Banshee Cries

by C. E. Murphy

Gary was wrong. There wasn't a body.

  There were three.

  Two

  "C'mon, Walker. Tell me what you see. Talk to me, Walker."

  "How many have you found?" My voice was groggy, as if I was talking through pea soup. Morrison let out a breath that sounded like it meant to be a curse.

  "Just the one. What're we missing?"

  "Two more." I slid out of his grasp and to the snow-covered bleachers. My jacket wasn't nearly long enough for sitting on, and cold started seeping through my jeans immediately. "All women. There and there and there." I pointed blindly at the field, unable to convince myself to lift my eyes and study it again. Not that it would've helped: the snow was only snow again, not breathing with its own chaotic pattern of lights. I was just as glad that I couldn't hang on to the second sight for long. "What the hell made you call me in for this?"

  "Holliday."

  That explained a lot. Billy Holliday—besides having one of the more unfortunate names I'd ever encountered—was the department's number-one Believer. I'd played a mocking Scully to his Mulder until my own sensible world turned upside down. He'd been remarkably kind, all things considered, in not giving me too much shit since then. If something struck him as genuinely abnormal about the murders, it made a certain amount of sense for him to think of me.

  God, how I wished he hadn't. I slumped down, forehead against my knees, which reminded me that I'd smacked my head earlier. I pressed my palm against it, trying—not very hard—to call up just enough of that energy inside me to smooth the bump away. It didn't work. I was almost grateful. It suggested I wasn't as completely weird as the past couple of minutes proved me to be. My silence drew on long enough to prompt my boss to keep talking, something I hadn't intended but for which I was also grateful.

  "Some teenagers found the first body. Holliday was on call and when they dug her free—you should probably see for yourself."

  "Do I have to?" My voice was still thin. "I'm a beat cop, Morrison, not a homicide detective." I'd never wanted to be either, despite having attended the academy. I'd been a mechanic, and the short version was Morrison'd hired my replacement when I had to go overseas for a while. But thanks to my mixed ethnic heritage—I'm half Cherokee—I looked too good on the roster to actually fire. Instead, I'd gotten an upgrade from mechanic to actual living breathing cop. Morrison figured—hoped—I'd spit in his face and quit.

  I couldn't stand to give him the satisfaction. Which left me sitting in the snow, whining and praying he'd give me a break.

  "You have to."

  So much for praying. I got up, brushed snow off my cold bottom, and stumped down the bleachers.

  * * *

  Billy'd obviously been on duty when the kids called in about the body, because he was wearing sensible shoes. Typically, when he got called unexpectedly he came in wearing a pair of great heels, which I still noticed because he had better taste in shoes than I did. I'd never heard anybody tease him about cross-dressing, partly because he was a hell of a detective, and partly because he was something over six feet tall and looked like he could break you in half. It didn't hurt that his wife could've been Salma Hayek's slightly more gorgeous sister. At the moment, though, he was wearing regulation boots and crouched over a frozen woman whose insides were no longer in. I stopped several feet back and said, "Jesus," by way of announcing my arrival.

  The woman's intestines stretched out of her belly and into the snow, ropy frozen lines of blackness buried in the cold. Her stomach had been cut open in an efficient X, and judging from the rictus her face was frozen in, she'd probably been alive when it happened. If it'd been summertime, I probably would have lost my lunch, but the icy strands and beads of cold on her face looked so surreal I couldn't quite wrap my mind around it having been a person once. She looked like a prop on a sound stage for a movie set in the Arctic.

  "Hey, Joanie." Billy was watching the guys from forensics brush snow away from the woman's body, careful detailed work that gave lie to the fact that the weather had almost certainly destroyed any available evidence. "Glad you could make it." He pursed his lips and shrugged. "Well."

  "I know what you mean." I edged a few steps closer, staring down at the woman reluctantly. "Why'd you want me?"

  "Look at her." He shrugged again. "Got ritual murder all over it."

  "Did the dead lady tell you that?"

  Billy gave me a dirty look that I deserved. I'd only learned recently that some of his intuitive leaps in homicide cases were courtesy of an occasional ability to converse with ghosts. It was not the kind of thing I was comfortable with, even though—or particularly because—I could now do it myself. "No," he said. "The physical evidence did. Can you not make jokes right now, Joanie? This woman deserves some respect."

  "These women." I let out a long exhalation, looking at my feet. "There's two more. I…saw them."

  Satisfaction showed in Billy's voice for just an instant. "I knew bringing you in was the right thing to do. You get anything else?"

  Creepy-crawlies shivered over my skin, making me even more uncomfortable than a wet butt and dead bodies did by themselves. Billy was much, much easier with weird shit than I was. The shamanic gift that I hated having would have been far better off residing in him. "No. I'm sorry." I forbore to mention I didn't have a clue how to get anything else. He looked disappointed enough as it was. I lowered my voice, feeling like a member of a Sekrit Brotherhood that dared not voice its name. "Did you get anything?"

  Billy shook his head. "Been dead too long. I never get anything from people who've been dead more than forty-eight hours. They lose their connection with the world."

  I nodded, then frowned. "I thought you said your sister visited you three years after she died."

  "I guess blood's thicker than ether."

  The wind picked up as he spoke, a hair-raising keen that had no business anywhere outside of a holler. I instinctively lifted my shoulders against it, then felt a scowl crinkling my forehead so hard it ached. There was no new chill in the air, no cutting cold through my coat, despite the shriek of sound. A shadow came down over the world, making me look up at the sky, as if the sun wasn't already hidden beneath doomfully gray clouds.

  There were no clouds. A window framed the section of sky I could see, scattered stars valiantly struggling against the light of a brilliantly full moon. Irish lace curtains caught at the moon's edges, making it whimsical and delicate in the clear black sky. Seattle's snowbound chill was driven from my skin, and the breath I took was full of warm air and the scent of tea.

  Recognition jolted through me like needles under my fingernails. I knew the window; I knew the curtains, and I knew that if I looked to my left I would see a near stranger, lying beneath a handmade quilt and dying of nothing more than her own determination to do so.

  I turned my head, for all that I didn't want to look at the woman on the bed. She had black hair, worn much longer than mine. It lay in soft-looking waves against her white pillow, stark contrast in the moonlight. Even in the blue-white light, her eyes were very green, and her skin was nearly as pale as the pillowcase. I heard myself say, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall," which I certainly hadn't said in real life. I wouldn't have let myself, even if I'd dared.

  I was a wildly imperfect reflection of the woman on the bed. Where her skin was uniformly smooth and pale, mine was marked with a handful of freckles scattered across my nose; where her features were fine, mine seemed too sharp or too blunt. She was tall, although not as tall as I was, and had a degree of elegance to her that my long limbs and mechanic's hands could never emulate.

  Her skin changed color, a horrid sallowness creeping in. I looked back at the moon to see blood draining over it. Fear scampered through me, the pure childish terror of the unknown. My voice broke as I said, "Sheila?" but when I turned to her, the woman was gone.

  "Joanie?" Billy's hand on my elbow, big and warm, brought me back to the field with a start. I looked at his hand, then up at his worried frown. "You all right?"r />
  "Yeah. I just…kind of spaced out. Sorry. I don't know what that was. Did you say something?" The wet chill of Seattle winter settled back into my bones, leaving me scowling at nothing. The moon had been full the night my mother died, but we hadn't spoken. We hadn't had much to say to one another, not from the time she'd called me out of the blue to say she was dying and she'd like to meet the daughter she abandoned twenty-six years earlier. I'd gone out of a mixed sense of duty and curiosity, and spent four uncomfortable months that culminated in her death on the winter solstice, almost three months ago to the day.

  "I said, do you think there's anything else you can pick up? You've got more mojo than I do." His grin suggested he was biting his tongue to not ride me harder than that.

  "I'll, um…shit." The last word wasn't meant to be heard, but Billy laughed anyway. I curled a lip and waved it off, perversely glad that he was teasing me a little. "I'll try." I wanted to try about as much as I wanted to stick red-hot pokers against my feet, but I couldn't quite bring myself to say that to the one person who didn't think I was at all crazy.

  Granted, he was nuts himself by any normal standards, but I wasn't in a position to be throwing stones. "Is the morning soon enough?"

  Billy turned a sad smile on the woman's body, then made a gesture to encompass the rest of the field. "There's a lot to do here, and I don't think another night is going to make this any harder on anybody. You work tomorrow?"

  "Yeah. I'll give you anything I've got before I go out on patrol." I admired the weary confidence in my voice, as if I actually expected to come up with anything.

  The problem was that I was afraid I might.

  "All right. Thanks, Joanie." Billy hesitated a moment before adding, "I know you don't like this."

  "So I'm a great sport for going along with it. I know. Tomorrow, Billy."

  It was more than not liking it. It was like fingernails on chalkboards combined with dentist drills on unnumbed teeth. My world was a sensible, straightforward place. Checking out ritual murders on a psychic level simply did not belong. I kicked clumps of snow as I slogged back to Morrison to bum a ride home. He was driving his personal vehicle, a gold Toyota Avalon XLS—which I thought of as the American version of "boxy, but safe!"—so he hadn't been on duty when he'd called me. I didn't envy him his job.

  Neither of us spoke during the whole drive, both wrapped up in our individual discomfort of what I was doing there. I didn't even say thanks when I got out, just thumped the top of his car and watched him drive off. Only after he disappeared down the Ave did I go into my building, taking the steps up to my fifth-floor apartment two at a time.

  Gary, to whom I was practically certain I had not given a key, was hanging out in my apartment playing Tetris on my computer. "Thought you never touched the things," I said as I unlaced my boots.

  "You didn't leave any entertainment rags. What was I supposed to do?"

  "Cook dinner?" I put the boots on the carpet where all the melting snow would be absorbed and slid into the kitchen in my stocking feet.

  "Nothin' to cook. I looked."

  "Details, details. Besides, there is, too. I've got at least three different frozen dinners in here." I heard the telltale musical bloop that said he'd died horribly in the game, and a moment later he appeared in the door frame, making it look ridiculously small with his bulk. Even in his eighth decade he retained the build of the linebacker he'd once been, a fact that he took no small amount of pride in.

  "So. Was there a body?"

  I pulled two microwave dinners out of the freezer. "Do you remember calling me a bloodhound when we first met?"

  "Nope." Gary gave me a disarming smile. "So there was a body."

  "There were three. And…" I really didn't want to say anything else. I busied myself stabbing holes in the plastic tops of the dinners, then mumbled, as fast as I could, "And I said I'd maybe do a little checking out of what was going on in the astral realm sort of thing I don't suppose you'd hang around and bang a drum after dinner."

  "Eh?" Gary cupped a hand behind his ear, leaning forward a little and wearing a cocky grin that would do James Garner's Maverick proud. "What'd you say? I'm an old man, lady. Can't hear when you don't speak up."

  "I hate you, Gary."

  He beamed at me. "Now, that's no way to talk to an old man, Joanne Walkingstick."

  "Augh! Gary! No! Stop that!" I'd dropped my last name along with the rest of my Cherokee heritage when I graduated from high school, and a compulsive slip of the tongue—was there such a thing? It had felt like it at the time—had caused me to mention the long-since-abandoned name to Gary the day we'd met. "It's Walker. Don't do that, Gary." The humor I'd started with fell away into discomfort and I shrugged my shoulders unhappily as I put the first meal into the microwave. "Please."

  "Hey." He came into the kitchen to put a hand on my shoulder and turn me around. "No harm meant, Jo. You arright?"

  "I just…" I summarized the experience at the park, staring alternately at his feet and my own, not wanting to meet his eyes. "I just hate this shit. And the thing with remembering my mother all of a sudden just freaked me out." The microwave beeped and I turned back to it, my stomach grumbling. Gary put a hand on the door, keeping me from opening it.

  "Let's hit the voodoo stuff first, darlin'. Food grounds you, you know that. You're shooting yourself in the foot by eating first." He lifted a bushy eyebrow. "Or is that on purpose?"

  I squirmed, feeling like I'd been caught being naughty. Gary grinned, bright flash of white teeth that looked like he'd never smoked a cigarette in his life, and steered me into the living room. "Where's your drum?"

  "Bedroom." I dragged a cushion off the couch and stuffed it against the front door, cutting off the draft that circled from beneath it. Gary went into my bedroom like he belonged there and got my drum.

  It was the only thing I owned of any intrinsic value. It'd been a gift from one of the elders out in Qualla Boundary, not long after my father and I moved back there. It was painted with a raven whose wings sheltered a wolf and a rattlesnake, and had a drumstick with a soft rabbit-fur end dyed raspberry red, and a knotted leather end that made sharp rich pangs of sound against the taut leather. Even fourteen years after having been gifted with it, I was still amazed anyone would make something like it for me. Gary knew it, and carried it as if it was fragile, a gesture that made my nose sting with embarrassing emotion.

  I settled down on the floor as he came out of the bedroom with the drum and a closed fist. "I thought you might want this."

  I turned my hand up and he dropped a silver choker into my palm. Made of tube links intersected by triskelions, it had an Irish cross—a simple quartered circle, identical to the Cherokee power circle—as its pendant. "What—?"

  "Your mom gave it to you, didn't she?"

  "Yeah, I…" She'd given it to me the day she died. I'd worn it for two weeks, gradually getting used to the peculiar feeling of having something resting in the hollow of my throat, until the day I'd been stabbed through the lung and the necklace had been blackened with my blood. It'd taken days to get the stains out, and I hadn't brought myself to put it back on in the intervening weeks. "Yeah, all right." I swallowed nervously and fastened the choker with fingers that suddenly felt thick and clumsy. "You're all Mr. Insightful tonight, aren't you?"

  Gary sat down on the couch cushion that hadn't been scavenged, grinning. "Somebody's gotta be. You ready?"

  I nodded, fighting the urge to curl my fingers around the necklace and pull it away from my throat to alleviate the alien pressure of jewelry against my skin. "I'll wake up thirty seconds after you stop drumming." We'd only done this a few times, but establishing the time felt like ritual. Gary started knocking out a heartbeat rhythm, and I let my eyes drift shut, waiting to follow the sound of the drum out of my own body.

  Three

  I had a deep dark secret. The world I saw through shamanic eyes—the one in which every thing on earth, be it animal, mineral or vegetable, sparked w
ith the essence of life—was a world I dreamed about even when I was dead set against its reality. The world I saw with my spirit eyes was one where I could see Gary's big rumbly presence like a V-8 engine that a girl could rely on. It was one where I could slide through the ceiling and get an alarming look at my neighbors' sexual proclivities—although this time I went through the window when I separated from my body, because I can be taught, and I really didn't need another eyeful of somebody else's sex life.

  Except for the glimpse that afternoon, I hadn't looked at the world from a spirit's perspective since January, when my life got turned upside down in the first place. There was something off-kilter as I slid into the Seattle night. Winter had come on too hard, and the life in the city that sped below me felt strained, like the world was being pushed in a direction it wasn't prepared to go in. The blues I'd seen a few months ago seemed darker, the electricity of life dammed up in some way. Streets seemed more congested, as if their purpose had been forgotten. It hadn't been like this a few months ago, and the feel of it made my skin prickle. There was a lingering feeling of familiarity below the wrongness, but when I reached for it, it slipped away.

  I spun through the air, weightless and silent, watching sudden flashes of red and orange erupt in backed-up traffic, countered by calm waves of blue that I tried to encourage, clumsily. I passed a stretch of road where a woman's astrally projected spirit hovered above her car, looking down at traffic much like I did. Pure boredom emanated from her, as if driving home had been so dull it'd flung her out of her own body. She didn't seem to sense my presence, and I whisked past her, not knowing how to stop and say hello.

  I left the city behind without having a destination in mind, moving as fast as thought itself. Color, vivid and strong, streaked with the coldness of winter, shot past me, sometimes forming into recognizable images, but more often staying abstract. I wondered if the abstraction was due to my lack of direction, but with the thought came a clear pathway that I recognized with a startled shiver.