C.E. Murphy - Mountain Echoes

Dad said, “Just another minute, Joanne,” like we had all the time in the world. I motioned Morrison back into formation with Sara and Les, the three of them shifting to make a protective circle around Danny, who at least had the grace to shut up during all of this. I was amazed none of the wights had gotten him, but it seemed likely he was more use alive and pouring out hate and loathing that they could scoop up and refashion into power for the Executioner.

Because it’d taken me a while, but I was finally cluing in: Aidan was by all intents and purposes missing, at this point. He had been since our little jaunt through time, and maybe since before that. The thing in the sky was shaped like Aidan, but it had very little in common with him except an ability to wield great power. Never mind the wights, the oncoming mob, the explanations to the CDC and the military: if we couldn’t reach that spark I’d gotten a heartbeat-long glimpse of, we were going to lose the boy. The rest of it mattered, but still somehow paled in comparison. “If I could just get my hands on him...”

“Use a net.”

Turned out I had a calm voice telling me what to do, after all. I shot Morrison a startled look and he lifted his eyebrows at me like “you would have thought of it eventually,” which was perhaps more credit than I deserved. I gathered power and flung it at the kid in the sky just as my Dad said, “Joanne, wait—!” a moment too late.

Aidan spun, caught my net in both hands, and whomped me all over the forest with it.

Trees splintered. Earth flew. I yowled. Power went schlucking out of me, my net exactly the right conduit to feed Aidan and his groupies even more magic. I let go of it, which had the effect of stopping the power flow, but also meant Aidan lost control of me as he swung me from one side of the gathering to the other. I was on an upward swing, too, and pinwheeled a genuinely astonishing distance across the sky before crashing violently into tree tops, branches, trunks and eventually roots.

I lay there wheezing for a little while, afraid to even check and see if anything was broken. It shouldn’t be: I was still shielded on a personal, physical level, but being bashed all over a forest still hurt. Perhaps it was my magic’s way of keeping me humble. It wouldn’t let me get battered into bits, but it was happy to let me know, by way of pain receptors, just how much more damage it was sparing me from.

Somewhere south of my feet, quite a considerable distance south, actually, a power circle sprang to life. That, no doubt, was what my father had been working on. That, no doubt, was what I should have waited on before trying to drag Aidan out of the sky. That, no doubt, would have been nice to know before I went all cowboy and got my ass handed to me. I sat up gingerly, whimpering as not-quite-broken bones settled back into place. Twigs poked me in impolite places and I brushed them away once I’d staggered to my feet. A deep breath and a cautious flex of magic washed the worst of the bruising away, but it refused to all fade. Teaching me a lesson, though I wasn’t sure what the lesson was. Maybe look before you leap, though I despaired of ever learning that one.

Since I wasn’t e I wasngoing to learn it anyway, I broke into a clumsy lope and headed back for the gang. It took longer than I expected—Aidan had thrown me a long way—and when I got there, I decided the positive way to look at things was to focus on the fact that Dad’s power circle was holding the wights and Aidan in place, not letting them spread beyond a relatively small circumference in the forest.

The negative viewpoint was that the entire top of the power circle had become a whirling black vortex that looked like a portal to another world.

Aidan was chanting. I couldn’t hear the words clearly enough to even assign a language, but it didn’t really matter. Where chanting and vortexes—vortecii? vortices?—vortexes, I decided firmly. Where chanting and vortexes occur together, bad things happen. I nudged the power circle, asking to be let in, though I wasn’t certain I wouldn’t be better off on the outside. Dad gave me a wild-eyed look that suggested he was in over his head, and I decided he was better off with me inside, even if I wasn’t. I slipped through, and Aidan’s shouting became clearer.

He was calling out in Cherokee, telling the story of the great things he and the wights had done, and inviting Raven Mocker to come enjoy the spoils of war. Not just inviting him, but laying down a path built on the pain and souls of the dead for him to enter on. The vortex strained at the edges of Dad’s power circle, and Dad gave me another frantic look.

I tried very hard not to look frantic back at him. I’d dealt with a portal-opening coven once. In fact, to my eternal embarrassment, I’d helped them open it. None of us, however, had been flying through the air at the time, and none of us, not even me, had been fighting at Aidan’s weight. A net was obviously not the way to take him down. The military guy with the gun had it trained on Aidan, but was looking at me, and clearly didn’t expect to be told to shoot. Even if I’d told him to, bullets were not going to make a difference at this particular stage of the fight. The only thing—the only thing—I could think to do was cut off their power somehow, and so far I was batting a thousand at not managing to do that. Trying to do so with magic only fed them more. Trying to do so without magic still gave them ordinary human lives to feed on. I muttered, “C’mon, Jo. C’mon. Be clever,” as I stared up at the whirling black pit of power.

Experience suggested that throwing a willing—and innocent, but I was going to overlook that requirement for the moment—soul into chasms of doom was one way to destroy them. Experience did not, however, suggest what to do if the chasm of doom in question was sixty feet overhead instead of conveniently at ground level. I could maybe just barely defy the laws of physics a second time in a day and throw myself skyward, but the thought had no conviction, and without conviction it wouldn’t work. Dad shouted my name, but I waved him off, still staring upward.

Aidan remained below the vortex, his hair purely white and his voice hoarse from shouting. Hoarse like a raven’s, like he was taking Raven Mocker into himself and we were running out of time. I didn’t know how we could run out of time when we had our spirit animals to help, spirit animals who could stretch and slow and speed up time, but we were running out and I had no answers.

My father, exasperated, roared, “Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick, get your ass over here!”

To the best of my knowledge, he had never used my full legal name before. He’d never called me Siobhán. I wasn’t sure he’d known he’d khow to pronounce it. Hell, I hadn’t been sure how to pronounce it until fairly recently, even though I’d looked it up dozens of times. Shevaun Grania, that’s what it sounded like, except coming from my father it also sounded sort of like the voice of God. I was hopping to it, getting my ass over there, before I even knew I was moving.

Dad put his hands out, palms up. I put mine on top of them instinctively. He exhaled a huge sigh of relief, and without asking or explaining, transferred the weight of the power circle to me. I hadn’t even known that was possible. He waggled a warning finger under my nose and stomped away, giving the distinct impression that I’d been wasting valuable time.

The circle fluctuated with the change of keepers, but didn’t fade in any way. I felt the strength of everyone inside the circle helping to keep it viable: Sara, Les, even Ada, who’d woken up at some point. The poor military guy was only putting out stress and confusion, not positive energy, but with the power circulating through me I could hear Ada’s murmur, her explanation to him about what he could do to help. I’d known she was a good woman before she’d wanted to adopt Aidan, but I was increasingly impressed with her resolute awesomeness. Morrison, like the others, was expending energy, but he was also carving something with a Swiss Army knife and a huge amount of concentration. Watching him reminded me of the carving he’d done in his own garden, the tiny figurine that had proven to be me, and my heart lurched.