“Of course you did.” She packed a truly amazing amount of sarcasm into four words, which was probably fair, given I wasn’t certain when I’d last talked to him. I exhaled and studied my feet a moment. First Sara’s paranoia, now Ada’s, and I hadn’t hardly gotten past the Qualla’s front door. There were probably another half-dozen bombs I didn’t even know about just waiting to go off.
My feet seemed unconcerned by the possibility. I nodded, accepting their complacency, and looked up again. “Of course I did,” I said again, more gently. “And from what I can tell, what you’re doing here is helping make sure nobody else goes missing. I had no idea you were—” I hesitated, fumbling over the word. I’d learned a lot of them recently, words that meant magically talented: adept, connected, talented. I didn’t know which she would respond to best.
What she didn’t respond to well was the hesitation. “I’m not like you Walkingsticks, but my grandmother was a shaman’s daughter. I have some of the blood.”
“I didn’t mean—” I wasn’t going to get out of this alive, and stopped trying. “I’m here because I hope I can help.”
“Then what’d you come with her for?” Sara suddenly became a presence again, one that Ada could look down on. I half turned toward Sara, who held her jaw so tight I could see muscle twitch. Anger, less profound than what the Nothing had called up, did a little stompy dance inside me. Sara and I might not be the best of buddies, but she deserved better than a total shut-out just because she’d become a Fed. But from how she stared resolutely away from Ada and the Nothing, it was pretty clear she wouldn’t take a stand. Maybe she felt like she’d betrayed her own by going into the line of work she had. Maybe she was afraid they’d stop looking for Lucas entirely if she rocked the boat at all. Maybe she just wasn’t confrontational by nature, though she’d been happy enough to get in my face.
Why didn’t matter. She could take it if she wanted to, but I didn’t have to enable it. I turned back to Ada with my best butter-wouldn’t-melt expression. “Sara called to tell me that my dad was missing, Ada, and her husband’s missing, too. Why wouldn’t she be here? Besides, I’ve worked with Sara in the past. I know what a professional asset she is, and I’d think everyone would be grateful for a trained agent on a search-and-rescue operation.”
Ada snapped, “This is Qualla business,” and I, very softly, said, “And Sara is a Qualla agent. The government’s done a lot of harm, I’m not arguing, but if everybody in the Qualla turns their back on people who pursue federal careers, then there’s not much chance those people are ever going to be able to help, or in the end even want to. Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, Ada. Now, can you tell me anything about what’s going on here, or bring me to someone who can?”
Mouth set in a thin line, Ada pointed toward the northern end of the holler, then folded her arms under her breasts and turned away from us. I went where she directed, Sara catching up to say, semigrudgingly, “Thank you. That was a dumb thing to do, but thank you.”
I nodded acceptance of the thanks, but asked, “Dumb?”
“She’s your kid’s mom, Joanne. You really want her angry at you?”
“Sara, if she wants him to loathe me then I’m sure it’s already far too late for that. Three minutes defending you is not going to change anything, and she pissed me off. You deserve more respect. I mean, you’re what, twenty-nine now? And you’re leading investigative teams with the FBI. That takes a lot of ambition and dedication. It doesn’t—it shouldn’t—matter if you’re a federal agent. You’re not the enemy.”
My little rant had taken us around the Nothing to the holler’s northern end. Sara, bemused, murmured, “I don’t know what you’ve done with the Joanne Walkingstick I drove up here with, but I like this version better,” as we were approached by an old woman I recognized. Carrie Little Turtle, whose steel-gray hair was still twisted in the same relentless braids she’d worn almost fifteen years earlier when she and Les’s grandfather, also Lester, and three other elders had given me the shaman’s drum that currently rested on my dresser back in Seattle.
Carrie looked equally at home in jeans or deerskin, the latter of which she was wearing now, with feathers woven into the under-skirt. She also wore so many rings and bangles that I wasn’t quite sure how she could lift her arms. Like Ada, she gave Sara a faintly scathing look, but since I was half certain Carrie actually remembered the Trail of Tears, I was less inclined to put my neck out in Sara’s defense.
Sadly, she gave me a far more scathing look than she graced Sara with. “Where’s your drum?”
“...Seattle...”
Carrie clicked her tongue so loudly I suspected they immediately started discussing my shame in the next county over. “Well, I didn’t,” I started, then tried, “I mean, I wasn’t,” before finishing up in a burst of desperation: “I was in Ireland, see.”
“And they don’t use drums in Ireland? Never mind.” For a woman eighty years older than God, she had some fine talk-to-the-hand action going on. I subsided without even trying to speak, feeling like a scolded puppy. “This is a bad time to come home, Joanne Walkingstick. You should have come home a long time ago.”
My guilt did a quick reverse into belligerence. “Really. A long time ago or not at all? Because tell you what, Carrie, that,” I said with a jab of my finger toward the power-bound Nothing, “scares the shit out of me, and if you’ve got some way to deal with it that I don’t have to play along with, I might actually be okay with that. I can just hightail my ass back to Seattle and all y’all can quiet the mountain down yourself.”
“Ah,” Sara said almost inaudibly, “there you are.”
“You think you can help the mountain? Stop that?” Carrie made much the same gesture I had, only somehow she filled it with derision, which actually stopped me cold.
There were two possible options. One was she genuinely wasn’t afraid of a boiling mass of Nothing that creeped me out so badly I was unconsciously doing everything I could not to look at it. If that was the case, Carrie Little Turtle was not only more of a badass than I was, but she was more of a badass than I could ever imagine hoping to be.
The other, far more likely option, was that she was every bit as terrified as I was, had no idea how to protect her land, her people, or their history, and had no intention of letting anyone see it. I bit back a response just as short-tempered as Carrie’s and eased the Sight on so I could take a look at her aura.
It spun with turmoil, earthy dark green and brown nearly overwhelmed by sharp bursts of red panic and bright orange throbs of pain. Her whole left torso was afire with orange, in fact, squeezing and straining her body, and her aura’s stuttering pulses reminded me of a faltering heartbeat. A whole metaphor rolled out of that in an instant, how the mountains were Carrie’s heart and this nothingness at their center was breaking it, that the stress reflected in her body was representative of what happened in the Carolina hills—
Then I got my English degree under control and realized no, actually, the woman was having a heart attack right in front of me. I yelped and shoved my hand over her heart.
Healing magic shot from me like it was desperate for something to do. Like the chance to heal Carrie was a chance to heal the mountain, though realistically I knew the metaphor wasn’t going to stretch that far. But the problems of age and stress, those I could deal with. Carrie’s heart muscle was old and worn out, arteries stiff with build-up. With a touch, I had the instant sense of how long she’d been breathing poorly, of how long she’d been growing weaker without fully realizing it.