Chicago
The Pot O’ Gold was doing good business. Plenty of customers, many of them obviously regulars, were enjoying the pub’s spirits and atmosphere, along with live fiddle music provided by a grizzled old Irish guy who was apparently a fixture at the place. Baird had staked out a place at the bar, where she was slowly nursing a single beer. She was on-duty, as it were, so she was watching her intake as well as the clientele.
“Popular place,” she observed to Bridget, who was busy behind the bar, where Stone had pitched in to help out, bartending being among his many unexpected talents, while Baird and Ezekiel staked out the scene. There had been no banshee sightings yet, but the night was young.
“Just wait until Thursday!” Bridget drew a pint of stout from a tap—slowly, to give it a proper head of foam—and handed it to a waiting customer. “Saint Patrick’s Day is always our biggest day of the year, not to mention our most profitable.”
Baird could believe it. “So I guess lying low until we sort out this whole banshee business is not an option?”
“Not if I want to stay in business,” Bridget said, wiping her brow. “Saint Pat’s Day is a big deal here in Chicago: parades, parties—they even dye the river green for the occasion. I can’t afford to miss out on the festivities.” She leaned toward Baird, lowering her voice in order to avoid being overheard. “Plus, how do you hide out from a banshee anyway?”
“Good question,” Baird conceded. As far as she knew, there wasn’t a Banshee Victim Protection Program.
“Personally, I’m looking forward to checking out the scene Thursday,” Ezekiel said. By amazing coincidence, he had taken a seat at the bar right where the magic gold coin was displayed. “Saint Patrick’s Day is one of my favorite holidays.”
“Funny,” Stone commented from the other side of the bar, “you don’t look Irish.”
“Haven’t you heard?” Ezekiel said, grinning. “Everyone is Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day. And what with all the green beer and tipsy people not paying close attention to their personal belongings … it’s better than Christmas.”
Baird rolled her eyes. Once a thief, always a thief.…
“Don’t even think about it,” she warned him. “We’re here on Library business, remember.”
“Gotta admit, though,” Stone said, “there are probably worse ways to spend Saint Patrick’s Day than camping out at an Irish pub.”
I suppose, Baird thought, although she hoped they wouldn’t have to stake out the pub for two more days. In theory, they were on hand to see if the banshee made an appearance tonight, while also keeping an eye on Bridget to protect her from whatever life-threatening jeopardy the banshee might be warning her about, be that the Serpent Brotherhood, her damaged heart, or something else altogether. Too bad the banshee couldn’t be more specific about what sort of danger we should be looking out for.
Baird shifted restlessly atop the barstool. As much as she liked and sympathized with Bridget, she still wasn’t entirely convinced that this was the best use of the Librarians’ time. Who knew what the Serpent Brotherhood was up to while they were stuck here, cooling their heels in an admittedly cozy bar, waiting for a crybaby fairy to show up?
Here’s hoping Jenkins and Cassandra are making more progress on their end of the investigation …
Applause rippled across the pub as the fiddler wrapped up his set.
“Thank ye kindly.” He doffed his cap in acknowledgment as he carefully laid his fiddle and bow down on a stool. “I’ll be taking a wee break now if ye don’t mind. Ye wouldn’t think it, but fiddling’s thirsty work, so it is.”
Leaving his instrument behind, he wandered over to the bar, where Bridget had a glass of amber whiskey waiting for him. “Here you go, old man. Jameson’s, neat, just how you like it.”
“Ah, thank ye, Bridget, me darling. Ye’re an angel, ye are.”
The fiddler certainly looked the part, as though he’d stepped out of some old Hollywood movie set in a colorful Irish village. He was a lanky fellow with bright eyes and a jovial expression, whose bushy eyebrows and scraggly beard had long ago surrendered to the gray. A well-worn paddy cap rested atop his head, while his rumpled tweed jacket was patched at the elbows. Calluses on his palm and index fingers were flushed from fiddling.
He raised his glass to toast all present. “Slainte!”
“Right back at you.” Baird lifted her glass. “I enjoyed your music, by the way.”
“Pleased I am to hear that, truly.” The fiddler sat down at the bar next to her. “And who might ye be?”
Bridget stepped in to provide introductions. “This is Eve Baird, who is visiting from Oregon, along with her friends.” She gestured toward Stone and Ezekiel. “Eve, meet Grady, a devilish old rascal if ever there was one, and one of the best Irish fiddlers in Chicago.”
“Och, ye’re just saying that ’cause I’ll play for spirits,” Grady said, pausing to imbibe some of his liquid compensation. “Not that I have any objections to the arrangement, mind ye.”
“So I can count on you Thursday night?” Bridget asked.
“And where else would I be?” Grady answered. “This fine establishment is me home away from home away from me old home.” He sighed wistfully. “If I can’t be back in the Auld Sod for the sainted Patrick’s day, this be the next best thing, so it is.”
Baird picked up on the homesickness in his voice. “You miss Ireland, do you?”
“Every blessed day,” Grady confessed, “but … well, let’s just say that it would be unwise to return in this lifetime, no matter how fiercely my poor heart yearns to look upon Erin’s emerald shores once more.”
“That’s too bad.” Baird assumed that the old man’s self-imposed exile had something to do with “The Troubles” of years past, but didn’t feel obliged to press him for the details. “Still, Ireland’s loss is Chicago’s gain.”
“A fine attitude,” Grady said, his mood lifting along with his glass. “So how do ye and yer friends come to know our Bridget?”
‘We’re librarians,” Stone said, joining the conversation. “Doing a research project on the Irish-American experience.” He wiped down the counter with a damp rag. “Hands-on research, obviously.”
“Fascinating,” Grady said, “and a worthy project to be sure. Ireland is famous for its scholars and libraries, so it is.” He eyed Baird carefully. “Still, I would not have pegged ye as a librarian.”
“Well, they’re librarians,” she confessed. “I’m more like … security.”
“Is that so?” Grady raised an eyebrow. “Who knew librarians needed security these days?” He polished off his whiskey and looked to Bridget for a refill. “Bridget, me darling…?”
“Way ahead of you.” She began to refill Grady’s glass from a bottle of Jameson’s, only to suddenly freeze mid-pour. Her face went pale and she stared in shock at something beyond the bar. “No, not now, not here.…”
“Steady, me girl.” Grady gently raised her arm as the glass overflowed, spilling whiskey onto the bar. “Ye don’t want to be wasting that.”
Baird was more worried about what Bridget was reacting to. She immediately kicked into high-alert mode, as did her Librarians. Stone and Ezekiel both dropped what they were doing and put their game faces on.
“What is it?” Baird asked, softly but urgently.
“That woman, there in the corner,” Bridget said, her voice quavering. Her eyes remained fixed on the sight. “I swear, she wasn’t there a moment ago.”
Turning, Baird followed Bridget’s gaze to see what had alarmed her. She strained to see past the other customers milling about, but quickly located the woman in question: a solitary figure wearing a hooded gray cape, sitting alone at a table in the far corner of the pub. The woman’s head was bowed, staring into an empty glass, so Baird couldn’t make out her face. Looking closer, however, she saw that the woman’s body seemed to be quaking beneath her thick woolen cloak, as though she was sobbing.
A weeping woman in gray?
Baird’s brain made the connection. “Is that … her?”
The banshee?
“Maybe. I’m not sure,” Bridget whispered. “She doesn’t always look the same.…”
Right, Baird recalled. Maiden, mother, crone, and all that.
Bridget was visibly trembling. Stone prudently took the whiskey bottle from her shaky hand as the redheaded bartender whimpered in fear.
“She … she’s never come inside before.…”
Baird hopped off the stool to investigate. To be honest, part of her was relieved to be finally getting down to business. They had come to Chicago to deal with a banshee, so she was anxious to get on with it. She just hoped this wasn’t a false alarm.
“Leave her be, miss.” Grady placed his hand on Baird’s arm to restrain her. “No good will come of this.”
“Sorry,” Baird said, not entirely sure where he was coming from or what exactly he thought this was about. “That’s not how I roll.”
Shaking off his grip, she glanced back at her team. “Stone, you stay close to Bridget. Make sure nothing happens to her.”
“And I’ll guard the magic gold,” Ezekiel volunteered. “What?” he said off her look. “Somebody needs to keep an eye on it.”
Baird started to roll her eyes, then realized he had a point. The Serpent Brotherhood had been chasing after that leprechaun’s gold back in the day, and the Librarians had established a possible link between the gold coins and the banshee haunting.
“Just keep an eye on the door, too,” she ordered. If this was their banshee, Baird didn’t want her getting away before they could get some answers at last. “Stay sharp, people.”
She made her away across the crowded pub. Given the number of unsuspecting civilians around, she figured it was probably just as well that the whole team wasn’t ganging up on the mystery woman; Baird didn’t want to cause a scene if she could avoid one. She quietly approached the suspect, going in smooth and easy. As she drew nearer to the table, she definitely thought she heard, over the general hubbub, low sobs coming from the hooded stranger. Just somebody crying into their beer after a very bad day, Baird wondered, or something more sinister? The sobbing started to attract concerned and/or annoyed looks from nearby customers, a few of whom looked relieved to see Baird walk right up to the woman. No doubt they preferred to let somebody else deal with her.
“Excuse me,” Baird said. “Do you mind if I join you?”
Without waiting for an answer, she sat down opposite the woman in gray, who kept her face turned down toward the table as she wrung her hands in seeming despair. The hands appeared smooth and unblemished and youngish.
Maiden, then, Baird concluded.
If the seemingly young woman noticed Baird’s arrival, she did not acknowledge it. Instead she began moaning, a low keening that tugged at Baird’s sympathy even as it sent a chill down her spine. She wished again that there weren’t so many civilians present.
“Is something wrong?” Baird asked softly. “Do you want to talk about it, maybe somewhere more private?”
She reached out and laid a gentle hand on the woman’s arm, only to be shocked by how cold it felt to the touch. There was no human warmth there, only the cold of a bleak winter night … or the grave.
But Baird’s touch provoked a reaction. Sitting up abruptly, the woman threw back her hood to reveal the corpse-white, tear-streaked face of a young woman with hypoxic blue lips, wild brown hair, and blank white eyes with no visible pupils or irises.
Uh-oh, Baird thought. Little Orphan Annie eyes are never a good sign.
The woman’s mouth opened, her bottom jaw falling farther than humanly possible, revealing a bottomless chasm from which emerged a hellish, high-pitched, high-decibel keening that instantly drowned all other sounds as its pitch and volume rocketed upward at a deafening rate.
In short, the banshee screamed.
Baird instinctively clamped her hands over her ears. Glasses shattered all across the pub, spraying beer and whiskey everywhere. Lightbulbs in the hanging lamps exploded, causing sparks to rain down on startled customers. Alarmed, Baird glanced back at Bridget and saw Stone playing bodyguard, shielding Bridget with his body and pulling her down behind the bar as whiskey bottles went off like firecrackers. The mirror behind the bar cracked down the middle, as Ezekiel and Grady and others dived for cover behind stools and tables. Ezekiel had his hands over his ears, grimacing in discomfort along with everyone else in the pub. Flickering lights created a strobe effect as panicked customers bolted for the exits, knocking over the furniture and each other in their frantic attempts to escape the chaos and the din. Baird assumed that people were shrieking and shouting and swearing, but couldn’t hear them over the ear-piercing cry of the banshee.
That’s right, she silently urged the fleeing civilians. Get far away from here, pronto.
The banshee, on the other hand, was not going anywhere, if Baird had anything to say about it. Risking her hearing, Baird tore her hands from her ears and lunged for the banshee, determined to silence and apprehend her, preferably in that order. Her hands seized the woman’s wool cloak, her fingers sinking into the freezing fabric. She was ready to shake some answers out of the banshee if necessary.
“That’s enough!” Baird shouted at the top of her lungs, still unable to hear herself regardless. “Stop wailing and start talking! What’s this all about?!!”
Lights sparked and sputtered overhead. Baird tugged hard on the cape, which went limp in her grasp. She blinked in surprise as she suddenly found herself holding an empty cloak that had held a woman inside it only a heartbeat before. She looked around in confusion, but the weeping woman/maiden/banshee was gone, vanished into thin air.
Yet her wail lingered, echoing in Baird’s ears for several long moments before finally fading away along with the cloak, which dissolved into a cold, damp mist before dissipating entirely.
“Crap,” Baird said.
She was reassured to hear her own voice again, but there was little else to celebrate. Blowing on her chilled fingers to warm them, she took in the messy aftermath of the banshee’s visit. The pub was trashed: tables and chairs overturned, broken glass and spilled booze everywhere. Bridget was going to have a hell of a job getting the place put back together in time for business tomorrow, if she was even interested in reopening at this point. The panicky exodus had emptied the pub of customers, but nobody seemed to have been seriously hurt in the stampede, at least as far as Baird could see.
“Everyone okay?” she called.
Murmured assents came from the few people remaining: Bridget, Stone, Ezekiel, and even Grady, who had apparently stuck around when everyone else had run for the hills. Baird remembered her earlier suspicions about his involvement in The Troubles decades ago and figured that he’d probably seen worse than a stray banshee or two; he’d been through the wars in his time.
“My ears are killing me,” Ezekiel said, “but don’t worry: I saved the gold!”
Sure enough, the glass sheet over the gold coin had shattered as well, but the coin rested safely in the thief’s outstretched palm. Baird was genuinely relieved to see that nobody had absconded with the magical gold in the tumult. That possibility hadn’t even occurred to her until this moment.
“Good job, Jones,” she said. “Just remember, you don’t get to keep it.”
“Party pooper,” he said, smirking.
Stone and Bridget leaned against the bar, which they had taken shelter behind earlier. Stone had his arm around Bridget, who was understandably shaken. She trembled uncontrollably, looking nearly as pale as the banshee. Baird hoped her bad heart was up to the stress.
“You all saw her?” Bridget asked. “Heard her? It wasn’t just me this time?”
“Oh, we heard her all right.” Baird’s ears were still ringing. “It’s official: we’ve definitely got a banshee on our hands.”
And the situation seems to be escalating, she added silently.
“That it’s then,” Bridget moaned. “I’m doomed. I think part of me was still kinda hoping you’d prove me wrong, that this was all in my head, after all, but now that we know for sure … I’m as good as dead.”
“Nay, don’t say that.” Grady tried to comfort her. “Ye mustn’t lose heart, me fine girl.”
“But don’t you know who that was?” she said. “What that was?”
“The bean-sidhe,” he said somberly, sounding none too surprised by proof of a banshee’s existence, as though he had always taken it for granted. “But ye can’t be sure that it’s truly ye she’s keening for. It may be the death-coach is coming for another.”
“Who?” she demanded tearfully. “Who else could it be?”
Grady shook his head sadly. “That I cannot say.”
Because Bridget is the obvious target, Baird thought. She appreciated Grady’s attempt to console the woman, but he was offering false hope at best—not that Baird had anything better to offer at the moment. Still, she no longer regretted involving the Librarians in Bridget’s case. This was exactly the kind of spooky, supernatural terrorism the Library was meant to protect people from, and Bridget was an innocent victim who needed their help. Baird wasn’t about to abandon her now, even if that meant putting the Serpent Brotherhood on the back burner for the time being.
Speaking of whom, Baird thought, I wonder what Cassandra and Jenkins have learned by now—and why we haven’t heard from them yet.