Mountain Echoes (The Walker Papers) (10 page)

It was pushing midnight by the time I was done. People were beginning to sing inside, songs that blended from gospel to traditional Cherokee music and occasionally slid into something modern, poppy, and still somehow appropriate. I walked back around the circle, checking the consistency with the Sight—the salt glowed the same purposeful green that the school and other protective constructs did—and was satisfied. I took up a place closest to the mountains where the Executioner had fled. Nothing like literally placing myself between the people and the evil. I bowed in all four directions, then sank power into the land, asking it to respond and protect.

Magic zinged through me like fireworks. I’d only joined the power circle on the mountain; I hadn’t opened it. The difference between opening a circle with two spirit animals and three was astounding. It added a depth of awareness that made the air itself come to life, dust and seeds shining in the dark. I felt the age of the land, the solemn incontrovertible strength of the mountains, and felt how even as we ravaged the planet, mankind’s touch was still a light thing on it:
it
would endure, whether we did or not.
It
had survived cataclysms before, and would again.
It
would bring life forth again, carried in those seeds and motes of dust, and in time the scars left by humanity would fade and heal. It could easily cast me away, deny my hopes and leave my people open and vulnerable to the dark magic gathering in the hills.

But it didn’t. It answered, living magic rising from the earth to answer my call. Its green was so dark as to be nearly black, rich with age and confidence. It met my silver-blue and amalgamated it, comforting and strong, until I was the unknown spark that had started the fire. It would continue burning now, keeping those things within it safe from the world outside, until I asked it to come down. I would feel the people coming and going, and if corruption tried to slip through, I had no doubt I would sense it. I’d never had such a strong sense of the earth itself, or of such a connection to it. I whispered, “Thanks, Renee,” aloud, and felt the walking stick give a little nod of pleasure in the depths of my mind. Raven and Rattler felt smug, like this was much better, this was the way things really
ought
to go, and I grinned as I left my place in the power circle to go back into the school.

Les met me at the doors, his eyes shining. “You did it, didn’t you? The circle is up.”

“Yeah. Why?”

He tipped his head toward the gym, then took a sort of skipping step in that direction. “You should have seen it. It was like someone wrapped the whole place in a blanket. The mountain echoes cut off and everybody relaxed a little. I’d never seen anything like it. They’re calmer now, all of them. It’s like the air gave us a hug.”

I chuckled quietly. “That’s good. I’ll leave it up until they’re ready to be buried. Maybe it’ll help.”

“Won’t that wipe you out?”

“Nah. It’s like turning the key to spark skeyth="1eman engine. Once the engine is going you don’t have to keep turning the key. As long as the earth is willing to help, the magic is self-sustaining.” I followed Les into the gym, where I, too, could feel the decrease of tension. There was still a lot of sorrow and anger, but the fear had faded. That was a relief, since this many unhappy people powered by fear could turn into a mob very fast, and Les didn’t have anything like the resources to contain an angry mob. Well, unless you counted me among his resources, but that made me start wanting a holocaust cloak and a wheelbarrow.

This time as I came in, a ripple went through the crowd. Everybody knew by now that Joanne Walkingstick was back in town, and that I’d had something to do with what had happened on the mountain. Calming power circle or not, there were a lot of suspicious faces and hurt gazes as I stuck close to Les. “This was maybe not a good idea.”

“Too late now.” He led me through the gathering, his badge giving him just enough authority that nobody got in my face. Not, at least, until we’d crossed the gym and were about to go into the music room. Then a big block of a man put himself between us and the door, and folded his arms.

“I don’t think you deserve to sit with the dead, Walkingstick. You ran out of here a long time ago. You should go back where you came from.”

Les murmured, “Grandpa Les asked for her, Dan,” while I tried to figure out who the guy was. The name rang a bell, and I took half a step back to get a better look at the guy.

“Dan. Danny Little Turtle?” Danny had been big in high school, too, but he’d filled out enough to be mistaken for a wall by casual observers. He’d been a football player, a big man on campus, and I was the tall skinny walking chip-on-the-shoulder who showed up and wasn’t impressed. To the best of my memory, “Oh, God. I’m so sorry, Dan. I’m so sorry about your grandmother. I liked her,” were nearly the first words I’d ever said to him.

“So much you got her killed. Get out of here, Joanne. Go back to Seattle. We don’t want you here.” His animosity picked up followers, men and women who were less aggressive by nature but glad to follow a lead.

Les started to look grim, and I touched his elbow to ask him to let me handle it. His expression didn’t change, but he didn’t break into the discussion yet, so I took that as my chance. “First off, you’re right. I left a long time ago and I have a lot of nerve coming back right now. A lot more nerve, coming here, into your memorial services. I’m sorry for intruding, and if you don’t want me helping keep vigil, I won’t. It’s not my place.”

There was nothing like agreeing with somebody to take the wind out of their sails. Dan’s scowl got darker, but he couldn’t argue when I was offering to do what he wanted. I kept my voice pitched exactly the same way, just loud enough to carry around a group of people who had suddenly gotten very quiet. “Grandpa Les thinks this horrible mess isn’t my fault, and I wish I believed him, but I’m not trying to kid anyone. Even if it’s not something I did, it’s something that’s happening to bring me back here. I wouldn’t have come back if Dad hadn’t gone missing.”

“I’m surprised you did anyway.”

That was way too shallow to hurt: I cut myself deeper than that every day. All I said was, “Yeah, I know,” because while I wasn’t exactly surprised at myself, I couldn’t imagine anyone else being anything
but.
“I’ll do what I can to help here, Danny. I can’t undo these deaths. I hope like hell I can prevent more. And if I go away s ifemo again when this is over, I hope at least this time I won’t be running away, and that maybe someday I’ll be invited back. It’s the best I can do. It’s not enough. We all know that. But it’s the best I can do.”

All that shamanic training was doing some good. I’d set Dan and everybody else on their ears, at least, shaking the foundations of what they expected from me. It was a good place to start, and for once smart enough not to push it, I gave Danny a respectful nod and said, “Thanks for letting me say my piece. I’ll get out of the way now. I don’t want to disrupt things more than I have.”

I went ahead and left through the doors we’d been heading for. Les and Dan both followed, the latter to make sure I wasn’t going into the music room. When I headed past it to the end of the hall, he went back into the gym. Les, though, caught up with me and said, “‘If’?”

There was only one
if
in what I’d said that he’d be asking about. “I couldn’t say ‘when I go away again’ without losing any possible street cred I’d just earned.”

“Ah. Yeah. I guess. I guess it was too much thinking you’d come back and realize everything you were missing, all inside a day.”

I crooked a smile. “Give it time. I haven’t even been here twelve hours yet. Look, I’m gonna do just what I said. I’m going to stay out of the way. Tell your grandpa I’m sorry, okay? But I don’t think it’s a good idea to push it with Danny, and there are probably others in there who think the same thing. They’ll be all right without a Walker in there.”

“A Walker?”

I sighed. “Walkingstick. I changed my last name when I left. Abandoning my roots, all of that. Don’t tell me you never noticed in the computer files.”

“I never looked.” Les had a funny expression. “Not on our files, anyway. I looked you up a few times online, but I was looking for Joanne Walkingstick. Guess that’s why I never found you.”

A crop of nervous butterflies awakened in my stomach. This didn’t seem like a good time to admit I’d never even thought of looking him up online. “I guess I didn’t think in terms of how changing my name might make me kind of disappear. But here I am now.” I spread my hands in demonstration, then nodded toward the gym. “You’d probably better get back in there. I’ll keep an eye on the power circle and if anybody needs me my mobile is, er, I mean, my cell phone number is—” I rattled off the number feeling silly, and mumbled, “I was in Ireland, everybody calls them mobiles there.”

“I’ll call if we need anything.” Les headed back into the gym and I watched him go, uncomfortably aware that his high school interest in me didn’t seem to have passed. Otherwise
if
I left versus
when
I left wouldn’t have mattered, never mind things like whether he could find me online. It all made me miss Morrison horribly, which was probably not in the least what Sheriff Lester would like to hear. I took my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and checked the time. One in the morning in North Carolina was only 10:00 p.m. in Seattle. I slid down against a wall and called Morrison, fingers tangled in my hair while I waited for him to pick up.

He didn’t. After five brisk rings, his voice mail invited me to leave a message. I sighed and said, “Hey, it’s me. I just, um. I miss you. Gimme a call if you get a chance, okay? I’m back in the States, I’m in North Carolina, I’m... It’s too much to put in a voice mail. Call me when you can.” I hung up, then went and did as I’d s di. I sighed promised Les I would—checked the power circle.

It was in fine condition, as I’d predicted. I stayed within it, but wandered the school grounds, breathing in the warm night air and listening to bugs sing. Probably it would’ve been smartest to try snatching a few hours’ sleep, but despite what I’d told Les, I wasn’t positive the circle would remain active if I paid so little attention as to take a nap.

Eventually I wound up in the mechanic’s shop, which was as close to home as anywhere in the world might be. I’d spent a lot of hours banging around in there when I was a teen, and the smell of grease and oil put me right back where I belonged. There was still a wreck of a stereo against one wall—it might have even been the same one—and I dug through a box of dust-covered CDs until I found a classical one. I put the CD on repeat and settled into a corner, letting myself drift into a semisomnolent state where the swoops and falls of Beethoven filled me with a slow-building exuberance. It wasn’t as good as a drum circle, but it did the job. I felt Rattler finally beginning to regain his strength, after two weeks of being put through the wringer. I retained just enough awareness to know nothing wicked struck from beyond the power circle. Hours later, the circle’s connection with the earth let me know that the sun was rising, and I slowly shook off the music’s power and got to my feet.

Everybody in the gym who was still awake had to be exhausted. I thought maybe I could run to the supermarket and come back with all the doughnuts in town. It was a cheap way to buy myself into the community’s good graces, if it worked. I left the shop and went back into the main part of the school, passing the music room on my way to check and see how many people had made it through the night awake.

A couple steps past the music room’s open door I stumbled, my brain catching up to what I’d seen there. I backed up, one hand already on the door frame for support, and the other one knotted over my stomach like I could keep sickness at bay until I was certain of what I’d seen.

The floor was littered with the vigil-keepers, whose mouths and eyes gaped in rigid horror. Above their unseeing eyes, fingertip-size burns were seared into each forehead. A few
of them had fallen in ways that suggested they’d been running and had simply been felled where they moved, bodies instantly going into rigor mortis. It was so macabre and senseless that for long moments I just stood there, swaying, unable to see what else was wrong in the room. Finally, though, it struck me.

The elders’ bodies were missing.

Chapter Ten

Saturday, March 25, 5:38 a.m.

From the outside.
I had set the circle to warn against threats from the outside. I hadn’t thought to check for evil already within the school, and I wasn’t certain it would have triggered any wards even if it had. Not the way I’d set it up, anyway. The thoughts ran through my mind, splashes of cold and hot, while I stared at the wreckage in the music room.

I didn’t notice when I started moving. I just saw it happening from above, watched myself turn around and walk out of the music room like my body had decided to go on walkabout while my spirit stayed with the dead, struggling to understand how I could have prevented another massacre.

By not letting Danny Little Turtle push me around, obviously, but I’d thought we were safe and I’d thought he had a point. I would never, ever r v di. the dead,efuse a request from an elder again.

My stomach dropped and I looked more carefully at the bodies. Somehow, inexplicably, Les Senior was not among them. I didn’t know if he’d stepped out for a bathroom break or what, but he’d been spared a second time inside of twenty-four hours. For one heartbeat I was grateful, and for the next I wondered if he’d cut a deal with somebody to make sure he survived.

I shuddered. The motion snapped me back into my body, which was getting into the rented Impala and offering a genial wave at the guys maintaining the traffic patterns and salt circle. By the time I really felt like I was behind my eyeballs again, I was halfway out of town. When I figured I had a good ten minutes’ head start on any pursuit, I broke the law and made a cell-phone call while driving.

Les picked up on the second ring, his voice hoarse like he’d been talking all night. “Sheriff Lee.”

“This is Joanne. Something’s gone wrong.”

The rough quality left his voice. “What? Where are you? I’m on my way.”

“I’m not at the school anymore. The elders are missing and their vigil-keepers are dead.” I couldn’t think of a way to soften the blow, so didn’t try.

His breath hitched, then turned gruff with professionalism. He reminded me of Morrison right then, and I wished desperately that the captain had picked up last night. “They’re dead and you’ve left the premises? Joanne, that doesn’t look good.”

“Heh. I know. I know, and I’m sorry, but I made a huge mistake and I’m going to try fixing it before it gets any worse. The trouble wasn’t coming in from outside, Les. It was already in the school, waiting for us.
Dammit!
” That was twice I’d been sucker punched, and I was starting to get pissed.

“You’ve made a mistake by leaving, Jo. Please come back before I have to explain to anyone why you left the scene of a crime.”

“It’s not a crime.” It was, of course. Just not the kind Les was going to be able to do anything about.

“Joanne.” The professional edge was getting harder. “If you don’t come back I’m going to have to consider you a suspect. You kn—
Jesus.
”

That, I judged, was the sound of him getting to the music room. “
Jesus,
Joanne, what happened here? Where are the bodies? The—the first bodies, I mean? You don’t have them, do you?”

“No. Either somebody in the school attacked the vigil-keepers and stole the bodies, or...” I didn’t much want to think about, much less say, the
or,
because I was considerably more convinced of its probability than of someone making off with seven dead people and not being noticed.

Les, grimly, said, “Or what?”

I sighed. “Or they got up, killed their watchers, and left on their own.” I was in the mountains now, and wishing the phone’s reception would start cutting out so I’d have an excuse to hang up. I didn’t want to convince Les that there were seven undead running around the North Carolina hills. I wished I didn’t feel so confident of it myself. It said something about my life that undead seemed more likely than body snatchers.

“Joanne....” Les’s exhalation came over the line, and his words were measured. “Just come on back so we can talk about this, all right?”

“Sorry, Les. I’m losing reception. I { reJ’ll talk to you later.” I hung up, then swore creatively for about a quarter mile, and called Sara. “Go to the music room. Les is going to need your help.”

“Joanne?” Sara sounded fuzzy with lack of sleep, but like Les, she sharpened right up. “What’ve you gotten us into now?”

“A fine mess, and I’m sorry. Look, please don’t tell Les, but I’m heading back to the holler where the Nothing came up from. It’s the only place I’ve got to start.”

I heard her say, “Got to start with what?” but I was already hanging up. I tossed the phone into the passenger seat and put both hands on the wheel, breathing, “C’mon, little buddy, let’s see what your punk-ass V-6 can do.”

The Impala, which had as much heart as could be expected from a late-model automatic transmission, jumped from forty to ninety in a respectably short distance, and for a few glorious minutes I didn’t think about anything except getting there
fast.
The car’s tires weren’t quite wide enough to stick to the mountain curves as well as I’d like, but he and I knew each other well enough by the time we got through the lower turns to take the higher ones at satisfying speed. I’d cut my teeth on these roads, learning to drive both safely and dangerously well, and some things you didn’t forget. Driving was the one skill at the police academy I’d come up aces in, and sometime soon after I got back to Seattle I was going to have to make a little drag-racing confession to Morrison, who would never, ever understand the impulse. Neither for the speed or for the thrill of the illegality of it, though at least I wasn’t a cop anymore, so I would at least save the department that embarrassment if I ever got caught.

Not that I ever got caught.

I overshot Sara’s holler-entering-site by a good distance, heading farther up the mountain to see if a pull-out gulley I remembered still existed. It did, as a big chunk of raw earth and dust where somebody had once cleared the land for tobacco. I killed the engine, got out, and slammed the car door closed. The noise echoed off the mountains and down into the gulley on the other side of the narrow road. For just a second it struck me as the only sound of civilization in all of creation, and the old soft beauty of the landscape impressed itself on me.

The sky was misty gold and pink, with just enough clouds hanging on the horizon to hold the color. The trees were still black with night, not yet giving up to daytime colors, and down in the gulley, steam rose off water that was warmer than the early-morning air. It couldn’t be more than half an hour past sunrise.

Which meant that realistically, I had to be way ahead of a bunch of animated dead bodies. There was no way they might have gotten up here faster than I had. Zombies were not known for their speed.

I fact-checked that against every zombie movie in history and decided to ignore movies. My personal experience indicated that zombies were, as tradition had them, slow. They also stank to high heaven, an experience that couldn’t be replicated in film, but which ought to give me some warning. Except these would be very fresh zombies, which might not stink so much.

I was not helping myself any, and neither was the awareness that I was not armed the way I’d been at Halloween. I had my sword and my magic, but I longed for Petite and the small arsenal I’d built into her trunk recently. It wasn’t much, just a sawed-off shotgun, some rock salt, three pairs of handcuffs and two wooden stakes, which I filed under “just in case” and assumed I would never actually have to use. Vampires did not exist. Dam {ot d two woodmit.

I’d taken a look around the pull-out while muttering all that to myself. There were fresh footprints, but not much in the way of tire tracks, which meant one of two things. Either this was not the other way into the holler, as I had hoped it would be, or the locals had been going to a tremendous amount of trouble to keep Sara from finding it. Unless there was also a major moonshine distillery up along the trail, I couldn’t imagine why they would go to so much bother, so I figured it wasn’t the way in. I sighed and decided to leave the Impala there, and walk back down to Sara’s roadside entrance to the holler. It would keep the car from getting banged up by traffic driving up the mountain the way I’d just done. I locked the doors and headed for the roadside.

Carrie Little Turtle, moving at lightning speed, came out of nowhere and tried to rip my face off.

* * *

The only thing that saved me was the sheerly instinctive flight reaction of falling over backward because something was in my face. I screamed loudly enough to be heard the next county over and kicked a booted foot into Carrie’s belly as she leapt at me. She weighed nothing, all that baling wire and sprung steel turning out to be personality more than physical strength. She went flying over my head and crashed to the earth somewhere beyond me. I dug my fingers in the clay, reminded myself that zombies were slow and came to my feet with a fistful of dirt in one hand and a blazing blue sword in the other.

The other six dead elders spread around me in a half circle, their hair bleached stone-white and their skin only a half shade darker. Their eyes were eaten with darkness, blood red where the color once had been. Their fingers were grotesquely long, nails discolored and sharp, and each of their forefingers looked as if it had been burned. Just like the marks on the vigil-keepers’ foreheads.

“Not zombies.” I actually said it aloud, surprising them at least as much as I surprised myself. “Definitely not zombies. Wights. I think I’ll call you wights. Is that all wight with you?”

Three of them snarled, possibly in response to the pun, and showed teeth that had decayed into yellow masses of dripping bile. I took that as a no, but before I could think of anything else stupidly witty to say, they came at me.

I envisioned the handful of clay as carrying the weight of the earth itself, and flung that weight at the nearest wight. It fell, pinned down and screaming under a shimmer of gunmetal-blue magic. I was starting to like that shade. It appeared to be the color my magic took on when it was really working in harmony, warrior and healer together again for the first time at last. The wight struggled, but healing power trumped death magic this time around, and I felt like having the bright morning sun on my side was a win.

The second wight avoided my rapier with a deftness I wouldn’t have attributed to the undead. I mean, I’d been sword fighting for almost a year now, and I’d skewered a thing or two in my time. Even with pinning one wight down magically, I could manage a lunge and thrust. But the second wight sucked its belly in and twitched to the side like it was invested with a rattlesnake spirit, too, lending it speed it had no native right to.

And that left the third one to jump on my head.

I went down under its weight, shouting and swearing. Its nails scrabbled at my shields, unable to break through, and for the umpteenth time in a week I cast a rueful thanks toward the werewolf whose attack had finally forced me to permanently activate those shields. I wa {shior thesn’t exactly invulnerable, but I was a whole lot harder to hurt now, which made this kind of fight a little less scary.

Still, there were seven of them and one of me. Shields were great, but if they decided to work together, I could be drawn and quartered before I blinked. I forgot about pinning the one monster down and shoved my left hand upward, willing magic to take a physical, concussive form.

The wight on top of me blew upward like it had been caught in Old Faithful and went spinning off to crash against the mountain somewhere. The remaining four closed in all at once. I threw magic in quick blasts, catching them repeatedly and knocking them back, but they kept getting up and coming at me again. They sauntered around my swordplay like I was a kid with a stick. After a minute or three, Carrie and the other one I’d blown off joined the others, so I was surrounded and starting to feel like the hapless kung fu student in the movie, right before everything comes together and she suddenly kicks everybody’s ass.

Except instead of kicking ass, I was slowly wearing down. That was almost entirely new territory for me. I was accustomed to drawing ridiculously deeply on my own strength, without the need for a power circle. Moreover, I’d leveled up in the past couple weeks, gaining more access to greater power. There was no way a bunch of undead monsters should be able to wear me down so fast. But not only was I starting to stumble, it seemed like they were getting faster and stronger with every hit they took.

A little belatedly, I realized that these things had been created by somebody sucking all the essential force out of seven people, and that throwing bolt after bolt of life magic into them was probably not the best way to defeat them.

For just an instant I wished the snarky little voice in the back of my head was still there. The one that told me when I was being an utter ass, and when I was making really stupid mistakes. Unfortunately, that voice had been the lingering ghost of a much younger me, and she and I had fully integrated now. All I had left was my own voice muttering, “Moron,” and somehow it just didn’t have the same ring to it. I reined in the magic and even drew it out of the sword, so it was just me and a silver rapier against seven wights on a mountainside.

It was the moment they’d been waiting for. They moved as one, so fast I could barely see them. One actually sacrificed itself, leaping belly-first onto my sword. It slid all the way to the hilt, wrapped its long-fingered hands around my wrist, and held on.