by Holly Lisle
"Tell me what happened, Birra."
"A rrôn got into Copper House." His voice dragged over rocks, fighting to get each next word to come out. "Molly…is dead. The Vodi necklace…gone."
Lauren felt the room get light and slippery beneath her feet, and she backed against the wall for a moment just to have something to hang on to.
"Oh, God." She looked at Birra, trying to find some hope in what he said. "How did this happen?"
"We don't know. After…after the rrôn got away with the necklace, we tried to figure out where we had failed. We searched all of Copper House—we could see where the rrôn had gone through your suite to get to the Vodi, but we do not know how he found her, or how all of us failed to protect her."
Lauren thought about what might have happened had Jake been in that room when the rrôn came through, and fear slammed her in the gut so hard her mouth filled with saliva, and she thought she would puke.
She would have been there, too, of course, but…
She closed her eyes and murmured, "Saved by your father again."
"Hunter?" Birra asked. "Are you unwell?"
Lauren waved away his concern. "Molly's dead again, and a rrôn has the necklace. But we still have some options."
"Options?" Birra asked, sounding suddenly the slightest bit hopeful. "We have options?"
"A few. We aren't out of the game yet, not by a long shot."
Birra suddenly seemed to realize that she and Jake were alone. "Did you get any good news from the gods about either Molly's soul or your…loved one?"
Lauren didn't look at him. "No." Then she shrugged. "Well—a little good news for Molly. I hope I get to give it to her."
She turned away from him and blinked back tears. She didn't want him to see her weakness. People whose job it was to fight off the annihilation of planets didn't have the luxury of public tears.
Copper House
Lauren stared at Seolar across a drafting table in his book-cluttered workroom. She held Jake, who had fallen asleep clinging to her and whose breath now blew against the side of her head. At about thirty pounds, he was heavy enough that she noticed his weight—and she had never been more grateful for the twinge between her shoulder blades in her life.
"The gods did not favor your quest?" Seolar asked.
"To put it mildly. The Molly who is there has disavowed any relationship to the one who is still here. But I have news for Molly."
Seolar gave Birra a panicked look, and Birra said, "I told her."
Seolar cleared his throat. "She isn't still here."
Lauren looked around the room for a place to sit. She ended up shoving a few books to one end of a bench and settling on the other end. "I know that. I know what happened to her, I know the rrôn has the necklace."
"So it's all over. We have lost. My people are doomed to the depredations of the old gods, your people will see the destruction of their world in their lifetime—"
Lauren closed her eyes. She was too tired for all of this—too tired for the despair of other people, too tired to keep fighting. It would be so easy just to give up and go home, to wait for the end to come. But she had a responsibility to her son to keep going; how she felt meant less than nothing. She held up the hand that wasn't holding Jake. "Whoa. Wait a minute. Don't get carried away; we don't know anything of the sort."
Seolar gave her a look of disbelief. "The necklace is gone. If he took it off her before he killed her, she won't be coming back. If he didn't, then surely he has destroyed the necklace by now."
Lauren said, "You might be right. We might have already lost. But we can't just assume we've lost. We have to know. I think I ought to do what I can to find her and get her back."
Seolar seemed completely lost in his grief. He just waved a hand as if pushing the suggestion away. Lauren, watching him, thought something about his behavior wasn't right. "Did you have something to do with this?"
He looked up and actually at her for the first time since Birra showed her into the room. "What?"
"Did you have something to do with the fact that the rrôn got in here? That she was killed, that the necklace is gone—is any of this your fault?"
Unblinking eyes stared into Lauren's and a voice like Death on a bad day said, "Of course it's my fault. Every bit of it. I brought her here against her will, I gave her the necklace knowing that it would make her a target to the worst dark gods in the worldchain, I lied to her about what the necklace did so that she would wear it, I let her think that I could protect her when I couldn't, I broke her trust…" He broke eye contact and turned away, and Lauren heard him say, "I didn't love her enough."
"Do you love her?"
"Yes. Of course I loved her. I loved her. Molly. I know I love the woman she was. When I see the…woman…that came back, I hunger for her, but at the same time, I am…I am in some way repelled. She both is and is not the woman I love, and this knowledge is a serpent that devours my heart from the inside, and keeps me awake nights with the sound of its gnawing. I can't look at her the same way. Do I betray the real Molly if I love the creature that is now Vodi? Do I betray a woman who loves me still because she is not the woman she once was?"
He turned to Lauren. "It's all darkness. Everything inside of me is darkness, and I do not think there is a place left where the light can get in. The future is gone, the present is death, the past was all foolish hopefulness without reason for hope."
Lauren stroked the back of Jake's head, and he shifted in his sleep, moving closer to her and draping his arms around her neck. "No," Lauren said. "I don't accept that. And now you're going to quit? Let evil win because you don't have the courage or the will to fight it? Let billions die—my people, and eventually yours? Is that right, Seolar? We've both lost people we love, but you—who have more of the one you love left than I do—are just going to throw up your hands in despair?" She rose, clutching Jake, staggering a bit as she tried to keep her balance. "You don't love her enough, or you love her the wrong way, you're having a bad day and you're all bruised inside, so you abandon your duty? How you feel is justification for the death of worlds, is it?"
Lauren headed for the door. "When you start thinking again, come talk to me. People who base world-changing decisions on their feelings instead of their thoughts aren't worthy of the people for whom they make those decisions."
She eased her way through the door and told Birra, "Take me to my room. I'm going to have to sleep before I go after her. I don't know when I last slept, but it was before I left, whenever that was. The floor looks like it's rolling."
"You're going after Molly?"
Lauren looked sidelong at him. "You, too, Birra?"
He didn't answer her for a moment. "Me too, what?"
"You think we should all just roll over and quit?"
He said, "I think we lost. I think it is all over for us—for my people, for your world. But if you think differently, I'll follow you through hell to try to save whatever we can."
Lauren studied him, and finally said, "I've already been through hell once this week. Let's see if we can find a better way to get where we need to go."
In the suite they gave her, with the goroths tucked into corners and hidden from even the sharpest eyes, and with guards outside the door and guards in the secret passageways, Lauren tucked Jake into the bed and climbed in beside him. Exhaustion weighted her eyes to the point that she could keep them open for only a few seconds before they slid shut again. But her mind raced.
She kept losing Brian. She kept having her hopes dashed; he would be waiting for her at the end of her life, but whatever they had in the afterlife would not be what they'd shared as a husband and wife on Earth. She'd wanted that, and she couldn't have it. Lying on clean, soft sheets in the darkness with her little son nestled tightly against her, Lauren finally realized that she had to give up the dream of getting Brian back. Every wife who had a husband she loved and lost would do anything to get him back—but there came a time when holding on only hurt, and didn'
t give anything in return. She'd passed that point.
He's waiting on you, she told herself. He'll be there. In the meantime, keep your eye on what matters. People are counting on you. Your life matters and you're not done here yet. And if you have to do it alone, you still have to do it. You don't have the luxury of quitting, because no one else is coming up behind you. No one has your back.
Even with her eyes closed, the bed still felt like it was spinning. She tried to relax. She tried to let go. But no one has your back kept running through her head.
Cat Creek
Pete waved to Eric and drove out of town before the sun even broke the horizon, ostensibly on his way to Charlotte to pick up Lauren. He hadn't given any disclaimers about how he might not be able to find her, he hadn't added anything to his story. For all everyone knew, he knew where she was and she would be back in Cat Creek in about four hours. Maybe five if there was traffic.
He drove through Laurinburg and got on 74, just like he was going to go to Charlotte. Instead, though, he got off again and headed north into the Sandhills from Hamlet. He took dirt roads deep into the rough woods, to a spot that he knew wasn't kept under close watch because it was simply too far out of reach, and the wider a Sentinel worked the circle when he was watching, the more astronomically impossible it became to cover the ground.
Pete didn't take chances, though. He got well off even the dirt road he'd been following, then hid the car. Then he pulled out his gate mirror—which he'd taken off his bathroom door at four in the morning and shoved into his trunk—and carefully laid it across the back seat of the car.
This, he feared, was going to be a real pain in the ass. And if he wasn't careful, he was going to blow his cover all to hell and gone.
He couldn't let himself think about that, though. So he closed his eyes and took a deep breath and told himself that everything would work out. He'd do his thing, and the universe would not stand in his way.
Pete had been to Lauren's family house in Oria. Not under the best of circumstances, granted—he'd been dragging Eric, who was dying at the time, and Pete and Lauren had been pretty sure the world was going to come to an end in a big hurry. Still, the trip had been memorable, and Pete thought he could find the old house again.
He needed to go to that house because Lauren already had a return gate set up there; in the event that he couldn't find Lauren, he would be able to get back home.
Pete crouched over the mirror, rested his fingertips on the glass, and brought his face down close enough that he could see the pupils of his eyes clearly. He stared into them, looking beyond the darkness reflected for the inside of the little house in Oria—the primitive hand-pump kitchen, the fireplace along the kitchen wall, the wood-burning stove, the hand-planed boards. He looked into the blackness in his eyes and remembered the smell of the air in Oria, and the way the forest outside the little house sounded, and the feeling of vast ancient waiting that hung around the trees.
Deep within those two dark points, green fire flashed—a little flicker, the faintest taste of pending success. He teased the fire closer, recalling folded quilts and stacked firewood, cast-iron cookware, hand-braided rugs. In his eyes, he could see the hint of the other world; then the world expanded and his reflection faded away. Beneath his fingertips, the mirror warmed. Pete felt the energy of the place between the worlds thrum and slide beneath his hands, elusive as quicksilver and utterly magical. Green fire flickered from the center of the glass outward, and when it illuminated the whole of the mirror, the sensation of touching something solid disappeared.
Pete took a deep breath and slipped one foot onto what had an instant before been a solid surface, but which was now the open gate. Then he stepped in with the other. With his legs suddenly weightless and hanging in nothingness, he had to use his arms to lower himself into the mirror. He had to pivot sideways to get his shoulders through, and ended up sliding the last of the way onto the path by holding his hands over his head and just dropping. He'd gone into swimming pools the same way, and the process was similar. Beneath both surfaces nothing was the same.
But on the fire-road that led to Oria, contentment, joy, and the touch of eternity poured into him and through him, and for the little time that he moved through the place between the worlds, he became one with the universe.
The experience never failed to move him—and it had changed him. Though he did not look forward to his eventual death, he no longer feared it. He could feel himself as part of eternity, and what claim could death have on that?
Then, of course, he reached the other side of the gate—the mirror in Lauren's family's cottage. And the infinite spit him out into darkness, dust, and the knowledge that he was in a desperate hurry. He needed to get to Copper House, but of course he had no idea how to get there from where he was.
Pete stepped out of the house and closed the door behind him. And all around him spread forest. Forest, capital F, ancient and ponderous and scary as hell—not deer-hunting woods or necking-with-a-girl woods like back on Earth. This was primeval wilderness—Little Red Riding FBI-Agent lost off the path with hungry bears and wolves and dragons all around. Pete's skin crawled. He'd been raised in the country, but he'd liked civilization. He'd liked cities and cars and electricity and…maps. Trees big around as houses—behemoths whose spreading limbs put to shame trees in most of the forests on Earth—spread before him in all directions as far as the eye could see. And spring had leafed out the trees enough that he didn't have any real visibility. Green. And trunks. And not a hell of a lot else.
He swore—softly but with real intensity. Even if he knew which way to go, he needed fast transportation to get him there—and he had nothing. His own two feet.
Well, he might be in the middle of the Brothers' Grimm's worst nightmare, but he had resources. He had magic—and the Sentinels had spent a fair amount of time working with him in the past week or so, just to make sure he didn't do anything unsalvageably stupid with it.
He had to remember three main points.
Control the energy he used.
Borrow rather than create whenever possible.
And do no harm.
He closed his eyes and focused on what he needed—a vehicle that would carry him straight to Copper House at the fastest possible speed, without taking any wrong turns. Something that would be unhindered by the lack of roads. Something he couldn't screw up or wreck, and something that wouldn't draw attention.
He didn't limit the shape or the size of the thing, and intentionally did not visualize a shape for it. He simply willed the right vehicle to appear, ready for his use.
He opened his eyes. Two enormous brown eyes stared into them, down a nose that, from Pete's perspective, looked as long as a railroad car.
The horse snorted, and Pete jumped.
"I hate horses," he muttered.
Copper House
Jake woke Lauren by trying to open her eyelids with his fingers. Since he had the three-year-old child's typical dexterity, this worked as effectively as if he had zapped her with a cattle prod.
"Jake!" she yelped, batting at his hands with her eyes tightly closed.
"Tickle me?" he asked.
She rolled over and blew a raspberry on his tummy, then tickled him until he yelled for her to stop. Then she flopped facedown on the bed, hoping he would let her go back to sleep. No such luck.
"I want something to eat," he told her. "Get up."
"Easy for you to say," she muttered. "You slept." She had no idea when she'd dropped off. Her eyelids felt like they were made of sand, though, and while the room had stopped spinning, there seemed to be a gravity anomaly surrounding the bed that made even thinking about standing up impossible. She rolled over and smiled at her son. "I don't suppose you'd consider going back to sleep for a while?"
"I want to get up. We can brush my teeth, and I can have breakfast."
"And I want to sleep."
"You sleepededed already." He'd gotten interested in the past tense recently
. He had the concept of tacking the "ed" on the ends of words, but he had decided somehow that three "ed's" were better than one. She tousled his hair and sat up. He was growing up too fast. He used whole sentences, and as long as they were talking about something she knew about, he usually made sense.
"Breakfast," she said, standing up, "is overrated." She stretched, then picked him up and swung him around the room. "Okay. Let's forage."
The suite offered limited resources. They could make a sort of oatmeal concoction with the hot water from the tea set. They could eat bread with peanut butter (the peanut butter—Jif—imported from Earth).
