Raven Calls

Chapter Sixteen

People fall down fast when they faint. There’s not usually time to catch them, and neither Méabh nor I even tried. In fact, we both watched Caitríona collapse with a sort of clinical awfulness, me wincing as her cheek bounced off a sharp stone and a bruise began to blossom under a sudden rivulet of blood.

“You’re a healer,” Méabh said after a moment, and gentle-hearted me shrugged.

“She already believes some of this, but I might as well wait for her to wake up and notice she’s— Hi, are you okay?” Faints didn’t usually last very long, either. I crouched beside an exceedingly bewildered Caitríona and patted her shoulder. “You fainted. Perfectly understandable, it’s been a rough day. It’s going to get worse. Or differently interesting, anyway. How’s your cheek?”

“It hurts.” Poor Caitríona was too overwhelmed to even whine. At worst her statement qualified as a whimper. I felt around in the pockets of my brand-new coat like I’d find a mirror there—as if I ever carried a compact mirror—then waved my hand at Méabh.

“C’mere, let her see herself in your sword. It’s the only reflective surface we’ve got.” The polished silver was in fact remarkably reflective, and Caitríona’s eyes filled with tears as the visual component added insult to injury.

“It’ll scar so it will.”

Under normal circumstances, she’d be right. There was a nice little puncture seeping blood at a remarkable rate, and since it had been made by a rock, it was likely dirty. But I was there, so it wasn’t normal circumstances by very definition. Fully aware of how much facial wounds hurt, I touched her cheek very gently and said, “Well, no, it probably won’t.”

Healing, now that I could do it without all the vehicle metaphors, felt fairly awesome. It was like putting the last lug nut onto a wheel, the absolute finishing touch to a restoration. It carried a little click of satisfaction, of a job well done, of something brought back to rightness. It wasn’t effortless: the power to make something change had to come from somewhere, and largely it came from me. I’d learned the hard way that big diseases like cancer really needed a power circle to spread the power draw around so I didn’t kill myself trying to make somebody else healthy. But Caitríona’s cheek wasn’t anything like that magnitude, and it took only a moment of envisioning it as whole, complete, right, for that change to happen. The bruise faded, round cut at its center disappearing into unblemished skin. Her eyes got bigger and she clapped her hand over her cheek when I released her and sat back. I’d healed Gary yesterday. I’d thrown shields around. I’d just healed Caitríona. The only person I couldn’t fix was myself. There was probably a lesson in that, but before I figured out what it was, Cat’s eyes narrowed and she pointed at my cheek. “You didn’t have that when you were here before.”

I touched the thin scar on my right cheek. “Nope.”

“So how come you’ve got it? You shouldn’t have any scars.”

“I got it the day I became a shaman. It’s a reminder. I like it.” Not that facial scars were generally high on my list of favorite things, but I did like the little cheekbone scar. It kept me balanced, somehow.

Cat had gone back to prodding her own cheek. “It’s healed? I can’t feel it at all anymore. Aunt Sheila never did that.”

“Did she not?” I was turning Irish with my phrasing. I shook myself and tried again. “Paper cuts and scrapes never went away when she was around? I kind of do that a lot. My precinct’s jumped to the head of the class for fewest sick days called in.”

“She had—” Caitríona broke off, comprehension dawning. “She had magic plasters. Put them on and don’t take them off for three days, three days, d’ye hear me so? Sure and we’d take them off sooner, but the cuts and bruises were always healed. She magicked us!”

I couldn’t help grinning. “Yeah, she did. She totally magicked you.” A shiver ran over me and I straightened. “And now we’re going to magic her in return. Méabh? Um, Méabh?”

The warrior queen stood at the mountain’s edge, looking into a rising mist. “Do ye’s not see it, Granddaughters? Do ye’s not see the coming storm?”

We both crept to where she stood, me trying not to look down. I didn’t generally have a problem with heights, but the magic mountain creeped me out. I didn’t want to get too close to the two-thousand-foot drop, just in case. “Sure and it’s black on the horizon,” Méabh whispered. “Coming for my children, hungry as only the dark can be. Do ye’s not see it?”

Caitríona and I exchanged glances, then eyed the horizon cautiously. She let me be the one to say, “All I see is mist in the valley. Do you see the future a lot, Méabh?”

Memory swept me as soon as I spoke. Premonitions fed to me by a coyote in a hard white desert, dreams of futures yet to be. A few of them had come to pass. More were no doubt pending. I wasn’t especially keen on that, but there wasn’t much I could do but man up and take it on the chin. But Méabh shivered and shook her head. “My power’s in the heat of battle, not in foresight and forewarning. If it’s my sight that sees what’s coming, then it’s a bloody road indeed. I’ll stand at your side to fight it if I may, but there’s none so clear as that in the signs I see.”

“What do you see?”

“Blood of my blood lost to me. Lost to time, sure and so. A people gone. A dying world. It’s black as night, Joanne. There’s no future for us here.”

There were moments I really hated pioneering a new exciting path through the unexplored wildernesses of magic. Warrior and healer, future-tripper, past-visitor, accidental end-times-sign, bearer of bad news. I wanted that Shaman’s Handbook, damn it, and nobody was ever going to give me one. I clapped Méabh on the shoulder and put on my best hail men and hearty voice. “The future’s mutable, Grandmother. If we can’t see one past the storm, then we’ll by God make one we can see.”

She startled, then smiled, which was precisely why I’d chosen to use the nomenclature. “You’re a bold one, aren’t you, Granddaughter?”

“It’s part of my charm.” Worry lanced through me, depleting any hope of actual charm rolling off me. Gary used that phrase all the time, and Gary wasn’t here. Much more subdued, I said, “Look, let’s get this thing done before the Morrígan notices we axed her go-to guy and sends something scarier. Like herself. Why would she not come herself? It’s just past the equinox, the banshees should be at full strength, the Master must be hungry....”

“Sure and you stepped through time to stop her sacrifice, sent a warrior and the Wild Hunt to do battle with her in your name, set a goddess to bind her deathless cauldron and caused the forging of a wedding gift that broke her power and which only a child of her own blood could remove from her throat. It is possible,” Méabh said, oh so dryly, “that my mother has learned caution. The fear darrig is no idle threat, Joanne Walker. They torture and trick the strongest men, and yet you were slowed not at all.”

I wasn’t sure which astonished me more, the approval behind her litany or the revelation that Méabh, Warrior Queen of Connacht, considered a Red Cap to be a significant threat. I’d gotten so used to having my ass handed to me that I kind of figured anything I could dispatch without much effort—albeit with the help of an awesome magic shield—probably didn’t rate on the scale of nasty monsters. Caitríona gave me a distinct “I told you so” look, although she hadn’t actually told me how scary Red Caps were because the attempt had left her spluttering. Still, I kind of wanted to pat myself on the back. In fact, I almost did, which made my arm start itching again, which did a dandy job of deflating me. Nothing like the threat of turning into a werewolf to make a girl reconsider just how swell she thought she was.

“And there’s the magic flooding this mountain, too,” Méabh said thoughtfully, as if I hadn’t been going through mental gymnastics while she took a breath. “Life magic, anathema to the Master and his chosen few. It may be this place is too steeped in white magic for her and her kind to safely come.”

“Not likely. There’s all that residual death magic here. Black magic stains. I don’t know how long it takes for white magic to bleach the really bad stuff away.” Back at home, my friend Melinda Holliday had done a fantastic job of cleaning up after some very ugly ritual magic had made a mess around her house, so it was possible. Hundreds of sacrificial murders just evidently took more than Saint Patrick hanging out on the mountain for forty days, or my mother coming up here several times a year to lend a helping hand.

My heart lurched. “This burning Mother’s bones thing, that’s a purifying ritual, right?”

Méabh nodded and my heart lurched a second time, heartbeat disrupted enough to make nausea rise again. If Melinda could wipe out the results of a suicide in her front yard, I could probably finish cleaning the ancient poison at a sacred site by means of a burning meant to purify. I croaked, “You’re right, Cat. Mother would like this to be done up here. It might even be what she always wanted. I just wish we had one more of our bloodline here to help.”

“We do,” Méabh said gently, and knelt by the suitcase full of Sheila’s bones.

The mountaintop was round, if I used my imagination vividly enough. Had I been arranging the universe, the chapel would have sat plunk in the middle of the vague roundness, but since someone else had arranged it, it was more toward the western slope, closer to the distant ocean and the nearby footpath than centered. I wibbled about it a bit, then decided to pretend the chapel wasn’t there at all, and built my power circle based on the mountaintop’s shape rather than the otherwise-obvious focal point that was the chapel. Besides, the chapel was locked up and I bet it wouldn’t go over well with anybody, either the locals or the powers that be, if we broke in to park in the power circle’s center.

Mother’s bones went at the north compass point of the circle, for the cold of death. I took the south, figuring the mother-daughter connection made as much of a power channel as could be asked for, and that living flesh and blood versus dead bones made a reasonable warmth of life contrast. I put Méabh in the west, for age represented by the setting sun, and Caitríona in the east for youth. I thought that made a nice channel, too: oldest of the bloodline to youngest. Or at least to the youngest available, since I knew there were younger cousins, never mind my own son, about whom I was trying hard not to think. It was too late, of course. Sheila the banshee knew about him now, and there was a good chance that she’d already passed the information on to her new master. But I was going to have to cross that bridge later. I had bones to burn now.

“I know you can call up a power circle, whether you can heal or not,” I shouted at Méabh. “I want your help here, okay? I want this circle to belong to both of us.”

“What about me?” Caitríona sounded less petulant than I would’ve in her shoes at her age. In fact, I might even label her tone hopeful, if I was feeling honest. It made me want to give her a meaningful task, whether she had the power or not. After a second I hit on something and answered swiftly enough to seem like I hadn’t hesitated at all.

“I want you to concentrate on Sheila. On everything you knew about her. Put that out there, focus it like you could call her up with your imagination. Put energy into it. The circle will pick up on that and your essence and your memories will become part of the power.”

“And what will it do?”

“The more people that weave power together the stronger the connection is. I’ve used other people’s energy before, but not for something like this. That’s why I want you to think about Sheila. You knew her a lot better than I did. We want to call as much of her spirit here as we can, to give her over to cleansing the mountain and also to breaking the bond between her bones and her soul.” I hadn’t been previously aware of bonds like that, but then, ghosts weren’t my specialty. That was my partner—former partner, which Morrison had probably told him by now, which was going to go down like a lead balloon—my former partner Billy Holliday’s forte. I also wasn’t absolutely certain my mother qualified as a ghost, but I was pretty sure she fell in the realm of undead, and for all I knew, the undead were deeply tied to their bones.

There was one potential snag in my plan. We might succeed in washing the mountain clean with all the heart and white magic Sheila had to offer, and that might leave nothing but the black-hearted banshee behind. I counted it a risk worth taking. In my judgment, the parts that counted as my mother would have been saved, and the rest, well. Everybody had a dark side, and there was a certain dramatic satisfaction in the idea of lopping the head off that dark side in a very literal fashion.

I decided it probably wasn’t necessary to explain the possible flaw in the plan, and instead called Raven to me. It wasn’t exactly that I needed his guidance in raising a power circle. More that I was heading into his realm, into the gray territory between life and death, and it was safer to do that with him nearby. He appeared, quarking curiously, and I scratched under his beak as he settled on my shoulder. “We have a big job, Raven. Life and death stuff. I need a circle that runs to the mountain’s roots, that’s how deep it has to go, and reaches up to where the air’s too thin to breathe. Earth and sky. I can be earth, you can be sky, huh?”

He quarked again, this time clearly delighted, and leapt off my shoulder to wheel above our heads, sketching an outline of the circle. For an instant I simply loved the silly animal, loved his enthusiasm and his opinions and his brashness, and I hoped like hell he knew that. He zipped around above us, dipping close to Méabh, then zooming around the top half of the circle to come around to Caitríona. I didn’t know if either of them could see him, though I saw Caitríona’s hair fliff as he caught a wing tip in it. Then he went back to the north again, this time climbing high before he turned his head to give me a birdy black eye in warning.

He dove, and magic fell down in a curtain with him. I squealed, as thoughtlessly delighted as he was, and yelled, “Now, Méabh!” as I pulled magic up from the earth.

Hers came from within, relying on the connection with the world that the aos sí shared. It linked Croagh Patrick with Cromm Crúaich, tying the present to the far-distant past, just as Méabh was currently tied. Even Caitríona reacted, throwing forth a burst of energy more solidly formulated than someone without mystical training had any business offering. Her strength and Méabh’s shot toward each other, making another link in the past/present rope, and for an instant their colors glimmered harmoniously.

Then my magic and Raven’s crashed together, top to bottom, in a blast of gunmetal blue. Méabh and Caitríona’s offerings, sandwiched between them, shone brilliantly for an instant, then exploded in rivulets through the ball of magic now encompassing Croagh Patrick.

It sounded like static, like the aurora was supposed to. It felt like laughter, a sheer primal joy in sympathetic magic. This was what wielding vast cosmic power was supposed to feel like: confident, strong, joyous, sharing. I’d thought once I could maybe heal Seattle. Maybe heal the world. All of a sudden I understood I was only part of a huge network of magic users, adepts, connected, whatever they wanted to be called, who could change the world if, and only if, they worked together like we were doing now. This was how my magic was meant to be used: as one of many. Nothing I could do on my own would ever feel so good.

Caitríona yelped, from which I ascertained she could either see or feel the power flowing. Méabh, far more stoic, stood her ground and mostly didn’t let a little smile get out of control. I stretched my power toward my mother’s bones, searching for the heat I’d once felt while healing. Fire shouldn’t be that difficult to call up; it was only a change of state, and shamanism was about change.

A hint of Mother’s red-gold power still clung to her bones. I dug into the marrow, reaching for every last whisper of that, ready to burn it out in a glorious, defiant blaze. Raven helped, settling on the bones with clenched claws, like he could snap and shake the last dregs of power from them. Between us, I felt her remaining magic gather, then lift, though neither Raven nor myself did the lifting. I tried to shutter the Sight on more deeply, and caught a glimpse of a much more fragile raven, so old his wings and beak had turned to white. Sheila’s raven: I knew it instantly, though I’d never even imagined she had spirit animals. But it made sense. Oh, it made sense, if we were the long-calendar descendants of the Morrígan. Ravens were part of us. They always would be.

And the faded streak that was Mother’s spirit raven held the fragments of her power in its claws, wings beating with a desperate, ponderous slowness. Time was so short, so very short, and there was so much to do. I pitched my voice to carry, not wanting to shout within the confines of the power circle. It seemed disrespectful, and if we’d just eked a spirit raven back from beyond to finish this task, the last thing I wanted was to show disrespect. “Give your memories of Sheila everything you’ve got, Cat. Let’s wipe this place clean and give her the send-off she deserves.”

Caitríona lowered her chin to her chest, eyes closed in concentration, and all of us held our breath, waiting to see Sheila’s ghost break free of the white bones.

A goddess rose up instead.