by Holly Lisle
He looked into the woods, wondering how far she'd gotten. Maybe she was already back at the Daisies and Dahlias. Maybe she was already home and packing.
"Betty Kay!" Mayhem shouted, and Eric turned around.
She was standing up out of the grass right next to the place where the three dark gods had fallen. The weapon, casually held against her hip, pointed down—Good girl, he thought—and she was rubbing her eyes.
"Betty Kay!" he yelled, but she didn't jump or turn or give any sign that she'd heard.
If she'd been there, she'd been right in the heart of it. Center of the storm, up next to the lightning and the thunder. She might have taken an indirect hit from the lightning as it bled off into the ground.
She looked around, still not hearing the people yelling at her, and stepped out into the road. From the pavement, she started picking things up. He saw a glimmer, a dull, lovely gleam. Gold.
Eric hurried to her side, touched her shoulder. She looked up at him and grinned, and on her face he saw the same wild joy he'd seen when Heyr-Thor strode into battle.
"WE GOT THE BASTARDS!" she shouted.
He put a finger to his lips. "I can hear you."
"I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" She held out what she'd found, and he stared.
Gold jewelry—beautiful hinged gold bands meant to be locked through skin. Piercing rings. Resurrection rings. The immortality of the three keth—memories that might run back ten thousand years or more, lay gleaming in her hand.
And they were poison. He stood staring at them for a long time, feeling their pull, their call. Wrap one around his wrist or clamp it through his skin and he would never die. He would claim knowledge and memories of worlds that no longer existed, of times before men built their first cities. He would be a god. He reached out to touch one of the bands, and the greasy feel of it and a horrible, blinding hunger rocked him.
"WE HAVE TO DESTROY THEM!" he yelled.
Betty Kay cringed. "Not so loud," she shouted, but softer than before.
So her hearing was coming back.
The other Sentinels clustered around them, and the two old gods as well.
"I'll take those off your hands," Loki said, and reached for the resurrection rings, but Betty Kay pulled them back. Instead, she flashed a smile at Heyr-Thor that was pure come-on—a smile unlike anything that Eric had ever seen on her face, and said, "You were…magnificent. Here."
And she handed the rings to him.
Loki stood there, hand still out, looking from Betty Kay to Heyr-Thor and back, and said, "Let me do something useful. I'll dispose of the rings."
Heyr-Thor hefted them in one hand, and Pete could see him sizing Loki up. After a moment, Heyr-Thor shook his head. "I've got it."
"All of this, and you still don't trust me."
"You are brother, friend, and comrade, and yet I know that in the end you will betray me, and all of us. I know where you will stand in the end days," Heyr-Thor said.
Loki's voice was a growl. "Have you ever thought your actions now might play some part in where I stand in the end days?" He studied all of them. "Don't call on me again, Thor. Not in your direst need, not in your deepest desperation. My ears are deaf to your pleas. For now at least, I will not stand against you and yours. But I will no longer stand for you, either." And then he pointed to the road and drew an arch out of it—a black asphalt vine that whipped up from the pavement in a loop—and when it was tall enough to permit him passage, he summoned green fire and vanished. The gate he'd created blinked out behind him, but the arch in the pavement remained.
Heyr-Thor stood staring at the gate, frowning. After a moment, he tapped the arch with his war hammer and it crumbled into dust.
Eric, with Loki's dark-god gun slung over his shoulder, shivered a little. That hadn't gone as well as it might have.
Heyr-Thor, however, seemed unperturbed. He put the resurrection rings on the ground. "Stand back."
He hefted his war hammer and measured the distance between him and his targets. All the Sentinels backed away.
Mjollnir slammed into the bands, and the pavement where they lay exploded into a cloud of black dust and a long, piercing scream. Eric, not back far enough, got a face full of asphalt. He felt the tiny shards go into his eyelids, his cheeks, his nose and lips. Great. Road rash the quick and easy way. He would be pulling bits of tar out of his skin for weeks, probably.
"That was all three?" Eric asked.
"All three," Heyr-Thor agreed. "All broken, but none yet sufficiently destroyed." He went over to the crater in the road and pulled out a fused, flattened tangle of gold. Eric saw similar patterns during the summer, when snakes got run over by cars.
"These have to be melted down," Heyr-Thor said. "Melted down, the gold poured into a mold and left to cool. Then ground to powder and the powder poured into moving water. This gold can never be used again. It is tainted, and if it is not ground and scattered, it will call to evil those who are willing to listen, and subvert even those who are not. This gold has been poisoned by the keth, who are the vilest of the dark gods—at least the ones we know."
Eric looked at the flattened metal bands. "I'll take care of it," he said.
Heyr-Thor told him, "It isn't the work for one man. In the dark, the gold will call to you. It will twist you. Let all of us work on it together; we must destroy it quickly and get free of it. It will work on us as much as it works on you."
Eric said, "Let's get off the road and back to the watch room. We have work yet to do."
Heyr nodded. "We should be doing it, and quickly. The keth won't be the last the Night Watch sends here."
Kerras
Lights swirled, sparkled, erupted across the dark side of Kerras, through the ice-layered chasms, deep in the dead abysses. Lights, pale blue and white, green and gold and pink; they crawled through the airless cold, slippery and liquid, stirring the ghosts with the rebound magic that had birthed them, pouring upworld, released from a battle that had seen the deaths of three dark gods, and that was witnessing their destruction.
Change. They were all change. Movement where there had been none before, energy reborn in a depleted land. The lights burrowed into the dead world, deep below the surface. They were potential waiting for a trigger. But the trigger had not yet come.
Cat Creek, North Carolina
Rekkathav had found a good location to watch the battle. And he had seen the whole thing. He had discovered that he would be going back as the bearer of bad tidings, no matter what had happened to the Beithan assassin. Having seen the unthinkable disaster with the keth, he started getting little nervous twitches and chills all over his tender, alien skin every time he considered the likely fate of the lone Beithan.
Aril, keth Master of the Night Watch, was not a creature who took bad news well. He would not be…pleasant.
He'd wiped out ten fieldmasters for his last bit of bad news. Now Rekkathav was going to go tell him that all three of his hand-picked keth were dead, destroyed, gone forever. That Thor was back in business. That the immortal had enough live magic in hand to fight effectively, and that he'd put together what looked like a team.
Yes. Rekkathav was going to go tell Aril all of that, with nothing to leaven the load. And he was going to visit the terminal box in short order.
Well, he didn't actually know what had happened to the Beithan, did he? And he had firm orders to find out. Thank the eternities for literal interpretation of orders.
Rekkathav was going to be very thorough in finding out about the Beithan. Very thorough, and if necessary, very slow. It was going to take him exactly as long to find the Beithan, he decided, as it took him to find enough good news to save his miserable life.
Cross Creek Mall, Fayetteville, North Carolina
Pete, sitting in the Cross Creek Mall's tiny food court with Lauren and a now-very-awake Jake, felt his beeper go off. He took the call at a pay phone—still the best way not to be tracked by anyone who might be watching—and got the good news.
He patted Lauren on the shoulder. "We can go home."
"We can?" Lauren looked at him. "They beat the keth? Who's dead?"
"Just the keth, from what I hear. We have to go back. You need to get some sleep. I'll stay with you to stand guard while you sleep, just in case. And then you're going to have to go talk to them."
"They don't want to hear anything I might have to say about this, Pete."
"Maybe they didn't before. I'm betting that they do now, though. They have to see that you must be doing something big and powerful if it's getting the attention of the Night Watch."
"Actually," Lauren said, standing and taking Jake's hand, "they don't have to see anything except that I'm causing them problems they never had before. These are not flexible people, Pete. They're men and women who have been part of this hereditary order since they were very young. They were taught that there was One True Way, and they believe it, and what I'm doing challenges everything they have worked for and believed in their whole lives."
Pete wanted to pull her into his arms and hold her and assure her that everything would be fine, that they would see her side of things, and that if they didn't he'd stand between her and hell itself. But he didn't. He just gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile, and said, "Give them a chance. I have your back if things don't go well. So does Heyr."
The ride back to Cat Creek was uneventful. Lauren slept, Jake sang and looked out the window and talked to Pete—or, when Pete wasn't talking, to an invisible friend.
Pete bet the invisible friend gave Lauren the creeps. How did one go about telling whether the kid was talking to nothing or talking to a downworlder who'd come to visit? Cold spots, maybe, but the van still had decent air-conditioning, so in this case, that wouldn't be the tip-off.
He took them home, tucked Lauren onto the couch, set him and Jake up across the hall in the dining room playing cars. And when Lauren was asleep, he called June Bug.
"It went well enough," June Bug told him. "One of the children has a bad case of buck fever now and wants to run right back out and do it all again."
"Raymond."
"Raymond is still all the ass he ever was, even though I think he did save us. But no. Not Raymond. Betty Kay."
Pete considered that for a moment, then laughed. "The quiet ones can surprise you. I wouldn't have picked her for the role."
"Nor I. But she's all fired up and hanging around Heyr like a cat in heat, wanting to go hunt more dark gods and gods-know-what all else. I see a lot of unhappiness coming there."
Pete tried to imagine Betty Kay doing anything like a cat in heat, and couldn't get the picture to focus. He let it go, and said, "I need to talk to you. Later, though."
"That'll be fine. I'll be in the library all day and probably most of the evening. I'm doing a bit of research."
"I'll stop by later, then."
Cat Creek, North Carolina
It was late when Pete left Lauren, and he left her with Heyr standing guard, which should have given him some comfort but which instead made him terribly nervous.
June Bug was in the back room with the doors all locked. He had to tap on the window to get her attention.
"So what has gone wrong in your world, Pete?" she asked by way of greeting.
"And hello to you, too."
"Don't chitchat me, boy. You wouldn't have come to talk to me if you didn't have a problem, and one, at that, that you figured I might be able to help you fix."
"That's a hell of a way to look at things."
"Maybe, but you've never come by to talk to me before. So. What's wrong?"
"Lauren."
"Who does not love you the way you love her."
Pete gave June Bug an exasperated look. "How did you know that?"
"You keep some of your secrets better than others. That one you're not doing too well with."
Pete felt his heart drop into his shoes.
June Bug laughed. "I've been around, boy. I've been watching people for a long lifetime. And I've kept a few secrets of my own. I know the signs." She waved him to a seat filled with books. "Put them on the floor, sit, and talk to me."
"What secrets?" Pete asked.
"If I told you, they wouldn't be secrets, would they?" She smiled a little. She'd been attractive in her day, he guessed. She still had good bones, kind eyes, and hair that was mostly brown. She'd aged well. She carried herself with certainty—she knew who she was and had come to peace with that. Which was more than he had done. He still lived in the middle of turmoil and endless, agonizing self-doubt.
She seemed always a little sad, but he'd heard the stories of the man she'd loved—the one who had left her when she was young. He'd heard from the other Sentinels how she had never loved again. He thought that was hard to imagine, and that she had chosen to carry her sorrow far too long. But then, Lauren wasn't giving up on her grief any too quickly, either.
Which was why he was here.
He took a deep breath. "I want to talk to you about Lauren."
"I figured as much."
"But I want to do it in a roundabout way—I want to know why you never loved anyone else after that man left you when you were young."
June Bug burst out laughing.
"What?"
"Well, you're direct. But why the hell would you want to know that?"
"Because if I can figure out why you hung on to someone who was gone, and to a relationship that was just a memory, maybe I can use that to figure out how to help Lauren let go."
June Bug sighed and moved things around on her desk. "And now I can lie to you or I can give you a bit of my secret, and chance your guessing the rest."
Pete sat very still, waiting.
"I can't help you, Pete," she said after another minute. "Not because I don't want to, but because the stories you've heard about me and my one long-lost love are lies. I made them up to cover a truth I didn't want to admit. That I still don't want to admit."
"What truth?" he asked when she was silent too long.
"That I spent most of my life in love with someone—but someone I couldn't have."
"Married?"
"Yes, happily married. And with family. And had I admitted the truth, this person would not have understood. The truth would have ended our friendship. And I was willing to take friendship over nothing."
"You could have said something. Taken a chance."
"No. First, trying to break up a family is a vile thing. And second, sometimes you know what the answer is going to be. And…" Her voice faltered. She shrugged, and managed a sad little smile, and he could see her eyes go bright with tears. "They're dead now, anyway, so it doesn't matter."
Something about the way she'd phrased things suddenly pinged on him. This person. And they, used incorrectly—when June Bug was always careful to get her words right. Pronoun game, he realized, and went for the wild guess. "What was her name?"
June Bug laughed again. "As I said, give you a bit and you get it all. Marian Hotchkiss."
"Lauren's mother?"
"Yes."
Pete rubbed his temples. "And people say small towns are boring."
"Not the people who pay attention."
"No. Probably not. So…you loved Lauren's mother, who never knew how you felt. But now she's been dead for a long time. And you've never loved again."
"I didn't say that."
"Who else, then?"
"It's too embarrassing to admit."
Pete ran possibilities through his mind, and the obvious answer popped up. "Lauren. Marian's daughter."
June Bug paled a little, but in her eyes Pete saw relief. So not Lauren. But he'd still been close. If they'd been playing Battleship, he would have only missed by one square. June Bug said, "I think we need to discuss your problem for a while. Or perhaps I need to get back to my research."
"We are discussing my problem. This talk of ours is helping a great deal. I'm seeing that Lauren could care about me as much as I could care about her and never let me know."
"I'd rather not consider that possibility."
