Winter Moon (33 page)

“I swear on my wife's grave.” Gary herded me up the stairs to Billy's front door, maneuvering Billy into line behind me. Mel stood in the open doorway, looking bemused. Gary spoke to her, not to me or Billy, which was just as well, because we'd gone well past punch-drunk sometime in the past hour of work and were howling with laughter every time anybody moved. “I swear on Annie's grave,” Gary repeated to Mel, “this ain't my fault. They were like this when I picked 'em up at the station.”

“I'd ask why Billy wasn't driving,” Melinda said, getting out of her husband's way as he snickered and staggered through the door, “but I think I see why. I'm Melinda Holliday.” She threaded a hand between me and Billy to shake Gary's, then fixed me with a gimlet eye. “Have you two been out drinking, Joanie?”

An eruption of giggles escaped through my nose
and squirted tears from my eyes. I clapped both hands over my mouth and tried to wiggle a finger up to clear my eyes. “No. Swear to God. Hi, Mel.” I bent to give her a hug, hoping I wouldn't lose my balance in doing so. She was nearly an entire foot shorter than I was and better dressed than anybody I'd ever met, including Billy. “This's my friend Gary. Gary Muldoon. He,” I said extravagantly, “is a
hero.
”

“Where ‘hero' equates to ‘designated driver'?” Melinda asked archly. “Get in here, all of you.” She sounded like she was herding cats, or her four children. We all straightened up and scurried inside to the best of our ability, more obediently than either cats or her kids would have done.

“Jooooooaaaaanne!”

That was the last thing I heard before I went down in a pile of elbows and knees and squirming bodies. “Oh, sure,” I heard Billy say, somewhere above my head. “Joanie gets all the hugs, but your old man gets nothing?”

“We see you all the time, Dad,” a voice from the pile of squirmy people on top of me pointed out. The oldest kid—Robert-who-didn't-like-to-be-called-Bobby, that-was-a-little-boy's-name—extracted himself from the pile to give Billy a proper hug. He was eleven, not quite old enough to have too much dignity to show such blatant affection.

That left two kids squishing me, and one toddler slapping his barefoot way down the hall with the clear intention of finishing off the dog pile. Melinda scooped that one up, eliciting a howl of dismay while the girls,
Jacquie and Clara, clambered off me, pulled me to my feet, and attached themselves to my sides like leeches. “Joanne, we haven't seen you since
forever
…how come you don't come over more often…did I show you my friendship pins…no I want to show her my Xbox it's cooler than the dumb pins—”

I didn't even know which of them wanted to show me what, but I promised, as loudly as I could, that I wanted to see both the pins and the Xbox and anything else they had to show me, which satisfied Clara, who released me and went tearing off down the hall shouting about the computer games. I grinned after her and gave Jacquie an extra hug. She beamed and clung to my side even more enthusiastically. I had no idea why they liked me so much, but I adored them and it made me feel I'd done something right in a prior life.

Except
, the annoying little voice in my head said, brightly,
you haven't had any. That's what Coyote told you, remember?

I told the annoying voice to shut up and tried to get my boots off without letting go of Jacquie. It was partly self-preservation; I still wasn't doing so well at the whole standing-on-my-own thing, and neither, it seemed, was Billy, who leaned against the now-closed door and smiled wearily. This was what he needed more than any power I could have jumped his battery with: the rambunctious noise and love of his family.

Erik, the toddler, yowled, “Dooowwn!” and then added, in a snuffle, “Pease?” Melinda laughed and
put him down. He crawled over to my feet through the snow we'd tracked in and helpfully began yanking on my shoelaces.

I'd been ushered out of the hall and into the kitchen, and had a glass of wine in my hand before I was entirely sure I'd gotten my boots off. Erik came trundling after us with one of the boots wrapped in his arms, which I took as more or less a good sign. Mel was exchanging pleasantries about it being nice to meet you with Gary, who scooped Jacquie—she was only five—off the floor and turned her upside down. Jacquie shrieked with unholy glee, narrowly missing kicking Gary in the nose. For an old guy with no kids of his own, he ducked well.

The first sip of wine hit me behind the eyes like a bowling ball. I let slip a startled giggle and lifted the glass to peer at it, as if I might see a miniature bottle of whiskey hidden in the rich dark liquid.

“Are you all right, Joanne?” Mel somehow heard my giggle through the general noise and turned to look at me, her eyebrows lifted and a teasing smile in place. “What have you and Bill been up to?”

“All kinds of weird sh—tuff.” I caught myself just in time, but Robert, sitting on the counter where he wasn't supposed to be, smirked and rolled his eyes as if to say,
grown-ups.
Mel, without having to look his way, said, “Off the counter, Rob. Go set the table,” which was apparently his punishment for thinking himself superior to adults. He thumped down with another eye-roll and I winked at him in sympathy as he skulked into the dining room.
“We've been misbehaving horribly,” I assured Mel. “I'll tell you about it after dinner.”

“You'd better. I get huffy when strange women bring my husband home acting drunk on holidays.”

“I'm not that strange,” I protested. She laughed and went to open the kitchen window, sending a blast of cooler air into the hot room. I stepped closer to it, taking a deep breath as I leaned over the sink and peered at their backyard. It looked like a Thomas Kincaid painting, down to giant snowmen and half-buried swing sets. Moonlight turned it all purpley-blue. I lifted a toast to the man in the moon, the hard edges of his full disc reddened and mellowed by the wine in my glass.

“You're pretty strange, Jo,” Gary said.

I looked back over my shoulder. “You're not helping.”

He shrugged, grinning, and turned to Melinda. “Anything I can do to help, ma'am?”

“You could start by not calling me ‘ma'am,'” Melinda suggested. I shook my head.

“Don't say that. He'll start calling you ‘dame' and ‘lady' and ‘broad' if you're not careful.”

“It's parta my charm,” Gary said. I laughed.

“You keep saying that.”

“And you keep hangin' around. I figure I must be right.”

Melinda arched a curious eyebrow at me. I put my nose in my wineglass, suddenly aware that my cheeks were staining pink from something other than the warmth of the kitchen. I heard her under-
the-breath, “Mmm-hmm,” before she clapped her hands together, making herself the picture of efficiency. “All right. Joanne, you get the roast beef, Gary, you can get the potatoes. Jacquie, get in here, thank you dear, would you get the corn and where's your sister? Erik, not under the table, sweetheart. Erik, not under the—Erik! Get out from under the table!” She went to pull her errant child from beneath the dining room table while Gary and I followed Jacquie around, all of us picking up our charged items.

“I don't know how she does it,” I whispered to Gary. “Four of them. I can't even find my own shoes some mornings.”

“That's 'cause you leave 'em in the bathroom.”

“Gary, how do you
know
that?”

He gave me an unrepentant grin and put the potatoes down on the table as he headed back into the kitchen. I put the roast beef down and smacked a hand against my forehead. Robert appeared at my elbow, looking curious. “Is he your boyfriend?”

“No!”

Robert got a grin that looked suspiciously like his mother's, said, “Uh-huh,” and sauntered off. I had the distinct feeling I'd been had.

“You can sit next to
me
,” Jacquie announced from behind me. I spun around, blinking down at her. At least she probably wouldn't tease me about Gary.

“Okay. Where are we sitting?”

“Here and here.” She dragged two chairs out and looked at me expectantly. I sat and she scrambled into
her own chair, looking smug. A moment later Mel appeared in the doorway, carrying Erik on one hip and an enormous bowl of gravy in the other hand.

“Jacquie, you're supposed to be helping set the table.”

“I'm keeping Joanne company,” Jacquie said virtuously. I gaped at her and Mel laughed out loud.

“I see how it is. All right. You keep Joanne company.” She put the gravy down and disappeared back into the kitchen as I yelled, “I'm being used!” after her. Jacquie giggled, pleased with herself, and tilted her chair precariously so she could lean on me. By the time I got her straightened up, the table was set and everyone had gathered around. I lifted my wineglass and my eyebrows, looking to Billy for permission to make a toast.

“To Mel,” I said cheerfully. “A miracle of modern efficiency. Thank you for inviting us to dinner.” I lifted my glass a little higher, watching the wine catch the bright white of one of the chandelier light-bulbs and turn it red as the full moon. “Oh,
shit!
”

I dropped the wineglass and ran for the door.

I didn't actually get my boots all the way on until Gary had us halfway to the park. I kept fumbling my stupid damned cell phone as I tried to call Morrison. Finally, on the fourth try, I got the right number punched in and he answered with a worn-out hello.

“Morrison? You've got to get everybody out of the park, right now. Do we have anybody there? Call them out. He's going to be there. The Blade. It's the full moon. Mother said the moon was changing. Can you call them out?”

Gary gave me a sideways glance of concern. Billy leaned over the front seat of the cab, hanging on my every word. I had no idea what Mel must think. I hadn't managed to say anything coherent between grabbing my boots and running for the cab.

Apparently I still wasn't saying anything coherent. Morrison was silent on the other end of the line for a few moments, then exhaled heavily. “Walker?”

“Of course it's Walker! Does anybody else do this kind of shit to you? Can you empty the park? They're never going to see him coming, Morrison, they're just going to get killed. You've got to move now!”

Another moment's silence, and then, “I will call you back in two minutes. Do not do anything until you hear back from me.” Morrison hung up. I finally pulled my second boot on, wishing my foot weren't soaking wet and cold from melting snow.

“Hurry-hurry-hurry-hurry, Gary, hurry.”

“If I hurry any more we'll be dead.” It was true. The roads were coated in black ice, and he was driving as fast as I would have, which didn't bode well for anybody.

“Joanie?”

“It's Blade, dammit, it's the full moon.” I twitched around to look at Billy, then twitched forward again. “I'm going to have to explain it to Morrison, I don't want to explain it twice.” I leaned forward, as if my doing so would urge the cab to a faster pace. “Dammit, dammit, dammit, stupid stupid stupid Jo.”

“Hey,” Gary said, surprisingly quiet under my litany of abuse. “You got no reason to be callin' yourself stupid, lady.”

Unexpected sniffles hit me right in the nose. “No right,” I mumbled. “Not no reason.”

“Close enough for this old dog.”

The cell phone rang and I nearly jumped out of my skin as I answered it. “God, I
hate
these things.”

“I assume you're talking about the phone,” Morrison said. “The park's clearing out. What the
hell is going on, Walker? You'd better not be screwing with me.”

“I would not screw with you,” I promised fervently. “It's the full moon, Morrison, my mother died on the full moon. It was the solstice, now it's the equinox and the moon is full again. Check the records, I bet that's what it was twenty-seven years ago, too.”

“How the hell am I supposed to check the records on the full moon from thirty years ago?”

“There's this really cool Web site,” I started, then screwed up my face and grabbed the oh-shit handle as Gary took a corner by use of the Force, without looking where he was going and with no apparent regard to life or limb. “Look, it doesn't matter, I know I'm right. He's killing people on the full moons of winter. This is the last one. Tonight's the equinox. I'm going to stop him.”

“How?”

“I have absolutely no idea.” I hung up, not wanting to hear Morrison's response to that. To my utter surprise, the phone didn't ring again. Less than two minutes later we pulled into the park's lot. I tumbled out of the cab almost before it stopped moving and ran for the baseball diamond as fast as I could. Gary and Billy came after me, shouting.

I expected to slam into the Blade's red barrier with such force that it'd throw me back. Instead I flung myself at it so hard that I skidded ten feet in the snow when I hit nothing at all. I said something witty and intelligent, like, “Da fuh?” around the mouthful of
snow I got for my troubles, and scrambled to my feet, waiting for all hell to break loose.

Somehow, despite everything, I didn't expect it to break loose by way of crimson falling down the face of the moon to cast a bloody shadow on the earth. Everything real seemed to go away: the bite of cold air, the shine of moonlight on fresh snow, my friends' voices yelling somewhere behind me. I stood there with my jaw hanging open, staring up at the bleeding moon, while a sliver fell from it and tumbled all the way to earth.

Just before it hit the ground, it flared a cloak of blackness that cut the air with a banshee scream. Then the cloak settled, the Blade walking forward, tall and thin and hatchet faced. I could feel power rolling off it, heavy as the sea, and with as much concern for the threat I provided as the ocean itself might be.

Right about then it struck me that I was so low on power I'd been punch-drunk and giggling less than an hour earlier, and that out of all the days to pick a fight with something that looked like Morticia Addams's incredibly evil older brother, today might well be the worst possible choice.

The Blade came toward me, faster than a run, without any visible means of locomotion. He simply glided over the blood-colored snow, picking up speed that was all the more eerie for its silence. I did a mental check over my list of available weapons.

There weren't any.

I was going to die.

To my surprise, I discovered I could live with that. I let out the best war cry I could manage—it had nothing on Jacquie's gleeful yelling, but it wasn't bad—and flung myself at the Blade with everything I had.

Which was nothing.

The Blade wasn't prepared for that.

I hit him in the stomach, a shoulder-first tackle Gary would've been proud of. It was like smashing into a flexible block of ice: cold split straight down into my bones and made the marrow into something that carried icy death. He screamed—for the first time I realized the metal-on-metal shriek I'd 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. 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 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 family, the protective streak that went beyond what a single person could encompass. I could use it, but I doubted I'd live through it.

It didn't matter.

The ocean of blue crushed down upon the banshee, pressing down to sever the blood lines. They flattened, carrying less sustenance but refusing to shatter. I felt half-moon cuts opening up on my palms, my hands fisted so tightly that blood couldn't escape the tiny slices my fingernails made. The banshee kept screaming, her voice muffled by the weight of my power, but not yet broken. I set my teeth together and reached deeper into the core of power I'd tapped, willing to die as long as I took the other bitch with me.