Mountain Echoes (The Walker Papers) (26 page)

Chapter Twenty-Five

That was it. Five of us: two shamans, one grieving widow, a desperate mother and a police captain with the magical aptitude of a horseradish. Sheriff Les watched us go, his gaze uncertain, but he didn’t join us, and the others were more strongly swayed by Grandpa Les and Danny Little Turtle. And by Aidan, for that matter, and the bitter thing was I couldn’t really blame them for trusting him more than they trusted me.

“He leaves every night at sundown,” Ada reported in a low, tense voice as we abandoned the caves to look for a sanctuary of our own. “He says he’s going out to make sure the valley is shielded from the searchers, but I don’t like him being alone in the dark. And how did the CDC know to come to Cherokee atnown. nyway? How did he know to warn us about them? It doesn’t add up, Joanne. It doesn’t add up.”

Worse, it did add up, but she didn’t like the sum it came to. Neither did I. “He always used to tell me everything,” Ada went on. “Now he won’t talk to me at all.”

That sounded a lot like a typical preteen, but the timing was too convenient for me to say so. Aidan would almost certainly clam up and stop telling his mother everything, but chances of it happening naturally on the same day he’d gotten pumped full of death magic was an unlikely coincidence. “We’ll get him back, Ada. He’s a tough kid, with a lot of power. He’s going to be fine.”

“You can’t know that.”

I stopped in the middle of the forest and turned to her, a finger of fire awakening in me. “Yes, I can. I know it because I’ll die trying to make this right, if I have to, and no way am I going to the extreme of dying and then
failing
to make it right.” It wasn’t very sound logic, but it was heartfelt.

Ada gave me a peculiar look. “You were always a strange girl, Joanne.” She passed by, following my father and Sara.

Morrison stayed at my side, both of us looking after Ada. “She’s right, you know. I don’t know about always, but you do say strange things.”

“Like I’m not going to die trying and fail? I don’t know, I think it makes sense. It would be embarrassing to fail if you died trying.”

“You didn’t say that to Sara.”

“Sara wouldn’t appreciate the hyperbole. Not that I’m being hyperbolic. But you know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do, but I’m not sure it matters, either. Joanne, how are you going to manage this? Even I can tell your energy is low, and you still haven’t eaten anything but some apples.”

“I should’ve asked them for some food.” I glanced back, then started walking again. “Oh well. Too late now. They probably wouldn’t have shared anyway, if they think I’m Raven Mocker. You don’t even know what that means, do you. Argh.”

“Your dad told me.”

“When? Oh.” When I’d been in Petite, trying to pull myself together, no doubt. Dad had explained everything about the scene at the hospital, and probably about Raven Mocker chasing Grandmother off the road. Neither of those topics accounted for their sudden silence when I got out of the car, but now, as then, I wasn’t absolutely sure I wanted to know what they’d moved on to saying about me. “Good. Raven Mocker isn’t something you defeat, Morrison. He’s an archetype, a demon archetype, like a trickster only malevolent instead of...flaky.”

“Like the Master.” It was guarded, almost a question.

I exhaled. “Yeah. I’m sure Raven Mocker is an aspect of the Master. I’m not sure if he
is
the Master. If he is I don’t know...you remember the banshee, right?”

“It’s hard to forget, Walker.”

“Heh. Yes, it is. Those murders interrupted a banshee ritual that fed the Master. My mother interrupted one twenty-eight years ago, too. He’s starving, and I’m not sure he can break through to this plane of existence when he’s this hungry. It’s why he needs the wights and the Executioner, to funnel food to him. So I’m not sure Raven Mocker can be the Master, because Raven Mocker came after Grandmother himself, see?”

“Did he?”

I frowned at Morrison as we climbed over a fallen tree in my father’s wake. “You saw him. We all did.”

“We saw an apparition. A manifestation of something you recognized as a specific Cherokee demon. But none of us touched it, Walker. None of us fought it hand to hand, not even your grandmother. It just chased her off a mountain. It may never have been something physical, just frightening. Especially to someone who believed she had a great deal to lose. You.”

That,
I believed was possible. The Master had been lurking at the edges of my subconscious for months. He’d come close to breaking free of the bonds that held him more than once, and had finally, briefly, walked in the Lower World just last week. I could believe the possibility that he had at least once gathered himself strongly enough to force an apparition into this world, even if he’d been too weak to follow it bodily. “I’m going to have to ask— Dad! Hey, Dad!”

Dad ducked under a branch, looking back at me, and that was what saved his life.

* * *

The bullet’s crack followed so close on my shout that it almost drowned me out. Leaves exploded above Dad’s head, falling in a rain of green and branches. Ada screamed. Sara grabbed her and hit the deck. Morrison snatched his duty weapon from its holster and spun so fast I expected him to be able to sight by the rifle’s still-bright muzzle flash.

Sight by the rifle. I shoved my feet under Morrison’s, slapped my hand on top of his head and commanded,
“See!”

Power rushed out fast enough to leave me woozy. I didn’t fight it, dropping to the ground so I was well and truly out of Morrison’s way. Two guns fired at once, and a scream followed.

It wasn’t Morrison’s. That was all that mattered. It came from behind us, in the direction he’d fired. It was a man’s scream, though, and I ran through the list of possibilities. Les. Les Senior. Danny Little Turtle. Dozens of others, but they were the most likely candidates, the ones we’d been interacting with. I barely got my feet under me enough to scramble back toward the screams, supporting myself with my hands as much as my legs. I was going to end up with a bad case of poison ivy.

It was Danny, which kind of relieved me. Morrison had taken him in the right collarbone, a debilitating shot that probably wouldn’t kill him. It was a hell of a shot, actually, since judging from where the rifle currently lay, Dan was right-handed and had no doubt had the gun against that shoulder. Sharpshooting with the Sight was apparently a distinct advantage. I thought I’d probably better not ever let Morrison, or anybody else, do that again.

Danny had gotten his screams under control and was making a terrible, high-pitched, breathless whining sound instead. I’d never been shot, but I was pretty certain I wouldn’t be able to stop screaming that fast. I admired his pride even as I whispered, “You damn fool,” and reached for healing power.

It started, sputtered, and failed. I yelled, not nearly as loudly as Danny was doing, but with far more frustration. “I’m sorry, okay? I’ll never build a rainbow bridge for a car again! Can I please have my power back now?
Please?
”

Raven, Rattler, and Renee all pretty much said, “Pblbblhtht,”— inside my head. As much fun as the crazy drive had been, throwing together an instantaneous air bridge had apparently taken it out of all of us.

I said, “Shut up, Danny, you’re going to be fine,” and Dad came out of the forest to say, “He is?”

“Of course he is. You’re going to heal him.”

“He just shot at me!”

“He’s sick, Dad. His heart is broken. His grandmother just died and he sees us as at fault. He’s a perfect vessel for Raven Mocker to guide. If you can’t forgive him for being weak, then build a power circle right here and start drumming so that I can heal him.” I couldn’t blame Dad. Barely two weeks ago I’d walked out on the woman I’d shot, unwilling and unable to heal her after she’d nearly taken Billy Holliday’s life. Nobody was perfect, but this particular burden was one I could shoulder if Dad couldn’t. I just needed a power jump.

A laugh broke from somewhere deep in my chest. If only I’d thought of it in those terms when I was back with Petite. I was pretty certain I could’ve gotten a jump from her sweet inanimate soul, the very image of my own. It was so easy to envision, the jumper cables locked onto her battery posts, me holding the other ends with a manic grin. Her big beautiful engine roaring to life, feeding power into my worn-down magic. A few minutes of hanging on, and my own engines would restart, battery coming to life again, and everything would be okay.

A single shot of sparkling purple magic arced over the mountains and slammed into me. It knocked me flat, dropping me on top of poor Danny, who justifiably shrieked with pain.

Healing power sparked, lit, and flooded into him. Fragments of bone were like debris in the gas line, swept together and tidied back into place rather than flushed out. Torn flesh stitched back together under the image of ragged hoses replaced. Within a few seconds, Danny’s shoulder was a massive black-and-blue bruise, the shattered bone repaired and the ruined flesh healed.

Mostly, anyway. I let go and shoved myself back a couple feet, stopping the flow of magic. Danny’s eyes were huge in the moonlight, his breath coming in short fast pants. “It doesn’t hurt as much.”

“Good. It should still hurt enough that if you take another shot at us it’s going to knock you on your ass and maybe rebreak that bone. I’ll fix it all the way once we’re clear of this, but I don’t have time for you to be playing hunter while we’re trying to hunt something a lot more dangerous.”

“You bitch,” he said in breathless astonishment. “You can’t do that. You’re a shaman.”

I seriously considered rebreaking his shoulder, and had to take several steps away to make sure I didn’t. “Looks like I can. Morrison, if you wanted to handcuff him to a tree or something, I wouldn’t hate that. No, don’t. God forbid we couldn’t find him again later and he starved to death tied to a tree.”

“How did you do that?” My father’s eyes were gold in the darkness, studying me with the Sight. “Where did the power come from?”

I opened my mouth and shut it again. Turned out I didn’t want to confess that Petite, the big purple heart of my soul, had so much of me invested in her that she really could jump-start my magic again, even from miles away. I would tell Morrison about it later, and maybe Gary, who would think it was awesome. But Dad belonged to another tradition from mine, and while I loved him, I wasn’t quite sure I trusted him with that kind of information. So I sent a mental apology winging toward Petite for belittling her role, and shrugged. “I told you. I do what I have to do, Dad. Somebody should find out if he’s got anybody else with hdy al apoloim, and we should move before—”

Before helicopter blades started cutting the air, the military alerted to a large presence of hot-bodied humans by their infrared scanners. The sound had to have been somewhere at the back of my mind for a couple of minutes before I started recognizing it and feeling the need to move, but that was a problem with being of the modern era. Helicopters, planes, cars, sirens, heavy machinery, all of that was background noise to the subconscious. It was easy not to recognize it until verging on too late, and Danny had provided plenty of distraction. By the time I finished speaking, vast white searchlights were flashing through the leaves, and a relentless loudspeaker voice was announcing that this was the U.S. military, lay down your weapons and surrender to their authority.

They had guns. They had missiles. We were never, ever going to outrun them. I gave my recharged power a little push, seeing how much of it there was to respond. Not very damned much, really. The problem with recharging a car battery was that if you had to kill the engine again, it was going to stay dead. Morrison’s drumming had gotten me back on my feet, and maybe I’d built up a little bit of reserves as we’d walked, but I’d shot that wad giving Morrison the Sight. Petite’s boost had basically started the battery once more, but I needed to be eyeball-deep in magic in order to keep my engines going. I didn’t really dare wrap us in invisibility, much less shield us, without some kind of external power source. I still needed some quality time with a power or drum circle. Morrison had my drum, but the whole “rest in the caves, replenish the spirit” thing hadn’t worked out so well, and I didn’t really think the military was going to let us convene for a little midchase drum circle.

The last thing I could think of—the
only
thing I could think of—was asking for a boost from the people around me. Even this wrung out, I should be able to borrow strength from Dad and Morrison, if we could distract the guys in the helicopter long enough for me to ask. I wished I’d thought of it earlier, and allowed myself exactly three seconds of self-mockery and recrimination for thinking Dad was traditional and hide-bound when I, too, had been so focused on the traditional drum circle that I hadn’t thought of doing something a little more outside of the box. Then I raised my hands in a classic surrender pose, and said, “Put your hands up, guys. We surrender.”

Morrison put his hands up, but said, “We do?”

“Not really.” The others put their hands up, as well, and I shouted out an explanation of what I wanted to do while the helicopter buzzed its way closer to the earth.

The result was sort of beautiful, actually. Energy began t
o coalesce between everybody’s upraised hands: Morrison’s familiar purples and blues, my dad’s less familiar greens and grays. Sara’s aura was ochre and red, and ragged with grief. Ada offered up an utterly fierce protective forest-green streaked with blazes of orange determination. We had the feel of a small coven, everyone confident in what they were doing, everyone able to share without reservation.