Raven Calls

Chapter Eighteen

I burst out laughing. I just couldn’t help it. I’d had enough. More than enough, and the flames dancing merrily over the chapel roof were the final straw. Although setting things on fire with my mind was not in my skill set, I was surprisingly confident of being able to douse them, and extended shields over the chapel. If I could keep scythes and avalanches and psychic attacks out with my shields, I saw no reason why I couldn’t keep oxygen out, too, and within moments the fire sputtered out under the increasing pressure of silver-blue magic. There wasn’t even any damage to the roof, possibly thanks to my hastiness, but more, I thought, thanks to the magical nature of the flames. They had been set with the power of the mind. Probably that kind of fire didn’t really need fuel at all, but it did need concentration, and Caitríona’s was gone all to hell and back.

When I turned away from the chapel, Méabh was staring accusingly at Caitríona, who was in turn staring at me accusingly. “Oh, no,” I said. “That was you, sister, not me.”

“What?”

“But she hasn’t the power!”

My eyebrows shot up. “Maybe she hadn’t the power, but I’d say she’s got it now. Áine kissed her, remember?”

“It doesn’t work that way!”

My eyebrows remained elevated. They felt like they might never come down, in fact. “Doesn’t it? Because as far as I knew, I didn’t have the power, either, not until Cernunnos skewered me. I’m kinda thinking close encounters with the deitific kind trigger all sorts of interesting responses in—” and I dropped my voice dramatically “—the granddaughters of Méabh.”

Méabh looked like she would set my head on fire if it was within the power of her mind to do so. “There are rituals, Granddaughter. There are slow awakenings. There are—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Sweat lodges and spirit danc—”

I was vaguely aware Caitríona had been saying, “Sorry, what?” and “Sorry?” and “Excuse me,” in increasingly voluble tones, but she broke into my litany with a roared, “What do you mean, that was me?” that stopped Méabh and me from snapping at one another’s heels I peeked over my shoulder to make sure the chapel wasn’t on fire again, then smiled brightly at Caitríona. “I mean I can’t set things on fire with my mind, and I’m guessing Méabh can’t, either, which leaves you, who was concentrating very hard on the idea of setting things on fire with your mind when the chapel went up. Wow. That’s a totally offensive power.”

Offense was the right word, all right. Caitríona balled her fist again and came at me. To her huge outrage, I caught the punch in my palm effortlessly. I was a lot bigger than she was, and it was a lousy attack. The verbal one was clearer, if not necessarily more heartfelt. “What do you mean, an offensive power? Sure and you’re the one trucking with a dead woman’s bones, there’s nothing more offensive than that!”

“No, no.” I leaned into Cat’s fist, holding her in place. “Not offensive bad. Offensive like offense, defense. It’s a power you can bring to the attack.” She relaxed a little, suddenly less, well, offended. “Which I’m guessing means whatever you are in the cosmic scheme of things, it’s not a shaman. Maybe more like Méabh here. She doesn’t heal. She just brings the fight to the bad guys.”

“I wield shamanic power,” Méabh said stiffly.

I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t think you do. You wield magic, absolutely, and it’s a magic that can shape bodies, but I’m not sure it’s shamanic. Healing’s a big part of shamanism. You’re more of a…” My hand fluttered away from holding Caitríona’s fist, waving in the air as if searching for words to pluck from it. I had firsthand experience with sorcerers. They were basically evil shamans. Méabh wasn’t one of those. And witches needed a coven and a deity to guide them, so she wasn’t a witch, either. I’d never met a wizard, but that had too many fantasy novel connotations for me. I finally settled on, “Mage!” and felt pretty good about it.

Or I did until I remembered that was exactly the word a Seattle speaker-with-the-dead had used to describe my mother. Sheila MacNamarra, the Irish mage, she’d said. Which meant your average mage, if there was such a thing, should be able to heal, since my mother apparently had been able to. Either that or magery came with different skill sets depending on the adept, which seemed fairly likely.

I was going to write the goddamned handbook, is what I was going to do. As soon as I was done hunting down a banshee and finding Gary and right after I’d gone home to tie Morrison to a bed for a week and then taken up jogging with any energy I happened to have left over. I didn’t have a job to go to anymore, after all. No doubt I could write a bestselling shamanic handbook in my suddenly copious free time and live off the riches from that.

Méabh and Caitríona, who were not, thankfully, privy to that whole line of thought, had equal looks of satisfaction. Apparently being mages sounded cool. I kind of thought it did, too, and momentarily tried it on for size. Joanne Walker, Mage For Hire. Siobhán Walkingstick, Magistrate. Not that I was certain magistrate could be used that way, but on the other hand, who was going to stop me?

I was, really. I’d kind of gotten used to the idea of being a shaman. Maybe if Sheila had raised me, I’d have come up in the idea of being a mage, but I’d had more exposure to my Cherokee side, and the magic had shaped itself in the idea of shamanism. Perhaps an unnaturally broad spectrum of shamanism, but still, that was the title I was comfortable with. Caitríona could be a mage. The mage, presumably. The Irish Mage. I felt guilty. That was a hell of a burden to plant on a nineteen-year-old.

“Am I really like you so? Like Auntie Sheila?” Cat didn’t sound burdened. She sounded breathless. Hopeful. Excited. All the things I’d been, now that I reached back for it, when Coyote had approached my thirteen-year-old self in dreams and had started to teach me to be a shaman. Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

Méabh, grumpily, said, “No,” at the same time I said, “Yeah, I think so.” We eyed each other, my expression falling into a frown. “What’s your problem, Granny? I’d think you’d be pleased.”

She looked as though she’d like to throttle us both. “The power doesn’t come on ye in a burst. It’s grown up into, day by day, bit by bit. It’s madness to be drowned in it all at once.”

I could hardly argue the latter point, but the former was manifestly untrue. I started to protest, trailed off before I got going, then tried again, with something totally different than I’d expected to say. “You’re aos sí, Méabh. We’re human. It might work differently for you. You’re connected to the world in a way I’ve never seen. If that all came up and smacked a person at once, yeah, it’d be madness, but I think maybe we mere mortals don’t have quite as much oomph to take under our wings.”

Méabh’s jaw worked. She clearly wanted to be annoyed, but I was honestly a bit agog at the aos sí connection to the world, and it had come through in my voice. It’s hard to be irritated with someone who’s all impressed by you. “Well,” she finally said, somewhere between grudging and exasperated, “what are we to do with her, then? Sure and we can’t leave a newly awakened power to fumble along on her own.”

“Sure and we won’t,” I said cheerfully. “She’s coming with us. I dunno where we’re going, but it can’t hurt to have new phenomenal cosmic power tagging along.”

Caitríona squeaked, “Really?” and I started to nod before she finished with, “Phenomenal cosmic power? Am I that grand?”

I said, “Time will tell,” in my very best intonation of wisdom voice, but Cat didn’t look impressed. Kids these days, I tell ya. “If you’re really going to step into Sheila’s shoes, you’ve probably got some fairly significant power. But it may take a while to access it all. Méabh’s right. These things usually do come up in bits and pieces, through lots of training, rather than being all Hammer time.”

She stared at me, a firm reminder that people born a decade later than I’d been were not versed in the same popular lingo. “Never mind. Just try not to set anything else on fire, okay?”

“I wouldn’t know how to.” Her eyes, though, were big and interested, and I caught her eyeing the chapel again.

“Don’t even think about it. I need to do some important stuff.” I really wished I’d had specifics to put in there, but I was coming up short on them. “I wish Billy was here. Or Sonata. A medium, anyway. I don’t know how to tell if Mother’s spirit has been…loosened.”

“Can ye not tell?” Méabh asked incredulously. “With all the power here, can ye not tell?”

“Speaking with the dead is way out of my skill set. Cat, did you feel anything from Sheila during that whole…” I waved my hand. “Thing?”

“Joy,” she said without missing a beat. “She was here, Joanne. I’m sure of it. She knows what was done here, and it’s gladdened her heart.”

“Go us.” I picked up my coat and mashed it against my mouth while I thought. It smelled faintly of stardust. Don’t ask how I knew what stardust smelled like. It just smelled of stardust. Clear and thin and distant and crisp. “Okay. The body is destroyed. That means the spirit’s attachment to the world is weaker, but it also means if she was attached to the bones, then the spirit hasn’t crossed over. Whatever’s on the other side, it ain’t there yet.” I did my best to sound like Gary, which was a mistake. Fortunately I already had the coat covering half my face and could wipe at tears without being too obvious about it. Not that leather was any good for absorbing tears, but at least they weren’t leaking down my face. I had to get him back. I had to do about a million things, all by sunset tonight.

“That’s right,” Méabh said while I wiped my face and glanced at the sky. Midmorning, if not a little later. We had six or eight hours to stage all the rescues in. I clung to that and turned my attention back to Méabh, who was saying, “He’ll have wanted her bound by her bones to this earth for all time. No spirit in his grasp can cross if he holds her bones.”

“Okay. Okay. So what do we do next? How do we free her spirit?”

Méabh, font of all knowledge, dried up. I waited, then waited some more, and finally realized she wasn’t going to come through with an answer. Desperate, I glanced at Caitríona, but she only shrugged apologetically. I stomped in a small circle, swore, reversed the whole thing, swore again and said, “Okay, fine. Then I’m going to go try to talk to her, because maybe she’ll know. I don’t know what else to do.”

“Talk to who?” Caitríona and Méabh asked with varying degrees of wariness and suspicion.

I spread my hands and sat to sketch a circle around myself. “My mother, who else?”

They exchanged glances, making me feel ganged up on. Méabh was voted spokesperson by silent ballot, and said, in a purely accusational tone, “I thought ye said speaking with the dead wasn’t a skill ye had.”

“It’s not, but apparently her spirit’s been tied to her bones all this time, which means if we’ve shaken her spirit loose at all we’ve only just done it, so maybe she hasn’t gotten that far into the great beyond. If she hasn’t, then I’ve got an inside man for the job.”

Raven dove down out of the sky.

Typically, my avian friend was pretty enthusiastic about—well, everything. The slightest opportunity to explore regions unknown was generally greeted by quarking and kloking and an admirable tattoo of wings. This time, though, he landed in a poof of feathers, then tucked his wings around himself and cocked his head to give me an unmistakably concerned look. I didn’t think of birds as having a lot of emotive capability, but Raven was happy to prove me wrong. Or unhappy, as the case happened to be.

My shoulders slumped. “What? Do you have a better idea? We’ve gotten off pretty lucky so far, and any day that includes accidental time travel, losing a friend in the annals of history and setting a mountaintop on fire doesn’t exactly rise high on my list of lucky days. If Mom can give us any guidance at all, we need it.”

He gave a low, drawn-out “quaa-aaa-aaar-k-k-k” of dismay. I slumped further. “Yeah, I know, but like I said, do you have a better idea?”

How I knew his hopeful hop and perky look around meant “We could go look for shiny food!” I don’t know, but I was absolutely certain that was his better idea. I chuckled and put my hands out to him. He hopped in, even though his expression said quite clearly that he knew I was assuaging his dashed hopes. “I meant a better idea with regards to how to find Mom before she becomes a hundred-percent banshee, get Gary back and kick the Morrígan’s ass, because I promise I’m not going home until I’ve gotten a piece of that bitch.”

What there was of Raven’s shoulders drooped. I kissed his head and said, “Yeah, I thought not. So will you guide me, Raven? Can we go into the Dead Zone and see if we can connect with Sheila MacNamarra before the Master takes her for his own?”

He sighed a heartfelt birdy sigh, hopped back out of my hands and stretched his wings until they touched both sides of the power circle. I twisted and touched it at opposite points, and magic rose with soothing, gentle ease to usher Raven and myself into the Dead Zone.

There was a weight on my shoulder. Slight, not like Raven’s heft. I turned my head to find myself nose to beak with the ancient, white-winged raven that had been my mother’s spirit companion. Raven, my Raven, still in my palms, made a sound of astonishment and hopped onto my other shoulder to peer around my head at the new arrival. White Wings peered the other way, and in no time at all they were playing a game, trying to catch the other out as they ducked back and forth around my head. I swore they were laughing, their rapid-fire kloks sounding like joyful, long-overdue greetings.

Me, I couldn’t actually see them. Partly because it was hard to focus on things on my shoulders, but mostly because my eyes prickled with tears. I hardly had a voice to say, “Hey, Wings,” to the white raven. “That’s what Áine was doing. She gave you to me before she burned the bones. I am so glad to meet you.”

Wings stopped playing hide-and-seek in my hair and pressed his head against my cheek. He didn’t even seem to mind that doing so spilled the tears from my eyes and made wet spots on top of his white head. Raven, a little jealous, pressed against me from the other side, and I put my hands up to cover both of them in a gentle embrace. “I have never been so glad to see anybody as I am to see you two right now. Wings, we’ve got to look for my mother. Raven’s amazing at guiding me through the Dead Zone, but you know her better than anybody, huh? With both of you helping I can’t go wrong, can I?”

I probably could, but there was no need to say that to them. Neither was willing to leave my shoulders, but they both hopped on them, evidently happy with the arrangement. My vision finally cleared enough to see, and for a moment I was too astonished to do anything but look.

I was accustomed to the Dead Zone being a black expanse a hairsbreadth smaller than infinity. It was featureless, unnavigable and generally scary in the sense of being implacably large to my infinitesimal smallness, which smallness I had no doubt the Dead Zone could crush like a bug at its faintest whim. It didn’t help that I had occasionally met giant murderous snakes and the occasional ferryman while here, neither of which was reassuring.

Raven’s presence made the whole place just slightly less dreadful. Just slightly, but sometimes that was enough. With him on my shoulder, I got a sense of landscape, though it changed with every breath. With him, I could see the rivers that carried the dead, the reapers that collected souls, takers-of-the-dead from different cultures all over the world. None of them saw each other, all traveling through the same idea—space without ever impinging on one another’s territory. I was the only one who did that.

Viewed with the help of two ravens, the Dead Zone became navigable. More than that: it became a real landscape, a countryside that misted around the edges but no longer stretched over intimidating distances. No longer threatening, though I had no doubt it remained dangerous. But it had a sense of comfort about it now, a sense of recognition of history that my travails from Seattle hadn’t shared. More of a reverence for the dead, less fear and more acceptance, maybe, than I was accustomed to. I still didn’t want to wander the green rolling hills, knowing they only tempered the Dead Zone’s dangers, but at least I wasn’t a mote in a vast nothingness.

I shivered, then exhaled quietly. I had blood ties to the spirit I was looking for this time, and her raven on my shoulder. That ought to help. I hoped. I called up a picture of my mother and said, “You’re not the Master’s yet,” to the darkness. “And God knows you were the most willful woman I’ve ever met, so I’m guessing if you want to you can break away from whatever hold he’s got on you, and come say hi.”

Wings kloked in dismay and I shrugged. “Look, we didn’t get along all that brilliantly, okay? I could be all mushy and squishy and sob story, but I don’t think she’d even know who I was if I did that. I might as well call it like I see it.”

“That,” Sheila MacNamarra said a little wryly, “that you got from me.”