by Holly Lisle
With enough of her self-control regained that she could move, she rose, and still fighting blinding pain, crept to the bedroom mirror that was her primary gate. She stared into her own eyes, and saw herself as she had once been, as she was again—a tall, plain-faced young woman with dun-brown hair and nondescript eyes, a large nose and thin lips. She sighed and muttered, "You know what? The hell with this." And in spite of the pain the change caused her, she made herself beautiful, too. It was shallow, it was vain, and she knew it. And she didn't care.
When she was finished with herself, she crawled on hands and knees and looked into the mirror again. Except for the anguish in her eyes and the tear stains on her cheeks, she looked…amazing. Golden-blonde hair that curled to her waist in soft ringlets; full lips; eyes the precise blue of an October sky; a pert, straight nose; and the curves of a goddess. She had become the woman of her dreams.
And, being that woman, her dreams no longer seemed so far-fetched. She no longer seemed to have so little to offer. "I could try it this time," she whispered to the stunning young woman in the mirror.
She could pursue love. She could take the chances she had been too fearful to take before. She could live the life she had never dared to live—except that Marian was dead and Molly wanted to be dead, and she could not live knowing that Molly, too, was gone from the world and she had done nothing to save her.
June Bug had a young woman's body and a goddess's beauty, but she still had an old woman's mind. A long and lonely life lay behind her, and ahead of her lay an eternity without hope of getting Marian back or finding her in the afterlife—when before June Bug had at least held deep inside her the hope that in the place beyond death she might have the courage to bare her soul and win Marian's love.
The tears slipped down her cheeks a little faster, and she collapsed again, the pain cascading over the walls she'd built to keep out the world, flattening her.
She wore a young body—but still she wasn't strong enough. Physical youth was not the cure. She could not fight like this. She curled into a fetal ball, full of failure, knowing that she was too weak even to stand for more than a moment under the weight she bore, while across Cat Creek, the hope and future of the world came under attack by monsters who had every chance of winning, and half of that future sought its own destruction.
Cat Creek
Molly turned to Heyr and said, "They're here. Outside the house." She could feel the angry Baanraak circling the house, and the faint shadow of the quiet Baanraak watching everything—the other Baanraak, the house, her.
Heyr swore. "No time to make you a god here, no time to do anything but fight. And it's just me guarding the three of you…"
Pete bolted onto the back porch, both feet hitting the top step with a thud that shook the kitchen—he slammed through the back door and stood panting, his back against it, locking it behind him with one hand. "You're in trouble. I got here as fast as I could."
He looked like hell.
Heyr said, "At least you're standing," but looking at Pete, Molly could only wonder how long that would be true.
Pete nodded. He turned to her. "Between you and Lauren, I heard something about…Baanraak?"
Molly said, "I thought I'd destroyed him. But he's here. Two of him are here. When I exploded him, I exploded myself as well. So I couldn't see what happened, but I think his resurrection rings must have scattered all across the forest floor in Oria. When he resurrected, I'm guessing he came back as more than one of himself. I destroyed one, and destroyed the two rings that Baanraak had in him. But…"
Heyr and Pete and Lauren exchanged worried looks. "Then the two that are out there might not be the only ones."
Molly shook her head.
"How many could there be?"
Molly shrugged.
"Any idea at all?" Lauren asked.
"Baanraak's old. He's had the opportunity to gather up a lot of resurrection rings and add them to his collection. The dark gods all seem to do this as they get older. He'd only be limited by the amount of gold he could carry inside him."
"He has access to magic—so that's no limit," Heyr said.
"Then…I guess there could be a lot more where those two came from."
"That's comforting," Pete said. He turned to Heyr. "Any sign of the other Sentinels?"
"They're too sick to move," Heyr said. "Eric can't even stand up. It'll take them days to be on their feet again. I don't know how you're standing already." He shrugged. "And as for Louisa and Raymond…"
"No," Lauren said. "We're better off without them."
Pete looked from Lauren to Molly and back to Lauren again, and said, "I would give anything to be with you through this, but I think I'm best in the front lines. They can't kill me even if they can hurt me. And they want the two of you dead—so we have to keep you together and safe."
Molly nodded. "We have good weapons. We can set up barricades."
Heyr leaned a hand against the wall of the house and half closed his eyes. After a moment, the walls, floors, and ceilings of the house began to glow green. "I took care of the barricades," he said, pulling his hand from the wall. The glow died away. "The house is hardened. Fireproof, windproof, and as magicproof as I can make it, though I have no doubt that there are spells and tricks I haven't discovered yet that could get through. When we close the doors behind us, only one of the four of us will be able to pass through them again. All you have to do is find a room with no windows, get in there, and bar the door behind you."
Molly said, "If the house will keep them out, why should we hide in a windowless room with the door barred?"
Heyr's voice was flat. "Because I don't know everything. Because what I don't know could kill you, and I would have you take every precaution, since I don't know which precaution will prove the valuable one."
"We'll have guns," Lauren said. "We still have Loki's weapons."
Pete muttered, "Pity we don't still have Loki."
"I've been regretting that, too," Heyr said. "I cost us a valuable ally."
Molly turned to Lauren. "I didn't think we'd just be hiding in a closed room. I thought we'd be…contributing. Fighting."
Lauren touched the pommel of the knife Heyr had given her, and with Jake riding on her hip, gave Molly an indecipherable look. "You can't lose any more of yourself. We can't afford for you to die again, even if you do come back. But especially if you don't. Me…" She shrugged. "That's obvious. Right now, though, we'll help them most if we're not easy targets." She turned to Pete and Heyr. "We'll be in the upstairs bathroom. No windows."
Heyr nodded.
Pete said, "I'd be with you if I could," and Lauren shook her head.
"Go," she said. "You're doing what you have to do." Lauren glowed with life, with the open, unsullied energy of the universe, and more than that—with the touch of the infinite. Jake had the same glow to him.
Just being close to the two of them reminded Molly of everything she wasn't. But it hurt her, too. The longer she was near Lauren, the more the life inside of Lauren burned her. It was like…sitting too near the sun, she decided.
She followed Lauren up the narrow back stairs into a spare bedroom, and to a very old, locked, cherrywood gun cabinet. Lauren pressed two spots on the top and side, and Molly heard a soft click, and the doors swung open to reveal an empty cabinet. "My great-great-grandfather—my father's great-grandfather—made this," Lauren said. "Wood-working ran in the family." She pressed on a central panel, and a hidden door popped forward. Behind it, Molly recognized weapons that could only have come from the old gods.
"Those'll do," Molly said.
Lauren nodded. "Loki left them. They're safe—they'll only shoot dark gods…" She turned to stare at Molly and her eyes went wide.
"Watch where you shoot around me, then, will you?"
Molly took the weapon Lauren handed her and followed her sister out of the room, down the hall, and into the bathroom. Jake watched her over his mother's shoulder, round-eyed and untrusting. Smart
kid.
Heyr and Pete were fighting to protect what remained of Molly as much as they were fighting to protect Lauren and Jake. But what remained of Molly was so small, and so weak, and what lay underneath felt the movement of the living hunger outside the house, and ached with that same hunger, and cried out to be fed. Darkness called, even stronger when forced into a corner by the light.
Lauren's presence—and Jake's—was reminding her of everything she was not and could never be again. She took a seat on the edge of the tub, and closed her eyes while Lauren barricaded the door, and wondered how she was going to get through what was coming.
Cat Creek
For Lauren, locking the bathroom door and wedging the chair underneath the doorknob felt all wrong. She put Jake on the floor when she was done and sat on the closed toilet seat and watched Molly sitting on the tub.
Molly's proximity made her skin crawl. She didn't want to feel that way about her sister—about this woman who was her partner in fighting the evil that threatened to destroy the world. But the changes in Molly had become too clear and too perilous to ignore. Jake, too, clearly felt the danger that Molly emanated, for he clung to Lauren's knee and pressed his face against her side, pointedly not looking at Molly.
Every once in a while, Lauren could catch a flash of the Molly she had known in her sister's eyes, but she could see the gaps now—the calculating coldness that transcended indifference and went all the way to heartlessness. Being locked in the bathroom with Molly felt like being on the wrong side of the door.
Worse, though, Lauren was just sitting there waiting for other people to save her. She understood that she and Molly were the targets of this attack. She understood that if the two of them fell, her world's chance of survival became almost zero.
But how could she sit there doing nothing? She was a gateweaver. More, she could do something no one else had ever done before—she could bring life back to her dying world. Surely she could find something she could do to help Heyr and Pete protect her and her son. And Molly, whatever was left of Molly.
Night Watch Control Hub, Barâd Island, Oria—Baanraak of Master's Gold
Baanraak watched the central display, trying to figure out what had so agitated Rekkathav. Initially he saw little to make him think he'd been called away from his meeting with the agents of the Night Watch to any good purpose. He saw Molly, but he would have expected to see her. She sat in a little room powerfully warded against incursions by the Night Watch. Her sister and her sister's child sat with her. They weren't doing anything, and Baanraak began to think that Rekkathav was going to serve him best, after all, as dessert.
But he caught sight of movement in one of the side displays, and after a moment he recognized Thor. His rilles went flat against his head and he caught himself growling—he bore an atavistic, bone-deep loathing for that bastard. Easy enough to be calm about his presence in the picture when Baanraak wasn't actually looking at him, wasn't it? The one with him was an immortal, too—but kitten-weak, sick and fragile and near breaking. Baanraak thought he could destroy that one without too much trouble if he could get into his head for a few moments. But still he saw nothing that would warrant calling him away from what he'd been doing.
He considered crushing Rekkathav beneath his foot.
And then he sensed something in a third display—one that appeared to hold nothing more than an image of old wooden outbuildings—and he leaned in, eyerilles drawing together, talons flexing.
There was a rrôn there, hiding, watching. Little shivers made the long trip down his spine, and the tip of his tail started to flick from side to side. Now that he knew he was there, Baanraak could make out the lines of him—he could catch stray thoughts as the other rrôn fought for the same silence that Baanraak had mastered long ago.
Interesting. He'd thought himself the only rrôn to pursue that path.
Gently, with surgical precision, he used the display gate to attach himself to that other rrôn; he eased himself into the stranger's mind, curious to discover who had finally decided to attempt to emulate him. The shock of what he found almost betrayed him.
He was inside his own mind. And worse, he was not alone in there. He felt the shape of another consciousness near him, and cautiously touched that, and discovered himself, again.
The effect was dizzying, almost sickening. He was seeing through his own eyes in three bodies, hearing his own thoughts in three minds. And while he was each of these three Baanraaks, he also was not. One of them felt young, weak, and still vulnerable, as he had been when he first became a dark god. The second had his age, his experience, his wariness and skills, but this one was scarred by silver, weakened by the emergence of a budding conscience.
He alone was Baanraak as Baanraak should be—but the presence of these others presented an opportunity. He might never have such an opportunity again.
The immortals surrounding Molly and her sister were still too weak to be effective. The attentions of the two who might provide genuine resistance were fixed on his two alter egos. And the two people who stood in the way of his plans for Earth and the worldchain sat in a cage of their own making with a child who had the smell of future trouble about him. They were armed and they were wary, but they were also vulnerable. If he could somehow draw them out of their cage…
Molly teetered on the brink of the long fall into dark godhood. Enough of her remained that she was still aware of all that she had lost, and still cared that she had lost it. Enough remained of her humanity that she feared the inhumanity that spread inside her—that held the majority within her now. She feared, too, the hunger for the drug of death and the desire for power that came with it. Shamed by the realization of what she was, she already yearned for oblivion.
If he could push her closer to the real self in her that longed to come out, if he could force her to embrace that hunger, he could help her find the nonexistence she wanted. She was already close—he would need only a little push to send her the rest of the way.
He studied her for a moment, and her sister, and the little boy.
The child was the key, wasn't he? She'd died for him, setting herself on this path. She bore some resentment toward him for that. Resentments could be fed. Nurtured. Prodded.
Baanraak smiled down at the just-waking Rekkathav and said, "You did well, Snacklet. I think perhaps I won't eat you today."
He left the observation room, heading for the Hub control room and for a convenient, maintained gate. His audience in the arena could wait. Only a fool would let an opportunity like this one slip between his talons, and Baanraak was no fool.
Cat Creek
"So as long as they're inside, they're safe," Pete said as he and Heyr stepped out onto the back porch.
"More or less." Heyr bound the door behind him so that it would not permit passage to any save the five of them. He would have sealed it entirely, but the chance always existed, however remote, that something would happen to break his bonds with the Earth, and that Baanraak would triumph and Heyr would die. He would not chance leaving the hope of this world caged, should that happen.
"Then we don't have to do anything but sit out here and wait for the Baanraaks to realize they can't get in and go away."
Heyr looked at Pete. The back porch light showed more than it should have—Pete's skin was an unhealthy gray, sheened with sweat in spite of the coldness of the night. Pete hadn't yet found a way to filter the little bits of live energy left on the planet so as to block out the poisons, and this wasn't something Heyr could show him. Only experience could do that—and Heyr didn't know of any way to speed experience. Pete would get it eventually, if he didn't give up first, or go mad in the interim. Heyr frowned, sympathetic with Pete's suffering, and said, "Unfortunately, this is a siege situation. Not favorable to us. We don't know how long they are prepared to stay out there, but we do know that we can't keep Lauren and Jake and Molly inside forever."
"So we have to destroy the Baanraaks."
"Yes."
/> "Only we can't see them."
Heyr sighed. "We have some options. We can try to make them visible. We can try to lure them out. We can shoot at where we think they are."
"We could use more people."
"We could use more immortals. More people would just get in the way and get themselves killed. In fact—" He waved a hand and cast a shield around Lauren's house and yard. It would hide the ungodly events that were about to erupt there from anyone on the outside. "Let's make sure we don't draw attention from the mortals." He shrugged. "We aren't going to get help from the rest of the Sentinels. You're the only one standing, and you're barely on your feet. I can't believe you're here, actually."
