by Holly Lisle
"And now you don't have to be stuck anymore."
Brian pulled her close and kissed her forehead. "You haven't learned the art of giving up gracefully yet, I see."
"I don't intend to learn that one. Giving up gracefully is just losing when you still might win. I intend to win."
He took her hand in his and pulled her onto a path. He started walking, and she realized they were heading for a lake, away from her stone arch, which was going to take the three of them back to Oria and a life together. "Laurie, listen to me. They had me dead to rights. I'd broken the rules not once but twice. In order for them to let the things I'd done with Jake stand, I had to agree to back out of life for a while. I'm not going to be taking on any new lives for…I don't know. A long time. Until I've learned how to let go."
"Neither one of us is good at letting go," she said. "But that's not a bad thing. That's a good thing. We belong together."
"You and Jake belong together." He laughed a little. "You're two of a kind. Me? Well, because of me, you still have Jake, and that was the finest thing I did in that lifetime."
"They're telling me I can't take Jake back, either."
Brian shook his head. "That can't be right. My deal with them was that Jake got to live his life. They won't cheat." He shook his head. "But you're missing the point, Laurie. I was supposed to die when I did. You're supposed to move on."
"Without you? No."
"You have other opportunities now. New directions."
"I don't want other opportunities or new directions," she said. "And neither does Jake. We want you. We love you. Enough excuses, enough bureaucracy, enough people telling you what you're supposed to do and what's supposed to be good for you. Come home. I'm taking us."
He put his hand on her shoulder and looked into her eyes, and slowly shook his head. "Put Jake down for a minute. He'll be okay."
Lauren put her son on the grass. Jake sat and looked up at her, suddenly solemn, suddenly patient.
Brian said, "We have this chance to say good-bye, you and I. This one chance, which you fought hard to get. Don't waste it. Kiss me, and tell me that you love me."
Lauren blinked back tears. Shook her head "no."
"Dead is dead, Laurie. My word is my word, too. I love you, and I will love you forever. When you return here—when you really belong here—I'll be here waiting for you. But I am not the last love you will have in this life of yours. Kiss me, and tell me good-bye, and go start living again."
"Oh, Brian, there's no one else like you."
"I hope not." He gave her a little smile, and she saw tears on his cheeks. "I don't want you to find a replacement for me—that would be living in the past. Just look forward. And remember that you're free. Heaven has no place for jealousy—here, all loves have room to flower and grow." He pulled her into his arms and kissed her hard, the way he used to when they were standing in the hangar and he was going TDY and had his bag on his shoulder and she could feel the plane out there, waiting to take him away from her again.
She kissed him back, melting into his arms, wanting so much for this to be the first time, not the last. For this to last forever. But he pulled away, bent over, and picked up Jake.
"I'm glad you came to see me, sport. But you know you don't get to come back here again."
"I know." Jake nodded.
"And you know I'll always be with you inside." He tapped Jake's chest.
"I know."
"Take care of your mommy," Brian said, and wrapped Jake in a tight embrace.
Jake flung his arms around his father's neck and kissed him on the cheek. "I wanted to be Superman," he said. "I wanted to save you."
"You're going to have to be Mommy's little Superman, okay? Be a good boy. I'm proud of you." He put Jake back on the grass. "Go with Mommy now. It's time to go home." Brian's face crumpled, and he had to turn away.
"Not yet," Lauren whispered.
"You have to go," Brian said. "They need you back there." He turned around to look at her again and forced a tiny smile. "I'll be here when you get back."
Lauren finally accepted it. He wasn't coming home. No last-minute reprieve, no miracle, no voice of God above saying, "Go. Go. You fought so hard to be together—you deserve this." Just that gate, waiting. And Jake. And the knowledge that back home, people needed her.
She picked up Jake and swung him onto her hip. "I'll miss you, Bri."
"I'll miss you, too. But it's never as long as it seems. Usually, it isn't even as long as you want. Be happy. That will make me happy."
With Jake in her arms and his legs wrapped around her waist, she put her hand on the gate and said, "I want to go home."
"Good-bye, Daddy," Jake yelled.
And then Lauren stepped through.
Onto a featureless gray plain, with a featureless gray sky, now lacking even a road to bisect it and offer to it some feeling of direction and finity.
"Oh, no," Lauren whispered. "This is not where we wanted to be." She closed her eyes and summoned a road beneath her feet. Then she gave it a sign that said, "Home," and started walking.
"I don't like this place," Jake said.
"You have good instincts, puppy-boy." She tightened her grip on him and walked faster.
"You know why you're here," the Administrator said. He sounded like he was right behind them, though Lauren didn't trust sound in this place. Nevertheless, when Jake gave a little whimper and buried his face against her neck, she did peek over her shoulder.
She wished she hadn't.
The Administrator stood right behind her, clad in his flowing, wind-whipped black, and with him were a hundred black-clad clones, all faceless, hidden beneath their dark cowls, with arms crossed over chests and censure in their stances.
They said nothing. They simply stood.
"I'm not leaving without my son," Lauren said. "Brian made an agreement—he would stay here and learn what he needed to learn—Jake got to live out his life."
"The child did live out his life," the Administrator said. "He left it of his own volition. And there are irregularities in his case."
"He's three!" Lauren shouted. "You don't have volition when you're three."
"Part of him is much older."
"Most of him isn't! You don't get to change the deal now!"
"We didn't change the deal. We are merely enforcing its terms."
"He's ALIVE!"
"Enough of him belongs here that we are within our rights to claim him and keep him."
"Jake came here because he loves his daddy. He's a little guy, and he wanted to save Brian, and because of that love, you're going to try to steal his life from him—and take my son away from me—on a technicality. I thought Heaven was a place of love. A place free from pettiness and bureaucratic bullshit."
"Rules matter. You may think what you like, but the child stays. And if you do not give him to us voluntarily, you will spend the rest of your life on this plain, alone."
"Go to Hell," Lauren said. "You aren't taking my kid."
"Yay, Mama," Jake whispered.
The Administrator began to speak, and with him all the silent ones now spoke in unison.
"By the authority vested in us,
by the hand of all that made us,
We who hold the keys to the gate
That stands between life and death,
And afterlife, hereby sentence—"
But all Lauren heard was the first part—By the authority vested in us. "You aren't the ultimate authorities!" she shouted over their chant. "I WANT TO TALK TO THE GUY IN CHARGE!"
That stopped them for a moment. The Administrator did not finish his chant, nor did the massed mob behind him. They all seemed dumbstruck, and for one long, lovely moment they stood silent.
Then the Administrator, sounding peevish, said, "Well, you can't. I deal with cases like yours."
Lauren, however, had spent time as a military wife. She knew when to stay within the chain of command. She also knew when to buck the system. She drew
in the power of this place, calling to herself the vast potential of the featureless gray plain, the endless gray sky, and the bleak light, and claimed it for her own use. She started to stretch upward, bringing Jake with her. First they towered over the Administrator and his cronies, and then over the line of the road that she'd made, which shrank until it looked like a pencil line, ruler-drawn on gray paper. They grew taller and more vast, hanging on to each other and staring into each other's eyes, until even the pencil line that had been the road disappeared, and the plain again became featureless. Suddenly, however, a voice said, "Do you then intend to fill up eternity?"
The voice was masculine, and friendly, and seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time.
"Is that what it will take to get Jake and me out of this place and back home where we belong?"
The light all around the two of them became brighter, then impossibly so. It was a beautiful light, warm and loving, and Lauren felt no fear in its presence.
"You are—mother and son—well-matched souls," the voice said. "Your love and courage do you both honor."
"Honor is great," Lauren said. "But what about what that…that administrator said? About the sentence he passed on both of us?"
"I've rescinded that. The administrator overreached himself. Have some pity for him, though. Souls in the lower realms gravitate toward situations that feel familiar to them. We tend to have problems with a lot of his sort—after death, so many bureaucrats become so wrapped up in their hunger to duplicate the petty power they wielded in life that they cannot release it; they get trapped in the gray places, wielding their power over others even smaller than themselves. Some never do find the joy of freedom—which is power over no one but yourself in a place where everyone else has just as much—and just as little—power. Some of them—perhaps even he—will spend eternity there, unable to break free and move on to better things."
Lauren looked at Jake, hopeful. "Then we get to go home?"
A gentle chuckle. "You both get to go home. Before you leave, a little message for your Molly."
Not Molly, Lauren noted, but your Molly. She nodded.
"Those born with souls frequently lose them or toss them away. But such a one as your Molly, born without a soul, does have a chance to grow one."
"Molly could get her soul back?"
"No. Your Molly never had a soul. She was born after the first Molly died, and they are not the same person."
"But she really is a person."
"If she chooses to be." His voice grew soft. "Now, dear children, it's time for you to leave. Take care of each other, find your destinies…and don't come back too soon next time."
Another soft chuckle, and he was gone, and the brilliant light was gone, and the gray plain was gone. Lauren and Jake floated in nothingness. Before them, a faint speck of green fire appeared; it expanded rapidly and became a gate. On the other side of it, she could see the chamber in Oria through which she had originally left.
Cast from heaven, she thought. Without Brian or Molly, finishing in exactly the same place they'd started. They had gained nothing, accomplished nothing, won nothing.
Jake cuddled close as the green fire of the gate enveloped them, and Lauren held him tightly.
At least, she thought, they didn't have less.
CHAPTER 14
Copper House
BAANRAAK KNEW his little Vodi hid behind the door. He could smell her in there, and hers was the smell of a living thing. But he could not find her thoughts, he could not hear her breathing, he could not sense even her awareness of him. He admired her ability—but she'd committed a few mistakes from which she wouldn't be able to recover. She'd fled rather than fighting; she had prevented others from sacrificing themselves to save her out of some misguided altruism, when numbers of veyâr on the attack might have defeated him, and if they didn't at least might have injured him enough that she could beat him herself. She'd moved away from rather than toward magic, when if she had gotten to magic first she might have turned it against him quickly enough to kill him, or even to destroy him.
Alone, in a contest of strength, she would not defeat him. She could not. He had uncounted thousands of years of experience in fighting, and dying, and living to fight again while avoiding the mistakes he'd made before. She was little more than a child as judged by her own species—by his standards she barely even existed.
He had to restrain a sudden pang of disappointment and the temptation to turn away and give her a second chance to do better. He would not find a worthy opponent. Not now, not ever. He was the only one of his kind, and he might as well go in, pick up his bauble, kill its wearer, and go back to basking in the sun on his rock. He'd been foolish to hope that his existence might once again offer a challenge, something to excite him, someone worthy…
She'd barred the door, and it was a heavy one. In this human form, he'd need a few minutes to batter it down. He couldn't change back to his natural shape, which would have let him shove through the thing as if it were made of well-rotted twigs. Damn copper for that; getting through a door was no challenge; it was merely an obstacle, and a poor one at that.
He shifted his mass, which had not changed with his form, and applied a slow, steady pressure to the weakest part of the door, the point on the floor opposite the hinges, where no bracket held anything steady. The door began to bulge inward at that point. He nodded and increased the pressure. Not much longer and he would be able to go home.
Copper House
Molly followed all of his thoughts, his assessment of her situation, his breakdown of where she had gone wrong. She let it flow through her, though she did not at first react to the information. She simply absorbed it and tried to find flaws in his reasoning.
There weren't any. She was alone, trapped, with a weapon she had minimal skill in using, and he was a killer who'd been killing longer than her species had been civilized. She couldn't beat him. She couldn't win.
And then, in one brief flash, she found the single way that she could beat him, and before she could think about it and give herself away, she took it.
Copper House
Baanraak determined that he would be through the door in another moment or two when, without warning, the Vodi's thoughts flared to life for one brief, flaming instant.
Then pain shut him down—pain that drove straight into his brain, so fierce and incomprehensible that he dropped to his hands and knees and puked on the stone and rolled up in a fetal ball, screaming. He pissed himself. His bowels let loose. He writhed and screamed.
It faded, though. Whatever she had done to him faded quickly, and he crawled back to his hands and knees, determined that he was going to hurt her for that. He had no idea how she'd shut him down so completely without using magic, but before that moment, he had experienced such pain and anguish only the few times that he'd been tortured.
Warily, Baanraak got to his feet. His senses were still in disarray, his nose clogged by the reek of his own urine and vomit and shit, his eyes half-blinded by nagging, persistent flashes of light—had he hit his head when he fell?—and his mind was numbed by that initial, terrible blast she'd thrown at him. He shuddered at the thought of pushing on that door again. She'd been remarkably effective in making him think twice about going after her. The question was, could she do whatever she had done again? He knew he'd screamed, and that he'd been loud about it. Soldiers looked for him now in the house, and he suspected that his scream had alerted them. He could find himself neck-deep in armed veyâr in no time, and he would not be able to get his prize.
He couldn't believe it. He'd seen no way out for her, and yet she'd managed to give herself a fighting chance to beat him. Now she was silent in there again—he could find no trace of her mind. She'd submerged herself as deeply as she'd been before.
Emotionless, he thought—or with stunning control—to be able to rise out of the depths of her hiding, shatter him with her single blast, then hide herself away from him again. He smiled a little.
He was still going to win, but by the gods, she was a better enemy than he'd thought.
He applied pressure to the door again, this time bracing himself against the next lightning bolt to his brain—but that second attack didn't come, and as he heard footsteps and shouts heading in his direction from up and in the distance, the door gave way and he burst in, claws flexed.
And then he saw that she had won after all.
She slumped against the wall, face resting against one bent knee, whole body bonelessly relaxed. The fingers of her right hand wrapped loosely around the hilt of a long knife. The blade was ripe with the stink of her blood.
