Mountain Echoes

Chapter Twenty-Seven

They didn’t last. We didn’t have time for them to last, but they were hot and fierce enough to make me let go of the terrible magic I was holding, to release the dangerous temptation I’d been about to give in to. The net faded, but the supercharge remained: I’d filled up again and had enough power to wield, though I had no idea how long it might last.

The gold faded from Morrison’s eyes and he kissed me again, then put an arm around my shoulder and pressed his lips against my forehead. “I know it’s not all right, Walker. I know it’s not okay, but it’s the hand we’re dealt. Stop the wights. Save Aidan. Show Montenegro’s spirit that you were worth fighting for.”

“The tribe is coming.” I sounded wrung out. “I felt them in the magic. They’ve left the caves and they’re on the way here. They’re going to end this. They’re going to start a war.”

“We won’t let them.” Morrison, in turn, sounded confident, even though I had no clue how he could possibly stop an armed, magic-maddened mob of hundreds.

Instead of asking, I said, “Okay,” because I didn’t have the heart to be told he didn’t know how to do it, either. I tried to pull myself together, looking beyond Morrison at the fight.

It was all going to hell. Les and Sara had run out of bullets and picked up sticks, which at least let them keep the wights more than an arm’s length away. The military survivor had given up and presumably clobbered Ada, and was now standing over her limp form, shooting anything that came near them. Dad, bizarrely, was standing several yards away looking serene. I had no idea what his deal was, and didn’t care enough to find out. And Aidan, who had never hit the earth again after bursting out of it, was still hovering about forty feet above the ground, body arched in an exultation of power.

The good news was there were only about a dozen wights left. The bad news was they were abandoning the fight and rising toward Aidan, spinning counterclockwise around him. I didn’t need the Sight to know that couldn’t be a good sign. The military guy sighted carefully and shot at one of them.

The bullet spanged off it just like Danny’s had done off the helicopter. I Saw a hint of its trajectory as it was deflected into a tree, and watched a puff of splinters explode out as it hit. “Cease fire, soldier.”

I felt very professional, or something, when he did, although his expression was highly dubious: Who was I to be giving orders, especially with his commander dead? I pointed at the drifting splinters. “That one bounced into a tree. If we’re unlucky, another one might hit one of us. Cease fire unless they attack us again.” I no longer sounded wrung out. I sounded preternaturally calm, which kind of worried me. It did not, however, worry the military guy, who looked somewhat reassured and stopped shooting wights. If only I had somebody being calm and telling me what to do.

But I didn’t, so I pulled it together and barked, “Dad, report!” Apparently having military people around gave me a brand-new vocabulary. Who knew?

Dad said, “Just another minute, Joanne,” like we had all the time in the world. I motioned Morrison back into formation with Sara and Les, the three of them shifting to make a protective circle around Danny, who at least had the grace to shut up during all of this. I was amazed none of the wights had gotten him, but it seemed likely he was more use alive and pouring out hate and loathing that they could scoop up and refashion into power for the Executioner.

Because it’d taken me a while, but I was finally cluing in: Aidan was by all intents and purposes missing, at this point. He had been since our little jaunt through time, and maybe since before that. The thing in the sky was shaped like Aidan, but it had very little in common with him except an ability to wield great power. Never mind the wights, the oncoming mob, the explanations to the CDC and the military: if we couldn’t reach that spark I’d gotten a heartbeat-long glimpse of, we were going to lose the boy. The rest of it mattered, but still somehow paled in comparison. “If I could just get my hands on him...”

“Use a net.”

Turned out I had a calm voice telling me what to do, after all. I shot Morrison a startled look and he lifted his eyebrows at me like “you would have thought of it eventually,” which was perhaps more credit than I deserved. I gathered power and flung it at the kid in the sky just as my Dad said, “Joanne, wait—!” a moment too late.

Aidan spun, caught my net in both hands, and whomped me all over the forest with it.

Trees splintered. Earth flew. I yowled. Power went schlucking out of me, my net exactly the right conduit to feed Aidan and his groupies even more magic. I let go of it, which had the effect of stopping the power flow, but also meant Aidan lost control of me as he swung me from one side of the gathering to the other. I was on an upward swing, too, and pinwheeled a genuinely astonishing distance across the sky before crashing violently into tree tops, branches, trunks and eventually roots.

I lay there wheezing for a little while, afraid to even check and see if anything was broken. It shouldn’t be: I was still shielded on a personal, physical level, but being bashed all over a forest still hurt. Perhaps it was my magic’s way of keeping me humble. It wouldn’t let me get battered into bits, but it was happy to let me know, by way of pain receptors, just how much more damage it was sparing me from.

Somewhere south of my feet, quite a considerable distance south, actually, a power circle sprang to life. That, no doubt, was what my father had been working on. That, no doubt, was what I should have waited on before trying to drag Aidan out of the sky. That, no doubt, would have been nice to know before I went all cowboy and got my ass handed to me. I sat up gingerly, whimpering as not-quite-broken bones settled back into place. Twigs poked me in impolite places and I brushed them away once I’d staggered to my feet. A deep breath and a cautious flex of magic washed the worst of the bruising away, but it refused to all fade. Teaching me a lesson, though I wasn’t sure what the lesson was. Maybe look before you leap, though I despaired of ever learning that one.

Since I wasn’t going to learn it anyway, I broke into a clumsy lope and headed back for the gang. It took longer than I expected—Aidan had thrown me a long way—and when I got there, I decided the positive way to look at things was to focus on the fact that Dad’s power circle was holding the wights and Aidan in place, not letting them spread beyond a relatively small circumference in the forest.

The negative viewpoint was that the entire top of the power circle had become a whirling black vortex that looked like a portal to another world.

Aidan was chanting. I couldn’t hear the words clearly enough to even assign a language, but it didn’t really matter. Where chanting and vortexes—vortecii? vortices?—vortexes, I decided firmly. Where chanting and vortexes occur together, bad things happen. I nudged the power circle, asking to be let in, though I wasn’t certain I wouldn’t be better off on the outside. Dad gave me a wild-eyed look that suggested he was in over his head, and I decided he was better off with me inside, even if I wasn’t. I slipped through, and Aidan’s shouting became clearer.

He was calling out in Cherokee, telling the story of the great things he and the wights had done, and inviting Raven Mocker to come enjoy the spoils of war. Not just inviting him, but laying down a path built on the pain and souls of the dead for him to enter on. The vortex strained at the edges of Dad’s power circle, and Dad gave me another frantic look.

I tried very hard not to look frantic back at him. I’d dealt with a portal-opening coven once. In fact, to my eternal embarrassment, I’d helped them open it. None of us, however, had been flying through the air at the time, and none of us, not even me, had been fighting at Aidan’s weight. A net was obviously not the way to take him down. The military guy with the gun had it trained on Aidan, but was looking at me, and clearly didn’t expect to be told to shoot. Even if I’d told him to, bullets were not going to make a difference at this particular stage of the fight. The only thing—the only thing—I could think to do was cut off their power somehow, and so far I was batting a thousand at not managing to do that. Trying to do so with magic only fed them more. Trying to do so without magic still gave them ordinary human lives to feed on. I muttered, “C’mon, Jo. C’mon. Be clever,” as I stared up at the whirling black pit of power.

Experience suggested that throwing a willing—and innocent, but I was going to overlook that requirement for the moment—soul into chasms of doom was one way to destroy them. Experience did not, however, suggest what to do if the chasm of doom in question was sixty feet overhead instead of conveniently at ground level. I could maybe just barely defy the laws of physics a second time in a day and throw myself skyward, but the thought had no conviction, and without conviction it wouldn’t work. Dad shouted my name, but I waved him off, still staring upward.

Aidan remained below the vortex, his hair purely white and his voice hoarse from shouting. Hoarse like a raven’s, like he was taking Raven Mocker into himself and we were running out of time. I didn’t know how we could run out of time when we had our spirit animals to help, spirit animals who could stretch and slow and speed up time, but we were running out and I had no answers.

My father, exasperated, roared, “Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick, get your ass over here!”

To the best of my knowledge, he had never used my full legal name before. He’d never called me Siobhán. I wasn’t sure he’d known he’d khow to pronounce it. Hell, I hadn’t been sure how to pronounce it until fairly recently, even though I’d looked it up dozens of times. Shevaun Grania, that’s what it sounded like, except coming from my father it also sounded sort of like the voice of God. I was hopping to it, getting my ass over there, before I even knew I was moving.

Dad put his hands out, palms up. I put mine on top of them instinctively. He exhaled a huge sigh of relief, and without asking or explaining, transferred the weight of the power circle to me. I hadn’t even known that was possible. He waggled a warning finger under my nose and stomped away, giving the distinct impression that I’d been wasting valuable time.

The circle fluctuated with the change of keepers, but didn’t fade in any way. I felt the strength of everyone inside the circle helping to keep it viable: Sara, Les, even Ada, who’d woken up at some point. The poor military guy was only putting out stress and confusion, not positive energy, but with the power circulating through me I could hear Ada’s murmur, her explanation to him about what he could do to help. I’d known she was a good woman before she’d wanted to adopt Aidan, but I was increasingly impressed with her resolute awesomeness. Morrison, like the others, was expending energy, but he was also carving something with a Swiss Army knife and a huge amount of concentration. Watching him reminded me of the carving he’d done in his own garden, the tiny figurine that had proven to be me, and my heart lurched.

Dad knelt in the center of the circle, taking up a number of branches that had been cut free from trees when the chopper went down. He pulled a knife from the back of his jeans, which surprised me in that I was surprised to be surprised. Of course Dad had a knife. He probably had an entire survival kit tucked into pockets and sleeves, because that was my father. He sharpened four sticks to deadly points in record time, then pulled a leather pouch out from under his shirt. I rolled my eyes at the sky because he was proving my point, but in rolling, saw Aidan again, and lost all humor.

By the time I looked back at Dad two seconds later, he’d taken a pinch of tobacco from the pouch, and Morrison was throwing him the thing he’d been carving: a small, rudimentary pipe. Dad packed the tobacco in and lit it with a match that came from the pouch, then sprang to his feet and strode from one side of the circle to the other, driving his stakes deep into the earth. By the time he was done, the pipe was smoking pretty well, leaving the rich scent of tobacco to follow him. He stopped in the middle of the circle, took a piece of black cloth from a pocket, and wrapped the pipe in it, giving it an air of permanence despite having just been carved.

The smoke created a drifting barrier inside the power circle, a secondary circle that reinforced the first one. Dad tipped his head back, blowing a deep lungful of smoke toward Aidan, the wights, and the shrieking portal. The first breaths barely touched the wights before they ripped themselves away from the circle and came, en masse, at my father.

It was all the excuse the military guy needed. The wights had taken themselves out of the shielding provided by Aidan’s presence, and the guy’s first shots took three of them out. For an instant they clashed together, chaotic indecision at its finest. Dad puffed another huge lungful of smoke at them and one shriveled in the air, collapsing into a dusty pile. Aidan’s chanting grew increasingly determined, and I struggled not to hop in place. I wanted to help. I wanted to do something. Never mind that I had no idea what to do and that everything I’d tried thus far had backfired. I wasn’t accustomed to being left holding the ball, or in this case, holding the power circle. Close enough.

As if feeling my impatience, Aidan’s shouting strengthened and the vortex sped up, testing the bounds of the power circle. I curled a lip and dug in. I might’ve been left holding the ball, but that didn’t mean I would let myself get sacked. Or something like that. Football metaphors were not my strong point.

Three of the wights had the good sense to abandon the attack on Dad and retreat to the safety Aidan offered. Less than they hoped, though: the moment they were close enough, he stretched his hands out and sucked them dry, gobbling up every last bit of magic that kept them functioning. Black light shot through the vortex, expanding it downward, since that was the only direction it could go. Aidan didn’t drop, though, only became more central to the expanding darkness. My heart started hammering in overtime as I wondered what happened when he became enveloped by the vortex.

Dad, in a voice much stronger than Aidan’s, began a counter-chant. He called on spirits I knew nothing about: men from the Lower World, a Red Man and a Purple Man. The Purple Man had a familiar feel to him, a Trickster feel that reminded me of Coyote. He came from the sky, dancing backward and covering his eyes with one hand as he shouted and teased at Aidan. The Red Man came from below, strong and generous of spirit, and drew arrows from his bones to fire at the vortex above.

One struck Aidan, and he fell.

It was a chance. I took it.

Aidan’s garden was shockingly vulnerable. Not surprising, I guessed, since it had been invaded by the Executioner and very possibly by Raven Mocker himself. The Executioner would have very little need to guard its own personal space, though I thought Raven Mocker had a lot more self-awareness. Especially if Raven Mocker was the Master, but that thought wasn’t worth pursuing. I could deal with the Executioner. Raven Mocker was a bigger fish to fry. I took a breath, trying to understand my surroundings, and put my money on Aidan’s possession being mostly Executioner: I had no sense of a personal vendetta, no active will beyond drinking down the available power. The Executioner’s hunger was only a funnel, passing what it took on to the Master, and what was left of Aidan’s garden had that transitory feel to it.

The walls had fallen. More than fallen. They had become ragged edges of a flat earth, with once-rich soil collapsing into nothingness while rivers of water poured over the sides. Every drop that passed wore away more of the garden’s area, and it ran relentlessly.

So did rain, pounding from vast black clouds against earth so water-laden it sucked at my feet, trying to hold me back. Dark shadows were illuminated by rapid explosions of lightning that struck time and again at shattered trees. Somewhere in there, I told myself: somewhere in there, a kid was huddling, holding a candle against the dark. All I had to do was find him. If the Executioner had no particular sense of self, it shouldn’t be that hard. It seemed logical that something without a sense of self wouldn’t think to disguise something that had a sense of self.

An eleven-foot-tall metal monstrosity of spikes and plate mail, bearing a sword larger than I was, erupted out of the darkness and put paid to that thought.

I nearly fell off the edge of the world, trying to escape it. Dirt crumbled under my fingers as I scrambled back to solid land. One of my knees dropped alarmingly before I lurched myself forward and crawled, then ran, for the garden’s center at s centetop speed. The Executioner lumbered after me, sending whole yards of earth falling away into the void as it ran. This was going to have to be a fast fight, or there would be nothing left of Aidan’s garden to recover. I got to what appeared, in the darkness, to be about as central a location as was to be had, and turned to face the Executioner with two fists full of healing power.

If nothing else, the magic provided light, but that proved less heartening than I might have hoped, since I could now see clearly how badly damaged the land was. I didn’t know how lush Aidan’s garden had been to start with, though I was betting it was in much better condition than my own. Even if it was as uninspired as mine to begin with, though, the fraying landscape had taken an appalling amount of damage. I breathed, “C’mon, kid,” and lobbed a ball of power into the Executioner’s gut, hoping to wake in Aidan a vestigial remembrance of what it was like to be one of the good guys.

The Executioner’s sword lit on fire.

“Oh, that’s just not fair.” The whole image was straight out of a twelve-year-old fantasy reader’s nightmare, a Frank Frazetta death rider of the apocalypse. And it was happy to murder me until I was dead, whereas I couldn’t afford to return the favor for fear of taking Aidan out along with it. Someday I was going to get to fight something and there would be no collateral damage, but this was not that day. Worried about Aidan or not, though, I drew my sword. I wanted to at least be able to parry if that thing came my way.

Which it did, a slow heavy swing that a sloth could have avoided. Good thing, too, because not only did it light the trees it hit on fire, but it also cut them all in half. Four of them. With one blow. I watched them slide to the earth, fwip fwip fwip fwip, and listened to the fire go out in a series of hisses and pops as the severed trunks slid into the sopping ground.

The Executioner was so ponderous it had to spin all the way around with the weight of the blow, which gave me time to watch the trees fall down and still get out of the way when it came back around. I ducked the next blow and ran inside its reach. It roared, dropped the sword while still wheeling from its second slash, and tried scraping me off its plate armor.

That was harder than it looked, given how many spikes decorated the armor. Ankles, knees, hips, for heaven’s sake, who needed hip spikes? Or a spiky belt, for that matter, or shoulder and elbow spikes? If it tilted its head more than two degrees left or right it would pierce its own brain with the spikes. On the other hand, all the pointy bits made a pretty good ladder, and I climbed its eleven-foot self in a couple of long strides. I’d dropped my own sword, but that was okay, because it was magic and I just had to call it again for it to appear. I bet the Executioner was going to have to bend over and pick his up, and I bet if I kicked its heiny it would fall flat on its face and stick in the ground thanks to all those spikes.

That actually sounded like a better game plan than the one I was trying. I filed it away for future reference, planted my feet on the Executioner’s spiny belt, grabbed hold of one shoulder spike for balance, and hauled its pointy helmet off. I expected to see Aidan in there, all big-eyed and alarmed-looking, like a tiny goblin in a great big mech suit.

Instead a black slash of nothing erupted from the armor and tried to suck my head off.