Mountain Echoes

“He got you pregnant!”

“And then he turned tail and ran. Sara, I don’t think liking somebody has much to do with sex for your average teenage boy. Opportunity, yes, fondness, not so much.”

Les, whom I’d more or less forgotten about, cleared his throat. Sara and I both looked at him accusingly and he said, “Don’t paint all of us with the same brush.”

I wrinkled my face. “I don’t need you being the voice of reason in the middle of my rant, Les.”

He shrugged expressively. “I’m just saying some things are more worth doing if you like the person.”

“So he did like you,” Sara said, which was such a wild extrapolation from Les’s statement that I flung my hands up in exasperation.

“Did or didn’t, it was half a lifetime ago, Sara. Get over it. Or would you rather I tried really hard not to find Lucas while I’m looking for my dad?”

She turned ever-more scarlet, spun on her heel and stalked out of the sheriff’s office. I stood there a moment, watching sunlight eat her silhouette, then turned to Les. “Is this what it’s like for people who never leave their hometowns? Does everybody get permanently stuck in high school?”

“Sara left,” he pointed out, but gave another shrug, this time one of agreement. “I think coming back makes us revert to form, maybe. Everybody knew who we were then. It’s pretty easy to fall right back into those expectations. Try being the stoner who comes home a cop. That’ll mess you right up.”

“You ever tempted to slide?”

Les looked thoughtful, but shook his head. “Not really. Feels better to be part of the community, to be useful and make a difference in people’s lives. It took some getting used to, but I wouldn’t want to go back.”

I glanced after Sara and sighed. “Yeah, I hear you. Guess I should try to remember that. Look, if I find anything useful, I’ll...”

“You’ll bring it to the elders,” Les said, which made a lot more sense than anything I’d have suggested. “Don’t forget you’re not alone on the path here, Joanne.”

I had, in fact, forgotten that, and for a moment it was far more interesting than chasing after Sara Isaac. I came back to the desk, half-curious and half-worried. “So why haven’t they already solved it?”

“You’ll see when you get up on the mountain.” Les shook his head. “I’m not screwing with you. I think it’s just better for you to see for yourself. I don’t have the eyes for it.”

Self-conscious, I touched my cheekbone just under the eye. They weren’t gold right now because I wasn’t drawing down power, but I felt a little like a marked man anyway. Then my fingertips brushed the scar on my right cheekbone, the one I’d gotten the day my shamanic powers had awakened, and I guessed maybe I was a marked man. “All right. Anything else I should know before I go up there?”

“Yeah.” Les’s grin flashed. “Sara drives like an old woman on those mountain roads.”

I laughed and dug my keys from my pocket on the way out the door.

Sara was in her own rental, a Toyota Avalon. I laughed again, shook my head, and dangled my keys. She shook her head. I sat on the Impala’s hood and waited. It only took about forty seconds for her to throw her door open, stand up in it and snap, “I’m not letting you drive me up there, Joanne. I remember how you drive. And what were you laughing at?”

“My, um. My, uh...” I crinkled my face. Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department, less than a week ago my boss, and now featuring as the romantic lead in the movie of my life, was thirty-eight years old. That seemed a little long in the tooth for the word boyfriend. And since I’d jetted off to Ireland within minutes of us finally mentioning the elephant in the room that were our feelings toward one another, we hadn’t really discussed different terminology. Significant other was a mouthful. Partner connoted long-term commitments, which I was kind of hoping for myself, but didn’t think seemed appropriate under the current circumstances. I cleared my throat and finally said, “Morrison. Captain Morrison, the guy who gave you my number in Ireland? He drives an Avalon. Highest safety rating in its class. That’s very FBI of you, or something. Get in the Impala.”

“I am not driving anywhere with you in that thing.”

She sounded like Morrison. I rolled my eyes. “Come on, Sara. It’s a brand-new car, not a classic roadster. It has seat belts. I promise not to drive over the speed limit.”

She closed her car door and took two wary steps toward me. “Promise?”

“Cross my heart.” I actually did, and Sara, still suspicious, came and got in the Impala. I got in, buckled up, waved at Les as I started the engine, and gunned it.

Dust kicked up, Sara screamed like a little girl and I laughed until the tears came as we zoomed toward the mountains. I slowed down, too, because driving while blinded by tears wasn’t a good idea, but I thought I was funny as hell. Sara waited until we reached a stop sign, then hit the meaty part of my shoulder so hard the thwock echoed against the dashboard. Still grinning, I rubbed my shoulder and didn’t even say “ow,” because I deserved it. “Yeah,” I said instead, “but you shoulda seen your face.”

Sara, through her teeth, said, “This is not a time to be joking, Joanne,” and two days of worry that I’d been holding off through force of will alone came to boil acid in my belly.

I was not close to my father. I hadn’t actually talked to him in years, not even a happy birthday or merry Christmas. I blamed him—unfairly, as it turned out, but then, it turned out most of the blame I laid was unfair—for raising me on the road, for always looking at me like he’d been saddled with a kid he didn’t know what to do with, for more or less everything wrong with my life that I couldn’t lay at my mother’s feet for abandoning me. I had issues. Hell, I had subscriptions. And I was only just discovering how badly I’d misread, oh, every situation that had shaped my life since infancy. I’d only resolved things with my mother after she was dead, which was not a statement most people got to make.

I was desperately afraid of the same thing happening with Dad. I had regrets with Mother, but I hadn’t known her very well. Dad had raised me. If I lost him and the chance to settle things between us, I didn’t think I’d ever forgive myself. Classic scenario, thinking I had time, in so far as I’d ever thought about it at all. Which I hadn’t, because I’d been busy being The Wronged Party, but a little forced perspective over the past week had changed that, and now—

Now my hands were cold and shaking and bile scored the back of my throat. I swallowed. “This is exactly the time to be joking, Sara, because otherwise I’m going to freak the hell out, okay? I know you’re stressed and I’m sorry, but so am I an—”

“Funny way of showing it.”

“Yeah,” I said softly, “yeah, that’s exactly what I’m trying for. Funny-ha-ha ways of showing it. You probably told Lucas you loved him the last time you saw him. I can’t even remember the last time I talked to Dad, much less what I said, so in fact, yes, I’m trying hard to act like none of this matters very much so I don’t burst into tears. Okay?” She didn’t say anything, so after a minute I said, “Okay,” and went back to the business of driving. Slowly, or at least less fast than I’d started out.

The road leading up to the mountains was better than I remembered. Either it had been resurfaced recently—sometime in the past ten years—or the late-model rented Impala had better suspension than my 1969 Mustang. Actually, it probably did, or at least better suspension than Petite had had when I drove her out of the Qualla. I’d done the restoration work myself over the course of a decade, but I hadn’t gotten nearly that far on her before I’d left. The smoother ride made driving faster easy, and I had to keep a steely eye on the speedometer to keep myself from panicking Sara. Truth was I hadn’t driven Appalachian roads in so long even I didn’t think I should be speed-demoning over them, but I could hardly say that aloud and lose face in front of my high school rival.

“I didn’t think you ever cried.” Sara spoke to the window, not me, and it took a moment to realize she was probably addressing me anyway. Then I snorted.

“Used to be my motto, I guess. Never let ’em see you bleed.”

“Yeah. I used to think you were so tough. So cool.”

“Sorry to spoil the illusion.”

It was her turn to snort. “I got over it a while ago.” She shifted in her seat, then muttered, “Or not. You were still a jerk when we met in December but you were fearless. I guess maybe I thought you were still all that. Pull over here.”

“There’s nowhere to pull over.” I pulled over anyway. Mountain rose on one side of us and dropped off on the other, with a road slightly wider than a horse track between. It reminded me of Ireland, except their horse-track roads had stone walls on both sides, not mountains.

Sara gestured for me to get out, then climbed across the seats and got out on my side. Had to; pulling over, such as it was, put her door up against the mountainside. Ten years earlier I wouldn’t even have objected to the lack of room. “Up or down?”

“Up. I’m pretty sure there’s a better way in but nobody would show it to me.” Sara walked along the road a few yards, searching for a trail I couldn’t see, then stepped off the road and disappeared into foliage. I tried to remember when poison ivy started to bloom, then shrugged and followed her. At least I was wearing a long-sleeved coat.

Sara, whom Les had accused of not being the outdoorsy type, was already a couple dozen feet up the mountain by the time I fought through the roadside brush. She bounced from one foot to another, lithe steps that took her higher while I scrambled along behind, wondering how it was I was climbing my second mountain inside a week when I didn’t make a habit of climbing them at all. This one was easier than Croagh Padraig: that had been slippery shoal and switchback rock face, while this one was wooded, mossy and offered things to hold on to. I kept an eye out for poisons ivy and oak, and called, “Who wouldn’t show you the better way?” after Sara.

“Everybody. The elders, the locals, nobody. I guess growing up here doesn’t count for much if you come back wearing an FBI jacket. A hundred and fifty years after the Trail of Tears and half of ’em still don’t trust Feds, even if it’s one of their own.”

“They kind of have a point.”

“That’s why I didn’t make an issue of it. Besides, I grew up here. This used to be my path up to the hollers and the backwoods.”

“Dad’s house backs up to the mountains. I used to just go out the back door. We could’ve gone that way.”

“Except this is the path I showed Luke.” She glared at me over her shoulder.

I sighed. “I’m sure he didn’t go through Dad’s house to go hiking on Saturday night, Sara.”

Her mouth pinched. Clearly that was not the answer she’d been looking for. She’d wanted me to say I never took him up in the mountains myself. I supposed I could have, but that would have been a lie, and no doubt would only make things worse at some point. She said “Anyway” a little too loudly, and went back to climbing. “Anyway, this is the long way around to where the mountain is crying—” She broke off again and shot me another glare.

This time I stopped, scowling the short distance up at her. “Sara, there’s almost nothing you can say that’s so weird I’m going to flip out. Les already told me about the hollers, er, hollering—”

“Can you hear them?”

“I’m not listening.”

“What’s that mean?”

I tipped my chin back and looked at the pale blue sky as if it could give me patience. “It means I’m not listening. I’m not using any power right now. I like to get the lay of the land through normal means first if I can, but more important, if the earth is screaming loudly enough that half the Qualla can hear it, then it’s probably going to knock me on my ass when I turn the Sight on, and I’d rather be sitting down, not climbing a mountain, when that happens. Okay?”

“Oh. Okay.” Sara waited another moment, still frowning at me, then shrugged and kept climbing. After a minute she crested a small ridge and waited for me there. I popped up beside her a few seconds later and exhaled sharply.

A scar across the mountainside drew my eye first, earth that hadn’t yet healed from the centuries-old tobacco farm that had been there. The broad-leafed plants were no longer part of the landscape, done out of business by bigger farms or given up on by families who’d lost too many members to the variety of diseases smoking offered. Mostly big business, though: even my grandfather, who had died of lung cancer, hadn’t given up his tobacco farm until it cost him more to run than it profited.

Surrounding that scarred earth, though, bluegrass and new leaves shimmered over hills so old they’d forgotten what it was like to have rough edges. A stream cut through the holler’s floor, feeding more life than the eye could see. Insects and birdsong hummed through air soft enough to touch, soft enough to wrap myself in and settle down where I belonged. I put my hands over my mouth, tears pricking my eyes. Sara, in mystified horror, said, “God, you really can cry.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been home.” I pressed my lips together behind the tent of my fingers and tried to find somewhere safe to look. There wasn’t really anywhere, not with Sara to one side and the silent valley before me, but the tightness in my throat faded and after a while I cleared it. “The whole never-let-’em-see-you-bleed thing sort of went to hell when this all started up.”

“‘This’?”

“The shaman thing.” As soon as I said it, I remembered Sara had a starkly different recollection of our childhood interests than I did, and she verified that with a peculiar look and a comment. “You were into that when we were teens, Joanne.”

“Not after Lucas. I shut it all down. It came back about fifteen, sixteen months ago, and I swear to God every little thing makes me sniffly now. You’d think I was making up for lost time.”

“Maybe you are.” Sara, as uncomfortable with my sudden emotional confessions as I was, waved at the valley. “Come on. We cut through here and the next holler is where the elders are waiting.”

I slipped down the hill behind her, trying not to catch my coat on branches. “Is that were Lucas and Dad went missing from? I mean, last place they were seen?”

“You could say that.”

I squinted at her shoulders. “You’re being cryptic. So was Les.”

“Joanne, just shut up and come on. You’ll see why in a few minutes.”

I mumbled dire imprecations, but followed along, eating three of the chocolate bars I’d stored in my coat pockets. An apple, too, a local breed so I didn’t feel guilty about ditching the core in the woods as we clambered along. Sara glanced back at me once and I offered another chocolate bar, which made her eyebrows rise. “The backseat of your car is full of candy-bar wrappers, too. How many of those things have you eaten?”

“About twelve.”

“And you’re still skinny,” she said in disgusted disbelief, and surged ahead before I could explain. Ten minutes later we crawled over the top of another ridge, and the chocolate turned to oil in my stomach as I finally understood why neither Les nor Sara had wanted to explain what was going on in the mountains.

The world had disappeared.

Chapter Three

The valley’s heart looked like something out of The NeverEnding Story. Gray misty nothingness hissed and swam at its center, held in place by wards so strong they were visible without the Sight. Wards of white magic, white as only power offered up by many could be, and the many were men and women I hadn’t seen for ten years or even longer.

They were impossible to recognize, magic sheeting over them so strongly that their features were lost to it. I could tell that a steel-haired man stood at the northern end of the holler. He was the focal point, probably the oldest of those gathered. If you’d told me he’d been standing there since the beginning of time and would be there until the end, I’d have believed it. His presence was rooted in the valley floor, determined against the nothing. Others stood not just at the cardinal points but at the half points, too, seven more of them in all. Another two dozen or more hung back, not part of the power circle but not far from it, either. I took them in at a glance, but mostly I couldn’t look away from the nothing. The Nothing. It deserved a capital letter.

It strained at the wards, doing its best to break free. Malevolence boiled at its heart, an age-old anger with intent and desire shaping it. My muscles locked up, fight-or-flight dissolving into simple fright. No one should have to look into that stuff, much less stand guard against it. I wanted to run, and couldn’t make myself move.

“Joanne?” Sara touched my arm, making me flinch. I nearly seized her hand, grateful for human interaction, but I suspected she wouldn’t appreciate it. Or maybe she would, if the Nothing unnerved her as badly as it did me. “What do you see?”

“I see—” Oh. She meant what did I See, not what did I see. I shuddered. If it was bleak and scary without the Sight, I really didn’t want to see it with otherworldly vision. “Look, if I fall over, don’t let me roll into it or anything, okay?”

“...okay.”

I nodded, shivered and, despite Sara’s assurance, knelt rather than dare trigger the Sight while still on my feet. It would be harder to fall over if I was kneeling, but more relevantly, it would be harder to run away, which my feet were already trying to do. I even leaned forward and put my hands in the moss, bracing myself before letting myself See the world through a shaman’s eyes.

I’d told Sara the truth. I liked to get the lay of the land through ordinary vision before using magic, for two reasons. One, once I used the Sight, it was easy to overlook nonmagical things I might have otherwise noticed. Two, I was always a little afraid the astonishing light-filled beauty of the shamanic world would be so compelling I would never go back to normality.

Not today. The brilliant blue light of sap coursing through tree branches, the resolute deep earthy red-brown of the mountains, the very brightness of the sky, were all distorted, as if the Nothing at the valley’s center sucked them down. The shamanic wards helped, but as I watched it became clear they were merely mitigating the situation, not solving it. Their white power bent inward, as well, dragged into the Nothing’s gravity well, and under that strain, the southwestern point of the compass faltered.

Without hesitation one of the extras stepped forward, put his hand on the shoulder of the woman standing at that point and strengthened her segment of the ward with his own magic. Over the course of a minute, maybe two, his aura blended and joined with the circle as hers became more distinct and separate. She finally stepped back, dropping to her knees with weariness, and two of the others came to help her away and offer food and drink.

I croaked, “How long have they been there?” and felt, rather than saw, Sara shake her head.

“Since your dad went missing. It’ll be three full days in a few hours.”

“Jesus.” The three dozen people in the valley couldn’t possibly have held that stuff off by themselves, not for that long. Every elder in the Qualla had to be stepping in, and probably every youth with any hope or hint of power in their bloodline. Maybe even many who didn’t, but who could focus their energy in a positive way, as my friends had once done for me back in Seattle. Half the rez had to be in on this, to make it work. Most of them wouldn’t even be believers, because really, although there was a pretty good sense of community amongst the People, and a lot of people turned out for the festivals and things, we were all modern-day people in a modern-day world. Magic wasn’t part of most people’s lives. But they still had to be showing up in the holler to stand their ground, or the whole place would have collapsed in on itself already.

And yet they wouldn’t let Sara help. Sara who I knew had a spirit animal, a badger, because I’d helped her find it almost fifteen years ago. Sara who had some vestige of power because of that. Sara who certainly knew how to place her trust and faith in the hands of others, a necessary gift in a fight against something like this.

Sara who was a federal agent, and who could not be trusted.

I wanted to cry.

The black heart of Nothing seized on that impulse, enriched it, pulled it up, emphasized despair over possibility, and for the first time I heard the mountain sobbing.

It came from deeper than the power circle reached, came all the way from a different level of reality where a low red sun hung bright and hard in a yellow sky. It came from the place the Native peoples of America were born of, the Lower World, and it cried at having lost its children not just now, but in the always. The dark magic devoured them, had devoured them through the centuries, had taken them with smallpox and measles and alcohol, and came again now to take them in whatever new way it could.

Anger roared within me, an infantile response to an unfair world. I wanted to throw everything I had against the Nothing, throw all my power in its teeth and prove to it that it couldn’t take everything away. I wanted to soothe the torn earth and promise its future was brighter than its past, and to offer healing magic from inside me to calm its pain. That impulse, like the first, was seized upon by the Nothing. It tried to dig claws into me but instead skittered across the mental shields that had finally become second nature.

I jerked my hands from the soil and cut off the Sight so violently I shivered with it. Sara crouched beside me, a hand on my shoulder. “Joanne? What happened? You went all...blue.”

“It tried to kill me.” I shuddered again and shoved my hands through my hair, trying to scrub away the feeling that it was all standing on end. “It hooked right into my despair, but it couldn’t grab hold of the magic. Thank God for that goddamned werewolf.”

“The what?”

“Werewolf. Never mind, I’ll explain later. I gotta do better with the emotional shielding, but we’d be really fucked if it had gotten the magic. Sara, that stuff is...really bad.” I’d gotten to my feet while I gabbled, but I couldn’t quite get myself moving toward the power circle.

Sara’s voice went deadly neutral. “How bad?”

I’d heard that voice before, when she’d asked about her agents after we fought the wendigo. It was her preparing-for-the-worst voice, and when it had been her agents, she’d appreciated me not pussyfooting around the truth.

But that was work, and this was her family. I said, “It’s hooked into the whole history of the People,” carefully. “Not just the Cherokee, but across the continent. It’s gained strength from every genocide wrought against Natives, and it’s trying to reach forward to wipe more of them out. It’s, um...” I pulled a hand over my face. “Shit. Look, I just dealt with this in Ireland. I mean, like three days ago. It’s corruption in the Lower World and I thought it wasn’t as bad here as it was in Europe, but maybe it’s just...different.”

“Joanne,” Sara said in the same neutral voice, “what about Lucas?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know yet.”

“But...” she said, even though I didn’t think I’d left an unsaid but dangling at the end of that. Maybe I didn’t have to. Maybe having known me when I was a kid meant she heard them even when I didn’t put them there, or maybe—more likely—being an FBI agent made her understand there was almost always a but when it came to bad things.

I closed my eyes, wishing I had another answer, then opened them again so I wouldn’t feel like a coward when I looked her in the eye and said, “But if your husband and my father went into that stuff, we should both start getting used to the idea they’re not coming out.”

Sara regarded me steadily for a long moment, then said something that made me like her again, really genuinely like her, for the first time since we’d been teenagers: “No.”

She walked down into the valley toward the horrible Nothingness, and to my surprise, I followed her with a smile.