You can never go home again

Joanne Walker has survived an encounter with the Master at great personal cost, but now her father is missing—stolen from the timeline. She must finally return to North Carolina to find him—and to meet Aidan, the son she left behind long ago.

That would be enough for any shaman to face, but Joanne’s beloved Appalachians are being torn apart by an evil reaching forward from the distant past. Anything that gets in its way becomes tainted—or worse.

And Aidan has gotten in the way.

Only by calling on every aspect of her shamanic powers can Joanne pull the past apart and weave a better future. It will take everything she has—and more.

Unless she can turn back time...

Praise for

and The Walker Papers series

Urban Shaman

“A swift pace, a good mystery, a likeable protagonist,

magic, danger—Urban Shaman has them in spades.”

—Jim Butcher, bestselling author of The Dresden Files series

Thunderbird Falls

“Fans of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels and the works

of urban fantasists Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff should

enjoy this fantasy/mystery’s cosmic elements. A good choice.”

—Library Journal

Coyote Dreams

“Tightly written and paced, [Coyote Dreams] has a

compelling, interesting protagonist, whose struggles and successes will captivate new and old readers alike.”

—RT Book Reviews

Walking Dead

“Murphy’s fourth Walker Papers offering is another gripping,

well-written tale of what must be the world’s most reluctant—

and stubborn—shaman.”

—RT Book Reviews

Demon Hunts

“Murphy carefully crafts her scenes

and I felt every gust of wind through the crispy frosted trees….

I am heartily looking forward to further volumes.”

—The Discriminating Fangirl

Spirit Dances

“An original and addictive urban fantasy!”

—Romancing the Darkside

Raven Calls

“The twists and turns will have readers shaking their heads

while devouring the next page.”

—USA TODAY

Mountain Echoes

C.E. Murphy

www.mirabooks.co.uk

for my father-in-law, Gary Lee

(why, yes, Joanne’s Gary is named after him, in fact)

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Friday, March 24, 4:15 p.m.

I came home to North Carolina just shy of a decade after promising I’d never go back.

Home was a funny word. I’d lived in Qualla Boundary during high school. That was longer than I’d lived anywhere else up until then, but in the intervening decade I’d lived exclusively in Seattle. But North Carolina still twigged as home, maybe because it was where my father had been born.

It was where he’d gone missing from, too, and that was why I was back.

Driving up from Atlanta was a slow immersion into memories. I had the windows of my rented Impala rolled down, and the rich rotting scent of winter collapsing into spring made a hungry place at the hollow of my throat. Of course, everything made me hungry right now—I hadn’t yet recovered from a week’s worth of exhaustive shape-shifting fueled by my body’s resources instead of food. But that slightly sweet smell of death begetting life had always made me hungry, and I’d forgotten that until now.

The low hills with a haze of new leaves lining the roads; the roads themselves narrowing as I pulled away from interstates; the way strangers stopped along the roadside would nod a greeting as I passed by: those things I remembered more clearly. Then again, I’d spent an awful lot of my formative years in cars, crisscrossing the country with my father. Things I could see from a vehicle were most likely to stay with me, maybe.

Like the sign welcoming the world to the Qualla. It was smaller than I remembered it. I was taller than I’d been fourteen years ago when Dad had driven us past that sign for the first time, but mostly its size was relative to its importance in my life. Back then those carved white words on a brown road sign had been the most important thing in my life. Welcome: Cherokee Indian Reservation. At thirteen, going on fourteen, I’d never belonged anywhere for more than a few months, and that welcome sign was supposed to be the start of a whole new life for me.

It had been, too. Just not the way I’d expected it to be.

I slowed the car as I drove into the town of Cherokee. It was equal parts bigger and better than I remembered it, and exactly the same. The main street was four lanes rolling through town, no sidewalks to mention, just road, then parking spaces, then tourist shops flush up against them. A lot of low brown buildings with statues of headdressed Indian chiefs or protective gleaming black bears in front of them, and—new to me—signs making sure everybody knew which way to drive to the casino. It had opened the year before I left the Qualla, and the bigger-better aspects of Cherokee probably had it to thank. There’d been tourism money half the year before that, and unemployment the other half. That was the Cherokee I remembered, but I was just as glad it had moved on.

I got out of my car in front of the sheriff’s station. Wind came down off the blue mountains and caught the skirt of my white leather coat with cinematic flair. For half a second I wished I was as cool as the woman reflected in the car window looked. Somebody that cool, though, probably wouldn’t have a stomach full of butterflies, and her hands wouldn’t shake as she took off her sunglasses. I’d burned bridges, mentally if not actually, when I’d left the Qualla. Coming back scared the crap out of me.

A man about my own age stepped through the station’s open front door, leaned in the frame and said, “I’ll be damned. Joanne Walkingstick’s come home.”

All the butterflies got squished as my stomach clenched. I’d Anglicized my last name the minute I left Cherokee, calling myself Walker. Excepting a handful of magic users, nobody had called me Joanne Walkingstick in ten years. I’d somehow forgotten that’s who I would be, back here.

“You haven’t changed,” the guy said, which was wildly untrue, although in physical terms he was right. I was still six feet tall with short-cropped black hair, and ten years wasn’t enough for most people to lose the youth they’d had graduating high school. I looked like me, albeit better-dressed.

The fellow in the door looked like himself, too, though it took me a good twenty seconds before I said, “Lester,” and even that I said slowly. It took another moment to finish with “You cut your hair. And you’re a cop?”

“Who better than the local troublemaker? Figure I at least have a clue what the kids are on about. I hear you’re a brother in blue, too.” Lester Lee pushed out of the door and stepped forward to offer his hand. I shook it automatically, still trying to get past the silver badge on his chest and the tidy police haircut. Last time I’d seen Les, he’d had hair to his ass and had been smoking pot during our graduation ceremony. Other than that, he did look like himself: pleasant dark eyes, wide cheekbones, reasonably fit and about four inches shorter than I.

“I was,” I said a bit absently. “I just quit. I’ve had othe— Who told you that?”

“Sara.”

“She’s here.” Of course she was here. Sara Buchanan, now Sara Isaac, was the one who’d called to tell me my father was missing. We’d been best friends about half a lifetime ago, right up until I blew it by sleeping with the boy she liked. In my defense, she’d said she didn’t like him, and my social skills hadn’t been well enough developed to recognize the lie. Either way, the friendship had ended. But we’d reconnected, if that was the right word for an encounter over half-eaten dead men, about four months earlier. When that case was over, I’d never expected to hear from her again.

“Lucas came with her,” Les said, watching me.

My stomach went to knots again, though I wasn’t surprised. Lucas Isaac had been the boy, back then. He’d gone home to Vancouver before my pregnancy became obvious, but he and Sara had kept in touch and eventually got married. I’d always refused to answer questions about who the father of my twins was, and had thought nobody knew. Judging from Les’s expression, if everybody hadn’t known then, they did now. That was awkward, so I ignored it.

“I’m more worried about my dad. Les, what’s going on? Sara called and said he was missing, but she wouldn’t say anything else.” That wasn’t exactly true. She’d said it was “my kind of thing,” which I took to mean it appeared to be something paranormal in nature.

“She wouldn’t—” Les broke off with a cough, then jerked his chin toward the station. “Come in and sit down a minute, Joanie. We—”

“Joanne. Or Jo, please. I don’t use Joanie much anymore.” Actually it had only just struck me in the past few days that I’d left the little-girl nickname behind, but Les didn’t have to know that.

He lifted an eyebrow. “You hated being called Jo.” With that observation he went inside, leaving me to look at the dark square of doorway with a blush mounting my cheeks.

We hadn’t been particular friends, Lester Lee and me. I hadn’t been particular friends with much of anybody, truth be told, because I’d had a chip the size of Idaho on my shoulder. I had my Irish mother’s pale skin, which made me unnecessarily self-conscious about coming to the Qualla, and the only long-term companion I’d ever had was my father. Coming into a high school of kids who’d known each other since birth made me horribly uncomfortable, and I’d mostly been a complete jerk through my adolescent years. I could not for the life of me imagine why Les knew I didn’t like being called Jo, when I couldn’t even remember talking to him more than five times in the years I’d been here. But he knew it, and I was once more smacked in the face with the realization that if I’d been less of a jackass, I’d probably have had a lot more fun in school. I sighed and followed Les inside the cop shop.

Last time I’d been in there it had been to hack my personal files in their computers, changing my last name from Walkingstick to Walker on my driver’s license. By the time it propagated to the state system I’d left North Carolina and Joanne Walkingstick behind.

The station hadn’t changed a lot since then. The computers were better and so was the system they were linked into. I probably wouldn’t be able to hack it anymore. Of course, I wouldn’t need to. I could just access any files I needed to change from the Seattle Police Department’s computers. Or I could have before I’d quit not quite a week ago. I sighed, pushed my hand through my hair and went to sit in one of the surprisingly comfortable chairs by Les’s desk. Sunlight hung on motes of dust between us, making the whole world seem like it was standing still. “All right. Hit me. What’d Sara leave out?”

“Luke’s missing, too.”

Static rushed my ears and for a minute I couldn’t say anything. Then I laughed, short and harsh. “Before or after Dad?”

“Before. Sara and him came into town last Friday. Luke went missing Saturday night and there’s been a manhunt on for him. Your dad was helping, but Monday night he didn’t come back.”

A house of cards collapsed in my mind, each card with a nugget of information on it. Monday had been the solstice. Dad was some kind of mystic. Those two things probably went together. Sara had called me Wednesday. Midafternoon, Irish time—I’d been in Ireland hunting banshees—which was morning here in Cherokee. Dad had been missing about thirty-six hours then, and Lucas for seventy-two. Aloud, I said, “You’re sure Sara didn’t tie Dad up somewhere so she’d have an excuse to call me?”

Humor creased Les’s face, showing what he would look like in another forty years. Like his grandfather, the tribal elder for whom he’d been named. “The thought crossed my mind,” he said, “but she was never an outdoorsy type. She’d never get the drop on your Dad.”

“She’s an FBI agent now, Les. She could get the drop on most people.”

“Not,” Les said firmly, “your Dad,” which was probably true. I’d never thought of my father as particularly impressive, but he was the kind of guy who could sit down and disappear into the landscape even if you were looking at him when he sat. Wild animals tended to treat him as if he was one of their own. Sara had learned the ropes well enough to kick my puny ass, but I couldn’t see her taking Dad out. “Not if her life depended on it,” Les finished, as if following my thoughts.

“What if Luke’s did,” I said under my breath, but I didn’t really mean it. Not mostly, though I was willing to bet Sara’d been almost relieved when my father went missing, if it meant she had an excuse to call me in. “Why’d she say it was my kind of thing?”

Les’s humor fell away. “I know the elders gave you a drum, Joan— Joanne.” He emphasized the name, reminding himself not to use the high school nickname.

A little shock ran through me. There’d been a bit of ceremony involved with the gifting of the drum and logically I supposed half the town knew I’d received it, but logic had never been my strong suit. I sat forward, elbows on my knees, and rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, they did. When I was fifteen.”

“So what happened?” Les’s voice dropped, his curiosity softened by what sounded like genuine respect.

I rubbed my face again, then sat on my hands so I’d stop doing that. “The really short version is I got pregnant and it screwed me up. Everything the drum suggested...” I shrugged. “Went off the rails. I only found the tracks again about fifteen months ago.”

“So you’re a...”

For the first time, I didn’t want to answer the question, not because I thought he would laugh, but because of where I was. Sitting in the heart of Qualla Boundary, in all that was left of the once-vast Cherokee nation, in the midst of that, saying “A shaman,” somehow sounded very arrogant indeed. There were too many charlatans and quacks out there buying, selling and bartering so-called shamanic gifts, and I’d spent way more of my life off the rez than on. For a minute I felt as false as any of those con artists. I’d never had any use for the mystical. Claiming I was now part of that heritage just seemed wrong.

Les, though, looked neither offended nor surprised when I said the word. He just nodded and let me work my way around to continuing. “Not quite like the traditional medicine men, as far as I can tell. When this all...woke up...I was told I was on a warrior’s path. Healing’s only part of it, for me.”

Les’s mouth twitched. “You always did like a fight.”

That much, certainly, was true. It was utterly bizarre to talk to someone who had enough knowledge of a younger me to say a thing like that, but it was true. I shrugged one shoulder and tried again. “So why’d Sara think it was my kind of thing?”

“The mountain’s been hollering, Jo. So loud even I can hear it, and I’m no shaman.”

The mountain was hollering. That was an utterly preposterous thing to say, except I had just gotten off a plane from Ireland, where a screaming stone laid out peoples’ destinies. Mountains hollering seemed right in line with that. I nodded. “What’s it shouting about?”

“It started the night Lucas went missing.” Les shrugged. “Your dad said it was trying to tell us how something was wrong. That’s why he went up there, why he went alone. He was looking for Luke like all of us were, but—”

“But he was looking to heal the crying land,” I finished.

Surprise and respect brightened Les’s eyes. I could see a question coming, and lifted a hand to ward it off. I’d only just, in the past couple days, discovered my father belonged to a magical bloodline just as much as my mother had. My nomadic childhood had crystallized into a never-before-appreciated kind of sense: Dad had been taking us from one damaged site to another, trying, I now suspected, to give something back to barren earth. I hadn’t yet wrapped my mind around the whole idea and wasn’t prepared to discuss it. “What happened when he didn’t come back?”

“It got worse. It’s echoing all over the mountains now, so bad you can’t tell where it starts. My grandpa looks like he’s sucking lemons all the time, that’s how much it’s affecting him. It’s worse for some of the other families.”

“Is there anybody it’s not affecting?”

Les’s mouth quirked again. I’d had no idea that under the hair and the weed he’d had a pervasive, low-key sense of humor. “Tourists,” he said. “White men. Whatever’s happening here, Jo, it’s not their story. It belongs to the People.”

“I’m half-white, Les.”

“Nah. You grew up in the Qualla.”

I stared at him a long moment, a smile tugging at the corner of my mouth. “Just like that, huh? All the time I spent being a dick, chip on my shoulder, obstreperously ignoring my Cherokee heritage, it all gets hand-waved away because I spent a handful of teenage years here? Shit, Les, if I’d known it was that easy—”

“Hadlv hehi, Joanne?”

I answered in the same language without thinking. “Home is where the heart is, Les. Which means—” I broke off, my brain catching up to my tongue and immediately forgetting the words I needed. I hadn’t spoken Cherokee regularly since I’d been a kid, less than ten years old. But Les was grinning at me, and shaking his head.

“Maybe you didn’t learn that here, Joanne. Maybe you learned it out there on the road with Joe, but as far as I’m concerned, it means you grew up in the Qualla. So you’re part of the People, even if your ma was white. Besides, most of us have white blood anyway. I mean, look at Sara.”

I actually looked over my shoulder, half expecting her to be there. She wasn’t, but I knew what he meant. Sara was honey-blonde with brown eyes and perpetually tanned skin, making her look like more of a California golden girl than somebody who laid claim to a quarter Cherokee blood. But kind of like me, her heritage came out in black and white: the high school yearbook snapshots emphasized the Indian aspects of her features, making the light hair seem less relevant. I turned back around and crooked a smile at Les. “Right. Christ, Les, were you this—”

His eyebrows rose as my face reddened again. “I was going to say this easy-going in high school, but my dim recollection is you were about as easy-going as anybody could be. This nice. Were you this nice in high school?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Bounced off you a few times, though, and figured you weren’t interested.”

I wasn’t especially good at reading between the lines, but I was reasonably certain that Cherokee County Sheriff Lester Lee had just confessed to having had a crush on me in high school. I sat there speechless long enough for him to get uncomfortable and to go back to the topic at hand. “Anyway, so white blood or not, it doesn’t mean the mountain hollers aren’t our story. I’ll call somebody to cover the station and I’ll take you up there now, if you want.”

Light changed behind me, somebody coming through the still-open front door, and a woman’s voice, cool enough to shave ice, said, “Don’t worry about it, Les. I’ll take her up myself.”

Oh, God. Caught between unrequited high school love and unforgiven high school rivalry. I slumped in my seat, trying to disappear myself. It didn’t work, and after a minute, Sara Isaac, Archnemesis, said, “Come on, Joanne. It already took you long enough to get here. We haven’t got all damned day.”

Chapter Two

“It—!” My voice rose and broke on the one-syllable word. My splendid white leather coat flared over the chair as I surged to my feet and faced her.

Sara, who was about six inches shorter than I was, took in the coat with a scathing, raking glance and managed to look down her nose at me. “Oh, please. Are you serious? What do you think this is, Joanne, a movie? The good guys wear white hats? My God, I thought you’d grown up a little.”

A better person than I would have remembered that this was a woman whose husband had been missing for almost a week. That this was a woman who’d been obliged to call in her rival to try to find her husband. That this was a woman who looked like she hadn’t slept much in the past several days, and who was gaunter than she’d been last I’d seen her.

I was by definition not that person. I snarled, “Yeah, actually, I am serious. Maybe the good guys should wear white hats, Sara. Maybe it makes them better target practice, but maybe it’s more reassuring than a bunch of grim-faced mooks in black jackets muttering, ‘We’re the FB freaking I.’ Jesus Christ, Lucas and my dad are missing and you’re worried about my fashion choices? I got here as fast as I damned well could. I don’t have an unlimited budget for international travel.” In fact, having maxed out my credit card buying a last-minute ticket to Ireland and then the leather coat, I’d had to borrow the ticket-change fee from my friend Gary, who I’d then left in Ireland to keep an eye on my cousin, the new Irish Mage.

“What the hell were you doing in Ireland anyway?”

“I was burying my mother, okay?”

Sara’s jaw snapped shut so definitively I heard the click. She had the grace to flush an attractive dusky red, and after a moment said in a much less antagonistic tone, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t even, um...” and decided she should stop there.

I finished for her, out of something I’d like to call the goodness of my heart and which I suspected was more like a gleeful willingness to twist the knife. “I didn’t know her. Not well, anyway, and not at all until the very end. So I got here as fast as I could, Sara, and if you’d told me Lucas had gone missing almost a week ago I might have tried getting here that much sooner.”

She stiffened all the way from her heels to the top of her head. I swear if it could have, all that honey-blond hair would have stood straight out like an angry cat’s. “I didn’t know it was—”

“‘My kind of thing’?” I asked when she broke off, then couldn’t help relenting a bit, palms turned up in something like apology. “Yeah, okay, that’s fair. Look, do we have to do this, Sara? Didn’t we get it out of the way in December?”

From her expression, no, we hadn’t. Or rather, we had, but only when Lucas wasn’t actually part of the physical scenario. Reintroducing him and me added a whole new level to the emotional mess we’d created in high school, or at least it apparently did in Sara’s mind. “I don’t,” I said to the ceiling, since I figured it was more inclined to listen than Sara was, “have designs on your man.”

“How do you know? You haven’t seen him in thirteen years.”

I reversed my gaze to peer at Sara. “You really think he and I are going to, what, Sara? Fall into each other’s arms in a fit of storybook love? He never even liked me, you idiot.”

“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.

* * *

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.

Glee rose up from my counterpart. Glee and triumph and all sorts of other premature but obvious emotions that I was inclined to share. I’d had a hell of a couple of weeks. I thought I deserved one easy win, especially if it made my homecoming a little easier. But I wasn’t quite foolish enough to do a touchdown dance yet. Shriveling evil magic was not the same as eliminating evil magic, and I wanted it good and eliminated. My shields were rock-solid, and I wrapped them in the idea of a net, just to help squish everything down a little more. Step by step we closed in around the Nothing, and with every step the others became more confident. It made a positive feedback loop, creating stronger magic because our belief in it was stronger. I had no idea how much time passed before I touched hands with my right neighbor, and then moments later with my left, but suddenly we were a physical construct as well as a magical one, and the Nothing roiled and shrieked and spat fury in the circle created by our linked hands.

Someone finally spoke aloud. Not either of my closest cohorts, and not the next people over, either. I could see them, but the Nothing still rose tall enough to block the other three from my line of vision. I figured it was the southern compass point, the other one who was flinging as much magic potential around as I was. She had a light voice, still a teenager’s voice, which fit with the glimpse I’d had of a slight figure, on my way into the holler.

“It’s a time traveler,” she said. “It’s trying to slide through. Forward, backward, I don’t think it cares very much as long as it pulls bad shit through. We’ve gotta cut it out. We’ve gotta remove it from the timeline entirely. That’s the only way it’s gonna be vulnerable enough for us to smash it.”

I had the impression she was lecturing me specifically. That kind of made sense, since everybody else had been here for days, and she had no way of knowing I’d recognized the Nothing’s time-slip capability, too. She sounded pretty sure she knew how to deal with it, and for a half second I wondered if I could’ve been her, self-assured and rife with magic, if I hadn’t blown it so badly half a lifetime ago.

Not that it mattered, because I had blown it, and I’d largely come to terms with that. I let regret go, said, “Sounds like a plan,” to my unseen counterpart, and let her take the lead.

For the first time, an edge of alarm slipped through the power circle. Her alarm, not mine, which made me think maybe giving her the lead hadn’t been so bright, but it also seemed not only rude but potentially dangerous to yank it back now. Besides, I wasn’t at all sure how a person went about yanking things out of time to castrate them. I knew how to yank things around in time, albeit clumsily, but that didn’t seem like the skill set necessary here. The kid across the circle had sounded sufficiently confident that I’d assumed she did know.

Eventually I was going to learn that assumptions were dangerous, but today was clearly not that day. I breathed, “Calmly, calmly,” and sent a ripple of healing power through the circle. I didn’t usually use it as a soporific, but it seemed to help. I felt the multistranded adept’s aura and power strengthen again.

An image popped into my head. I didn’t know if it was my own or my counterpart’s, though if it was hers I really wanted that nifty telepathic aspect to my magic. Either way, the idea of a sensory deprivation tank came to mind. That, in essence, was what we needed to do to the Nothing. Except where I was supposed to find a tank so secluded that time didn’t affect it, I didn’t know. Well, except maybe on the event horizon of a black hole, but that led to all sorts of other really bad possibilities that I wasn’t eager to explore.

It did, though, give me an idea. Space was affected by time: anything that light passed through kind of had to be. But the idea of the dark side of the moon introduced itself to me, and I seized on it. It wasn’t really dark, I knew that, it was just that we never saw its other face, so maybe that was close enough. I was willing to take it.

I filled my shields with that idea: cold black timelessness, lingering in the silence, no pressure or need for change. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good, and the cold started crackling the edges of the Nothing. That was shamanism: change instigated by belief. I could turn the air within that crushing shield to a space vacuum without harming any of the nonspacesuit-clad elders in the power circle. And that little inkling of time that was still part of the equation, that was no big deal, that was—

—slipping.

Slipping, cracking, sliding out of control, bringing the Nothing back into the world because it still had something to latch on to. I clamped down, trying to ignore it, trying to hold on to the possibility of taking something entirely out of time, trying to remember just how much depended on me doing that, and felt a jillion little bug feet run up my spine and send shivers all over me. They all leapt off, my spine abandoned by an infinitesimal number of bugs, and I lost control of the magic.

Panic and dismay shot up from the other side of the circle. The dismay cut deep, much deeper than the fear. The Nothing erupted again, knocking us all over the holler. I crashed against soft dirt and immediately staggered to my feet, weaving physical shields together again, determined to catch the stuff before it got out-of-control large again. It was much smaller than before, but not gone, dammit. All around me, power stuttered back into wakefulness, everyone who’d been thrown around trying, as I was, to hold the Nothing to a smaller size. My counterpart’s magic rushed through us all, connecting us like railroad ties, until it slapped into me and we once more had a functional power circle around the Nothing. The younger woman’s magic was flushed with anger, fitting against my own anger tidily. I was able to hang on to its edges easily, improving our connection with the sense of long familiarity.

It all came home to me a little slowly. I’d worked with sympathetic magic before. Recently, even, up on a mountaintop in Ireland. Maybe it had something to do with mountains. Anyway, I knew the strength of blending familiar, familial magics, but I hadn’t expected it in the Qualla.

Which, in retrospect, was really, really stupid, because the Qualla had the two people on Earth who were closest to me by blood.

It wasn’t a teenage girl at all, the counterpart who stalked up to me with frustration and anger in brown eyes. It was a prepubescent boy, a twelve-year-old nearing his thirteenth birthday but not his voice change, and he said, “You’re twice as old as I am, Joanne. I thought you would be good at this stuff,” with all the disdain in the world.

It was not, all things considered, how I’d envisioned remeeting my son.

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.

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.

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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