“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.”