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Backwoods Banshee

Page 83

by David R. Slayton

He could eat. He should be hungry after the fight and all the plane hopping, but it felt like the mattress had a grip on him.

The fan spun lazily above him for a while before he forced himself to sit up.

“Enough,” he said.

He needed to do something, anything at all, to not feel so useless.

Adam retrieved his tarot deck and lay back down, this time on his stomach.

Making sure his legs weren’t crossed, he poured everything he was feeling into the cards as he shuffled. He thought about all the dead ends, all the questions until he felt his magic sync with the deck.

He drew and cut the cards.

The Two of Swords, reversed.

Indecision and confusion.

Yep. That about summed it up.

He was getting a lot of reversals lately.

Nothing hurts like sitting on the fence, he thought, echoing something his Aunt Sue had first told him.

Adam put the cards aside and sat on the edge of the bed.

He needed to make a move, any move.

Going back to the laundry basket, he retrieved Seamus’s coin.

The skull figure on the face wasn’t any less disturbing.

He could practically hear the leprechaun telling him to get it done in his Irish accent.

Closing his eyes and crossing his arms over his chest like the blindfolded figure in the card, Adam sat on the edge of the bed and fell back. He sat up again in the spirit realm.

The graveyard around the western tower hadn’t changed since his last visit. None of the Lost Ones seemed to have moved. There were as many of them here as outside the northern tower.

Eyes tracked him as he moved among the tents and tombstones. He saw no sign of Lily. At least the miner didn’t make an appearance. Adam wasn’t looking forward to seeing him again after the scene in the Night Market.

There wouldn’t be much he could do if Lily was sick.

Adam wasn’t a healer, and he wasn’t here in body so he couldn’t bring anything, not even something to help with a fever. Maybe he could figure out what she needed and pass it along through the Lost Ones. Carl hadn’t seemed as hostile as the others.

The stares grew harder, longer, but he did not call the sword. He did not run away.

I come in peace, he thought, trying to project that.

He hadn’t found Lily, but there was one place left to look.

The cardboard church where they’d found the dying banshee stood mostly intact. The camping lanterns needed charging. They’d mostly gone out, thickening the gloom.

Lily lay inside, stretched out atop a purple sleeping bag in the same spot where the monster she’d called an angel had lain and died. She was alone.

“Lily?” he called.

“Oh. Hi,” she said weakly.

She was pale but shone with sweat. He could feel the heat coming off her. The banshee’s briny smell had been replaced with a stale, human odor, something sickly and sallow.