wreck of heaven

by Holly Lisle

  At her feet, Jake said, "Oh, no. Mama. No."

  Lauren turned to see what was bothering him. She couldn't see anything. She took a step forward and moved into a spot of air so icy, so terrifying, that she almost shrieked. But in her mind something whispered, Get the man to leave. I have news for you.

  CHAPTER 2

  Cat Creek

  LAUREN FROZE in place, trying desperately to think. She picked up Jake and held him close, and whispered in his ear, "Hush, puppy, everything is going to be all right." She stroked his hair and moved out of the ice blast that almost had to be one of the Orians.

  "Mama, the guy wants to talk to you," Jake said, and started sobbing loudly. "Let's go. Come on, Mama. Let's go."

  Lauren headed out of the kitchen toward the front of the house, bypassing Pete, who turned with a bewildered expression on his face and came after her.

  "What's wrong?"

  Lauren said, "I don't know. Jake's been having—if he were older I'd say he had panic attacks every time we came to the back of the house. He has a bad reaction in the foyer by the mirror, of course, but he also gets panicked in the kitchen. He won't go in there on his own, and he tries to talk me out of going back there."

  Pete looked chagrined. "I'm sorry. I didn't know. I thought bringing him back would help him get past being afraid of the mirror…" He patted Jake on the shoulder, and Jake turned his head away and buried his face in Lauren's hair.

  "Go…."

  Pete looked at Lauren. "He's mad at me?"

  Lauren, showing Pete to the front door, gave him an apologetic smile. "He's gotten very good at laying blame recently. The person who gets him into a situation he doesn't want to be in becomes the enemy—at least for a little while. Usually it's me, since I'm the only one he's with all the time." She shrugged as she opened the door for Pete, and with Jake still clinging to her like a barnacle on a boat, said, "He doesn't hold grudges, though. He's a pretty cool little guy that way. Next time he sees you, he'll be fine."

  "But we were having such fun," Pete said, stepping out onto the porch.

  "Yep. And then he realized that you got him to go into the kitchen, where he knew he didn't want to go—so in his eyes, you became just another sneaky adult." Lauren stepped far enough out onto the porch that Pete had to clear the doorway completely. When she was sure he'd committed, she took a half step back in and said, "I'll have to get the gate for the new girl later. It isn't like she has to have it right this minute, anyway. She can just be off duty when she's home until I have a chance to get over there. I think I need to make sure Jake is calmed down and okay right now."

  Pete, who clearly couldn't figure out how he'd been steamrolled onto the porch, started to protest. Then he nodded. "Yeah—go ahead and get him feeling better. I'm sorry, little guy. I didn't want you to be scared."

  Jake yanked his head around so he was facing away from Pete.

  "He'll get over it," Lauren said, stepping into the foyer and closing the door.

  Pete stood on the porch for a moment, the flummoxed expression not leaving his face. Then he turned and walked down the steps. Lauren locked the front door—her fellow Sentinels had an unnerving habit of knocking to announce their presence, then coming on in if the door wasn't locked. Those small-town habits didn't bother Lauren most of the time.

  Now, however, an uninvited guest—rather, a second uninvited guest—could be a problem.

  "I'm not coming back to the kitchen," she said when she saw Pete pull the black-and-white out of the drive. "If you want to talk to me, you're going to have to come up here. My kid is afraid of the kitchen."

  She saw a shimmer at the back of the hall—something transparent moving toward her. She waited, and the thing took shape. It was one of the veyâr. Because it remained translucent and kept itself toward the back of the foyer away from the bright outside light, she had to guess at color, but she thought it was one of the blue-green ones.

  "I have news," the veyâr said. Lauren could now hear its voice, but it sounded to her like it was calling to her from the end of a very long, echoey tunnel.

  "So you said." Lauren held Jake tight against her chest. His little body had gone rigid, and she could feel him shaking with fear. "Make it quick. You're scaring my little boy."

  Veyâr faces were hard to read—Lauren could only guess at the emotions that flashed across this one's tattooed visage. He looked nervous, timid, and at the same time almost excited.

  "Brief. Yes. I will be brief. The Imallin sent me—you must come to Oria to carry out your destiny."

  "My destiny died with my sister," Lauren said quietly. "I don't have a destiny anymore."

  The veyâr snapped his wrists emphatically by shaking them up and down; Lauren had no idea what that gesture meant until he said, "No, no, no. Your destiny is reborn. The Vodi has returned to us."

  "You found a new Vodi?" Lauren asked, trying to make sense of what he was saying.

  "No. Your sister. The Vodi. She is alive."

  Lauren felt something twist in her gut. Anger. Fear. Something dark and ugly. "I buried Molly," she said, her voice dropping and getting softer as the anger grew. "She's dead. I can take you to the grave if you'd like. But I'm not going to be dragged into Oria with my little boy for some farce you people thought up. Without Molly, I can't do anything that matters."

  "And without you, neither can she," the veyâr said. "She gave me a message for you. She said you would know that it was from her, that this was something that only the two of you would be able to make sense of. She told me that your parents planned for her to be the warp, and you to be the weft."

  Lauren stared at the veyâr, disbelieving. "Explain yourself."

  "I cannot. I can only relay what she told me to tell you. She said your parents planned the two of you to weave our worldchain back together, and she was to be the warp, and you the weft." He shrugged—that gesture, at least, Lauren could make some sense of.

  Your parents planned for her to be the warp, and you to be the weft.

  Yes. That was it precisely—the analogy that they had implanted through magic in Lauren's and Molly's minds. That image had exploded to life, along with a thousand other connections, when Lauren and Molly finally met and touched. In the same day that it came to life, though, Molly died, without having an opportunity or a reason to share that information with anyone else. Lauren had never told anyone—had never said a single word about what had passed between the two of them. Perhaps the veyâr had ways of reading her mind—she wouldn't put that past them. But somehow…somehow this felt real to Lauren.

  Could Molly be alive?

  No. Of course not. Lauren had been to the funeral, seen her sister lying in the coffin, watched June Bug Tate quietly fall apart standing there staring at Molly's body. Jake was alive because Molly had given her life to save him.

  Warp and weft.

  She took a deep breath and asked the veyâr, "How? How is she alive?"

  The veyâr said, "She is the Vodi. She wears the necklace of all the Vodian who lived before her, and it protects her the way it protected them. She is alive, and she and the Imallin beg you to come to Oria."

  "He's bad, Mama," Jake said, his face pressed into her neck. "Make that bad guy go away."

  Lauren leaned against the wall and stared at the veyâr, rocking her son against her body and patting him on the back as if he were still a baby. Warp and weft—the threads that would weave the dying worldchain back together. Her parents had left that message with Molly, they'd left it with Lauren—and here it was, come back to haunt her.

  And if Molly truly still lived, then the plan lived, too. Lauren's parents hadn't died for nothing. Lauren still had a destiny. The world she loved and wanted to leave for Jake and Jake's eventual children still had a chance.

  And if the plan still lived, then the Sentinels might be a problem, and other things might be a problem, and Lauren and Jake, unprotected in the old family house, were sitting ducks for anything that came looking for them with an ey
e toward rectifying a situation that Molly's funeral hadn't quite handled. Shit.

  Copper House would be a safe place for her and Jake—at least for the length of time it would take for her to determine whether Molly was alive and whether any real danger threatened them. Copper House lay through the gates, downworld in Oria, and it had been built to ward off the magics of the oldest and most deadly of the dark gods. The veyâr might be edging close to extinction, but it wasn't because they'd failed to take adequate precautions in covering their asses.

  If Molly lived, Lauren had an obligation to go to Oria. She had a duty. She had work to do—and she couldn't turn her back on it, because she of all the people in the world had been born to do the things she had to do. Molly—half-human, half-veyâr—had been conceived and born at enormous personal cost to Lauren's mother. Lauren wasn't sure if her parents had actually figured out their plan before or after they discovered that Lauren could weave gates, and that she had a real knack for weaving them to places she'd never been. She knew, though, that even among gateweavers she was a rarity.

  Lauren looked around the house that had belonged to her parents—that now belonged to her—and realized that if the veyâr told the truth, she was going to have to leave it behind, maybe forever. She didn't want to do that. Her mother had planted the daffodils and the crocuses, the phlox and the forsythia, the dogwoods and the azaleas. Her father had built the bookshelves and the window seats, fixed the front porch and made the porch swing, and done things up in the attic that Lauren still hadn't completely figured out. This was the only place in the world that she could truly claim as home. She didn't belong anywhere else.

  "I'm going to have to bring Jake with me," she told the shadowy veyâr.

  "Bring him."

  "You don't understand. I can't get him anywhere near a gate without him going completely to pieces. Something awful happened to him related to Molly and gates, and I don't want to cause him any more pain."

  The veyâr looked sympathetic—at least Lauren interpreted his expression and body movements as sympathy. He said, "The little boy will be safer in Copper House than here. The Imallin told me to be sure you knew that forces aware of the return of the Vodi—and of the import of that—have already begun to gather. They will know your relation to her. They will understand your importance. And if they cannot get to her—and they cannot, because she is safe in Copper House—they will come after you."

  "No," Lauren said, but she already knew the truth in his words.

  "Please. For your safety, for our worlds—for our people. Please come. She needs you. We need you."

  Lauren tightened her grip on Jake, and stroked his hair.

  "Go back. Tell her that I'll be there as quickly as I can. I need to take care of a few things before I leave here—I can't know how long I'll be gone, and I'll need to make arrangements."

  She couldn't tell any of the Sentinels she was leaving, though. She couldn't trust them to be on her side if they knew Molly was alive. Except for Pete, maybe. She thought she could trust Pete. She needed to make sure he had her keys, that he could get into her house, pay her bills if she couldn't get back quickly enough…and she needed to be sure that he could keep the rest of the Sentinels from coming after her if she couldn't return to Earth promptly.

  Lauren wouldn't have to worry too much about packing for a journey; the veyâr would take care of everything she needed while she stayed in Copper House. Once she left the veyâr stronghold and began to carry out her duties, she would have magic to provide for most of her needs. She'd have to have a couple of Jake's favorite toys. She'd need her picture of Brian. Beyond that…

  She'd been staring at the floor, and she looked up to tell the veyâr that she would be along in a day or so—and he was already gone.

  Lauren took a deep breath. Molly alive. Maybe…and if she was alive, how? And how did her being alive relate to the Sentinels' flat prohibition against bringing anyone back from death—or against the sick twist Lauren got in her gut when she even thought about using magic to resurrect the dead?

  But those were details she could only know when she got to Oria. First she had to get there.

  Lauren listed the things she needed to accomplish. A note and a key to the house shoved through a little gate into Pete's apartment, left on the table where he'd find both when he got home—and some sort of plausible lie to put in the note; put the house services on hold; get someone trustworthy to keep an eye on the house; put Bearish and Mr. Puddleduck and the Crashable Cars in a backpack with Jake's flannel jammies and Brian's photo.

  And the letters. She wasn't leaving home without the letters she and Brian wrote to each other when he was stationed overseas.

  She could do all of that in an afternoon. Rocking Jake in her arms, she realized that she could very possibly be out of the house before it started to get dark.

  She didn't want to be. But the faster she got to Oria, the faster she would know the truth. And then maybe she would find that it was all a lie, and she could come back home.

  But inside, she knew the veyâr had been telling her the truth. She could feel it, like the coming of a storm. Molly was alive again, and the two of them had work to do.

  Cat Creek to Copper House

  Lauren got the gate for the new girl out of the way simply because she didn't want to leave things undone. She had her paper stopped, left a note in the mailbox for the postman, turned the thermostat in the house down so that it would kick on and keep the pipes from freezing if Cat Creek had a late frost. She checked to make sure all the doors and windows were locked, that her car was locked away in the storage building to the back, that her private gates in the storage building were all shut down and blocked with her personal key.

  All that, and twilight was just settling around the town. She wasn't ready to go.

  "But I don't know that I'll ever be ready to go," she told Jake. "The big question is, do we ever get to come back…and I can't answer that one for us."

  Jake, used to being the listening part of conversations that made no sense to him, gave her a tentative smile and focused on the words he recognized. "Go?" he asked. "Go to Hardee's, get biscuits?"

  Lauren said, "Not today, Jake-o. Today we have other things to do. Time to go visit your aunt Molly."

  That meant nothing to him. Well, he'd only met her once, under the worst possible circumstances; no reason to think her name would stick. Going through a gate would ring a few of Jake's bells, though. Lauren got her little overnight bag, slung it on her shoulder, and went to the hall mirror. She had Pete's note all ready. She read it again, looking for flaws.

  Pete,

  Sorry to beg a favor from you without warning, but Jake and I have to go to Charlotte. Brian's parents are going to be in town for the next few days, and have called from out of the blue and asked that he go visit them. Since there is no way in hell he's going to see those people without me around, I'm going to be out of town for the next few days. The Sentinels can get coverage from the gateweaver in Vass if you have an emergency before I get back. I'm not going to leave a phone number—this is something I have to do, and it isn't open for negotiation or time limits.

  Please pass on my apologies to everyone. I would have done a more graceful job of this with more warning. I'll be back as soon as I can. Meantime, please keep an eye on the house for me, and eat anything perishable that you want from the fridge.

  Thanks,

  Lauren

  It looked okay to her.

  Lauren let Jake sit on the bottom step at the front of the foyer to wait for her. She went to the huge mirror at the back, took a deep breath, and rested one hand against the glass. She stared into her reflected eyes and concentrated on Pete's kitchen table, and after a moment she could see a tiny flash of green shimmer in the eyes of her reflected self. She called that fire to her, and beneath her splayed fingertips felt the mirror begin to purr like a happy cat. She unfocused her eyes just a bit, and the picture she saw changed—no longer a dark-haired wo
man standing with her hand on a full-length mirror in the hallway of an old house. Now she saw a neat, almost bare kitchen, the card table in the corner wiped clean and with a tiny handful of unopened bills placed at an exact ninety-degree angle in Pete's little apartment across town. She looked at this kitchen through a green glow—a haze of pale, cold fire. She didn't want to just shove the letter through, in case he was around, so she concentrated on pivoting her view to take in the rest of the kitchen.

  His pantry, doorless and with neat wire shelves that she knew he'd installed himself, was terrifying. Lauren had lived within the military system, and she'd still never seen anything quite so compulsively neat. He'd alphabetized the cans, and cans occupied a different set of shelves than cereals and baking goods—which he actually had. Go figure. Not the typical bachelor.

  She got a full-circle look at the area, and if he was around, he occupied some corner where he could see her. So she shoved the letter through the surface of the mirror, feeling the sensual pull of the paths spun between the worlds. Then, because she wanted him to see the letter, she made sure that it didn't line up at a right angle, but instead looked like she'd tossed it from the other side of the room and only barely hit her target. She dropped her key ring on the table beside the letter.