by C. E. Murphy
My bacon was, for once, not in need of saving, so when a white butterfly drifted through the darkness, I figured it was just checking me out, and probably indicative of a more traditional quest. That was good. I was down with tradition, for once. The butterfly faded, and only after the fact did I remember my last encounter with butterflies had made a serious stab at ending the world. My stomach clenched up and I tried to remember what other totem animals I’d dealt with. I did not want a parade of bad associations contaminating my quest for a third spirit animal.
Raven, who in the Lower World was much more real than in the Middle World, smacked me alongside the head so hard I got dizzy even with my eyes closed. I took that as an indication that I was probably making things worse, told my brain to shut up, and held my breath, like that would make my brain shut up.
It didn’t. Nothing ever made my brain shut up. It went right back to worrying about the various spirits I’d seen before Raven in the quest run by an evil sorceress. Rattler, with a sense of exasperation as great as Raven’s, let go of his tail to bite me. I yelped, but it did at least remind me that I’d seen a snake, too, during that particular ritual, and that it had turned out I did indeed have a snake spirit who was no more wicked than Raven. Possibly less so, in fact, since Raven had a teasing sense of humor and Rattler didn’t have much of one. So maybe if the horse from that first session showed up, it wouldn’t mean I was in trouble after all.
No horses showed up. No badgers or tortoises or rams had shown up during some of the quests I’d done for other people. No nothing, in fact: apparently the butterfly was just an errant wanderer, lost in the ether. Grumpy, I said, “This is getting us nowhere,” and opened my eyes.
The entire landscape was covered in walking sticks.
Chapter Six
I squeaked and shoved my hands against my mouth to keep it from turning into a full-on shriek. It wasn’t that I was afraid of bugs. Even if I was, walking sticks were such peculiar bugs that they moved out of the realm of Potentially Scary all the way into That Is So Weird It’s Cool, which wasn’t usually frightening. Even more, this was at least the third time I’d suddenly been faced with an onslaught of walking sticks, but there were zillions of them now, far, far more than I’d encountered on other spirit journeys. Purple foliage bent under their collective weight, and the ground shifted subtly as they moved around. It bordered on creepy.
They had not crossed the tiny power circle Rattler made. Rattler was eyeing the nearest ones like he thought someone had just provided the largest smorgasbord in history, and also like he suspected he really shouldn’t start chowing down on other denizens of the Lower World.
One of them was eyeing me as blatantly as Rattler eyed it. It was nearly as long as my arm—not my forearm, but my whole arm—and striped green and yellow, which made it stand out against the multicolored earth. Its legs were long enough to wrap around me, and I was reasonably certain that although walking sticks were nominally herbivores, its mandibles could take a sizable chunk out of tender body parts.
It lifted one spindly leg and tapped its foot on Rattler’s scales, just like it was knocking to be let in.
Way at the back of my head, a penny dropped. This was at least the third time I’d been faced with an onslaught of walking sticks. The other times had also been in spirit realms, and both times the bugs had gone away again with a sense of resignation. Of waiting.
And now they were knocking to get in.
I gently disengaged Rattler’s grip on his tail and put my arm out. The walking stick bumped its nose against my fingers, kind of like a big dog sniffing before deciding I was okay, then stepped onto my hand and traipsed lightly up my arm.
Eye-to-eye and nose-to-nose with a giant bug was not somewhere I’d ever imagined I’d be. Its eyes were black and shining, and its mouth really was big enough to make divots in flesh. Despite its size, it had almost no weight, which reminded me of Raven. Raven was huge, but bird-boned even if he wasn’t also a spirit animal, and his weight was always surprisingly negligible. Rattler seemed to have more oomph to him, but the walking stick was pure delicacy. It leaned in until its forehead touched mine, and a little spark of embarrassed recognition popped through me.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought of it when the bugs had come visiting previously. My last name was, after all, Walkingstick. I hadn’t imagined it was pure coincidence that innumerable stick bugs had decided to parade over me as I scrambled through the Upper World. I just hadn’t quite realized they were early-stage spirit animals waiting for me to be ready for them.
I dearly wanted that mind-meld pose to make everything cascade into clarity, sense and reason. I wanted to suddenly understand the stick’s purpose, to understand what it offered and why, and wrap that all together with my magic so I finally had a full grip on it. Raven had always been my guide between life and death. Rattler’s gifts were multifaceted, as variegated as his scales: healing, fighting, shapeshifting; he encompassed all of those aspects.
There was really only one thing left that I could do, one major power component that had been dogging me since before I was born. Something so big I figured it had to warrant a spirit animal of its own, even if I had no clue why a walking stick was the manifestation of that power set. It was so big and so absurd I didn’t even like putting it into words, but having just jumped back and forth around the entire history of Ireland, I was pretty damned certain that for some unbelievably stupid reason, the last of my phenomenal cosmic power set was freaking time travel.
I could not for the life of me imagine why anyone would be given the power to travel through time, even if it had become manifestly clear to me that doing so was more of a perspective-offering scheme than a “Woo hoo! I can change history!” kind of thing. I could not, in fact, change history. The timeline was pretty fixed, with only minor variations permitted. So far the best I’d been able to do was get an understanding of time loops that had been opened a long time ago, so that I could close them on this end of time.
“We are unchanging,” the stick bug said in a surprisingly feminine voice, and I sat bolt upright, blinking at her. She did not blink back, what with having no eyelids, but somehow conveyed a sense of sedate blinking anyway. I waited, but she didn’t say anything else, which made me have to think about what she’d said.
I wasn’t certain, but I thought stick bugs were a bit like crocodiles: an evolutionary path that got it right early on, and didn’t mess with anything afterward. I thought they’d been pretty much the same animals for tens of millions of years. From that perspective, unchanging and being associated with time travel made a certain amount of sense. I’d been able to haul myself through time by fixating on something as comparatively new as a Neolithic cairn. If stick bugs had twenty million years of unchanging evolution to draw on, they were probably damned fine focal points for time travel.
It made me wonder if some of the other animals whose fossil records were relatively unchanged were also time-traveling spirit animals. I was just as glad my last name was Walkingstick and not Sharkbait. “Right,” I said out loud, to stop myself going down that line of thought. “You’re...I mean, welcome. Welcome to our funny little magic family. It’s, um...it’s nice to meet you.”
A smooth talker I was not. But then, despite all my hopes, nobody had ever shown up with that Shaman’s Handbook I’d been asking for. Spirit animals, like everybody else, had to make do with my clumsy, if usually well-meant, expressions of greeting and methods of coping. “This is Raven,” I said to the stick bug, as politely as I could, “and this is Rattler. Guys, this is...”
Stick was a lousy name, and I couldn’t exactly call her Walker, because that’s what Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department, formerly my boss and with any kind of luck shortly to be my partner, called me. Besides, I had Rattler and Raven. “Walker” didn’t fit with that, alliteratively speaking. “Renee,” I decided.
“This is Renee the stick bug. She’s the last of our merry band, and...” My shoulders slumped. “Does this mean we’re going to do more time traveling?” I perked right up again, though, suddenly eager. “Oh, but maybe with you along it’ll be easier. It might be kind of cool if I’m not fighting against the tide so much. Can we go see the Library at Alexandria? There must be stick bugs of some sort in Egypt to cross-reference...”
Renee still didn’t blink, but she kind of looked like she wished she could. I wondered if spirit animals knew what they were getting themselves into when they signed on, or if like most people, only realized after the fact that something had gone horribly wrong. I took a deep breath, straightened my shoulders, and tried hard to look like a shaman she’d want to stick with.
No pun intended. I dissolved into giggles at myself. Raven flapped around my head in delight while Rattler and Renee exchanged expressions of despair. It was no use. I was never going to be the proper dignified medicine woman of legend. They would have to take me as I was. I got up, Renee still balanced on my arm, and bowed to the legions of stick bugs still flooding the Lower World. “Thank you,” I said to all of them, but especially Renee. “Thank you for putting up with me, for coming when I needed you, and for facing whatever hell you’re likely to go through with me until we’ve got this thing beat. I’m a terrible ingrate, but I do know how much I owe you. All of you,” I added to Rattler. He slithered around my ankles, effectively pinning me in place, but accepting me, too. Raven plonked down on my shoulder and stuck his beak in my hair, so I was spirit-animaled from head to toe.
It felt pretty good, actually. I felt pretty full of life and confident, which was a damned sight better than I’d felt facing the Nothing in the Middle World.
A Nothing that was still up there, but maybe now I had the weapons to fight it. I stroked Renee’s long heart-shaped head with a fingertip and she tipped her chin up to do something that registered as smiling at me. “So what do you think?” I asked her. “Can you help me snip that stuff out of time? If you’re unchanging, then maybe time doesn’t mean anything to you, so you’re not constrained by it.... Raven, can you take us home?”
He kloked with surprise, since I usually asked him to take me in and out of the Dead Zone, not the Lower World. But I figured anything that could transition between life and death probably shouldn’t be too stymied by mere world-walking. Nor was he, springing off my shoulder to lay down a path of yellow bricks with each wing beat. I followed along behind, Renee and Rattler fading with each stride, until I stepped back out of the Lower World and into the Carolina holler with no visible signs of having been on a spirit quest. I felt the three of them at the back of my mind, though, murmuring and examining one another, and, I suspected, giving me a good hard once-over as they decided whether I was redeemable.
The whole trip to the Lower World had taken about as long as it took for Aidan to back off from me by a couple of steps. I was never going to really get used to that: traveling within the space of my head while my body stood there in the real world like an empty puppet. It usually only lasted a few seconds—longer spirit journeys did, or at least should, involve safe territory and someone to watch over me—but it was always disconcerting to realize I’d gone through a transition while other people were scratching their noses.
Usually, though, nobody else noticed. Aidan, however, froze midstep, toes planted in the dirt and heel still elevated as he stared at me. Then he surged forward again, eyes full of golden fire.
This time, however, he slammed into shields that were strong enough to keep young gods at bay, and bounced off hard enough that he actually lost his balance. I snagged a hand out to catch his biceps, and kept my voice low. “Not twice, kid. You caught me off guard once and bullied your way into my garden, but not twice. First off, that’s rude. Second, it’s rude. And third—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it, it’s rude.”
“Dangerous. You don’t know me, and you don’t know what’s inside my head or what I’ve faced. For all you know, I’m set up with a guard dog at the gate, and the only thing that kept it from attacking you was me knowing who you were.”
“Attack? What kind of shaman would attack somebody?”
“One who’s on the warrior’s path.” I let him go at the same time he yanked his arm out of my grip, and he couldn’t decide if that meant he’d escaped or if I’d relented. Either way, he pushed his lower lip out in a pout that was all too familiar, and muttered, “I’ve never heard of somebody being on the warrior’s path. Shamans are healers.”
“Lucky for you I am. Ever met a sorcerer, Aidan? They use shamanic magic. It’s just corrupted. If you go blowing into somebody’s soul space like that—”
A disdainful sneer appeared. “Now you’re trying to scare me. It won’t work.”
“—then you might open yourself up to let that corrupted magic in. Or do you think that—” and I jabbed a finger at the Nothing “—is just something the earth spat out after eating too much spicy food? Don’t go making yourself vulnerable if you can avoid it. Having said that—”
“Why do you think you get to tell me something like that? You’re not my mother!”
Of all the conversations I didn’t want to have with half of Cherokee looking on, this one was close to the top of the list. But I’d already had it with Ada once and it wasn’t like the answer had changed in the half hour since then. “I know I’m not your mother. I am a shaman, though, and I probably have more experience with black magic than most. I’m sure I’ve got more experience rushing in where angels fear to tread, and in paying the consequences for that. Forget being careful because I’m asking you to. Be careful so your mother doesn’t have to worry about you.”
Aidan scowled like he thought I was trying to pull a fast one, hiding my own concern for him under the mask of the word mother, which could technically mean either me or Ada. I wasn’t, actually, because I wasn’t that clever, or at least not that manipulative. I was concerned about him, but my concern landed in the grand scheme of “Hi, kiddo, I accidentally let the Major Bad Guy know you existed, so along with trying to find both of our missing fathers, I’d also like to make sure you don’t get creamed by monsters” rather than what I imagined were Ada’s more standard maternal worries.
I looked at the Nothing, and at Aidan, and for once in my life realized I should probably tell him about all of the Master garbage that was likely to come raining down on him, rather than keeping it bottled up inside myself and trying to fix it all myself. I did not, however, think that the middle of a holler with half the town listening in was the time or place to do it, so I said, “And I was trying to say thanks, before you derailed me,” instead.
His scowl deepened suspiciously. “What for?”
“Rude and dangerous as it was, shoving me into the Lower World gave me a chance to find that last spirit animal. Which you knew as soon as I stepped out of there, didn’t you? That’s why you came at me again. Man, you really—”
He really reminded me of me, was what I wanted to say. I had certainly been as impulsive and angry as a kid, and probably wasn’t much different now. But wisdom reared its ugly head and I managed to stop talking before I said something unforgivable. “You really know what you’re doing. I wouldn’t know how to recognize somebody lacking a spirit animal if it bit me.”
Aidan gave me a sideways look, which was pretty talented, given that we were still facing each other straight on, and said, quite slyly, “If the spirit animal bit you, or if the person who didn’t have it did?”
“If it bit me I’d be sure it was there.” The conversation had turned completely nonsensical in three sentences, but we were both grinning, which was a great improvement. Maybe the kid was just edgy because of my unheralded arrival. Maybe he wasn’t quite as much of a punk as I’d been. Either way, I suddenly thought that maybe I could like this young man, and better yet, maybe he could like me. “
Look, this is as rude as you just were, but...walking sticks?”
His grin turned into a much more solemn expression, though it didn’t quite lose the smile. “Yeah. Yeah, it makes Mom kind of crazy, because she doesn’t really want me to be anything other than boring and normal, but at the same time she’s kind of proud, you know? I mean, if she wasn’t she never would’ve let me start training with Grandpa, and I started like half my life ago, so...”
“Gra— You mean my dad?” If it was possible for a brain to wobble and wiggle like a bowl of dropped Jell-O, mine did it right then. “You’ve been studying with Dad?”
Aidan shrugged with the insouciance only available to children on the cusp of teen-hood. “Well, yeah, didn’t you? I mean, he said you guys drove all over the country your whole life, and he’s been telling me about all the cool stuff he did, I mean, not that he called it cool, but it was, healing the land and—”
He kept talking, but I heard nothing more than Charlie Brown wah-wah-wah-waaah! sounds for a few seconds. For about that length of time, I couldn’t even see Aidan: my vision went kind of red and staticky, though I wasn’t exactly enraged. More gut-punched, more shocked and cold-handed and betrayed. Dad had taught me the Cherokee language when I was a kid. That was the only studying I’d ever done with him. It had been less than a week since I’d discovered he had magic of his own, or begun to suspect the reasons—now confirmed by Aidan—why we’d spent my childhood driving around America.
It went beyond “not fair” that Aidan was now studying magic with him. “Not fair” didn’t even begin to touch it. It was “why,” and “what did I do wrong,” and “did he just not want a daughter” and a thousand other black-streak thoughts dashing around the static Jell-O in my head. The ball of Nothing was roiling and pitching nearby, reacting to the depth of my emotion. Reacting to it more than I was, really, because I could hardly let myself touch on any of those bleak thoughts before bouncing off in pain. But I didn’t want the Nothing to latch on, so I stuffed the shock down deep, buttoning it up until I could take it out and admire it later. Aidan’s voice faded back into comprehensibility. “...knew you had magic too, so I thought you’d studied with him....”
