Mountain Echoes (The Walker Papers)

by C. E. Murphy

  Oh, yeah. I was my parents’ child, through and through.

  “Aidan is here.” Even I was surprised at the coldness of my voice. “Is Lucas?”

  Dad’s expression went flat. So did something inside of me. He said, “I’m sorry,” and a wall of white noise rose up, drowning out the sounds of battle in a static rush. Morrison didn’t, or couldn’t, catch me this time: after a while I became aware I was on my knees, fingers dug into the red mucky earth, and that my breathing was harsh and shuddering. Scalding tears dripped from my eyes, still hot as they hit the backs of my hands while I stared wide-eyed and barely seeing at the ground beneath me.

  I hadn’t seen Lucas Isaac in more than thirteen years. I hadn’t been much looking forward to it, either, because the best way I could imagine a reunion turning out was awkwardly. I’d wanted the chance, though. I’d wanted to see how he’d grown up.

  That wasn’t exactly true. I did want to know how he’d grown up, but what I meant by that, in my heart of hearts, was that I’d wanted to see if he’d apologize for having been a chickenshit and running back to Vancouver. I’d long since accepted we’d never been fated for a happily ever after, and while I understood why he’d done it, I still thought if he’d grown up well he might have apologized.

  Dad started talking again, or maybe he was repeating something he’d already said. “...called me Sunday afternoon, after he hadn’t come back from an overnight camping trip in the mountains. He had his compass, and plenty of food and water, but...”

  “Why hadn’t she gone with him?” That was Morrison, the consummate professional.

  A smile flickered through Dad’s voice. “Sara is the five-star-hotel camping type. She never liked getting out into the woods and getting dirty. She likes things tidy.” The sound of the smile faded. “So I went up to where she’d dropped him off and followed his trail. It wasn’t hard. He’d gone to—” He hitched, and I felt the weight of his gaze on me. I didn’t look up. My breathing was still ragged. “He’d set up camp in a hollow Joanne used to visit, a couple miles back in the hills.”

  My stomach dropped again and I bent closer to the ground, making fists to put my forehead against. I knew where Dad was talking about. It had been my sanctuary, far enough from town I couldn’t hear anything but the loudest engines or the occasional airplane. I’d pretended I was a remote survivor of the olden days, or a modern one thrown back in time. That was where the time-travel game had come from, the one Morrison had evidently never played. I’d brought Lucas there because it was special to me, and I was trying so hard to make him like me. I hadn’t been back since I’d realized I was pregnant. I wondered how often Lucas had gone back.

  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 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 even 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 sympa
thy 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 did 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?”

  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 me 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.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “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 sma
ll 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 his pistol, moving so easily it appeared he had all the time in the world, and began to shoot.

  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.