Gods old and dark

by Holly Lisle

  "Fred Buchanan," the guy said, holding out his hand, and they shook, and Raymond said, "Raymond Smetty," and Louisa said, "Pleased to meet you. I'm Louisa Tate," and they all walked through an empty open office where the desks were all clean, into a private office with a door. Fred showed the two of them to chairs, then took a seat opposite them behind his desk.

  Fred had on a white button-down shirt, and had the sleeves rolled up, and he looked sort of like an accountant, Raymond thought. Not a G-man, that was for damn-all sure. And what sort of big-shot FBI guy would be named Fred, anyway? Raymond had a basset hound named Fred when he was a kid. The dog and the guy had the same eyes.

  Raymond relaxed.

  Fred picked up a manila envelope and pulled out a couple of photos—one was of a group of people walking down one of those cobblestone streets in some European city with fancy stone buildings and pigeons all over the place. The other was two guys standing and talking in a park—could have been anywhere, pretty much. Raymond took the pigeon-and-street picture; Louisa took the other one.

  "Recognize anyone in those pictures?" Fred asked.

  Raymond studied faces. A couple of rough-looking men, a gorgeous woman, and—though he was younger and thinner and his hair was black and he had a mustache—Pete. Pete with a dangerous look on his face that Raymond had never seen when the deputy sat in the sheriff's office with his feet up on the sheriff's desk reading. "Yeah," he said, handing the picture back. "The one with the mustache is Pete, but he doesn't look like that now."

  Fred nodded.

  Louisa looked at the picture in her hands and said, "The one on the right. With the gun."

  "That's him," Fred said. "And you say he killed someone and shoved the body in a barrel."

  Louisa and Raymond both nodded.

  Fred pulled out a topographical map of Cat Creek. "Show me where he stays, where we can find him, where we can find the body—anything else you have. And tell us who he's working for now."

  Between the two of them, Louisa and Raymond implicated not just Pete, but also Lauren, Eric, and even June Bug.

  Fred took it all in, got the details, was thankful and grateful to the point that Raymond felt like a hero by the time he and Louisa were ready to go.

  And then they got up to leave and Fred stood and said, "You aren't going to be able to go back there, not for a while. I don't want to see either one of you end up diced into little pieces. I don't dare let you go back there yet."

  Raymond felt his stomach drop. "We don't have a choice," he said. "We're going to have to go back. We don't dare leave." He was thinking of the Sentinels, and of how badly they took unexplained absences. He was thinking of how this whole business ceased to be a clever operation if he and Louisa couldn't get back to Cat Creek in a timely fashion and act like nothing had happened. Because while Pete's being some kind of whacked-out international killer scared him, it didn't scare him half as much as having the Sentinels realize what he'd done and come after him. The Sentinels' reach was a hell of a lot longer than the FBI's—and unlike the FBI, the Sentinels were bound by neither the laws of their country nor the watchful eyes of human rights groups like the ACLU and Amnesty International. If they came after him or Louisa, nobody was going to get a chance to call a lawyer or finagle bunches of appeals.

  And then there were four big guys at the door, guys who looked the way Raymond thought FBI agents would look. Bigger than him, and tougher, with cold eyes and cold expressions.

  Fred was smiling, saying, "We're going to put the two of you up at our expense for a few days, to make sure our witnesses survive long enough for us to gather up Pete and his cronies." And he and Louisa were hustled off in opposite directions, into separate cars, and he was scared.

  But not as scared as he got when the two FBI guys took him into his room in a seedy hotel out away from everything, and there wasn't a mirror anywhere in the place. Then, when it was too late for him to do a damn thing about it, he realized that he'd run to the wrong people.

  FBI Headquarters, Charlotte, NC

  Fred Buchanan ripped a corner off a piece of notepaper and scrawled a quick note on it.

  Louisa Tate and Raymond Smetty tried to turn you and a few of your contacts in. Both under protective custody, separated, rooms with no mirrors. Don't know what's going on down there, but watch your back.

  Fred

  He handed it to Wylie Blake, one of the guys who'd worked with Pete before, and said, "Get this down to the Hot Zone without anyone seeing you. Including Pete if you can help it. And then get back here fast as you can."

  Wylie nodded. "Sure, boss. Couple hours down, couple hours back. I'll take care of it now."

  That would have to be good enough. Fred hoped that all the traitors had come forward at once; he wasn't sure how much help the office would be if Pete got himself into real trouble down in Cat Creek. Fred didn't know if even Pete was altogether up on what it was he was hooked into down there. Fred had good people available, but against aliens and a technology that looked very much like magic…

  Fred sighed. Aliens interested him. He was happy to be in charge of the hottest region in one of the most interesting cases the Bureau had ever worked. But he wanted to start seeing where everything fit, and instead, Pete's portion of the case kept getting weirder and scarier. Fred found himself wondering if all the pieces would ever fall into place.

  He hoped Pete had a better handle on Cat Creek's goings on than he did.

  Raleigh to Cat Creek—Baanraak of Silver and Gold

  Baanraak, driving his black Mercedes Benz CL600 Coupe DE, slid into Cat Creek quietly but not unnoticed. The car alone would make invisibility impossible, but that was fine. He didn't want to be unnoticed. He simply wanted to be misidentified.

  He had not hurried his trip from Raleigh. He'd meandered, taking back roads and stopping from time to time to look around, to get a feel for the region and to mark the territories of old gods and Night Watch and Sentinels and other irritants. They were, most of them, bright and sharp and shiny against the dull background noise of mortal, mundane humanity. The Sentinels marked themselves with their standing gates and their laughably vigilant, unblinking stares into the between. Toothless and handcuffed by crippling rules, the whole lot of them. They might have been a threat to the plans of the Night Watch, but the Night Watch under Baanraak's leadership had infiltrated their Council long ages past, and guaranteed that the Sentinels would serve no greater purpose than to clean up messes made by third parties and keep their world on its rails until it was ripe enough to be tasty. The Night Watch certainly could have been dangerous, but its current members hadn't taken the time or effort to mask themselves against each other. Unopposed by any real threat for time out of mind, they'd fallen into the complacency of top-of-the-chain predators, and their noisy minds and extravagant feeding and sharp-edged use of the world's dark magic screamed to Baanraak. He would have no surprises from any of them.

  Even the old gods, timid and few and perpetually in hiding, hid only from the Night Watch. They kept small enough and silent enough to hide from those with minds and magic noisier than their own. To Baanraak, master of stillness, they might as well have been dancing and screaming, silhouetted against a level horizon.

  Reaching Cat Creek, he knew what lay at his back. A handful of Sentinel outposts, three timorous old gods, a dozen dark gods of the Night Watch. And one disturbing patch of ground in the sand hills out by the Fort Bragg reservation where he'd thought he sensed something, but on careful inspection had discovered nothing but some odd echoes of his own mind. That bad patch bothered him, but not enough to stop him entirely. It wasn't an issue unless it made itself an issue, he decided—and if it made itself an issue, nothing in the universe existed more capable than he to deal with it.

  So he was comfortable that he had control of what lay behind him.

  What lay in front of him, however, was another matter. Lauren he located without too much trouble. She was not noisy—mortal and for the moment out of t
he touch of the between, she would not have stood out at all from other mortals except for that strange echo of immortal love and hope that clung to her—the fingerprint of her brush with the soul of the infinite, a power beyond his scope or reach or knowing. Her child bore that same faint, pure light. But she would have been easy enough to locate had she been no one special. For she had protectors. She was bounded round with old gods, which in this world were already rare as peacocks on an arctic snowfield. But the old gods surrounding her were not upworld mortals stretching out their mortal years with self-serving magic and timorousness, but true immortals. Pain-bearers, Baanraak had always called them. And those he had thought long gone from Earth.

  Unlike the general run of old gods, the pain-bearers were dangerous, even to him. He could not kill them, could not harm them, could not even slow them down unless he could draw them into gates and so break their links to their binding-world. The death of their binding-world would put a quick enough end to them, but destroying Earth was outside the scope of Baanraak's current mission, even had he the time or the means or the interest to accomplish it.

  One of these pain-bearers Baanraak knew. He and Thor had crossed paths twice, on other worlds and in days long past. A newly immortal Thor had once nearly bested Baanraak in a head-to-head fight long before Baanraak had become the Master of the Night Watch. At the time, Baanraak had been a dark god still in the forging and did not know that in a straight fight a true immortal had the advantage over one such as he. Thor had been, in fact, the last creature to successfully kill Baanraak's body—until Molly. Baanraak's mentor, Fherghass, had not wished to see all his work on Baanraak go to waste. He'd inserted himself into the fight, and had taken great personal risks to prevent Thor from pillaging Baanraak's corpse or capturing his resurrection rings.

  On their second meeting, after Baanraak had destroyed Fherghass and taken Mastery of the Night Watch for himself, Baanraak nearly bested Thor, catching the old god as he came through a gate, before Thor had a chance to bind himself to the world he'd just reached. Thor's skill with magic and weapons had not been enough to spare him grievous injury, though unfortunately he had lived. And here he was, and he was one third of the portcullis that stood between Baanraak and what he wanted.

  Thor was not as strong as he had been on their first meeting. This world didn't have enough live magic in it to feed the monster that Thor had been. But he was still a power to be reckoned with. And unless he walked to another world and Baanraak got to his destination first, Baanraak couldn't touch him. And did not want to try.

  The others felt familiar to Baanraak, but could not have been. They were immortals newly made, still sickened by pain, weak with the full weight of the dying of their world. Unlike Thor, they had not yet learned to drink life from pure springs—they had not found their way to one of the wells where Lauren had brought live magic. They watered from the river of the world, and the river of the world was poison to living things.

  Yet—weak and newly hatched and still naïve—even they were untouchable. Baanraak snarled.

  And then there was the object of Baanraak's desire and the author of his pain. Molly.

  Molly, whom he wished to possess, whom he yearned to destroy. He tasted her in the air only as the faintest shimmer, her power damped down as low as he kept his own. In all the worlds, Molly alone would be able to see him coming and perhaps read his intent and waylay him. In this world, Molly had only faint magic born of her dual heritage. But Thor at that moment debated the merits of changing her.

  And it was when Baanraak strip-mined Thor's thoughts for the means by which Thor intended to change Molly that he discovered his little demesne on Kerras had been discovered. And not just discovered but invaded.

  Most of the Sentinels in Cat Creek had been to his hiding place; most of them had become gods there. The only one who had not was Molly. If she went there—if Thor did as he considered and took her—she would know the place, and she would know its creator. His work would betray him, and he would not be there to give her an explanation or to show her how to see what he had done. She would see it through other filters than his, and she would make of it something over which he had no influence and no control. And he discovered that he could not even begin to imagine what she would think.

  He discovered himself clenching the steering wheel of the car with hands white-knuckled and aching from the strain. He released them.

  He needed a diversion.

  Fast.

  Cat Creek, North Carolina

  Pete lay in the bed, restless, unable to sleep, unable to think, ravaged by pain no drug could touch. In his head, voices screamed for rescue, and he could not save them. Villains dealt horror and death, and he could not stop them. The world slipped a little closer to oblivion, and he could not pull it back or even stand in its way to keep it from sliding. At that moment he could do nothing—not even block out the sounds.

  Had he been at work, he would have been worthless, but at least he would have had something to think about besides his own distress. He wasn't sick. He wasn't likely to ever be sick in the normal sense again. The fact that he wished he were dead was another matter entirely.

  He reached out with his mind and touched Lauren, yearning for comfort and something to hang on to. She was reading, with Jake curled up on her lap. They were singing nursery rhymes out of a big red book. He smiled and closed his eyes and let himself drift into her, past the surface. He opened himself to her, letting her drown out the six billion other voices by concentrating on her alone.

  And he found things he wished he'd never seen. Her and Brian, meeting in a library when they both reached for the same Theodore Sturgeon novel on the shelf.

  Them fighting—the fights had been amazing. No violence against each other, but doors and clothes hampers and plastic-wrapped bacon hadn't fared well. And them making up after the fights; that was even harder to bear. They had been something wonderful; they had experienced a love that Pete couldn't even imagine. He hadn't realized until that instant how much of the magic that Lauren wove was shaped by Brian's touch, and by her yearning for him. Pete could feel the shape of Brian still inside Lauren's heart, and he could feel, for the first time, her ocean-deep love for him. And for the first time he could understand why she clung to Brian's memory. He absorbed her anguish and her agony at losing Brian as if it were his own.

  And Pete saw himself through her eyes, and through her heart, and he realized that he was no Brian and never could be. Lauren and Brian had been painted in primary colors and vibrant, thick brush strokes. They had shaken the world with their love. Nothing about what the two of them shared had been thin or shallow or pale. If Brian had lived longer, perhaps the love they had shared would have mellowed a bit, or faded at the edges. But Brian hadn't lived longer, and when he died he'd ignored Heaven to stay with her and eventually to give a part of his soul to save their child—and how the hell could anyone compete with that?

  Pete could see that Lauren cared about him. But Pete was a watercolor kind of guy, done with nice detail in faded washes and quiet colors. Lauren was edging sideways toward thinking that she might love him, that she might need him, that she might find a place in her heart and her life for him. But she could not conceive of Pete's being anything but secondary to the love and the life she had lost. And seeing what she had lost from the inside, neither could he.

  He pulled away from her. Better the impersonal agony of six billion strangers than the clear, honest, and painfully un-flattering reflection of him as seen through the eyes of the woman he wanted to love.

  Pete sat up. He had to move, had to do something. The noise in his head was unbearable; the pain in his body screamed for a cure, a fix, some sort of ease. And he had nothing to offer but movement. He changed into jeans and sneakers and went walking. He hooked his thumbs in his pockets and plodded forward, with no direction and no goal.

  The streets of Cat Creek, quiet even on weekdays, were empty. The cold and the drizzle had everyone inside—the
tiny town might have been abandoned save for voices that carried into the street through poorly insulated walls. The smell of burning wood as people used their fireplaces to take off the chill seemed cozy—but he was looking at Cat Creek through new eyes. He'd never thought of the town as a particularly peaceful place; his time in the Sheriff's Department had disabused him of any illusions of that sort. But he hadn't realized the quiet pain behind the doors—heartache and loss and loneliness and rage and betrayal that never made it to the surface. That had never reached him.

  He ambled past fine old houses and those that had once been fine, along streets where the old oaks formed arches across the road and blocked out the sky, and he tried to keep it all out. Heyr had told him to look for the good, for everything that was live and healthy and strong, and to draw from that. Pete was having a hard time finding that healthy power. But he kept looking.

  "Bit nasty for a walk," someone said, and Pete turned. A man sat in shadow on the steps of one of the old houses. The red tip of a cigarette glowed in the grayness of the shadowed eaves and the day.

  "It is," Pete agreed, stopping. "Bit nasty for anything, really."