by C. E. Murphy
Like how to crush the Nothing into a tiny ball of, er, nothing. We had some kind of major power blend going on here, far stronger than I’d anticipated. Stronger than the Master had anticipated, too, I was willing to bet. But I didn’t know if the Nothing could be undone, or only captured. Wondering made my head hurt, so I took action instead of thinking anymore, and squeezed my shields down.
The first couple advances we’d made had been instinctive. This was deliberate, and there was a world of difference. The Nothing made a sound, a shriek of anger that reverberated in my ear bones. It collapsed in, shrinking visibly as the southern adept squeezed, too, and as the others followed our lead.
Glee rose up from my counterpart. Glee and triumph and all sorts of other premature but obvious emotions that I was inclined to share. I’d had a hell of a couple of weeks. I thought I deserved one easy win, especially if it made my homecoming a little easier. But I wasn’t quite foolish enough to do a touchdown dance yet. Shriveling evil magic was not the same as eliminating evil magic, and I wanted it good and eliminated. My shields were rock-solid, and I wrapped them in the idea of a net, just to help squish everything down a little more. Step by step we closed in around the Nothing, and with every step the others became more confident. It made a positive feedback loop, creating stronger magic because our belief in it was stronger. I had no idea how much time passed before I touched hands with my right neighbor, and then moments later with my left, but suddenly we were a physical construct as well as a magical one, and the Nothing roiled and shrieked and spat fury in the circle created by our linked hands.
Someone finally spoke aloud. Not either of my closest cohorts, and not the next people over, either. I could see them, but the Nothing still rose tall enough to block the other three from my line of vision. I figured it was the southern compass point, the other one who was flinging as much magic potential around as I was. She had a light voice, still a teenager’s voice, which fit with the glimpse I’d had of a slight figure, on my way into the holler.
“It’s a time traveler,” she said. “It’s trying to slide through. Forward, backward, I don’t think it cares very much as long as it pulls bad shit through. We’ve gotta cut it out. We’ve gotta remove it from the timeline entirely. That’s the only way it’s gonna be vulnerable enough for us to smash it.”
I had the impression she was lecturing me specifically. That kind of made sense, since everybody else had been here for days, and she had no way of knowing I’d recognized the Nothing’s time-slip capability, too. She sounded pretty sure she knew how to deal with it, and for a half second I wondered if I could’ve been her, self-assured and rife with magic, if I hadn’t blown it so badly half a lifetime ago.
Not that it mattered, because I had blown it, and I’d largely come to terms with that. I let regret go, said, “Sounds like a plan,” to my unseen counterpart, and let her take the lead.
For the first time, an edge of alarm slipped through the power circle. Her alarm, not mine, which made me think maybe giving her the lead hadn’t been so bright, but it also seemed not only rude but potentially dangerous to yank it back now. Besides, I wasn’t at all sure how a person went about yanking things out of time to castrate them. I knew how to yank things around in time, albeit clumsily, but that didn’t seem like the skill set necessary here. The kid across the circle had sounded sufficiently confident that I’d assumed she did know.
Eventually I was going to learn that assumptions were dangerous, but today was clearly not that day. I breathed, “Calmly, calmly,” and sent a ripple of healing power through the circle. I didn’t usually use it as a soporific, but it seemed to help. I felt the multistranded adept’s aura and power strengthen again.
An image popped into my head. I didn’t know if it was my own or my counterpart’s, though if it was hers I really wanted that nifty telepathic aspect to my magic. Either way, the idea of a sensory deprivation tank came to mind. That, in essence, was what we needed to do to the Nothing. Except where I was supposed to find a tank so secluded that time didn’t affect it, I didn’t know. Well, except maybe on the event horizon of a black hole, but that led to all sorts of other really bad possibilities that I wasn’t eager to explore.
It did, though, give me an idea. Space was affected by time: anything that light passed through kind of had to be. But the idea of the dark side of the moon introduced itself to me, and I seized on it. It wasn’t really dark, I knew that, it was just that we never saw its other face, so maybe that was close enough. I was willing to take it.
I filled my shields with that idea: cold black timelessness, lingering in the silence, no pressure or need for change. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good, and the cold started crackling the edges of the Nothing. That was shamanism: change instigated by belief. I could turn the air within that crushing shield to a space vacuum without harming any of the nonspacesuit-clad elders in the power circle. And that little inkling of time that was still part of the equation, that was no big deal, that was—
—slipping.
Slipping, cracking, sliding out of control, bringing the Nothing back into the world because it still had something to latch on to. I clamped down, trying to ignore it, trying to hold on to the possibility of taking something entirely out of time, trying to remember just how much depended on me doing that, and felt a jillion little bug feet run up my spine and send shivers all over me. They all leapt off, my spine abandoned by an infinitesimal number of bugs, and I lost control of the magic.
Panic and dismay shot up from the other side of the circle. The dismay cut deep, much deeper than the fear. The Nothing erupted again, knocking us all over the holler. I crashed against soft dirt and immediately staggered to my feet, weaving physical shields together again, determined to catch the stuff before it got out-of-control large again. It was much smaller than before, but not gone, dammit. All around me, power stuttered back into wakefulness, everyone who’d been thrown around trying, as I was, to hold the Nothing to a smaller size. My counterpart’s magic rushed through us all, connecting us like railroad ties, until it slapped into me and we once more had a functional power circle around the Nothing. The younger woman’s magic was flushed with anger, fitting against my own anger tidily. I was able to hang on to its edges easily, improving our connection with the sense of long familiarity.
It all came home to me a little slowly. I’d worked with sympathetic magic before. Recently, even, up on a mountaintop in Ireland. Maybe it had something to do with mountains. Anyway, I knew the strength of blending familiar, familial magics, but I hadn’t expected it in the Qualla.
Which, in retrospect, was really, really stupid, because the Qualla had the two people on Earth who were closest to me by blood.
It wasn’t a teenage girl at all, the counterpart who stalked up to me with frustration and anger in brown eyes. It was a prepubescent boy, a twelve-year-old nearing his thirteenth birthday but not his voice change, and he said, “You’re twice as old as I am, Joanne. I thought you would be good at this stuff,” with all the disdain in the world.
It was not, all things considered, how I’d envisioned remeeting my son.
Chapter Five
Aidan Monroe had inherited his father’s golden-brown skin tones and hair so black its natural highlights were blue. He’d also gotten some of the same shape to his nose as Lucas had, mitigating my own beak somewhat. But I could see bits of me in him, too: the shape of his eyes and jaw, particularly with said jaw thrust into a too-familiar scowl. He was rangy like I’d been—like I still was—and there wasn’t any hint yet of whether he would grow into shoulders like Lucas’s or not. He was barefoot, red clay under his toenails, and his ragged-ankle jeans and sleeveless T-shirt could’ve belonged on any kid from the mid-20th century on.
I thought he was beautiful.
I mean, I guessed mothers were supposed to, but I hadn’t been a prime candidate for mother of the ye
ar when I’d gotten pregnant and given him up at age fifteen. If anything gave me potential mother-of-the-year status, in fact, it was having given him up. I had a lot of emotional investment in that decision, but not a lot of sentimental investment, even if that seemed like a fine hair to shave. The point was, I hadn’t been overwhelmed with his infantile beauty, so I was a little surprised to find myself wanting to smile and pat him on the head like he—or I—had done well, just by him being cute.
Given that he was already glaring at me, I manfully restrained myself and instead shrugged. “I probably should be, but I’m a lot further behind on my studies than you’d expect. Sorry.” The word, while flippant, was also sincere: I’d have preferred to unveil myself to Aidan in all my shining glory, instead of fumbling the ball just before the end zone. I was pretty certain that was the right sports metaphor.
He squinted and rolled back on his heels, a sign of surprise so like my own body language I had to fight not to laugh. I supposed lots of people did that, but seeing it on him was a little like looking in a reverse-gender mirror. Offhand, I suspected he hadn’t expected an apology from me, or anything less than a like-for-like chip on my shoulder.
To be fair, everybody who’d known me, anybody who might have told him about me—and he clearly knew who I was—would have told him to expect that chip. To expect whole icebergs, probably, not just chips.
For half a second I lost my battle with the smile, because I was obviously surprising him, and surprise allowed for a possibility of change, and that, at its heart, was what my magic was supposed to latch on to and work with. Shamanistic magic right there in action, even if no actual magic was being worked.
Aidan didn’t like the smile. It gave him something to be pissed off about, which was why I’d been trying to suppress it in the first place. “Are you laughing at m—”
“No.”
The poor kid looked so surprised again I had to bite the inside of my cheeks to keep from laughing for real that time. “Aidan—it’s Aidan, right?” I’d asked his mother that once already, but somehow it seemed important to clear it with him, too. He nodded, somewhere between sullenly and suspiciously, and I said, “Right. Aidan. No, I’m really not laughing at you. I’m laughing at me a little, maybe, because somehow I didn’t expect to see you so soon, and because it’s sort of embarrassing to admit a kid pushing thirteen almost certainly has it all over me in terms of mystical training. I mean, holy crap, kid, did you see you out there?”
I waved toward the Nothing, which was a much smaller seething ball now, and being held in place by the six elders who’d been working with us, and two others who’d joined them when Aidan and I broke out to have some awkward family time. I’d hardly even noticed them taking over for me, I’d been so busy gawking at Aidan. “You were awesome. What was I supposed to do there at the end? Maybe if we can do it now...?”
Aidan’s eyes went deep gold. Molten gold, a crazy color I was pretty sure mine didn’t reach, not even in the depths of magic use. He turned that heated gaze on me, slamming it right between my eyes, like he was looking into my head—
—and my garden ripped to life around us. The mountain holler faded, short-shorn grass and neat stone pathways appearing under our feet. A waterfall began burbling, and crumbling stone walls rose up out of the earth, farther away than I’d ever seen them. Ivy wrapped around the trunks of strong young hickory trees, which made me mutter and flick a finger, clearing the ivy away. It scattered from the trees and returned to the walls where it used to grow, thin climbing branches working to break them down further. A breeze swept through, carrying the scent of flowers from somewhere, and I could almost pretend that my staggering was actually me setting off in search of where those blooms were growing.
Almost. Mostly, though, I was just staggering and gaping. “How the hell—! What the hell! What are you—”
The garden turned to mist, blue sky turning yellow and the sun turning red. The ground was red, too, redder than the deep earth of the Appalachians, and the grass growing up around us was purple in some places and yellow in others. Familiar enough territory, except I had no idea how Aidan had slammed us not just into, but through, my garden and into the Lower World. “What are you d—”
Raven, my cheerful, chattering spirit guide, exploded into being with a clatter of wings and noise. He dove around Aidan’s head fast enough to make me dizzy, pulling at Aidan’s long hair and tangling his beak in it. My long-suffering Rattler spirit also appeared, though less exuberantly. He wound around Aidan’s feet, tongue flickering in and out, then returned to wrap around my ankles. Rattler had had a much more difficult couple of weeks than Raven, and I really needed some not-forthcoming downtime to get him back on his feet. Belly. Whatever.
Aidan, evidently waiting on something, stoically ignored Raven. Me, I crouched to stroke Rattler’s head and watched Raven’s antics with bemusement. Not even my mother had been able to pull my spirit guides into focus, but then, Mother had been a mage, not a shaman. I had plenty of questions, but for once I kept my mouth shut, more curious about what Aidan’s expectations were than about how he’d hauled us into the Lower World.
Finally it became clear that whatever he was waiting on wasn’t going to put in an appearance. Full-on teenage horror filled his face. “Oh, my God. You don’t even have all your spirit animals. You’re useless.”
He disappeared from the Lower World, leaving nothing but a set of footprints behind in the red earth, and I flung my hands up with a shout of exasperated laughter.
Raven klok-klok-kloked at me and came to settle on my shoulder, where he could peer at me from a third of an inch away. “What,” I said to the bird, “does he think I can’t get back if he leaves me here? Is this some kind of test?” I sat down. Rattler slithered into my lap and coiled up comfortably small. I stroked his head again, smiling as he leaned into the touch like a cold-blooded scaly cat. I’d spent enough time as a child tromping around snake-littered woods that I’d never imagined having an affinity, much less fondness, for a rattlesnake, but Rattler was something special. And I was sure that I’d think so even if he hadn’t saved my life more than once.
“Perhapsss,” he said once he was cozy and lazy in my lap, “perhaps you should take this opportunity to seek out your third, as he thinks you ssshould.”
“Third what, spirit animal? I don’t know, that seems like it would be giving the little punk the upper hand. ‘Hop to it, birth vessel! Heed my wisdom!’ Like that.” It probably wasn’t fair to call Aidan a punk. He probably had every reason to be upset with the woman who had skipped out on her magical heritage and failed to come back home firing the big guns in a moment of need.
And besides, it wasn’t like I had any room to go around throwing stones. I had been a pain-in-the-ass punk teen, with what was turning out to be less justification than Aidan probably had. I said, “Sorry, kid,” aloud and mentally retracted the punk nomenclature with the intention of retiring it permanently.
Rattler, who apparently didn’t care what I called Aidan, said, “It isss foolish to not ssstrike when the opportunity arissses,” with an acerbic tang. I could tell, because his sibilants got stretchier when he was annoyed.
I rubbed the top of his head. “So I should ignore the fact that someone I barely know and maybe shouldn’t trust because of that brought me here, and just head gung-ho into a spirit quest?”
“Do you missstrust him?”
“Nah.” That was a much softer and far less flippant answer. “Nah, I don’t know him at all, but I guess I’d trust him way past where I could throw him. He’s got power and he’s got a lot more training than I do. Maybe I should listen.” A chortle bubbled around my chest. “Because, you know. That’s always been my strong suit up until now.”
“Sssometimes,” Rattler said, and it was amazing how dryly a snake could speak, “sometimesss it isss all right to learn from past missstakes.” He slith
ered out of my lap and coiled around me in a tight circle, closing it up by taking his rattle in his mouth. Raven gave an excited caw and bounced into flight, wheeling around my head like he was drawing circles in the sky to match the one Rattler made on the ground.
“Right,” I said to both of them. “This is me, getting the message. When your spirit animals start drawing your power circles for you....” I traced a hand along Rattler’s sinuous spine, stopping at the cardinal points to murmur a little breath of nonsense that mostly meant I was paying attention to where they were. If I wasn’t careful, soon I’d be doing rituals and all the other silly stuff that went along with being a magic practitioner. It was bad enough that I adopted this weird semiformal language structure when I started talking about magic. I really didn’t want to get any more New Agey than I was, though I was much less biased against the whole scene than I’d been when I’d started out.
A soft wash of magic splashed up while I was trying to convince myself I was still normal and not hippy-dippy. Blue and silver swirled around each other, reaching for the sky-circle Raven had drawn, and thoroughly putting paid to any dreams of normalcy. I snorted at myself and closed my eyes, listening for something that would do as a drum and drop me into the quiet dark space where spirit animals roamed.
My heartbeat did the job, thumping in my ears more loudly than usual. I counted the beats until I started to drowse, my shoulders going slack and my hands loosening from the curls I’d held them in. I’d done the spirit quests for both Rattler and Raven while in the Lower World, though I hadn’t meant to either time. It seemed appropriate to be doing a third one here, too, though I had no sense of whether it would be like Raven’s appearance or like Rattler’s. Raven’s had been fairly traditional—well, except for the part where it had been conducted by an evil sorceress—with several creatures coming to say hello before Raven picked me. Rattler had simply shown up in the nick of time and saved my bacon.