C.E. Murphy - Mountain Echoes

Our time wasn’t a ghost world, so that meant we would succeed. I promised myself that and tried very hard to ignore the fact that I felt nothing, nothing, in this time and place that meant time couldn’t be changed here. I’d run up against a wall of magic when I’d tried to save Lugh, in Ireland. Someone had already changed the timeline close to when he died, and it had refused to alter anymore. There was no such wall here. It implied that, despite my insistence that the timeline was pretty fixed and didn’t care to be mucked with, that this was a time and place in which it might be muckable.

For one desperate moment I wondered if that meant I really could have changed the whole future if I’d tried hard enough. If I could have saved the aboriginal Americans, and taken the price from the future I knew. Then Morrison said, “Walker,” again, this time with a note of warning, and coulda-woulda-shouldas faded. We needed to survive here and now, and the timeline needed to continue as unchanged as it could be, because this was what built the world we knew. Some other me in some other adventure could try the other road, and maybe my dreams would tell me how that turned out.

For now I ground my teeth, fixed the idea of the net around Aidan as hard as I could, and latched it in my mind instead of in my hands. Then I took Morrison’s pistol and reloaded it with the spare clip from my own duty weapon, which I hadn’t had time to give up after quitting the police force. It had been in Petite’s trunk along with the shotgun, which I also took and reloaded when it emptied. Then for good measure I loaded my duty weapon and tucked it into Morrison’s belt.

In the twenty seconds that took, my net frayed. When I turned back to Aidan, he lurched at me with his hands clawed, cold fingers latching around my throat. Black magic pulsed out, strangling me, and exultation gleamed in his discolored eyes.

I whispered, “Wrong approach, kiddo,” and grabbed his pinkies, wrenching them back. His fingers loosened and his triumph turned to churlish outrage. Black magic roared and spat around me, struggling to find a chinto nkik in my armor. There were none, not this time. He could pour all his magic out trying to break through, and I would come out aces.

He realized it at the same time I did, and the outpouring ceased. He collapsed in my arms, his eyes and skin returning to normal, though his hair remained half-bleached. I caught his weight and he tipped his chin up, all exhausted little boy, and whispered, “Mommy?”

I burst out laughing. Honest-to-God belly laughs, the kind that brought tears of mirth to my eyes. I whooped and wheezed, patted his cheek, and spoke to who or whatever was trying to sucker punch me from inside him. “You might’ve gotten me with ‘Mom,’ but you pushed that one way too far, buddy. This kid’s mommy is somebody else entirely.” My laughter faded into cold fury. “Now let him go, you son of a bitch. He’s not your vessel, and don’t think he means so little to me that I would let that happen.”

The words had a familiar ring. Cernunnos had said something very similar just a few days ago, when I was the one boiling over with dark magic. He would have crushed my windpipe to make sure I didn’t become the Master’s doxy. I wasn’t certain I had the nerve to do the same to Aidan, but there were no other ends to which I was not willing to go. This particular battle could go on for the rest of my life, if necessary, and I was okay with that.

“Walker,” Morrison said a third time, and we were out of bullets, out of choices and out of time.

Aidan’s face split in an ugly grin. The black came back into his eyes, gold flecks warning that he was reaching for magic again. His skin paled, becoming even more wightlike than before, and I braced myself for the inevitable blow.

My father said, “Now,” and clean healing power smashed my shields down from the inside.

I’d forgotten about him. I really had. Between Morrison and Aidan, I’d just forgotten about my father, and about what I’d told him to do.

He’d done it in spades. He’d done what the valley shaman had done: reinforced a power circle by going over it again in reverse, except he’d used the bubble of my shields as the base for his power circle. The entire bubble, every surface, top, bottom, sides, where it intersected with the ground, everything. He’d lined it with his own magic, with the pure, deep healing power that he’d developed and honed over a decade and more of traveling America’s wounded places. I had no idea if he’d called on any gods. Not any I knew, anyway, and not any I could see, which made me think that he hadn’t.

Which meant the magic that battered mine down was all my father’s, and that I knew nothing of healing, if this was what a Walkingstick could do.

My father’s briefly glimpsed aura was green and gray, protective, resolute colors. The magic that burst outward was white, blazing white, a color I’d only ever seen come from the amalgamation of many magic practitioners working together. As it slammed into my shields, it took their power, drained all the magic I was throwing out to keep us safe, to keep Aidan in my grip. It flashed even brighter with that addition, purifying to an even greater degree, but I wasn’t kidding myself: Dad’s unleashed magic was the most hugely positive power I had ever encountered. He didn’t need me for this. My presence only added some shine to a knowledge that ran deep into the earth.

It rolled over the battlefield as quickly as the time bubble had overubbs unlearun the Appalachian valley, and left roses in its wake.

Some of them were literal: the bodies of the dead changed, softening, becoming things of beauty instead of victims of violence. The wounded staggered to their feet fully healed. Rose petals stuck to their skin instead of blood, and they brushed them away in bewilderment. Wights fell, disintegrating into sweet-smelling dust. The rage in the air gentled. It didn’t end: roses, after all, had thorns, but it was mitigated, and the worst of the battle broke apart.

It wouldn’t last. There would still be wars fought between Native tribes, between Indians and Europeans, between settlers and the people who had lived on these lands for millennia. But for the moment, at least, the poison was broken apart, and the weight of darkness was lifted.

A handful of wights remained, still spread across the battlefield at the points that had most strongly fed the black lightning. I felt their panic erupt as their power fell away. Then they rallied, coming toward us in a flash, dark magic gathering in a whirlpool as they approached.

A heartbeat too late, I spun toward Aidan.

One slash of light illuminated the dark vortex as it enveloped him, and then he winked out, swallowed whole by time.

“We need to go.” My father’s voice was completely different, deeper and more determined than I’d ever heard it. I whipped back toward him and squinted, even with the Sight turned off. He blazed with power, spirit animals standing tall and strong on his shoulders. A walking stick on his left, above his heart, and the others were fainter, less easy for me to recognize. Renee appeared on my own shoulder, brought to life and visibility by the magic Dad was working.

That was as clear a statement as I needed, but I still hesitated. “Where did he go?”

“We have to go find out. Come on, Joanne. I can’t hold this for long.”

I could, but there was no point in saying so. I reached for Morrison’s hand. He looked between me and my father, put the guns away, and laced his fingers through mine.

“We were here when you were eight,” Joseph Walkingstick said in a strained voice. “That’s when I laid down power here. That’s when I’m connecting to. I’m twenty years off target, Joanne. You’re going to have to get us the rest of the way home.”