But it didn’t. It answered, living magic rising from the earth to answer my call. Its green was so dark as to be nearly black, rich with age and confidence. It met my silver-blue and amalgamated it, comforting and strong, until I was the unknown spark that had started the fire. It would continue burning now, keeping those things within it safe from the world outside, until I asked it to come down. I would feel the people coming and going, and if corruption tried to slip through, I had no doubt I would sense it. I’d never had such a strong sense of the earth itself, or of such a connection to it. I whispered, “Thanks, Renee,” aloud, and felt the walking stick give a little nod of pleasure in the depths of my mind. Raven and Rattler felt smug, like this was much better, this was the way things really ought to go, and I grinned as I left my place in the power circle to go back into the school.
Les met me at the doors, his eyes shining. “You did it, didn’t you? The circle is up.”
“Yeah. Why?”
He tipped his head toward the gym, then took a sort of skipping step in that direction. “You should have seen it. It was like someone wrapped the whole place in a blanket. The mountain echoes cut off and everybody relaxed a little. I’d never seen anything like it. They’re calmer now, all of them. It’s like the air gave us a hug.”
I chuckled quietly. “That’s good. I’ll leave it up until they’re ready to be buried. Maybe it’ll help.”
“Won’t that wipe you out?”
“Nah. It’s like turning the key to spark engine. Once the engine is going you don’t have to keep turning the key. As long as the earth is willing to help, the magic is self-sustaining.” I followed Les into the gym, where I, too, could feel the decrease of tension. There was still a lot of sorrow and anger, but the fear had faded. That was a relief, since this many unhappy people powered by fear could turn into a mob very fast, and Les didn’t have anything like the resources to contain an angry mob. Well, unless you counted me among his resources, but that made me start wanting a holocaust cloak and a wheelbarrow.
This time as I came in, a ripple went through the crowd. Everybody knew by now that Joanne Walkingstick was back in town, and that I’d had something to do with what had happened on the mountain. Calming power circle or not, there were a lot of suspicious faces and hurt gazes as I stuck close to Les. “This was maybe not a good idea.”
“Too late now.” He led me through the gathering, his badge giving him just enough authority that nobody got in my face. Not, at least, until we’d crossed the gym and were about to go into the music room. Then a big block of a man put himself between us and the door, and folded his arms.
“I don’t think you deserve to sit with the dead, Walkingstick. You ran out of here a long time ago. You should go back where you came from.”
Les murmured, “Grandpa Les asked for her, Dan,” while I tried to figure out who the guy was. The name rang a bell, and I took half a step back to get a better look at the guy.
“Dan. Danny Little Turtle?” Danny had been big in high school, too, but he’d filled out enough to be mistaken for a wall by casual observers. He’d been a football player, a big man on campus, and I was the tall skinny walking chip-on-the-shoulder who showed up and wasn’t impressed. To the best of my memory, “Oh, God. I’m so sorry, Dan. I’m so sorry about your grandmother. I liked her,” were nearly the first words I’d ever said to him.
“So much you got her killed. Get out of here, Joanne. Go back to Seattle. We don’t want you here.” His animosity picked up followers, men and women who were less aggressive by nature but glad to follow a lead.
Les started to look grim, and I touched his elbow to ask him to let me handle it. His expression didn’t change, but he didn’t break into the discussion yet, so I took that as my chance. “First off, you’re right. I left a long time ago and I have a lot of nerve coming back right now. A lot more nerve, coming here, into your memorial services. I’m sorry for intruding, and if you don’t want me helping keep vigil, I won’t. It’s not my place.”
There was nothing like agreeing with somebody to take the wind out of their sails. Dan’s scowl got darker, but he couldn’t argue when I was offering to do what he wanted. I kept my voice pitched exactly the same way, just loud enough to carry around a group of people who had suddenly gotten very quiet. “Grandpa Les thinks this horrible mess isn’t my fault, and I wish I believed him, but I’m not trying to kid anyone. Even if it’s not something I did, it’s something that’s happening to bring me back here. I wouldn’t have come back if Dad hadn’t gone missing.”
“I’m surprised you did anyway.”
That was way too shallow to hurt: I cut myself deeper than that every day. All I said was, “Yeah, I know,” because while I wasn’t exactly surprised at myself, I couldn’t imagine anyone else being anything but. “I’ll do what I can to help here, Danny. I can’t undo these deaths. I hope like hell I can prevent more. And if I go away again when this is over, I hope at least this time I won’t be running away, and that maybe someday I’ll be invited back. It’s the best I can do. It’s not enough. We all know that. But it’s the best I can do.”
All that shamanic training was doing some good. I’d set Dan and everybody else on their ears, at least, shaking the foundations of what they expected from me. It was a good place to start, and for once smart enough not to push it, I gave Danny a respectful nod and said, “Thanks for letting me say my piece. I’ll get out of the way now. I don’t want to disrupt things more than I have.”
I went ahead and left through the doors we’d been heading for. Les and Dan both followed, the latter to make sure I wasn’t going into the music room. When I headed past it to the end of the hall, he went back into the gym. Les, though, caught up with me and said, “‘If’?”
There was only one if in what I’d said that he’d be asking about. “I couldn’t say ‘when I go away again’ without losing any possible street cred I’d just earned.”
“Ah. Yeah. I guess. I guess it was too much thinking you’d come back and realize everything you were missing, all inside a day.”
I crooked a smile. “Give it time. I haven’t even been here twelve hours yet. Look, I’m gonna do just what I said. I’m going to stay out of the way. Tell your grandpa I’m sorry, okay? But I don’t think it’s a good idea to push it with Danny, and there are probably others in there who think the same thing. They’ll be all right without a Walker in there.”
“A Walker?”
I sighed. “Walkingstick. I changed my last name when I left. Abandoning my roots, all of that. Don’t tell me you never noticed in the computer files.”
“I never looked.” Les had a funny expression. “Not on our files, anyway. I looked you up a few times online, but I was looking for Joanne Walkingstick. Guess that’s why I never found you.”
A crop of nervous butterflies awakened in my stomach. This didn’t seem like a good time to admit I’d never even thought of looking him up online. “I guess I didn’t think in terms of how changing my name might make me kind of disappear. But here I am now.” I spread my hands in demonstration, then nodded toward the gym. “You’d probably better get back in there. I’ll keep an eye on the power circle and if anybody needs me my mobile is, er, I mean, my cell phone number is—” I rattled off the number feeling silly, and mumbled, “I was in Ireland, everybody calls them mobiles there.”
“I’ll call if we need anything.” Les headed back into the gym and I watched him go, uncomfortably aware that his high school interest in me didn’t seem to have passed. Otherwise if I left versus when I left wouldn’t have mattered, never mind things like whether he could find me online. It all made me miss Morrison horribly, which was probably not in the least what Sheriff Lester would like to hear. I took my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and checked the time. One in the morning in North Carolina was only 10:00 p.m. in Seattle. I slid down against a wall and called Morrison, fingers tangled in my hair while I waited for him to pick up.