“Dad’s house backs up to the mountains. I used to just go out the back door. We could’ve gone that way.”
“Except this is the path I showed Luke.” She glared at me over her shoulder.
I sighed. “I’m sure he didn’t go through Dad’s house to go hiking on Saturday night, Sara.”
Her mouth pinched. Clearly that was not the answer she’d been looking for. She’d wanted me to say I never took him up in the mountains myself. I supposed I could have, but that would have been a lie, and no doubt would only make things worse at some point. She said “Anyway” a little too loudly, and went back to climbing. “Anyway, this is the long way around to where the mountain is crying—” She broke off again and shot me another glare.
This time I stopped, scowling the short distance up at her. “Sara, there’s almost nothing you can say that’s so weird I’m going to flip out. Les already told me about the hollers, er, hollering—”
“Can you hear them?”
“I’m not listening.”
“What’s that mean?”
I tipped my chin back and looked at the pale blue sky as if it could give me patience. “It means I’m not listening. I’m not using any power right now. I like to get the lay of the land through normal means first if I can, but more important, if the earth is screaming loudly enough that half the Qualla can hear it, then it’s probably going to knock me on my ass when I turn the Sight on, and I’d rather be sitting down, not climbing a mountain, when that happens. Okay?”
“Oh. Okay.” Sara waited another moment, still frowning at me, then shrugged and kept climbing. After a minute she crested a small ridge and waited for me there. I popped up beside her a few seconds later and exhaled sharply.
A scar across the mountainside drew my eye first, earth that hadn’t yet healed from the centuries-old tobacco farm that had been there. The broad-leafed plants were no longer part of the landscape, done out of business by bigger farms or given up on by families who’d lost too many members to the variety of diseases smoking offered. Mostly big business, though: even my grandfather, who had died of lung cancer, hadn’t given up his tobacco farm until it cost him more to run than it profited.
Surrounding that scarred earth, though, bluegrass and new leaves shimmered over hills so old they’d forgotten what it was like to have rough edges. A stream cut through the holler’s floor, feeding more life than the eye could see. Insects and birdsong hummed through air soft enough to touch, soft enough to wrap myself in and settle down where I belonged. I put my hands over my mouth, tears pricking my eyes. Sara, in mystified horror, said, “God, you really can cry.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been home.” I pressed my lips together behind the tent of my fingers and tried to find somewhere safe to look. There wasn’t really anywhere, not with Sara to one side and the silent valley before me, but the tightness in my throat faded and after a while I cleared it. “The whole never-let-’em-see-you-bleed thing sort of went to hell when this all started up.”
“‘This’?”
“The shaman thing.” As soon as I said it, I remembered Sara had a starkly different recollection of our childhood interests than I did, and she verified that with a peculiar look and a comment. “You were into that when we were teens, Joanne.”
“Not after Lucas. I shut it all down. It came back about fifteen, sixteen months ago, and I swear to God every little thing makes me sniffly now. You’d think I was making up for lost time.”
“Maybe you are.” Sara, as uncomfortable with my sudden emotional confessions as I was, waved at the valley. “Come on. We cut through here and the next holler is where the elders are waiting.”
I slipped down the hill behind her, trying not to catch my coat on branches. “Is that were Lucas and Dad went missing from? I mean, last place they were seen?”
“You could say that.”
I squinted at her shoulders. “You’re being cryptic. So was Les.”
“Joanne, just shut up and come on. You’ll see why in a few minutes.”
I mumbled dire imprecations, but followed along, eating three of the chocolate bars I’d stored in my coat pockets. An apple, too, a local breed so I didn’t feel guilty about ditching the core in the woods as we clambered along. Sara glanced back at me once and I offered another chocolate bar, which made her eyebrows rise. “The backseat of your car is full of candy-bar wrappers, too. How many of those things have you eaten?”
“About twelve.”
“And you’re still skinny,” she said in disgusted disbelief, and surged ahead before I could explain. Ten minutes later we crawled over redrawled the top of another ridge, and the chocolate turned to oil in my stomach as I finally understood why neither Les nor Sara had wanted to explain what was going on in the mountains.
The world had disappeared.
Chapter Three
The valley’s heart looked like something out of The NeverEnding Story. Gray misty nothingness hissed and swam at its center, held in place by wards so strong they were visible without the Sight. Wards of white magic, white as only power offered up by many could be, and the many were men and women I hadn’t seen for ten years or even longer.
They were impossible to recognize, magic sheeting over them so strongly that their features were lost to it. I could tell that a steel-haired man stood at the northern end of the holler. He was the focal point, probably the oldest of those gathered. If you’d told me he’d been standing there since the beginning of time and would be there until the end, I’d have believed it. His presence was rooted in the valley floor, determined against the nothing. Others stood not just at the cardinal points but at the half points, too, seven more of them in all. Another two dozen or more hung back, not part of the power circle but not far from it, either. I took them in at a glance, but mostly I couldn’t look away from the nothing. The Nothing. It deserved a capital letter.
It strained at the wards, doing its best to break free. Malevolence boiled at its heart, an age-old anger with intent and desire shaping it. My muscles locked up, fight-or-flight dissolving into simple fright. No one should have to look into that stuff, much less stand guard against it. I wanted to run, and couldn’t make myself move.
“Joanne?” Sara touched my arm, making me flinch. I nearly seized her hand, grateful for human interaction, but I suspected she wouldn’t appreciate it. Or maybe she would, if the Nothing unnerved her as badly as it did me. “What do you see?”
“I see—” Oh. She meant what did I See, not what did I see. I shuddered. If it was bleak and scary without the Sight, I really didn’t want to see it with otherworldly vision. “Look, if I fall over, don’t let me roll into it or anything, okay?”
“...okay.”
I nodded, shivered and, despite Sara’s assurance, knelt rather than dare trigger the Sight while still on my feet. It would be harder to fall over if I was kneeling, but more relevantly, it would be harder to run away, which my feet were already trying to do. I even leaned forward and put my hands in the moss, bracing myself before letting myself See the world through a shaman’s eyes.
I’d told Sara the truth. I liked to get the lay of the land through ordinary vision before using magic, for two reasons. One, once I used the Sight, it was easy to overlook nonmagical things I might have otherwise noticed. Two, I was always a little afraid the astonishing light-filled beauty of the shamanic world would be so compelling I would never go back to normality.
Not today. The brilliant blue light of sap coursing through tree branches, the resolute deep earthy red-brown of the mountains, the very brightness of the sky, were all distorted, as if the Nothing at the valley’s center sucked them down. The shamanic wards helped, but as I watched it became clear they were merely mitigating the situation, not solving it. Their white power bent inward, as well, dragged into the Nothing’s gravity well, and under that strain, the southwestern point of the compass faltered.