C.E. Murphy - Mountain Echoes

As far as I could tell, no one from the settlement had chosen to follow me. That was a relief. We had enough to worry about without adding potentially, and understandably, hostile natives to the mix. Renee, can you get us back home?

I can guide you. The power is yours alone.

I’d gotten used to Raven’s playfulness and Rattler’s snarky tongue. I was not prepared for a pedantic spirit animal. I shifted my eyebrows upward in a sort of snooty ooh-la-la response, and had the distinct impression a bug glared at me from the inside of my own head. Well, as long as between the two of us we could get home, I wasn’t going to worry about that aspect too much. Finding Morrison and Aidan could take top priority. I stopped a few times to drink from the river, wondering vaguely what kinds of interesting bugs were in it, and whether healing magic would flush them out or if I should be boiling this stuff. I guessed I’d find out.

I heard it before I saw it, a soft crashing through the woods. There were still deer and the occasional report of mountain lions in the Appalachians in my time, so I slipped behind a tree and stood as quietly as I could, waiting to see what would burst out of the trees. I was hoping for a puma, since I’d never seen one, when Morrison stepped out of the branches. He had a wary hand near his gun, and an intent expression on his face. I squeaked and whispered, “Morrison!”

His shoulders visibly relaxed and he moved his hand away from his gun. I scooted around the tree and hugged him as he said, “Walker. Thank God you understood me. I didn’t know if you knew Morse,” into my shoulder.

“I don’t. What did you tell me to do?”

“Head downriver.” He set me back, hands on my shoulders and his eyes as disturbed as I’d ever seen them. “Where the hell did you go? ”

“Oh. I was doing that anyway. I hoped you might think of it, too.” I frowned. “Where did I go? Downriver, just like you sa—”

“You disappeared, Walker. You turned north, your face went blank, and a few seconds later you...I don’t know what happened.” The strain in his face came out in his voice. “The air rippled. Not as badly as it did later, but it rippled and the sun jumped in the sky. I don’t know how much time I lost. But from the moment the air changed, you were gone. I saw your magic for a few seconds. I don’t know what it was doing, but it looked wrong. Dangerous. Like you stretched and snapped away. What the hell happened?”

Watching him try to maintain composure put stepping out of time on my short list of things to never do again, certainly not in front of a witness. I hadn’t thought about what it would look like, or what might happen to people moving through normal time while I took a shortcut. I suspected losing a few minutes was the least awful potential side effect, and that much, much worse ones could be in store. I’d cut maybe a couple of hours of travel time by doing the leapfrog. If I’d skipped a century, the ripple might have turned Morrison to dust.

It is likely, Renee said, and I prsaileaessed my fists to my mouth, feeling sick.

“I was in a hurry,” I whispered behind my hands. “Aidan was fighting the wights. I had to get to him. I’m sorry.” I was not about to explain how badly I could have screwed him up, but I would never, ever do it again. “I’m sorry.”

Morrison, bless him, accepted the apology with a nod and cut to the important business: “Did you save him?”

My shoulders slumped. “No. He tried saving me, instead, and the wights got hold of his magic. And I think I didn’t get him shielded well enough yesterday. I think the Executioner left a mark on him, and once the wights plugged into that...”

“That’s what happened with the valley? With the shock wave? I saw your power again—why can I see it now?”

“I don’t think you can, mostly. But it takes on a visible element sometimes. When I’m using a lot at once.”

Morrison looked relieved, which seemed fair enough. He wasn’t magically adept himself, and for all that he’d taken my gifts in very good stride, I doubted a lifetime of being able to see my magic at work was really what he’d had planned. “You were trying to stop that ripple. What was it?”

“A time-quake.” It was a terrible, stupid word, but I didn’t have a better one. “The Nothing, I told you it was born from the genocides on this continent, right? Right. It wanted to open that up, spread it around the modern day. And it turns out Walkingsticks—my family—have an affinity for sliding through time. So getting their claws into Aidan may have let them rip a hole open right back to the source.”

Morrison closed his eyes a moment. I all but heard him going through his paces, working his way around to being able to say, “Are you telling me we’ve traveled through time?”

“Um. Yeah.”

He opened his eyes again, expression very steady and eyes very blue. “To when?”

“I don’t know exactly. Somewhen between 1492 and 1831.”

“That’s a lot of time, Walker.”

“I know. Probably more on the 1492 end, but...your vaccinations are up-to-date, right?” He gave me a look and I mumbled, “I thought so, but I had to ask. My spirit animal says it’s before the sickness came, but I’m not sure how much sense of human time scale she really has.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. He pulled his hand over it, wiping the smile away, but it crept back into place. “You realize you sound insane.”

“Me? You’re the one who told me when I called and woke you up at 3:00 a.m. that I shouldn’t worry about my cell phone not working when I tried calling Gary, since he had been lost in time. I might sound crazy, but you’ve adapted to it. You adapted faster than I did.”

“Walker, after working with Holliday for four years, when you turned up with magic it was either accept it or leave the job. If you and I are here, why isn’t Aidan?”

“I don’t know. Every time I’ve gone hopping through time I’ve stayed in the same place physically.” Except that wasn’t true, as manifestly demonstrated just a few short hours ago, when I’d skipped through both time and space in my attempt to rescue Aidan. “Shit.” I stepped away, looking up the river like there would be answers somewhere in the soft haze. “Aidan’s magic opened the time loop, but if the wights or the Executioner were in control, then they may have focused on another locat anmewhion. Somewhere they could suck up a lot of power, pain and death. Then all they would have to do is go home again and release it.”

“What would that do?”

“Bad things. Humans are like rats in cages anyway. It doesn’t take much to set us off. If you dumped a continent’s worth of pain and anger on top of our high-tension lives already, I’d think we’d be looking at riots and murder in the streets.”

“Is that how it happens?” Morrison sounded genuinely curious, enough so that I looked back and wrinkled my nose.

“I don’t know. Maybe sometimes. Mostly it’s probably just natural reaction, something getting pushed a little too far and society breaking down. But it doesn’t take all that much to break it down, so if thousands of people were pushed just a little bit further than usual thanks to black magic with cruel intent behind it, then yeah, I think it could happen that way. We’re susceptible, and there are people and things out there who want to take advantage of that.”

“To what end?” Morrison shrugged when I frowned at him. “Criminals want something, Walker. To lash out, to have something they don’t, to protect someone, to prove themselves. They’re like anyone else, right? They want something. What do spirits or monsters want? ”