As gently as I could, I said, “That would be really great, if it’s okay with your mom. But honestly, you look like you need some rest, Aidan. I know you want to be doing something. It helps a little, having something to do. But if you’re going to guide me through the mountains, I need you to be totally sharp so we don’t both end up lost.”
He thrust his jaw out and dared a glance at me, trying to determine if I was serious or just wheedling him into getting some rest. His eyes flashed gold, probably checking my aura for truthfulness, and his shoulders relaxed a millimeter. “I guess that maybe makes sense.”
“Yeah. Ada? Is it okay if he takes me up into the mountains in the morning?”
Ada’s mouth thinned. “We’ll talk about it when we get home.”
In my vocabulary that constituted a yes. I smiled with relief at Ada, then looked hopefully at Aidan, whose shoulders relaxed just that little bit more. I guessed he thought it meant yes, too. Then we both turned to Sara, waiting to see if that was an acceptable solution.
Her eyebrows were drawn down. “Won’t the trail go cold? Isn’t every minute you’re sitting here losing us time in the manhun—”
She stopped before I had to say it, her scowl growing darker as I picked up in the silence she’d left off. “It’s not like setting dogs on a scent or following a predisposition toward certain brands of cigarettes or patterns of cash withdrawals that might let you find a suspect. Magic doesn’t leave a trail like that. It’s not going to get any colder by morning.”
“If we let it go tonight, can things get worse?”
“Oh, yeah. It could always get worse.” I looked skyward. “It could be raining.”
Sara smacked my shoulder, just like we were teens again, and muttered, “I can’t believe you said that. No, I meant is it likely to attack? Is it going to tear the mountain up? What was it, anyway? Not a demon.”
“No, not like the wendigo. This is a spirit creature. An evil ghost, kind of. It’s made up of all the hate and indifference and deliberation that slaughtered the First Nations, and of their pain and loss and fear and anger, as well. It’s like a ghost on steroids, and it’s been deliberately awakened and is being directed. At all of us in general and at me in particular.”
“What does it want?”
I shrugged. “To obliterate us. But it retreated for a reason. Either we were more than it expected, or more likely, it’s resting and getting used to its new strength. I think it’s not going to try anything again just yet.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“Then it’ll probably come looking for me, so with any luck everybody else will stay safe.”
“How often does ‘any luck’ come in to the equation?”
“Not often enough.” I got up as a familiar thup-thup-thup began echoing against the mountains. “Are those helicopters?”
A few seconds later, two Medivac choppers crested the mountains and maneuvered around each other to find landing space at the foot of the holler. Wind and dust and leaves kicked up, spraying everyone and sending arms over faces to block the updrafts. A fair number of paramedics jumped out and came running up the hill, bent double until they were well away from the choppers. Their expressions went unusually blank when they saw the bodies. I was sure they’d been briefed, but a briefing wasn’t the same as laying eyes on seven uninjured dead people sprawled in an otherwise idyllic setting. Sara got to her feet and met them, taking charge naturally. None of the people who had refused to talk to her earlier objected, either. I took an uncharitable moment to regard them all as hypocrites, then got over my judgmental self and went to see if I could help.
I couldn’t. I got turned away faster than a bad smell, and was left cold-shouldered by the men and women who carefully helped lift bodies onto the Medivac sledges, too. That, as far as I was concerned, wasn’t hypocriticaclass="underline" I was far more an outsider than Sara, and I’d been responsible in some fashion for these deaths. They fully deserved to handle and respect their dead without my interference, even if some of the dead had been important to me, too. I backed up the holler a ways, wondering if I could find my way to the trail Aidan and Ada had planned to take out of here. Given that I’d just sworn I’d get lost the moment I left the holler, I figured I should wait until the valley cleared and I could fight my way back down through the trees, the way Sara and I had come. I expected her to ride away in the helicopters, and she did.
Only after the choppers were gone and the sounds of their blades had faded did people begin to move out. Slowly, in small groups that supported each other and chose not to look at me. I could have followed them, but watched them go instead, even Ada and Aidan, the former of whom had the grace to glance toward me in invitation. I shook my head and she went along with the others, until I was alone in a mountain holler with the sun fading fast on the western horizon.
In a world with a proper sense of drama or mystical nonsense, the ghost of my father would no doubt have come slowly down the hills as the sun disappeared. I was just as glad the world wasn’t inclined toward that kind of theatrics, since I really didn’t want Dad to be dead. I did, though, sort of want...something. Some kind of connection to the land, I guessed. Something that said, “It’s okay, Jo. You belong here, too. The ghosts of your ancestors welcome you home,” or something to that effect.
What I got was a slight chill as a breeze picked up, and a greater awareness that late March was maybe the perfect time of year in the Qualla. Summer’s mugginess hadn’t come on full yet, nor were the bugs out in full force. Though I’d been serious about the likelihood of getting lost if sent out here alone, I’d also spent quite a bit of time in the mountains, especially after the twins had been born and I’d thoroughly branded myself an outsider and a loser. Then I went to college in Seattle, and while the Pacific Northwest was covered in forests, I’d stayed out of them. Only in the past year had I gotten back to the outdoors at all, and it had reminded me how much I’d liked being part of the world in that way. But the Northwest’s trees were nothing like down here in the Appalachians, and these were the ones that made my heart sing with familiarity. I wanted to curl up beneath them and pull a blanket of leaves over myself so I could sleep in the land and belong again.
Except I couldn’t, because there were seven dead people on their way home, and I had to first pay my respects, then go find what had killed them and stop it. I swayed a little, preparing myself for motion, but as the stars began to appear, crickets started singing, and some of the night wildlife began rustling through the underbrush. I closed my eyes, feeling raccoons and possums and shrews scrambling through the woods, and got a far-off sense of a puma who wasn’t supposed to be there any more than I was. Deer were settling down for the night, and there were individual human settlements still awake and pulsing with energy here and there amongst the hollers and hills. The road wasn’t so far away I couldn’t hear it over night’s quiet, and there was a steady stream of traffic. I imagined most of it was heading down the mountains into Cherokee as more and more people learned of the deaths.
I thought maybe Les Senior would be presiding over the vigil tonight, no doubt feeling his own near miss keenly. I wondered, had my own father not gone missing, if he might have been the shaman most qualified to perform death rites. There was so much about my own family that I didn’t know, and standing out here on a mountain was not going to teach me any of it.
I stayed there anyway, until it was fully dark and the likelihood of me snagging a handful of poison oak on the way back to the road was extremely high. I laughed at myself, because of course I hadn’t thought of that possibility while I was indulging in the dramatic lonesome-warrior-on-a-hill pose, and then I went home to Cherokee to see what help I could be.