by Holly Lisle
He felt Loki's eyes on him as he jumped out of the cab, and saw the other old god watching through the back window as he went to the Sentinels. "We will circle around behind them and take them by surprise, Loki and I. Our powers here are not as great as they once were, yet thanks to your Lauren they are greater than they have been. You will remain behind, and from the distance fire at them, providing a distraction. Keep up a steady fire. You won't be likely to kill them or even do them much harm with the weapons you have, but if you can let us flank them, we can take them."
"You're going to be up there with them," one of the women said. "If we fire at them, we fire at you."
Thor appreciated the concern. "The weapons are spelled to hit only creatures bound by dark magic…." And then his voice trailed off. The weapons hoards of the old gods had always been treated that way, yet Loki had always had a foot in both camps. Loki's mistress, Angrboda, a creature from Asgard's downworld with whom Loki had fathered three children, had become one of the dark gods when Loki had refused to leave Sigyn for her. And even Odin had declared Loki's love for his mistress and his children as great as the love he felt for his loyal wife. Perhaps these weapons would not destroy dark gods at all; perhaps they would only do damage to the living—to old gods, and those who helped them.
But no. Heyr took a deep breath. If this planet died, Loki died with it. He was bound here, cursed here until the way was found to break the curse—and according to the hag, the curse would hold until Ragnarok itself. No matter where his future loyalties might lay, Loki could gain no benefit from the dying of this world.
Heyr took a deep breath and said, "You may fire straight at both of us if you get a shot at the keth behind us by doing it. Your bullets will not harm us."
Loki got out of the truck. "Very good, Thunder Boy. Worked your way through that one at last. I could see it grinding its way through your brain—a tedious process for sure. And yet you did finally find your way to the right answer." He went to the back, slung one of his own stockpiled weapons on his shoulder, and said, "Your wits have gotten a bit quicker since last I saw you."
Heyr didn't take offense. He knew that next to Loki, he was no genius. He shrugged. "You're using one of those?"
"Words don't move the keth," Loki told him. "They don't use them and don't need them. They're immune to poetry and prose alike. And they don't get jokes—for that sin alone, the fuckers have to die."
Heyr looked at Loki and grinned. "At least you have your priorities."
The humans were on the ground, looking uncertain. Loki said, "You deploy half of them in a fan to one side of your chariot and I'll deploy the other half. They don't know what to do."
"Quickly," Heyr agreed. "Then you and I will run forward and out to either side of them. We'll flank them and attack inward."
Loki said, "You think we'll get the benefit of surprise?"
Heyr shrugged. "Perhaps. We've done nothing yet to alert them—there were already gates here, and we've used only what existed."
Loki nodded. "Nonetheless, we'd be wise, perhaps, to assume they'll be ready."
"Wise," Heyr agreed. And carefully, quietly, from all the corners around, he began to summon the storms.
Cat Creek, North Carolina
I'm getting too old for this, June Bug thought. I don't care so much if I win anymore. It's getting easier to think about dying—about walking away from all of this and leaving the younger folks to chase after it.
Maybe today.
Belly down in the tall grass, waiting, she didn't have much trouble thinking that on the other side of all this fear and pain, nearly everyone she'd ever loved waited. Her parents. Aunts and uncles. Sister, nephew, friends. The two women she would have risked everything for, that she would have loved if she'd dared.
But the earth smelled of autumn coming, and the air was sweet and good in her lungs. On either side of her waited people who depended on her, needed her, cared about her. She wasn't all that old. She wasn't all that tired.
So.
Maybe not today, either. She still had a lot on this side of eternity, too.
CHAPTER 8
Cat Creek, North Carolina
LAUREN SAW PETE running across the lawn before he had time to ring the doorbell. She should have been asleep, but she could not sleep. Dread filled her; something had rippled through the gate in the house, and the energy of that ripple had yanked her into wakefulness from sound sleep, still so weary she almost couldn't stand on her feet. She paced the floor around the bed where Jake slept with Heyr's blade in her hand, fretting and waiting.
She dared not leave Jake alone in the room, whether sleeping or awake, even for a minute, so at the sight of Pete, she picked her son up with some difficulty, wrapped both arms around the still-sleeping child, and clutching the sword, hurried through the house and down the stairs.
Pete didn't waste time on greetings. "We have to get out of here now," he said.
Lauren didn't ask—"Why?" would wait until they were safer. She nodded and handed Jake to Pete. She grabbed her house keys and her bag, and barefooted, dressed in the oversized black T-shirt and black sweatpants that had belonged to Brian, she ran out the door after him. She took time to lock the front door, but didn't worry about anything else.
They jumped into Lauren's van, which had the car seat for Jake already in place. Pete took the driver's seat and was already backing them out of the drive while Lauren fastened Jake in.
She slipped the blade into its sheath once she climbed to the front of the car; only then, with the doors locked and her seat belt on, did her heart stop racing. "What's happening?" she asked Pete.
"A lot." He glanced over at her. His skin was pale and bleached, and he looked as scared as she felt. "First, keth have come to Cat Creek to kill you."
Lauren leaned back and closed her eyes and swallowed. She knew of the keth only by reputation. The reputation, however, was that even the rrôn were terrified of the keth. And she knew and feared the rrôn. "I see. What else?"
"Heyr is one of the old gods."
"I'd suspected as much."
"One of the well-known old gods."
She turned a bit and looked at him. A tiny smile touched the corner of his mouth.
"Oh? Which one?"
"Thor."
Lauren digested that for a bit. Thor. Well…she wasn't that conversant with Norse mythology, but she did recall that Thor had always been one of the good guys where people were concerned. She sat there, considering. Yes, if she'd been paying a bit better attention, she might have recognized him when he pulled her and Jake and Pete out of certain death on that downworld.
Of course, how often did people really consider the possibility that they were meeting Thor?
"He's going to arm the Sentinels and lead them into battle against the keth."
Lauren shook her head, and Pete must have caught the disgust she was feeling, for he said, "Wha-a-a-at?" It was a pretty good Nathan Lane impression; at another time she would have laughed.
"My life used to make sense. It didn't have gates or goroths or magic or visitations from dragons or…whatever the hell the keth were in our mythology—I'm sure they were in there—or Thor and magic battles, for God's sake."
"But that was only because you didn't see any of this—not because it wasn't there. Is it better to know? Or not to know?" Pete accelerated to pass a car on the two-lane road to Fayetteville, and for the first time Lauren realized how far above the speed limit he was driving. "Speaking for myself, I'd rather know. I'd rather be able to see the danger and do something than walk around thinking that everything is fine, and be helpless and unprepared against whatever is coming."
They drove for a few minutes, and Pete suddenly slowed down to legal speeds. "There's usually a guy with a radar gun up ahead," he said. He glanced in the rearview mirror, then back at the road. "What about Jake? You two could have been just like everyone else, dumb and happy; you could have enjoyed him and not worried about anything, and one day the worl
d would have just gone up in smoke around you. Though, probably there would be clues before that happened—wars and disease and horror—and then it would have gone up in smoke around you, and you would have been helpless. This way, you're doing something." He sighed. "Hell, this way, you're the one person who's doing something that's actually working. If you weren't, the keth wouldn't be coming after you."
"I'm glad I'm making a difference. I still wish someone else was doing it. I wish I could be happy and ignorant of the danger and just have fun watching Jake grow up, and other people could take all the risks and have monsters trying to kill them. And that wonderful, mythical 'someone else' would save everything." She turned and looked out the window at the countryside rolling past. Trees crowded up close to the road on her side—a forest of young wood, scrub oak and dogwood and a lot of tall pines, the occasional scattered sycamore; she had always enjoyed being the passenger in a car, looking out the window and daydreaming. She hadn't been a passenger in quite some time. It was comforting to let someone else drive; she just wished she could let someone else do all the other things that she was doing. "I spent most of my life wanting adventures, and magic, and wonder—and as soon as I get them, all I can do is wonder what the hell I was thinking."
"I'm sure you weren't thinking about being the bull's-eye in a game of let's-destroy-the-planet. And I know you want things to be normal. I wish you could have a normal life; I wish someone else could save the worldchain and that you could just be a mom with a nice little kid. It would…it would make a lot of things easier."
Lauren kept staring out the window, pretending that she didn't get what he meant. He was talking about the two of them—or rather, the continuation of there not being any two of them, in spite of the fact that they were so clearly attracted to each other.
After a while, when she didn't say anything, he sighed. "We could be really good together, Lauren."
"I know we could."
"Then what's the problem?"
Lauren looked over at Pete. She could still feel Brian's arms wrapped around her when he told her good-bye in that place that could have been Heaven or the Summerland but that was, whatever it was, the final destination and resting place of most souls. She could still see Brian's eyes when he told her to go on and get on with her life. When he told her that he would be waiting for her in the afterlife, but that in the meantime she could love again. That there was no jealousy in Heaven. She believed him, believed what he said was both true and right. And it didn't change anything. She could care about Pete, she could like him, she could want him, she could think he was sexy and that he'd probably be great in bed—but the second a stray yearning for Pete crossed her mind, she felt that she was being unfaithful to Brian.
She looked sadly at Pete. "I'm having a hard time letting go," she said.
"I know. But it's been what—three years?"
"Almost. Or three months, depending on how you look at it." Her trip down the River of the Dead was far too fresh in her mind.
"I'd rather look at it as three years," Pete said.
Lauren smiled a little. "Except that three months ago he held me in his arms and told me good-bye and to get on with my life and that he'd be there waiting for me when I got back. I can still feel his tears on the back of my neck."
Pete sighed.
"You know how many times I told him almost the same thing as he was getting on a plane to go off to serve his country? I don't. But a lot. I said, 'Go ahead. What you're doing matters. I love you, and I'll always love you. And I'll be here when you get back.'" Lauren leaned her face against the window and stared down at the pavement sliding by beneath the van. The painted line wobbled and jiggled in a hypnotic fashion as it streamed past.
"I have to let go. I know I do. But I was happy once. I had someone who loved me, and someone I loved, and I never took it for granted. There was not a single day that we were together that I regretted him—not when we were fighting, not when we were mad at each other, not when he had to be away on duty. I never regretted him. I only regret that I lost him. That's it." She clenched her hands into tight fists and swallowed against the tears that still came too easily. "How do I move on to something new with someone else when all that I want is what I already had?"
"I don't know," Pete said. "I'll try to help you find out if you want, but I don't have any answers. I've never had one special person I wanted to keep. I don't know how you get past that."
"Not ever?"
"I've never let myself think in terms of forever. My life has not offered a lot of stability or a lot of security. So my relationships already had an exit clearly marked before I went in. I knew it, the women involved knew it—"
"Did they?"
"Well, most of them." She could hear embarrassment in his voice. "I did a few things I regret. I've never been a playboy. But I wasn't always completely honest, either."
Lauren smiled a little and watched the road roll by. Perhaps he hadn't been, nor was he completely honest with her. She wondered again what he was hiding from everyone in the Sentinels, including her. He was one of the good guys; she knew it, and she had already bet her life on it more than once. She could feel his goodness in her bones. But whatever he was hiding was big.
She sat up straight and turned to look at him. "Why don't you tell me your big secret—the one you've been keeping from me and Eric and everyone else."
He looked over at her, and she saw shock in his eyes, and behind that shock, a faint edge of fear.
"Now is the perfect time," she said. "We know they aren't watching the gates; they aren't watching us at all. We're out of viewing range of anyone but June Bug and maybe Mayhem, but even then, they have bigger problems right now than us. I don't think any of the rest of them suspect; if they did, they would have been all over you about it before now. And I promise that I won't tell them. But I need to know."
He looked at the road, and she could see his doubts and worries and yearning crossing his face. He wanted to tell her, he was afraid to tell her, and there was something else, too. Perhaps he wasn't allowed to tell her.
Lauren glanced back at Jake. "Jake's still asleep, too," she said. "Right now is about as good as it's ever going to get."
Pete took a deep breath. "This is life and death," he said. "If I tell you this, and you betray me, I'm dead."
She'd figured the thing he was hiding was that big. "I swear I won't tell anyone. But you and I are fighting to save worlds together. Even if our relationship is never anything more than that, I still need to know what you're hiding. And why."
He nodded. "Yes. You do. You need to know that you can trust me. I think you already do trust me."
"With my life."
"Yeah. The feeling is mutual, you know."
"I know."
He smiled a little. "I'm a special agent with the FBI. I've been undercover for quite a few years, first in England because we got a very hot lead there, and then back to Cat Creek, which was where the lead took me."
"Investigating…what? Drugs? Organized crime?"
"Aliens."
"Oh, dear."
"The things I'm going to tell you are classified Top Secret, and if you didn't already know the truth behind all of them, I couldn't tell you. But you know much more than the FBI does. So…"
Lauren said, "They ran across some upworld stuff, huh?"
"Oh, yeah. The Roswell incident was real—on July 4, 1947, an alien craft crash-landed outside of Roswell, New Mexico. There's been a lot of speculation about it—the military hadn't had nearly as much experience in covering up alien encounters as they have now. So they were sloppy. They do a much, much slicker job today, believe me."
"I'm sure." Lauren laughed.
"Working on the reasonable theory that the craft they found was of extraterrestrial origin, and designed for space flight, they took it, hid it and the bodies they recovered from it, and spent a long time studying everything. The information they acquired aided our own science and military development effort
s. We made huge leaps in vehicle and armament technologies."
Lauren frowned a bit, considering that. "So the crash was probably a dark god plant."
Pete looked startled. "A what?"
"An information plant engineered to look like an accident by the dark gods. Their objective is to bring our world closer to its own destruction. Dropping usable advanced technology in a convenient location and in a conspicuous fashion would be the perfect Trojan horse. How could the military not take it in and study it? And the Soviet military programs no doubt benefited from some similar 'alien accident' that gave them access to more advanced technology."
