C.E. Murphy - Mountain Echoes

My father’s eyes bugged, just about going poing! like a cartoon character’s. “You knew I... Yes.”

“All right. This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to get as close to Aidan as we can, and you’re going to do the magical equivalent of opening up a vein. Whatever it takes to awaken the link between the power you laid down then, and us being here now.”

“Jo, we do—”

“Joanne.” It was petty as hell and I wasn’t going to let it go. Gary could call me Jo. Morrison could call me Jo. Pretty much everybody in the damned world could call me Jo, but my father was going to have to earn it.

There was a beat in which Dad swallowed before saying, “Joanne. We don’t have a power circle in place, and I don’t think we’ll be able to build one under the weight of that magic. It’ll kill us.”

“No. It’ll be rough, but we’ll be all right.” That, to my surprise, was Morrison, who sounded far more calm and confident than I would have if I’d had to say it. I didn’t lack confidence. It was just that I’d be arguing with my daddy, whereas Morrison had no emotional baggage on this claim.

“Jo-Joanne, you don’t understand the kind of power you’re asking me to use—”

“Yeah, I do. It’s the kind of power you would normally need a big, strong power circle and ideally at least three others of your bloodline to work. It’s the kind of power you might ask the Great Makers to help you handle, because without a god’s touch it might burn you out. And calling on gods isn’t something you do without a power circle unless you’re me, so I understand your concern, Dad.”

Under different circumstances, my father’s expression might have been funny. He hadn’t gotten as far as rearranging his expectations of me. They were all just being smashed around like billiard balls in his mind, bouncing and rattling chaotically, no pattern yet establishing itself. Under different circumstances—like circumstances in which he had told me about and guided me in my mystical heritage—I might even have felt sorry for hitting him over the head with his suddenly take-no-prisoners shamanic daughter.

Under these circumstances, however, I repeated, “I do understand, Dad. I just don’t give a damn. You’re either going to do this or I’m going to have to do it myself. The magic you laid down in the future will probably respond to me because I’m your daughter, but it won’t be as responsive as it would be to you. We need that link to help get us back to our own time. I’m already going to have to cut Aidan off from the lightning and provide any magical offense we need, so it would be really helpful if you just did what I’m asking.”

“It’s impossible.”

“Then do the impossible.”

“What am I going to do?” Morrison kept right on sounding calm and sensible, for which I loved him beyond reason.

“You’re going to shoot every wight that comes near us between the eyes, and leave an archaeological record that will bewilder the hell out of anybody who goes digging around here five centuries from now.” I handed him the shotgun and my other weaponry, and he gave m ancal recore a shockingly fierce grin. Properly armed, we both turned to my father, who was still struggling to rearrange his expectations.

That was good. He was off balance. Shamanic change happened when people were off balance. I said, “Come on,” and slammed the invisibility shields up around us again. Dad staggered into step behind us and we slipped across the battlefield.

We were within fifty feet of Aidan when he said, “I see you, Joanne.”

“Well, shit.” I dropped the invisibility shield, because if he saw right through it there was no point in expending energy to keep it up.

Aidan was sprawled in a throne of bones. His skin was deadened, not quite bleached white, but nothing like his normal, healthy tones. His eyes were black and gold, much more disturbing than just one or the other, and his hair was turning white from the roots down. All he needed was a skull from which to drink blood and the image would be complete. My father whispered, “Aidan,” and the boy’s gaze switched from me to him.

“Grandpa.” He sounded just like a surprised little boy, which gave me hope. Surely if he was entirely absorbed by evil he would have just given a hollow laugh or smote Dad where he stood. In the heartbeat while he was being surprised, I flung a psychic net out, seized him with it, and yanked.

To my pure astonishment, it worked. Aidan crashed against the net’s ropes as I hauled it in, but he didn’t fall through or throw it off. Triumph exploded in me and for a moment I thought maybe it really would be that easy.

Then the next sheet of lightning fell, and I discovered it didn’t care if Aidan was sitting on his throne of bones or bumping on his skinny little-boy butt across the mud and muck. It was perfectly happy to follow him, like electricity to a rod. Aidan howled with offended dignity and thrashed around, but there was strength in the gunmetal threads of my magic. Right then I thought a bomb could go off inside it and I’d have a good chance of holding it in. I pulled Aidan closer, fist over fist, even though the magic probably could have reeled him in without the physical action on my part. But it was all about expectations, so I pulled him in like a fisherman working the nets, and inside of two breaths he was at the heart of our little gathering.

Black lightning fell on us. It electrified Aidan, arching his body and spilling another inch of whiteness into his hair. When he came out of the arch he had a ghoul’s grin, all sharp white teeth in a skeletal face. I said, “Now would be good,” to my father, and braced myself for the next rain of lightning.

It hit my shields, not Aidan. I’d never made a shield so small and tight that also had to encompass more than one person, but this one had to hold. We were in a tiny bubble of melting silver-blue, the black magic’s weight so heavy it split the gunmetal into its base tones. I kept my feet through sheer willpower, using Aidan’s terrible changes to strengthen myself. If I fell, so would he, and that was unacceptable.

“Walker?”

“It keeps things out.”

“All right.”

I had no idea when Morrison and I had moved into the phase of a relationship where whole conversations were contained within single words and unrelated sentences, but I was glad we had. Having gotten the answer he needed, he methodically checked his weapons, then smoothly lifted heryn>

Not wildly. Not Morrison. He wouldn’t do that. Every action he’d taken filled up just the right amount of time while the wights left off their harvesting and came for us. The lightning did them no good if Aidan wasn’t taking the magic into himself. Morrison fired, the sound explosively loud within the confines of my shields, and the shields did what he’d been asking about: kept things out, but didn’t keep them in. He could shoot, and they, in theory, couldn’t break through. He moved around the shield bubble, firing steadily, taking down the bad guys with each shot. It wasn’t like they were trying to avoid him. They just kept coming.

He shot five, and they still kept coming.

Seven, and they still kept coming.

Two more, and his duty weapon was empty, and they still kept coming. He tucked it into the holster and began with the shotgun, but they still kept coming.

I was a moron.

I’d assumed it was just the five wights that had come back with Aidan, but that was a stupid, stupid assumption. They’d had days to drain the dead and create more of themselves. The more of them there were, the more food was funneled to a hungry Master, and the faster a crisis point built. We didn’t just have to get Aidan out of here. We had to wipe out dozens, maybe hundreds, of living dead, or the time we went home to would be a ghost world.