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heard time and again was actually coming from the Blade, a banshee wail
straight out of hell.
A banshee wail.
If I d had time, I d have stopped to beat my head on something. I d called
the haunting shrieks banshee cries without thinking it through all along. The
Blade was a banshee. Harbinger of death.
My death, specifically, if I didn t gain the upper hand. We rolled and
thumped across the frozen field, struggling for sheer physical dominance.
For a moment I had him, but he wrapped bony fingers around my wrist and
cold seared into my skin again, numbing my arm all the way to the elbow. I
was going to have a dandy case of frostbite if I got out of this alive.
He flung me backward over his head, using my arm like a fulcrum. I
actually cartwheeled in the air, watching the blood moon zip by before I
smashed into the snow and skidded. I staggered to my feet, turning just in
time to catch the Blade s shoulder with my gut, an excellent reversal of my
tackle a moment earlier. All the air wheezed out of me and I hit the snow
again, doing less skidding and more sinking with his weight on top of me.
He was heavy for such a skinny thing, as if he d been emptied of bone and
muscle and had cold iron poured into his skin instead. His fingers wrapped
around my throat, driving me further into the snow. It felt so warm
compared to his hands that for a few seconds I stopped caring, cozy in my
snow bed and ready to sleep.
A tiny, offended burst of power flared in my belly, reminding me what real
warmth was.
I opened my eyes again, looking up into the Blade s grimacing rictus. I
couldn t tell if it had ever been human. Skin stretched across its bones so
tightly it might ve been a mummy, eyes with bloody fire lighting them
staring wide and empty at me. Its teeth her teeth, I finally realized: it was,
or had been at one time, female. Of course. Banshees were. Her teeth were
bared, dry lips pulled back from them. I wasn t sure she needed to breathe,
but her chest was expanding.
Wait. I knew this part. This was where she screamed until my eardrums
ruptured. I thought twice in one day was a little much, so I took what
warmth the power inside me offered, forced it into my arm, and jabbed
upward with two stiffened fingers. Right into her throat.
My fingers went all the way through to her spine with a horrible sound of
flesh tearing as easily as paper. The scream turned into an aborted glerk and
the banshee loosened her hold on me. I kicked her off and rolled away,
clapping my hand to my throat, coughing through bruised muscle for air. For
a few seconds we stayed there, both swaying, watching each other warily.
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The hole in her throat sealed up, not like human flesh would, but like paper
was being stretched back to fit into a hole it d been wrinkled away from.
She pounced again and I ducked, absurdly smug at the startled look that
brightened her flame-colored eyes as she went flying over my head. Then
she tackled me from behind, smashing my face into the snow. I thought,
very clearly, damn, that thing really corners, and had a brief, irrational
moment of wanting to try Petite out against her.
Instead I dragged in a lungful of snow and ice as I shoved so deep into the
snow that I hit the earth below it. The banshee s knee was in my back,
bearing down with too much weight for me to move. I scrabbled for the
worn-out center of power within myself, and came up dry. Apparently I d
blown my one chance when I didn t finish ripping her head off a minute
earlier. I pounded a fist in the snow, weak flailing as I tried to buck her off.
It was about as effective as threatening to catch a storm in cotton candy.
She bent forward, bony knee pressing into my spine between my shoulder
blades. I thought about screaming, but I couldn t get enough air to. She
hissed, right there behind my ear, and I had the horrible idea she was spitting
maggots into my hair. Why maggots were a problem when I was about to be
dead, I didn t know, but the idea completely grossed me out. In the womb I
heard you die, for no one lives when a banshee cries.
I wasn t just going to die. I was going to be rhymed to death. That simply
wasn t fair. I flailed again, wishing my arms didn t feel so heavy. Wishing
my legs would kick, instead of lying there getting colder. Wishing I could
wake up enough energy inside me to reach out for more. I didn t even have
enough to ask the city to hit me with its best shot, a tactic I d tried once
before and had sworn I wouldn t do again. That I even thought about trying
told me I was in dire straits.
The pregnant gwyld was clever and wise, took you away from prying
eyes. Should have known it couldn t last, power like yours can t be passed.
Her voice was singsong and scaly, grating against the ringing in my ears. I
tried jerking my head back. Not even a banshee could like a head butt to the
bridge of the nose, right? But the weight of her hand was too much to move.
I considered giving up and dying. It was pretty clearly in the books. On the
other hand, she was saying something interesting, if I could get enough
oxygen to my brain to work my way through her bad poetry. Master sees
and Master hears, gains his strength through bloodred tears. Thirty years
he s gone unfed, shaman s gifts protect the dead.
The words burrowed into my brain, extracting details about my life in
exchange for my fumbling grasp of what the banshee was telling me. I
whimpered into the snow and tried hard to hang on to the idea of my name
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wrapped safely up in airbags and seat belts. I felt the scrape of her voice
slide off that thought, and nearly laughed with relief. I could keep her away
from the most important things. At least if I was going to die, I wasn t going
to die with my soul eaten.
Power erupted in my belly like molten gold being poured into me. I
straightened my arms, suddenly filled with strength, and shoved up, lifting
the Blade s weight as if it were inconsequential. I whipped around, flinging
her off me, and she landed yards away, skidding through the snow on hands
and knees, back arched like an angry cat. For an instant, the banshee cries
stopped, leaving a silence so profound it hurt me in my bones.
I had no time to wonder where the new strength was coming from. I drew
on the memory of my mother, throwing up a jail cell made of her own will,
and copied it. Bars of blazing silver flashed up out of the snow, slamming
closed around the banshee. She threw her head back and keened, a high
piercing note that shivered all the way to the bloody moon. My bars wavered
under the onslaught, and her voice strengthened, the moon itself seeming to
hang lower in the sky the longer she wailed.
Black threads of power, the sacrificed lives of three women, wound
together and responded to the banshee s cries. They leaped through the bars
I d built, piercing her bony body. She grew in size and in power, feeding
from the blood lines, which throbbed and pulsed like arteries as they spread
across the snow. I dug deeper into the fresh power I d found, discovering an
ocean s depth of energy waiting to be tapped. It ran deeper than I did, the
same kind of power that Billy had tapped into earlier that day. The love of
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