by C. E. Murphy
We were barely forty feet in before Morrison made a sound of satisfaction and called me over with a crooked finger. Bent grass, broken branches and hints of heel prints were visible, the wights' high-speed escape left its mark. Either that or this was the path most people had been taking up to the Nothing Holler, which I suggested to Morrison in apologetic tones. He said, "I think you'd better fill me in," and I did as we hiked up the mountainside.
He didn't interrupt often, once with a "They'd really make it that difficult for Sara because she's a Fed?" that wasn't so much disbelieving as a sigh at the human condition, and later with a quiet "It wasn't your fault, Walker."
"People keep saying that. Doesn't make it any easier to believe." We crested the mountain as I finished catching Morrison up, and there we paused, taking in the view. I loved Seattle and the sharp, ragged Rockies in its distance, but North Carolina's soft old mountains and hazy landscape were welcoming in a way the Pacific Northwest would never seem, to me. I inhaled deeply, and Morrison cast me a cautious look.
"Miss it?"
"More than I realized." After a beat, I recognized the real intent behind the question, and shook my head. "Not enough to come back, except maybe to visit. Too much water under this bridge. I'm pretty dedicated to Seattle at this point."
A flash of regret sang through me as I remembered the expression on my friend and mentor Coyote's face when he'd realized that I really wasn't ever going to give up my cool Seattle street stomping grounds for the heat and wilderness of Arizona. It wasn't a lot of regret, especially with the reasons for my decision standing right here beside me on a low-rolling mountaintop, but the echo of Coyote's fear in Morrison's question brought it to mind. His eyebrows quirked, suggesting he was reading something of my emotions in my face, but I didn't think this was a great time to explain I was thinking about another man. "Trust me, Morrison. I'm coming home with you when this is over."
"Good. The trail goes two directions here. Which one do we take?"
Even I could see there was a reasonably well-beaten path heading off to the east, in which direction lay the Nothing Holler. Sara had not, I thought, tried very hard to find the easier path into the holler.
The other trail was considerably less obvious, only visible if I crouched and squinted at things. "This way. The path less traveled by."
"No one can accuse you of taking anything else." Morrison forged ahead until I caught up, said, "Snakes," and lifted my booted foot in comparison to his shod one. It wasn't so much that I'd come prepared for tromping through viper-infested forests as I'd been wearing my favorite stompy boots when I'd left Seattle. They just happened to go up to the bulge of my calf muscle, which was high enough that most startled snakes would get a fang full of leather instead of flesh.
Morrison blanched and fell behind me. For a while we worked our way up, down, through, around, over, under, and occasionally between valleys, hollers, trees, dells, streams and shrubberies. The wights' path was mostly clear enough to follow, though I called Morrison forward a few times when I wasn't certain. The second or third time I breathed, "What, Boy Scouts?" and he said, "Eagle Scout," without missing a beat.
I laughed. "Of course you were. I'm surprised you're not a troop leader now."
He said, "No kids," in a tone light enough that it was weighty. I narrowly avoided tripping over my own feet as we got started again. It wasn't so much that somebody had to have children themselves to lead Scout troops as clearly that was how Morrison envisioned himself doing it, and that was a thought I hadn't gone anywhere near. And I wasn't going to go any closer to it, either, not now and not for any time in the immediate future.
The sun was overhead before we broke over another crest that lay a whole rich valley out beneath us. A creek not quite big enough to be a river dribbled down the center, visible here and there between breaks in a full-on old-growth forest. The water's song bounced around the valley just enough to be heard when the wind caught it, and the scent of early wildflowers rose up with the buzz of captivated insects. It was as idyllic a setting as I'd ever seen.
Morrison, softly, said, "But if you insist on moving back South..." which reminded me of the glimpses I'd had of his inner garden: wilderness, as lush and varied as this place, though much more informed by the Pacific Northwest's landscape. I had miles to go before I caught up with his spiritual development, and I doubted it was something Morrison spent much, if any, conscious time on.
"We'd need a helicopter to get in and out. I don't think I'm man enough to hike three hours each way every time I wanted to go see a movie. Seriously, though, yeah. I can't believe it's not settled. The water must be coming in and out of a cave system, or somebody would have followed it upstream and built a homestead here." I slid the Sight on, wondering if I could get a glimpse of the water system.
Instead a roar of pain and anger rose from the earth, black wiping out the color and life I saw with normal vision. I fell back a step, shocked, and felt Morrison's hand at the small of my back again. Not really supporting me so much as letting me know he was there. I could get used to that.
It took a minute or two for the roar to die down, and even then it didn't disappear, just faded out. I could nearly See that a settlement had been made in this valley, once upon a time. Small buildings, cleared spaces, campfires, and children's laughter filled my mind, though I knew they were imaginary. I didn't see ghosts, not the way some people did. But I could See the centuries-buried fire circles, the fallen structures of homes and meeting places. The Cherokee had built wattle and daub homes with thatched roofs, previous to Western encroachment. This valley had been home to buildings like those, and to dozens, maybe hundreds, of people. Their bones faded into view the same way the buildings had, buried deep and forgotten by time. Bit by bit I realized the trees weren't actually old-growth, not the way I was thinking. Their roots ran deep, blue strength making concentric rings in the trunks, but they were a couple hundred years old, not centuries on end. One of the fires had burned through the valley, left untended by the dying. Nothing deliberate had happened here, no massacre, no driving the natives out. It had been destroyed through illness, smallpox and influenza carried on blankets and racing ahead of the conquering people.
"No," I said very quietly, "we wouldn't want to live here after all." I shut the Sight down. As I did, something flared at the corner of my vision. I steeled my stomach for a second hit from the death valley and triggered the Sight again, turning north toward the brightness.
Aidan's aura, unmistakable with its broad tangle of colors, and from the frantic pulse to his magic, he was fighting for his life.
Chapter Thirteen
Three things hit me at once: I could not get there fast enough. No matter what was happening, I simply could not get there fast enough.
I could not throw magic that far, not without at least being able to see my target.
I could not do less than try.
I whispered, "Renee," aloud, and for the first time tried to trigger time-shift magic on purpose.
I had done it before, inadvertently. Done it at Morrison's home, in fact, and therefore his presence at my side boosted my confidence. I had thrown my spirit forward, gone out of body to see what was happening in a room I couldn't get into. I still had no recollection of how my body had caught up to that passage of distance. It had just snapped into focus, catching up somehow, and in retrospect I thought I'd done something a little like folding a square of time. A tesseract.
If Mrs Who could do it, so could I.
I cut free from my body. Distance was irrelevant in the spirit world. It was all about expectations, there. One moment I was beside Morrison and the next I was beside Aidan, whose body language was pure last stand: they were going down, or he was.
They were the wights. All five of the remaining ones, whose presence made a sick lurch in the space that was nominally my stomach. There were seven more people back in town who had died in more or less the same way the wights had, by having their lives sucked aw
ay through black magic. I should have told Sara to burn those bodies, because I couldn't think of anything else that would guarantee they wouldn't rise like these ones had. I guessed they'd be buried by sundown, but I wasn't at all sure that would be enough. I hoped like hell that once this was over, I would remember to call and tell her that. And that there would be cell phone reception that would let me. And that was the last time I worried about anything but me, Aidan and survival for a little while.
Renee was a firebrand inside my skull, stitching things together with her long sticklike legs. I reached for my sword and remembered two things at once: first, it hadn't been a good weapon against the wights, and second, I was immaterial. I had nothing to hold a sword with.
The attempt to draw magic, though, got the wights' attention. Two, then three of them, moved away from Aidan, drawn by the source of raw energy that was me. My shields were in place, rock-solid, but without a body to house my power in, I blazed all over the landscape, a delicious temptation. I still didn't know how to fight them, and had probably made it worse by de-bodying, but if it was me or Aidan, I much preferred them siphoning off me. Not so much because I was confident of my survival, but because if somebody was going to die here it was not, by God, going to be the twelve-year-old. As the wights closed in on me, I forced myself to think. They were undead. Monsters created by sucking the life force out of others, as they had none left of their own.
The question, then, was what happened if I sucked the power out of them.
The wiser part of my brain suggested it would be nothing good, but I didn't see a lot of choice in the matter. I extended my hands and waggled my fingers like they were tasty energy sausages, and the wights pounced.
This time I let them land. I kept my shields in place, kept them ratcheted up to full power, and I scrambled for mental imagery that would let me try turning the whammy on the wights. Draining things wasn't so hard. Oil tanks, gas lines, even air from tires. The thing they all had in common was a valve of some kind.
I didn't much want to use the most common human drainage valve for this particular experiment. I settled for sticking my fingers into the mouth of the nearest wight, and imagining an oil tank releasing its black gooey contents onto the ground.
The good news was they had no shields at all. Nothing prevented me from doing as I imagined.
The bad news was its corrupted life force came out exactly as I imagined, as horrible stench-ridden sticky black goo. I shouted in disgust. It would have been more effective with a voice, but it made shock waves anyway, magic reverberating against the air. The wight pulled backward, screaming. Black oil stretched from it to my fingers, thickening instead of thinning. Its life drained away, corruption skimming down my ethereal arms and searching for ways in.
It weighed a tremendous amount. I'd mostly had experience with things trying to kill me. Attempts at corruption had been relatively subtle, but there was nothing subtle about this. It coated me, growing stickier and more alarming as it rushed over my torso and toward my face. The wight I was draining kept screaming even as it faded, but there was a vicious triumph in its cold eyes as it screamed. I started to get the idea that I had once more made a terrible mistake. I wasn't turboed up like I'd been before, but possibly leaving my body behind and attacking a bunch of soul-sucking monsters while one of my spirit animals was going great guns working magic inside my head had not been all that well thought out.
I wished for the umpteenth time that someone had given me a goddamned handbook, and then I put that thought to bed forever, because I'd gotten this far without one and I wasn't dead yet. I could hold on through this. I could take on every inch, every ounce, every spot of nastiness these things had, and when they'd poured it all onto me I could wrap it up in a big shining blue-and-silver bow, and obliterate it. All I had to do was hang on while they gnawed and pierced and did their best to get inside me. I shut my eyes, sealed my mouth, did my best to pinch my nostrils together. No access. I was a seal, with crazy ear flaps that kept water out.
Rattler stirred at the base of my skull. I hastily assured him I did not want to actually turn into a seal right then. He settled again, and I stuck with the imagery. Nothing was going to get inside me, and I was going to suck these bastards dry. The first one's howl began to lose confidence, like it had believed it would break through and then have all of my potential for its pickings. My own confidence picked up. I could do it. I was going to do it, one at a time or all of the rest of them at once, I didn't care, and then Aidan wouldn't have to fight a battle nobody his age should be seeing. A kind of give-me-your-best-shot triumph crashed through me.
So did a freight train's worth of white magic.
* * *
Every ounce of my attention had been wrapped up in the wights. I had nothing left to keep my metaphorical feet on the ground. Aidan's power slammed me backward into the forest. Bark and bugs and leaves and twigs smeared through my spirit and my impression of the world, and only gradually slowed me down. Six months ago they'd have stopped me cold, because my consciousness would have accepted them as totally solid, the kind of thing a body would crash into and slither down. Now not only could I register them as ephemeral, but also myself.
Under other circumstances I might have been proud of myself for that change of belief. Under these ones, I wished I hadn't come quite so far in accepting the new way my world worked, because it left me thirty trees back from Aidan and the wights as they went into a throw-down.
I'd lost the one into whose mouth I'd shoved my fingers. The muck connecting us had been vaporized, sparks of it still lingering in the air. I got myself heading the right direction again and shot back to the fight.
All five wights had risen into the air, bodies arched with exultation. Near-white magic danced between them, sucked out of Aidan at an impossible speed. I was close enough now to shield him, and threw a wall of magic between him and the undead.
Or I tried, anyway. I didn't know if he felt it coming or if my timing was just excruciatingly bad, but in the half an instant between throwing the magic and it manifesting, his power changed. He wrenched it back from the wights with brute strength that even I admired, rechanneled it and threw it like a massive missile, intent on destroying the wights. I squeaked, but it was too late.
Aidan's magic backfired. I knew exactly what it felt like, because I'd had it happen myself. He was a healer, and healing magic had strong opinions about being weaponized. I was astonished it hadn't happened when he bowled me over, but my guess was that had been solely intended to save me, not damage the wights. Magic, the living stuff of the soul, had a sense of the intent behind its use. Violently saving somebody was borderline okay. Taking the fight to the bad guys was something else. That was why my own path had been such a tricky one to get right. I hoped Aidan would never have to walk it. But right now he was dangerously close to trying, and I watched his magic roll up and shut down.
For what I bet was the first time in his life, his spiritual presence became quite ordinary, if spiked with fear. I Saw him struggling to call the magic again, and watched it retreat deeper into him, until there was nothing left but a scared kid.
A scared kid with a black mark on his soul.
Renee finished her work, and my body surged through time and space, slamming my spirit back into place. It rattled my teeth, but not my vision.
With all his magic tamped down, I could See the streak of darkness that had lodged in Aidan's center. It was a small scar, but it sizzled and stung like cold iron melting magic away. It was growing fast, like his magic had been holding it in place and it now suddenly had room to expand. I took a half dozen running steps, my hands alight with power, though I already knew it wasn't an infection I could simply wipe away. I would have to go into his garden--be invited into his garden, after the fuss I'd made yesterday--and we would have to tackle that growing corruption together.
Two steps away from him, the wights threw down a thunderous wall of magic that cut me off from Aidan entirely. I boun
ced off, shocked, and shot a look upward. They were gathered together, cannibalizing the magic that sustained them in order to build a funnel between themselves and Aidan. The black mark inside him expanded exponentially, seizing his retreating magic and bending it to its own will.
I slammed my sword into existence and bashed it against the cascading magic, but its strength called on exactly the same things that had made me vulnerable to my mother's power: in Ireland, Mom's magic had known mine well enough to break in. Here, Aidan's magic knew mine well enough to keep it out. And I was unaccustomed to forcing myself in where I wasn't wanted, magically. I doubted it had been high on Mom's list of honed talents, either, but she had, after all, been one of the bad guys when she did it to me.
I was not one of the bad guys, but the power draw was reaching a crescendo. If I didn't act now, something bad was going to happen, and I didn't even have enough imagination to wonder what. I whispered, "Sorry, kid," and let my spirit go a second time.
This time I dove deep, as deep into the mountain as I could go, then turned tail and began scrambling back toward the surface, but on the other side of the magic pouring from the sky. I was a mouse, a badger, a wombat, any digging thing. The images were familiar to me from my first journeys into my garden, but this time I was digging my way toward Aidan's. He could be righteously furious and I could be properly apologetic later. Right now we had bigger problems, and the only way to defeat them was from the inside out.
I focused on the black streak consuming Aidan, aiming for it. Within seconds, I burst through the surface on the inside of the wights' casting of magic.
Aidan's eyes were black and soulless, his mouth contorted with wicked glee. He raised one hand, calling on power. I redoubled my shields, even though he shouldn't be able to throw any more magic around, and was glad I did. The blow that hit me had the Master's strength behind it, cold and enraged and viciously satisfied all at once. It was diluted, compared to what he'd thrown at me in Ireland, but there was no mistaking the source of power. I skidded backward but kept my feet, cementing the belief that the Master was weaker than he'd been. In Ireland he'd sliced and diced me for the fun of it, and I hadn't been able to raise a finger against him, much less shield myself.