by C. E. Murphy
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 sympathy 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 dieryn’t cod 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 m ancal recore 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 ov
er 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 small 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 heryn>
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.
Seven, and they still kept coming.
Two more, and his duty weapon was empty, and they still kept coming. He tucked it into the holster and began with the shotgun, but they still kept coming.
I was a moron.
I’d assumed it was just the five wights that had come back with Aidan, but that was a stupid, stupid assumption. They’d had days to drain the dead and create more of themselves. The more of them there were, the more food was funneled to a hungry Master, and the faster a crisis point built. We didn’t just have to get Aidan out of here. We had to wipe out dozens, maybe hundreds, of living dead, or the time we went home to would be a ghost world.
Our time wasn’t a ghost world, so that meant we would succeed. I promised myself that and tried very hard to ignore the fact that I felt nothing, nothing, in this time and place that meant time couldn’t be changed here. I’d run up against a wall of magic when I’d tried to save Lugh, in Ireland. Someone had already changed the timeline close to when he died, and it had refused to alter anymore. There was no such wall here. It implied that, despite my insistence that the timeline was pretty fixed and didn’t care to be mucked with, that this was a time and place in which it might be muckable.
For one desperate moment I wondered if that meant I really could have changed the whole future if I’d tried hard enough. If I could have saved the aboriginal Americans, and taken the price from the future I knew. Then Morrison said, “Walker,” again, this time with a note of warning, and coulda-woulda-shouldas faded. We needed to survive here and now, and the timeline needed to continue as unchanged as it could be, because this was what built the world we knew. Some other me in some other adventure could try the other road, and maybe my dreams would tell me how that turned out.
For now I ground my teeth, fixed the idea of the net around Aidan as hard as I could, and latched it in my mind instead of in my hands. Then I took Morrison’s pistol and reloaded it with the spare clip from my own duty weapon, which I hadn’t had time to give up after quitting the police force. It had been in Petite’s trunk along with the shotgun, which I also took and reloaded when it emptied. Then for good measure I loaded my duty weapon and tucked it into Morrison’s belt.
In the twenty seconds that took, my net frayed. When I turned back to Aidan, he lurched at me with his hands clawed, cold fingers latching around my throat. Black magic pulsed out, strangling me, and exultation gleamed in his discolored eyes.
I whispered, “Wrong approach, kiddo,” and grabbed his pinkies, wrenching them back. His fingers loosened and his triumph turned to churlish outrage. Black magic roared and spat around me, struggling to find a chinto nkik in my armor. There were none, not this time. He could pour all his magic out trying to break through, and I would come out aces.
He realized it at the same time I did, and the outpouring ceased. He collapsed in my arms, his eyes and skin returning to normal, though his hair remained half-bleached. I caught his weight and he tipped his chin up, all exhausted little boy, and whispered, “Mommy?”
I burst out laughing. Honest-to-God belly laughs, the kind that brought tears of mirth to my eyes. I whooped and wheezed, patted his cheek, and spoke to who or whatever was trying to sucker punch me from inside him. “You might’ve gotten me with ‘Mom,’ but you pushed that one way too far, buddy. This kid’s mommy is somebody else entirely.” My laughter faded into cold fury. “Now let him go, you son of a bitch. He’s not your vessel, and don’t think he means so little to me that I would let that happen.”
The words had a familiar ring. Cernunnos had said something very similar just a few days ago, when I was the one boiling over with dark magic. He would have crushed my windpipe to make sure I didn’t become the Master’s doxy. I wasn’t certain I had the nerve to do the same to Aidan, but there were no other ends to which I was not willing to go. This particular battle could go on for the rest of my life, if necessary, and I was okay with that.
“Walker,” Morrison said a third time, and we were out of bullets, out of choices and out of time.
*
Aidan’s face split in an ugly grin. The black came back into his eyes, gold flecks warning that he was reaching for magic again. His skin paled, becoming even more wightlike than before, and I braced myself for the inevitable blow.
My father said, “Now,” and clean healing power smashed my shields down from the inside.
*
I’d forgotten about him. I really had. Between Morrison and Aidan, I’d just forgotten about my father, and about what I’d told him to do.
He’d done it in spades. He’d done what the valley shaman had done: reinforced a power circle by going over it again in reverse, except he’d used the bubble of my shields as the base for his power circle. The entire bubble, every surface, top, bottom, sides, where it intersected with the ground, everything. He’d lined it with his own magic, with the pure, deep healing power that he’d developed and honed over a decade and more of traveling America’s wounded places. I had no idea if he’d called on any gods. Not any I knew, anyway, and not any I could see, which made me think that he hadn’t.
Which meant the magic that battered mine down was all my father’s, and that I knew nothing of healing, if this was what a Walkingstick could do.
My father’s briefly glimpsed aura was green and gray, protective, resolute colors. The magic that burst outward was white, blazing white, a color I’d only ever seen come from the amalgamation of many magic practitioners working together. As it slammed into my shields, it took their power, drained all the magic I was throwing out to keep us safe, to keep Aidan in my grip. It flashed even brighter with that addition, purifying to an even greater degree, but I wasn’t kidding myself: Dad’s unleashed magic was the most hugely positive power I had ever encountered. He didn’t need me for this. My presence only added some shine to a knowledge that ran deep into the earth.
It rolled over the battlefield as quickly as the time bubble had overubbs unlearun the Appalachian valley, and left roses in its wake.
Some of them were literal
: the bodies of the dead changed, softening, becoming things of beauty instead of victims of violence. The wounded staggered to their feet fully healed. Rose petals stuck to their skin instead of blood, and they brushed them away in bewilderment. Wights fell, disintegrating into sweet-smelling dust. The rage in the air gentled. It didn’t end: roses, after all, had thorns, but it was mitigated, and the worst of the battle broke apart.
It wouldn’t last. There would still be wars fought between Native tribes, between Indians and Europeans, between settlers and the people who had lived on these lands for millennia. But for the moment, at least, the poison was broken apart, and the weight of darkness was lifted.
A handful of wights remained, still spread across the battlefield at the points that had most strongly fed the black lightning. I felt their panic erupt as their power fell away. Then they rallied, coming toward us in a flash, dark magic gathering in a whirlpool as they approached.
A heartbeat too late, I spun toward Aidan.
One slash of light illuminated the dark vortex as it enveloped him, and then he winked out, swallowed whole by time.
*
“We need to go.” My father’s voice was completely different, deeper and more determined than I’d ever heard it. I whipped back toward him and squinted, even with the Sight turned off. He blazed with power, spirit animals standing tall and strong on his shoulders. A walking stick on his left, above his heart, and the others were fainter, less easy for me to recognize. Renee appeared on my own shoulder, brought to life and visibility by the magic Dad was working.
That was as clear a statement as I needed, but I still hesitated. “Where did he go?”
“We have to go find out. Come on, Joanne. I can’t hold this for long.”
I could, but there was no point in saying so. I reached for Morrison’s hand. He looked between me and my father, put the guns away, and laced his fingers through mine.