On the fourth hand, I forgot my stupid magic wasn’t working properly and retaliated.
Luckily, for some value of luck, I threw a net rather than trying any internal magics, and the external ones were mostly still working okay. Iron bars may a cage make, but magic nets weren’t particularly stymied by them. My silver-and-blue net whisked through the narrow spaces between her gold-and-red cage and spun large, wrapping her as thoroughly as I’d been trapped. Her concentration broke for an instant and I surged through the dissolving cage bars.
Exasperation flitted across her features. She flung a hand up, palm toward me, and I hit another wall, bouncing onto my butt this time. Mages might be about spells and preparation, but from what I knew of my mother she would have a list of spells as long as her arm prepared. Probably longer. I was going to get knocked around a lot before she worked her way through all of them. Instead of getting up, I tightened my net, and that same mild exasperation showed before concussive power exploded the net all over the place.
I slithered down a distant wall with no real idea of how I’d gotten there. My head hurt. Worse, it rang like Notre Dame’s bells, and the fragments of my magic were raw and sharp-edged as I tried pulling them back together. It felt like someone had gotten right inside my power and set off a grenade.
Which, of course, was basically what had happened. Sheila had, after all, been wrapped up nice and tight in a net of my magic. Moreover, she was my mother. She couldn’t have been much more inside my magic than that, both literally and emotionally. It was just dawning on me that none of this fight was likely to go the way I wanted it to when she spoke. “I’ll scream if I have to, cuisle mo chroí.”
Cushla mahcree. I knew that phrase. Some of my aunts had used it with their children. It meant something like “my heart,” and seemed a little peculiar to add onto the end of a threat.
Because it was a threat. I’d barely stood up to Aibhill’s scream when it had brought my mother’s voice into it. I’d shatter with Sheila’s voice as the lead. So for once in my life I tried to do the smart thing, and didn’t throw another net.
Well, mostly the smart thing, anyway. I did say, “I have to kill you, you know that, right?”
She came down to earth—I’d hardly noticed she’d been floating, but now that I thought about it, Aibhill had been, too—and knelt next to me. I scooted along the wall, trying to get far enough away to avoid sudden evisceration. She started to follow, then put her palms on the floor as if to say, “Look, no danger!” and otherwise held still. “I’m dead already, alanna. There’s nothing left to kill.”
“You’re awfully damned mobile for a dead woman. And I don’t do ghosts, so you’re something else, and that just can’t be good, so I’ve got to finish it. I promised Méabh.”
Disappointment flashed across my mother’s too-pale face. “I did so want to meet her. Joanne, Siobhán, alanna my dear. Would I be speaking to you this way if I belonged to them?”
I dared a glance at the them in question, the banshees who still hung about the rafters, all hungry haunted eyes and silent voices. “Aibhill was very reasonable, too. Right up until she gutted Méabh. So forgive me if I don’t quite trust reasonable and polite.”
“Aibhill,” my mother said softly, “did not have the bond of bone and blood broken before her soul became the Master’s. More, she did not have it done by her daughter, nor with the help of a goddess she had long since loved.”
That whole ritual on the mountaintop seemed very distant just then. I looked at her for a long time, trying to understand what she meant, and finally said, “You mean it worked? You’re free?”
“Free to choose, cuisle mo chroí, and I’ve chosen this cloak to wear.”
I couldn’t have heard her correctly. My expression indicated as much, and after a moment she smiled. Not Aibhill’s sweet, syrupy smile, but a smile with points. With fangs. A smile that reminded me how my mother had chosen to die through willpower alone, and therefore a smile that I found peculiarly reassuring. I still had to say it. “Why on God’s little green earth would you do that? This is… I mean, Mom. Doesn’t this kind of cut you out of the circle of life? Of reincarnation? You’ve got to be an old soul, even if I’m not. Why would you do that?”
“There’s not a one of them with power, my girl,” Sheila said as if it explained everything. It didn’t. She pursed her lips to hide another smile and went on. “Aibhill had power in her mortal life, alanna. The magic of her voice, to warn men of their deaths, but the magic to strike vengeance was the Master’s alone. The rest are vassals only, creatures of Aibhill’s making and of his. Without me, they remain his, but I have power, Joanne. I have the strength they do not. I can guide them. I can draw them away from him, and make them what they once were meant to be. Harbingers, not bringers, of death. There’s no harm in knowing death comes,” she added even more quietly. “It gives those that know how to take it a chance to say goodbye.”
There were worlds of meaning in that, things we really probably should discuss, but sitting on the floor of a ruined castle in the Irish version of the Lower World, with banshees and my best friend overlooking us, was not the time or place to discuss them. I pulled my scattered brain cells together and said, “You’ve done an end-route,” blankly. “You pulled a Hail Mary on the big bad. Jesus, Mom, that could have gone all wrong.”
She smiled again. “I trusted you.”
“Me?” Man, and I thought I wasn’t too bright sometimes.
“That you would find your magic. That you would come back to Ireland to take up the mantle I discarded too early. That you would stop the ritual from being completed, and that I would be free to make the choices I had to make.”
My throat was dry. “You took a hell of a risk.”
“But I was right.” Sheila MacNamarra stood and offered me a hand. “Now, my daughter, shall we end this fight we began together eight and twenty years ago?”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Eight and twenty, Mom? Really?” Still, I got up and offered her my hand. Right hand. The left continued to be a dead weight. Sheila frowned and instead of taking the one I offered, reached for the useless other. I pulled about half an inch away, realized there was nowhere to hide and slumped as she caught the bitten flesh in her hands.
Her eyebrows drew down. “What’s this magic you’re working, my heart?”
“Magic I’m wo— I’m not working any magic! I got bit by a damned werewolf a couple days ago!”
She gave me a puzzled look. “So?”
“So my magic’s screwed up because I’m trying to keep from going all furry!”
Silence met my outburst. After a long moment, my mother said, as gently as she could, “Sure and you don’t think a bite transforms you into a werewolf, do you, cuisle mo chroí?”
“Of course it does. Everybody knows tha…” I swallowed. “Everybody knows that.”
The queen of the banshees looked like she was trying not to laugh. “You’ve watched too many movies, Joanne. Where does magic come from?”
“Within.” I actually knew that one, and as soon as I said it started to feel uncomfortable. “I mean… Well, yeah. It comes from within.”
“And so how,” she wondered, “could a bite, an external wound, change you from one thing to another?”
My face heated up and I grabbed my arm defensively. A wave of pain washed over me, which helped my righteousness as I snapped, “It’s an infection. It gets into the blood. That’s the whole idea of how werewolves work.”