Mountain Echoes

Chapter Twenty-Six

The bullet spanged off the helicopter’s side, behind the large doors, just one superfast bright spark that disappeared as quickly as it came. The silence that followed was thunderous, never mind that there were chopper blades roaring through the air, never mind that the damned rifle shouldn’t have even been audible above that sound. I heard it anyway, and I heard the clang of metal against metal, and I heard the incredulous shock that silenced everything else.

In that silence I thought, Fuck.

I had bigger fish to fry. I had a mystical enemy out there, one who was driving Danny’s stupidity. If I didn’t go stop that bigger bad, then Danny Little Turtle’s name was going down in history as the guy who fired the first shot in the Second Indian Wars. And there I was, literally standing between one side and the other, metaphorically split down the middle myself, and it seemed utterly ludicrous that I was going to have to stop a war before I could go do my job. I was not cut out for peace negotiations. I liked hitting things as an action of first resort. I was supposed to fight the impossible things, not get embroiled in politics extended to other means.

I didn’t know when I’d triggered the Sight. As we’d started pooling our collective energy, since I’d been Watching that. But it was certainly burning full force now, and I could See the soldiers in the helicopter. I could See their indecision even as they readied their weapons. Firing on American citizens was not lightly done, but they had every right, every expectation, to protect their own lives, and Danny goddamned Little Turtle had fired the first shot.

There was a woman at the helm. She stared at me through the windshield with exactly the same expression she’d had earlier that day: hope and disbelief, with the hope so much stronger than the disbelief it made me want to cry. I said, “Don’t,” into the impossible silence. Just one ordinary word, not even shouted. Just, “Don’t.”

I Saw her hear it, Saw her flinch back half an inch and Saw her hand hovering above a panel that I had no doubt would launch our destruction. I took every ounce of energy my people were offering, and turned the air around us to shields. Nuclear bunkers, that’s what they were, and I put everything I had into making them visible.

The night lit up with white magic, shimmering and sliding around us in a half dome. It even covered Danny, which I thought was very generous of me, as I was feeling that throwing him to the wolves wouldn’t be a bad move.

Every single face in the chopper went awestruck, maybe terror-struck. More than one of the weapons began spitting bullets, a rattle of silver that smacked into my shields, crumpled, and slid to the ground. Everybody, including me, flinched, but after the first hail fell harmlessly to the ground we all got our nerve back and held it together, watching the chopper’s pilot to see what happened next.

I saw the shape of the words on the captain’s lips, and the sudden steely resolution in her aura. Hold your fire, she said. Hold your fire.

Indecision spattered across every face, but they were military, and theielal,

She took her hands off the flight controls. Lifted them very, very slowly, and cocked her head slightly, like she was saying “your move, lady.”

I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to give her a medal. I wanted to grab her and dance her around the forest, shouting my relief at hope and magic just this once overriding training and cynicism. Instead I relaxed some of the shield and wove it back into a net that I slid under the chopper, then up around the base of its blades, being very careful not to catch the blades. That would end badly for somebody, and I didn’t know if it would be them or me. I didn’t want to find out, either. Once I had the chopper wrapped safely in the net, I cautiously drew it down to the ground. Without the captain steering it in the other direction, it wasn’t difficult, just nerve-wracking.

After a minute it settled. The captain shut it down, then ordered her people to stay where they were as she jumped out to approach us. She stopped on the far side of the still faintly shimmering shields and stopped at ease, hands locked behind her back and feet in a wide solid stance. “Captain Sandra Montenegro. Who the hell are you? What the hell are you? And who the hell was shooting at my boys?”

The last was pretty obvious, since Danny was over there on the ground, moaning and clutching his rebroken shoulder, with a rifle barely out of his reach. I decided Captain Sandra Montenegro wanted the other answers more. “I’m Joanne Walker, and I’m a shaman. And,” I added thoughtfully, “I think you’re going to have to surrender.”

Montenegro laughed. She was pretty in the way military women often seemed to be: fit, strong-shouldered, strong-jawed, like she’d walked into a lot of fists in her life and didn’t figure she was done yet. I liked her. Of course, she’d decided not to shoot us all to bits, which would make me like her anyway, but she had a solid presence, a confidence in herself, that was highly appealing. “I’m going to have to surrender?”

“I’m sure we won’t call it that when it comes time to do the paperwork, but yeah.” My thoughts were skittering all over the place. “Look, Captain, may I safely say you’ve had an unusual day?”

She laughed again, a big open sound that bounced around the valley with no concern at all. “You could say that. How the hell did you do that with the car? Beautiful car, by the way. Your work?”

For a brief moment I considered throwing Morrison over and running away with Captain Montenegro. I swear to God the man knew what I was thinking, because he arched an eyebrow at me and gave me the slyest, sexiest grin I’d ever seen from him. I reconsidered my consideration, but I still beamed at Montenegro. “Yeah, my work. I’ve had her since I was—” This was not the point. I shook myself and tried again. “Magic. It was magic, Captain, and the mess down in Cherokee that the CDC is trying to clean up is also magic, and by tomorrow morning you’re probably not going to remember this right, much less believe it, but—”

“The hell I won’t.”

I paused. Most people confronted with magic turned a blind eye. They found excuses to explain away what they’d seen, or let themselves start to believe they’d imagined it: anything, in essence, to deny the metaphysical in the world. I’d had a lot of sympathy for that position then. Still did, in fact, mostly because magic was hard to believe in. Or at least it was for most people.

Captain Montenegro might just be a believer, though. I’d met a couple, people who weren’t magical themselves but who accepted its realism. There’d been a young woman working at a morgue when the zombies had risen last Halloween, and when I met her several months later, she still knew and recognized the truth of what had happened. There’d been the false FBI agents up in Mount Rainier National Park when I’d been hunting the wendigo. There were Morrison and Gary, for that matter.

For some reason I really wanted Captain Montenegro to be like them. It wouldn’t make her life easier, but it might make it happier, because she was the first person I’d ever seen who’d looked joyful when she saw the impossible unfolding in front of her. “All right,” I said happily. “You’ll remember it tomorrow, but there’s a good chance they won’t.” I waved at her crew, who looked nervously back at me. “Anyway, the point is, I really do need you to surrender, Captain, because there are about six hundred Cherokee out here and they all think the military is coming to arrest them, put them in quarantined concentration camps, and ultimately murder them.”

“If they pose no threat—”

“Captain.”

Montenegro actually shut up, sucked her cheeks in, then nodded. She was right, of course. If they posed no threat nothing bad should happen to them. There wasn’t a genocide in history that supported that theory, though, and the Cherokee had already been down that road. The people in this valley weren’t going down it again.

“So if you don’t surrender, they’re likely to fight, Captain, and if a massacre breaks out, it’s going to be your name that goes down in infamy. That’s the first reason you should surrender.”

“And the second?”

“Is that if a massacre happens it’s going to be because some bad magic has peaked. I really can’t afford to babysit you while I go stop it, so I need you to surrender and be on your best behavior under Cherokee watch.”

“Who’s going to make sure they’re on their best behavior?”

“I am.”

I just about jumped out of my skin and whipped around with pointed irritation. Sheriff Lester Lee came out of the woods with a sigh. “Sorry, Jo. I should’ve let you know I was here before. I followed Danny out.”

Still irritated at being surprised, I snapped, “And you didn’t stop him from shooting at us?”

“Some of us can’t see in the dark, Joanne. I didn’t know he was that close, much less shooting, until he fired. Everybody’s okay?”

“Yeah, but that’s not the point!”

“I think it is, Walker.”

I made a face at Morrison, but he was probably right, so I let it go and turned back to Montenegro. “This is Cherokee town Sheriff Lester Lee. He’ll, er, accept your surrender and make sure you remain safe.”

“Just one problem, Ms. Walker. How am I going to explain to my superiors how you took down a military helicopter?”

“Oh.” I looked at the undamaged chopper, then at Danny. “You stopped to provide humanitarian aid?”

“To the guy who was shooting at us?”

“He wasn’t shooting at you,” I said blandly. “He was deer hunting.”

“At night?”

“It’s all been a terrible mistake.” I kept the look of blank neutrality until Montenegro let go another one of her big laughs.

“I guess it has been. Remind me again why the hell I surrendered?”

“Because it was clear to you that no one here wanted to be involved in a firefight, but that they were in fear of their lives. In the name of peace between nations, you relinquished your arms and offered humanitarian aid. You’ll probably get a medal.”

“I don’t want a medal. I want a flying purple car.” Montenegro lifted her voice a little. “Put down your weapons, men. We’re here for humanitarian purposes, not to call down trouble. Come on out unarmed.”

I thought they were actually going to do it, until Aidan and about three dozen wights burst out of the ground below us.

I hadn’t felt them coming. I didn’t know if I should have felt them coming, but I hadn’t, and we all went flying as a result. Morrison, Dad, the chopper, half a dozen military guys, me, we all got flung into the air and came down in a rain harder than the bullets. The chopper crumpled when it landed, its scream of metal briefly drowning out the screams of the men it smashed.

The wind knocked out of me and I saw stars. No, not stars, after all: I saw wights, white against the dark night. They soared and pounced, driving burning fingertips against the foreheads of trapped bodies. Three of Montenegro’s men were dead before the chopper stopped screaming. First casualties of the Second Indian Wars, I thought, and staggered to my feet.

One of Montenegro’s men lifted his weapon and, with the same calm Morrison had shown a few days earlier, started methodically shooting wights. They went down easily with a bullet to the brain, but there were a lot of them and more kept popping free of the earth. I threw shields up left right and center, trying to keep the wights away from everybody on my side of the fight, and swore violently when one of the damned things laid both hands on a shield and sucked it into nothingness. Its cadaverous form filled out some, and power flooded from it toward Aidan, who soared thirty feet off the ground, spinning around in exultation.

The military guy with the gun, being no fool, looked upward when I did and trained his weapon on the boy in the sky.

I honestly didn’t know which of us hit the soldier first, me or Ada. She flung herself at him bodily and I punched a wall of air at him. He slammed back and forth like he’d been caught in a two-way tackle, and crashed to the ground. Ada sat on his chest, beating the hell out of him as she shrieked about keeping her son safe. I knew I should stop for her own sake if nothing else, but a wight burst out of the ground in front of me and I discovered once again how completely helpless I was against a thing that fed on my energy shields.

Shields. God in Heaven, but I was dim sometimes. My magic sword was useless, but it wasn’t the only weapon in my repertoire. The wight reached for me with a sizzling fingertip, and I lopped it off with the edge of a small, round, sharpened shield.

Copper, embedded with gold and purple. It was born of the Purple Heart medal Gary had won in the Korean War and had given to me as a protective amulet, and of the copper bracelet my father had given me when I was a teenager. It wasn’t magic like the sword. It hadn’t been forged by an elf king out of silver taken from his arm of living silver. It was a stronger and simpler magic than that: made of gifts from the heart and meant to protect a loved one.

I grabbed one side and swung it, Captain America style. The razored edge sliced through the wight’s throat, and my second blow knocked its head off. I lifted the shield in both hands and brought it down, vivisecting the head, and turned away confident that being split in half was as effective as a bullet to the brain.

The military guy had gotten the upper hand with Ada, but had a look of intense frustration as he held her off. He obviously didn’t want to hurt her, and her shrieks about Aidan being her son explained why she’d attacked him. On the other hand, Aidan was clearly a source of trouble, and military training said to take down the troublemakers. If it weren’t for the fear of leaving Ada totally vulnerable to attack, I might have tried knocking her out with magic just to remove her captor’s quandary. On the other hand, that would probably leave Aidan open to attack, too, which also was an undesirable scenario.

The whole forest was alight with undesirable scenarios, really. Morrison, Sara and Les were back-to-back-to-back, shooting wights from a three-point defensive position. The surviving military guys were, too, all of them concentrating on the ground game instead of looking skyward. Dad appeared to be scrambling around dead people in a panic.

Captain Montenegro was one of them.

I stared uncomprehendingly at her body for a few seconds. I’d just met her. She’d been so alive and so smart, so glad to embrace the world opening up in front of her, and it had killed her within minutes. There was a scar on her forehead, an ash mark left by one of the wights. She had to be burned before dawn, or she would rise as one of them.

Right then I hated magic. Hated it straight to the bottom of my soul, with a blind rage that went beyond comprehension. Right then I wanted to wipe all the magic out of the world, just so shit like this didn’t happen. I had gotten so many people killed. Marie d’Acanto. Colin Johannsen. Caroline Holliday. My mother. Captain Sandra Montenegro. And nothing I did seemed to stop it, no matter how hard I tried. People kept dying, dying because magic interfered with their lives. Because I had interfered with their lives. And I was supposed to be the good guy.

Calm locked into the depths of my fury and said, You could do it, you know. You could take the magic away. The Sight flared up, stronger than usual, and highlighted the animistic power in everything. The purpose in existence, the continuation from then to now, the strength of magic that flowed through everything. It was a vast continuous net running through the whole world, and I was good with nets. My hands clawed, gathering up those threads, ready to yank them all out and twist them dry. Power roared into me, reigniting the deep magic that I’d burned out with the flying car stunt. I wanted to finish it. I wanted people to stop dying. I wanted to stop being responsible. All I had to do was give one impossibly hard yank. I was faintly aware it would probably kill me, but at least everything else would be done too.

Morrison glanced my way, his eyes still bright gold with the Sight I’d set on him earlier. He didn’t hesitate, just stepped away from Les and Sara, letting them close ranks as he left the firefight and came to me.

The threads of life and light that I held ran through him, too. Tugged at him when I yanked on them, like I was pulling him toward me. His aura jounced when I did that, slipping a little free of his body. He stumbled, then straightened and kept coming. Even through rage and frustration, I didn’t like to see him stumble, so I didn’t pull again. Not yet, anyway.

When he reached me, he put both hands against my face and whispered, “Let it go, Joanie. Let it go. This is Kolona Ayeliski, not you. This is Raven Mocker, trying to turn you like he’s doing to Aidan. I can See it, Walker. Listen to me, and let it go.”

Then he kissed me, and my rage turned into tears.