Mountain Echoes

* * *

From up close, the eight men and women in the power circle were barely more discernible than they’d been from a distance. Hair color under the pouring white magic told me they weren’t all elders. In fact, from the apparent height and breadth, the person at the southern end of the circle was still a kid. The woman who’d been replaced was in her forties, and looked up as Sara and I came down the hill. Her face was drawn, but she pushed away the bottle of water someone else offered and got up as we joined them.

Rather, as I joined them. Sara might not have been there for all the woman cared, which seemed a bit unfair. I started to introduce myself, but she interrupted with “Joanne.”

Not a friendly sort of “Joanne,” but more a how-dare-you-appear-in-my-presence kind of “Joanne.” I blinked at her, utterly bewildered. “Yes?”

“I’m Ada Monroe.”

A small thermonuclear explosion went off in my belly. Heat rushed up, burning my face and setting my ears on fire. “Oh.”

I probably should have recognized her. She had silver threads in black hair now, crow’s feet around brown eyes and twenty or so extra pounds, but she was the same woman she’d been thirteen years earlier. She’d been happier then, but then, she’d also just adopted the infant she’d been unable to have herself, and possibly more relevantly, hadn’t just staggered out of a power circle that had been heavily borrowing from her life force. I said, “Oh,” again, as the nuke in my stomach settled. “Hi. Are you okay?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m...oh. It’s my dad, Ada, not Aidan. Um. Aidan?”

She nodded stiffly and a thrill of pleasure shot through me, then muted under wondering if she’d kept Aidan’s name because it was similar to her own. “Aidan,” I said again. “God, no, Ada, I’m not here for him. He’s your son. Sara called and said Dad was missing. Of course I came.”

“Of course you did.” She packed a truly amazing amount of sarcasm into four words, which was probably fair, given I wasn’t certain when I’d last talked to him. I exhaled and studied my feet a moment. First Sara’s paranoia, now Ada’s, and I hadn’t hardly gotten past the Qualla’s front door. There were probably another half-dozen bombs I didn’t even know about just waiting to go off.

My feet seemed unconcerned by the possibility. I nodded, accepting their complacency, and looked up again. “Of course I did,” I said again, more gently. “And from what I can tell, what you’re doing here is helping make sure nobody else goes missing. I had no idea you were—” I hesitated, fumbling over the word. I’d learned a lot of them recently, words that meant magically talented: adept, connected, talented. I didn’t know which she would respond to best.

What she didn’t respond to well was the hesitation. “I’m not like you Walkingsticks, but my grandmother was a shaman’s daughter. I have some of the blood.”

“I didn’t mean—” I wasn’t going to get out of this alive, and stopped trying. “I’m here because I hope I can help.”

“Then what’d you come with her for?” Sara suddenly became a presence again, one that Ada could look down on. I half turned toward Sara, who held her jaw so tight I could see muscle twitch. Anger, less profound than what the Nothing had called up, did a little stompy dance inside me. Sara and I might not be the best of buddies, but she deserved better than a total shut-out just because she’d become a Fed. But from how she stared resolutely away from Ada and the Nothing, it was pretty clear she wouldn’t take a stand. Maybe she felt like she’d betrayed her own by going into the line of work she had. Maybe she was afraid they’d stop looking for Lucas entirely if she rocked the boat at all. Maybe she just wasn’t confrontational by nature, though she’d been happy enough to get in my face.

Why didn’t matter. She could take it if she wanted to, but I didn’t have to enable it. I turned back to Ada with my best butter-wouldn’t-melt expression. “Sara called to tell me that my dad was missing, Ada, and her husband’s missing, too. Why wouldn’t she be here? Besides, I’ve worked with Sara in the past. I know what a professional asset she is, and I’d think everyone would be grateful for a trained agent on a search-and-rescue operation.”

Ada snapped, “This is Qualla business,” and I, very softly, said, “And Sara is a Qualla agent. The government’s done a lot of harm, I’m not arguing, but if everybody in the Qualla turns their back on people who pursue federal careers, then there’s not much chance those people are ever going to be able to help, or in the end even want to. Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, Ada. Now, can you tell me anything about what’s going on here, or bring me to someone who can?”

Mouth set in a thin line, Ada pointed toward the northern end of the holler, then folded her arms under her breasts and turned away from us. I went where she directed, Sara catching up to say, semigrudgingly, “Thank you. That was a dumb thing to do, but thank you.”

I nodded acceptance of the thanks, but asked, “Dumb?”

“She’s your kid’s mom, Joanne. You really want her angry at you?”

“Sara, if she wants him to loathe me then I’m sure it’s already far too late for that. Three minutes defending you is not going to change anything, and she pissed me off. You deserve more respect. I mean, you’re what, twenty-nine now? And you’re leading investigative teams with the FBI. That takes a lot of ambition and dedication. It doesn’t—it shouldn’t—matter if you’re a federal agent. You’re not the enemy.”

My little rant had taken us around the Nothing to the holler’s northern end. Sara, bemused, murmured, “I don’t know what you’ve done with the Joanne Walkingstick I drove up here with, but I like this version better,” as we were approached by an old woman I recognized. Carrie Little Turtle, whose steel-gray hair was still twisted in the same relentless braids she’d worn almost fifteen years earlier when she and Les’s grandfather, also Lester, and three other elders had given me the shaman’s drum that currently rested on my dresser back in Seattle.

Carrie looked equally at home in jeans or deerskin, the latter of which she was wearing now, with feathers woven into the under-skirt. She also wore so many rings and bangles that I wasn’t quite sure how she could lift her arms. Like Ada, she gave Sara a faintly scathing look, but since I was half certain Carrie actually remembered the Trail of Tears, I was less inclined to put my neck out in Sara’s defense.

Sadly, she gave me a far more scathing look than she graced Sara with. “Where’s your drum?”

“...Seattle...”

Carrie clicked her tongue so loudly I suspected they immediately started discussing my shame in the next county over. “Well, I didn’t,” I started, then tried, “I mean, I wasn’t,” before finishing up in a burst of desperation: “I was in Ireland, see.”

“And they don’t use drums in Ireland? Never mind.” For a woman eighty years older than God, she had some fine talk-to-the-hand action going on. I subsided without even trying to speak, feeling like a scolded puppy. “This is a bad time to come home, Joanne Walkingstick. You should have come home a long time ago.”

My guilt did a quick reverse into belligerence. “Really. A long time ago or not at all? Because tell you what, Carrie, that,” I said with a jab of my finger toward the power-bound Nothing, “scares the shit out of me, and if you’ve got some way to deal with it that I don’t have to play along with, I might actually be okay with that. I can just hightail my ass back to Seattle and all y’all can quiet the mountain down yourself.”

“Ah,” Sara said almost inaudibly, “there you are.”

“You think you can help the mountain? Stop that?” Carrie made much the same gesture I had, only somehow she filled it with derision, which actually stopped me cold.

There were two possible options. One was she genuinely wasn’t afraid of a boiling mass of Nothing that creeped me out so badly I was unconsciously doing everything I could not to look at it. If that was the case, Carrie Little Turtle was not only more of a badass than I was, but she was more of a badass than I could ever imagine hoping to be.

The other, far more likely option, was that she was every bit as terrified as I was, had no idea how to protect her land, her people, or their history, and had no intention of letting anyone see it. I bit back a response just as short-tempered as Carrie’s and eased the Sight on so I could take a look at her aura.

It spun with turmoil, earthy dark green and brown nearly overwhelmed by sharp bursts of red panic and bright orange throbs of pain. Her whole left torso was afire with orange, in fact, squeezing and straining her body, and her aura’s stuttering pulses reminded me of a faltering heartbeat. A whole metaphor rolled out of that in an instant, how the mountains were Carrie’s heart and this nothingness at their center was breaking it, that the stress reflected in her body was representative of what happened in the Carolina hills—

Then I got my English degree under control and realized no, actually, the woman was having a heart attack right in front of me. I yelped and shoved my hand over her heart.

Healing magic shot from me like it was desperate for something to do. Like the chance to heal Carrie was a chance to heal the mountain, though realistically I knew the metaphor wasn’t going to stretch that far. But the problems of age and stress, those I could deal with. Carrie’s heart muscle was old and worn out, arteries stiff with build-up. With a touch, I had the instant sense of how long she’d been breathing poorly, of how long she’d been growing weaker without fully realizing it.

For months I’d used detailed visualizations to heal, mapping my mechanic’s skills at fixing cars to healing the human body. I didn’t need to do that anymore—in the end, with my full belief behind it, healing was essentially instantaneous—but the images came anyway. Blocked arteries were clogged fuel lines that needed to be scraped clean; loosened bits of plaque were the floating debris that needed to be flushed from the system. It was easier with a car, of course, since cars usually had valves that could be unfastened and drained, whereas yanking a coronary artery out so gunk could wash free would probably be bad for the patient. Still, the basic idea was solid, and the image held in my mind for less than a breath as my silver-blue power coursed through Carrie’s body.

Her next breath came more easily. Red still dominated her aura, but the orange flares of tension were gone, the tightness and weight in her chest no longer wearing her down. She clutched her left breast, classic heart attack motion, but there was neither pain nor fear in her expression, only astonishment.

Astonishment, then joy. “You have come home. You’ve come back to the path. I thought you were lost to it, all those years ago. I thought you didn’t carry the drum because it meant nothing to you.”

My throat tightened up again. I said, “The drum,” then had to swallow and try a second time. “The drum never stopped meaning something to me. It was the only thing that did for a long time. Well. That and my car.”

Amusement crinkled Carrie’s eyes, which I hadn’t even known was possible. “I remember the car. We thought perhaps when its restoration was finished, your soul would be healed. Have you completed it?”

I blinked, taken aback. “Um, actually, yeah. I even put in a manual transmission like I’d always promised her. That was just a couple months ago, at Christmas. And I sort of...” Had really pulled my shit together around then, too. That was when my mentor Coyote had returned, and when I’d finally really began to understand what being both a healer and a warrior meant.

But the alarming bit was I’d always envisioned my car—Petite, her name was Petite, and she was a 1969 Mustang Boss 302 I’d rescued out of somebody’s barn the summer I turned sixteen. The first thing I’d replaced was her spiderwebbed windshield, and for the past fifteen months I’d envisioned my soul as exactly that mess of a windshield. It made Carrie’s theory equal parts viable and too damned weird to contemplate. I shivered all over, trying to put it out of my mind. “Anyway, I came back because Sara told me Dad was missing, but there’s obviously a hell of a lot more going on. I Saw what that stuff is doing, how deep it’s reaching—you Saw that, too?”

Carrie shook her head, which I didn’t expect. “I only see how it eats at the mountain. What more do you See?”

“Oh, God. It’s—”

The power circle fluctuated again, but differently this time. Not a weakening in one place, but responding to a sudden vast surge of power from within the Nothing. A concussive force blew out, like it was testing for vulnerable spots through sheer strength of magic. The skirt of my coat blasted backward. Sara went head over heels. Carrie stayed upright only because I grabbed her arm and grounded myself, shamanic magic telling the earth I was there and requesting its support.

The wards almost held. They flickered and faltered, white magic shimmering to more individual colors, but at seven points of the compass, they held, keeping the Nothingness from gobbling up more of the mountain.

At the eighth point, at the most northerly edge of the circle, hungry gray mist rushed out, taking advantage of an old man’s weakness.

For one frozen moment, Carrie and I stood together, numb and unable to move, as Les’s grandfather collapsed at our feet.

Chapter Four

Two things needed doing and I couldn’t make a choice: step up and hold the line against the Nothing, or drop to my knees and heal Les’s grandpa. Carrie, thank God, snapped into action, pointing an imperious finger at Grandpa Lee as she flung every bit of her age, rage and will against the surging wall of Nothing. There was nothing elegant about the transference of power, not the way the other one I’d just seen had gone. She just stepped in, forcing her strength to merge with the other seven. Raw edges flared and burned white as they struggled to hold the shields together and accommodate Carrie’s rough entrance. The mountain shrieked pain and fear, and triumph rolled through the gray, but too soon. Carrie would die before she let the Nothing win, and she had just gotten topped up full of glowing blue healing magic. Les’s grandpa had been the weak link for a heartbeat there, but Carrie was the strong one now. It wasn’t going to last, but it didn’t need to, not with me there.

Not as long as I got my act together and got Lester Lee Senior on his feet again. I shaved off part of my concentration and built a shield around him and me, one that ran deeper and stronger than usual. I didn’t want the Nothing leaking out the edges of the power circle shielding to get even one tendril inside Les Senior while I patched him up. The world went pleasantly blue around us, a bubble of active magic so solid I hoped warheads couldn’t budge it. Then I put a hand on Les Senior’s chest and had a quick look around inside him.

I got more than an eyeful of what I expected, too. Most times I got a sense of someone’s physical well-being. This time he was so worn and raw I Saw straight into his garden, the metaphorical center of self that reflected a person’s well-being. Les Senior’s was parched and dry, red earth cracked and once-lush plant life brown and drooping. It didn’t feel like age—God knew my pal Gary, who was at least as old as Les Senior, wasn’t suffering from any kind of drying–out of his garden. This was more like Les Senior was being sucked dry. More like he’d given everything he had, and was now too exhausted to replenish himself. There was nothing else wrong with him, no clotted arteries or other common maladies of age. Gratitude surged through me. It wasn’t often I got to save two people back to back, but between Les Senior and Carrie, I was batting a thousand.

Bizarrely, fixing exhaustion was more delicate work than stopping a heart attack. Cardiac arrest was all about violence and instantaneous reaction, and shutting it down had taken the same response. Exhaustion was something that built up, and Les’s garden was so parched that throwing a metaphorical river in would just drown him. I tamped the power down to a trickle, easing the gas on, as it were, and let it drain in slowly enough that his garden’s earth had time to absorb the replenishing magic instead of being flooded by it. I couldn’t let myself pay attention to what was going on outside my shields, trusting that Carrie and the others had it under control. Or at least trusting they could triage until I was done getting Les Senior’s feet back under him.

He opened his eyes sooner than I expected, blinked a couple times, and somehow didn’t seem surprised to focus on me. “I’ll be fine. Go on.”

I swear, the old man was like Carrie, made of sprung steel and baling wire. Nothing was gonna keep them down, not until they marched out of this world and into the next, where they would probably start setting things to right all over again. I still said, “You sure?”

Les Senior nodded, and I pointed out a direction away from the boiling Nothing. “You get the hell away from that stuff, you hear me? Don’t be stupid just because you’re conscious.”

Amusement darted through his brown eyes and he nodded again. I let the shields down slowly, keeping them thickest to my left, where I’d last left the Nothing, until I was certain the world around us hadn’t disappeared entirely. It hadn’t. I pointed to my right. “You go that-a-way.”

Les Senior went as directed, and only when he was well away and into the arms of others did I get to my feet and put my hands on Carrie’s shoulders. “My turn.”

“We need you out there. Fighting.”

“I need to know what I’m fighting. I’ve got to See what’s at the heart of this thing. And you just came a hair’s breadth from a coronary. You don’t need to be shouldering this burden right now. So move it.”

I got the dirtiest look in Creation, but bit by bit Carrie transferred the weight of shielding she’d taken on to me. The power fluctuating between the eight compass points strengthened considerably as I took more of it on. Partly because I was a heavyweight in the mojo department, but partly because this transition was deliberate, rather than somebody shoving themselves in to plug a bursting dyke. After about two minutes, Carrie stepped out, and I...

...stepped up.

Because I wasn’t kidding anybody, least of all myself. I had a pretty goddamned good idea who, or at least what, was behind the pit of Nothing trying to eat out the heart of my homeland. Barely three days ago I’d effectively nailed a cross to my enemy’s door, made it clear we were about to reach a header. I’d seen him for the first time, the Master whose power was death and corruption, and I’d come damned close to losing my life.

I had lost my mother, forever and for always, to the fight against him. She’d come to protect me one last time, and had burned out everything she’d ever been, in that battle. There were old souls and new ones in this world, and my mother’s had been old, but it would never be reborn. That was the price she’d chosen to pay to keep me alive. It had given me the last bits of breathing room I needed, because it had turned out I wasn’t quite ready to face him after all. She’d left him wounded and embarrassed, and there was no chance the mess in Carolina was coincidence, not after that.

So I wasn’t screwing around when I joined the power circle. I didn’t let them have it all at once, because I’d noticed an alarming tendency for blown-out electrical grids and other exciting ramifications of announcing my psychic presence in a grand slam. But I came to the party to play, and by the time Carrie’s power faded out and mine replaced it, I was feeling pretty white-hot with magic. If there was any chance I could snuff out the Nothing, I was going to take it right now.

I expected resistance. I expected it to seep inside me and find my fear again. I expected it to ratchet that up to eleven, and for grim determination and a whole lot of stubbornness to get me through. I was prepared for that, leaning forward a little, saying, “C’mon, I can take it,” with my body language. I thought I could take it, now that I was ready for it. The fear hadn’t been as bad as the Master hitting me in the teeth with pain, and I’d survived that. Only just, but this wasn’t the time to quibble over details. So I was braced, ready for whatever the Nothing threw at me.

I was not prepared for sympathetic magic to skyrocket across the power circle, south to north, and catch me in the breastbone. Catch me right where my magic had lodged itself for all the long months before I’d really accepted it, in fact. Not my heart: my center. I wasn’t prepared for its vainglorious brilliance, four shades of brightness that whipped and blended together so fast they became white. And I was really not prepared for the boom of power that erupted when that magic and my own fused.

A visible ring bounced through the power circle like a shock wave, vibrating the mountain under our feet. Vibrating the air, vibrating sound, vibrating everything: I could’ve been standing under the bells at Notre Dame and gotten less resonance.

The gasp couldn’t have been audible, not beneath all the power noise, but it felt audible. Everyone took a step forward, a step closer together, like we were drawn in by that power burst. Part of my brain screamed an objection, not wanting to get any closer to the Nothing than it had to, but it wasn’t the part in control. I moved just like everyone else.

The Nothing shrank. Rolled in on itself, no farther than we’d stepped forward, but it got just a little bit smaller. Emotion spiked through the power circle, hope and confusion and flaring confidence. We stepped forward again, magic ricocheting between me and the southern point like some kind of earthbound display of Northern Lights. My power sluiced along the outsides of the other adept’s magic, encompassing it with silver and blue. The four bands of bright colors spun inside mine, and everybody else’s swam alongside ours, drawn back and forth at light speeds. From inside I could See the different auras, though only faintly: mostly they remained blended to brilliance, subsuming themselves to the massive working of white magic. We all took one more step forward, coming much closer to the Nothing, and a sense of nervous anticipation swept through the working. Six of them were waiting: waiting to see what the southern and northern compass points to their circle did next.

I wasn’t sure voices would carry through the Nothing between us. I clenched my stomach, preparing myself for a fight, and sent that feeling of determination through the magic.

It bounced back at me so fast it felt like laughter. A grin stretched across my face, wild and a little crazy. I spread my arms, knowing I was much too far away to catch the hands of the elders nearest me, but feeling like it was a statement: Come and get me. Catch me if you can. The same feeling crashed back at me from the other side of the circle, all kinds of reckless and foolhardy and ready for a fight. I knew the feeling intimately. I’d been like that as a kid. Who was I kidding: most of the time I was still like that. I hadn’t been set on the warrior’s path just because there was a big bad monster who needed taking out. I was sort of an aggressive little punk most of the time. Mouthy and full of ’tude, even—or especially—when it wasn’t warranted.

God knew I had plenty to introspect over, but even I thought this was sort of a weird time for it to crop up. I told myself it was the familiarity of emotion in my partner’s magic, and let it go. There were far more important things to worry about right now.

Like how to crush the Nothing into a tiny ball of, er, nothing. We had some kind of major power blend going on here, far stronger than I’d anticipated. Stronger than the Master had anticipated, too, I was willing to bet. But I didn’t know if the Nothing could be undone, or only captured. Wondering made my head hurt, so I took action instead of thinking anymore, and squeezed my shields down.

The first couple advances we’d made had been instinctive. This was deliberate, and there was a world of difference. The Nothing made a sound, a shriek of anger that reverberated in my ear bones. It collapsed in, shrinking visibly as the southern adept squeezed, too, and as the others followed our lead.