Memory of Fire

by Holly Lisle

  She didn't let herself look too closely at her actions—she felt like two people, one who knew what she was doing and one who was clueless, and the only thing she could figure out was that someone had left the clueless part in charge of most of her life. Now she was getting hints that she'd been missing something—something big—and the part who knew what was going on wasn't telling, and the clueless part was scared to death to ask any questions because she knew she wasn't going to like the answers.

  On-the-Ball was thinking, "I just shoved a chair through a mirror into another world so monsters won't get into the house while we're sleeping," and Clueless was whistling loudly so as not to hear such frightening thoughts. While they fought it out with each other, Lauren tuned out both sides of her mind and listened instead to the voice of reason, which reminded her that her energetic two-year-old would be waking up and ready for action in a very short time. If she didn't get some sleep, he'd run all over her. So she pretended she hadn't seen anything out of the ordinary and went up to bed.

  Cat Creek

  "Eric? Sorry to call at this godforsaken hour, but we had another blip. A bad one this time."

  Eric MacAvery rolled over and stared at his alarm clock. Three-thirty in the morning. He sat up but didn't turn on the lights. Maybe he'd be able to go back to bed. "How bad?"

  "Every gate in the circle shimmied. From the size of the blip, we only have a few options, and most of them don't make sense. Either something came in from upworld—"

  "Not a chance."

  "—or something blew open a gate from downworld—"

  "Blew open a gate…?"

  "—or someone just blasted through a locked gate or ripped us a new one."

  "Shit." Eric rubbed his eyes and tucked the phone against his shoulder so he could talk and fish for clothes along the side of his bed at the same time. "You said 'blip.' You said 'shimmy.' To me, a 'blip' is a tiny event that goes away without doing anything, and 'shimmy' implies a wee fluctuation in the gate flow. They don't belong in the same sentence as 'blasted through' or 'blew open.'"

  Tom Watson, who was young and earnest and hadn't been doing night watch all that long, sounded chastened. "Well, maybe blip wasn't quite what I felt—and I guess the gates didn't exactly…shimmy. The Tubbses's gate crashed. George Mercer's gate is so wobbly he's already called Willie over to restructure it. The rest of them have pretty much gone back to normal now…as far as I can tell from reading the circle…but whatever hit was big. I was in the circle at the time, and oh, mama…"

  Eric had started swearing softly with "The Tubbses's gate crashed" and by the time Tom got to "oh, mama," he had pulled on the first pair of pants he found in the pile of acceptably used clothes and the first shirt and the first two socks, even though he could tell when he pulled them up that they didn't match, and he was fishing for shoes. "Directionals?"

  "Yes, I got…sort of…well. That gate opening hit me so hard I…got kind of muddled. I thought you put me on the night shift because it was so slow, and when everything happened, I…it took me a minute or two to get my head straight…. The hit came from in town. I'm sorry. I can't do better than that."

  "Not a circle gate."

  "No."

  "It's got to be related to the one yesterday."

  "Not really. I mean, yesterday's could still be natural gate-flux. We don't have any real proof that something took Molly McColl downworld. She might still show up. She's been a bit…flaky…since she moved to town."

  "Tom—" Eric located two work shoes. He hoped they were from a matching pair, but if they weren't, he'd live with it. People in small towns got used to the sheriff showing up looking like he just woke up and got dressed in the dark. Frequently he did. "You're at the watchpoint, right?"

  "Yes."

  "Stay put. Get back in the circle, keep your feelers out for any changes. I'm going to pick up Willie Locklear—I'm guessing he'll be either at George's place or on the way, and then I'll be right there. If you get any directionals at all…anything…mark them immediately. I don't care if they're weak, if you're not sure…I want no excuses. This is two gate disturbances in two days, and we have a woman missing. You got me?"

  "Yessir." Tom, when yelled at with sufficient volume, always got very polite. That never ceased to amaze Eric, whose reaction to the same stimulus was exactly the opposite.

  He slammed down the phone and ran out the door, not even bothering to lock the place up first. There was sheriff's business, after all, which in Cat Creek could generally be done at a walk, and sometimes even from a hammock. And then there was Sentinel business. And this was the latter.

  Willie was already at George's and hard at work when Eric skidded into the drive. George came out to the front porch when the headlights flashed across the front of the house, his bathrobe flapping around him like rags on a scarecrow—his skinny legs, knobby knees and bony feet in their floppy slippers looked oddly vulnerable. He peered near-sightedly at Eric through thick, rimless glasses, and at the look on Eric's face, said "I'll get him," and ran back inside without Eric having said a word.

  When Willie came out, he seemed to float on a private sea of calm. "Wasn't bad," he said, and saw Eric's face. He chuckled, an action that involved his whole body from white-bearded face to broad shoulders to ample belly. He ran one massive hand through still-thick white hair and said, "Tom got you all riled up, didn't he? That boy's been itching for some excitement since we brought him in—he got some flitters tonight, and my guess is he damn near shit his britches—"

  "More than flitters," Eric said, waving a hand. "Anyone reach you yet to let you know the Tubbses's gate went down?"

  "Crashed?"

  "So I'm told."

  "Well—that's pretty serious. Both good stable gates; George tends his like it was his own newborn baby, and I don't think Ernest and Nancine have ever had a crash…."

  "And Tom suggested that the rest of the circle had the shimmies, though he says everything seems to have leveled out now."

  "One crashed…one twisted…and the whole circle shaken…?"

  "Yes."

  Willie was quiet for a long time, but that was Willie. Eric had always figured thoughts took a long time to bore through hair and beard and that placid wall of calm to the place where work actually got done. Finally, Willie said, "I was wrong then," though he still maintained his aura of unshakable self-assuredness. He was the oldest of the Sentinels—at seventy, he'd seen more of everything than the rest of them, and he'd always said it was his lot in life to be the voice of serenity when everyone else panicked. "Eric, I reckon you need to get everyone together."

  "George can call them and have them meet us at the watchpoint. I want both of us to get out there right away."

  George looked at Eric. Eric nodded.

  George, wide-eyed, said, "I'll start calling everyone then," and hurried off the porch.

  Eric watched him go, thoughtful.

  "Still…might find out something interesting by paying everyone a surprise visit," Willie offered.

  Eric gave him a long sideways look. "Might. And might not find a damn thing, and then we've lost anything we could hope to get from the circle while the disturbance is still fresh."

  Willie set his bag of tools on the porch and rubbed his back thoughtfully.

  "You hurt it?"

  Willie glanced at him, realized what he was doing, and seemed a little surprised. "The back? Just the price of age, son. The price of age." He picked up his tools again and hefted them with the ease of long practice. "You're thinking it might be one of us, though, aren't you?"

  "Hell, Willie, you know I have to think that. But if we have somebody who's turned, I'll find him soon enough. If we have something breaking through from Oria, though, or some sort of…rogue…or, God, I don't even know what my worst nightmare is here. What I'm saying is, we at least need to find out right now what this isn't. When we've narrowed down our possibilities, we'll figure out what the hell it is."

  "Let's go then."
/>
  NEW FLU HITS HARD

  By Lisa Bannister, Staff Writer

  (Richmond County Daily Journal, Rockingham, NC)

  Flu patients between the ages of twenty and forty have filled Richmond Memorial Hospital to overflowing, in what RMH spokesman Rick Press called "the worst outbreak of influenza we've seen in Richmond County since 1918." County doctors are recommending that anyone who has not had a flu shot this year should have one immediately. Richmond County doctors all agree that they've seen a sudden sharp rise in new flu cases, and that these new cases are severe. Symptoms include sudden headaches and intense body aches followed by fevers that run as high as 105°, and respiratory symptoms that begin with sneezing, coughing, and difficulty breathing.

  "It's the respiratory distress that's the big thing with this new flu," states Dr. Wilson Tilley, chief of staff at Richmond Memorial. "People's lungs fill up very fast with it; one minute they're coughing and wheezing and the next they're drowning. And this isn't hitting the usual flu sector—the very old and the very young. Our sickest patients are people in their twenties and thirties."

  Dr. Tilley and other area doctors recommend…. (continued on page B-8)

  Cat Creek

  By the time the last arrivals hid their cars behind Nancine Tubbs's flower shop, Daisies and Dahlias, the scene had the look of an old Abbott and Costello routine. What it lacked, Eric thought, was the humor. No matter how he ran this through his mind, it still came out reading disaster. He'd gotten a call the previous night from June Bug Tate, telling him that unexpected motion had hit the circle—she read it as a quick gate-open-and-close. Nothing big, she said, and it might have been a natural gate that just happened to intersect the circle—but Eric had always known that the size of the problem didn't necessarily have anything to do with the size of the ripples it caused. It was like…stealth submarines and Great White sharks, he thought. They didn't leave much of a wake, but they packed a hell of a punch.

  And midway through the day, someone had gone looking for Molly McColl and hadn't found her. The door to her trailer had been open, and all her lights were on, and the lady had called, sounding kind of nervous. So Eric had done a walk-through of the trailer, noticing that nothing seemed disturbed and nothing seemed to be missing. Except, of course, for Molly. He'd tried the speed-dial numbers on her phone and discovered that her priorities in life were delivered pizza, delivered Chinese food, and delivered fried chicken, all from up in Laurinburg, and that she didn't have a single personal number in the bunch. That seemed scary to him.

  He'd known the girl to look at her, but in a town of just over a thousand he would have had to be either stupid or remiss not to have known her name and face. His comfortable assurance that he was on top of things in Cat Creek got a bad shaking when he had to look deeper than the surface, though. He realized he had no idea what she did for a living, who her friends were, who her family was, or how to find anyone who might be able to clear things up for him.

  He couldn't say for sure that something bad had happened to her—his gut told him she'd run into trouble, but she did have a reputation for eccentricity. For being a loner. People in the town didn't know her and didn't seem to care to, but in the three years she'd lived in the town, he'd never heard anyone say anything bad about her. No one seemed to say much about her at all.

  He'd worked on her disappearance all day because it was the only thing happening all day. When Pete Stark, his lone deputy, came in to relieve him, he didn't have much to give him. And of course he couldn't give Pete the truth, or what he suspected to be the truth—that the girl had either gone through to Oria on her own or been kidnapped there. The Sentinels weren't the business of the Sheriff's Department. Couldn't be, if anyone cared to have the planet continue in its more-or-less-healthy rotation.

  He'd kept his suspicions to himself. But the girl's trailer was neat. Carefully kept up, bed made, laundry in a hamper, no mess in the kitchen, food carefully stored in the tiny pantry, spices in alphabetical order. No sign of struggle.

  And the door left unlocked, and unlatched, which didn't fit in his book with the sort of person who took the time to put Chives ahead of Cinnamon and behind Cayenne. The door had looked closed from a distance, the woman who called in the report had said, but when she went up to it to knock, it had just been hanging open. She'd poked her head in and yelled when no one answered her knock, then peeked in to see if there was a body on the floor, but she hadn't actually stepped inside. To her, that open door had said trouble.

  To Eric, too. And two troubles within the span of two days that touched on—perhaps threatened—the Sentinels and their work was too much of a coincidence for Eric to buy. They would run the circle—check for directionals, check for ties or leaks or anchors, wait for anything that didn't belong there to move through the flow again. They would find the problem, he told himself, and then they would correct it. The beginning of the end would not fall on his watch.

  CHAPTER 3

  Copper House, Ballahara

  THROUGH THE WINDOW GRILLE of her lovely prison, Molly watched the start of her second day in this new world. Her captors had appeared before first light and laid out clothing for her and brought her a hearty meal. She got up then, which seemed to surprise them; her years in the military had left her used to early mornings. She tried out the tub, put on the complicated clothing, and then she waited.

  Mostly, she found herself waiting for the other shoe to drop. She grew more certain with every passing minute that when it did, it was going to be elephantine.

  They'd barred the grand doors from the outside. She'd given both the front one and the back one a solid shove, and nothing short of dynamite would move either of them. They felt like they weighed a ton apiece, and she thought that in all fairness, if they were of solid metal and as thick as they appeared—she'd looked through the gap between door and frame and estimated thickness—they could easily weigh twice or three times that. The hinges were on the outside, of course; no sense designing a prison and leaving the prisoner even the flimsiest of keys. Had she been able to pull the hinge pins, she thought her luck would have been to crush herself when the door fell free on top of her, so she was probably fortunate that she couldn't get at them. But she hated being in a position where all she could do was wait.

  Her captors had given her all of the day before to rest and eat and wander about in her cage, but she didn't believe they would keep her waiting much longer. They would be impatient to start seeing returns on their considerable investment—they would want her to start healing their sick, making their lame to walk, making their blind to see.

  Her lot in life was to never be able to escape the sick and the dying. Her bitterly resented talent had scarred and maimed and twisted every facet of her existence from childhood on. She felt the pain of others as if it was her own—she hadn't been able to walk through a grocery store without getting the by-blast of every arthritis twinge and groin pull and throbbing hernia and creeping cancer that came down the aisle. All her life, she'd been a magnet for everyone else's agony—and when she discovered that she could touch the sufferer and take the agony into her own body and thus relieve them both of it, things got worse instead of better.

  When she learned how to eat death, she also learned that she had a limited appetite, but that death spread an endless banquet. Her body would only take so much—she could help one person who was dying, or a few who were terribly sick, or many who were merely ill, but when she reached her limit, she collapsed. She couldn't move again until her body did whatever it did with the horror it had swallowed. She lay where she fell, wracked with pain, poisoned by death not her own, for hours on top of hours, until her body gradually washed the stranger-death out of her and sent it…elsewhere.

  She had always felt the pain of others—Jimmy and Betty McColl, her adoptive parents, had wearied themselves of taking her to the doctor for sudden fits of screaming and vomiting and diarrhea before she was even old enough to speak. By the time she was six, they h
ad debated for the thousandth time giving her to a children's home—but they kept her, in the same way and with the same grudging spirit that they kept the puppy they got from the pound to play with her, the puppy that turned out to be too nervous and stupid to be housebroken.

  Then, when she was seven, everything changed. She had felt the nightmare pain of the old woman sitting next to her on the pew in church. She doubled over in agony but kept quiet, because by the age of seven she had learned that there were worse things than sharing the suffering of those nearby. Screaming in church was worse, because the pain and the humiliation that brought her came when she got home, where no strangers could see how furiously her adoptive parents punished her.

  So instead of crying out, she had rested her hand on the old woman's hand, and she had wished the woman's pain would stop—had thought she would do anything to make that pain stop. And the pain and the death that were devouring the old woman had listened. They poured into Molly's young body through the old woman's hand—heart failure and kidney failure and arthritis and inoperable stomach cancer. Molly didn't remember what happened right after that; her adoptive parents told her later that she had turned the most terrible shade of gray and fainted. The old woman, they said, stood up shouting, "I've been healed, I've been healed," and ran from the church.