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The Nothing hadn’t struck at Aidan because it was waiting for me, and the mind behind it had lulled me into a goddamned sense of self-security. It had given me the chance to almost defeat it, taken me off the defensive, and then hit like a pile driver when I thought I had it in the bag.
That all fell into my mind at once, like crystal drops from heaven, so utterly clear I could’ve killed myself for not seeing it coming. But I had bigger problems right then, and at the same time I was recognizing I’d been had, I was also rushing into action.
I threw a second shield up, pouring all the power I had available into it. It splashed into full live-action color behind the elders, a desperate attempt on my part to hold their life force inside a sphere where I might have a chance at putting it back where it belonged. The shield was as strong as I could make it with my attention split: I was also running hell-bent for leather toward Carrie with the conviction that if I could save her, I’d be off to a strong start for saving the others. She was the one I’d just healed, after all. She was the one I should have the deepest connection to.
She was barely fifteen feet away, and by the time I got to her, her body was cold. Cold. Not just breathless, not just without a heartbeat, but cold, like she’d been dead for hours. Part of me knew it was already too late and the rest of me went two directions at once. I slammed a fistful of healing power into her chest, trying to jump-start her heart, and at the same time I plunged recklessly into the Dead Zone, shrieking for Raven’s assistance as I went.
He appeared, his beaky face as grim as I’d ever seen it. The Dead Zone resolved around us. There was an unusual emptiness to it, a distance that went deeper than its near-infinite size and its endless, featureless blackness. Raven hung in the air before me, banging his wings to hover there, and said, “Quark,” so intensely I half thought it was an actual word.
It wasn’t, and the next wing-flap keeping him hovering also smashed my ears, boxing them while he shouted, “Quark!” again. Every wing-beat from there drove me back a step, until I realized he was sending me home and blurted, “But her soul...!”
Raven gave me as flat and angry a look as he could, and what faint hope I had slithered away. I’d watched the Nothing rip the life essence out of everybody, but when people died their souls passed into the Dead Zone, there to be found by whatever gods or spirits they believed would carry them through to the next world. That was how it worked.
Except Carrie’s soul hadn’t passed through the Dead Zone. I’d almost managed to bring somebody back once, when her life essence had been ripped away but her soul had passed into the Dead Zone. That time, the woman had been so startled by her death that she hadn’t even registered it as violent, and had simply moved along. This time I didn’t have even that much chance. Carrie’s soul had been flayed right out of her body along with her life essence.
If I was really lucky, there were enough pieces of her soul sticking to the insides of my shields that I could put it back together. I stepped back out of the Dead Zone as fast as I’d gone in. Carrie’s body was arching under my hand, exactly like my healing power was a burst of electricity trying to restart her heart. That was how little time had passed. I looked up, the Sight raging full-on, and my stomach fell.
My shields hadn’t held the stolen life forces in. My brain scrabbled around that, trying to understand why, and landed on a six-year-old’s answer, the kind of thing that fixes itself in a kid’s mind and the adult never quite lets go: of course the shields hadn’t held. Their essence had been gobbled up by Nothing, and everybody knows you can’t hold nothing.
This was not the kind of deeply held childhood belief that would get anybody on the entire planet except me in trouble. I vowed that I would later stab an ice pick through the part of my brain that was still six, and got up, shaking with anger, to face down the Nothing.
It had taken everything it was built on, all the wounds and pain born of genocidal history, all the raw power of life it had just obliterated, and it sharpened itself on the whetstone of the fresh terror spiking from everyone else in the holler. It whipped around, no longer a Nothing, but instead becoming something honed, a personification of not just death, but murder. An executioner, an executioner’s ax. It wasn’t that anthropomorphized, but that was the sense of it, its weight ready to fall.
And there were so many people in the holler for it to fall onto. Dozens of them, everyone who had come up from town and from across the county to try to help heal the crying mountain. There was so much power here, and so much good will, and it was ripe for the plucking. My shields, strong as they were, would be spread too thin across this much space. I could not protect them. Not by fighting. So I did the only thing I could think of.
I dropped my shields.
Chapter Eight
The Executioner went still, like a giant gray smear of evil suddenly catching its breath. I wasn’t sure how sentient it was, though I had considerable faith in the sentience behind it. It was its Master’s dog, just like the Morrígan had been, just like all the others had been. And the Master really ought to be smart enough not to fall for me making myself vulnerable this way, but the fact of the matter was, if he’d done it to me, I’d have gone for his throat, too, never mind what the smart thing was. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when the Executioner swung toward me, slow and ponderous like a thing trying to fool me with its slow ponderousness.
It was not a Nothing anymore. My brain wasn’t going to pull that trick again. I could catch an Executioner. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it once I caught it, but that was a problem for later. Hopefully not much later, but later. I flexed my hand, waiting for just the right moment, and when it moved, I drew a rapier out of thin air.
An elf king had made it for a god, and I’d taken it away from the god. Like any decent magic sword, it had useful qualities, like being summonable from the ether, rather than having to carry it around a modern world. But like any decent magic sword, it also had flaws—or I did. For the past year I’d been alternating between learning how to use it and paying the price for not having my healing magic and my warrior’s path in balance. For most of the time I’d owned it, I could either fight with it, or I could fill it with magic. I couldn’t do both without suffering significant backlash.
But that was yesterday’s news.
Today the sword blazed blue, my power searing through it. Healing power invested in an edged weapon made for powerful mojo. For a moment I thought what to do with the Executioner after I’d caught it was going to be moot. An adrenaline rush of battle thrill erupted within me, and I met the creature halfway, more than ready to spike it.
To my complete shock, the Executioner chickened out.
It split in half, gray cloudy body ripping down the middle and both sides passing so close by that I felt the cold misty rush against my cheeks and arms. I spun around, howling in childish offense as it reamalgamated and fled up the mountainside.
Fled toward Ada and Aidan, just now cresting the path leading from the holler.
For the second time in as many minutes I dropped every personal shield, but this time I threw everything I had up the path, willing it to get there before the Executioner did. Aidan’s name echoed around the mountain, cried out not just by me but by half the valley’s population.
Sound and shields and evil all hit him in nearly the same instant. He and Ada both turned as voices screamed warnings, and I couldn’t tell if they fell because the Executioner hit them or because my shields slammed into place so hard as to knock them to the ground. I knew the Executioner hit my shields: I felt the impact reverberate in my bones, and caught a taste of whiplash as it struck back at me, too, forgetting or not caring about the distance. I sucked back just enough magic to instigate rudimentary shields and it gave up. Not, I thought, because it couldn’t have taken me, but because Aidan was potentially more poorly shielded, and it was hungry for as much power-bearing life force as it could suck down.
I was halfway up the mountain when Ada Monroe slammed a four-foot-long hickory log against the Executioner’s spine.
It misted to pieces again, and the log crashed against the shields I was holding around Aidan. A roar of approval chased me up the mountain, my own voice fronting it as the leading shout. The Executioner came together again, its ax-like aspects increasing as it prepared to strike Ada down. She swung her hickory bat again, and to my astonishment, I Saw power streak the air. Green, the determined, resolute color that most buildings and protective structures were imbued with. It hit the Executioner with more force than I’d have expected, and by that time I was only ten steps away. I launched myself at it in a superhero jump, fully intending to slam my sword into its shady skull from above.
It howled in fury and for the third time, fled. I cast the sword aside as I came down, seized Ada’s shoulders when I landed, and bellowed, “You! Are! AWESOME!” into her face. Then we both dropped to our knees on either side of Aidan, whose brilliant, multivariegated aura was spinning wildly with fear, surprise, confusion, pride, anger and a dozen other emotions I couldn’t focus on long enough to name.
Pride won out, at least temporarily, because he, too, was bellowing, “MOM! DID YOU SEE THAT! YOU’RE AWESOME!” at Ada, and smacking at both of us as we tried to make sure he was all in one piece.
I couldn’t See any indication that the Executioner had ripped any life force away from him, but his aura was so overwhelming I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to tell. I just didn’t know him well enough. I looked up at Ada, meeting her eyes, and we both blurted, “Is he okay?” at the same time.
“I’m fine.” Aidan sat up, suddenly remembering his dignity. In remembering, he looked so much like my friend Billy’s thirteen-year-old son I giggled. Aidan glowered at me and I wiped laughter away.
Once it was gone I remembered the chaos left in the valley below, and all hope of humor faded. I got up and stared down the path I’d taken, realizing it was not humanly possible for me to have climbed the distance I had in the time I had. Rattler?
Ssspeed is an easier gift in the otherworlds, he answered wearily, but when necesssssary...
“Thank you,” I whispered aloud. “Thank you.”
I felt his pleasure in the acknowledgment, and let the poor snake drift back into resting. I badly needed to spend some quiet time in a drum circle, letting it fill me up and replenish my spirit snake. I’d done a little of that work in Ireland before Sara called, but not nearly enough. It wasn’t looking especially promising to get any done in North Carolina, either. I let out a long, slow breath, and murmured, “I’m sorry,” to everyone in the valley.
Then I pulled up my big-girl pants and headed back down the mountain, because I certainly had some explaining to do, and we had seven bodies to carry out of the hills.
* * *
Sara was kneeling by Carrie Little Turtle’s body when I got back down. Aidan and Ada had followed me, but their footsteps had stopped when they’d gotten close enough to get a sense of what had happened. Others were gathered around the other dead women and men, most faces still too shocked to begin moving on to grief. I went to Sara and Carrie, though I pitched my voice to carry around the fallen circle. “We were sucker punched. This whole thing was a bait and switch. It was trying to get at me. That’s probably why Dad went missing.”
“Who the hell are you, that an evil wants you this badly?” A big-boned man spoke from across the circle, accusation raw in his question.
Despite everything that was happening, I doubted he wanted to know my long, drawn-out history with the Master and his minions. After a long minute I settled on a response that might or might not mean anything to him, but did, in its way, answer the question: “I’m Joanne Walkingstick.”
Apparently it answered the question a lot better than I’d thought it would. A ripple of recognition and a strange mix of relief and hostility swept the gathered mourners. The hostility wasn’t much of a surprise. I hadn’t exactly left the Qualla on good terms, and I’d come back to preside over the mass murder of seven elders.
The relief was unexpected, given that I had just presided over a mass murder. Not deliberately, maybe, but still. It gave me the sneaking suspicion that my family name carried a lot more weight and a lot more respect than I’d ever imagined. I was going to punch my father in the nose when I found him again. Sara, quietly, said, “That thing ran away. Is it over?”
“No. I’m going to have to go hunting.” Hunting magic wasn’t easy, at least not for me. It didn’t leave discernible tracks, and unless I knew exactly what I was looking for, I often couldn’t see the scars it left on the landscape where it gathered. “We need to get everyone back down into town, though. We—”
“Can you magic them down there?”
I blinked. “Er. No. That would be cool. But no.”
“Then you need to go hunt and the rest of us will deal with the bodies.”
I opened my mouth and shut it again. Sara had a point. A very good one, actually, thwarted only by one minor detail. “I need Les. Or somebody else who actually grew up in the mountains, Sara. I spent some time tromping around when I was a teenager, but I’d be kidding myself if I didn’t think I’d get my ass lost up here by the time I was five minutes out of this holler. Can you...?”
“If I was good enough in the mountains to guide you I’d have found Lucas by now.”
“I’ll take her.” Aidan had come up behind us. I twitched around to see him and bit my lower lip. The warmth was gone from his face, leaving blue shadows under his eyes and his skin sallow. He focused on a spot just beyond Carrie, close enough he could pretend he was looking at her without actually doing so. Being brave, in other words, and it broke my heart.
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