So now here Brendan was, sitting in the shiny, clean, freshly-painted room at the community clinic, watching over Cordelia as she slept…which was also starting to feel a mite creepy. But it pulled at his heart, seeing her so small and defenseless in the hospital bed, hooked to the monitors. He couldn’t leave.
What had she felt from that casket that had taken her so? For as long as he lived, he would never forget the expression on her lovely face as she looked at it, a terrible mix of dread and desire. She’d wanted to touch it, and he could only thank the small, instinctual shred of self-preservation that had kept her from making contact. Just being in the same room was enough to knock her out for hours.
He reached out, touching his fingers to her wrist to assure himself that the machines weren’t lying, that her heart was still beating. Her skin was so warm and soft, and it felt so good that he immediately felt guilty and withdrew his hand—only for her fingers to tangle with his. She drew a sharp breath through her nose and opened her eyes. For a split second, she looked terrified, jerking away from him, her eyes wide and panicked.
“It’s all right! I’m right here. It’s all right, love.”
“Where am I?” she whispered, glancing down at their joined hands. He slipped his fingers away from hers, reluctantly. He didn’t want to compound her discomfort with physical contact.
“The community clinic,” he murmured back. “You’ve been checked over by the doctor and he says you’re fine. No lasting damage, but you’re under strict orders not to go back to the rift site for at least a week, if not more.”
She cleared her raspy throat. “That’s going to make it difficult for us to do our jobs.”
“Well, considering it was your direct supervisor that gave those strict orders, I think you’re safe. You scared the hell out of her,” Brendan said.
“What am I going to do with all my time?” Cordelia asked.
Brendan’s jaw dropped. “You’re in hospital and that’s your biggest worry?”
“Work keeps me from going crazy. I haven’t been left to my own devices in years.”
“I’m sure Jillian will be able to find something for you,” he assured her. “From the comfort of your sofa. She’ll probably start with a nice long report on what you felt from the casket to make you faint.”
She groaned. “This is so embarrassing.”
“Well, better embarrassed than dead, as me dear sainted mother always said.”
Cordelia laughed. “No, she didn’t.”
“You don’t know that,” he scoffed. “My mam spent a good deal of time discussing death and all death-related matters. It was the family’s favorite topic.”
“Well, I guess that makes sense, given your situation. You were holding my hand when I woke up,” Cordelia noted.
He cringed. “I’m sorry about that. I wasn’t thinking.”
“I still don’t feel anything from you,” she mused. “It’s just sort of white noise, like a fan you turn on when you can’t sleep.”
“I’m trying to figure out a way that’s not insulting,” Brendan said.
“It’s not an insult, it’s a relief,” she sighed. “Having this gift, it keeps me away from people. I’m tired of being kept away.”
He replied. “I know the feeling.”
“So what’s it like growing up in Ireland? I’ve been trying to picture it and I keep going back to Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” Cordelia said.
“Gah, that movie did so much more harm than good.” He snorted. “I’ve met very few actual leprechauns. I have lots of loud redheaded uncles, many of them only loud whilst drunk, but it still counts. And for the love of all that’s holy, never mention football around my Uncle Stephen. He will bore you with the full details of every bad Cork City call in the last ten years. And every time there’s a holiday, there’s lots of food, lots of prodigal daughters returning home. Which is a little sad sometimes. I see how much the gift wears on my cousins. They know too much. That’s why I decided to work for the League, handling artifacts that are too dangerous for others to touch; it keeps me from that.”
She seemed to consider him for a long moment. “So you’re dead?”
He waggled his hands back and forth. “As Jillian said, technically speaking.”
“How does that work?” she asked. “Also, I thought banshees were supposed to be female ghosts.”
“Ghosts, no. We’re a sort of hybrid, dating back to when humans first made contact with the fae,” he said. “There are a lot of different stories. One of our kind lost her child, lost her husband, lost her mother, lost her lover—someone was lost, we know that much. And she was so shattered by grief, she honed her cries like a weapon to warn others. Over time, her will to see danger coming, to open her eyes to the future, worked its way into our very blood, and here we are. The first time you see someone’s death, your heart stops and you scream their death song. You go from being a normal, living person to the walking dead. You can breathe, though it’s more about getting the air to work your vocal cords than a need for oxygen. You still eat and drink if you like, but your body stops aging. And you’re stuck in that state forever. My poor cousin Eloise bloomed early and has been an awkward fifteen-year-old for two decades now. It seems cruel, but only the dead can sing for the dead. There’s a lot of nonsense about us appearing in different disguises, a beautiful maiden, the loving mother, the crone. Sometimes, people say that we appear as a dear departed member of the family. But really, it’s just us. People see what they want to see.”
She smiled, but there was a bitter twist to it. “That is a principle I’m well familiar with. So, you’re immortal?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “We’re around longer than most. My great-gran ‘lived’ until she was one hundred and fifty. And when your time comes and you feel like you’ve sung your last death song, you pass over with that person.”
“And you can’t change anything about the deaths you foresee?”
“No,” he said, immediately. “It’s not our place to change fate. It’s against our code.”
“This is going to sound like a stupid question, but why…?” she asked. “This seems like such a cruel gift—to see someone die and not be able to do anything about it.”
“We consider it a sort of public service, warning people what’s to come, to hold their loved ones close and make the most of their lives,” he insisted. “Not to waste time. And in rare cases—very rare, mind you—a properly superstitious Irishman will heed our screams and change their course. We can’t save them, but they can save themselves.”
“Well, I would certainly change travel plans if I heard one. If it makes you feel any better, seeing the past isn’t a more comfortable gift than seeing the future.”
“It does help, thank you,” he told her.
She laughed, and her fingers were still twined with his. “But they didn’t make you leave or anything, right? Because you’re a boy banshee?”
“I’m a man banshee, thank you very much. And no, it’s not like they were ashamed of me. Not to brag, but I’m a bit of a miracle, really, there are only two other male banshees in our known history, and they passed hundreds of years ago. The bansidhe stick to themselves, generally. There are three, maybe four banshee families in Ireland. A family usually lives together, clustered in houses like our own little villages. Once a banshee knows she has the voice, she leaves the settlement for some remote countryside town in need of a little mysticism. My family operates from a compound outside Cork, all of the non-banshees bunched together in a group of cottages on a farm, because who else would understand? Who else would welcome us home?