Mountain Echoes

Chapter Nine

Old Cherokee tradition laid the dead to rest by sunset the day they died, or the day after, and had someone remain with the bodies to make sure sorcerers didn’t steal the soul in the meantime. My recollection was that as a teen I had thought it was a supremely bullshit, embarrassing, hokey-dokey ritual that no one with any grip on the modern era would admit to participating, never mind actually believing, in. And to be fair, most people didn’t. That was why it was tradition, not modern practice. On the other hand, there were people who kept to the old traditions, and I was pretty certain at least some of the dead would be among them.

Besides, the forced perspective of the past year made me reconsider my stance to a significant degree. Now I not only didn’t think it was bullshit, but since the elders’ bodies wouldn’t have gotten back to town until just before sunset, far too late to bury them, I was also incredibly grateful that there would be someone watching over them. Even if it was just an undertaker, that would be good, but I had hopes that there might be a genuine vigil. I was pretty certain the bodies didn’t have any souls left to steal—recovering those souls by taking out the Executioner was going to be my job—but it was good to know they’d be observed and shielded from further desecration.

I supposed one very powerful medicine man might keep all seven of them safe, but it seemed more likely to me that if anybody was taking the old rituals seriously, that there would be at least seven: one for each body. I wasn’t surprised, when I got back to town myself, that there were far more than seven gathering for a vigil. Cherokee was a small community, and seven deaths was a lot to take in at once. A slow stream of vehicles drove down toward the high school. There was a natural amphitheater up in Cherokee County itself, where this kind of tragedy would be dealt with on a deeper, community-wide level later. But for tonight, the high school became the default location for large gatherings, just like it would be in many other small towns. I followed the taillights and parked my rented Impala on the outskirts of the lot, where it wouldn’t be boxed in, should I need to make a quick exit.

I stopped cold at the school doors, not because of horrific teenage memories, but because the last time I’d been in a high school, it, too, had been the source and gathering place of a tragedy. That had been the same day my shamanic powers had reawakened, and a bunch of teens had been murdered by a lunatic demigod. The terrible silence in the school had struck me: the murmur of shocked voices, the barely echoing footsteps in the halls, the arms around one another, and the blank helplessness sketched on the faces of children were all echoed in the devastated community now entering Cherokee High. It wasn’t something I particularly wanted to immerse myself in again, especially since I’d had more connection to some of the victims here. Not much more, maybe, but a little.

“Come on, Joanne.” Sheriff Lester Lee passed by, putting just enough hitch in his step to let me fall in beside him.

I did so, shoving my hands in my pockets and not quite seeing the hopelessly familiar, totally changed halls around me. “I thought you’d be in there already. I’m late.”

“I was filling out incident reports. The medical examiner has the bodies right now. She’ll be bringing them in later, after the autopsies. She won’t find anything, will she?”

“I don’t think so. Is there someone, a medicine man, someone, with them?”

“Of course. Is it going to be important?”

“I hope not.”

Les nodded, accepting that, and I had a surreal moment of wondering whether this was what life would be like if everyone took the mystical and magical as matter-of-fact. It wasn’t that I thought everybody in the Qualla would take it seriously, but I’d met more people here in the past twelve hours who were accepting of magic than I’d met in the past year. Most of the time I found myself stuttering around explanations that didn’t matter anyway, because people made up their own stories as soon as the magic faded. Les, however, was calm, cool, collected, and obviously not going to put this out of his mind. “Grandpa says you saved his bacon up there on the mountain today. Twice.”

“Only once. He was out of the power circle when this happened, either way. If I hadn’t been there, he certainly wouldn’t ha...” It finally struck me that Les was obliquely saying “Thank you,” and that arguing over the details was not gracious. I cleared my throat. “You’re welcome. He’s welcome. I’m glad I was there. I just wish...” I made a useless little gesture as we entered the gym, where hundreds of people were gathered.

I stopped and smiled in spite of myself. There was a cohesive look to the people gathered, a certain similarity of facial shapes, of skin tones, that I hadn’t seen for a while. Seattle’s Native American population was a lot smaller than the area’s historical settlements could account for. I’d unconsciously missed seeing a solid representation of the Native element, and seeing it again made me happy.

It also made me aware that while I’d resented being paler-skinned than so many of my classmates when I was a teen, as an adult it was clear to me that the thing that had really made me stand out was my bad attitude. There were people in the gym who looked like they’d walked straight out of three hundred years ago, but there were as many whose lighter skin had a sun-warmed ruddiness to it, or who had African influence in their genetics. Every single one of us still laid legitimate claim to Cherokee heritage. Too bad I’d been such a punk when I was a kid, and too bad I already knew time travel wouldn’t fix it if it could.

“You all right, Joanne?” Les, who’d gone on ahead, noticed I wasn’t at his side and turned back. “It’s all right, you know. You can come on in. Nobody’s going to blame you.”

“That wasn’t it.” Though it was a perfectly reasonable fear, now that he’d reminded me of it. I caught up again and we made our way through the throng to find Les Senior on his way into the music room that lay across the hall from the gym.

“This is where we will watch over them until morning. There are too many eyes in the gym now. Too much anger and hurt that a sorcerer could steal and use. The elders and the medicine men will take turns shepherding the dead and counseling the living. It would be good to have a Walkingstick sit with us,” he said to me as we went into the music room.

I blinked around at the room, mumbling about how it had hardly changed as a method of trying not to show my surprise at the invitation. Both Lesters waited with a degree of patience that told me I wasn’t fooling anyone, so I cleared my throat, then nodded. “Sure, yeah. I mean, I’d be honored. It should be Dad, not me, but...yeah. If you’re sure. Not everybody’s going to like it.”

The wrinkled corners of Les Senior’s mouth quirked upward. “They don’t have to. There are some advantages to a people who still at least pretend to respect their elders. Can you make this room a safe place?”

That, I was much more confident about. I nodded. “In fact, if we’ve got the time and some chalk dust, maybe, we could build a protective circle around the whole school. It wouldn’t hurt any of us to have that sense of security, not after today. Grandpa Les, I’m—”

“It was not your fault.” He didn’t do the same talk-to-the-hand gesture Carrie had used earlier, but the tone of voice was very similar. My throat tightened and tears burned in my eyes at the reminder. It barely seemed possible Carrie was dead, even if I’d seen her fall.

“I’m not sure it wasn’t,” I said hoarsely. “I’ve turned into a walking bull’s-eye lately.”

“Did you ask for this? Did you call down evil and welcome it into yourself? Did you cast it on your family here and gain strength from their sorrow? No. A target is not responsible for the weapon pointed at it, Joanne.”

“Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel responsible as hell for the...”

“Collateral damage,” Les Junior said, which I would not have done even though they were the obvious words. I wasn’t about to refer to seven dead elders as collateral damage, like I was a heartless military machine and they were faceless enemies, or even faceless allies.

“Fallout,” I said instead, but the other phrase hung there too. Both of them were war terms, and for the first time it actually hit me that I was in fact at war. That I had been all along, not just from my rebirth as a shaman fifteen months ago, but since my mother had given me up to Dad so I’d be safe from the Master for a little while longer. For more time than that, even, because I finally understood that I was the latest in a long tradition of warriors on both sides of my family, men and women who had been holding the line against darkness for thousands of years. I wet my lips and exhaled. “I’m sorry anyway. Whether it was my fault or not, whether I could have stopped it or not, this is horrible and I’m sorry. And I’m glad you’re okay.”

“So am I,” he said in a measured tone that told me just exactly how much of my guilt he was sharing. Survivor’s guilt rather than instigator’s guilt, maybe, but we were both up to our teeth in coulda-woulda-shouldas.

Sheriff Les took us out of it with the deft touch of a professional: “Grandpa, if you want to get a couple others to help you get the room ready, Joanne and I will go find some chalk dust and lay that circle. Jo, are you going to need anybody to help you raise it?”

“No, I’ll be fine by myself. It might even be smarter to keep other people out of it right now. That attack up in the mountains—” We left Les Senior and headed for the custodian’s offices, though I couldn’t really imagine them having chalk dust in this day and age. There would be something, though.

Les picked up my story thread, nodding an already established comprehension of what had happened. “Sara said it was a setup, trying to draw you in. Probably trying to suck you dry, too. That everybody else got caught up in it.”

I gave a terse nod, trying to figure out how that possibly made me not responsible for seven deaths, but set the thought aside. Wallowing was not going to help. “So it’s probably better for me to be the only target.”

“Why didn’t it take you down?” Les either had school keys or a skeleton key, because we went straight to the custodial rooms and he opened them without stopping to ask anyone for help. I raised my eyebrows and he looked slightly sheepish. “They haven’t changed the locks since before we graduated. I stole school keys when I was about fifteen and made all my own copies. There’s salt in massive buckets in the back corners. For the two or three times a decade when it snows.”

Despite everything that had happened, I laughed. “You were a criminal mastermind. I had no idea.” We lifted buckets, mops, long rolls of heavy colored paper, moved floor waxers and vacuums, and dumped a box of glitter onto ourselves before we managed to get to the salt. I brushed as much glitter off as I could, but I still looked like I lived in a snow globe as Les wrestled a dolly into place and we hauled two giant buckets of salt onto it. “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

“There’s a trolley over there, but we just piled about three hundred pounds of school supplies on it.”

“That was not well-planned.” We were both sweating glitter by the time we got four buckets of salt onto the trolley. Les banged something else onto the front of the trolley, the buckets hiding it from my line of sight, and by unspoken consent we hunched over the handles and took the most indirect route out of the school, trying to avoid being seen by mourners. I felt like I was fifteen again, in fear of the law catching me, and again, despite the circumstances, giggles kept cropping up. We finally got ourselves outside and straightened up like we’d successfully escaped, and Les flashed me a bright grin.

“If I’d known you were that good at sneaking in high school....”

I grinned back. “Who knows what trouble we could’ve gotten into. Okay, look, this is a lot of salt but it’s a lot of ground to cover, too. We’re going to have to be scarce with it, but it also needs to be a solid line.”

He scooped up the thing he’d thrown onto the trolley: a thin-nosed funnel about eighteen inches deep, pretty much perfect for laying down a salt circle. I stared at it. “That can’t possibly be meant for salt. I mean, in the snow you need salt to scatter, not make tidy lines.”

“It’s for repainting the parking-lot lines. There’s another piece that it fits onto for power-pressured paint, but I didn’t think we’d need it.”

“You’re a freaking genius.”

Les, modestly, said, “I am. How perfect a circle does this need to be?”

“The rounder the better, but it’s more about intent than perfection. The important thing is to make sure nobody breaks it when they’re coming or going. I don’t know how we’ll manage that.”

“I’ll get some of the deputies to direct traffic and assign someone to keeping the salt fresh where the cars are coming in. How’s that sound?”

My eyebrows rose. “Great. Won’t they think you’re insane?”

“Probably, but they’ll do it. Look, I can go set that up, but I can’t do it and help you lay the circle at the same time.”

“That’s fine. I can handle this. Thanks, Les.”

“You sure you’re going to be all right? You never did say why that thing up there in the mountains she nt>

“Because I have psychic shields to shame the Rock of Ages. I’ll be fine, Les. Go get the traffic situation sorted out.”

He went with only one last backward glance, which made me smile. He was pretty cute. I wondered if I’d thought so in high school, and concluded I’d been a moron if I hadn’t. And I’d definitely been a moron, so probably I hadn’t. Amused at myself, I filled the paint-dripper with salt and started building a circle around the school.

It was pushing midnight by the time I was done. People were beginning to sing inside, songs that blended from gospel to traditional Cherokee music and occasionally slid into something modern, poppy, and still somehow appropriate. I walked back around the circle, checking the consistency with the Sight—the salt glowed the same purposeful green that the school and other protective constructs did—and was satisfied. I took up a place closest to the mountains where the Executioner had fled. Nothing like literally placing myself between the people and the evil. I bowed in all four directions, then sank power into the land, asking it to respond and protect.

Magic zinged through me like fireworks. I’d only joined the power circle on the mountain; I hadn’t opened it. The difference between opening a circle with two spirit animals and three was astounding. It added a depth of awareness that made the air itself come to life, dust and seeds shining in the dark. I felt the age of the land, the solemn incontrovertible strength of the mountains, and felt how even as we ravaged the planet, mankind’s touch was still a light thing on it: it would endure, whether we did or not. It had survived cataclysms before, and would again. It would bring life forth again, carried in those seeds and motes of dust, and in time the scars left by humanity would fade and heal. It could easily cast me away, deny my hopes and leave my people open and vulnerable to the dark magic gathering in the hills.

But it didn’t. It answered, living magic rising from the earth to answer my call. Its green was so dark as to be nearly black, rich with age and confidence. It met my silver-blue and amalgamated it, comforting and strong, until I was the unknown spark that had started the fire. It would continue burning now, keeping those things within it safe from the world outside, until I asked it to come down. I would feel the people coming and going, and if corruption tried to slip through, I had no doubt I would sense it. I’d never had such a strong sense of the earth itself, or of such a connection to it. I whispered, “Thanks, Renee,” aloud, and felt the walking stick give a little nod of pleasure in the depths of my mind. Raven and Rattler felt smug, like this was much better, this was the way things really ought to go, and I grinned as I left my place in the power circle to go back into the school.

Les met me at the doors, his eyes shining. “You did it, didn’t you? The circle is up.”

“Yeah. Why?”

He tipped his head toward the gym, then took a sort of skipping step in that direction. “You should have seen it. It was like someone wrapped the whole place in a blanket. The mountain echoes cut off and everybody relaxed a little. I’d never seen anything like it. They’re calmer now, all of them. It’s like the air gave us a hug.”

I chuckled quietly. “That’s good. I’ll leave it up until they’re ready to be buried. Maybe it’ll help.”

“Won’t that wipe you out?”

“Nah. It’s like turning the key to spark engine. Once the engine is going you don’t have to keep turning the key. As long as the earth is willing to help, the magic is self-sustaining.” I followed Les into the gym, where I, too, could feel the decrease of tension. There was still a lot of sorrow and anger, but the fear had faded. That was a relief, since this many unhappy people powered by fear could turn into a mob very fast, and Les didn’t have anything like the resources to contain an angry mob. Well, unless you counted me among his resources, but that made me start wanting a holocaust cloak and a wheelbarrow.

This time as I came in, a ripple went through the crowd. Everybody knew by now that Joanne Walkingstick was back in town, and that I’d had something to do with what had happened on the mountain. Calming power circle or not, there were a lot of suspicious faces and hurt gazes as I stuck close to Les. “This was maybe not a good idea.”

“Too late now.” He led me through the gathering, his badge giving him just enough authority that nobody got in my face. Not, at least, until we’d crossed the gym and were about to go into the music room. Then a big block of a man put himself between us and the door, and folded his arms.

“I don’t think you deserve to sit with the dead, Walkingstick. You ran out of here a long time ago. You should go back where you came from.”

Les murmured, “Grandpa Les asked for her, Dan,” while I tried to figure out who the guy was. The name rang a bell, and I took half a step back to get a better look at the guy.

“Dan. Danny Little Turtle?” Danny had been big in high school, too, but he’d filled out enough to be mistaken for a wall by casual observers. He’d been a football player, a big man on campus, and I was the tall skinny walking chip-on-the-shoulder who showed up and wasn’t impressed. To the best of my memory, “Oh, God. I’m so sorry, Dan. I’m so sorry about your grandmother. I liked her,” were nearly the first words I’d ever said to him.

“So much you got her killed. Get out of here, Joanne. Go back to Seattle. We don’t want you here.” His animosity picked up followers, men and women who were less aggressive by nature but glad to follow a lead.

Les started to look grim, and I touched his elbow to ask him to let me handle it. His expression didn’t change, but he didn’t break into the discussion yet, so I took that as my chance. “First off, you’re right. I left a long time ago and I have a lot of nerve coming back right now. A lot more nerve, coming here, into your memorial services. I’m sorry for intruding, and if you don’t want me helping keep vigil, I won’t. It’s not my place.”

There was nothing like agreeing with somebody to take the wind out of their sails. Dan’s scowl got darker, but he couldn’t argue when I was offering to do what he wanted. I kept my voice pitched exactly the same way, just loud enough to carry around a group of people who had suddenly gotten very quiet. “Grandpa Les thinks this horrible mess isn’t my fault, and I wish I believed him, but I’m not trying to kid anyone. Even if it’s not something I did, it’s something that’s happening to bring me back here. I wouldn’t have come back if Dad hadn’t gone missing.”

“I’m surprised you did anyway.”

That was way too shallow to hurt: I cut myself deeper than that every day. All I said was, “Yeah, I know,” because while I wasn’t exactly surprised at myself, I couldn’t imagine anyone else being anything but. “I’ll do what I can to help here, Danny. I can’t undo these deaths. I hope like hell I can prevent more. And if I go away again when this is over, I hope at least this time I won’t be running away, and that maybe someday I’ll be invited back. It’s the best I can do. It’s not enough. We all know that. But it’s the best I can do.”

All that shamanic training was doing some good. I’d set Dan and everybody else on their ears, at least, shaking the foundations of what they expected from me. It was a good place to start, and for once smart enough not to push it, I gave Danny a respectful nod and said, “Thanks for letting me say my piece. I’ll get out of the way now. I don’t want to disrupt things more than I have.”

I went ahead and left through the doors we’d been heading for. Les and Dan both followed, the latter to make sure I wasn’t going into the music room. When I headed past it to the end of the hall, he went back into the gym. Les, though, caught up with me and said, “‘If’?”

There was only one if in what I’d said that he’d be asking about. “I couldn’t say ‘when I go away again’ without losing any possible street cred I’d just earned.”

“Ah. Yeah. I guess. I guess it was too much thinking you’d come back and realize everything you were missing, all inside a day.”

I crooked a smile. “Give it time. I haven’t even been here twelve hours yet. Look, I’m gonna do just what I said. I’m going to stay out of the way. Tell your grandpa I’m sorry, okay? But I don’t think it’s a good idea to push it with Danny, and there are probably others in there who think the same thing. They’ll be all right without a Walker in there.”

“A Walker?”

I sighed. “Walkingstick. I changed my last name when I left. Abandoning my roots, all of that. Don’t tell me you never noticed in the computer files.”

“I never looked.” Les had a funny expression. “Not on our files, anyway. I looked you up a few times online, but I was looking for Joanne Walkingstick. Guess that’s why I never found you.”

A crop of nervous butterflies awakened in my stomach. This didn’t seem like a good time to admit I’d never even thought of looking him up online. “I guess I didn’t think in terms of how changing my name might make me kind of disappear. But here I am now.” I spread my hands in demonstration, then nodded toward the gym. “You’d probably better get back in there. I’ll keep an eye on the power circle and if anybody needs me my mobile is, er, I mean, my cell phone number is—” I rattled off the number feeling silly, and mumbled, “I was in Ireland, everybody calls them mobiles there.”

“I’ll call if we need anything.” Les headed back into the gym and I watched him go, uncomfortably aware that his high school interest in me didn’t seem to have passed. Otherwise if I left versus when I left wouldn’t have mattered, never mind things like whether he could find me online. It all made me miss Morrison horribly, which was probably not in the least what Sheriff Lester would like to hear. I took my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and checked the time. One in the morning in North Carolina was only 10:00 p.m. in Seattle. I slid down against a wall and called Morrison, fingers tangled in my hair while I waited for him to pick up.

He didn’t. After five brisk rings, his voice mail invited me to leave a message. I sighed and said, “Hey, it’s me. I just, um. I miss you. Gimme a call if you get a chance, okay? I’m back in the States, I’m in North Carolina, I’m... It’s too much to put in a voice mail. Call me when you can.” I hung up, then went and did as I’d s di. I sighed promised Les I would—checked the power circle.

It was in fine condition, as I’d predicted. I stayed within it, but wandered the school grounds, breathing in the warm night air and listening to bugs sing. Probably it would’ve been smartest to try snatching a few hours’ sleep, but despite what I’d told Les, I wasn’t positive the circle would remain active if I paid so little attention as to take a nap.

Eventually I wound up in the mechanic’s shop, which was as close to home as anywhere in the world might be. I’d spent a lot of hours banging around in there when I was a teen, and the smell of grease and oil put me right back where I belonged. There was still a wreck of a stereo against one wall—it might have even been the same one—and I dug through a box of dust-covered CDs until I found a classical one. I put the CD on repeat and settled into a corner, letting myself drift into a semisomnolent state where the swoops and falls of Beethoven filled me with a slow-building exuberance. It wasn’t as good as a drum circle, but it did the job. I felt Rattler finally beginning to regain his strength, after two weeks of being put through the wringer. I retained just enough awareness to know nothing wicked struck from beyond the power circle. Hours later, the circle’s connection with the earth let me know that the sun was rising, and I slowly shook off the music’s power and got to my feet.

Everybody in the gym who was still awake had to be exhausted. I thought maybe I could run to the supermarket and come back with all the doughnuts in town. It was a cheap way to buy myself into the community’s good graces, if it worked. I left the shop and went back into the main part of the school, passing the music room on my way to check and see how many people had made it through the night awake.

A couple steps past the music room’s open door I stumbled, my brain catching up to what I’d seen there. I backed up, one hand already on the door frame for support, and the other one knotted over my stomach like I could keep sickness at bay until I was certain of what I’d seen.

The floor was littered with the vigil-keepers, whose mouths and eyes gaped in rigid horror. Above their unseeing eyes, fingertip-size burns were seared into each forehead. A few of them had fallen in ways that suggested they’d been running and had simply been felled where they moved, bodies instantly going into rigor mortis. It was so macabre and senseless that for long moments I just stood there, swaying, unable to see what else was wrong in the room. Finally, though, it struck me.

The elders’ bodies were missing.