Mountain Echoes

Chapter Ten

Saturday, March 25, 5:38 a.m.

From the outside. I had set the circle to warn against threats from the outside. I hadn’t thought to check for evil already within the school, and I wasn’t certain it would have triggered any wards even if it had. Not the way I’d set it up, anyway. The thoughts ran through my mind, splashes of cold and hot, while I stared at the wreckage in the music room.

I didn’t notice when I started moving. I just saw it happening from above, watched myself turn around and walk out of the music room like my body had decided to go on walkabout while my spirit stayed with the dead, struggling to understand how I could have prevented another massacre.

By not letting Danny Little Turtle push me around, obviously, but I’d thought we were safe and I’d thought he had a point. I would never, ever refuse a request from an elder again.

My stomach dropped and I looked more carefully at the bodies. Somehow, inexplicably, Les Senior was not among them. I didn’t know if he’d stepped out for a bathroom break or what, but he’d been spared a second time inside of twenty-four hours. For one heartbeat I was grateful, and for the next I wondered if he’d cut a deal with somebody to make sure he survived.

I shuddered. The motion snapped me back into my body, which was getting into the rented Impala and offering a genial wave at the guys maintaining the traffic patterns and salt circle. By the time I really felt like I was behind my eyeballs again, I was halfway out of town. When I figured I had a good ten minutes’ head start on any pursuit, I broke the law and made a cell-phone call while driving.

Les picked up on the second ring, his voice hoarse like he’d been talking all night. “Sheriff Lee.”

“This is Joanne. Something’s gone wrong.”

The rough quality left his voice. “What? Where are you? I’m on my way.”

“I’m not at the school anymore. The elders are missing and their vigil-keepers are dead.” I couldn’t think of a way to soften the blow, so didn’t try.

His breath hitched, then turned gruff with professionalism. He reminded me of Morrison right then, and I wished desperately that the captain had picked up last night. “They’re dead and you’ve left the premises? Joanne, that doesn’t look good.”

“Heh. I know. I know, and I’m sorry, but I made a huge mistake and I’m going to try fixing it before it gets any worse. The trouble wasn’t coming in from outside, Les. It was already in the school, waiting for us. Dammit!” That was twice I’d been sucker punched, and I was starting to get pissed.

“You’ve made a mistake by leaving, Jo. Please come back before I have to explain to anyone why you left the scene of a crime.”

“It’s not a crime.” It was, of course. Just not the kind Les was going to be able to do anything about.

“Joanne.” The professional edge was getting harder. “If you don’t come back I’m going to have to consider you a suspect. You kn— Jesus.”

That, I judged, was the sound of him getting to the music room. “Jesus, Joanne, what happened here? Where are the bodies? The—the first bodies, I mean? You don’t have them, do you?”

“No. Either somebody in the school attacked the vigil-keepers and stole the bodies, or...” I didn’t much want to think about, much less say, the or, because I was considerably more convinced of its probability than of someone making off with seven dead people and not being noticed.

Les, grimly, said, “Or what?”

I sighed. “Or they got up, killed their watchers, and left on their own.” I was in the mountains now, and wishing the phone’s reception would start cutting out so I’d have an excuse to hang up. I didn’t want to convince Les that there were seven undead running around the North Carolina hills. I wished I didn’t feel so confident of it myself. It said something about my life that undead seemed more likely than body snatchers.

“Joanne....” Les’s exhalation came over the line, and his words were measured. “Just come on back so we can talk about this, all right?”

“Sorry, Les. I’m losing reception. I’ll talk to you later.” I hung up, then swore creatively for about a quarter mile, and called Sara. “Go to the music room. Les is going to need your help.”

“Joanne?” Sara sounded fuzzy with lack of sleep, but like Les, she sharpened right up. “What’ve you gotten us into now?”

“A fine mess, and I’m sorry. Look, please don’t tell Les, but I’m heading back to the holler where the Nothing came up from. It’s the only place I’ve got to start.”

I heard her say, “Got to start with what?” but I was already hanging up. I tossed the phone into the passenger seat and put both hands on the wheel, breathing, “C’mon, little buddy, let’s see what your punk-ass V-6 can do.”

The Impala, which had as much heart as could be expected from a late-model automatic transmission, jumped from forty to ninety in a respectably short distance, and for a few glorious minutes I didn’t think about anything except getting there fast. The car’s tires weren’t quite wide enough to stick to the mountain curves as well as I’d like, but he and I knew each other well enough by the time we got through the lower turns to take the higher ones at satisfying speed. I’d cut my teeth on these roads, learning to drive both safely and dangerously well, and some things you didn’t forget. Driving was the one skill at the police academy I’d come up aces in, and sometime soon after I got back to Seattle I was going to have to make a little drag-racing confession to Morrison, who would never, ever understand the impulse. Neither for the speed or for the thrill of the illegality of it, though at least I wasn’t a cop anymore, so I would at least save the department that embarrassment if I ever got caught.

Not that I ever got caught.

I overshot Sara’s holler-entering-site by a good distance, heading farther up the mountain to see if a pull-out gulley I remembered still existed. It did, as a big chunk of raw earth and dust where somebody had once cleared the land for tobacco. I killed the engine, got out, and slammed the car door closed. The noise echoed off the mountains and down into the gulley on the other side of the narrow road. For just a second it struck me as the only sound of civilization in all of creation, and the old soft beauty of the landscape impressed itself on me.

The sky was misty gold and pink, with just enough clouds hanging on the horizon to hold the color. The trees were still black with night, not yet giving up to daytime colors, and down in the gulley, steam rose off water that was warmer than the early-morning air. It couldn’t be more than half an hour past sunrise.

Which meant that realistically, I had to be way ahead of a bunch of animated dead bodies. There was no way they might have gotten up here faster than I had. Zombies were not known for their speed.

I fact-checked that against every zombie movie in history and decided to ignore movies. My personal experience indicated that zombies were, as tradition had them, slow. They also stank to high heaven, an experience that couldn’t be replicated in film, but which ought to give me some warning. Except these would be very fresh zombies, which might not stink so much.

I was not helping myself any, and neither was the awareness that I was not armed the way I’d been at Halloween. I had my sword and my magic, but I longed for Petite and the small arsenal I’d built into her trunk recently. It wasn’t much, just a sawed-off shotgun, some rock salt, three pairs of handcuffs and two wooden stakes, which I filed under “just in case” and assumed I would never actually have to use. Vampires did not exist. Dam {ot d two woodmit.

I’d taken a look around the pull-out while muttering all that to myself. There were fresh footprints, but not much in the way of tire tracks, which meant one of two things. Either this was not the other way into the holler, as I had hoped it would be, or the locals had been going to a tremendous amount of trouble to keep Sara from finding it. Unless there was also a major moonshine distillery up along the trail, I couldn’t imagine why they would go to so much bother, so I figured it wasn’t the way in. I sighed and decided to leave the Impala there, and walk back down to Sara’s roadside entrance to the holler. It would keep the car from getting banged up by traffic driving up the mountain the way I’d just done. I locked the doors and headed for the roadside.

Carrie Little Turtle, moving at lightning speed, came out of nowhere and tried to rip my face off.

The only thing that saved me was the sheerly instinctive flight reaction of falling over backward because something was in my face. I screamed loudly enough to be heard the next county over and kicked a booted foot into Carrie’s belly as she leapt at me. She weighed nothing, all that baling wire and sprung steel turning out to be personality more than physical strength. She went flying over my head and crashed to the earth somewhere beyond me. I dug my fingers in the clay, reminded myself that zombies were slow and came to my feet with a fistful of dirt in one hand and a blazing blue sword in the other.

The other six dead elders spread around me in a half circle, their hair bleached stone-white and their skin only a half shade darker. Their eyes were eaten with darkness, blood red where the color once had been. Their fingers were grotesquely long, nails discolored and sharp, and each of their forefingers looked as if it had been burned. Just like the marks on the vigil-keepers’ foreheads.

“Not zombies.” I actually said it aloud, surprising them at least as much as I surprised myself. “Definitely not zombies. Wights. I think I’ll call you wights. Is that all wight with you?”

Three of them snarled, possibly in response to the pun, and showed teeth that had decayed into yellow masses of dripping bile. I took that as a no, but before I could think of anything else stupidly witty to say, they came at me.

I envisioned the handful of clay as carrying the weight of the earth itself, and flung that weight at the nearest wight. It fell, pinned down and screaming under a shimmer of gunmetal-blue magic. I was starting to like that shade. It appeared to be the color my magic took on when it was really working in harmony, warrior and healer together again for the first time at last. The wight struggled, but healing power trumped death magic this time around, and I felt like having the bright morning sun on my side was a win.

The second wight avoided my rapier with a deftness I wouldn’t have attributed to the undead. I mean, I’d been sword fighting for almost a year now, and I’d skewered a thing or two in my time. Even with pinning one wight down magically, I could manage a lunge and thrust. But the second wight sucked its belly in and twitched to the side like it was invested with a rattlesnake spirit, too, lending it speed it had no native right to.

And that left the third one to jump on my head.

I went down under its weight, shouting and swearing. Its nails scrabbled at my shields, unable to break through, and for the umpteenth time in a week I cast a rueful thanks toward the werewolf whose attack had finally forced me to permanently activate those shields. I wasn’t exactly invulnerable, but I was a whole lot harder to hurt now, which made this kind of fight a little less scary.

Still, there were seven of them and one of me. Shields were great, but if they decided to work together, I could be drawn and quartered before I blinked. I forgot about pinning the one monster down and shoved my left hand upward, willing magic to take a physical, concussive form.

The wight on top of me blew upward like it had been caught in Old Faithful and went spinning off to crash against the mountain somewhere. The remaining four closed in all at once. I threw magic in quick blasts, catching them repeatedly and knocking them back, but they kept getting up and coming at me again. They sauntered around my swordplay like I was a kid with a stick. After a minute or three, Carrie and the other one I’d blown off joined the others, so I was surrounded and starting to feel like the hapless kung fu student in the movie, right before everything comes together and she suddenly kicks everybody’s ass.

Except instead of kicking ass, I was slowly wearing down. That was almost entirely new territory for me. I was accustomed to drawing ridiculously deeply on my own strength, without the need for a power circle. Moreover, I’d leveled up in the past couple weeks, gaining more access to greater power. There was no way a bunch of undead monsters should be able to wear me down so fast. But not only was I starting to stumble, it seemed like they were getting faster and stronger with every hit they took.

A little belatedly, I realized that these things had been created by somebody sucking all the essential force out of seven people, and that throwing bolt after bolt of life magic into them was probably not the best way to defeat them.

For just an instant I wished the snarky little voice in the back of my head was still there. The one that told me when I was being an utter ass, and when I was making really stupid mistakes. Unfortunately, that voice had been the lingering ghost of a much younger me, and she and I had fully integrated now. All I had left was my own voice muttering, “Moron,” and somehow it just didn’t have the same ring to it. I reined in the magic and even drew it out of the sword, so it was just me and a silver rapier against seven wights on a mountainside.

It was the moment they’d been waiting for. They moved as one, so fast I could barely see them. One actually sacrificed itself, leaping belly-first onto my sword. It slid all the way to the hilt, wrapped its long-fingered hands around my wrist, and held on.

Like Carrie, it didn’t weigh very much, but it didn’t have to weigh a lot in order to completely inconvenience me. Apparently being skewered by a relatively ordinary sword wasn’t enough to hurt an undead, never mind kill it, because its grip on my wrist didn’t loosen at all. I couldn’t shake the thing off, and while I was trying, five others did their best to tear me apart. One jumped on my back and wrapped its arm around my throat, going for a rear naked choke hold. I thrust the idea of a fender between its arm and my throat, creating a little more barrier, strengthening my shields there a little, but then another one started gnawing on my ankle and I started to discover inherent shields were one thing, but fighting half a dozen enemies at once were another. I ran backward as best I could, planning to smash the one on my back against the mountain. Instead I tripped on the one chewing my ankle and fell over.

On the positive side, while I didn’t think it was possible to knock a dead man breathless, the impact did at least cause the wight to loosen its grip around my neck. I kicked frantically and rolled away, feeling the earth rumble beneath me. There was a vehicle on the mountain somewhere, a huge roaring V-8 engine like Petite’s eating up the road. I thought it was a kind of nice sound to die by, and surged to my knees against the weight of two more wights pulling me back toward the ground. None of my spirit animals were about strength. Rattler was fast, Raven was clever, Renee was...timey-wimey-wibbly-wobbly, as best I could tell. I needed a freaking bull to draw on.

Or a burst of healing magic used entirely on myself, rather than shoved out into the world. I’d never done that before. It was worth a shot. I concentrated on the idea of a turbo thruster, where the stoked-up, over-oxygenated engine was the muscles in my arms. Blue fire lit up in my biceps, triceps and deltoids. I bellowed from the bottom of my diaphragm, using all that focused energy to fling the wight on my sword upward. Straight up, with the intent to not just dislodge it, but toss it halfway across the mountains.

It would have worked better if the damned thing hadn’t still been clinging to my wrist like a leech, but its unnaturally long fingers lost their grip and I shook the sword free. The wight flopped over instead of flying off, and dragged my arm right back down with its weight. But I was now firing blue power on all muscular cylinders, and bashed my left hand into its face. It drove straight into the earth. I surged to my feet, twitching with the need to act and trying without much success to fight down an unholy glee. This had to be what Olympic athletes felt like at the top of their game: purely unstoppable, fully in their bodies, utterly certain of the physical response they would achieve.

I bet Olympic athletes hardly ever had wights shove a fingertip against their foreheads and begin to siphon off their physical prowess. The wight’s blank face curdled into a hideous smile, and beyond it I saw the others, including Carrie, coming toward me for a final time. My shields slipped and scrambled even as I fundamentally understood what was happening: I was pouring so much power into my own body that there was bleed-off, enough that the monsters could suck some of it up as it spilled out of the shields. And I’d overloaded myself just like a nitroed-up engine: it wasn’t going to come down until the fuel ran out. I had a lot of fuel for them to burn through. I hated to think what they would do with it, once I was depleted and they were all topped up.

My vision got woozy, way faster than I’d have thought possible, and I had the utterly childish thought “this is not fair!” before I dropped to my knees, wondering faintly how I was going to get out of this one.

Petite, my big, beloved 1969 Boss 302 Mustang, custom purple paint job and Washington State vanity plates declaring her name, hit the brakes behind me, spun a flawless 180 in a spray of red dust, and came to a shuddering stop not ten inches from my nose.

Morrison flung her door open, stood up with his duty weapon in hand, and shot Carrie Little Turtle between the eyes.