Free More Than Magic by Donna June Cooper

date, he had gotten really intense and quiet, asking questions about the carvings that she couldn’t answer.
    “I’m thinkin’ that’s real old magic down in there, Gracie-girl. Older’n the Cherokee, that.”
    Pops had tried more than once to find the room by himself, to no avail. Each time he would either end up at a different dead end or in a different loopback to the entrance. Later, when she was a teenager, they had gone back together, and to Pops’s delight they had found the room and the carvings with no trouble. But, oddly, although Granny Lily’s initials were still there, the handprint was gone. Grace had sworn to him she hadn’t imagined it, and he had believed her— “The old magic does what it will, Gracie-girl. It’s not ours to command.”
    Pops had tried to persuade Grace to go back in alone to see if the mountain would show the handprint to her again, but she had refused. As a teenager, the whole idea of the mountain being aware that she was there, alone, and somehow adjusting to her presence had been disturbing. But as a child she had felt only a sense of wonder and delight down there. It had seemed the safest place in the world.
    Now, much to Pooka’s dismay, Grace climbed down into the crevice and stood, blinking in the dim light and waiting until the cave mouth emerged from the murk—a darker hole in the darkness. Briefly, she considered crawling in to see if she could find that room again, all these years later. Even more briefly, she considered just staying in there.
    “You suspected it, didn’t you Pops?” she said. “You thought I might have her gift.” And she wondered about Daniel, and his dreams.  
    Pooka whined from above her, just as he had done that day when he and Pops had finally found her, climbing up out of the warm dark.
    Plants that shouldn’t survive. Dogs that live far longer than they should. Loved ones who are rarely ill. And now Tink. She sighed. “You were afraid of what it meant. You were afraid for me—”
    And I refused to see it. Until a fairy forced me to—
    Perhaps that was what was wrong with the mountain. She had rejected this gift. She was still rejecting it, not trusting it, trying to control it, instead of accepting it and—
    And what? It was impossible —as impossible as asking her to “fix the mountain” or screaming at her in an archaic language to guard against poison and plague. There had to be a scientific explanation.
    Fueled by sudden frustration, Grace clambered out of the crevice and donned her backpack, much to Pooka’s relief. For half of her life she had studied and trained to become a healer, had dreamed of discovering the next miracle plant in the rainforest that might help cure people of some disease or another. But nothing she had learned in those classrooms or labs had given her the tools or the knowledge to deal with this . She studied her hands.
    If there was some ancient melody humming through these rocks, she was certainly off-key and out of tune with it. Caught between incomprehensible dreams and an unbelievable reality, she was beginning to feel utterly lost and alone.
     
    He was lost. Absolutely lost. And that was a first.
    For a while, following Grace had gone just fine. Nick had his GPS as well as a backup compass and a damn fine sense of direction. He was a good tracker, having worked on some rather interesting cases in some pretty remote places. It wasn’t too cold, although he wouldn’t have described the day as warm exactly and the forest floor never really got beyond a kind of dim dusk because the trees were so thick, even without their leaves.
    Then the GPS had gone out. Not only lost the signal, which wasn’t surprising considering the tree canopy in here, but stopped working entirely—no display, no nothing. And it was followed by his regular compass, which started spinning erratically. Cursing, he had switched to using the map, his gut, and his tracking skills. In spite of it all, he had been making good