Gods old and dark

by Holly Lisle

  He walked across the office, many-windowed, plush-carpeted, and vast, around the fine teak-and-ebony desk, to the man in his silk suit and his club tie, and reached out lumpish fingers and settled them over Nottingham's face.

  He took his time. Baanraak absorbed Nottingham's memories: names and details of friends and associates, knowledge of places, links to accounts and passwords, connections to business deals, and dirty little secrets. At the same time, he absorbed Nottingham's cellular information—body composition, blood type, bone structure, skin composition, finger and retinal patterns, hair structure and composition and growth patterns. When he was done, he wore a perfect overlay of Nottingham; he knew everything Nottingham knew, could do Nottingham's business without missing a step if he chose, could not be discovered as a fraud by any means available to normal human beings. He was Nottingham—if Nottingham had been a god. Silver and gold still marked him, of course; immortality marked him. But he could hide those marks from most of those who could read them. He could pass among even the most cautious of old gods, the most paranoid of dark gods. Further, he could pass in a high enough circle that he was basically free to do as he chose, surrounded by people whose job it was to cover for him and make him look good.

  "My problem now being," he said in Nottingham's refined, upscale Charleston Battery accent, "that I don't need two of us."

  Nottingham's eyes bulged, and again he tried to scream, but Baanraak didn't let him.

  "Your screaming would pose problems for me."

  Baanraak stood naked beside Nottingham's desk, and stroked Nottingham's cheek with a finger. "You've been very good at being a very bad boy. You're about to get even better at it. Your friends will be astonished. But you won't be around to enjoy it."

  Nottingham's body ignited with a dark fire, an absence of light that flickered through him while he writhed and fought—but silently. Silently. Baanraak didn't like noise, especially with the secretary in the other room.

  A hand rattled the doorknob, and Baanraak said, loudly enough that the sound would carry through the door, "I understand, Jim. I'll have to rearrange my schedule, but Susan's still here. I can put her on it right away. I'll drive down tonight, meet with you first thing in the morning." He paused and smiled at Nottingham, who—wide awake and fully aware—was suffering being ripped atom from atom in hellish agony and dead silence. After letting the pause draw out in his pretend phone conversation, Baanraak said, "I can be out the door in fifteen minutes, I suppose, if you want to get together yet tonight. You know how long it will take me to get there…. No. I'll drive myself. I'd rather have my own car available, and I'd rather leave everyone else out of this for now." Another artful pause. "That'll be fine. I'll meet you there as soon as I can make it."

  Nottingham, nearly burned through by Baanraak's death-fire, faded. Baanraak could devour his death energy, could feed on fresh dying, fresh anguish, could…could…and should not let such a treat go to waste. A little taste of the death of worlds, but fresh and intimate, no more filling than a doughnut freshly made, but for the instant it lay on the palate, just as satisfying.

  Instead, he let the death slip past him, uncaught, untasted. Then, disgusted with himself, Baanraak sped up the dissolution of Nottingham's flesh, and the body vanished in a blink, leaving all the clothes untouched.

  Baanraak put them on, rage growing within him. Poisoned by silver, he had let slip a taste of death honed to perfect sweetness by horror and pain and disbelief; he had not fed on his natural food when he hungered for it to the point of aching.

  Poisoned by silver. And he thought to capture Molly and make her his heir, when he should destroy her. She had wakened the silver that had been dormant—or at least easy to ignore—through long ages of worlds now dead and lost. He had walked unscathed, untouched, unscarred, through hell after toppling hell, and had not ached for his own lost world or any lost world, nor grieved for the lost dead, nor taken hurt from pain, until Molly.

  Silver. The metal of order, the universe's guard against the undead, and a brand, a white-hot poker now shoved into his flesh and left there to constantly burn and smoke.

  He closed his eyes and dropped gently into the still place within him, the place beyond breath and scent and sensation, where he became mind without body, where he became reason without distraction.

  In that place, he looked at Molly. He wanted her companionship because alone through all the worlds she was the one creature like him that he had found. And he wanted her destruction, because if she were gone he would see no mirror of himself, and he could once again live within the stillness he had wrought for himself without the intrusion of the worlds and all their noise. The scales balanced and gave him no direction.

  Within his silence, he looked at himself. He wanted to be Baanraak as he had ever been. And that should have been simple enough—it should have clearly marked out his path for him. Except that he had just rediscovered what he had long forgotten: that he had been Baanraak mortal before he had been Baanraak eternal, and that the living silver yearned for Baanraak mortal with a power that equaled the cold hunger of gold for Baanraak eternal.

  No direction. He had no direction. He was a compass in a place with two norths, torn from pole to pole, whipping wildly in this new and terrible shift in the fundament of his universe, he who had once been steady and unwavering and unshakable.

  The world was riven, the poles tossed and torn. But he would find Lauren, and through her acquire Molly, and with Molly in his possession he would know what to do. With her in his possession the two of them would line up, either attracted or repelled, and he would know then which path to follow.

  Baanraak breathed and came back to the world, and the office, and the moment. Time to move.

  He picked up his briefcase, checked to be sure the cell phone, car keys, PDA, and other essentials were in place, and went into his secretary's office.

  "What's wrong?" she said.

  "Don't ask. What you don't know you can't be drawn into. I'm not sure how long I'll be gone this time. Put Larry on the Triex deal, reschedule my appointments so that the senior partners handle them, call each of them tonight and say, 'Ruby Bowman vetoed the merger.' You have that?"

  She was a good secretary—she did not ask what or why. She wrote his instructions down—but not the line about Ruby Bowman, which was a code phrase that meant, essentially, "The shit has hit the fan; hide all evidence and put everything illicit on hold. Pretend to be legit until this blows over." That phrase would forestall any searches for him by the partners when he didn't reappear. The partners would assume he'd gone to Brazil or Argentina, that he was in hiding, and that he'd resurface when things had cooled down.

  In the meantime, Baanraak would be free to move around with unlimited access to Nottingham's money, his persona, his power, and his very fine car. He didn't have to worry about flimsy cover stories or fake IDs—he was exactly who he said he was, and could prove it in any way that might be required.

  CHAPTER 17

  Rockingham, North Carolina

  RAYMOND SMETTY turned to Louisa Tate. "Still a chance to back out now," he said.

  She shook her head.

  "You're sure we shouldn't call the Fayetteville office?" he said.

  "Charlotte oversees all one hundred counties in the state. If we call Fayetteville, we're going to end up having to talk to Charlotte eventually anyway, and we're going to lose time. We need them out of here." Louisa snorted, exasperated, and said, "I did the research, boy."

  "All right," he said. Now that the two of them were here, he'd lost faith in the idea. He wasn't sure if he could carry this off without screwing it up, and he was sorely tempted to hand the whole thing off to Louisa, who'd gotten on the Internet and rounded up the information for them anyway. But it had been his idea. It was a good idea, dammit.

  He took a deep breath. "Hand me the stuff."

  She handed him a thin sheaf of paper, stapled together at the top left corner. The pages were printouts of the Char
lotte FBI website. He flipped through them until he found the one he wanted:

  Charlotte Office—FBI

  Special Agent in Charge: Fred Buchanan

  Assistant Special Agent in Charge: Loren Hammersmith

  Law Enforcement Training Coordinator: Dave Boehm

  InfraGard Coordinator: Patty Dawson

  And below that a list of phone numbers. He called the main one and listened to the phone ring on the other end, his heart in his throat.

  I could still back out now. I could. I could just walk away from this and do what Eric said and stay the hell out of the whole thing—

  And then, "FBI, Charlotte office, this is Gracie MacDeel. How may I help you?"

  Raymond sputtered and stuttered, and finally got out, "I'd like to report a m-m-murder. There's a body of a…a foreigner…in a barrel in Cat Creek, North Carolina, and I know who killed him and who put the body there."

  A faint pause. "All right. Have you reported this to local law enforcement?"

  "I can't," Raymond said. "One of the people who put it there is local law enforcement. I say anything, I'm dead. The killer's name is Pete Stark, and he's the deputy sheriff in Cat Creek."

  "Pete…Stark. Cat Creek. Okay." He heard a pencil scribbling across paper, and the woman said, "Hold, please."

  He held, suddenly needing to take a leak, wishing to hell he could have thought of some other way of getting rid of Lauren and Pete and maybe Eric that didn't involve him and conversations with the FBI, which had seemed like a real good idea until he was standing at the pay phone with Louisa staring at him with those bugged-out fish eyes of hers.

  "This is Fred Buchanan," a guy said on the other end of the line, and Raymond wanted to drop the phone. This guy's voice was not kidding around—had probably never kidded around about anything ever—and Raymond could close his eyes and get what he figured was a pretty good picture of him. Fred Buchanan was, from the sound of his voice, about eight feet tall, and weighed three hundred pounds, all of it muscle, and he ate small children for breakfast. Raymond's balls crawled into his belly to hide, and Raymond would have given anything right then to have had the 'nads to drop the phone and run. But he was transfixed by the voice, which said, "You found Pete Stark, did you? Can you describe him for me?"

  Raymond swallowed around a tongue turned to sand in a mouth dry as Hell itself, and said, "Uh, yessir. He's about thirty years old, about six feet tall, I reckon. Light hair cut short, light eyes. He's a right big fellah."

  "Scars?"

  "Nossir. Not that I've seen." He put a hand over the mouthpiece. "Pete Stark have any scars?"

  Louisa shrugged. "Not that I've seen. Lauren might know. You remember to tell him about Lauren now, too."

  Raymond nodded. He was a Sentinel. He should not be intimidated by some mere lackey of the FBI. He shouldn't. He took a deep breath, acknowledging that he was intimidated, and said, "No scars that we've seen, sir."

  "Sounds like someone we've been looking for now for quite some time," the FBI agent said. "He's dangerous if he's our guy." A pause. "He know you?"

  "Yessir," Raymond said, giving Louise a frantic look.

  "All right. That's not good. He's dangerous. Very dangerous."

  "Well, yeah," Raymond said, feeling sick but justified. Didn't it figure that Pete Stark was wanted by the FBI? Didn't that just beat all?

  "I'll come down there," the guy said. "You can show me where he's hiding out, where the body is, point out his accomplices—"

  Raymond stopped him fast. "We can't meet with you in Cat Creek. We didn't even dare use a phone in Cat Creek. It's…it's just not safe."

  A pause. "Then come to Charlotte. Meet with me here in the office, and I'll make sure the two of you stay safe."

  Charlotte. A trip into the big city would work, Raymond thought. He and Louisa could take off for a day, drive over, talk with this man. He covered the mouthpiece and said, "He wants us to meet him in Charlotte. Pete's wanted. We'll be doing the Sentinels a favor."

  Louisa thought about it for just a second, then nodded. "Find out when."

  "Today?"

  "No. I have watch, and I never ask to get out of watch. Can't change that now. Tomorrow?"

  Raymond asked the FBI agent, "Tomorrow? Y'all open on Saturday?"

  "The office is open Monday through Friday for walk-ins, but I'll be there tomorrow. So I'll see you first thing in the morning," the agent told them. "You know your way around town enough to find the place?"

  Raymond didn't know his way around Rockingham yet, much less Charlotte. But Louisa had lived in the area all her life, and they had the Internet for maps, and he was getting an itchy feeling between his shoulder blades. He wanted to get off the phone.

  He quickly gave the agent his name, and then Louisa's, and said they'd find the place and they'd be there by ten in the morning.

  When he hung up the phone, he was sweating. He turned to Louisa and said, "We have to pull this off without anyone knowing we're involved. If the Sentinels ever find out we pointed the FBI at any of our own people, we're dead."

  Louisa shrugged. "Once they find out what Pete and Lauren and…Molly"—she spat the name—"have been doing, they won't care how the FBI got involved. Don't worry about us. We'll watch our backs until this is over, and then we'll be heroes."

  Cat Creek, North Carolina

  Pete sat on Lauren's porch swing beside her, watching Jake stack Legos into complex and unrecognizable shapes. "Are you sure you won't reconsider Heyr's offer of immortality?" he asked her. Wrapped inside of that perfectly reasonable request, delivered in an almost casual tone of voice, was Pete's ice-cold utter terror that she was going to get herself killed at any minute, and that he was going to be right with her and still be helpless to save her.

  "It comes down to where I draw magic from…." She looked down at Jake. "A lot of it is love. A lot of it is fear. Almost all of it is raw emotion—not remembered emotion, but what I'm feeling right at the moment when I create the links between the worlds. In a way, those links are me—and if I was safe, and if I didn't have to fear for myself, I don't know that I could make them."

  Pete looked into her eyes and brushed her cheek with his thumb. "I can feel that love when you make the siphons. I can feel the strength and the passion in you." He took a deep breath, deciding to ask a question that had been crawling around in the back of his mind since the dinner with Heyr and the rest of the would-be immortals. "Is loving…someone else…sort of like that, too? Do you think that if you fell in love again you wouldn't be able to give as much of yourself to rebuilding the magic?"

  She studied him for a long moment, and a smile started, and without any warning she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him full on the lips—a deep, hard, passionate kiss that sent his blood surging and made his heart race in his chest like a caged cheetah. Before he could respond, she pulled away, and said, "I don't think that at all. And though I hadn't thought of it until you asked that question, more love in my life could only be a good thing. I think." She frowned a little, and he waited for the guilt to show up in her eyes. But it didn't.

  Lauren bit her lip. "I'm going to have to do some thinking, Pete. I'm definitely going to have to think this through—but…" Her voice trailed off, and she shrugged. "I don't know."

  Pete nodded, afraid to hope anymore, but still feeling that kiss on his lips. "It comes down to this. You do what you have to do to get through this. I'll do everything I can to back you up. I'm here for you. I'm going to make sure that I'm always here for you." I love you, he thought, but that was something he didn't dare say. Not yet.

  She reached out and took his hand. "Thank you."

  He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. "Heyr wants to start taking us through to Kerras as soon as possible, to…transform us. He wants you and Jake with us, so that he can make sure you're safe."

  Lauren nodded. "I'll go with you when you do your transformation." She grinned a little. "Even if I didn't have to, I'd still go."

&nbs
p; Pete looked at his watch and sighed. "I'm due in at work in forty-five minutes. I guess I ought to go home and change."

  Lauren nodded. "I'll see you later."

  "You'll be all right?"

  "Heyr's around."

  "He would be," Pete said, feeling ungracious. Heyr could keep Lauren safe, and he couldn't—yet. But that didn't mean he had to be happy about the old god's hanging around. Heyr made no pretense of his interest in Lauren—just as he made no pretense of his interest in Betty Kay, or in Darlene…. Pete didn't like the direction his thoughts were taking. He and Lauren stood, and he gave her a quick hug, and waited while she and Jake went into the house. And then he left.

  He was scheduled to become an immortal after his shift. For just a moment—until he considered the implications—that struck him as funny.

  Somewhere Far Downworld—Baanraak of Beginner's Gold