by Holly Lisle
But she'd take the opportunities life gave her. She kicked open the front door and dragged him—or the main part of him—inside. He was too light, too light. She did not worry about going back for the arm or the leg that still lay on the porch. She pulled him through the foyer to the huge old mirror at the back, and holding on to him and begging him to just keep breathing a little longer, she opened the gate and reached downworld a short way. Just to Oria, just to the little cabin that her parents had built in the ancient forest on the edge of the veyâr realms. It was near enough that she could reach it easily, far enough that she gained the power of the old gods.
When she could see the inside of the cabin, she stepped backward into the gate, dragging Pete and hearing a sleepy "Hey!" from Jake.
The three of them tumbled through green fire, along the pathways of eternity, and though she could hear Jake clearly and feel his presence, she could feel nothing of Pete save that he still lived.
They stepped out into her parents' old bedroom, into deep cold. Winter came earlier to the ancient forest in Oria's northland, and Lauren could hear snow howling outside the windows. She crouched in the darkness, ignoring her discomfort, and willed the magic of the world through her fingertips and into Pete. She saw him whole, saw him healthy, and green fire sheened his body, and the horrible gashes in his torso closed up. An arm budded out, stretched to full length, and detailed itself; a leg regrew itself from the awful hole where his first leg had been. She pressed her hands flat against his chest and felt his heart beat stronger beneath her palms. She felt his chest rise and fall in a steadier rhythm, felt his breaths get slower and deeper.
But still he didn't open his eyes.
She tried to reach inside of him, to find any damage that might have touched his mind, but she could find nothing wrong. She crouched over him and shook him, and he didn't wake up. Tears welled in the corners of her eyes, and she swallowed them.
"Wake up, dammit," she said.
Inside Pete, she felt something click, as if a light had turned on. His eyes opened, and he whispered, "Molly," and then they focused and he looked up at her, and said, "Lauren?"
She dropped on top of him, hugging him desperately, and heard Jake's muffled "Hey! Stop it!" as her abrupt movements tossed him around.
Pete sat up, and wrapped his arms around her, and hugged her back.
She kissed him, hungrily, desperately, searching for guarantees that she had not lost this second chance after all. He returned her kisses, tentatively at first and then with growing passion. When at last they pulled apart, he touched her cheek and said, "I'm not going to question this. Whatever changed for you, I'm just going to accept it. If what you really want is someone to talk you out of this, it's going to have to be someone else."
"Good," she told him. "Because that's not what I want at all."
Cat Creek
Heyr got the better of Baanraak at last—one blow from Mjollnir hit dead-on and crushed his skull, and he flopped to the ground, twitching. Heyr sent the thunder away and stilled the lightning after giving it the final task of blasting Baanraak's corpse to cinders. The body burned, and Heyr fed the fire with magic. In minutes he had a black pile of ash and one gleaming gold ring that lay half-buried in the pile. Heyr studied it. He recognized the style—it was Art Deco, Earth-made. He would put its creation date as 1930, but it could have been later. One new ring.
Damn.
This, then, had been a minor Baanraak; a raw, green, most-of-the-pieces-missing Baanraak.
Well, it explained the fighting style, anyway. Fierce, furious, and completely lacking in guile.
With a sigh, Heyr pocketed the ring and went around the house to see how Pete was doing.
He stopped as he rounded the corner. An enormous Valkyrie of a woman, split lengthwise, with a fine silver sword still clutched in one hand and a massive silver shield in the other, sprawled across the whole of the front yard. On the porch, an arm, a leg, and pools of blood. Footprints in the blood, and a bloody handprint on the door, and bloody drag marks that led into the house.
Heyr gripped Mjollnir and took a step toward the house, and suddenly realized that power poured out of it in a pure stream. Vast power, life rich and sweet and good enough to feed not just one immortal but an army of immortals. He anchored himself to it, and for the first time in hundreds of years, he felt more life than death, more hope than despair. He took a deep breath, and tipped his head to the heavens, and said, "By the halls of Valhalla, by the Æsir and the songs of the heroes, by all that is right and just in man, I am Thor again. And against the tide of darkness, I will stand."
Knowing that he might find the worst, but knowing, too, that the best had returned, if only in small measure, and that the world and Humankind had reason again to hope, he headed up the stairs and into the house.
He met Pete, with Lauren and Jake, stepping through the mirror and into the foyer.
Pete's first words were, "We haven't won yet. Baanraak took Molly."
Heyr stood in the foyer, trying to put that together. "What happened out front?"
"After you went after the Baanraak with Molly's necklace, a third Baanraak showed up as I was heading to her to heal her," Pete said. "He ripped me apart, and was going to kill her, but June Bug stepped through a gate—"
"June Bug?" Lauren and Thor asked at the same time.
"I didn't recognize her until I saw the cigar. But it was June Bug. She stepped through the gate and just started fighting—she was amazing."
"She wasn't immortal," Heyr said.
"I think that was the way she managed to stand against him. She didn't act like she had any pain, any doubt. She just waded in and tore him apart."
"She killed him?"
Pete shook his head. "I don't think so. She hurt him. But after he killed her, he was strong enough to start toward the house. He was going to kill Molly. And then something chased him off. I saw him make a gate and dive into it, and a second later the third Baanraak—the man-shaped one that I went drinking with—was up on the porch and kneeling over Molly. And he did something to me, and the next thing I knew I was in Oria, and Lauren…well…"
"I put Pete back together," Lauren said.
Thor nodded, guessing from the looks of the two of them standing there together that she had done a bit more than that.
"We have to go after Molly, then," Lauren said.
Pete said, "We have to take care of June Bug first. We can't leave her out there like that."
Thor said, "No. We'll send her to the gates of Valhalla as she deserves. As a warrior."
Baanraak's Demesne, Kerras
Molly felt the pain of the gate, and then the nothingness of being without physical form. She held up a hand, and saw it only as the faintest of shadows; she looked at the bright sunshine, the tall, vivid grass, the alien wildlife everywhere, and she wondered where Baanraak had brought her. And why.
Baanraak—a human-looking Baanraak, but still the rrôn whose mind she knew so well—stood atop a broad, flat rock. He wasn't a shadow; he was perfectly solid. Molly was with him, but not through any choice of her own. She could not move. Something was very wrong with her, but she felt no pain and no fear. She had been torn to pieces back on Earth. Was she still? Had she died? Perhaps this was some dying dream.
Then Baanraak put her down, and she realized that he had been holding her. Still she could not move. He touched her; she could see him do it though she could not feel him.
And then, in a rush, sensation returned. The warmth of the sun on her face, the scent of the breeze, the million and one sounds of a world in motion, full of life and vibrant. And the pain. The pain returned, too, and in spite of her determination not to, she cried out.
"Wait," he said. "I had to bring you all the way here before I could heal you."
And his hands touched her again, but this time she felt them. They were gentle, and they channeled the green fire that burned her—but burned cleanly. Her wounds healed, and after a moment she could move
her arms and her legs, and turn her head, and sit up on her own.
"Where are we?"
"Kerras."
"Kerras is a cinder."
"Most of it is," he agreed. "I made this place, though. I used your sister's siphon—the magic she channeled here."
Molly looked around. "It's…beautiful," she said. She remembered him with another face, on another day, walking with her as they talked about a city lost, its people gone, and she remembered how much pleasure she had taken from his companionship. Later that same day, she followed him and blew him into pieces, of course, and herself in the process, which rather ruined the memory.
Still, as she looked around her, she could see something of the beauty within him.
"It suits you."
He smiled a little. The smile was a lot less forbidding when he wore a human face. "It does," he said. "It is the world of my birth." He shrugged. "As I remember it, in any case."
She thought about how any contact with Lauren's magic hurt her, and she looked at the beautiful panorama of wilderness that spread around her in all directions. "How did you do it?" she asked. "How did you bear it?"
"It hurt," he admitted. "But I've borne pain before. And…I wanted to see my home again. I wanted to feel my own sun, smell my own air, taste the foods that I have not tasted since I was young. It mattered, so I simply did what I had to do."
She looked around her and thought about touching live magic or working with live magic. She hadn't really considered that she might be able to do anything as vast as rebuilding a world; the more of herself she stripped away, the more pain life caused her.
And yet Baanraak—this Baanraak, anyway—had changed for the better, and she thought it was this place and the fact that he had created it that had changed him. She felt the beginnings of emotion in him, and the faintest stirrings of hope. And things so rare and beautiful that she dared not even give them names. They were all buds, barely breaking the surface, certainly tender and easily trampled and destroyed.
If only Baanraak didn't have to worry about dying, he might be able to rebuild this world and somehow find his way back to being the Baanraak he would have been if the dark gods had never touched him.
He needed to be immortal, she thought, and at the same instant, she thought, I know how to do that.
"Have any of the dark gods ever…become true immortals?" she asked him.
"No," he said. "The resurrection rings wouldn't tolerate such a thing. The gold—" He looked at her, falling silent.
"We both wear gold laced with silver," she said.
He stared at her.
"Have you ever yearned for your soul?" she asked him.
He was quiet for a long time. He looked away from her, staring out over the wildlife-dotted plains. At last he said, "Of late, I have missed my mother," he said. "She died when my world died. And I know that…beyond…I would find her there, if I could only get there. But, soulless…" He took a deep breath, then continued. "Yes. I have longed for my soul."
"We can earn our souls," Molly said, and looking out at the world he had made, she thought she knew a way that they might do it. "We could become immortals—hang on to everything that is left of us, and rebuild on that. We could hunt down and destroy the Night Watch, because no one else could track them the way we can track them. But perhaps we could create, too. Perhaps we could be forces for life as well as for death."
He looked at her, his eyes strange and frightening.
"Or perhaps I speak too soon when I say 'we.' Maybe…I thought since you sought me out, since you brought me here, since you healed me…"
He took her hand in his. "From the first moment that our minds touched, I knew that you were a force for change. I felt something in you that gave me reason to hope—and hope is something I had turned away from long ago." He smiled a little. "Now I see where that hope might become more. Where it might become reality."
"You would fight with me? You would try this?"
"It will hurt. The pain the immortals live with is unlike anything you have ever experienced. And we would have, too, the pain of live magic, when we are at base dead things."
"I know," Molly said. "But I don't fear pain. Only oblivion."
"I'll fight with you. I'll create with you. If we do not earn our souls, it will not be because we did not try."
Molly smiled. And then she laughed softly. "What will we be, Baanraak? Will we be old gods? Will we be dark gods?"
Baanraak grinned. "We will be the gods who bring down the Night Watch. Whatever name there might be for that—that is what we'll be."
"Oh," Molly said. "We'll be heroes."
Baanraak stood up and looked out at the setting sun. "Go tell your sister that, won't you? Otherwise I fear she and that horde of immortals of hers will come after me with big guns and big magic and try to blast me into dust. And I haven't had the opportunity to be a hero in a very long time. I find I fancy the idea."
Cat Creek
In true Viking tradition, the new immortals sent June Bug out to sea in a beautiful, burning longship, arrayed in her finest clothes, bearing her silver sword and her silver shield.
The new immortals: Darlene and Betty Kay, Eric and Mayhem, and standing with them Molly the dark god, now made immortal, with pain in her eyes but an aura of hope that surrounded her, and holding her hand Baanraak—the first of the Baanraaks, and the only one to bear the burden of immortality—wearing for the moment a human seeming.
George had come, too, to see June Bug off. And so had Lauren and Jake.
They had to give her their Viking send-off on the green world Lauren had found because they were afraid of drawing attention anywhere nearer to Earth. But they would not deny her a send-off befitting a hero. When the ship sailed out of sight and even the last of the flames disappeared from view, they raised silver goblets to her, and each toasted her journey to the Hall of Heroes in silence.
Then Pete said, "May you find love waiting on the other side," and Thor said, "May you find adventures worthy of a hero." Darlene wiped at her eyes with the back of one hand and said, "I wish I'd been strong enough to do what you did. And…I hope they have cigars over there, and that no one minds if you smoke."
Some of the Sentinels chuckled, and Betty Kay said, "I'm going to miss her."
They stood a while longer in silence, watching the water, watching the thread of smoke on the horizon fade away to nothing.
Then Lauren kissed Pete and handed Jake to him. She walked down to the water's edge and waded in. When she was waist-deep, she took a letter that she had written to Brian, and read it out loud.
"I love you," she read. "And I will love you forever. And someday—perhaps even some day very soon—I'll rejoin you. "You told me I was free to love again. Now I have found someone to love, and though I'm afraid, every day, of where this love might lead me and of what the future holds, still I am going to go on.
"Jake will forever hold you in his heart as his father, and I will forever hold you in my heart as my first and greatest love.
"Give me your blessing until we meet again.
"Your Laurie."
She sealed the letter in a bottle and tossed the bottle out into the waves. And then she turned back to see her friends, her supporters, the people who believed in her, standing on the shore watching her. And with them her dear friend and her new love, Pete.
Her heart skipped a beat, and she smiled at him, and he and Jake both waved to her.
She turned back to the sea, to where June Bug had vanished. I'll dare to live, she promised herself. I'll dare to love, and dare to fight, so that when I die my life will be a testament to the chances I took, and not to the chances I was afraid to take.
And she whispered, "Thank you, June Bug. Go find happiness. It's waiting there for you. I know it is."
Then she started back to shore.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to:
The fast turnaround crew, who bug-hunted with both vim AND vigor, and with lightnin
g speed found an astonishing array of typos, spellos, and continuity errors—Sheila Kelly, Kay House, James Milton, Jim & Valerie Mills, Linda Sprinkle, and Lazette & Russ Gifford. Between them, they dug out 497 mistakes that I missed, and got these errors back to me in typed, line-separated, database-sortable form in three days from the day they received a manuscript they'd never seen—and in some cases got them back in hours rather than days. Your comments were brilliant, your eyes were keen, and I am deeply grateful. You were wonderful.
The slow turnaround crew, who read long and deeply, sought out theme and story and the places where those two failed to meet, and brought the news back to me clearly and kindly, asking incisive questions and offering useful suggestions—Sheila Kelly again, BJ Steeves, Joshua Johnston, Krista Heiser, Jinx Kimmer, and David Stone. You pushed me to think harder about the story, the theme, what I wanted to do with this story and how I wanted to get there, and if, after all the revising and reworking, I have not answered your questions, the fault is mine alone. Thank you so much for your help; it made a world of difference.
