Mountain Echoes

Chapter Five

Aidan Monroe had inherited his father’s golden-brown skin tones and hair so black its natural highlights were blue. He’d also gotten some of the same shape to his nose as Lucas had, mitigating my own beak somewhat. But I could see bits of me in him, too: the shape of his eyes and jaw, particularly with said jaw thrust into a too-familiar scowl. He was rangy like I’d been—like I still was—and there wasn’t any hint yet of whether he would grow into shoulders like Lucas’s or not. He was barefoot, red clay under his toenails, and his ragged-ankle jeans and sleeveless T-shirt could’ve belonged on any kid from the mid-20th century on.

I thought he was beautiful.

I mean, I guessed mothers were supposed to, but I hadn’t been a prime candidate for mother of the year when I’d gotten pregnant and given him up at age fifteen. If anything gave me potential mother-of-the-year status, in fact, it was having given him up. I had a lot of emotional investment in that decision, but not a lot of sentimental investment, even if that seemed like a fine hair to shave. The point was, I hadn’t been overwhelmed with his infantile beauty, so I was a little surprised to find myself wanting to smile and pat him on the head like he—or I—had done well, just by him being cute.

Given that he was already glaring at me, I manfully restrained myself and instead shrugged. “I probably should be, but I’m a lot further behind on my studies than you’d expect. Sorry.” The word, while flippant, was also sincere: I’d have preferred to unveil myself to Aidan in all my shining glory, instead of fumbling the ball just before the end zone. I was pretty certain that was the right sports metaphor.

He squinted and rolled back on his heels, a sign of surprise so like my own body language I had to fight not to laugh. I supposed lots of people did that, but seeing it on him was a little like looking in a reverse-gender mirror. Offhand, I suspected he hadn’t expected an apology from me, or anything less than a like-for-like chip on my shoulder.

To be fair, everybody who’d known me, anybody who might have told him about me—and he clearly knew who I was—would have told him to expect that chip. To expect whole icebergs, probably, not just chips.

For half a second I lost my battle with the smile, because I was obviously surprising him, and surprise allowed for a possibility of change, and that, at its heart, was what my magic was supposed to latch on to and work with. Shamanistic magic right there in action, even if no actual magic was being worked.

Aidan didn’t like the smile. It gave him something to be pissed off about, which was why I’d been trying to suppress it in the first place. “Are you laughing at m—”

“No.”

The poor kid looked so surprised again I had to bite the inside of my cheeks to keep from laughing for real that time. “Aidan—it’s Aidan, right?” I’d asked his mother that once already, but somehow it seemed important to clear it with him, too. He nodded, somewhere between sullenly and suspiciously, and I said, “Right. Aidan. No, I’m really not laughing at you. I’m laughing at me a little, maybe, because somehow I didn’t expect to see you so soon, and because it’s sort of embarrassing to admit a kid pushing thirteen almost certainly has it all over me in terms of mystical training. I mean, holy crap, kid, did you see you out there?”

I waved toward the Nothing, which was a much smaller seething ball now, and being held in place by the six elders who’d been working with us, and two others who’d joined them when Aidan and I broke out to have some awkward family time. I’d hardly even noticed them taking over for me, I’d been so busy gawking at Aidan. “You were awesome. What was I supposed to do there at the end? Maybe if we can do it now...?”

Aidan’s eyes went deep gold. Molten gold, a crazy color I was pretty sure mine didn’t reach, not even in the depths of magic use. He turned that heated gaze on me, slamming it right between my eyes, like he was looking into my head—

—and my garden ripped to life around us. The mountain holler faded, short-shorn grass and neat stone pathways appearing under our feet. A waterfall began burbling, and crumbling stone walls rose up out of the earth, farther away than I’d ever seen them. Ivy wrapped around the trunks of strong young hickory trees, which made me mutter and flick a finger, clearing the ivy away. It scattered from the trees and returned to the walls where it used to grow, thin climbing branches working to break them down further. A breeze swept through, carrying the scent of flowers from somewhere, and I could almost pretend that my staggering was actually me setting off in search of where those blooms were growing.

Almost. Mostly, though, I was just staggering and gaping. “How the hell—! What the hell! What are you—”

The garden turned to mist, blue sky turning yellow and the sun turning red. The ground was red, too, redder than the deep earth of the Appalachians, and the grass growing up around us was purple in some places and yellow in others. Familiar enough territory, except I had no idea how Aidan had slammed us not just into, but through, my garden and into the Lower World. “What are you d—”

Raven, my cheerful, chattering spirit guide, exploded into being with a clatter of wings and noise. He dove around Aidan’s head fast enough to make me dizzy, pulling at Aidan’s long hair and tangling his beak in it. My long-suffering Rattler spirit also appeared, though less exuberantly. He wound around Aidan’s feet, tongue flickering in and out, then returned to wrap around my ankles. Rattler had had a much more difficult couple of weeks than Raven, and I really needed some not-forthcoming downtime to get him back on his feet. Belly. Whatever.

Aidan, evidently waiting on something, stoically ignored Raven. Me, I crouched to stroke Rattler’s head and watched Raven’s antics with bemusement. Not even my mother had been able to pull my spirit guides into focus, but then, Mother had been a mage, not a shaman. I had plenty of questions, but for once I kept my mouth shut, more curious about what Aidan’s expectations were than about how he’d hauled us into the Lower World.

Finally it became clear that whatever he was waiting on wasn’t going to put in an appearance. Full-on teenage horror filled his face. “Oh, my God. You don’t even have all your spirit animals. You’re useless.”

He disappeared from the Lower World, leaving nothing but a set of footprints behind in the red earth, and I flung my hands up with a shout of exasperated laughter.

Raven klok-klok-kloked at me and came to settle on my shoulder, where he could peer at me from a third of an inch away. “What,” I said to the bird, “does he think I can’t get back if he leaves me here? Is this some kind of test?” I sat down. Rattler slithered into my lap and coiled up comfortably small. I stroked his head again, smiling as he leaned into the touch like a cold-blooded scaly cat. I’d spent enough time as a child tromping around snake-littered woods that I’d never imagined having an affinity, much less fondness, for a rattlesnake, but Rattler was something special. And I was sure that I’d think so even if he hadn’t saved my life more than once.

“Perhapsss,” he said once he was cozy and lazy in my lap, “perhaps you should take this opportunity to seek out your third, as he thinks you ssshould.”

“Third what, spirit animal? I don’t know, that seems like it would be giving the little punk the upper hand. ‘Hop to it, birth vessel! Heed my wisdom!’ Like that.” It probably wasn’t fair to call Aidan a punk. He probably had every reason to be upset with the woman who had skipped out on her magical heritage and failed to come back home firing the big guns in a moment of need.

And besides, it wasn’t like I had any room to go around throwing stones. I had been a pain-in-the-ass punk teen, with what was turning out to be less justification than Aidan probably had. I said, “Sorry, kid,” aloud and mentally retracted the punk nomenclature with the intention of retiring it permanently.

Rattler, who apparently didn’t care what I called Aidan, said, “It isss foolish to not ssstrike when the opportunity arissses,” with an acerbic tang. I could tell, because his sibilants got stretchier when he was annoyed.

I rubbed the top of his head. “So I should ignore the fact that someone I barely know and maybe shouldn’t trust because of that brought me here, and just head gung-ho into a spirit quest?”

“Do you missstrust him?”

“Nah.” That was a much softer and far less flippant answer. “Nah, I don’t know him at all, but I guess I’d trust him way past where I could throw him. He’s got power and he’s got a lot more training than I do. Maybe I should listen.” A chortle bubbled around my chest. “Because, you know. That’s always been my strong suit up until now.”

“Sssometimes,” Rattler said, and it was amazing how dryly a snake could speak, “sometimesss it isss all right to learn from past missstakes.” He slithered out of my lap and coiled around me in a tight circle, closing it up by taking his rattle in his mouth. Raven gave an excited caw and bounced into flight, wheeling around my head like he was drawing circles in the sky to match the one Rattler made on the ground.

“Right,” I said to both of them. “This is me, getting the message. When your spirit animals start drawing your power circles for you....” I traced a hand along Rattler’s sinuous spine, stopping at the cardinal points to murmur a little breath of nonsense that mostly meant I was paying attention to where they were. If I wasn’t careful, soon I’d be doing rituals and all the other silly stuff that went along with being a magic practitioner. It was bad enough that I adopted this weird semiformal language structure when I started talking about magic. I really didn’t want to get any more New Agey than I was, though I was much less biased against the whole scene than I’d been when I’d started out.

A soft wash of magic splashed up while I was trying to convince myself I was still normal and not hippy-dippy. Blue and silver swirled around each other, reaching for the sky-circle Raven had drawn, and thoroughly putting paid to any dreams of normalcy. I snorted at myself and closed my eyes, listening for something that would do as a drum and drop me into the quiet dark space where spirit animals roamed.

My heartbeat did the job, thumping in my ears more loudly than usual. I counted the beats until I started to drowse, my shoulders going slack and my hands loosening from the curls I’d held them in. I’d done the spirit quests for both Rattler and Raven while in the Lower World, though I hadn’t meant to either time. It seemed appropriate to be doing a third one here, too, though I had no sense of whether it would be like Raven’s appearance or like Rattler’s. Raven’s had been fairly traditional—well, except for the part where it had been conducted by an evil sorceress—with several creatures coming to say hello before Raven picked me. Rattler had simply shown up in the nick of time and saved my bacon.

My bacon was, for once, not in need of saving, so when a white butterfly drifted through the darkness, I figured it was just checking me out, and probably indicative of a more traditional quest. That was good. I was down with tradition, for once. The butterfly faded, and only after the fact did I remember my last encounter with butterflies had made a serious stab at ending the world. My stomach clenched up and I tried to remember what other totem animals I’d dealt with. I did not want a parade of bad associations contaminating my quest for a third spirit animal.

Raven, who in the Lower World was much more real than in the Middle World, smacked me alongside the head so hard I got dizzy even with my eyes closed. I took that as an indication that I was probably making things worse, told my brain to shut up, and held my breath, like that would make my brain shut up.

It didn’t. Nothing ever made my brain shut up. It went right back to worrying about the various spirits I’d seen before Raven in the quest run by an evil sorceress. Rattler, with a sense of exasperation as great as Raven’s, let go of his tail to bite me. I yelped, but it did at least remind me that I’d seen a snake, too, during that particular ritual, and that it had turned out I did indeed have a snake spirit who was no more wicked than Raven. Possibly less so, in fact, since Raven had a teasing sense of humor and Rattler didn’t have much of one. So maybe if the horse from that first session showed up, it wouldn’t mean I was in trouble after all.

No horses showed up. No badgers or tortoises or rams had shown up during some of the quests I’d done for other people. No nothing, in fact: apparently the butterfly was just an errant wanderer, lost in the ether. Grumpy, I said, “This is getting us nowhere,” and opened my eyes.

The entire landscape was covered in walking sticks.

Chapter Six

I squeaked and shoved my hands against my mouth to keep it from turning into a full-on shriek. It wasn’t that I was afraid of bugs. Even if I was, walking sticks were such peculiar bugs that they moved out of the realm of Potentially Scary all the way into That Is So Weird It’s Cool, which wasn’t usually frightening. Even more, this was at least the third time I’d suddenly been faced with an onslaught of walking sticks, but there were zillions of them now, far, far more than I’d encountered on other spirit journeys. Purple foliage bent under their collective weight, and the ground shifted subtly as they moved around. It bordered on creepy.

They had not crossed the tiny power circle Rattler made. Rattler was eyeing the nearest ones like he thought someone had just provided the largest smorgasbord in history, and also like he suspected he really shouldn’t start chowing down on other denizens of the Lower World.

One of them was eyeing me as blatantly as Rattler eyed it. It was nearly as long as my arm—not my forearm, but my whole arm—and striped green and yellow, which made it stand out against the multicolored earth. Its legs were long enough to wrap around me, and I was reasonably certain that although walking sticks were nominally herbivores, its mandibles could take a sizable chunk out of tender body parts.

It lifted one spindly leg and tapped its foot on Rattler’s scales, just like it was knocking to be let in.

Way at the back of my head, a penny dropped. This was at least the third time I’d been faced with an onslaught of walking sticks. The other times had also been in spirit realms, and both times the bugs had gone away again with a sense of resignation. Of waiting.

And now they were knocking to get in.

I gently disengaged Rattler’s grip on his tail and put my arm out. The walking stick bumped its nose against my fingers, kind of like a big dog sniffing before deciding I was okay, then stepped onto my hand and traipsed lightly up my arm.

Eye-to-eye and nose-to-nose with a giant bug was not somewhere I’d ever imagined I’d be. Its eyes were black and shining, and its mouth really was big enough to make divots in flesh. Despite its size, it had almost no weight, which reminded me of Raven. Raven was huge, but bird-boned even if he wasn’t also a spirit animal, and his weight was always surprisingly negligible. Rattler seemed to have more oomph to him, but the walking stick was pure delicacy. It leaned in until its forehead touched mine, and a little spark of embarrassed recognition popped through me.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought of it when the bugs had come visiting previously. My last name was, after all, Walkingstick. I hadn’t imagined it was pure coincidence that innumerable stick bugs had decided to parade over me as I scrambled through the Upper World. I just hadn’t quite realized they were early-stage spirit animals waiting for me to be ready for them.

I dearly wanted that mind-meld pose to make everything cascade into clarity, sense and reason. I wanted to suddenly understand the stick’s purpose, to understand what it offered and why, and wrap that all together with my magic so I finally had a full grip on it. Raven had always been my guide between life and death. Rattler’s gifts were multifaceted, as variegated as his scales: healing, fighting, shapeshifting; he encompassed all of those aspects.

There was really only one thing left that I could do, one major power component that had been dogging me since before I was born. Something so big I figured it had to warrant a spirit animal of its own, even if I had no clue why a walking stick was the manifestation of that power set. It was so big and so absurd I didn’t even like putting it into words, but having just jumped back and forth around the entire history of Ireland, I was pretty damned certain that for some unbelievably stupid reason, the last of my phenomenal cosmic power set was freaking time travel.

I could not for the life of me imagine why anyone would be given the power to travel through time, even if it had become manifestly clear to me that doing so was more of a perspective-offering scheme than a “Woo hoo! I can change history!” kind of thing. I could not, in fact, change history. The timeline was pretty fixed, with only minor variations permitted. So far the best I’d been able to do was get an understanding of time loops that had been opened a long time ago, so that I could close them on this end of time.

“We are unchanging,” the stick bug said in a surprisingly feminine voice, and I sat bolt upright, blinking at her. She did not blink back, what with having no eyelids, but somehow conveyed a sense of sedate blinking anyway. I waited, but she didn’t say anything else, which made me have to think about what she’d said.