by C. E. Murphy
The world had disappeared.
Chapter Three
The valley’s heart looked like something out of The NeverEnding Story. Gray misty nothingness hissed and swam at its center, held in place by wards so strong they were visible without the Sight. Wards of white magic, white as only power offered up by many could be, and the many were men and women I hadn’t seen for ten years or even longer.
They were impossible to recognize, magic sheeting over them so strongly that their features were lost to it. I could tell that a steel-haired man stood at the northern end of the holler. He was the focal point, probably the oldest of those gathered. If you’d told me he’d been standing there since the beginning of time and would be there until the end, I’d have believed it. His presence was rooted in the valley floor, determined against the nothing. Others stood not just at the cardinal points but at the half points, too, seven more of them in all. Another two dozen or more hung back, not part of the power circle but not far from it, either. I took them in at a glance, but mostly I couldn’t look away from the nothing. The Nothing. It deserved a capital letter.
It strained at the wards, doing its best to break free. Malevolence boiled at its heart, an age-old anger with intent and desire shaping it. My muscles locked up, fight-or-flight dissolving into simple fright. No one should have to look into that stuff, much less stand guard against it. I wanted to run, and couldn’t make myself move.
“Joanne?” Sara touched my arm, making me flinch. I nearly seized her hand, grateful for human interaction, but I suspected she wouldn’t appreciate it. Or maybe she would, if the Nothing unnerved her as badly as it did me. “What do you see?”
“I see—” Oh. She meant what did I See, not what did I see. I shuddered. If it was bleak and scary without the Sight, I really didn’t want to see it with otherworldly vision. “Look, if I fall over, don’t let me roll into it or anything, okay?”
“…okay.”
I nodded, shivered and, despite Sara’s assurance, knelt rather than dare trigger the Sight while still on my feet. It would be harder to fall over if I was kneeling, but more relevantly, it would be harder to run away, which my feet were already trying to do. I even leaned forward and put my hands in the moss, bracing myself before letting myself See the world through a shaman’s eyes.
I’d told Sara the truth. I liked to get the lay of the land through ordinary vision before using magic, for two reasons. One, once I used the Sight, it was easy to overlook nonmagical things I might have otherwise noticed. Two, I was always a little afraid the astonishing light-filled beauty of the shamanic world would be so compelling I would never go back to normality.
Not today. The brilliant blue light of sap coursing through tree branches, the resolute deep earthy red-brown of the mountains, the very brightness of the sky, were all distorted, as if the Nothing at the valley’s center sucked them down. The shamanic wards helped, but as I watched it became clear they were merely mitigating the situation, not solving it. Their white power bent inward, as well, dragged into the Nothing’s gravity well, and under that strain, the southwestern point of the compass faltered.
Without hesitation one of the extras stepped forward, put his hand on the shoulder of the woman standing at that point and strengthened her segment of the ward with his own magic. Over the course of a minute, maybe two, his aura blended and joined with the circle as hers became more distinct and separate. She finally stepped back, dropping to her knees with weariness, and two of the others came to help her away and offer food and drink.
I croaked, “How long have they been there?” and felt, rather than saw, Sara shake her head.
“Since your dad went missing. It’ll be three full days in a few hours.”
“Jesus.” The three dozen people in the valley couldn’t possibly have held that stuff off by themselves, not for that long. Every elder in the Qualla had to be stepping in, and probably every youth with any hope or hint of power in their bloodline. Maybe even many who didn’t, but who could focus their energy in a positive way, as my friends had once done for me back in Seattle. Half the rez had to be in on this, to make it work. Most of them wouldn’t even be believers, because really, although there was a pretty good sense of community amongst the People, and a lot of people turned out for the festivals and things, we were all modern-day people in a modern-day world. Magic wasn’t part of most people’s lives. But they still had to be showing up in the holler to stand their ground, or the whole place would have collapsed in on itself already.
And yet they wouldn’t let Sara help. Sara who I knew had a spirit animal, a badger, because I’d helped her find it almost fifteen years ago. Sara who had some vestige of power because of that. Sara who certainly knew how to place her trust and faith in the hands of others, a necessary gift in a fight against something like this.
Sara who was a federal agent, and who could not be trusted.
I wanted to cry.
The black heart of Nothing seized on that impulse, enriched it, pulled it up, emphasized despair over possibility, and for the first time I heard the mountain sobbing.
It came from deeper than the power circle reached, came all the way from a different level of reality where a low red sun hung bright and hard in a yellow sky. It came from the place the Native peoples of America were born of, the Lower World, and it cried at having lost its children not just now, but in the always. The dark magic devoured them, had devoured them through the centuries, had taken them with smallpox and measles and alcohol, and came again now to take them in whatever new way it could.
Anger roared within me, an infantile response to an unfair world. I wanted to throw everything I had against the Nothing, throw all my power in its teeth and prove to it that it couldn’t take everything away. I wanted to soothe the torn earth and promise its future was brighter than its past, and to offer healing magic from inside me to calm its pain. That impulse, like the first, was seized upon by the Nothing. It tried to dig claws into me but instead skittered across the mental shields that had finally become second nature.
I jerked my hands from the soil and cut off the Sight so violently I shivered with it. Sara crouched beside me, a hand on my shoulder. “Joanne? What happened? You went all…blue.”
“It tried to kill me.” I shuddered again and shoved my hands through my hair, trying to scrub away the feeling that it was all standing on end. “It hooked right into my despair, but it couldn’t grab hold of the magic. Thank God for that goddamned werewolf.”
“The what?”
“Werewolf. Never mind, I’ll explain later. I gotta do better with the emotional shielding, but we’d be really fucked if it had gotten the magic. Sara, that stuff is…really bad.” I’d gotten to my feet while I gabbled, but I couldn’t quite get myself moving toward the power circle.
Sara’s voice went deadly neutral. “How bad?”
I’d heard that voice before, when she’d asked about her agents after we fought the wendigo. It was her preparing-for-the-worst voice, and when it had been her agents, she’d appreciated me not pussyfooting around the truth.
But that was work, and this was her family. I said, “It’s hooked into the whole history of the People,” carefully. “Not just the Cherokee, but across the continent. It’s gained strength from every genocide wrought against Natives, and it’s trying to reach forward to wipe more of them out. It’s, um…” I pulled a hand over my face. “Shit. Look, I just dealt with this in Ireland. I mean, like three days ago. It’s corruption in the Lower World and I thought it wasn’t as bad here as it was in Europe, but maybe it’s just…different.”
“Joanne,” Sara said in the same neutral voice, “what about Lucas?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know yet.”
“But…” she said, even though I didn’t think I’d left an unsaid but dangling at the end of that. Maybe I didn’t have to. Maybe having known me when I was a kid meant she heard them even when I didn’t put them there, or maybe—more likely—being an FBI agen
t made her understand there was almost always a but when it came to bad things.
I closed my eyes, wishing I had another answer, then opened them again so I wouldn’t feel like a coward when I looked her in the eye and said, “But if your husband and my father went into that stuff, we should both start getting used to the idea they’re not coming out.”
Sara regarded me steadily for a long moment, then said something that made me like her again, really genuinely like her, for the first time since we’d been teenagers: “No.”
She walked down into the valley toward the horrible Nothingness, and to my surprise, I followed her with a smile.
*
From up close, the eight men and women in the power circle were barely more discernible than they’d been from a distance. Hair color under the pouring white magic told me they weren’t all elders. In fact, from the apparent height and breadth, the person at the southern end of the circle was still a kid. The woman who’d been replaced was in her forties, and looked up as Sara and I came down the hill. Her face was drawn, but she pushed away the bottle of water someone else offered and got up as we joined them.
Rather, as I joined them. Sara might not have been there for all the woman cared, which seemed a bit unfair. I started to introduce myself, but she interrupted with “Joanne.”
Not a friendly sort of “Joanne,” but more a how-dare-you-appear-in-my-presence kind of “Joanne.” I blinked at her, utterly bewildered. “Yes?”
“I’m Ada Monroe.”
A small thermonuclear explosion went off in my belly. Heat rushed up, burning my face and setting my ears on fire. “Oh.”
I probably should have recognized her. She had silver threads in black hair Cin ho now, crow’s feet around brown eyes and twenty or so extra pounds, but she was the same woman she’d been thirteen years earlier. She’d been happier then, but then, she’d also just adopted the infant she’d been unable to have herself, and possibly more relevantly, hadn’t just staggered out of a power circle that had been heavily borrowing from her life force. I said, “Oh,” again, as the nuke in my stomach settled. “Hi. Are you okay?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m…oh. It’s my dad, Ada, not Aidan. Um. Aidan?”
She nodded stiffly and a thrill of pleasure shot through me, then muted under wondering if she’d kept Aidan’s name because it was similar to her own. “Aidan,” I said again. “God, no, Ada, I’m not here for him. He’s your son. Sara called and said Dad was missing. Of course I came.”
“Of course you did.” She packed a truly amazing amount of sarcasm into four words, which was probably fair, given I wasn’t certain when I’d last talked to him. I exhaled and studied my feet a moment. First Sara’s paranoia, now Ada’s, and I hadn’t hardly gotten past the Qualla’s front door. There were probably another half-dozen bombs I didn’t even know about just waiting to go off.
My feet seemed unconcerned by the possibility. I nodded, accepting their complacency, and looked up again. “Of course I did,” I said again, more gently. “And from what I can tell, what you’re doing here is helping make sure nobody else goes missing. I had no idea you were—” I hesitated, fumbling over the word. I’d learned a lot of them recently, words that meant magically talented: adept, connected, talented. I didn’t know which she would respond to best.
What she didn’t respond to well was the hesitation. “I’m not like you Walkingsticks, but my grandmother was a shaman’s daughter. I have some of the blood.”
“I didn’t mean—” I wasn’t going to get out of this alive, and stopped trying. “I’m here because I hope I can help.”
“Then what’d you come with her for?” Sara suddenly became a presence again, one that Ada could look down on. I half turned toward Sara, who held her jaw so tight I could see muscle twitch. Anger, less profound than what the Nothing had called up, did a little stompy dance inside me. Sara and I might not be the best of buddies, but she deserved better than a total shut-out just because she’d become a Fed. But from how she stared resolutely away from Ada and the Nothing, it was pretty clear she wouldn’t take a stand. Maybe she felt like she’d betrayed her own by going into the line of work she had. Maybe she was afraid they’d stop looking for Lucas entirely if she rocked the boat at all. Maybe she just wasn’t confrontational by nature, though she’d been happy enough to get in my face.
Why didn’t matter. She could take it if she wanted to, but I didn’t have to enable it. I turned back to Ada with my best butter-wouldn’t-melt expression. “Sara called to tell me that my dad was missing, Ada, and her husband’s missing, too. Why wouldn’t she be here? Besides, I’ve worked with Sara in the past. I know what a professional asset she is, and I’d think everyone would be grateful for a trained agent on a search-and-rescue operation.”
Ada snapped, “This is Qualla business,” and I, very softly, said, “And Sara is a Qualla agent. The government’s done a lot of harm, I’m not arguing, but if everybody in the Qualla turns their back on people who pursue federal careers, then there’s not much chance those people are eve Ceopne r going to be able to help, or in the end even want to. Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, Ada. Now, can you tell me anything about what’s going on here, or bring me to someone who can?”
Mouth set in a thin line, Ada pointed toward the northern end of the holler, then folded her arms under her breasts and turned away from us. I went where she directed, Sara catching up to say, semigrudgingly, “Thank you. That was a dumb thing to do, but thank you.”
I nodded acceptance of the thanks, but asked, “Dumb?”
“She’s your kid’s mom, Joanne. You really want her angry at you?”
“Sara, if she wants him to loathe me then I’m sure it’s already far too late for that. Three minutes defending you is not going to change anything, and she pissed me off. You deserve more respect. I mean, you’re what, twenty-nine now? And you’re leading investigative teams with the FBI. That takes a lot of ambition and dedication. It doesn’t—it shouldn’t—matter if you’re a federal agent. You’re not the enemy.”
My little rant had taken us around the Nothing to the holler’s northern end. Sara, bemused, murmured, “I don’t know what you’ve done with the Joanne Walkingstick I drove up here with, but I like this version better,” as we were approached by an old woman I recognized. Carrie Little Turtle, whose steel-gray hair was still twisted in the same relentless braids she’d worn almost fifteen years earlier when she and Les’s grandfather, also Lester, and three other elders had given me the shaman’s drum that currently rested on my dresser back in Seattle.
Carrie looked equally at home in jeans or deerskin, the latter of which she was wearing now, with feathers woven into the under-skirt. She also wore so many rings and bangles that I wasn’t quite sure how she could lift her arms. Like Ada, she gave Sara a faintly scathing look, but since I was half certain Carrie actually remembered the Trail of Tears, I was less inclined to put my neck out in Sara’s defense.
Sadly, she gave me a far more scathing look than she graced Sara with. “Where’s your drum?”
“…Seattle…”
Carrie clicked her tongue so loudly I suspected they immediately started discussing my shame in the next county over. “Well, I didn’t,” I started, then tried, “I mean, I wasn’t,” before finishing up in a burst of desperation: “I was in Ireland, see.”
“And they don’t use drums in Ireland? Never mind.” For a woman eighty years older than God, she had some fine talk-to-the-hand action going on. I subsided without even trying to speak, feeling like a scolded puppy. “This is a bad time to come home, Joanne Walkingstick. You should have come home a long time ago.”
My guilt did a quick reverse into belligerence. “Really. A long time ago or not at all? Because tell you what, Carrie, that,” I said with a jab of my finger toward the power-bound Nothing, “scares the shit out of me, and if you’ve got some way to deal with it that I don’t have to play along with, I might actually be okay
with that. I can just hightail my ass back to Seattle and all y’all can quiet the mountain down yourself.”
“Ah,” Sara said almost inaudibly, “there you are.”
“You think you can help the mountain? Stop that?” Carrie made much the same gesture I had, only somehow she filled it with derision, which actually stopped me cold.
There were two possible options. One was Cion”>“You t she genuinely wasn’t afraid of a boiling mass of Nothing that creeped me out so badly I was unconsciously doing everything I could not to look at it. If that was the case, Carrie Little Turtle was not only more of a badass than I was, but she was more of a badass than I could ever imagine hoping to be.
The other, far more likely option, was that she was every bit as terrified as I was, had no idea how to protect her land, her people, or their history, and had no intention of letting anyone see it. I bit back a response just as short-tempered as Carrie’s and eased the Sight on so I could take a look at her aura.
It spun with turmoil, earthy dark green and brown nearly overwhelmed by sharp bursts of red panic and bright orange throbs of pain. Her whole left torso was afire with orange, in fact, squeezing and straining her body, and her aura’s stuttering pulses reminded me of a faltering heartbeat. A whole metaphor rolled out of that in an instant, how the mountains were Carrie’s heart and this nothingness at their center was breaking it, that the stress reflected in her body was representative of what happened in the Carolina hills—
Then I got my English degree under control and realized no, actually, the woman was having a heart attack right in front of me. I yelped and shoved my hand over her heart.
Healing magic shot from me like it was desperate for something to do. Like the chance to heal Carrie was a chance to heal the mountain, though realistically I knew the metaphor wasn’t going to stretch that far. But the problems of age and stress, those I could deal with. Carrie’s heart muscle was old and worn out, arteries stiff with build-up. With a touch, I had the instant sense of how long she’d been breathing poorly, of how long she’d been growing weaker without fully realizing it.
