Mountain Echoes. C.E. Murphy

myself. I did not, however, think that the middle of a holler with half the town listening in was the time or place to do it, so I said, “And I was trying to say thanks, before you derailed me,” instead.

      His scowl deepened suspiciously. “What for?”

      “Rude and dangerous as it was, shoving me into the Lower World gave me a chance to find that last spirit animal. Which you knew as soon as I stepped out of there, didn’t you? That’s why you came at me again. Man, you really—”

      He really reminded me of me, was what I wanted to say. I had certainly been as impulsive and angry as a kid, and probably wasn’t much different now. But wisdom reared its ugly head and I managed to stop talking before I said something unforgivable. “You really know what you’re doing. I wouldn’t know how to recognize somebody lacking a spirit animal if it bit me.”

      Aidan gave me a sideways look, which was pretty talented, given that we were still facing each other straight on, and said, quite slyly, “If the spirit animal bit you, or if the person who didn’t have it did?”

      “If it bit me I’d be sure it was there.” The conversation had turned completely nonsensical in three sentences, but we were both grinning, which was a great improvement. Maybe the kid was just edgy because of my unheralded arrival. Maybe he wasn’t quite as much of a punk as I’d been. Either way, I suddenly thought that maybe I could like this young man, and better yet, maybe he could like me. “Look, this is as rude as you just were, but...walking sticks?”

      His grin turned into a much more solemn expression, though it didn’t quite lose the smile. “Yeah. Yeah, it makes Mom kind of crazy, because she doesn’t really want me to be anything other than boring and normal, but at the same time she’s kind of proud, you know? I mean, if she wasn’t she never would’ve let me start training with Grandpa, and I started like half my life ago, so...”

      “Gra— You mean my dad?” If it was possible for a brain to wobble and wiggle like a bowl of dropped Jell-O, mine did it right then. “You’ve been studying with Dad?”

      Aidan shrugged with the insouciance only available to children on the cusp of teen-hood. “Well, yeah, didn’t you? I mean, he said you guys drove all over the country your whole life, and he’s been telling me about all the cool stuff he did, I mean, not that he called it cool, but it was, healing the land and—”

      He kept talking, but I heard nothing more than Charlie Brown wah-wah-wah-waaah! sounds for a few seconds. For about that length of time, I couldn’t even see Aidan: my vision went kind of red and staticky, though I wasn’t exactly enraged. More gut-punched, more shocked and cold-handed and betrayed. Dad had taught me the Cherokee language when I was a kid. That was the only studying I’d ever done with him. It had been less than a week since I’d discovered he had magic of his own, or begun to suspect the reasons—now confirmed by Aidan—why we’d spent my childhood driving around America.

      It went beyond “not fair” that Aidan was now studying magic with him. “Not fair” didn’t even begin to touch it. It was “why,” and “what did I do wrong,” and “did he just not want a daughter” and a thousand other black-streak thoughts dashing around the static Jell-O in my head. The ball of Nothing was roiling and pitching nearby, reacting to the depth of my emotion. Reacting to it more than I was, really, because I could hardly let myself touch on any of those bleak thoughts before bouncing off in pain. But I didn’t want the Nothing to latch on, so I stuffed the shock down deep, buttoning it up until I could take it out and admire it later. Aidan’s voice faded back into comprehensibility. “...knew you had magic too, so I thought you’d studied with him....”

      I heard myself speaking rather faintly and hollowly, as if I was on the far end of a bad telephone connection. “He knew I had magic, or you did?”

      “He did.” The poor kid knew he’d stepped in something and had no clue how to extricate himself. “Are you, um... Are you okay?”

      “Yes. No. Sort of. Not really.” My nostrils flared as I dragged in a deep breath, stood with my eyes pressed shut a moment or two, then exhaled as deeply and opened my eyes to force a smile. “I’m fine. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof. I didn’t actually study magic with Dad, no, so you’re definitely ahead of me in that game. Anyway, walking sticks. What do you know about them?”

      Aidan hesitated, clearly not sure if he should respond to my obvious emotional distress or the facade I was putting on. In the end, though, he was twelve, and went with the surface story. “I know your walking stick shoulda helped with that.” He pointed a thumb at the Nothing and scowled at me, visibly returning to the slightly sullen wariness of before. That seemed fair enough. I hadn’t exactly imagined we’d get on like a house on fire from the moment we met. I was a little wary of him, too, despite our moment of camaraderie. A faint edge came back into his voice. “I mean, look, dude, no pressure, but you’re the grown-up here. You’re supposed to be more awesome than I am. I thought you were gonna show me what to do.”

      “How about we give it another shot?”

      Aidan looked somewhere between dubious and envious. “You only just got back from your spirit quest. You think you’ve got a handle on shi— things?”

      “Probably not, but that’s never stopped me before.” That wasn’t quite true. My magic had come in over the past ten days, far more cohesively than before. I believed I could handle whatever new aspects Renee’s gifts uncovered, because I’d handled everything up until now, and I was finally firing on all cylinders. “Let’s go see.”

      Ada Monroe’s voice stopped us cold: “No.”

      Chapter Seven

      Aidan sounded like every kid in the world mortified by a parent at an inopportune time: “Mom!”

      “I said no, Aidan. You’ve just come out of that power circle after being in there for fifteen hours. Do you even know what day it is? You need sleep and food.” Ada shot me a daggered look, which was only partially unfair. It wasn’t like I’d known Aidan had been on his feet and fighting the good fight for more than half a day. On the other hand, given how wiped out Ada and Carrie had been when they staggered from the circle, I probably should not have automatically assumed Aidan would be raring to go.

      Except he was, which I could See in his superbright aura as much as in his impatient squirm. “I’m fine, Mom, really, and if Joanne and I do this thing now maybe everybody can get some rest. It’s bugging the whole Qualla, not just us up here in the mountains, so c’mon, Mom, please? Pleeaaaaaaaaase?”

      She gave me another hard look and I raised my hands. Even if I could See he was in dandy shape, I was not about to get caught in the middle of this particular stomping match. Among other things, I had no other way to prove that, no, really, I thought of him as her kid. I was not the one who got to make decisions for him.

      Unfortunately for me, she snapped, “Is he right? Is he fine? Can you two fix this?”

      “We can try. As far as I can tell, he’s just fine, yeah. He’s got a lot of raw power.” As much as I did. Maybe more, which was alarming, given that I’d called down a Navajo Maker god with the strength of my magic. “But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong, because I have no idea how long he’ll keep burning this bright. He might just fall over from exhaustion halfway through. I’ve been known to do it,” I said defensively as Aidan’s expression indicated I was betraying his trust. Two minutes ago we’d been antagonists, but for the moment I’d been moved to his side of the fight, and could thus betray him. How quickly the lines shifted.

      “I’m fine! Really, Mom, come on, please? I just want to help.”

      Ada glanced at Carrie, which took the weight of responsibility off my shoulders. The old woman looked between all three of us and sniffed. “With Joanne here I imagine we can keep the Nothing under control until you’ve gotten some rest, Aidan. Don’t worry,” she said dryly. “I don’t expect we’ll do anything exciting without you.”

      Aidan gave me a perfectly filthy