C.E. Murphy - Mountain Echoes

Dad answered the question without meaning to. “You’ll want to go, Jo...anne.”

Jo. The nickname my father had used for me all my life, no matter how much I protested. He was Joe, I was Jo, like I was some not-quite-good-enough not-a-boy knockoff. I’d come around to rather liking it since Gary started using it, but it still left a mark when Dad said it. He could keep right on calling me Joanne forever, as far as I was concerned. I got hung up on that instead of thinking about why Dad thought I should go back to the holler I’d once er koff. I’shared with Lucas. It was better that way.

Dad went back to talking to Morrison, since I was clearly not going to participate in this conversation. “He camped overnight, and I think he must have decided to find another route home. It took him through the Nothing Holler.” There was no doubt in his voice that we knew what he was talking about. We were here, after all, on the wrong end of time, and we’d gotten here somehow. “His trail led right into it. I followed, but I was too late. It came out here, and I think he must have died before he even knew what had happened. I’m sorry, Joanne. I know you liked him.”

“I barely knew him. Sara is going to be destroyed.” It was pure displacement and I knew it, but I had to do something that would let me get on my feet again. If shoving Lucas’s death into a box was what it took, that’s what I would do. Later I would let myself wonder if Aidan had known him at all, and what the news would do to him. I shut that thought down. Later.

It took everything I had to get up. Morrison put a hand under my elbow, supporting me, and it took everything I had not to shake him off, too, which wasn’t at all fair to him. My jeans were filthy with blood and mud, and my hands were only clean in the spots where tears had fallen. The coat, the ridiculous gleaming white coat, still gleamed white, unaffected by the mess I’d pressed it against. That was what good guys did, wore white. Made themselves targets, so no one else would get shot at.

Lucas Isaac had not deserved to get shot down, and I was going to wreak some unholy vengeance in his name.

“How did you get here, Jo?”

I snarled, “Joanne,” and saw Morrison’s surprise as much as Dad’s recoil as I continued, still snarling. “The Nothing killed Carrie Little Turtle and six, no, thirteen others. At least half of them rose again as wights. They kidnapped Aidan—” which was playing fast and loose with accuracy but was close enough for government work “—and when Morrison and I went after him they used Aidan’s power to open a window to this place. Morrison and I got sucked in, but we weren’t tied into the death magic here, so we ended up in a different location. It took us three days to get here. And all that time Aidan has been sucking down death magic. When everybody here is dead, they’re going back to the future—” and I had been trying so hard to avoid that phrase “—and they’re going to release it. They’re trying to finish the job Columbus and Ponce de León started. They want to wipe out the Native Americans, and anybody else they can take along with them.”

“Why?”

“Because they thrive on chaos and pain, and the Native genocides are the biggest thing on this continent for them to feed off. If they restart them in our time, and draw more people into ethnic wars or psycho survivalist modes, they’ll keep gaining power. This is Mom’s enemy, Dad. This is the Master. This is his attempt at a checkmate. He’s trying for an endgame, and there is no way he gets to have that on this territory. I’m going to clean this mess up and then I’m taking it home and I’m going to finish this shit.”

Morrison made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a cheer, cut off deep in his throat. My father, less inspired, stared at me in consternation. “You know about your...about your mother?”

I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten that I hadn’t spoken to Dad in years, much less in the past year when the magical world had come up and bitten me on the ass. I’d forgotten he had no way of knowing what had happened. That I hadn’t eveI hin yearsn told Morrison about the postmortem reconciliation with my mother, never mind having told Dad, whose entire knowledge of my relationship with her was based on my childhood resentment of her having left me with him. That he couldn’t possibly know that I’d finally, finally learned that he himself was an adept, a shaman of some considerable power, and that magic was, if not exactly old hat, certainly part of my everyday life now.

And I did not want to explain it to him while standing in the middle of a battlefield with death and hatred raging around me and feeding monsters that were in turn filling a little boy with all that darkness and evil. So I said, “Yes,” and left it at that.

It took Dad a good long minute to get past that. He eventually said, “You said Aidan is here,” in a voice that suggested we had a lot to talk about, but that he agreed Aidan was in fact much more important.

I pointed at the still-increasing flashes of black lightning. “He’s right there. Getting nailed by that crap every few seconds. What have you been doing out here, Dad?”

“Trying to stay alive.” A string of tension came into the words, and I had another moment of recollection: Dad was a shaman. A healer. He couldn’t take the fight to the other guys even if he wanted to, and I didn’t know if he wanted to. He was not like me.

Nobody was like me, and I knew I should have some sympathy for him because of that, but I was all out of sympathy. Lucas was dead. We were all out of time, not just in the sense of being displaced by centuries, but also in terms of the black lighting flashes coming closer and closer together. The war around us was reaching its peak. Very soon there wouldn’t be enough people left to sustain the increase, and the power would break. And I was a moron, because they weren’t going to wait until everybody was dead. They would move as soon as the frenzy hit its highest point, taking all the passion and pain and anger at its strongest, before it broke and began to fall away again.

If we didn’t get to Aidan before the black lightning became a single sheet, we would be out of time for real.

The thought had a horribly familiar feeling. It was obvious, but it seemed like it, or one like it, had gone through my head about a thousand times in the past few days. Everything kept coming around to rescuing Aidan. Of course it did, but it seemed like the idea shouldn’t need to reestablish itself every couple of hours. It seemed like it should be at the forefront of my mind all the time.

“It’s a loop in itself.” My father and Morrison both looked at me, but I was staring at the power pouring into Aidan. “You bastard. You fucking clever bastard. You’ve got me spinning my wheels, don’t you. A tiny little time loop built right into my head. It spikes with ‘we’ve got to rescue Aidan!’ So we start off in that direction, but then we hit something personal that’s got just as much punch. Things I’ve been avoiding or haven’t had the chance to think or talk about for months. Important things, but they keep cropping up when I should be making a mad dash for Aidan, and it takes a while to shake it off. And then we start all over. We’ve got to rescue Aidan! And off we go. It keeps happening.”

I couldn’t count how many times over the past few days Morrison and I had gone through that loop. It wasn’t like we’d been spending hours or days moping around being romantic, but we’d hit that emotional circle half a dozen times, and collapsed into sleep afterward more than once. Every time we dieryn’t cod it, it lost us a little time and gained the Master and his minions a little more. “You clever fucking bastard,” I said again. “But I’m fucking wise to you now. It’s not going to work again. Dad, is this one of the places we stopped when I was a kid? Did you work to heal the land here?”