Always Be My Banshee

by Molly White

  “See?” Zed asked with a grin. “Siobhan’s got kitchen magic. Just looking at you, she knows what you need—pie for sadness, pie for the soul, pie to settle your nerves.”

  Cordelia’s face was serene as she swallowed another bite. “Does she have pie for when you need bigger pants? Because I’m going to be spending a lot of time here.”

  Brendan chuckled around his mouthful, just as an older bald man in overalls walked up to the table, accompanied by a pot-bellied man with an impressive walrus mustache. “Zed, I need to talk to ya with your mayor hat on.”

  Zed straightened in his chair, suddenly very serious. “What’s up, Karl? And it’s Walter, isn’t it?”

  The man reached out to shake Zed’s giant hand. “Yep, Walter Benson. You can call me Walt. Nice to meet you, Mr. Mayor.”

  “Aw, just call me ‘Zed,’” he said, waving him off.

  “Otherwise, his head gets even bigger,” Clarissa agreed. “Barely leaves room for a hat.”

  Zed gasped in indignation. “Maman!”

  “Well, I hate to interrupt your lunch date with these pretty ladies,” Walt said, winking at Clarissa and Cordelia. “But we’re having a bit of trouble with the potholes on our road. The big one—I call him Cranky Pete—has gotten big enough to get my tractor tire stuck.”

  “You named your pothole?” Cordelia asked.

  “It’s my fault,” Walt sighed. “The moving trucks were hauling stuff back and forth to the new house. I made it worse.”

  “Well, my tractor didn’t help things, Walt. No use blaming yourself. Cranky Pete was bound to take one of us out eventually,” Karl assured him.

  Cordelia giggled, amused by the personalization of road hazards. This prompted Walt to give her another wink. “Well, that’s the sweetest sound I’ve heard all day.”

  “You bought the McNairy place, didn’t you?” Zed asked.

  “There are people still moving into town? Even with all the problems?” Cordelia asked Zed.

  He nodded. “We’ve had a few new families move into the bayou, which makes sense since the rift is expanding. Magique are feeling the call more than ever.”

  Walt nodded. “A-yep, couldn’t resist the pull any longer. We’d heard about Mystic Bayou for years, and when my Lettie passed away, well, I just didn’t see any reason to stay in Bangor anymore.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your wife,” Zed said. “But we’re glad you’re here. Always nice to have another shifter around.”

  Brendan returned his attention to his pie as Zed and his constituents talked about repair options for Cranky Pete. During this debate, Karl made a gesture and the back of his hand brushed against Brendan’s shoulder. Brendan froze as a familiar sensation spread across his skin, like frost taking hold, and he knew what would happen if he didn’t get up from the booth right that moment.

  In his head, he saw Karl lying in his bed, holding his wife’s hand. He kissed her cheek, rolled over, and slipped off to sleep, a contented smile on his face. Within a few minutes, his breathing stopped, and so did his heart. He had a death that most people hoped for, in a warm bed, at an old age, next to the woman he loved.

  Brendan held in the scream. Singing in a crowded room like this would only cause a panic. Yet when a death song wasn’t released, it always ended badly for the singer. Without a word, Brendan pushed to his feet scrambling around Zed and Karl, ducking around anyone between him and the door. He finally reached the street, running around the corner of the restaurant and vomiting his pie on the gravel parking lot.

  Cordelia was suddenly behind him, rubbing his back through his shirt. She pressed a cold bottle of water into his hand. “Do you think she dosed the pie after all?”

  Brendan shook his head as he heaved one last time. “No.”

  “Maybe you’re sick from being exposed to the rift? It’s not like it’s an exact science,” Cordelia suggested.

  “Banshee,” he whispered, wiping at his mouth.

  Her blue eyes went saucer-wide. “You saw someone dying?”

  He stood to his full height and nodded.

  “Who?” she gasped. “Shouldn’t you go inside and warn them? Maybe they can go to the hospital or—”

  “I told you, that’s not how it works, darling. It’s a sort of sin among the banshees to do anything beyond the song. It’s not my purpose to prevent death. Death is a part of the cycle. The balance has to be kept.”

  “I know you said that. It’s one thing to say that in the abstract, it’s something else altogether when it’s a real live person standing in front of you. Is it Zed??” she demanded. “Or Clarissa?”

  “Trust me, this is a natural, enviable death,” he said. “I can’t go around preventing every death I see. If every banshee did that, the world would be over-run with people who had missed their fates.”

  “So you’re going to do nothing?” Cordelia cried.

  Karl ambled out of the restaurant, a concerned expression on his craggy face. “Your dinner hit you wrong, fella?”

  Brendan cleared his throat. “It’s just all the traveling, doesn’t agree with me.”

  “Well, a hot shower and ham and cheese sandwich always puts my wife to rights after she has to go to New Orleans for the day,” Karl said.

  Brendan nodded shakily. “That’s good advice.”

  “Well, speaking of the little lady, I better head home. We’re having the whole brood over tonight for gumbo. If I’m late, no gumbo for me,” Karl said.

  Brendan could feel the understanding and then disapproval rolling off of Cordelia. “Well, be sure to tell all of them how much you love them. Your family can never hear that enough.”

  Karl grinned at him. “Sure will. Have a good night, you two.”

  Karl climbed into his truck and drove off, with loud country-western music blaring out his open windows.

  “I don’t even know what to say,” Cordelia sighed.

  “Would you rather your loved one die a peaceful death in his sleep after a big family dinner, where he was able to give everybody closure by telling them he loved them? Or in a hospital bed after a prolonged fight against incurable heart problems?” Brendan asked.

  Cordelia considered that for a moment. “The peaceful death, I suppose.”

  “If you think seeing the past is difficult, Cordelia, try seeing the inevitable.”

  She sighed. “I know, I’m sorry. I’m not being fair.”

  “I’m not either. I know this has to look cold. It’s not that I don’t feel anything, trust me. I feel it all,” Brendan said.

  She leaned forward and brushed her lips across his cheek. He turned to her, tempted, so tempted to press his mouth to hers. It had been so long since he’d had even a simple kiss on his face; he didn’t want that sweet warmth to leave him. The smell of fresh-baked biscuits wafted up from her hair and his hands itched to comb through it. His forehead bumped against hers as he bent his head to press his lips to hers. And then suddenly remembered that he’d just thrown up.

  Not the best time for a mouth-based romantic gesture, then.

  “I think I’m just going to walk home,” she murmured as he pulled away.

  “I’ll come with you,” he said. “I think I’ve had enough for one night.”

  “So, do you always throw up? Because if so, your gift sucks on a lot of levels,” Cordelia said.

  “Only when I try to hold it in,” Brendan said.

  She kept her arms wrapped around her waist as they crossed the street, as if warding off a chill they knew wasn’t there. As they approached the court of trailers, they spotted a group of League employees playing a boisterous card game at one of the outdoor tables. They were laughing, yelling at each other in a way that only close friends could. Brendan followed her line of sight and the look of longing on her face just about broke his heart.

  “You know, maybe if you kept your gloves on, you might be able to join them,” Brendan suggested.

  She chuffed out a laugh, shaking her head. “Oh, no. I really don’
t want to play. It just reminds me of how I grew up. The best parts of it, anyway.”

  He waited for a beat, for her to give him some context, but she just smiled sadly and turned away from the sight of the game table. “So, you’ve never said anything, when you see something like that?”

  Brendan grimaced. “Not once.”

  “OK, well, do me a favor, if you see me dying in some embarrassing way, like missing the step on my trailer porch, please tell me, so I can plan something more dignified,” Cordelia said.

  “I will keep that in mind,” Brendan promised.

  5

  Cordelia

  For the first time in years, Cordelia slept in. She slept past her usual alarm, all the way to eleven a.m., until her body ached with the heaviness of sleep. And then when she woke up to see the mid-morning sun streaming through the trailer window, she pulled the covers over her head and slept some more.

  The artifact had sucked the energy out of her in a way she’d never experienced before, like a kiss that stole her breath and overwhelmed her—but not in a good way. Like her improbably brief date with Jack Newsome when she was twenty, just after striking out on her own. Jack had seemed so safe, and she’d been so hopeful about a man she’d met in such a normal way—shopping at the grocery store. It took her just a few seconds after he’d picked her up before she realized she wasn’t safe at all; she’d made a mistake and she needed to run. The moment she’d put her hands on Jack Newsome’s shoulders, she’d seen him slipping a vial labeled “Rohypnol” into his jacket pocket just before he left for their date. He’d planned on dropping it into her drink at dinner. It had taken her a very long time to block the rest of his intentions from her mind.

  Now, she realized she’d become complacent over the years. She’d grown accustomed to managing her life and her gift with her routine and her precautions—rise, go to work, lock herself in her apartment, go to sleep, repeat. But Mystic Bayou and whatever was in that black stone casket had thrown her out of that safe little loop. And so, for the next few days, she retreated into her usual shell of solitude. She told herself she deserved it after braving the rift in the universe and the pie shop.

  As delightful as Siobhan’s pastries had been, Cordelia’s head had been swimming with psychic sensory overload the entire time she sat in the booth. And while Clarissa—and Zed, darling, goofy Zed, with his safely communicable emotions—were perfectly sweet people, Brendan’s hand in hers was the only thing that kept her from losing her mind. It had been a stupid risk to take after collapsing at the rift, but she’d stubbornly wanted to prove to herself that she would be able to do this job. It wasn’t the first time her stubbornness had come back to bite her in the ass.

  And then, of course, she’d seen the full extent of Brendan’s gift, which had thrown her for a whole new loop. So she burrowed in again, creating her safe space with Netflix and food and isolation. And just when she thought maybe she could leave the trailer, she’d looked outside to see Karl Bruhl’s incredibly long funeral procession driving through town and felt a horrible flash of guilt.

  She supposed she shouldn’t have been shocked when the nightmares started. All this emotional turmoil was bound to weaken the hold she had on all those “germs” in her system, other people’s memories and thoughts that surfaced in her dreams. She saw herself as a bus driver, unable to stop a student from stepping out in front of her bus. She saw herself as a teenage boy, thrown into a closet while her father screamed prayers in Lithuanian. She saw herself being hung in some cattle town in Kansas, accused of rustling by a screaming crowd of prairie folk.

  Her mother had handed her that hangman’s rope when she was four years old. Bernadette had stolen it from the “Traveling Wild West Museum” with the Fenster Carnival Show to test whether Cordelia had the sight or an active imagination. Cordelia had screamed so hard that she passed out, and she’d never been able to shake that feeling of the rope closing around her throat, fighting for one last breath. It had haunted her dreams in times of stress for years, which was pretty typical of Bernadette’s parenting techniques.

  Still, it was Brendan that Cordelia pitied. She thought her gift was uncomfortable, but to see people dying and know that you couldn’t—and shouldn’t—do anything to stop it? And he was right; if he stopped every death he saw, the universe would be all out of whack with people running around with unfulfilled fates. Of course, it was hard to rationalize that when she thought of Mrs. Bruhl in her widow’s weeds.

  This shared secret and her self-imposed exile had put distance between them, and she was sorry for it. The way he touched her, unafraid and easy, was something she was left craving like a drug—not because he was the only man she’d met who could touch her so casually, but because she wanted Brendan touching her. Brendan of the musical voice and the soft eyes, who was considerate and kind, who did his duty even when it hurt him. Her mother had convinced her she would never have that. She’d even kissed his cheek! The last time she’d kissed anyone was…

  Nope, thinking of Alex Carver and her abiding teenage love for him would not help her focus.

  A sudden knock at her door jerked her out of her deep thoughts. While the idea of socializing after spending so many days without human contact seemed like a mountain she had no interest in climbing, she was also aware that the person at her door could be her boss. It didn’t seem wise to just leave Jillian standing there. So she glanced in the mirror and straightened her hair, praying that Jillian wouldn’t hold a pair of yoga pants and a ten-year-old hoodie against her.

  She opened the door to find a heavyset woman with a glorious crown of silver hair braided on top of her head. She was wearing neatly pressed gray pants and a faded floral blouse bearing a name tag reading “Bonita.”

  “Can I help you? Are you making a delivery?” Cordelia asked.

  The woman grinned at her. “No, but Jillian told me I might want to stop by for a visit. I’m Bonita De Los Santos.”

  Cordelia arched her brows. It struck her as unusual that Jillian would be sending people to her house. Jillian seemed to be a stickler about professional etiquette.

  “Shake my hand, Cordelia Canton,” Bonita insisted.

  Cordelia shook her head. “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t do that.”

  “Because it’s cold and flu season?” the other woman asked with a smirk.

  “No, really, I—"

  The woman rolled her eyes and took Cordelia’s hand firmly in hers, shaking it. For once, Cordelia was not overwhelmed by images, but treated to an orderly slide show that trickled into her mind. She saw Bonita sliding packages into the various mailboxes at the post office. She saw Bonita holding envelopes and divining the contents of various bills and letters, writing it off as her God-given curiosity. Cordelia saw Bonita walking through the grocery store, able to shop and casually touch the carts and register without worry.

  Suddenly, she remembered what Dani had said about “Miss Bonita” having a similar gift.

  “You’re like me,” Cordelia whispered.

  Bonita hefted a soft-sided cooler that Cordelia had mistaken for her mailbag. “How about you invite me in before you let out all the bought air? Now, I know that Clarissa left a lot of food for y’all,” Bonita said as Cordelia waved her through the door. “But I thought you might enjoy some boudin and cornbread. Have you eaten yet today?”

  Cordelia glanced at the clock. It was past noon and she had not, in fact, eaten yet today—a question she only understood by virtue of her time in Florida. She’d been too distracted to eat. Without being invited, Bonita made herself at home in Cordelia’s temporary kitchen, putting two Tupperware containers of sausages in her fridge.

  “You know you can’t keep up a proper shield unless you eat.” Bonita opened her cabinets and began dishing up golden-brown cornbread. The older woman chin-pointed to the dinette table and carried two plates over while Cordelia sat down. She moved a few stacks of paperbacks out of the way to make room.

  Bonita scanned the titles of Cordel
ia’s books, mostly historical fiction and biographies. “You’re quite the reader, aren’t you? Do you have one of those fancy degrees like Dr. Ramsay?”

  “No, I barely passed a GED test, to be honest. It was the damn math questions. But, fortunately, I don’t need a fancy degree for my job. I’m uniquely qualified in a very narrow field. What about you? Did you like school?” Cordelia asked.

  “I did well enough,” Bonita said. “My gift didn’t start showing up until I was almost out of high school, which was normal for my family.”

  On each plate, near a large wedge of cornbread, Bonita added a big dollop of butter that smelled of honey. Cordelia’s stomach growled in response.

  “Dig in, there,” Bonita said. “You know, it’s rare anymore that I meet someone who has the touch, so when Dani and Jillian told me about you, I just had to drop by.”

  “I’ve never met anyone else with ‘the touch,’” Cordelia said.

  “Didn’t anybody in your family have it?” Bonita asked. “My mama had it and so did her mama, and all my sisters. We didn’t talk about it all the time, but we didn’t hide it. It was something that just was. My daddy was terrified of us all—and he was the most honest man you ever met. Though I never figured out whether it was because he didn’t want to be caught in a lie by his wife, his daughters, or his mother-in-law.”

  “Whatever the reason, he sounds like a smart man,” Cordelia snorted. “My grandmother had it but she’d passed before I was born, so I never got to talk to her about it…and my mother…”

  Bonita’s expression softened. “Didn’t have the gift?”

  Cordelia shook her head. Bernadette had been so bitter about her own lack of talent that Cordelia didn’t dare ask her questions about how Grandma Natalia controlled her gift. She’d had to learn on her own.

  “She resented me,” Cordelia said. “She was desperate for the gift and when it passed her over and was given to me? Nothing I ever did was enough of an apology. And while she sure the hell begrudged me the gift, she had no trouble taking the cash I earned with it. We never had much of a chance at a Hallmark Channel mother-daughter relationship.”