“I’m not sure it wasn’t,” I said hoarsely. “I’ve turned into a walking bull’s-eye lately.”
“Did you ask for this? Did you call down evil and welcome it into yourself? Did you cast it on your family here and gain strength from their sorrow? No. A target is not responsible for the weapon pointed at it, Joanne.”
“Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel responsible as hell for the...”
“Collateral damage,” Les Junior said, which I would not have done even though they were the obvious words. I wasn’t about to refer to seven dead elders as collateral damage, like I was a heartless military machine and they were faceless enemies, or even faceless allies.
“Fallout,” I said instead, but the other phrase hung there too. Both of them were war terms, and for the first time it actually hit me that I was in fact at war. That I had been all along, not just from my rebirth as a shaman fifteen months ago, but since my mother had given me up to Dad so I’d be safe from the Master for a little while longer. For more time than that, even, because I finally understood that I was the latest in a long tradition of warriors on both sides of my family, men and women who had been holding the line against darkness for thousands of years. I wet my lips and exhaled. “I’m sorry anyway. Whether it was my fault or not, whether I could have stopped it or not, this is horrible and I’m sorry. And I’m glad you’re okay.”
“So am I,” he said in a measured tone that told me just exactly how much of my guilt he was sharing. Survivor’s guilt rather than instigator’s guilt, maybe, but we were both up to our teeth in coulda-woulda-shouldas.
Sheriff Les took us out of it with the deft touch of a professionaclass="underline" “Grandpa, if you want to get a couple others to help you get the room ready, Joanne and I will go find some chalk dust and lay that circle. Jo, are you going to need anybody to help you raise it?”
“No, I’ll be fine by myself. It might even be smarter to keep other people out of it right now. That attack up in the mountains—” We left Les Senior and headed for the custodian’s offices, though I couldn’t really imagine them having chalk dust in this day and age. There would be something, though.
Les picked up my story thread, nodding an already established comprehension of what had happened. “Sara said it was a setup, trying to draw you in. Probably trying to suck you dry, too. That everybody else got caught up in it.”
I gave a terse nod, trying to figure out how that possibly made me not responsible for seven deaths, but set the thought aside. Wallowing was not going to help. “So it’s probably better for me to be the only target.”
“Why didn’t it take you down?” Les either had school keys or a skeleton key, because we went straight to the custodial rooms and he opened them without stopping to ask anyone for help. I raised my eyebrows and he looked slightly sheepish. “They haven’t changed the locks since before we graduated. I stole school keys when I was about fifteen and made all my own copies. There’s salt in massive buckets in the back corners. For the two or three times a decade when it snows.”
Despite everything that had happened, I laughed. “You were a criminal mastermind. I had no idea.” We lifted buckets, mops, long rolls of heavy colored paper, moved floor waxers and vacuums, and dumped a box of glitter onto ourselves before we managed to get to the salt. I brushed as much glitter off as I could, but I still looked like I lived in a snow globe as Les wrestled a dolly into place and we hauled two giant buckets of salt onto it. “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
“There’s a trolley over there, but we just piled about three hundred pounds of school supplies on it.”
“That was not well-planned.” We were both sweating glitter by the time we got four buckets of salt onto the trolley. Les banged something else onto the front of the trolley, the buckets hiding it from my line of sight, and by unspoken consent we hunched over the handles and took the most indirect route out of the school, trying to avoid being seen by mourners. I felt like I was fifteen again, in fear of the law catching me, and again, despite the circumstances, giggles kept cropping up. We finally got ourselves outside and straightened up like we’d successfully escaped, and Les flashed me a bright grin.
“If I’d known you were that good at sneaking in high school....”
I grinned back. “Who knows what trouble we could’ve gotten into. Okay, look, this is a lot of salt but it’s a lot of ground to cover, too. We’re going to have to be scarce with it, but it also needs to be a solid line.”
He scooped up the thing he’d thrown onto the trolley: a thin-nosed funnel about eighteen inches deep, pretty much perfect for laying down a salt circle. I stared at it. “That can’t possibly be meant for salt. I mean, in the snow you need salt to scatter, not make tidy lines.”
“It’s for repainting the parking-lot lines. There’s another piece that it fits onto for power-pressured paint, but I didn’t think we’d need it.”
“You’re a freaking genius.”
Les, modestly, said, “I am. How perfect a circle does this need to be?”
“The rounder the better, but it’s more about intent than perfection. The important thing is to make sure nobody breaks it when they’re coming or going. I don’t know how we’ll manage that.”
“I’ll get some of the deputies to direct traffic and assign someone to keeping the salt fresh where the cars are coming in. How’s that sound?”
My eyebrows rose. “Great. Won’t they think you’re insane?”
“Probably, but they’ll do it. Look, I can go set that up, but I can’t do it and help you lay the circle at the same time.”
“That’s fine. I can handle this. Thanks, Les.”
“You sure you’re going to be all right? You never did say why that thing up there in the mountains she nt>
“Because I have psychic shields to shame the Rock of Ages. I’ll be fine, Les. Go get the traffic situation sorted out.”
He went with only one last backward glance, which made me smile. He was pretty cute. I wondered if I’d thought so in high school, and concluded I’d been a moron if I hadn’t. And I’d definitely been a moron, so probably I hadn’t. Amused at myself, I filled the paint-dripper with salt and started building a circle around the school.
It was pushing midnight by the time I was done. People were beginning to sing inside, songs that blended from gospel to traditional Cherokee music and occasionally slid into something modern, poppy, and still somehow appropriate. I walked back around the circle, checking the consistency with the Sight—the salt glowed the same purposeful green that the school and other protective constructs did—and was satisfied. I took up a place closest to the mountains where the Executioner had fled. Nothing like literally placing myself between the people and the evil. I bowed in all four directions, then sank power into the land, asking it to respond and protect.
Magic zinged through me like fireworks. I’d only joined the power circle on the mountain; I hadn’t opened it. The difference between opening a circle with two spirit animals and three was astounding. It added a depth of awareness that made the air itself come to life, dust and seeds shining in the dark. I felt the age of the land, the solemn incontrovertible strength of the mountains, and felt how even as we ravaged the planet, mankind’s touch was still a light thing on it: it would endure, whether we did or not. It had survived cataclysms before, and would again. It would bring life forth again, carried in those seeds and motes of dust, and in time the scars left by humanity would fade and heal. It could easily cast me away, deny my hopes and leave my people open and vulnerable to the dark magic gathering in the hills.