Mountain Echoes wp-8

by C. E. Murphy

  “It’s hard to forget, Walker.”

  “Heh. Yes, it is. Those murders interrupted a banshee ritual that fed the Master. My mother interrupted one twenty-eight years ago, too. He’s starving, and I’m not sure he can break through to this plane of existence when he’s this hungry. It’s why he needs the wights and the Executioner, to funnel food to him. So I’m not sure Raven Mocker can be the Master, because Raven Mocker came after Grandmother himself, see?”

  “Did he?”

  I frowned at Morrison as we climbed over a fallen tree in my father’s wake. “You saw him. We all did.”

  “We saw an apparition. A manifestation of something you recognized as a specific Cherokee demon. But none of us touched it, Walker. None of us fought it hand to hand, not even your grandmother. It just chased her off a mountain. It may never have been something physical, just frightening. Especially to someone who believed she had a great deal to lose. You.”

  That, I believed was possible. The Master had been lurking at the edges of my subconscious for months. He’d come close to breaking free of the bonds that held him more than once, and had finally, briefly, walked in the Lower World just last week. I could believe the possibility that he had at least once gathered himself strongly enough to force an apparition into this world, even if he’d been too weak to follow it bodily. “I’m going to have to ask— Dad! Hey, Dad!”

  Dad ducked under a branch, looking back at me, and that was what saved his life.

  *

  The bullet’s crack followed so close on my shout that it almost drowned me out. Leaves exploded above Dad’s head, falling in a rain of green and branches. Ada screamed. Sara grabbed her and hit the deck. Morrison snatched his duty weapon from its holster and spun so fast I expected him to be able to sight by the rifle’s still-bright muzzle flash.

  Sight by the rifle. I shoved my feet under Morrison’s, slapped my hand on top of his head and commanded, “See!”

  Power rushed out fast enough to leave me woozy. I didn’t fight it, dropping to the ground so I was well and truly out of Morrison’s way. Two guns fired at once, and a scream followed.

  It wasn’t Morrison’s. That was all that mattered. It came from behind us, in the direction he’d fired. It was a man’s scream, though, and I ran through the list of possibilities. Les. Les Senior. Danny Little Turtle. Dozens of others, but they were the most likely candidates, the ones we’d been interacting with. I barely got my feet under me enough to scramble back toward the screams, supporting myself with my hands as much as my legs. I was going to end up with a bad case of poison ivy.

  It was Danny, which kind of relieved me. Morrison had taken him in the right collarbone, a debilitating shot that probably wouldn’t kill him. It was a hell of a shot, actually, since judging from where the rifle currently lay, Dan was right-handed and had no doubt had the gun against that shoulder. Sharpshooting with the Sight was apparently a distinct advantage. I thought I’d probably better not ever let Morrison, or anybody else, do that again.

  Danny had gotten his screams under control and was making a terrible, high-pitched, breathless whining sound instead. I’d never been shot, but I was pretty certain I wouldn’t be able to stop screaming that fast. I admired his pride even as I whispered, “You damn fool,” and reached for healing power.

  It started, sputtered, and failed. I yelled, not nearly as loudly as Danny was doing, but with far more frustration. “I’m sorry, okay? I’ll never build a rainbow bridge for a car again! Can I please have my power back now? Please?”

  Raven, Rattler, and Renee all pretty much said, “Pblbblhtht,”— inside my head. As much fun as the crazy drive had been, throwing together an instantaneous air bridge had apparently taken it out of all of us.

  I said, “Shut up, Danny, you’re going to be fine,” and Dad came out of the forest to say, “He is?”

  “Of course he is. You’re going to heal him.”

  “He just shot at me!”

  “He’s sick, Dad. His heart is broken. His grandmother just died and he sees us as at fault. He’s a perfect vessel for Raven Mocker to guide. If you can’t forgive him for being weak, then build a power circle right here and start drumming so that I can heal him.” I couldn’t blame Dad. Barely two weeks ago I’d walked out on the woman I’d shot, unwilling and unable to heal her after she’d nearly taken Billy Holliday’s life. Nobody was perfect, but this particular burden was one I could shoulder if Dad couldn’t. I just needed a power jump.

  A laugh broke from somewhere deep in my chest. If only I’d thought of it in those terms when I was back with Petite. I was pretty certain I could’ve gotten a jump from her sweet inanimate soul, the very image of my own. It was so easy to envision, the jumper cables locked onto her battery posts, me holding the other ends with a manic grin. Her big beautiful engine roaring to life, feeding power into my worn-down magic. A few minutes of hanging on, and my own engines would restart, battery coming to life again, and everything would be okay.

  A single shot of sparkling purple magic arced over the mountains and slammed into me. It knocked me flat, dropping me on top of poor Danny, who justifiably shrieked with pain.

  Healing power sparked, lit, and flooded into him. Fragments of bone were like debris in the gas line, swept together and tidied back into place rather than flushed out. Torn flesh stitched back together under the image of ragged hoses replaced. Within a few seconds, Danny’s shoulder was a massive black-and-blue bruise, the shattered bone repaired and the ruined flesh healed.

  Mostly, anyway. I let go and shoved myself back a couple feet, stopping the flow of magic. Danny’s eyes were huge in the moonlight, his breath coming in short fast pants. “It doesn’t hurt as much.”

  “Good. It should still hurt enough that if you take another shot at us it’s going to knock you on your ass and maybe rebreak that bone. I’ll fix it all the way once we’re clear of this, but I don’t have time for you to be playing hunter while we’re trying to hunt something a lot more dangerous.”

  “You bitch,” he said in breathless astonishment. “You can’t do that. You’re a shaman.”

  I seriously considered rebreaking his shoulder, and had to take several steps away to make sure I didn’t. “Looks like I can. Morrison, if you wanted to handcuff him to a tree or something, I wouldn’t hate that. No, don’t. God forbid we couldn’t find him again later and he starved to death tied to a tree.”

  “How did you do that?” My father’s eyes were gold in the darkness, studying me with the Sight. “Where did the power come from?”

  I opened my mouth and shut it again. Turned out I didn’t want to confess that Petite, the big purple heart of my soul, had so much of me invested in her that she really could jump-start my magic again, even from miles away. I would tell Morrison about it later, and maybe Gary, who would think it was awesome. But Dad belonged to another tradition from mine, and while I loved him, I wasn’t quite sure I trusted him with that kind of information. So I sent a mental apology winging toward Petite for belittling her role, and shrugged. “I told you. I do what I have to do, Dad. Somebody should find out if he’s got anybody else with hdy al apoloim, and we should move before—”

  Before helicopter blades started cutting the air, the military alerted to a large presence of hot-bodied humans by their infrared scanners. The sound had to have been somewhere at the back of my mind for a couple of minutes before I started recognizing it and feeling the need to move, but that was a problem with being of the modern era. Helicopters, planes, cars, sirens, heavy machinery, all of that was background noise to the subconscious. It was easy not to recognize it until verging on too late, and Danny had provided plenty of distraction. By the time I finished speaking, vast white searchlights were flashing through the leaves, and a relentless loudspeaker voice was announcing that this was the U.S. military, lay down your weapons and surrender to their authority.

  They had guns. They had missiles. We were never, ever going to outrun them. I gave my recharged power a litt
le push, seeing how much of it there was to respond. Not very damned much, really. The problem with recharging a car battery was that if you had to kill the engine again, it was going to stay dead. Morrison’s drumming had gotten me back on my feet, and maybe I’d built up a little bit of reserves as we’d walked, but I’d shot that wad giving Morrison the Sight. Petite’s boost had basically started the battery once more, but I needed to be eyeball-deep in magic in order to keep my engines going. I didn’t really dare wrap us in invisibility, much less shield us, without some kind of external power source. I still needed some quality time with a power or drum circle. Morrison had my drum, but the whole “rest in the caves, replenish the spirit” thing hadn’t worked out so well, and I didn’t really think the military was going to let us convene for a little midchase drum circle.

  The last thing I could think of—the only thing I could think of—was asking for a boost from the people around me. Even this wrung out, I should be able to borrow strength from Dad and Morrison, if we could distract the guys in the helicopter long enough for me to ask. I wished I’d thought of it earlier, and allowed myself exactly three seconds of self-mockery and recrimination for thinking Dad was traditional and hide-bound when I, too, had been so focused on the traditional drum circle that I hadn’t thought of doing something a little more outside of the box. Then I raised my hands in a classic surrender pose, and said, “Put your hands up, guys. We surrender.”

  Morrison put his hands up, but said, “We do?”

  “Not really.” The others put their hands up, as well, and I shouted out an explanation of what I wanted to do while the helicopter buzzed its way closer to the earth.

  The result was sort of beautiful, actually. Energy began to coalesce between everybody’s upraised hands: Morrison’s familiar purples and blues, my dad’s less familiar greens and grays. Sara’s aura was ochre and red, and ragged with grief. Ada offered up an utterly fierce protective forest-green streaked with blazes of orange determination. We had the feel of a small coven, everyone confident in what they were doing, everyone able to share without reservation.

  In this case, of course, it was because we were going to get our asses handed to us if we didn’t, rather than us all being so much on the same page in terms of what we wanted from and for the world, but whatever worked. I spread my hands a little, expanding the gunmetal ball between them, and a net began to form, threads dancing from me to Morrison, to Dad, to Ada and Sara. Raven gave a shout of joy and took wing, bright spirit spinning through the net, and Rattler sighed with satisfaction as my strength returned. Everything was going to be fine. I could shield us, I couielall betweeld pin the helicopter down, I could do what was necessary to get us out of here, and then we were going to rescue Aidan and bring this thing to a close.

  Then Danny took a potshot at the U.S. military.

  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 vall
ey 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 theen,. 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.”