Mountain Echoes (The Walker Papers)

by C. E. Murphy

  I would be a completely different person if I’d grown up on the Qualla. I was sure if we’d stayed here, my grandmother would have eventually worn Dad down, and I’d have begun shamanic studies at a much younger age. I might never have crossed paths with Coyote, and I almost certainly would never have met Morrison.

  But it was my grandmother, my father’s mother, and it obviously still tore him apart that she’d died. Maybe he wouldn’t have stayed, anyway. Maybe the promise to my mother—to Shell, I’d never imagined Sheila MacNamarra with a nickname—maybe that would have kept him moving, especially if he thought he would lose the argument about my training. Maybe nothing would have changed, except my grandmother would still be alive. I said, “I don’t know,” again, and sat down in the grass with my hands covering my face.

  After a moment a light touch brushed my arm. I spread my fingers to see little Joanne peeking at me. “Are you my momma? You look like me. We both has fweckles.”

  “Have freckles,” I corrected automatically, then closed my eyes, because I couldn’t stand looking into my own interested baby face. “No, sweetheart. I’m not your momma, even if we both have freckles.”

  “Are you sad? Is that why you hiding you face?”

  I made a soft sound. “I’m a little bit sad, yes.”

  She patted my arm. “Don’t be sad. I has a ladybug. Hewe.” She offered me the bug on a dirty fingertip.

  I unfolded my hand to stroke its ghostly back. I couldn’t feel it, and wasn’t sure why she could pat me when she’d run through me once already. I suspected it had something to do becoming aware of me after she’d dashed through me, and let it go at that. “Thank you for sharing your ladybug. It’s very nice.”

  “Is you happy now?”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. Thank you, Joanie.”

  “You welcome!” She scampered off again, revealing Morrison watching me—us, I supposed—with an expression of wonder.

  “You think I take things in stride, Walker?”

  “It’s not the first time I’ve had a conversation with my younger self. This one was nicer than most. Usually I excoriate myself. Of course, I also usually learn something.”

  “What’d you learn this time?”

  “That she’s a nice little girl and probably deserves to grow up into somebody less messed up than I am. Maybe I should go help Dad try to save my grandmother.”

  Morrison’s voice got very quiet. “Don’t.” I blinked up at him and he met my gaze, concern rising in his blue eyes. “You do that, Walker, and everything changes, right?”

  “Maybe. Probably. I don’t know. I’ve never really changed anything. I don’t know what happens, but it seems most likely.”

  “Don’t make me miss out on you.” He spoke so softly he sounded like a different man. “Don’t change our future before we get a chance at finding out what it is, Walker. We’ve come this far. I want to find out where this road goes.”

  The part of me that didn’t know when to shut up almost pointed out he wouldn’t know any better, if everything did change. The part of me that occasionally said the right thing got there first, and said, “So do I.”

  Morrison’s shoulders dropped about six inches, and I had the dizzying realization he’d actually been afraid. I got up and wrapped my arms around his waist. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do, Morrison. It’s my grandmother. I don’t even remember her, but I can’t blame Dad for wanting to try.”

  “He must know better.” Morrison sounded shaken, which made me hug him harder.

  “He does. He’s just not thinking. Or he knows more than we do. We’ll go ask. We’ll find out. Come on.” I moved half a step and bumped into something.

  I looked down to find Joanie gazing up at Morrison with starry-eyed adoration. She tugged my pant leg and pronounced, “He vewy handsome,” in a stage whisper that would’ve been audible in the rafters.

  I laughed out loud and said, “Yeah, he is,” as Morrison crouched and grinned at mini-me. “And you’re very pretty,” he informed her, which made me laugh again. Joanie skipped off, pink and happy as could be. I offered a half-hearted kick at Morrison’s shin as he stood. “Imprinting yourself on me young, are you?”

  He looked horrified, then slightly uncomfortable. “She’s a cute kid, Walker. She— You— Ah, hell. I wasn’t thinking about her being you. I was imagining her being—” He stopped abruptly and his ears flushed red.

  My eyebrows went up. “As being what?”

  He said, “Nothing,” so hastily that I followed his train of thought and turned as pink as Joanie had.

  “Oh. Um. Okay. Um. Let’s, um. Let’s go find Dad and tell him he can’t do this.”

  Still hastily, Morrison said, “Good idea,” and we skittered off my grandmother’s lawn like a couple of guilty kids.

  * * *

  Dad hadn’t gotten all that far, really. He was about half a mile down the road, at what I suspected was the crash site. The road and sky were both clear, no standing water to make the old boat of a Pontiac slip or to create glare that might have blinded my grandmother as she drove. There were no fallen trees, no lurking deer, nothing to drive her off the road. I went up to him, hands in my pockets, and said, “Maybe she was just driving too fast.”

  He shook his head once. “That’s all you, Joanne. Your grandmother never broke the speed limit in her life. I don’t know where you got the daredevil streak.”

  “You’re telling me you never sped on all those trips across the country?”

  He slid a perplexed glance at me. “With my daughter in the car? No. There was never any hurry great enough to risk you.”

  And the hits just kept on coming. I tipped my chin up and stared at the sky, absorbing that. Then I reversed my gaze, sighing at the view again. “You know you can’t save her, Dad.”

  “I know I shouldn’t. It could change everything. But don’t tell me you’re happy with the way things turned out, Joanne. You’ve hated me since you were a teenager.”

  Air whuffed out of me. “Hated you. No. I just couldn’t figure out what the fuck I had to do to make you love me. Your daughter, so disappointing you decided to call her by a boy’s name.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Come on, Dad. I mean, it was pretty clear you didn’t want to be saddled with me in the first place, but the point kind of got driven home when Aidan said you were teaching him. Sorry I wasn’t born with a penis, Dad. So glad you got a grandkid who was.”

  “Joanne, I was trying to protect you—”

  “Yeah. By keeping us moving all the time. By not telling me about my heritage. By letting me get so fucked in the head that I did the stupidest things possible to try to get attention. From you, from anybody, whatever the hell. Good job, Dad. Banner job.”

  Dad, through his teeth, said, “I started teaching Aidan because I’d realized how badly I’d done by you. I thought I was protecting you, Joanne, and for the love of God, I didn’t call you Jo because I wanted a boy. I thought it made it you and me against the world, Big Joe and Little Jo—”

  “That’s what I thought until you started looking at me like I was a stranger!”

  “You were growin’ up and no matter what I did you kept recognizin’ more and more about the shamanism I was practicin’! If I was lookin’ at you like you were a stranger it was ’cause I was tryin’ ta figure out how to keep you out of it!”

  Having grown up with it, I almost never actually heard my father’s North Carolina accent, but when his temper got up, it got thicker, until he was almost indecipherable. The same thing happened to me if I got pissed enough, and I was fast approaching that level of anger now. “Like I said, banner goddamned job, Dad! You—”

  “And then you said we were comin’ back here, hell or high water, back to where your grandmother died, and I
knew I’d lost you—”

  “I was thirteen years old, Dad, you don’t lose somebody when they’re thirteen years old unless you goddamned well give up on them!”

  The rest of the argument was shattered by the Pontiac screaming around the corner, a fallen angel in pursuit.

  All the what-ifs fell away. I didn’t think, I just reacted. I threw a wall of magic up between the Pontiac and the angel—it could not be an angel, fallen or otherwise, but it sure as hell looked like one, with black-soot wings spread wider than the road and a beautiful face scored by misery and despair—I threw magic, and the angel smacked against it at full speed.

  Smacked against and burst through, almost all at once. The strength I was so proud of was utterly meaningless by comparison to its. Dad gasped, “Kolona Ayeliski,” and the Cherokee language Renee had revived translated it—Raven Mocker.

  Even I knew about Raven Mocker. He was one of those legends I’d sarcastically dismissed as a teen determined to turn her back on all things Cherokee. He was a demon, a monster, a fallen angel, sure. Something from the Lower World that disguised himself as a creature from the Upper, pretending to provide spiritual guidance and safety while sucking the soul out of his victims. Raven Mocker was the specific thing that vigil-keepers were keeping vigil against, when they watched over the bodies of the dead.

  He was not a daylight monster, and there was no way in hell he should be chasing my grandmother down the road at deadly speeds. I gathered strength again to throw another wall up, or to catch him with a net, anything to at least slow him down so the Pontiac could slow down, too. I waited for a straight stretch, a place where Grandmother would have time to apply the brakes without going flying off the mountainside, and I dug deep, getting ready to throw everything I had between her and the Raven Mocker.

  Shields as strong as my own wrapped me, muffling my power, and rebounding it back into me when I let it go. An echo banged around my head, magic left with nowhere else to go, and I staggered a few inches. Dad caught my shoulders, steadying me, and I recognized the steady, implacable touch of his magic as what was shielding me. “What the hell!”

  “Who do you think Kolona Ayeliski is, Joanne? Who do you think your mother was trying to protect you from when she brought you to me? He must have been waiting here for some sign we’d returned. We just gave it to him. We stepped through time and landed where we weren’t supposed to be. If I had agreed to go into town with your grandmother....”

  Any hold I had on my magic dissipated. “She obviously knew he was chasing her,” I said dully. “And he must not have known we weren’t—I wasn’t—in the car. She...”

  She leaned on the gas pedal, the Pontiac picking up incredible speed on the straight stretch. There was another curve up ahead, a hairpin bend.

  Grandmother never hit the brakes as she approached the bend. Dad closed his eyes, unable to watch as the car soared went off the narrow road, briefly and beautifully unbowing to gravity’s call. It sailed farther than I imagined possible. I stood in Dad’s grip, unable to take my own gaze away until it fell from my line of sight and the first scream of metal sounded. Then my own eyes closed, and Morrison was there to hold both of us up.

  We skipped forward through time.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I knew where we were before I even opened my eyes. It was the smell, the faint scent of antiseptic, that sharp astringency in dry air that hospitals never quite manage to erase. I hated that smell, and I said, “No. No. Get me out of here. Get me out of here, I can’t do this again,” without ever opening my eyes. My heart was sick in my chest, pounding so hard I thought I would throw up. “Get me out of here, Daddy. Get us out of here now. Please. Please. I don’t want to see. Not again. Please get me out of here, Daddy. Please.” Tears squeezed through my lashes and left hot streaks on my face, but I would not open my eyes.

  I heard the men catch their breath as they figured out where we were. I was sobbing by then. We were in a hospital ward and there were two very small babies nearby, and there was only enough life in the both of them for one. Morrison caught me, holding on hard as I thrashed against him, the words tearing at my throat. “Get me out of here, get me out of here, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it I hate it I hate it I hate it get me out of here please please please get me out of here I can’t I can’t I can’t not now why weren’t you here!”

  I tore myself out of Morrison’s arms and hit Dad as hard as I could. “You’re a healer, you’re a goddamned healer, why weren’t you here to save her, why weren’t you here?”

  And my father, terribly, whispered, “I was.”

  My eyes flew open. Beyond Dad-now I saw Dad-then, standing outside the ward windows, his hands clenching and opening with impotence. It wasn’t the distance, I knew it wasn’t the distance, they would let him in, he was their grandfather, and besides, I didn’t believe for a minute he couldn’t affect a healing from a mere few yards away. Not when the babies were so fresh and new, with no expectations placed on the world. Dad could do it. He could do it.

  But he didn’t. His walking-stick spirit animal sat on his shoulder, its face hidden behind long thin arms, as if the anguish twisting my father’s features hurt it just as badly. “You have to See, Joanne,” my now-father said in a thick voice. “You have to understand.”

  “I don’t want to see!”

  “Don’t.” Morrison sounded dangerous. “Don’t do this to her, Joseph.”

  Somehow that gave me the strength to look, even though my father said nothing. I reached for Morrison’s hand, crushing his fingers with mine, and steeled myself to look, just once, at the babies.

  My whole life I’d had the idea they’d only had enough strength for one. That Ayita had given up her strength for Aidan so that at least one of them would live. I Saw now, for the first time, how incredibly right I had been. The babies, born just minutes apart, already lying so close together, shared more than the strength of their bodies. They shared the strength of their souls, as well, Ayita’s dancing, laughter-filled soul merging and melding with Aidan’s more serious, contemplative personality. Her yellows and pinks wound around his blues and greens, the colors brightening and burgeoning until the single surviving child’s aura burned almost white, all the time.

  Two-spirited. No wonder Aidan had so much raw power. Two-spirited souls, people who carried both the masculine and the feminine within them, were sacred to most Native Americans, the Cherokee included. They were respected and believed to have a closer connection to the spirit world than most, making them natural shamans and guides.

  And Aidan was literally two-spirited. Like my friend Billy, he actually shared his body with his sister’s spirit, but there was one huge difference. Billy’s sister, Caroline, had died when she was eight, a developed personality of her own already. She’d remained with Billy for decades because of their close bond, and that had affected him, but it wasn’t the same as being born from the same womb, together for every moment of their brief existences, and given unto one another in death as in life. Aidan and Ayita’s spirits were melded from birth, incomplete without one another. Aidan’s power was boundless, with Ayita’s spirit a part of his.

  And it was his only chance against the Executioner.

  I knew it in my gut, inside the sickness that still boiled within me. I turned away, wishing I could throw up. I wasn’t one for Seeing the future, but Renee, on my shoulder like the walking stick on Dad’s shoulder, showed me something that was, to her, so close in time to right now that it was all the same. Now and then were so close together, from an unchanging insect’s viewpoint, that there was no particular difference in Seeing what lay in the children’s future. Maybe Dad could have saved Ayita, but it would have been at the cost of both their lives, when the Master came for them. And the Master, Raven Mocker, Kolona Ayeliski, was coming for them.

  There’d been some question about it, with
me. Maybe Mom had hidden me well enough. Maybe keeping me out of the traditional training had been enough to slip me under the radar. But the walking stick had shown Dad what lay in Aidan’s future. What lay in Ayita’s future, if they both lived.

  Death had lain in their future, if they both lived. They only stood a chance together, as one, two-spirited.

  Ayita Walkingstick had only lived a few minutes, but she was the bravest person I had ever met.

  Empty, drained and exhausted, I said, “Take us home,” to Renee, and she did.

  Thursday, March 30, 12:12 p.m.

  The sky was unbearably bright when we stepped back into our own time. Petite was where she’d been, sitting quietly under a thin film of dust. The Impala was gone, with no recent tread marks to say when. I was glad I’d taken out full insurance on the thing, and kind of wondered why Petite was still there—and undamaged—if the Impala was missing. I unlocked her doors and sat down in the driver’s seat to turn the radio on and find out what day it was.

  Thursday, according to the DJ. That made no sense. Morrison and I had gone into the mountains on Saturday. We’d lost most of a week.

  They were not lost, Renee said. The days passed as you ran the ancient forests.

  Of course they had. We’d overnighted in the valley with the isolated tribe, then it had taken us three days to get to the Ohio. I slumped in Petite’s front seat, wrung out and with no idea at all of where I should start. Morrison leaned in the open door, concerned. “You okay, Walker?”

  “I’m really not. I’m really, really not.” I closed my eyes, and after a moment Morrison closed the door gently and went to talk to my dad. I heard the explanation without letting myself listen to the words, and all but felt Morrison’s sorrow roll toward me. I still had afterimages burned into the backs of my eyes, things I hadn’t let myself look at, in the hospital. Doctors. My fifteen-year-old self, stone-faced to keep anybody from suspecting I was screaming inside. I had never let my grief and rage and helplessness go the way I’d just done while in Morrison’s arms. Eventually it would probably be cathartic, perhaps finally allowing wounds that were scabbed over to properly heal. Right now I was just exhausted and fragile, prepared to shatter again if anything hit me wrong.