Texting the Underworld Read Online Free

know how many lifetimes—when everyone I knew had been reborn many times over, lost to me, lost, lost, lost in the World.” Her voice rose. “And I am no bard, and yet I must tell the same old tales over and over and over and over.
Ach!
What a fate for a daughter of the Ee Nay-ill!”
    â€œShhh.”
    â€œAnd now at last, at
last,
the Lady has said if I serve her once as a banshee she will send me back to the World. I will have a new human life.” She tightened her grip on the hockey stick, fixed him with an intense gaze. “I would do anything—
anything
—for a new life.”
    â€œYou mean . . . Cripes. You mean you’ll be reincarnated?”
    â€œI have heard it called that, yes. And this will make up for the life so cruelly taken from me by the dreaded raiders of the Dahl Fyet’ugh.”
    Conor’s brains went floaty. “Dahl Fyet’ugh,” he repeated, trying to match the funny guttural sound she made at the end.
    Ashling scrunched up her face and slammed the hockey stick down on the beanbag chair as if beheading someone. “Curs!” she shouted. “Sons of no mother!”
    I am Conor O’Neill, 36A Crumlin Street . . .
    A chair scraped in the kitchen. “Pixie? What are you doing? Are you all right?” The stairs creaked.
    Conor leaped to crack open the door. “I’m fine, Mom,” he said in a loud whisper—Glennie was most likely to wake up exactly when you didn’t want her to. “I dropped my pre-algebra book. I was killing a spider.”
Why don’t I tell her we have a banshee?
    Because there’s no such thing as banshees.
He imagined the expression on his dad’s face. Good enough reason to keep this to himself.
    His mom’s blond head appeared at the top of the stairs, her brow furrowed. “Go to bed, Pixie. It’s late.”
    â€œYeah. Okay.”
Don’t call me Pixie.
    â€œMoira,” his dad said from downstairs. “The kid’s fine. And stop calling him Pixie.”
    â€œGood night, Pixie.”
    Conor sighed. “Good night, Mom.”
    When he turned around, he half expected the room to be empty. But Ashling was still there, still brandishing the hockey stick like an ax. She grinned, showing off her one brown tooth. “‘Pixie’?”
    Conor was embarrassed. “My name’s Conor, but they started calling me ‘Pixie’ when I was little. Because I was so scrawny”—
like I’m not still
—“and sometimes my eyebrows peaked up so high Grump said I looked like . . . well, a pixie.”
    â€œYour eyebrows peak up when you’re unnerved.” Her grin broadened. “Like now, Conor-boy.”
    â€œI’m not unnerved.” But then he saw himself in the mirror. The eyebrows never lie.
Cripes. They’re practically in my hair.
    He got his eyebrows under control and tried to deepen his voice. “So, these Dahl Fyet’ugh. They killed you.”
    â€œAnd my brother before me, demons that they be. Maybe the rest of my family, too, but I was too dead to know.”
    â€œHow . . . ?”
    â€œA raiding party as we drove our cattle home from afar, an ax in my head as I defended the little ones.”
    She didn’t look much older than he was. Conor rubbed the back of his head, which felt like it had an ax in it. “Holy macaroni. I bet that didn’t tickle.”
    â€œDidn’t
tickle
? It was an ax in the head!”
    Conor felt his eyebrows peaking up. “It probably hurt a lot.”
    His visitor dropped the hockey stick on the rug and replunked herself down on the beanbag. “But then I appeared before the Lady to be praised for my bravery, which bested any in the history of . . . What is
holy macaroni
?”
    â€œSomething my grump says.” But there were bigger questions, weren’t there? “Does . . . does everybody