Raven Calls

by C. E. Murphy

  That line of thought did nothing to disguise my heart rate’s elevation or how its quick beat made my arm itch like the devil. I stopped for a breather and cautiously unwound the bandages to take a peek at the bite.

  And wished I hadn’t. Whether it was the fresh air against it or seeing how awful it looked, the itching redoubled and became hot red pain. The skin around the punctures emanated heat, shiny tight surface looking and feeling infected. An infected werewolf bite had to be worse than just a regular werewolf bite. I touched it gingerly and hissed at both its warmth and the bright flash of ow that pressure sent through it. I muttered, “C’mon, Jo, you’re supposed to be a healer,” and tried my magic on it again.

  Maybe it was the sleep I’d had on the airplane. Maybe it was the soothing drive across the country. But this time when the magic didn’t respond, I went a little deeper, and Saw what was going on.

  It was already going all-out trying to keep the infection from spreading. Viewed with the Sight, my arm looked like a petri dish swarm of antibodies attacking bacteria. The speed and activity made me dizzy, and watching made it itch even more, until I was about ready to rip my own arm off and beat myself to death with it just to escape the itch. I closed my eyes hard, shutting the Sight down, but it was too late. I knew what was going on. I felt genuinely worse than before, like viewing it had let the heat spread. My lips were parched, and I’d left my water bottle in the car. I swallowed, light-headed, and looked up the insurmountable hill.

  Gary had my sword. If he was in Méabh’s tomb, he could chop my arm off for me. That would be easier than tearing it off. Buoyed by that unlikely, feverish logic, I staggered to my feet and lurched toward the cairn above.

  The view from the top of Knocknaree was magnificent. I could see half of Ireland, even if it was doing a wavy little dance. Everybody needed to dance now and again. I wobbled around the whole cairn, which was a fancy word for “big pile of rocks,” for about twenty minutes. There was no entrance anywhere, and when I came around to the front again I noticed a sign I’d missed while admiring the wobbly view. It said Méabh’s “tomb,” quotation marks theirs, was a Neolithic structure and had never been excavated. Also, it said, please don’t take any rocks. I nodded solemnly, spun back to the big piles of rocks and started pitching stones away.

  Three minutes later a grinning skeleton toppled out of the cairn and spat its false teeth at me.

  Chapter Eleven

  I screamed in genuine horror-movie terror. The skeleton fell apart into about eleventy million pieces, or at least two hundred and six. Seven, counting the teeth. I dropped to my knees and scooped them up, already blinded by tears. Finding Gary’s bones might technically qualify as him waiting for me in the tomb, but it was not the answer I was looking for. The teeth were heavy and sharp, a snaggle catching my palm as I turned them over and over. If this was going to be my legacy, I didn’t want it. To hell with phenomenal cosmic power, to hell with saving the world, to hell with all the lessons I’d learned clawing my way to where I was now. I’d stepped up. I’d done everything I could to be the hero, and all I’d gotten for it was a view to literally die for.

  Somehow I was on my feet, screaming at the distant horizon. “Fuck you! Fuck you all! I did not sign up for getting my friends killed, and you can all go fuck yourselves! I am not playing this game anymore!” I threw the teeth as hard as I could, the snaggle poking my hand a second time as I clenched and released. A sob wrenched my throat and I fell to my knees again, face buried in my hands. The stupid little poke from the teeth itched. Nothing like the werewolf bite, but enough to be a horrible reminder that I’d just thrown away the last remnant of the best friend I’d ever had. I’d come to grips with my powers because people had died when I hadn’t. People dying because I had seemed like a justifiable reason to lose that grip. Gary wouldn’t want me to, but I didn’t have so many friends I was willing to lose them over a power set I hadn’t asked for. I reversed my legs, scootching on my butt toward the downward path. I was going home. I was going to ask Morrison for my job back. Or not, because I couldn’t be his employee and his girlfriend at the same time. Maybe I’d open that mechanic shop I’d always wanted to. With all the spare cash I’d saved up against quitting my job on no notice. It didn’t matter. The Morrígan and the cauldron and Brigid and the Master and whatever the hell else was out there could just sort itself out, and I’d amputate my goddamned arm to avoid becoming a werewolf. I was done.

  A stray bolt of sunlight caught the white curve of the teeth I’d thrown down the hill.

  Gary’s teeth were perfect.

  My whole body went so cold the werewolf bite stopped itching. I sat there on my butt, utterly frozen, staring at the teeth as the illuminating sunlight faded away. They had a snaggle, and Gary’s teeth were perfect. The collapsed skeleton behind me did not belong to my friend.

  For the second time in as many minutes I was on my feet, shrieking at the horizon again as I punched the sky. “Take that, motherfuckers! Take that, you ugly sons of bitches! I’m going to find you, you hear me? I’m going to find you and me and Gary are gonna kick your asses! Fuck you! Fuck all of you right in the ear!”

  I went on like that for quite a while, until I noticed that tears were streaming down my face again. It struck me that I was possibly in need of some therapy. I wondered what the police department shrink, who had told me just three days ago that I was handling having shot somebody pretty well, would think of my current antics. I wondered if she was in any way equipped to therapize somebody like me, whose life really did encompass the impossible. I’d have to ask when I got back, because it had been a rough weekend even by my standards, and there wasn’t much standing between me and a total mental breakdown. It seemed like Gary not being quantifiably dead should restore me, not send me over the edge, but I was teetering dangerously close to the edge.

  Gary. If that wasn’t Gary up there, it was somebody else. Somebody who’d died recently enough to have modern false teeth. Somebody who had been buried shallowly in a national monument, and hadn’t yet been discovered.

  Somebody who had decomposed into a fragile skeleton instead of a heap of smelly flesh. Maybe it wasn’t such a recent death after all. I pulled myself together and went to check.

  The skeleton really was in about two hundred and six pieces, and there were no markers—no clothes, no jewelry, no handy wallet—to indicate who it might once have been. I was no forensic anthropologist. I couldn’t tell if the splayed hip bones were male or female. And ghosts were not my strong suit, which was to say, I couldn’t call one up if my life depended on it. Even Billy wouldn’t be much help this time, since he was good with the newly dead, and unless my friend here had been dumped in a vat of acid, he wasn’t all that newly dead. So he was probably a murder victim, and I should probably call the local cops.

  The question of whether or not to call was abruptly negated by a banshee rising out of the disturbed bones.

  I’d met a banshee before. This one was…fresher. Skin drawn less tightly across her bones, black hair still thick and lush instead of scraggly. Clawed fingernails slightly less clawlike, as if she hadn’t had centuries to hone them. And I guessed that answered the question of whether the skeleton was male or female. For an instant we stared at one another, me shocked and her—I don’t know what she was thinking. It looked like she was assessing me as a potential threat. I started to reach for my sword, remembered it was lost somewhere in time with Gary and with that failure apparently came up lacking in the banshee’s estimation. She dove at me, shrieking, and I fell ass over teakettle trying to get out of the way. The bite on my arm flared, itch suddenly all-consuming as the urge to become other struck me again.

  This time I was tempted. I hadn’t come out so well fighting a banshee the first time around. It had taken my dead mother to pull my hiney out of the fire, and I didn’t think she would be able to do it again. Being four-legged, furry and with vicious teeth sounded like a better bet than my own raggedy-ass self. The onl
y problem was I wanted to be in control of a change. The raging heat in my forearm assured me I wouldn’t be.

  The banshee overshot thanks to my display of gymnastic excellence. I scrambled to all fours, crouching on the mountaintop as she swung back around. Her aura shone black against the cloud-spattered skies, making my tight-to-skin shields a bastion of light in comparison. She probably literally had the home field advantage, but I hadn’t been in control of my magic when I’d last met a banshee. I repeated that to myself and tried not to look too hard at her nails. They were more than long enough to eviscerate me. Shields or not, I still wanted my tender underbelly well out of her reach. It wasn’t killing season as far as ritualistically feeding the Master was concerned, but it also wasn’t far off, and besides, I felt relatively certain he’d make a special exception if one of his minions managed to get me served up on a plate.

  This particular minion, though, hung there in midair with rage contorting her papery face as she snarled, “Firstborn daughter, blooded child, Master’s slave is driven wild!”

  Oh, hell. I’d forgotten about that. The damned banshees spoke in terrible poems. Last time I’d faced one I was afraid I’d be rhymed to death. Cryptic was bad enough. Cryptic rhymes were rubbing salt in the wound.

  But slave was an interesting choice of word. I stayed huddled, trying to remember if the last banshee had responded when I didn’t speak in rhyme. I hoped so, because under pressure like this I couldn’t come up with even a bad poem to save my life. “I don’t mean to go all Spartacus on you, but there’s one sure way out of slavery. If you want to come down here and talk it out I’ll…” Rip your head off with my bare hands was kind of how that sentence ended, but I didn’t think that would go over so well. “…help you.”

  Rather than take me up on my generous offer, she screamed and came at me again. Fingernails on chalkboards and metal tearing and hysterical babies and every other hideous, piercing, reverberating sound in the history of mankind rang through that scream, and it tried to shiver my skin off. It actually did get through my shields, not entirely, but enough to crack them. I yelped, as much startled as afraid, then clenched my belly and strengthened the idea of pearlescent shields shimmering around me, Star Trek-like.

  It was too late. Somehow she was under the shields, her scream seeping through to suck up against my skin and worm its way deeper. My vulnerabilities were exposed, all the spiderweb cracks in my windshield. She went for them like she knew they were there, endless shrieks wresting them apart. Gary’s disappearance was the newest crack in my facade, and my fear for him grew with each new banshee cry.

  I wondered if that was how banshees killed people when they weren’t eviscerating them. Death by screaming. Death by prying at all the cracks that made up a persona until they shattered and the few really unbearable things in a life were exposed and remembered. In that case, they weren’t harbingers of death at all, regardless of what the legends said. They were murderers through and through.

  She pushed past my worries about Gary and latched onto a deeper concern. An older one: Morrison. The Almighty Morrison, with his silvering hair and ice-blue eyes and his strong, competent hands. Morrison, who had been so utterly gorgeous the first time I’d laid eyes on him I’d gotten all fourth grade and hit him—metaphorically if not physically—to show him how much I liked him. Morrison with his frustrated grace in deciding to use my powers, powers neither of us understood, to solve cases that had no rational explanation. Morrison with his expectations of me, expectations I desperately wanted to live up to without admitting that to either of us. Morrison in the wilderness of a mountain forest, with the shadow of a tattoo on his shoulder. A tattoo that didn’t really exist. Yet.

  I bristled, fingernails digging into the dirt as I shoved back. Morrison was my territory, and I wasn’t about to give him up to a shrieking she-demon from the world beyond. Glee shot through her hideous voice like she’d made a palpable hit, and a vision of Morrison going down under a banshee’s attack swept me.

  A vision of Morrison unloading his gun into the banshee’s belly swept me, too. It wouldn’t stop her. Supernatural creatures usually didn’t die from mundane weapons. But it would sure as hell slow her down, and once I got done with this jaunt to Ireland it was my goal in life to never be so far from Morrison’s side that slowing down a monster wouldn’t buy enough time for me to get there and go medieval on its ass.

  I snapped my teeth at the banshee in my own sort of savage glee, and somewhere way down at the back of my brain I started worrying that all this snapping and bristling was starting to get very lupine. I had to haul myself back. My arm didn’t itch anymore. It felt like it was on fire instead, and the fire was spreading through my whole body. The very cells were crying out to change, and I was just barely staying on this side of self-aware enough to fight it.

  The banshee’s voice went high and almost sweet, and drove right through my skull down to my most buried and most vulnerable concerns. “What’s this, what’s this, she remembers a kiss!” Delicious spite brightened her voice, making it sound like swords scraping. “The Master’s meal was a little wild, bore herself a wee boy child!”

  I whispered, “Oh, come on, that’s twice in a row you’ve used wild/child. You can do better than that,” but the mockery wasn’t enough to keep rage from rising as silver in my gaze. I’d given Aidan up for adoption so he could have a better life than my fifteen-year-old self was prepared to offer him. Letting banshees know about his existence and come hunting him did not in any way qualify as better. Maybe fighting to the death to protect a child was stereotypical, but right there, right then, I was okay with that. I sounded raw and cracked as the banshee as I grated, “You will not touch my son.”

  I stopped fighting it and let the werewolf take me.

  Pure savagery rose in my bones, contorting them with snaps and stretches. The boiling heat within me expanded outward, sudden rush of kinetic energy released. It hurt like scratching a bad itch did: it hurt good. That was wrong, because according to Coyote, shapeshifting was supposed to be a seamless and painless transition, but I’d spent so much time itching and being unable to scratch that it was just a relief. I didn’t care if it was wrong.

  I was in motion before the shift even finished, four feet grasping the earth more certainly than two could ever do. The animal was angry, not my protective fury, but a deep rage that drove its every move. A banshee was as good a target as any to unleash that anger on, though a whiff of scent told my hind brain that it and I—me the werewolf, not me the shaman—were probably on the same side. It was a familiar scent of decay, of dark magic, a thing I hadn’t even known had a scent, and it said we were born of the same master. There was another smell, too, one that caught at the back of my throat for just a moment, and which the werewolf couldn’t put a name to. I disregarded it, hell-bent on the banshee. It was free, and I was bound to the moon—full tonight, last of the three full moons, and it seemed a werewolf didn’t change only at night after all—and its freedom was reason enough for it to die whether we served the same master or not. I sprang upward, tooth and claw reaching for the banshee with glorious, furious power.

  The whole thing, from beginning to end, lasted about fifteen seconds. Then fresh magic slammed into me so hard I collapsed, and when I woke up I’d been buried alive.

  Chapter Twelve

  Stone curved so close to my face I began to hyperventilate. I hadn’t noticed a dislike of enclosed rocky spaces until just this past weekend, when I’d gone traipsing around an awful lot of caverns that weren’t supposed to be beneath Seattle. The weight of the world pressing down turned out to be more than I could handle. Panicked, I rolled sideways in search of escape, and crashed into a woman eight inches taller than I.

  She was made of granite, and lay serenely on the tomb we shared. I sat up a few inches, clobbered my head and fell back down with a whimper. My granite friend held an actual sword in her stone hands. She wore an all-too-familiar necklace, too, though it was carved of sto
ne, not made of silver. An effigy, that’s what she was. A remarkable amount of curly stone hair lay around her shoulders, and for a second I wondered if she was an effigy of a comic-book character, since real people hardly ever had that much hair.

  It slowly dawned on me that for someone who’d been buried alive I could see very clearly. Not the glowy bright world visible through the Sight, but just ordinary ol’ Joanne vision, slightly fuzzy because I’d lost my goddamned glasses again when I shapechanged. I was still wearing my clothes, though, including the leather coat, which had apparently fit a wolf well enough not to entangle me while I jumped a banshee. Either that, or someone had thoughtfully dressed me before burying me.

  I was clearly not dead if that was my major concern. I exhaled very, very carefully, and lifted my head to look for the source of the light.

  It came from somewhere beyond my feet. I dug my heels in, bent my knees until they hit the low ceiling and hitched myself down a few inches. After a few repeats, I edged off the tomb’s far end and landed on my ass in a small round room covered in rubble.

  “Sure and it’s sorry I am for shoving ye in there,” said the living embodiment of the granite woman, “but there was nowheres else to put ye so I could sit and wait on ye, too.”

  I did not say “What?” which I thought took a great deal of restraint. I didn’t say anything else, either, not out of restraint but out of gaping astonishment.

  She wasn’t just the living color version of the effigy. She was the woman in my visions, the one who had bound the werewolves to the moon’s cycle. Fair copper hair in as much quantity as the statue possessed, which made me touch my own short-cropped and stick-straight hair self-consciously. Light eyes, a strong build and an aura that sank down into the earth, anchoring her so it looked like nothing could possibly knock her from her feet. After many long seconds I managed what I thought was a pleasantly casual, “Méabh, I presume.”