Mountain Echoes

Chapter Twenty-One

I knew where we were before I even opened my eyes. It was the smell, the faint scent of antiseptic, that sharp astringency in dry air that hospitals never quite manage to erase. I hated that smell, and I said, “No. No. Get me out of here. Get me out of here, I can’t do this again,” without ever opening my eyes. My heart was sick in my chest, pounding so hard I thought I would throw up. “Get me out of here, Daddy. Get us out of here now. Please. Please. I don’t want to see. Not again. Please get me out of here, Daddy. Please.” Tears squeezed through my lashes and left hot streaks on my face, but I would not open my eyes.

I heard the men catch their breath as they figured out where we were. I was sobbing by then. We were in a hospital ward and there were two very small babies nearby, and there was only enough life in the both of them for one. Morrison caught me, holding on hard as I thrashed against him, the words tearing at my throat. “Get me out of here, get me out of here, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it I hate it I hate it I hate it get me out of here please please please get me out of here I can’t I can’t I can’t not now why weren’t you here!”

I tore myself out of Morrison’s arms and hit Dad as hard as I could. “You’re a healer, you’re a goddamned healer, why weren’t you here to save her, why weren’t you here?”

And my father, terribly, whispered, “I was.”

My eyes flew open. Beyond Dad-now I saw Dad-then, standing outside the ward windows, his hands clenching and opening with impotence. It wasn’t the distance, I knew it wasn’t the distance, they would let him in, he was their grandfather, and besides, I didn’t believe for a minute he couldn’t affect a healing from a mere few yards away. Not when the babies were so fresh and new, with no expectations placed on the world. Dad could do it. He could do it.

But he didn’t. His walking-stick spirit animal sat on his shoulder, its face hidden behind long thin arms, as if the anguish twisting my father’s features hurt it just as badly. “You have to See, Joanne,” my now-father said in a thick voice. “You have to understand.”

“I don’t want to see!”

“Don’t.” Morrison sounded dangerous. “Don’t do this to her, Joseph.”

Somehow that gave me the strength to look, even though my father said nothing. I reached for Morrison’s hand, crushing his fingers with mine, and steeled myself to look, just once, at the babies.

My whole life I’d had the idea they’d only had enough strength for one. That Ayita had given up her strength for Aidan so that at least one of them would live. I Saw now, for the first time, how incredibly right I had been. The babies, born just minutes apart, already lying so close together, shared more than the strength of their bodies. They shared the strength of their souls, as well, Ayita’s dancing, laughter-filled soul merging and melding with Aidan’s more serious, contemplative personality. Her yellows and pinks wound around his blues and greens, the colors brightening and burgeoning until the single surviving child’s aura burned almost white, all the time.

Two-spirited. No wonder Aidan had so much raw power. Two-spirited souls, people who carried both the masculine and the feminine within them, were sacred to most Native Americans, the Cherokee included. They were respected and believed to have a closer connection to the spirit world than most, making them natural shamans and guides.

And Aidan was literally two-spirited. Like my friend Billy, he actually shared his body with his sister’s spirit, but there was one huge difference. Billy’s sister, Caroline, had died when she was eight, a developed personality of her own already. She’d remained with Billy for decades because of their close bond, and that had affected him, but it wasn’t the same as being born from the same womb, together for every moment of their brief existences, and given unto one another in death as in life. Aidan and Ayita’s spirits were melded from birth, incomplete without one another. Aidan’s power was boundless, with Ayita’s spirit a part of his.

And it was his only chance against the Executioner.

I knew it in my gut, inside the sickness that still boiled within me. I turned away, wishing I could throw up. I wasn’t one for Seeing the future, but Renee, on my shoulder like the walking stick on Dad’s shoulder, showed me something that was, to her, so close in time to right now that it was all the same. Now and then were so close together, from an unchanging insect’s viewpoint, that there was no particular difference in Seeing what lay in the children’s future. Maybe Dad could have saved Ayita, but it would have been at the cost of both their lives, when the Master came for them. And the Master, Raven Mocker, Kolona Ayeliski, was coming for them.

There’d been some question about it, with me. Maybe Mom had hidden me well enough. Maybe keeping me out of the traditional training had been enough to slip me under the radar. But the walking stick had shown Dad what lay in Aidan’s future. What lay in Ayita’s future, if they both lived.

Death had lain in their future, if they both lived. They only stood a chance together, as one, two-spirited.

Ayita Walkingstick had only lived a few minutes, but she was the bravest person I had ever met.

Empty, drained and exhausted, I said, “Take us home,” to Renee, and she did.

Thursday, March 30, 12:12 p.m.

The sky was unbearably bright when we stepped back into our own time. Petite was where she’d been, sitting quietly under a thin film of dust. The Impala was gone, with no recent tread marks to say when. I was glad I’d taken out full insurance on the thing, and kind of wondered why Petite was still there—and undamaged—if the Impala was missing. I unlocked her doors and sat down in the driver’s seat to turn the radio on and find out what day it was.

Thursday, according to the DJ. That made no sense. Morrison and I had gone into the mountains on Saturday. We’d lost most of a week.

They were not lost, Renee said. The days passed as you ran the ancient forests.

Of course they had. We’d overnighted in the valley with the isolated tribe, then it had taken us three days to get to the Ohio. I slumped in Petite’s front seat, wrung out and with no idea at all of where I should start. Morrison leaned in the open door, concerned. “You okay, Walker?”

“I’m really not. I’m really, really not.” I closed my eyes, and after a moment Morrison closed the door gently and went to talk to my dad. I heard the explanation without letting myself listen to the words, and all but felt Morrison’s sorrow roll toward me. I still had afterimages burned into the backs of my eyes, things I hadn’t let myself look at, in the hospital. Doctors. My fifteen-year-old self, stone-faced to keep anybody from suspecting I was screaming inside. I had never let my grief and rage and helplessness go the way I’d just done while in Morrison’s arms. Eventually it would probably be cathartic, perhaps finally allowing wounds that were scabbed over to properly heal. Right now I was just exhausted and fragile, prepared to shatter again if anything hit me wrong.

I leaned forward and touched the bottom edge of Petite’s windshield. It was whole, unmarked—I never risked dings turning into cracks—and the world beyond it was slightly hazy from the thin film of dust. Other than that, though, perfect. I reached for the image that had risen from within me the day my shamanic powers had awakened: the idea that Petite’s windshield reflected the state of my soul. In my mental image, there was a massive hole punched through the windshield, spiderwebs and long cracks radiating out from it. Over the past year the cracks had begun sealing up, the spiderweb receding, glass fusing back together. Recently it had become more whole than broken, but the puncture wound was still there.

Its edges, though, were maybe a little softer than they’d been before. The spiderweb had closed up around it until the entire fracture was only about the size of my spread hand, instead of spreading from one side of the windshield to the other. I didn’t think the damage would ever be completely fixed. Eventually it might just be a warped spot, though, just a wobble in the windshield where resin had been poured in and sealed to the unbroken whole. I tried fixing the idea of a glass-sealer to the windshield, seeing how much I could smooth out if I put actual effort into it.

To my surprise, a delicate layer of new glass appeared, splootching across the bullet-size hole itself and filling in more of the spiderweb around it. I flattened a piece of film over it to make sure it stayed in place, and sat back to study it. I couldn’t say the whole of the scar had shrunk any, but it was bandaged, which was more than it had been for over a decade. I patted Petite’s dashboard and whispered, “Looking good, girl.”

My father and Morrison were still talking. I thought the topic of conversation was probably what to do next, and knew I should be taking part in it. I didn’t want to. I wanted to curl up in Petite’s passenger seat and sleep for about sixty hours. It wasn’t even that I hadn’t had enough sleep, because for once I was getting reasonable amounts. I couldn’t, as usual, remember when I’d eaten last, except for a vague awareness that I had been a coyote when I had. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that Morrison had been right, I was too skinny. I’d cannibalized my body’s extra resources and been burning up muscle with all the shapeshifting I’d done in Ireland, and hadn’t come anywhere near returning to fighting weight. Food suddenly sounded more important than sleep, even if I was an emotional basket case. I got out of the car.

Both men stopped talking like they’d been caught doing something naughty, and looked at me guiltily. I deduced they had not been discussing a game plan, but had instead been talking about me. “I don’t even want to know.”

Relief replaced guilt, which made me want to know after all, but it was too late. “Do you guys have a plan? Because I don’t have a plan, and we’ve missed a week and I don’t know where the hell Aidan is and I don’t know what to do and somebody’s got to go tell Sara her husband is dead and I’m hungry enough to gnaw my arm off and, and, and...” I put my arms on the top of Petite’s door and put my forehead against them, completely out of steam. Muffled, I asked, “Is that diner we used to go to still open, Dad? Because I could really go for about three pounds of applesauce biscuits and grits.”

My father, cautiously, said, “There’s going to be a lot of magic coming our way, Joanne. Eating—”

I lifted my head to give him a flat stare. “I. Don’t. Care. Having food in my stomach has never weighed me down when I needed to work magic—” which may have been because I never remembered to eat while running around on adventures, but he didn’t need to know that, because “—and even if it did, I’ve been running on empty for most of two weeks, how can it possibly have been only two weeks since that dance concert? Two and a half weeks? Since I shot Raleigh?” That was addressed to Morrison, who half smiled.

“Because despite your best efforts, Walker, the calendar only passes one day at a time.”

“I guess.” I kept looking in his direction, but I wasn’t focusing on him anymore. “Oh, hell, Morrison. It’s Thursday. Never mind Dad and Lucas. We’ve been missing for most of a week. And Aidan...”

Aidan had been pulling down power strong and focused enough that he wasn’t as wedded to arriving at the same times or places we were. For all I knew, he could have come back within minutes of us leaving. He could have returned to an entirely different location. For all I knew, he’d stepped into some already volatile location and dropped a massacre’s worth of death magic into it. If we’d been missing most of a week, we could be screwed.

“We need to get into town.”

Cherokee was deserted. It wasn’t like high tourist season anyway, when people came by the thousands to go to the casinos and visit the mountains, but at noon on a Thursday there should be traffic, people coming and going to lunch, little kids out of school, buses carting older students on field trips—the usual signs of life in a small town. But it was all missing. Petite crept down the main drag, no traffic to make me drive at a normal speed, and we all peered down side streets and into blank, black business windows. Vehicles were idle, dust-sprinkled like Petite, CLOSED signs hung on normally open doors, and no one was to be seen on the streets. It felt like a ghost town.

None of us said anything, because we all knew none of us could answer the questions we all wanted to ask. Dad was wedged into Petite’s tiny backseat, nose all but pressed against her window. Seeing the town like this had to be worse for him than me, and I found it disconcerting as hell. We passed a guns-and-ammo store and Morrison said, “Stop.”

I did. He got out of the car and, to my eye-popping astonishment, broke the store’s front window to let himself in. Three minutes later he came out with new ammo for our duty weapons and the shotgun, and a guilty expression. “I left a couple hundred dollars on the till,” he muttered defensively.

Grinning, I leaned over to kiss him, whispered, “Good thinking,” against his mouth, and got back to the business of creeping down Cherokee’s main street.

We all three saw it at the same time, glimpsed out of the corner of our eyes as we passed another side street. I hit the brakes, not that we’d been moving fast, and hovered my hand above the gearshift, not quite willing to put her in reverse yet. “Was that...?”

Dad and Morrison said, “Did you—” and, “Was that—” at the same time, making me pretty sure we’d all seen the same thing. I said, “What the...” and cautiously put Petite into Reverse. We backed up a few feet, all of us looking to the left.

A CDC truck sat at the other end of the street. I killed Petite’s engine and we all sat there staring at it. I’d never seen one except in movies. It wasn’t particularly menacing in and of itself, but the words blazoned on the side were by their nature scary: Centers for Disease Control.

There were no circumstances ever in the whole wide world that a person wanted to see a vehicle with those words in her hometown. In fact, a person never wanted to see a vehicle with those words anywhere, because the CDC was not an agency that fucked around. They were the people called in for anthrax scares. They were the people who maintained—for reasons I would never, ever understand—live smallpox samples. They were the people who went into Ebola breakouts, who fought the plague, who, for sweet pity’s sake, kept the live smallpox virus under lock and key within their facilities. CDC workers were goddamned superheroes, and any circumstances that required superheroes were not good circumstances for the local population.

“Walker,” Morrison said in a thunderous voice, “please tell me we haven’t triggered the zombie apocalypse.”

I said, “We have not triggered the zombie apocalypse,” obligingly enough, and Morrison relaxed a hair. I said, “Aidan might have,” and Morrison tensed up again, glowering at me in a fashion reminiscent of the tried-and-true Almighty Morrison.

My father, unable to believe we were making light of the situation and possibly a little afraid we weren’t, said, “The zombie apocalypse?”

Right about then the CDC guys came pouring out of everywhere and surrounded my car.