Mountain Echoes. C.E. Murphy
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.