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But the alarming bit was I’d always envisioned my car—Petite, her name was Petite, and she was a 1969 Mustang Boss 302 I’d rescued out of somebody’s barn the summer I turned sixteen. The first thing I’d replaced was her spiderwebbed windshield, and for the past fifteen months I’d envisioned my soul as exactly that mess of a windshield. It made Carrie’s theory equal parts viable and too damned weird to contemplate. I shivered all over, trying to put it out of my mind. “Anyway, I came back because Sara told me Dad was missing, but there’s obviously a hell of a lot more going on. I Saw what that stuff is doing, how deep it’s reaching—you Saw that, too?”
Carrie shook her head, which I didn’t expect. “I only see how it eats at the mountain. What more do you See?”
“Oh, God. It’s—”
The power circle fluctuated again, but differently this time. Not a weakening in one place, but responding to a sudden vast surge of power from within the Nothing. A concussive force blew out, like it was testing for vulnerable spots through sheer strength of magic. The skirt of my coat blasted backward. Sara went head over heels. Carrie stayed upright only because I grabbed her arm and grounded myself, shamanic magic telling the earth I was there and requesting its support.
The wards almost held. They flickered and faltered, white magic shimmering to more individual colors, but at seven points of the compass, they held, keeping the Nothingness from gobbling up more of the mountain.
At the eighth point, at the most northerly edge of the circle, hungry gray mist rushed out, taking advantage of an old man’s weakness.
For one frozen moment, Carrie and I stood together, numb and unable to move, as Les’s grandfather collapsed at our feet.
Chapter Four
Two things needed doing and I couldn’t make a choice: step up and hold the line against the Nothing, or drop to my knees and heal Les’s grandpa. Carrie, thank God, snapped into action, pointing an imperious finger at Grandpa Lee as she flung every bit of her age, rage and will against the surging wall of Nothing. There was nothing elegant about the transference of power, not the way the other one I’d just seen had gone. She just stepped in, forcing her strength to merge with the other seven. Raw edges flared and burned white as they struggled to hold the shields together and accommodate Carrie’s rough entrance. The mountain shrieked pain and fear, and triumph rolled through the gray, but too soon. Carrie would die before she let the Nothing win, and she had just gotten topped up full of glowing blue healing magic. Les’s grandpa had been the weak link for a heartbeat there, but Carrie was the strong one now. It wasn’t going to last, but it didn’t need to, not with me there.
Not as long as I got my act together and got Lester Lee Senior on his feet again. I shaved off part of my concentration and built a shield around him and me, one that ran deeper and stronger than usual. I didn’t want the Nothing leaking out the edges of the power circle shielding to get even one tendril inside Les Senior while I patched him up. The world went pleasantly blue around us, a bubble of active magic so solid I hoped warheads couldn’t budge it. Then I put a hand on Les Senior’s chest and had a quick look around inside him.
I got more than an eyeful of what I expected, too. Most times I got a sense of someone’s physical well-being. This time he was so worn and raw I Saw straight into his garden, the metaphorical center of self that reflected a person’s well-being. Les Senior’s was parched and dry, red earth cracked and once-lush plant life brown and drooping. It didn’t feel like age—God knew my pal Gary, who was at least as old as Les Senior, wasn’t suffering from any kind of drying–out of his garden. This was more like Les Senior was being sucked dry. More like he’d given everything he had, and was now too exhausted to replenish himself. There was nothing else wrong with him, no clotted arteries or other common maladies of age. Gratitude surged through me. It wasn’t often I got to save two people back to back, but between Les Senior and Carrie, I was batting a thousand.
Bizarrely, fixing exhaustion was more delicate work than stopping a heart attack. Cardiac arrest was all about violence and instantaneous reaction, and shutting it down had taken the same response. Exhaustion was something that built up, and Les’s garden was so parched that throwing a metaphorical river in would just drown him. I tamped the power down to a trickle, easing the gas on, as it were, and let it drain in slowly enough that his garden’s earth had time to absorb the replenishing magic instead of being flooded by it. I couldn’t let myself pay attention to what was going on outside my shields, trusting that Carrie and the others had it under control. Or at least trusting they could triage until I was done getting Les Senior’s feet back under him.
He opened his eyes sooner than I expected, blinked a couple times, and somehow didn’t seem surprised to focus on me. “I’ll be fine. Go on.”
I swear, the old man was like Carrie, made of sprung steel and baling wire. Nothing was gonna keep them down, not until they marched out of this world and into the next, where they would probably start setting things to right all over again. I still said, “You sure?”
Les Senior nodded, and I pointed out a direction away from the boiling Nothing. “You get the hell away from that stuff, you hear me? Don’t be stupid just because you’re conscious.”
Amusement darted through his brown eyes and he nodded again. I let the shields down slowly, keeping them thickest to my left, where I’d last left the Nothing, until I was certain the world around us hadn’t disappeared entirely. It hadn’t. I pointed to my right. “You go that-a-way.”
Les Senior went as directed, and only when he was well away and into the arms of others did I get to my feet and put my hands on Carrie’s shoulders. “My turn.”
“We need you out there. Fighting.”
“I need to know what I’m fighting. I’ve got to See what’s at the heart of this thing. And you just came a hair’s breadth from a coronary. You don’t need to be shouldering this burden right now. So move it.”
I got the dirtiest look in Creation, but bit by bit Carrie transferred the weight of shielding she’d taken on to me. The power fluctuating between the eight compass points strengthened considerably as I took more of it on. Partly because I was a heavyweight in the mojo department, but partly because this transition was deliberate, rather than somebody shoving themselves in to plug a bursting dyke. After about two minutes, Carrie stepped out, and I...
...stepped up.
Because I wasn’t kidding anybody, least of all myself. I had a pretty goddamned good idea who, or at least what, was behind the pit of Nothing trying to eat out the heart of my homeland. Barely three days ago I’d effectively nailed a cross to my enemy’s door, made it clear we were about to reach a header. I’d seen him for the first time, the Master whose power was death and corruption, and I’d come damned close to losing my life.
I had lost my mother, forever and for always, to the fight against him. She’d come to protect me one last time, and had burned out everything she’d ever been, in that battle. There were old souls and new ones in this world, and my mother’s had been old, but it would never be reborn. That was the price she’d chosen to pay to keep me alive. It had given me the last bits of breathing room I needed, because it had turned out I wasn’t quite ready to face him after all. She’d left him wounded and embarrassed, and there was no chance the mess in Carolina was coincidence, not after that.
So I wasn’t screwing around when I joined the power circle. I didn’t let them have it all at once, because I’d noticed an alarming tendency for blown-out electrical grids and other exciting ramifications of announcing my psychic presence in a grand slam. But I came to the party to play, and by the time Carrie’s power faded out and mine replaced it, I was feeling pretty white-hot with magic. If there was any chance I could snuff out the Nothing, I was going to take it right now.
I expected resistance. I expected it to seep inside me and find my fear again. I expected it to ratchet that up to eleven, and for grim determination and a whole lot of stubbornness to get me through. I was prepared for that, leaning forward a little, saying, “C’mon, I can take it,” with my body language. I thought I could take it, now that I was ready for it. The fear hadn’t been as bad as the Master hitting me in the teeth with pain, and I’d survived that. Only just, but this wasn’t the time to quibble over details. So I was braced, ready for whatever the Nothing threw at me.
I was not prepared for sympathetic magic to skyrocket across the power circle, south to north, and catch me in the breastbone. Catch me right where my magic had lodged itself for all the long months before I’d really accepted it, in fact. Not my heart: my center. I wasn’t prepared for its vainglorious brilliance, four shades of brightness that whipped and blended together so fast they became white. And I was really not prepared for the boom of power that erupted when that magic and my own fused.
A visible ring bounced through the power circle like a shock wave, vibrating the mountain under our feet. Vibrating the air, vibrating sound, vibrating everything: I could’ve been standing under the bells at Notre Dame and gotten less resonance.
The gasp couldn’t have been audible, not beneath all the power noise, but it felt audible. Everyone took a step forward, a step closer together, like we were drawn in by that power burst. Part of my brain screamed an objection, not wanting to get any closer to the Nothing than it had to, but it wasn’t the part in control. I moved just like everyone else.
The Nothing shrank. Rolled in on itself, no farther than we’d stepped forward, but it got just a little bit smaller. Emotion spiked through the power circle, hope and confusion and flaring confidence. We stepped forward again, magic ricocheting between me and the southern point like some kind of earthbound display of Northern Lights. My power sluiced along the outsides of the other adept’s magic, encompassing it with silver and blue. The four bands of bright colors spun inside mine, and everybody else’s swam alongside ours, drawn back and forth at light speeds. From inside I could See the different auras, though only faintly: mostly they remained blended to brilliance, subsuming themselves to the massive working of white magic. We all took one more step forward, coming much closer to the Nothing, and a sense of nervous anticipation swept through the working. Six of them were waiting: waiting to see what the southern and northern compass points to their circle did next.
I wasn’t sure voices would carry through the Nothing between us. I clenched my stomach, preparing myself for a fight, and sent that feeling of determination through the magic.
It bounced back at me so fast it felt like laughter. A grin stretched across my face, wild and a little crazy. I spread my arms, knowing I was much too far away to catch the hands of the elders nearest me, but feeling like it was a statement: Come and get me. Catch me if you can. The same feeling crashed back at me from the other side of the circle, all kinds of reckless and foolhardy and ready for a fight. I knew the feeling intimately. I’d been like that as a kid. Who was I kidding: most of the time I was still like that. I hadn’t been set on the warrior’s path just because there was a big bad monster who needed taking out. I was sort of an aggressive little punk most of the time. Mouthy and full of ’tude, even—or especially—when it wasn’t warranted.
God knew I had plenty to introspect over, but even I thought this was sort of a weird time for it to crop up. I told myself it was the familiarity of emotion in my partner’s magic, and let it go. There were far more important things to worry about right now.
Like how to crush the Nothing into a tiny ball of, er, nothing. We had some kind of major power blend going on here, far stronger than I’d anticipated. Stronger than the Master had anticipated, too, I was willing to bet. But I didn’t know if the Nothing could be undone, or only captured. Wondering made my head hurt, so I took action instead of thinking anymore, and squeezed my shields down.
The first couple advances we’d made had been instinctive. This was deliberate, and there was a world of difference. The Nothing made a sound, a shriek of anger that reverberated in my ear bones. It collapsed in, shrinking visibly as the southern adept squeezed, too, and as the others followed our lead.
Glee rose up from my counterpart. Glee and triumph and all sorts of other premature but obvious emotions that I was inclined to share. I’d had a hell of a couple of weeks. I thought I deserved one easy win, especially if it made my homecoming a little easier. But I wasn’t quite foolish enough to do a touchdown dance yet. Shriveling evil magic was not the same as eliminating evil magic, and I wanted it good and eliminated. My shields were rock-solid, and I wrapped them in the idea of a net, just to help squish everything down a little more. Step by step we closed in around the Nothing, and with every step the others became more confident. It made a positive feedback loop, creating stronger magic because our belief in it was stronger. I had no idea how much time passed before I touched hands with my right neighbor, and then moments later with my left, but suddenly we were a physical construct as well as a magical one, and the Nothing roiled and shrieked and spat fury in the circle created by our linked hands.
Someone finally spoke aloud. Not either of my closest cohorts, and not the next people over, either. I could see them, but the Nothing still rose tall enough to block the other three from my line of vision. I figured it was the southern compass point, the other one who was flinging as much magic potential around as I was. She had a light voice, still a teenager’s voice, which fit with the glimpse I’d had of a slight figure, on my way into the holler.
“It’s a time traveler,” she said. “It’s trying to slide through. Forward, backward, I don’t think it cares very much as long as it pulls bad shit through. We’ve gotta cut it out. We’ve gotta remove it from the timeline entirely. That’s the only way it’s gonna be vulnerable enough for us to smash it.”
I had the impression she was lecturing me specifically. That kind of made sense, since everybody else had been here for days, and she had no way of knowing I’d recognized the Nothing’s time-slip capability, too. She sounded pretty sure she knew how to deal with it, and for a half second I wondered if I could’ve been her, self-assured and rife with magic, if I hadn’t blown it so badly half a lifetime ago.
Not that it mattered, because I had blown it, and I’d largely come to terms with that. I let regret go, said, “Sounds like a plan,” to my unseen counterpart, and let her take the lead.
For the first time, an edge of alarm slipped through the power circle. Her alarm, not mine, which made me think maybe giving her the lead hadn’t been so bright, but it also seemed not only rude but potentially dangerous to yank it back now. Besides, I wasn’t at all sure how a person went about yanking things out of time to castrate them. I knew how to yank things around in time, albeit clumsily, but that didn’t seem like the skill set necessary here. The kid across the circle had sounded sufficiently confident that I’d assumed she did know.
Eventually I was going to learn that assumptions were dangerous, but today was clearly not that day. I breathed, “Calmly, calmly,” and sent a ripple of healing power through the circle. I didn’t usually use it as a soporific, but it seemed to help. I felt the multistranded adept’s aura and power strengthen again.
An image popped into my head. I didn’t know if it was my own or my counterpart’s, though if it was hers I really wanted that nifty telepathic aspect to my magic. Either way, the idea of a sensory deprivation tank came to mind. That, in essence, was what we needed to do to the Nothing. Except where I was supposed to find a tank so secluded that time didn’t affect it, I didn’t know. Well, except maybe on the event horizon of a black hole, but that led to all sorts of other really bad possibilities that I wasn’t eager to explore.
It did, though, give me an idea. Space was affected by time: anything that light passed through kind of had to be. But the idea of the dark side of the moon introduced itself to me, and I seized on it. It wasn’t really dark, I knew that, it was just that we never saw its other face, so maybe that was close enough. I was willing to take it.
I filled my shields with that idea: cold black timelessness, lingering in the silence, no pressure or need for change. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good, and the cold started crackling the edges of the Nothing. That was shamanism: change instigated by belief. I could turn the air within that crushing shield to a space vacuum without harming any of the nonspacesuit-clad elders in the power circle. And that little inkling of time that was still part of the equation, that was no big deal, that was—
—slipping.
Slipping, cracking, sliding out of control, bringing the Nothing back into the world because it still had something to latch on to. I clamped down, trying to ignore it, trying to hold on to the possibility of taking something entirely out of time, trying to remember just how much depended on me doing that, and felt a jillion little bug feet run up my spine and send shivers all over me. They all leapt off, my spine abandoned by an infinitesimal number of bugs, and I lost control of the magic.
Panic and dismay shot up from the other side of the circle. The dismay cut deep, much deeper than the fear. The Nothing erupted again, knocking us all over the holler. I crashed against soft dirt and immediately staggered to my feet, weaving physical shields together again, determined to catch the stuff before it got out-of-control large again. It was much smaller than before, but not gone, dammit. All around me, power stuttered back into wakefulness, everyone who’d been thrown around trying, as I was, to hold the Nothing to a smaller size. My counterpart’s magic rushed through us all, connecting us like railroad ties, until it slapped into me and we once more had a functional power circle around the Nothing. The younger woman’s magic was flushed with anger, fitting against my own anger tidily. I was able to hang on to its edges easily, improving our connection with the sense of long familiarity.
It all came home to me a little slowly. I’d worked with sympathetic magic before. Recently, even, up on a mountaintop in Ireland. Maybe it had something to do with mountains. Anyway, I knew the strength of blending familiar, familial magics, but I hadn’t expected it in the Qualla.
Which, in retrospect, was really, really stupid, because the Qualla had the two people on Earth who were closest to me by blood.
It wasn’t a teenage girl at all, the counterpart who stalked up to me with frustration and anger in brown eyes. It was a prepubescent boy, a twelve-year-old nearing his thirteenth birthday but not his voice change, and he said, “You’re twice as old as I am, Joanne. I thought you would be good at this stuff,” with all the disdain in the world.
It was not, all things considered, how I’d envisioned remeeting my son.
Chapter Five
Aidan Monroe had inherited his father’s golden-brown skin tones and hair so black its natural highlights were blue. He’d also gotten some of the same shape to his nose as Lucas had, mitigating my own beak somewhat. But I could see bits of me in him, too: the shape of his eyes and jaw, particularly with said jaw thrust into a too-familiar scowl. He was rangy like I’d been—like I still was—and there wasn’t any hint yet of whether he would grow into shoulders like Lucas’s or not. He was barefoot, red clay under his toenails, and his ragged-ankle jeans and sleeveless T-shirt could’ve belonged on any kid from the mid-20th century on.
I thought he was beautiful.
I mean, I guessed mothers were supposed to, but I hadn’t been a prime candidate for mother of the year when I’d gotten pregnant and given him up at age fifteen. If anything gave me potential mother-of-the-year status, in fact, it was having given him up. I had a lot of emotional investment in that decision, but not a lot of sentimental investment, even if that seemed like a fine hair to shave. The point was, I hadn’t been overwhelmed with his infantile beauty, so I was a little surprised to find myself wanting to smile and pat him on the head like he—or I—had done well, just by him being cute.
Given that he was already glaring at me, I manfully restrained myself and instead shrugged. “I probably should be, but I’m a lot further behind on my studies than you’d expect. Sorry.” The word, while flippant, was also sincere: I’d have preferred to unveil myself to Aidan in all my shining glory, instead of fumbling the ball just before the end zone. I was pretty certain that was the right sports metaphor.
He squinted and rolled back on his heels, a sign of surprise so like my own body language I had to fight not to laugh. I supposed lots of people did that, but seeing it on him was a little like looking in a reverse-gender mirror. Offhand, I suspected he hadn’t expected an apology from me, or anything less than a like-for-like chip on my shoulder.
To be fair, everybody who’d known me, anybody who might have told him about me—and he clearly knew who I was—would have told him to expect that chip. To expect whole icebergs, probably, not just chips.
For half a second I lost my battle with the smile, because I was obviously surprising him, and surprise allowed for a possibility of change, and that, at its heart, was what my magic was supposed to latch on to and work with. Shamanistic magic right there in action, even if no actual magic was being worked.
Aidan didn’t like the smile. It gave him something to be pissed off about, which was why I’d been trying to suppress it in the first place. “Are you laughing at m—”
“No.”
The poor kid looked so surprised again I had to bite the inside of my cheeks to keep from laughing for real that time. “Aidan—it’s Aidan, right?” I’d asked his mother that once already, but somehow it seemed important to clear it with him, too. He nodded, somewhere between sullenly and suspiciously, and I said, “Right. Aidan. No, I’m really not laughing at you. I’m laughing at me a little, maybe, because somehow I didn’t expect to see you so soon, and because it’s sort of embarrassing to admit a kid pushing thirteen almost certainly has it all over me in terms of mystical training. I mean, holy crap, kid, did you see you out there?”
I waved toward the Nothing, which was a much smaller seething ball now, and being held in place by the six elders who’d been working with us, and two others who’d joined them when Aidan and I broke out to have some awkward family time. I’d hardly even noticed them taking over for me, I’d been so busy gawking at Aidan. “You were awesome. What was I supposed to do there at the end? Maybe if we can do it now...?”
Aidan’s eyes went deep gold. Molten gold, a crazy color I was pretty sure mine didn’t reach, not even in the depths of magic use. He turned that heated gaze on me, slamming it right between my eyes, like he was looking into my head—
—and my garden ripped to life around us. The mountain holler faded, short-shorn grass and neat stone pathways appearing under our feet. A waterfall began burbling, and crumbling stone walls rose up out of the earth, farther away than I’d ever seen them. Ivy wrapped around the trunks of strong young hickory trees, which made me mutter and flick a finger, clearing the ivy away. It scattered from the trees and returned to the walls where it used to grow, thin climbing branches working to break them down further. A breeze swept through, carrying the scent of flowers from somewhere, and I could almost pretend that my staggering was actually me setting off in search of where those blooms were growing.
Almost. Mostly, though, I was just staggering and gaping. “How the hell—! What the hell! What are you—”
The garden turned to mist, blue sky turning yellow and the sun turning red. The ground was red, too, redder than the deep earth of the Appalachians, and the grass growing up around us was purple in some places and yellow in others. Familiar enough territory, except I had no idea how Aidan had slammed us not just into, but through, my garden and into the Lower World. “What are you d—”
Raven, my cheerful, chattering spirit guide, exploded into being with a clatter of wings and noise. He dove around Aidan’s head fast enough to make me dizzy, pulling at Aidan’s long hair and tangling his beak in it. My long-suffering Rattler spirit also appeared, though less exuberantly. He wound around Aidan’s feet, tongue flickering in and out, then returned to wrap around my ankles. Rattler had had a much more difficult couple of weeks than Raven, and I really needed some not-forthcoming downtime to get him back on his feet. Belly. Whatever.
Aidan, evidently waiting on something, stoically ignored Raven. Me, I crouched to stroke Rattler’s head and watched Raven’s antics with bemusement. Not even my mother had been able to pull my spirit guides into focus, but then, Mother had been a mage, not a shaman. I had plenty of questions, but for once I kept my mouth shut, more curious about what Aidan’s expectations were than about how he’d hauled us into the Lower World.
Finally it became clear that whatever he was waiting on wasn’t going to put in an appearance. Full-on teenage horror filled his face. “Oh, my God. You don’t even have all your spirit animals. You’re useless.”
He disappeared from the Lower World, leaving nothing but a set of footprints behind in the red earth, and I flung my hands up with a shout of exasperated laughter.
Raven klok-klok-kloked at me and came to settle on my shoulder, where he could peer at me from a third of an inch away. “What,” I said to the bird, “does he think I can’t get back if he leaves me here? Is this some kind of test?” I sat down. Rattler slithered into my lap and coiled up comfortably small. I stroked his head again, smiling as he leaned into the touch like a cold-blooded scaly cat. I’d spent enough time as a child tromping around snake-littered woods that I’d never imagined having an affinity, much less fondness, for a rattlesnake, but Rattler was something special. And I was sure that I’d think so even if he hadn’t saved my life more than once.
“Perhapsss,” he said once he was cozy and lazy in my lap, “perhaps you should take this opportunity to seek out your third, as he thinks you ssshould.”
“Third what, spirit animal? I don’t know, that seems like it would be giving the little punk the upper hand. ‘Hop to it, birth vessel! Heed my wisdom!’ Like that.” It probably wasn’t fair to call Aidan a punk. He probably had every reason to be upset with the woman who had skipped out on her magical heritage and failed to come back home firing the big guns in a moment of need.
And besides, it wasn’t like I had any room to go around throwing stones. I had been a pain-in-the-ass punk teen, with what was turning out to be less justification than Aidan probably had. I said, “Sorry, kid,” aloud and mentally retracted the punk nomenclature with the intention of retiring it permanently.
Rattler, who apparently didn’t care what I called Aidan, said, “It isss foolish to not ssstrike when the opportunity arissses,” with an acerbic tang. I could tell, because his sibilants got stretchier when he was annoyed.
I rubbed the top of his head. “So I should ignore the fact that someone I barely know and maybe shouldn’t trust because of that brought me here, and just head gung-ho into a spirit quest?”
“Do you missstrust him?”
“Nah.” That was a much softer and far less flippant answer. “Nah, I don’t know him at all, but I guess I’d trust him way past where I could throw him. He’s got power and he’s got a lot more training than I do. Maybe I should listen.” A chortle bubbled around my chest. “Because, you know. That’s always been my strong suit up until now.”
“Sssometimes,” Rattler said, and it was amazing how dryly a snake could speak, “sometimesss it isss all right to learn from past missstakes.” He slithered out of my lap and coiled around me in a tight circle, closing it up by taking his rattle in his mouth. Raven gave an excited caw and bounced into flight, wheeling around my head like he was drawing circles in the sky to match the one Rattler made on the ground.
“Right,” I said to both of them. “This is me, getting the message. When your spirit animals start drawing your power circles for you....” I traced a hand along Rattler’s sinuous spine, stopping at the cardinal points to murmur a little breath of nonsense that mostly meant I was paying attention to where they were. If I wasn’t careful, soon I’d be doing rituals and all the other silly stuff that went along with being a magic practitioner. It was bad enough that I adopted this weird semiformal language structure when I started talking about magic. I really didn’t want to get any more New Agey than I was, though I was much less biased against the whole scene than I’d been when I’d started out.
A soft wash of magic splashed up while I was trying to convince myself I was still normal and not hippy-dippy. Blue and silver swirled around each other, reaching for the sky-circle Raven had drawn, and thoroughly putting paid to any dreams of normalcy. I snorted at myself and closed my eyes, listening for something that would do as a drum and drop me into the quiet dark space where spirit animals roamed.
My heartbeat did the job, thumping in my ears more loudly than usual. I counted the beats until I started to drowse, my shoulders going slack and my hands loosening from the curls I’d held them in. I’d done the spirit quests for both Rattler and Raven while in the Lower World, though I hadn’t meant to either time. It seemed appropriate to be doing a third one here, too, though I had no sense of whether it would be like Raven’s appearance or like Rattler’s. Raven’s had been fairly traditional—well, except for the part where it had been conducted by an evil sorceress—with several creatures coming to say hello before Raven picked me. Rattler had simply shown up in the nick of time and saved my bacon.
My bacon was, for once, not in need of saving, so when a white butterfly drifted through the darkness, I figured it was just checking me out, and probably indicative of a more traditional quest. That was good. I was down with tradition, for once. The butterfly faded, and only after the fact did I remember my last encounter with butterflies had made a serious stab at ending the world. My stomach clenched up and I tried to remember what other totem animals I’d dealt with. I did not want a parade of bad associations contaminating my quest for a third spirit animal.
Raven, who in the Lower World was much more real than in the Middle World, smacked me alongside the head so hard I got dizzy even with my eyes closed. I took that as an indication that I was probably making things worse, told my brain to shut up, and held my breath, like that would make my brain shut up.
It didn’t. Nothing ever made my brain shut up. It went right back to worrying about the various spirits I’d seen before Raven in the quest run by an evil sorceress. Rattler, with a sense of exasperation as great as Raven’s, let go of his tail to bite me. I yelped, but it did at least remind me that I’d seen a snake, too, during that particular ritual, and that it had turned out I did indeed have a snake spirit who was no more wicked than Raven. Possibly less so, in fact, since Raven had a teasing sense of humor and Rattler didn’t have much of one. So maybe if the horse from that first session showed up, it wouldn’t mean I was in trouble after all.
No horses showed up. No badgers or tortoises or rams had shown up during some of the quests I’d done for other people. No nothing, in fact: apparently the butterfly was just an errant wanderer, lost in the ether. Grumpy, I said, “This is getting us nowhere,” and opened my eyes.
The entire landscape was covered in walking sticks.
Chapter Six
I squeaked and shoved my hands against my mouth to keep it from turning into a full-on shriek. It wasn’t that I was afraid of bugs. Even if I was, walking sticks were such peculiar bugs that they moved out of the realm of Potentially Scary all the way into That Is So Weird It’s Cool, which wasn’t usually frightening. Even more, this was at least the third time I’d suddenly been faced with an onslaught of walking sticks, but there were zillions of them now, far, far more than I’d encountered on other spirit journeys. Purple foliage bent under their collective weight, and the ground shifted subtly as they moved around. It bordered on creepy.
They had not crossed the tiny power circle Rattler made. Rattler was eyeing the nearest ones like he thought someone had just provided the largest smorgasbord in history, and also like he suspected he really shouldn’t start chowing down on other denizens of the Lower World.
One of them was eyeing me as blatantly as Rattler eyed it. It was nearly as long as my arm—not my forearm, but my whole arm—and striped green and yellow, which made it stand out against the multicolored earth. Its legs were long enough to wrap around me, and I was reasonably certain that although walking sticks were nominally herbivores, its mandibles could take a sizable chunk out of tender body parts.
It lifted one spindly leg and tapped its foot on Rattler’s scales, just like it was knocking to be let in.
Way at the back of my head, a penny dropped. This was at least the third time I’d been faced with an onslaught of walking sticks. The other times had also been in spirit realms, and both times the bugs had gone away again with a sense of resignation. Of waiting.
And now they were knocking to get in.
I gently disengaged Rattler’s grip on his tail and put my arm out. The walking stick bumped its nose against my fingers, kind of like a big dog sniffing before deciding I was okay, then stepped onto my hand and traipsed lightly up my arm.
Eye-to-eye and nose-to-nose with a giant bug was not somewhere I’d ever imagined I’d be. Its eyes were black and shining, and its mouth really was big enough to make divots in flesh. Despite its size, it had almost no weight, which reminded me of Raven. Raven was huge, but bird-boned even if he wasn’t also a spirit animal, and his weight was always surprisingly negligible. Rattler seemed to have more oomph to him, but the walking stick was pure delicacy. It leaned in until its forehead touched mine, and a little spark of embarrassed recognition popped through me.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought of it when the bugs had come visiting previously. My last name was, after all, Walkingstick. I hadn’t imagined it was pure coincidence that innumerable stick bugs had decided to parade over me as I scrambled through the Upper World. I just hadn’t quite realized they were early-stage spirit animals waiting for me to be ready for them.
I dearly wanted that mind-meld pose to make everything cascade into clarity, sense and reason. I wanted to suddenly understand the stick’s purpose, to understand what it offered and why, and wrap that all together with my magic so I finally had a full grip on it. Raven had always been my guide between life and death. Rattler’s gifts were multifaceted, as variegated as his scales: healing, fighting, shapeshifting; he encompassed all of those aspects.
There was really only one thing left that I could do, one major power component that had been dogging me since before I was born. Something so big I figured it had to warrant a spirit animal of its own, even if I had no clue why a walking stick was the manifestation of that power set. It was so big and so absurd I didn’t even like putting it into words, but having just jumped back and forth around the entire history of Ireland, I was pretty damned certain that for some unbelievably stupid reason, the last of my phenomenal cosmic power set was freaking time travel.
