Last time I’d been in there it had been to hack my personal files in their computers, changing my last name from Walkingstick to Walker on my driver’s license. By the time it propagated to the state system I’d left North Carolina and Joanne Walkingstick behind.
The station hadn’t changed a lot since then. The computers were better and so was the system they were linked into. I probably wouldn’t be able to hack it anymore. Of course, I wouldn’t need to. I could just access any files I needed to change from the Seattle Police Department’s computers. Or I could have before I’d quit not quite a week ago. I sighed, pushed my hand through my hair and went to sit in one of the surprisingly comfortable chairs by Les’s desk. Sunlight hung on motes of dust between us, making the whole world seem like it was standing still. “All right. Hit me. What’d Sara leave out?”
“Luke’s missing, too.”
Static rushed my ears and for a minute I couldn’t say anything. Then I laughed, short and harsh. “Before or after Dad?”
“Before. Sara and him came into town last Friday. Luke went missing Saturday night and there’s been a manhunt on for him. Your dad was helping, but Monday night he didn’t come back.”
A house of cards collapsed in my mind, each card with a nugget of information on it. Monday had been the solstice. Dad was some kind of mystic. Those two things probably went together. Sara had called me Wednesday. Midafternoon, Irish time—I’d been in Ireland hunting banshees—which was morning here in Cherokee. Dad had been missing about thirty-six hours then, and Lucas for seventy-two. Aloud, I said, “You’re sure Sara didn’t tie Dad up somewhere so she’d have an excuse to call me?”
Humor creased Les’s face, showing what he would look like in another forty years. Like his grandfather, the tribal elder for whom he’d been named. “The thought crossed my mind,” he said, “but she was never an outdoorsy type. She’d never get the drop on your Dad.”
“She’s an FBI agent now, Les. She could get the drop on most people.”
“Not,” Les said firmly, “your Dad,” which was probably true. I’d never thought of my father as particularly impressive, but he was the kind of guy who could sit down and disappear into the landscape even if you were looking at him when he sat. Wild animals tended to treat him as if he was one of their own. Sara had learned the ropes well enough to kick my puny ass, but I couldn’t see her taking Dad out. “Not if her life depended on it,” Les finished, as if following my thoughts.
“What if Luke’s did,” I said under my breath, but I didn’t really mean it. Not mostly, though I was willing to bet Sara’d been almost relieved when my father went missing, if it meant she had an excuse to call me in. “Why’d she say it was my kind of thing?”
Les’s humor fell away. “I know the elders gave you a drum, Joan— Joanne.” He emphasized the name, reminding himself not to use the high school nickname.
A little shock ran through me. There’d been a bit of ceremony involved with the gifting of the drum and logically I supposed half the town knew I’d received it, but logic had never been my strong suit. I sat forward, elbows on my knees, and rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, they did. When I was fifteen.”
“So what happened?” Les’s voice dropped, his curiosity softened by what sounded like genuine respect.
I rubbed my face again, then sat on my hands so I’d stop doing that. “The really short version is I got pregnant and it screwed me up. Everything the drum suggested...” I shrugged. “Went off the rails. I only found the tracks again about fifteen months ago.”
“So you’re a...”
For the first time, I didn’t want to answer the question, not because I thought he would laugh, but because of where I was. Sitting in the heart of Qualla Boundary, in all that was left of the once-vast Cherokee nation, in the midst of that, saying “A shaman,” somehow sounded very arrogant indeed. There were too many charlatans and quacks out there buying, selling and bartering so-called shamanic gifts, and I’d spent way more of my life off the rez than on. For a minute I felt as false as any of those con artists. I’d never had any use for the mystical. Claiming I was now part of that heritage just seemed wrong.
Les, though, looked neither offended nor surprised when I said the word. He just nodded and let me work my way around to continuing. “Not quite like the traditional medicine men, as far as I can tell. When this all...woke up...I was told I was on a warrior’s path. Healing’s only part of it, for me.”
Les’s mouth twitched. “You always did like a fight.”
That much, certainly, was true. It was utterly bizarre to talk to someone who had enough knowledge of a younger me to say a thing like that, but it was true. I shrugged one shoulder and tried again. “So why’d Sara think it was my kind of thing?”
“The mountain’s been hollering, Jo. So loud even I can hear it, and I’m no shaman.”
The mountain was hollering. That was an utterly preposterous thing to say, except I had just gotten off a plane from Ireland, where a screaming stone laid out peoples’ destinies. Mountains hollering seemed right in line with that. I nodded. “What’s it shouting about?”
“It started the night Lucas went missing.” Les shrugged. “Your dad said it was trying to tell us how something was wrong. That’s why he went up there, why he went alone. He was looking for Luke like all of us were, but—”
“But he was looking to heal the crying land,” I finished.
Surprise and respect brightened Les’s eyes. I could see a question coming, and lifted a hand to ward it off. I’d only just, in the past couple days, discovered my father belonged to a magical bloodline just as much as my mother had. My nomadic childhood had crystallized into a never-before-appreciated kind of sense: Dad had been taking us from one damaged site to another, trying, I now suspected, to give something back to barren earth. I hadn’t yet wrapped my mind around the whole idea and wasn’t prepared to discuss it. “What happened when he didn’t come back?”
“It got worse. It’s echoing all over the mountains now, so bad you can’t tell where it starts. My grandpa looks like he’s sucking lemons all the time, that’s how much it’s affecting him. It’s worse for some of the other families.”
“Is there anybody it’s not affecting?”
Les’s mouth quirked again. I’d had no idea that under the hair and the weed he’d had a pervasive, low-key sense of humor. “Tourists,” he said. “White men. Whatever’s happening here, Jo, it’s not their story. It belongs to the People.”
“I’m half-white, Les.”
“Nah. You grew up in the Qualla.”
I stared at him a long moment, a smile tugging at the corner of my mouth. “Just like that, huh? All the time I spent being a dick, chip on my shoulder, obstreperously ignoring my Cherokee heritage, it all gets hand-waved away because I spent a handful of teenage years here? Shit, Les, if I’d known it was that easy—”
“Hadlv hehi, Joanne?”
I answered in the same language without thinking. “Home is where the heart is, Les. Which means—” I broke off, my brain catching up to my tongue and immediately forgetting the words I needed. I hadn’t spoken Cherokee regularly since I’d been a kid, less than ten years old. But Les was grinning at me, and shaking his head.
“Maybe you didn’t learn that here, Joanne. Maybe you learned it out there on the road with Joe, but as far as I’m concerned, it means you grew up in the Qualla. So you’re part of the People, even if your ma was white. Besides, most of us have white blood anyway. I mean, look at Sara.”
I actually looked over my shoulder, half expecting her to be there. She wasn’t, but I knew what he meant. Sara was honey-blonde with brown eyes and perpetually tanned skin, making her look like more of a California golden girl than somebody who laid claim to a quarter Cherokee blood. But kind of like me, her heritage came out in black and white: the high school yearbook snapshots emphasized the Indian aspects of her features, making the light hair seem less relevant. I turned back around and crooked a smile at Les. “Right. Christ, Les, were you this—”