by Holly Lisle
Pete closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Okay. He hadn't even considered the possibility that Lauren had just snapped. She had been under a lot of pressure, but…fuck. He got out his cop voice—the reasonable one that worked best on people who were right on the edge and carrying big guns—and said, "Lauren…honey…Molly has been dead for a while. We all went to her funeral with you. Remember? Why don't you come for a walk with me, and we'll go get Jake, and go home, and we can talk about this. I'm sorry—"
She gave him a cockeyed grin and held up a hand to cut him off. "That's very good. Nice tone, nice delivery. I'm impressed. But I'm not cracking up. The Vodi necklace—that big hunk of gold Molly had around her neck when she died the first time—is a magical artifact. It brings the wearer back from death."
Pete remembered back to the day Eric got shot, and to Lauren's panicked rush to get him out of the hospital and through the gate into Oria before he died. "I thought you said bringing people back from the dead was…bad."
"It is. Well, if you or I did it, it would be. The Vodi necklace keeps a lot of who Molly was intact, so that what comes back is mostly her. It isn't perfect. And every time she dies, she loses a little of who she was. But…well…there may be some good news there, if we can get her back. Maybe. But first we have to get her back."
"So she already…came back…once. And you saw her."
"Everyone here saw her. She got here the day you were over at the house—the day I left. She was real, she and I have work to do, and we may be able to carry out our parents' plans."
"Only she's dead. Again."
"Yeah. For a while."
"Eeuw. That's…eeuw. Has to suck to be her."
Lauren raised an eyebrow. "I'd guess so. Anyway—can you lie for me a little longer?"
"You're working on the problem now? The one that the old gods are leaving Earth to escape?"
"Yes."
"I can lie for you. What should I tell them?"
"Obviously something a lot more convincing than what I told you. I'm not a good liar."
Pete considered that for a moment. "Well, I am."
And again she gave him that strange little smile. "Maybe not quite as good as you think. So be careful, okay? If they think they can't trust you, they'll eat you in a New York minute."
"That fast?" Pete sighed. "I guess I'll go, then. See if I can't come up with a convincing lie between now and the time I drive home. When you get back, you have to see me first so we can get our stories straight, though. Deal?"
She laughed a little. "Deal. And I hope…" She turned and glanced at the green-glowing mirror in the corner, and shook her head. "Doesn't matter. I hope I make it back to Cat Creek so we get a chance to get our stories straight."
He realized she was in danger, and that the only thing he could do right at that moment was get out of her way. He didn't like that. When he got back to Cat Creek, he would be doing something useful—but not anything that would keep her safe. He found that he very much wanted to keep her safe.
He went over, hugged her, and said, "Take care, okay. And I'll see you when you get home."
She nodded, and gave him a hard squeeze. "Thanks."
The whole long, convoluted trip back to Cat Creek, he found himself somewhere between despair and walking on air.
CHAPTER 17
Copper House
LAUREN, finishing the next gate, discovered that Jake had already arrived and was teaching Doggie to play Superman. Jake, red silk swirling behind him, stomped like he was trying to bring the roof down. Superheroes did not walk lightly. And he put his hands on his hips and glowered. Superheroes never smiled, either.
"Break time," she said. She gathered Jake up and hugged him. Outside her magic window, the sun sparkled through the trees high overhead, and Lauren realized she was ravenous. "Hey, monkey-boy, come help me make lunch."
Jake gave her the Superhero look, and said, "I am Superman."
"That's fine. But Superman can either help make lunch, or he can get his butt kicked by Supermom."
"You will not kick my butt."
Lauren looked at her son sidelong and said, "Say, 'All right, Mama, I'll help you make lunch.'"
He caught the tone of her voice and repeated the sentence word for word. When she turned away, he muttered, "I am Superman."
But he behaved himself. The two of them made lunch for themselves and the goroths, and when everyone was done eating, she rested briefly over a cup of hot green tea. She hugged and kissed Jake, turned him over to the goroths, and dropped back into communion with the paths between the worlds, the gates, and magic.
Dalchi
"You're going to like it here. It's a good warm spot, right in the sunlight, and I got you plenty of meat—meat makes it all go faster." Baanraak dug in front of the mouth of the cave he'd chosen—he'd found a soft, humus-rich patch of sweet earth that he could guard easily. Now he flung dirt with his forelegs like a dog digging in a garden, until he had a hole about seven feet deep and about equally wide.
He looked at the Vodi necklace that gleamed in the sun on the little rock to his right. "For the next little while you're going to hate me. But eventually you'll be free of emotion, and hatred will burn away with love—and you'll become so much clearer. And so much more dangerous."
He grabbed a carcass, stripped of its skin and entrails, and dumped it into the hole, then he dropped his forelegs onto the carcass heavily and repeatedly, talons splayed, while the bones crunched and the flesh tore, until the dead thing was little more than a bloody pulp. He scraped a layer of dirt over the carcass, walked around the circle once to study his result, added a bit more dirt, then threw in another skinned carcass and repeated the jumping-up-and-down process. Another layer of dirt, another carcass. And another. And another. Finally, he placed the necklace carefully in the middle of the hole, and covered it with the rest of the dirt, packing it down tightly.
When he was done, he had a mound in front of his cave that he could watch and protect. She'd re-form quickly—he'd softened the meat well, had packed the dirt tightly, and made the cover shallow enough that she'd break the surface when her new body was ripe.
"I'll kill you quickly," Baanraak told the mound of dirt. "Waking up like that is gruesome—but you have to wake all the way up before killing you again does any good. Otherwise, everything is still there the next time the body forms. I should be able to see your eyes when they open though. One quick swipe when you blink the first time and we won't even have to redig the hole. You'll be able to reuse your own flesh to feed the next bodies, and that will save us time, too." He sighed and settled onto the warm earth and spread his wings to catch the sunlight. "You're small—you should be ready for your first killing in a day, certainly no more than two. This whole thing will go quickly. In thirty or forty days you should be free of every vestige of your life."
He didn't let himself think about the gemstones, about the silver that polluted the gold, about the betrayal of emotion that muddied his own thoughts. He'd been alive too long—had taken on some of the oldest habits of the souled. A death would purge the contamination from him. Perhaps once he finished creating Molly, she would do him that favor.
He rested his chin on the hard-packed mound he'd created and said, "It took Fherghass longer to make me, but there was more of me to tear down and rebuild each time."
He closed his eyes and let the sunlight bleed red through his eyelids. Warmth of sun, cool breeze, the rustle of leaves and the sounds of life all around him. He drifted in his thoughts, and remembered waking up packed into the earth—remembered his eyes opening into dirt, and dirt in his mouth and his nose, and the horror he felt as he discovered that his wings wouldn't work, that his legs were encased in what might as well have been stone. He could still feel his fear and his despair as he fought to free himself. Fherghass had been cruel in his method of rebuilding Baanraak; he'd never actually killed him. He had just left Baanraak encased in the ungiving earth until Baanraak died of suffocation,
only to be reborn into the same horror.
"You won't suffer much," Baanraak told the mound. "Not like I did. Fherghass said that the way he made me was the best way to purify a dark god, but I found out later it wasn't the way he was made. He had it easy—strapped to a bed in a charnel house, his resurrection ring fed bodies of plague victims as it needed them. He could breath, he could see, he could move a bit, and his purifier killed him as soon as he woke up every time."
Baanraak sighed and settled himself a bit more comfortably on the ground. "Over the years I've come to the conclusion that Fherghass was either lazy or a sadistic bastard, or maybe both." He patted the mound with one taloned foreleg and managed a smile. "But I'm not. I won't let you suffer."
Cat Creek
"She and Jake had already checked out when I got there," Pete said. "I interviewed hotel staff, called around a few places, phoned the airport about plane tickets—things like that. I didn't find anything. So I was hoping she'd be back here."
Eric looked like he might stroke out. "She isn't."
"She's a responsible person. What she's doing matters to her—she's trying to save the world for her little guy as much as for everyone else combined. She isn't going to flake out on you and just disappear."
"I hate to point this out," Eric said, leaning back in his desk chair and closing his eyes, "but she did flake out on us and disappear. Otherwise…" He tapped a pen on the desk surface. "Otherwise, we would have a gateweaver here right now, when we so desperately need one."
Pete nodded. "She'll get here."
Eric studied him. "You're sure she was in Charlotte?"
Pete raised an eyebrow.
"I'm just checking," Eric said. "It isn't like we haven't had problems lately with Sentinels being places other than where they said they were, doing things other than what they said they were doing. And Lauren's parents were traitors."
"No they weren't."
"Let me rephrase. Her parents were…working outside the accepted role for Sentinels. They went rogue." Eric stretched and stood up and walked over to the window that looked out onto Main Street before he said anything else. "When our lives and the lives of everyone else on the planet depend on all of us working together, with one vision and one direction, going rogue is about the same as being a traitor."
The phone rang.
Eric picked it up. After a moment, he said, "Lauren? This is the worst connection I have ever heard. Where the fuck are you? We need you here now." He was quiet for a long moment, then he turned a little pale. "Oh." He stared at the phone, and listened another moment. "Oh. No, I guess you can't. I'll tell you later that taking off without telling anyone was a shitty thing to do. For now, take care of yourself, and good luck. We'll figure out something."
He put the phone back into the cradle, and looked positively sick.
Pete said, "What?"
"That was Lauren."
"I gathered that much."
"Jake's grandparents snatched him. Lauren is in pursuit."
Pete closed his eyes. "Which sort of explains her leaving in such a hurry."
"Yes."
"What the hell happened?"
"She didn't have time to say. Just that she had alerted authorities, that she was on her way to California following the grandparents, and that she would get back here as quickly as she could."
"What about our emergency?"
"People who apparently hate her kidnapped her child. We cannot expect her to drop that to get back here—there are just some things we have to learn to work around."
Pete nodded. "I hadn't actually meant I expected her to come back here with Jake missing. What I meant was, who are we going to get to fill in?"
"I don't know. It isn't like you can just run into Sears and pick up a new gateweaver. We'll start doing extra maintenance checks on all our gates to keep them in good condition. Every six hours, I think. That should keep them healthy enough not to crash. I'll start calling around to other groups—see if anyone can help us out. We'll…figure out something."
Pete nodded. "You're a good man, Eric," he said.
Eric raised an eyebrow. "But not a happy one."
Pete thought, You would be so much more unhappy if you knew that wasn't Lauren—that it was a bad connection from an FBI phone circling over Charlotte, with an agent I knew who, if we could get a bad enough connection, sort of sounded like Lauren. He would have to send Fred a thank-you note for putting Mariyne on a plane on such short notice and getting her to lie. Pete patted the mirror in his wallet. Nice device.
Copper House
Every world felt richer than the last. Lauren had Cadwa, Povreack, and Niiadaa gated and linked, and the power that flowed into her and the room from those three gates felt like the air on the first true spring day, turned into a liquid and injected into her veins. She felt like a kid just being in contact with such places, and she wondered how anyone could feel that much life and that much power humming through their veins and along their skin, and then intentionally poison and kill that world.
Hunger and her body's need for sleep drove her to bed at last, but she'd no more than drifted off when one of her alarm chimes rang. She lunged to the mirror, opened the gate just enough to see the spot her search spell had found, and sighed with frustration when she saw what she was looking at—a stone arch that Baanraak had almost certainly used as a gate. It was on the first world, too—Cadwa. So all it really told her was that he and Molly—or the Vodi necklace that would resurrect Molly, had passed that way.
She considered shutting down the spell, but left it running. It didn't take that much out of her, and should Baanraak decide to get clever and double back, she'd have a chance of finding him.
She crawled back into bed and discovered that Jake had taken over the whole sleeping surface while she was gone—he'd spread out like a starfish, facedown, and covered twice as much space as anyone who weighed about thirty pounds should be able to. She sighed, picked him up, and scooted him over. He didn't wake up. Grateful, she crawled back into bed, wrapped an arm around him, and went to sleep. This time she slept until sunlight pouring through her magical window onto the futon woke her.
On her next round, she completed gates and spells for Dalchi, Zodhfr, and Iio, taking small breaks in between each to eat, play with Jake, and stretch. Even sitting in the chair, the work she was doing wore on her. The day was long gone and moonlight backlit the budded-out trees of the forest into lace by the time she finally quit. When she shook herself out of the trance for the final time, she was surprised to find two guards waiting for her.
"Seolar would speak with you, Hunter," one of them said, bowing.
"Fine," Lauren told him. She yawned and stretched. "I'll be happy to speak with him, but he'll have to come here. I don't dare leave the mirror."
"He knows this, Hunter," the other said. "He only wished to be told when you were available to meet with him."
"Tell him to come on. He can have some coffee or some hot chocolate with me."
Both guards turned without another word and loped away. Lauren looked at Jake, curled up in the bed with Doggie beside him, his arm flung possessively around her as if she were his toy, and Lauren wanted to cry. These were the first times in his life that Jake had ever gone to sleep without her, and she hated it. She hated thinking that she could be replaced, even in such a small way. She hated seeing him grow up so fast, knowing that someday he would grow away from her and become a man with a life and a world of his own. And yet she was so proud of him already. In spite of everything that had happened to him, he still managed to laugh, and to play, and to trust.
By the time Seolar knocked on the door and let himself in, Lauren had two big mugs of steaming hot chocolate waiting.
She smiled at Seolar, handed him a cup of hot chocolate, and pointed to one of the kitchen chairs. "Have a seat."
He took the hot chocolate, sniffed it, and sipped it cautiously. He frowned a little at the taste, and took a bigger one. "This is a liquid form of
the brown sweets that Molly loved so much."
"Chocolates?"
"I suppose." He sat on the chair. He looked tired and drained, and his use of the word "loved" dinged on Lauren's ear.
She sat across from him and sipped her own chocolate. "She's not past tense yet, Seo."
He studied her with those weird, huge, all-black eyes, and said, "Even if she isn't, we have other problems, and those problems tie in with this."
