Mountain Echoes (The Walker Papers) Read Online Free PDF Page A

stepped forward, put his hand on the shoulder of the woman standing at that point and strengthened her segment of the ward with his own magic. Over the course of a minute, maybe two, his aura blended and joined with the circle as hers became more distinct and separate. She finally stepped back, dropping to her knees with weariness, and two of the others came to help her away and offer food and drink.
    I croaked, “How long have they been there?” and felt, rather than saw, Sara shake her head.
    “Since your dad went missing. It’ll be three full days in a few hours.”
    “Jesus.” The three dozen people in the valley couldn’t possibly have held that stuff off by themselves, not for that long. Every elder in the Qualla had to be stepping in, and probably every youth with any hope or hint of power in their bloodline. Maybe even many who didn’t, but who could focus their energy in a positive way, as my friends had once done for me back in Seattle. Half the rez had to be in on this, to make it work. Most of them wouldn’t even be believers, because really, although there was a pretty good sense of community amongst the People, and a lot of people turned out for the festivals and things, we were all modern-day people in a modern-day world. Magic wasn’t part of most people’s lives. But they still had to be showing up in the holler to stand their ground, or the whole place would have collapsed in on itself already.
    And yet they wouldn’t let Sara help. Sara who I knew had a spirit animal, a badger, because I’d helped her find it almost fifteen years ago. Sara who had some vestige of power because of that. Sara who certainly knew how to place her trust and faith in the hands of others, a necessary gift in a fight against something like this.
    Sara who was a federal agent, and who could not be trusted.
    I wanted to cry.
    The black heart of Nothing seized on that impulse, enriched it, pulled it up, emphasized despair over possibility, and for the first time I heard the mountain sobbing.
    It came from deeper than the power circle reached, came all the way from a different level of reality where a low red sun hung bright and hard in a yellow sky. It came from the place the Native peoples of America were born of, the Lower World, and it cried at having lost its children not just now, but in the always. The dark magic devoured them, had devoured them through the centuries, had taken them with smallpox and measles and alcohol, and came again now to take them in whatever new way it could.
    Anger roared within me, an infantile response to an unfair world. I wanted to throw everything I had against the Nothing, throw all my power in its teeth and prove to it that it couldn’t take everything away. I wanted to soothe the torn earth and promise its future was brighter than its past, and to offer healing magic from inside me to calm its pain. That impulse, like the first, was seized upon by the Nothing. It tried to dig claws into me but instead skittered across the mental shields that had finally become second nature.
    I jerked my hands from the soil and cut off the Sight so violently I shivered with it. Sara crouched beside me, a hand on my shoulder. “Joanne? What happened? You went all...blue.”
    “It tried to kill me.” I shuddered again and shoved my hands through my hair, trying to scrub away the feeling that it was all standing on end. “It hooked right into my despair, but it couldn’t grab hold of the magic. Thank God for that goddamned werewolf.”
    “The what? ”
    “Werewolf. Never mind, I’ll explain later. I gotta do better with the emotional shielding, but we’d be really fucked if it had gotten the magic. Sara, that stuff is...really bad.” I’d gotten to my feet while I gabbled, but I couldn’t quite get myself moving toward the power circle.
    Sara’s voice went deadly neutral. “How bad?”
    I’d heard that voice before, when she’d asked about her agents after we fought the wendigo. It was