Mountain Echoes (The Walker Papers) Read Online Free PDF

her preparing-for-the-worst voice, and when it had been her agents, she’d appreciated me not pussyfooting around the truth.
    But that was work, and this was her family. I said, “It’s hooked into the whole history of the People,” carefully. “Not just the Cherokee, but across the continent. It’s gained strength from every genocide wrought against Natives, and it’s trying to reach forward to wipe more of them out. It’s, um...” I pulled a hand over my face. “Shit. Look, I just dealt with this in Ireland. I mean, like three days ago. It’s corruption in the Lower World and I thought it wasn’t as bad here as it was in Europe, but maybe it’s just...different.”
    “Joanne,” Sara said in the same neutral voice, “what about Lucas?”
    “I don’t know. I really don’t know yet.”
    “But...” she said, even though I didn’t think I’d left an unsaid but dangling at the end of that. Maybe I didn’t have to. Maybe having known me when I was a kid meant she heard them even when I didn’t put them there, or maybe—more likely—being an FBI agent made her understand there was almost always a but when it came to bad things.
    I closed my eyes, wishing I had another answer, then opened them again so I wouldn’t feel like a coward when I looked her in the eye and said, “But if your husband and my father went into that stuff, we should both start getting used to the idea they’re not coming out.”
    Sara regarded me steadily for a long moment, then said something that made me like her again, really genuinely like her, for the first time since we’d been teenagers: “No.”
    She walked down into the valley toward the horrible Nothingness, and to my surprise, I followed her with a smile.
    * * *
     
    From up close, the eight men and women in the power circle were barely more discernible than they’d been from a distance. Hair color under the pouring white magic told me they weren’t all elders. In fact, from the apparent height and breadth, the person at the southern end of the circle was still a kid. The woman who’d been replaced was in her forties, and looked up as Sara and I came down the hill. Her face was drawn, but she pushed away the bottle of water someone else offered and got up as we joined them.
    Rather, as I joined them. Sara might not have been there for all the woman cared, which seemed a bit unfair. I started to introduce myself, but she interrupted with “Joanne.”
    Not a friendly sort of “Joanne,” but more a how-dare-you-appear-in-my-presence kind of “Joanne.” I blinked at her, utterly bewildered. “Yes?”
    “I’m Ada Monroe.”
    A small thermonuclear explosion went off in my belly. Heat rushed up, burning my face and setting my ears on fire. “Oh.”
    I probably should have recognized her. She had silver threads in black hair Cin ho now, crow’s feet around brown eyes and twenty or so extra pounds, but she was the same woman she’d been thirteen years earlier. She’d been happier then, but then, she’d also just adopted the infant she’d been unable to have herself, and possibly more relevantly, hadn’t just staggered out of a power circle that had been heavily borrowing from her life force. I said, “Oh,” again, as the nuke in my stomach settled. “Hi. Are you okay?”
    “What are you doing here?”
    “I’m... oh. It’s my dad, Ada, not Aidan. Um. Aidan?”
    She nodded stiffly and a thrill of pleasure shot through me, then muted under wondering if she’d kept Aidan’s name because it was similar to her own. “Aidan,” I said again. “God, no, Ada, I’m not here for him. He’s your son. Sara called and said Dad was missing. Of course I came.”
    “Of course you did.” She packed a truly amazing amount of sarcasm into four words, which was probably fair, given I wasn’t certain when I’d last talked to him. I exhaled and studied my feet a moment. First Sara’s paranoia, now Ada’s, and I hadn’t hardly gotten past the Qualla’s front door.