Mountain Echoes

I wasn’t certain, but I thought stick bugs were a bit like crocodiles: an evolutionary path that got it right early on, and didn’t mess with anything afterward. I thought they’d been pretty much the same animals for tens of millions of years. From that perspective, unchanging and being associated with time travel made a certain amount of sense. I’d been able to haul myself through time by fixating on something as comparatively new as a Neolithic cairn. If stick bugs had twenty million years of unchanging evolution to draw on, they were probably damned fine focal points for time travel.

It made me wonder if some of the other animals whose fossil records were relatively unchanged were also time-traveling spirit animals. I was just as glad my last name was Walkingstick and not Sharkbait. “Right,” I said out loud, to stop myself going down that line of thought. “You’re...I mean, welcome. Welcome to our funny little magic family. It’s, um...it’s nice to meet you.”

A smooth talker I was not. But then, despite all my hopes, nobody had ever shown up with that Shaman’s Handbook I’d been asking for. Spirit animals, like everybody else, had to make do with my clumsy, if usually well-meant, expressions of greeting and methods of coping. “This is Raven,” I said to the stick bug, as politely as I could, “and this is Rattler. Guys, this is...”

Stick was a lousy name, and I couldn’t exactly call her Walker, because that’s what Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department, formerly my boss and with any kind of luck shortly to be my partner, called me. Besides, I had Rattler and Raven. “Walker” didn’t fit with that, alliteratively speaking. “Renee,” I decided. “This is Renee the stick bug. She’s the last of our merry band, and...” My shoulders slumped. “Does this mean we’re going to do more time traveling?” I perked right up again, though, suddenly eager. “Oh, but maybe with you along it’ll be easier. It might be kind of cool if I’m not fighting against the tide so much. Can we go see the Library at Alexandria? There must be stick bugs of some sort in Egypt to cross-reference...”

Renee still didn’t blink, but she kind of looked like she wished she could. I wondered if spirit animals knew what they were getting themselves into when they signed on, or if like most people, only realized after the fact that something had gone horribly wrong. I took a deep breath, straightened my shoulders, and tried hard to look like a shaman she’d want to stick with.

No pun intended. I dissolved into giggles at myself. Raven flapped around my head in delight while Rattler and Renee exchanged expressions of despair. It was no use. I was never going to be the proper dignified medicine woman of legend. They would have to take me as I was. I got up, Renee still balanced on my arm, and bowed to the legions of stick bugs still flooding the Lower World. “Thank you,” I said to all of them, but especially Renee. “Thank you for putting up with me, for coming when I needed you, and for facing whatever hell you’re likely to go through with me until we’ve got this thing beat. I’m a terrible ingrate, but I do know how much I owe you. All of you,” I added to Rattler. He slithered around my ankles, effectively pinning me in place, but accepting me, too. Raven plonked down on my shoulder and stuck his beak in my hair, so I was spirit-animaled from head to toe.

It felt pretty good, actually. I felt pretty full of life and confident, which was a damned sight better than I’d felt facing the Nothing in the Middle World.

A Nothing that was still up there, but maybe now I had the weapons to fight it. I stroked Renee’s long heart-shaped head with a fingertip and she tipped her chin up to do something that registered as smiling at me. “So what do you think?” I asked her. “Can you help me snip that stuff out of time? If you’re unchanging, then maybe time doesn’t mean anything to you, so you’re not constrained by it.... Raven, can you take us home?”

He kloked with surprise, since I usually asked him to take me in and out of the Dead Zone, not the Lower World. But I figured anything that could transition between life and death probably shouldn’t be too stymied by mere world-walking. Nor was he, springing off my shoulder to lay down a path of yellow bricks with each wing beat. I followed along behind, Renee and Rattler fading with each stride, until I stepped back out of the Lower World and into the Carolina holler with no visible signs of having been on a spirit quest. I felt the three of them at the back of my mind, though, murmuring and examining one another, and, I suspected, giving me a good hard once-over as they decided whether I was redeemable.

The whole trip to the Lower World had taken about as long as it took for Aidan to back off from me by a couple of steps. I was never going to really get used to that: traveling within the space of my head while my body stood there in the real world like an empty puppet. It usually only lasted a few seconds—longer spirit journeys did, or at least should, involve safe territory and someone to watch over me—but it was always disconcerting to realize I’d gone through a transition while other people were scratching their noses.

Usually, though, nobody else noticed. Aidan, however, froze midstep, toes planted in the dirt and heel still elevated as he stared at me. Then he surged forward again, eyes full of golden fire.

This time, however, he slammed into shields that were strong enough to keep young gods at bay, and bounced off hard enough that he actually lost his balance. I snagged a hand out to catch his biceps, and kept my voice low. “Not twice, kid. You caught me off guard once and bullied your way into my garden, but not twice. First off, that’s rude. Second, it’s rude. And third—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, it’s rude.”

“Dangerous. You don’t know me, and you don’t know what’s inside my head or what I’ve faced. For all you know, I’m set up with a guard dog at the gate, and the only thing that kept it from attacking you was me knowing who you were.”

“Attack? What kind of shaman would attack somebody?”

“One who’s on the warrior’s path.” I let him go at the same time he yanked his arm out of my grip, and he couldn’t decide if that meant he’d escaped or if I’d relented. Either way, he pushed his lower lip out in a pout that was all too familiar, and muttered, “I’ve never heard of somebody being on the warrior’s path. Shamans are healers.”

“Lucky for you I am. Ever met a sorcerer, Aidan? They use shamanic magic. It’s just corrupted. If you go blowing into somebody’s soul space like that—”

A disdainful sneer appeared. “Now you’re trying to scare me. It won’t work.”

“—then you might open yourself up to let that corrupted magic in. Or do you think that—” and I jabbed a finger at the Nothing “—is just something the earth spat out after eating too much spicy food? Don’t go making yourself vulnerable if you can avoid it. Having said that—”

“Why do you think you get to tell me something like that? You’re not my mother!”

Of all the conversations I didn’t want to have with half of Cherokee looking on, this one was close to the top of the list. But I’d already had it with Ada once and it wasn’t like the answer had changed in the half hour since then. “I know I’m not your mother. I am a shaman, though, and I probably have more experience with black magic than most. I’m sure I’ve got more experience rushing in where angels fear to tread, and in paying the consequences for that. Forget being careful because I’m asking you to. Be careful so your mother doesn’t have to worry about you.”

Aidan scowled like he thought I was trying to pull a fast one, hiding my own concern for him under the mask of the word mother, which could technically mean either me or Ada. I wasn’t, actually, because I wasn’t that clever, or at least not that manipulative. I was concerned about him, but my concern landed in the grand scheme of “Hi, kiddo, I accidentally let the Major Bad Guy know you existed, so along with trying to find both of our missing fathers, I’d also like to make sure you don’t get creamed by monsters” rather than what I imagined were Ada’s more standard maternal worries.

I looked at the Nothing, and at Aidan, and for once in my life realized I should probably tell him about all of the Master garbage that was likely to come raining down on him, rather than keeping it bottled up inside myself and trying to fix it all myself. I did not, however, think that the middle of a holler with half the town listening in was the time or place to do it, so I said, “And I was trying to say thanks, before you derailed me,” instead.

His scowl deepened suspiciously. “What for?”

“Rude and dangerous as it was, shoving me into the Lower World gave me a chance to find that last spirit animal. Which you knew as soon as I stepped out of there, didn’t you? That’s why you came at me again. Man, you really—”

He really reminded me of me, was what I wanted to say. I had certainly been as impulsive and angry as a kid, and probably wasn’t much different now. But wisdom reared its ugly head and I managed to stop talking before I said something unforgivable. “You really know what you’re doing. I wouldn’t know how to recognize somebody lacking a spirit animal if it bit me.”

Aidan gave me a sideways look, which was pretty talented, given that we were still facing each other straight on, and said, quite slyly, “If the spirit animal bit you, or if the person who didn’t have it did?”

“If it bit me I’d be sure it was there.” The conversation had turned completely nonsensical in three sentences, but we were both grinning, which was a great improvement. Maybe the kid was just edgy because of my unheralded arrival. Maybe he wasn’t quite as much of a punk as I’d been. Either way, I suddenly thought that maybe I could like this young man, and better yet, maybe he could like me. “Look, this is as rude as you just were, but...walking sticks?”

His grin turned into a much more solemn expression, though it didn’t quite lose the smile. “Yeah. Yeah, it makes Mom kind of crazy, because she doesn’t really want me to be anything other than boring and normal, but at the same time she’s kind of proud, you know? I mean, if she wasn’t she never would’ve let me start training with Grandpa, and I started like half my life ago, so...”

“Gra— You mean my dad?” If it was possible for a brain to wobble and wiggle like a bowl of dropped Jell-O, mine did it right then. “You’ve been studying with Dad?”

Aidan shrugged with the insouciance only available to children on the cusp of teen-hood. “Well, yeah, didn’t you? I mean, he said you guys drove all over the country your whole life, and he’s been telling me about all the cool stuff he did, I mean, not that he called it cool, but it was, healing the land and—”

He kept talking, but I heard nothing more than Charlie Brown wah-wah-wah-waaah! sounds for a few seconds. For about that length of time, I couldn’t even see Aidan: my vision went kind of red and staticky, though I wasn’t exactly enraged. More gut-punched, more shocked and cold-handed and betrayed. Dad had taught me the Cherokee language when I was a kid. That was the only studying I’d ever done with him. It had been less than a week since I’d discovered he had magic of his own, or begun to suspect the reasons—now confirmed by Aidan—why we’d spent my childhood driving around America.

It went beyond “not fair” that Aidan was now studying magic with him. “Not fair” didn’t even begin to touch it. It was “why,” and “what did I do wrong,” and “did he just not want a daughter” and a thousand other black-streak thoughts dashing around the static Jell-O in my head. The ball of Nothing was roiling and pitching nearby, reacting to the depth of my emotion. Reacting to it more than I was, really, because I could hardly let myself touch on any of those bleak thoughts before bouncing off in pain. But I didn’t want the Nothing to latch on, so I stuffed the shock down deep, buttoning it up until I could take it out and admire it later. Aidan’s voice faded back into comprehensibility. “...knew you had magic too, so I thought you’d studied with him....”

I heard myself speaking rather faintly and hollowly, as if I was on the far end of a bad telephone connection. “He knew I had magic, or you did?”

“He did.” The poor kid knew he’d stepped in something and had no clue how to extricate himself. “Are you, um... Are you okay?”

“Yes. No. Sort of. Not really.” My nostrils flared as I dragged in a deep breath, stood with my eyes pressed shut a moment or two, then exhaled as deeply and opened my eyes to force a smile. “I’m fine. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof. I didn’t actually study magic with Dad, no, so you’re definitely ahead of me in that game. Anyway, walking sticks. What do you know about them?”

Aidan hesitated, clearly not sure if he should respond to my obvious emotional distress or the facade I was putting on. In the end, though, he was twelve, and went with the surface story. “I know your walking stick shoulda helped with that.” He pointed a thumb at the Nothing and scowled at me, visibly returning to the slightly sullen wariness of before. That seemed fair enough. I hadn’t exactly imagined we’d get on like a house on fire from the moment we met. I was a little wary of him, too, despite our moment of camaraderie. A faint edge came back into his voice. “I mean, look, dude, no pressure, but you’re the grown-up here. You’re supposed to be more awesome than I am. I thought you were gonna show me what to do.”

“How about we give it another shot?”

Aidan looked somewhere between dubious and envious. “You only just got back from your spirit quest. You think you’ve got a handle on shi— things?”

“Probably not, but that’s never stopped me before.” That wasn’t quite true. My magic had come in over the past ten days, far more cohesively than before. I believed I could handle whatever new aspects Renee’s gifts uncovered, because I’d handled everything up until now, and I was finally firing on all cylinders. “Let’s go see.”

Ada Monroe’s voice stopped us cold: “No.”

Chapter Seven

Aidan sounded like every kid in the world mortified by a parent at an inopportune time: “Mom!”

“I said no, Aidan. You’ve just come out of that power circle after being in there for fifteen hours. Do you even know what day it is? You need sleep and food.” Ada shot me a daggered look, which was only partially unfair. It wasn’t like I’d known Aidan had been on his feet and fighting the good fight for more than half a day. On the other hand, given how wiped out Ada and Carrie had been when they staggered from the circle, I probably should not have automatically assumed Aidan would be raring to go.

Except he was, which I could See in his superbright aura as much as in his impatient squirm. “I’m fine, Mom, really, and if Joanne and I do this thing now maybe everybody can get some rest. It’s bugging the whole Qualla, not just us up here in the mountains, so c’mon, Mom, please? Pleeaaaaaaaaase?”

She gave me another hard look and I raised my hands. Even if I could See he was in dandy shape, I was not about to get caught in the middle of this particular stomping match. Among other things, I had no other way to prove that, no, really, I thought of him as her kid. I was not the one who got to make decisions for him.

Unfortunately for me, she snapped, “Is he right? Is he fine? Can you two fix this?”

“We can try. As far as I can tell, he’s just fine, yeah. He’s got a lot of raw power.” As much as I did. Maybe more, which was alarming, given that I’d called down a Navajo Maker god with the strength of my magic. “But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong, because I have no idea how long he’ll keep burning this bright. He might just fall over from exhaustion halfway through. I’ve been known to do it,” I said defensively as Aidan’s expression indicated I was betraying his trust. Two minutes ago we’d been antagonists, but for the moment I’d been moved to his side of the fight, and could thus betray him. How quickly the lines shifted.

“I’m fine! Really, Mom, come on, please? I just want to help.”

Ada glanced at Carrie, which took the weight of responsibility off my shoulders. The old woman looked between all three of us and sniffed. “With Joanne here I imagine we can keep the Nothing under control until you’ve gotten some rest, Aidan. Don’t worry,” she said dryly. “I don’t expect we’ll do anything exciting without you.”

Aidan gave me a perfectly filthy glare and stomped away without saying another word. Ada shrugged at the world in general and followed him. Sara was right: they went up the holler instead of heading toward the hedges we’d scraped our way through. There had to be another, easier pathway in, probably via a different mountain. Well, I was going to show it to Sara once I found it, whether the rest of them liked it or not.

“Or will we?” Carrie asked the moment Aidan was out of earshot.

I pursed my lips and turned back to the Nothing. It didn’t scare me as badly as before, but I thought that was bravado and suspected if I scratched it, panic would knock me over again. “The big advantage to waiting for Aidan is he’s too young to be scared senseless of that stuff. It’s hard to believe the world might actually get eaten when you’re twelve. Not much sense of personal mortality yet, and that entrenched self-confidence might help wipe it out.”

“But...?”

“But he’s twelve and if something goes wrong I’d rather he wasn’t here to be part of it or feel like it was his fault.”

“Could work the other way,” the old lady said philosophically. “Could be that if he’s not part of it and something goes wrong, he’ll blame himself.”

I examined that from the attitude I would have had at his age, and said, “More likely he’ll blame me.”

“True.” She snapped her fingers, making me jump to her beat, and I scurried into place at the northern edge of the power circle, where I’d been before. Carrie marched down to the southern edge, taking Aidan’s place, and we tapped the shoulders of the people in those positions, asking to be let in.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure I should be letting Carrie participate any more than I wanted Aidan to. Five minutes ago she’d been having a heart attack. I had every confidence in her new-found well-being, but that didn’t mean it was an especially good idea for her to go throwing herself right back into battle. On the other hand, Carrie Little Turtle was every bit as intimidating to the adult me as she’d been to the teen me. I was just slightly too scared to suggest she sit this one out.

Besides, she was one of the elders, along with Les Senior, who had presented me with my drum. It meant we shared an affinity, and while that wouldn’t be anything like as strong as my magic pairing with Aidan’s, it was still a bonus. My walking-stick spirit animal was settled in now, a sense of eagerness building within her, like her whole purpose was invested in doing something about the Nothing that was a slash in time. I’d seen walking sticks neatly slice and fold up leaves for consumption, and had the vivid idea that was exactly what Renee was going to do with the Nothing. Suddenly buoyed, I flexed my magic through the circle, checking to see if everyone was willing to follow my lead.

Their power responded, falling in line behind the ripples I sent through. No one seemed to have a need to put themselves forward, no one presenting a history of shamanic practice that I should heed. There were shamans in the Qualla, but if this had been going on for three days, they had to be spelling one another as the focal point for the circle. I suspected Aidan had been playing that role for this particular circle until my arrival. Later I might feel guilty about being the interloper, but right now I was just glad everybody was willing to let me and Renee hone the magic to a fine point and obliterate the bad stuff.

The imagery was easy, with the spirit stick’s input. She was utterly serene in her self-confidence, in her certainty of what she represented. Odd little details floated up from her as the magic began to parcel up the Nothing, cutting it away and reducing it to uselessness. She, and other stick bugs like her, had had wings once, but that in no way reduced the eternal sameness of their structure. They had needed wings in the past, and might need them again in the future, but it didn’t change what they were. It was a mere flick of a...and I couldn’t imagine a spirit animal, much less a stick bug, was actually using the words or images, but the sense I had was a mere flick of DNA, whether wings came or went. The wings were inherent, and therefore unchanging. She was as her mother had been, and her mother’s mother, all the way back to the beginning. That, too, spawned a bizarre language choice for an insect: parthenogenesis, females breeding without males, begetting more females, all the way back to the beginning. Renee was eternal, imperturbable, and unflappable. The Nothing, built on pain and rage and death, had nothing on that calm confidence in always.

It fought, though. Holy crap, did it fight. Everything that had hit me in the moment I saw it redoubled: the lonely ghosts, last of their people, who simply stopped eating when everyone around them had died. Worse, sometimes: the ones who could not quite bear to die themselves, and lived empty and hollow, a single red man among the whites. Good Indians, the dead kind, or the ones who gave up on tradition and lived as the white men did, in soulless houses and crammed into clothes that kept the world off the skin. They were pinpoints of agony against a backdrop so bleak it could barely be comprehended, thus making individual pain all the more exquisite.

The memory of empty villages rose up within me, of empty plains discovered by European settlers who never understood just how many people had died long before their arrival. Disease traveled faster than hordes of men, leaving nothing—Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, like the Nothing trying to eat its way through the holler—leaving nothing in its place, nothing to discover except a sense of superiority, that the poor pathetic natives of this new world had never even explored and peopled these amazing broad lands. I kept unwinding my hands from fists, trying not to feed the Nothing with my own rage and frustration: that was half my heritage disappearing into the wind, and even today most people didn’t grasp just how many Natives had died when the West discovered the Americas.

My heartache had nothing on Carrie’s. Carrie was old, old enough that it had been her grandparents, people she remembered, telling her stories of loss. Her memories extended to people who had been born in the middle of the nineteenth century, people who had watched family walk away on the Trail of Tears. So many of them had died, and the Nothing wanted to finish the job.

In the space of a heartbeat, I realized that was exactly what the Nothing wanted, and made a desperate attempt to throw a shield between it and the people trying to contain it.

The Nothing, all parceled out into the sharp thin blades and deadly edges of Renee’s imagery, sliced through my shields and drove deep into the hearts of the Cherokee elders.

* * *

Not into me. My shields, my personal shields, were sacrosanct. I had gone through too much hell and breakfast lately to let them falter, but I was not prepared to shield seven others with such vigor, not with so little notice. Knives bounced off me, shattered, turned to splinters of black and disappeared, but so many more of them drove through the elders and burst out of their spines, sucking the Nothing out the other side.

The Nothing pulled their life forces with it as it fled. All the magic we’d been working, all the effort and passion we were pouring in to wiping the Nothing away: it had been waiting for us. Why it had taken so long to respond, why it hadn’t attacked when Aidan and I were working together and raising the power usage to a whole different level, that I didn’t know, but I knew we’d been set up, and that we were now taking the fall.

No. I did know. We hadn’t been set up.

I had been set up.

I’d said it to myself already: there was no chance the problems in Carolina were cropping up a few days after the mess in Ireland just by coincidence. Between my mother, Gary and myself, we’d taken out some major talent on the Master’s side over the past couple weeks, and in the midst of all that I’d let it slip that I had a son.