by C. E. Murphy
Then I pulled up my big-girl pants and headed back down the mountain, because I certainly had some explaining to do, and we had seven bodies to carry out of the hills.
* * *
Sara was kneeling by Carrie Little Turtle's body when I got back down. Aidan and Ada had followed me, but their footsteps had stopped when they'd gotten close enough to get a sense of what had happened. Others were gathered around the other dead women and men, most faces still too shocked to begin moving on to grief. I went to Sara and Carrie, though I pitched my voice to carry around the fallen circle. "We were sucker punched. This whole thing was a bait and switch. It was trying to get at me. That's probably why Dad went missing."
"Who the hell are you, that an evil wants you this badly?" A big-boned man spoke from across the circle, accusation raw in his question.
Despite everything that was happening, I doubted he wanted to know my long, drawn-out history with the Master and his minions. After a long minute I settled on a response that might or might not mean anything to him, but did, in its way, answer the question: "I'm Joanne Walkingstick."
Apparently it answered the question a lot better than I'd thought it would. A ripple of recognition and a strange mix of relief and hostility swept the gathered mourners. The hostility wasn't much of a surprise. I hadn't exactly left the Qualla on good terms, and I'd come back to preside over the mass murder of seven elders.
The relief was unexpected, given that I had just presided over a mass murder. Not deliberately, maybe, but still. It gave me the sneaking suspicion that my family name carried a lot more weight and a lot more respect than I'd ever imagined. I was going to punch my father in the nose when I found him again. Sara, quietly, said, "That thing ran away. Is it over?"
"No. I'm going to have to go hunting." Hunting magic wasn't easy, at least not for me. It didn't leave discernible tracks, and unless I knew exactly what I was looking for, I often couldn't see the scars it left on the landscape where it gathered. "We need to get everyone back down into town, though. We--"
"Can you magic them down there?"
I blinked. "Er. No. That would be cool. But no."
"Then you need to go hunt and the rest of us will deal with the bodies."
I opened my mouth and shut it again. Sara had a point. A very good one, actually, thwarted only by one minor detail. "I need Les. Or somebody else who actually grew up in the mountains, Sara. I spent some time tromping around when I was a teenager, but I'd be kidding myself if I didn't think I'd get my ass lost up here by the time I was five minutes out of this holler. Can you...?"
"If I was good enough in the mountains to guide you I'd have found Lucas by now."
"I'll take her." Aidan had come up behind us. I twitched around to see him and bit my lower lip. The warmth was gone from his face, leaving blue shadows under his eyes and his skin sallow. He focused on a spot just beyond Carrie, close enough he could pretend he was looking at her without actually doing so. Being brave, in other words, and it broke my heart.
As gently as I could, I said, "That would be really great, if it's okay with your mom. But honestly, you look like you need some rest, Aidan. I know you want to be doing something. It helps a little, having something to do. But if you're going to guide me through the mountains, I need you to be totally sharp so we don't both end up lost."
He thrust his jaw out and dared a glance at me, trying to determine if I was serious or just wheedling him into getting some rest. His eyes flashed gold, probably checking my aura for truthfulness, and his shoulders relaxed a millimeter. "I guess that maybe makes sense."
"Yeah. Ada? Is it okay if he takes me up into the mountains in the morning?"
Ada's mouth thinned. "We'll talk about it when we get home."
In my vocabulary that constituted a yes. I smiled with relief at Ada, then looked hopefully at Aidan, whose shoulders relaxed just that little bit more. I guessed he thought it meant yes, too. Then we both turned to Sara, waiting to see if that was an acceptable solution.
Her eyebrows were drawn down. "Won't the trail go cold? Isn't every minute you're sitting here losing us time in the manhun--"
She stopped before I had to say it, her scowl growing darker as I picked up in the silence she'd left off. "It's not like setting dogs on a scent or following a predisposition toward certain brands of cigarettes or patterns of cash withdrawals that might let you find a suspect. Magic doesn't leave a trail like that. It's not going to get any colder by morning."
"If we let it go tonight, can things get worse?"
"Oh, yeah. It could always get worse." I looked skyward. "It could be raining."
Sara smacked my shoulder, just like we were teens again, and muttered, "I can't believe you said that. No, I meant is it likely to attack? Is it going to tear the mountain up? What was it, anyway? Not a demon."
"No, not like the wendigo. This is a spirit creature. An evil ghost, kind of. It's made up of all the hate and indifference and deliberation that slaughtered the First Nations, and of their pain and loss and fear and anger, as well. It's like a ghost on steroids, and it's been deliberately awakened and is being directed. At all of us in general and at me in particular."
"What does it want?"
I shrugged. "To obliterate us. But it retreated for a reason. Either we were more than it expected, or more likely, it's resting and getting used to its new strength. I think it's not going to try anything again just yet."
"And if you're wrong?"
"Then it'll probably come looking for me, so with any luck everybody else will stay safe."
"How often does 'any luck' come in to the equation?"
"Not often enough." I got up as a familiar thup-thup-thup began echoing against the mountains. "Are those helicopters?"
A few seconds later, two Medivac choppers crested the mountains and maneuvered around each other to find landing space at the foot of the holler. Wind and dust and leaves kicked up, spraying everyone and sending arms over faces to block the updrafts. A fair number of paramedics jumped out and came running up the hill, bent double until they were well away from the choppers. Their expressions went unusually blank when they saw the bodies. I was sure they'd been briefed, but a briefing wasn't the same as laying eyes on seven uninjured dead people sprawled in an otherwise idyllic setting. Sara got to her feet and met them, taking charge naturally. None of the people who had refused to talk to her earlier objected, either. I took an uncharitable moment to regard them all as hypocrites, then got over my judgmental self and went to see if I could help.
I couldn't. I got turned away faster than a bad smell, and was left cold-shouldered by the men and women who carefully helped lift bodies onto the Medivac sledges, too. That, as far as I was concerned, wasn't hypocritical: I was far more an outsider than Sara, and I'd been responsible in some fashion for these deaths. They fully deserved to handle and respect their dead without my interference, even if some of the dead had been important to me, too. I backed up the holler a ways, wondering if I could find my way to the trail Aidan and Ada had planned to take out of here. Given that I'd just sworn I'd get lost the moment I left the holler, I figured I should wait until the valley cleared and I could fight my way back down through the trees, the way Sara and I had come. I expected her to ride away in the helicopters, and she did.
Only after the choppers were gone and the sounds of their blades had faded did people begin to move out. Slowly, in small groups that supported each other and chose not to look at me. I could have followed them, but watched them go instead, even Ada and Aidan, the former of whom had the grace to glance toward me in invitation. I shook my head and she went along with the others, until I was alone in a mountain holler with the sun fading fast on the western horizon.
In a world with a proper sense of drama or mystical nonsense, the ghost of my father would no doubt have come slowly down the hills as the sun disappeared. I was just as glad the world wasn't inclined toward that kind of theatrics, since I really didn't want Dad to be dead. I did, though,
sort of want...something. Some kind of connection to the land, I guessed. Something that said, "It's okay, Jo. You belong here, too. The ghosts of your ancestors welcome you home," or something to that effect.
What I got was a slight chill as a breeze picked up, and a greater awareness that late March was maybe the perfect time of year in the Qualla. Summer's mugginess hadn't come on full yet, nor were the bugs out in full force. Though I'd been serious about the likelihood of getting lost if sent out here alone, I'd also spent quite a bit of time in the mountains, especially after the twins had been born and I'd thoroughly branded myself an outsider and a loser. Then I went to college in Seattle, and while the Pacific Northwest was covered in forests, I'd stayed out of them. Only in the past year had I gotten back to the outdoors at all, and it had reminded me how much I'd liked being part of the world in that way. But the Northwest's trees were nothing like down here in the Appalachians, and these were the ones that made my heart sing with familiarity. I wanted to curl up beneath them and pull a blanket of leaves over myself so I could sleep in the land and belong again.
Except I couldn't, because there were seven dead people on their way home, and I had to first pay my respects, then go find what had killed them and stop it. I swayed a little, preparing myself for motion, but as the stars began to appear, crickets started singing, and some of the night wildlife began rustling through the underbrush. I closed my eyes, feeling raccoons and possums and shrews scrambling through the woods, and got a far-off sense of a puma who wasn't supposed to be there any more than I was. Deer were settling down for the night, and there were individual human settlements still awake and pulsing with energy here and there amongst the hollers and hills. The road wasn't so far away I couldn't hear it over night's quiet, and there was a steady stream of traffic. I imagined most of it was heading down the mountains into Cherokee as more and more people learned of the deaths.
I thought maybe Les Senior would be presiding over the vigil tonight, no doubt feeling his own near miss keenly. I wondered, had my own father not gone missing, if he might have been the shaman most qualified to perform death rites. There was so much about my own family that I didn't know, and standing out here on a mountain was not going to teach me any of it.
I stayed there anyway, until it was fully dark and the likelihood of me snagging a handful of poison oak on the way back to the road was extremely high. I laughed at myself, because of course I hadn't thought of that possibility while I was indulging in the dramatic lonesome-warrior-on-a-hill pose, and then I went home to Cherokee to see what help I could be.
Chapter Nine
Old Cherokee tradition laid the dead to rest by sunset the day they died, or the day after, and had someone remain with the bodies to make sure sorcerers didn't steal the soul in the meantime. My recollection was that as a teen I had thought it was a supremely bullshit, embarrassing, hokey-dokey ritual that no one with any grip on the modern era would admit to participating, never mind actually believing, in. And to be fair, most people didn't. That was why it was tradition, not modern practice. On the other hand, there were people who kept to the old traditions, and I was pretty certain at least some of the dead would be among them.
Besides, the forced perspective of the past year made me reconsider my stance to a significant degree. Now I not only didn't think it was bullshit, but since the elders' bodies wouldn't have gotten back to town until just before sunset, far too late to bury them, I was also incredibly grateful that there would be someone watching over them. Even if it was just an undertaker, that would be good, but I had hopes that there might be a genuine vigil. I was pretty certain the bodies didn't have any souls left to steal--recovering those souls by taking out the Executioner was going to be my job--but it was good to know they'd be observed and shielded from further desecration.
I supposed one very powerful medicine man might keep all seven of them safe, but it seemed more likely to me that if anybody was taking the old rituals seriously, that there would be at least seven: one for each body. I wasn't surprised, when I got back to town myself, that there were far more than seven gathering for a vigil. Cherokee was a small community, and seven deaths was a lot to take in at once. A slow stream of vehicles drove down toward the high school. There was a natural amphitheater up in Cherokee County itself, where this kind of tragedy would be dealt with on a deeper, community-wide level later. But for tonight, the high school became the default location for large gatherings, just like it would be in many other small towns. I followed the taillights and parked my rented Impala on the outskirts of the lot, where it wouldn't be boxed in, should I need to make a quick exit.
I stopped cold at the school doors, not because of horrific teenage memories, but because the last time I'd been in a high school, it, too, had been the source and gathering place of a tragedy. That had been the same day my shamanic powers had reawakened, and a bunch of teens had been murdered by a lunatic demigod. The terrible silence in the school had struck me: the murmur of shocked voices, the barely echoing footsteps in the halls, the arms around one another, and the blank helplessness sketched on the faces of children were all echoed in the devastated community now entering Cherokee High. It wasn't something I particularly wanted to immerse myself in again, especially since I'd had more connection to some of the victims here. Not much more, maybe, but a little.
"Come on, Joanne." Sheriff Lester Lee passed by, putting just enough hitch in his step to let me fall in beside him.
I did so, shoving my hands in my pockets and not quite seeing the hopelessly familiar, totally changed halls around me. "I thought you'd be in there already. I'm late."
"I was filling out incident reports. The medical examiner has the bodies right now. She'll be bringing them in later, after the autopsies. She won't find anything, will she?"
"I don't think so. Is there someone, a medicine man, someone, with them?"
"Of course. Is it going to be important?"
"I hope not."
Les nodded, accepting that, and I had a surreal moment of wondering whether this was what life would be like if everyone took the mystical and magical as matter-of-fact. It wasn't that I thought everybody in the Qualla would take it seriously, but I'd met more people here in the past twelve hours who were accepting of magic than I'd met in the past year. Most of the time I found myself stuttering around explanations that didn't matter anyway, because people made up their own stories as soon as the magic faded. Les, however, was calm, cool, collected, and obviously not going to put this out of his mind. "Grandpa says you saved his bacon up there on the mountain today. Twice."
"Only once. He was out of the power circle when this happened, either way. If I hadn't been there, he certainly wouldn't ha..." It finally struck me that Les was obliquely saying "Thank you," and that arguing over the details was not gracious. I cleared my throat. "You're welcome. He's welcome. I'm glad I was there. I just wish..." I made a useless little gesture as we entered the gym, where hundreds of people were gathered.
I stopped and smiled in spite of myself. There was a cohesive look to the people gathered, a certain similarity of facial shapes, of skin tones, that I hadn't seen for a while. Seattle's Native American population was a lot smaller than the area's historical settlements could account for. I'd unconsciously missed seeing a solid representation of the Native element, and seeing it again made me happy.
It also made me aware that while I'd resented being paler-skinned than so many of my classmates when I was a teen, as an adult it was clear to me that the thing that had really made me stand out was my bad attitude. There were people in the gym who looked like they'd walked straight out of three hundred years ago, but there were as many whose lighter skin had a sun-warmed ruddiness to it, or who had African influence in their genetics. Every single one of us still laid legitimate claim to Cherokee heritage. Too bad I'd been such a punk when I was a kid, and too bad I already knew time travel wouldn't fix it if it could.
"You all right, Joanne?" Les, who'd gone on ahead, no
ticed I wasn't at his side and turned back. "It's all right, you know. You can come on in. Nobody's going to blame you."
"That wasn't it." Though it was a perfectly reasonable fear, now that he'd reminded me of it. I caught up again and we made our way through the throng to find Les Senior on his way into the music room that lay across the hall from the gym.
"This is where we will watch over them until morning. There are too many eyes in the gym now. Too much anger and hurt that a sorcerer could steal and use. The elders and the medicine men will take turns shepherding the dead and counseling the living. It would be good to have a Walkingstick sit with us," he said to me as we went into the music room.
I blinked around at the room, mumbling about how it had hardly changed as a method of trying not to show my surprise at the invitation. Both Lesters waited with a degree of patience that told me I wasn't fooling anyone, so I cleared my throat, then nodded. "Sure, yeah. I mean, I'd be honored. It should be Dad, not me, but...yeah. If you're sure. Not everybody's going to like it."
The wrinkled corners of Les Senior's mouth quirked upward. "They don't have to. There are some advantages to a people who still at least pretend to respect their elders. Can you make this room a safe place?"
That, I was much more confident about. I nodded. "In fact, if we've got the time and some chalk dust, maybe, we could build a protective circle around the whole school. It wouldn't hurt any of us to have that sense of security, not after today. Grandpa Les, I'm--"
"It was not your fault." He didn't do the same talk-to-the-hand gesture Carrie had used earlier, but the tone of voice was very similar. My throat tightened and tears burned in my eyes at the reminder. It barely seemed possible Carrie was dead, even if I'd seen her fall.