love you.” There was nothing left but her smile, and then even that was gone.

Morrison had joined Billy and Gary at the bleachers when I walked back to them. None of them seemed to see me coming. Gary clutched his chest and sat down with a thud, glaring at me as I clumped up to the bleachers. “What the hell happened out there, Jo?”

“What’d you see?”

“Not a goddamned thing! You ran off and now you’re back!”

I looked up at the sky. The moon seemed higher than it had been, more solid and real somehow. “It didn’t seem that long to me.”

Morrison was staring grimly at the head I still carried. “Is that the killer?”

I lifted the head a few inches. “Yeah.”

“Where’s the rest of it?”

“Out there.” I turned around, waving the banshee’s head at the field.

There was no body lying in the snow, nor any sign of the wrestling fight I’d had with her. The only footprints at all in the new snow were mine, leading up to the bleachers. Even they only seemed to begin a few yards away, just on this side of the closest blood line that had been drawn with one of the victim’s entrails. I stood there a few seconds, waiting for a clever explanation to pop into mind.

Nothing did. After a moment I looked at the head again, then over my shoulder at Morrison as I hefted it. “Do you want me to bring this in?”

It took a long time for him to say no. I nodded and gave it a swing or two, then threw it back the way I came. It arched and hit the snow with a soft poof, powder flying in the air. When it cleared, there was no mark that suggested anything had landed on the smooth white surface.

“It’s over.” Morrison said, almost a question. I nodded. Billy let out a whistle that split the air and shoved his hands in his pockets with an air of finality.

“So who wants to come back to the house for dinner? I bet Mel kept it warm. Why don’t you come with us, Captain? There’s plenty.”

Gary stomped down the bleachers, Billy a step or two behind him. Morrison looked at me. I kept my head turned a little to the side, meeting his eyes. He finally nodded and jerked his chin. “Let’s go.”

Tension ebbed from my shoulders and I dropped my chin to my chest. “Captain.” Not Morrison. I didn’t know why.

Morrison turned, eyebrows lifted. I swallowed, trying to figure out the right thing to say. Neither “thank you” nor “sorry” seemed exactly appropriate. I stood there gazing at him until he developed a faint, surprisingly understanding smile. “Come on, Walker,” he said, more gently. “We’re done here.” He tilted his head again and walked down the bleachers after the other two.

I let out a deep breath and followed them all, smiling at the moon.