“What about me?” Caitríona sounded less petulant than I would’ve in her shoes at her age. In fact, I might even label her tone hopeful, if I was feeling honest. It made me want to give her a meaningful task, whether she had the power or not. After a second I hit on something and answered swiftly enough to seem like I hadn’t hesitated at all.
“I want you to concentrate on Sheila. On everything you knew about her. Put that out there, focus it like you could call her up with your imagination. Put energy into it. The circle will pick up on that and your essence and your memories will become part of the power.”
“And what will it do?”
“The more people that weave power together the stronger the connection is. I’ve used other people’s energy before, but not for something like this. That’s why I want you to think about Sheila. You knew her a lot better than I did. We want to call as much of her spirit here as we can, to give her over to cleansing the mountain and also to breaking the bond between her bones and her soul.” I hadn’t been previously aware of bonds like that, but then, ghosts weren’t my specialty. That was my partner—former partner, which Morrison had probably told him by now, which was going to go down like a lead balloon—my former partner Billy Holliday’s forte. I also wasn’t absolutely certain my mother qualified as a ghost, but I was pretty sure she fell in the realm of undead, and for all I knew, the undead were deeply tied to their bones.
There was one potential snag in my plan. We might succeed in washing the mountain clean with all the heart and white magic Sheila had to offer, and that might leave nothing but the black-hearted banshee behind. I counted it a risk worth taking. In my judgment, the parts that counted as my mother would have been saved, and the rest, well. Everybody had a dark side, and there was a certain dramatic satisfaction in the idea of lopping the head off that dark side in a very literal fashion.
I decided it probably wasn’t necessary to explain the possible flaw in the plan, and instead called Raven to me. It wasn’t exactly that I needed his guidance in raising a power circle. More that I was heading into his realm, into the gray territory between life and death, and it was safer to do that with him nearby. He appeared, quarking curiously, and I scratched under his beak as he settled on my shoulder. “We have a big job, Raven. Life and death stuff. I need a circle that runs to the mountain’s roots, that’s how deep it has to go, and reaches up to where the air’s too thin to breathe. Earth and sky. I can be earth, you can be sky, huh?”
He quarked again, this time clearly delighted, and leapt off my shoulder to wheel above our heads, sketching an outline of the circle. For an instant I simply loved the silly animal, loved his enthusiasm and his opinions and his brashness, and I hoped like hell he knew that. He zipped around above us, dipping close to Méabh, then zooming around the top half of the circle to come around to Caitríona. I didn’t know if either of them could see him, though I saw Caitríona’s hair fliff as he caught a wing tip in it. Then he went back to the north again, this time climbing high before he turned his head to give me a birdy black eye in warning.
He dove, and magic fell down in a curtain with him. I squealed, as thoughtlessly delighted as he was, and yelled, “Now, Méabh!” as I pulled magic up from the earth.
Hers came from within, relying on the connection with the world that the aos sí shared. It linked Croagh Patrick with Cromm Crúaich, tying the present to the far-distant past, just as Méabh was currently tied. Even Caitríona reacted, throwing forth a burst of energy more solidly formulated than someone without mystical training had any business offering. Her strength and Méabh’s shot toward each other, making another link in the past/present rope, and for an instant their colors glimmered harmoniously.
Then my magic and Raven’s crashed together, top to bottom, in a blast of gunmetal blue. Méabh and Caitríona’s offerings, sandwiched between them, shone brilliantly for an instant, then exploded in rivulets through the ball of magic now encompassing Croagh Patrick.
It sounded like static, like the aurora was supposed to. It felt like laughter, a sheer primal joy in sympathetic magic. This was what wielding vast cosmic power was supposed to feel like: confident, strong, joyous, sharing. I’d thought once I could maybe heal Seattle. Maybe heal the world. All of a sudden I understood I was only part of a huge network of magic users, adepts, connected, whatever they wanted to be called, who could change the world if, and only if, they worked together like we were doing now. This was how my magic was meant to be used: as one of many. Nothing I could do on my own would ever feel so good.
Caitríona yelped, from which I ascertained she could either see or feel the power flowing. Méabh, far more stoic, stood her ground and mostly didn’t let a little smile get out of control. I stretched my power toward my mother’s bones, searching for the heat I’d once felt while healing. Fire shouldn’t be that difficult to call up; it was only a change of state, and shamanism was about change.
A hint of Mother’s red-gold power still clung to her bones. I dug into the marrow, reaching for every last whisper of that, ready to burn it out in a glorious, defiant blaze. Raven helped, settling on the bones with clenched claws, like he could snap and shake the last dregs of power from them. Between us, I felt her remaining magic gather, then lift, though neither Raven nor myself did the lifting. I tried to shutter the Sight on more deeply, and caught a glimpse of a much more fragile raven, so old his wings and beak had turned to white. Sheila’s raven: I knew it instantly, though I’d never even imagined she had spirit animals. But it made sense. Oh, it made sense, if we were the long-calendar descendants of the Morrígan. Ravens were part of us. They always would be.
And the faded streak that was Mother’s spirit raven held the fragments of her power in its claws, wings beating with a desperate, ponderous slowness. Time was so short, so very short, and there was so much to do. I pitched my voice to carry, not wanting to shout within the confines of the power circle. It seemed disrespectful, and if we’d just eked a spirit raven back from beyond to finish this task, the last thing I wanted was to show disrespect. “Give your memories of Sheila everything you’ve got, Cat. Let’s wipe this place clean and give her the send-off she deserves.”
Caitríona lowered her chin to her chest, eyes closed in concentration, and all of us held our breath, waiting to see Sheila’s ghost break free of the white bones.
A goddess rose up instead.
Chapter Seventeen
I had met gods, demigods, semi-gods or whatever the grandchildren of gods should be called, archetypes, demons, elves and avatars. There were magnitudes of difference in the power each category blazed with, and I had not one single teeny tiny doubt that I was finally—finally!—in the presence of a genuine goddess. The utterly irreverent part of me thought it was about damned time. The rest of me tried not to fall down on my knees in gibbering worship.
Cernunnos had that effect on me, too, but their similarities mostly ended there. He was a creature of order, for all that I thought of death and its attending miseries to be chaotic. But he helped maintain the flow of life into death, while she was the chaos of new life. Power boiled off her incandescent skin, curls of magic licking life into existence with each molecule of air they touched. Chance exploded at every instance, random and frantic exploration of mutations pursuing survival. Happenstance and hope guided all the permutations, fractals of magic struggling to create sustainable life in a world already filled with it. My eyes burned from watching her for barely the space of an indrawn breath. Then I howled and clapped my hands over my face, shutting down the Sight.