by Holly Lisle
And that was why she'd had to go through the mirror. Why she couldn't wait, why she didn't dare question. And this was the thing she had been seeking all her life, wandering from place to place and job to job, growing ever more lost and ever more hopeless. This—this place on the other side of the mirror—had been her destination all along.
The odd images that touching the mirror that first time had stirred suddenly fell into focus in her mind. The laughing voices had been friends of hers from this world whom she had liked a great deal once upon a time. The woman in the white, flowered dress was her own mother, whom Lauren had never before recalled having looked so beautiful or so young. That flickering green lightning…magic itself. Her magic.
And other memories flooded her, too. Her father when he was actually happy and idealistic and full of hope. And the way she had seen herself then—as someone with a destiny, a plan, a place in the world. She'd lived without any of those things—destiny, plan, or place—for most of the past twenty-five years. She had been as lost in her life as a rudderless boat in a typhoon, and her hopeless, confused wandering had all been for nothing, because she'd been living a lie. A huge, vile lie that felt like the rape of her own life. Why had her parents crushed her this way?
The reason why they had done this to her…
She couldn't remember, but it had to be in there—in with all her newly found memories.
The reason why they had done this to her…
She fought through everything she could call up from the dark recesses of her mind, chased down every fleeting newly released image of her parents, of magic, of Oria. She hunted, she rummaged, she sought with desperation. It was important, it was something that mattered so much she had given up who she was and what she loved for it.
The reason why they had done this to her…
Was gone.
And that, she discovered, was the most hellish betrayal of all. There had been a reason. It had been important. Frightening to a ten-year-old girl who knew when her parents told her what they had to do that she could stop them. Instead, she had agreed to this horror, had agreed to have this awful thing done to her. She had agreed to let her parents remove her memories and bar her from her own magic because they had promised her when it was over, she would get her memories back, and with it, her destiny, her place…and the Plan. The thing her parents had been working on, the thing that was so important they hid the real Lauren inside a shell of herself for twenty-five years.
And the Plan wasn't there.
Lauren stood in the center of a boarded-up, freezing house in the middle of a world that she had once known as well as she knew Earth, clutching her son in one arm and a picnic basket in the other, and she wept—tears of rage and grief and loss and hurt and betrayal. If her parents hadn't been dead already, she could have killed them for what they had done to her. She tipped her head back and howled. Her breath clouded around her, and Jake patted her face, saying, "Mama…okay…Mama…okay…" and then, when he couldn't comfort her, Jake burst into tears of his own.
That stopped her more effectively than any slap to the face could have. She caught her breath, brought the tears to an end with a few hiccups, and put the basket down. Then she cuddled her son. "Jake, sweetheart…oh, baby…it's okay…it's okay…it's okay…" She rocked him back and forth, and he laid his head against her shoulder and snuffled, and after a moment she felt his little arm slip around the back of her neck and pat her in rhythm to their rocking.
"Okay…" he whispered. "…Mama okay."
They stood that way for a long time, holding each other, comforting each other. Jake, as usual, was the one who decided enough was enough. He lifted his head, looked in her eyes, and said, "Please…down."
She didn't want to let go of him yet, but she didn't want to cling, either. That she needed more comfort than he could give was a problem for her. She didn't wish to make it one for him. She'd need to let him get down and be two for a while, but she couldn't let him run until she checked the place out.
"Hang on," she said. "We'll walk through it together, and I'll see if there's someplace here that I can let you play."
"Hang on," he muttered. "Hang on." One of his least favorite commands—she occasionally heard him telling it to the big white stuffed bunny just before the bunny ended up someplace unpleasant. She had no doubt what he was thinking of her at that moment. So she hurried.
The place was dusty and cobwebby, but in remarkably good shape. If it hadn't been used since her parents had done whatever they did to her, it was in impossibly good shape. She did a quick tour; the house included the room that had served as her parents' bedroom when they had been here—which, oddly, was the room she had stepped through the mirror into, and it still held the chair she'd shoved through the night before—her bedroom, a very primitive indoor bathroom, and a central room that would serve as kitchen, living room, dining room, and family room all at once. A huge black cast-iron woodstove dominated the center of the main room; a small trestle table and two benches sat to one side of it near the front door, and a gaggle of rocking chairs clustered around a rag rug on the other side. She saw a washtub and drying rack hanging on the wall behind the stove, a hand-cranked clothes wringer bolted to one end of a counter that ran the length of the room and had been designed as an all-purpose utility area. The house had indoor running water of a sort—a hand-pumped well had been brought up through the counter. When the pipes thawed, Lauren thought, if the years of disuse hadn't destroyed the pump, she could probably pump a glass of water for herself and Jake. She remembered the water in this house tasting wonderful. She saw nothing that seemed out of place and nothing that seemed dangerous.
Jake said, "Please…down," again, this time more loudly and less accommodatingly. He was getting squirmy. She dusted off one of the rocking chairs with the sleeve of her coat and put him down on it, and said "Rock, rock."
As she looked for cleaning supplies, she heard the reassuring squeak, squeak of Jake rocking. "Rock…rock…the baby," he crooned. "Rock…rock…the baby…"
The windows were boarded shut, which made the place pretty dark. Light was coming in from somewhere, though. She looked around. It was diffuse light, really dim—it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. She frowned. If it were just a bit brighter, she'd be able to locate the source, she thought. She wanted it to be brighter.
And suddenly it was. She yelped and looked around the room to see if Jake had done something, but Jake was still rocking happily and singing to himself. The room was as bright and sunny as if she were standing in a meadow at midday. And she still couldn't figure out the source of the light.
She frowned, and a bit more memory trickled back.
Wanting was a key.
She wanted the light to be dimmer. And when she wanted it so, it was.
Right. The magic. It ran on desire. Will. Focused intent.
I want it to be nice and warm in here, she thought. Take-off-your-coat-and-stay-a-while warm.
And it was.
Oh, yeah.
She slipped off her coat and dropped it on the trestle table.
"Rock…rock…the baby…" Jake sang. The chair squeaked. She thought, I want this place to be clean inside, and she imagined it clean.
The dust and the cobwebs vanished, the floor and the table and the rocking chairs acquired a smooth, hand-rubbed sheen, and the whole place smelled just slightly of furniture wax and dried lavender. Perfect.
Then she thought, I want it prettier in here. She imagined the spacious, warm, welcoming interior she'd seen on the front cover of a log-home magazine—broad beams, brilliantly white ceilings, soft, deep, tan carpets, a curving log staircase that had been a miracle of the joiner's art, massive overstuffed furniture that had still fit the interior scale of the place, a beautiful brass-and-glass chandelier, a huge and welcoming fireplace with a merry fire burning behind the spark screen. Fire and all.
And there it was.
Behind her, Jake whispered, "Wo-o-o-o-ow!"
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She turned in circles, thrilled and awed and full of admiration for her handiwork. Perfect.
Then she heard a soft thump. And Jake said, "Oh, Jake!" in a voice that was half-mournful and half-chastising, and she thought, Torn? Broken? Or spilled? And turned to see what sort of mess he'd made. And found it was none of the above.
Jake was squatting nose to nose with a pale blue-green creature with yellow eyes the size of plums. The creature itself couldn't have been much bigger than an average cocker spaniel, but what it lacked in size it made up for in ugliness. Ratty, tangled hair stood up from its low forehead in a crest that ran in a stripe down the back of its otherwise bald skull to the base of its neck. Its skin hung in wrinkles and wattles and tags, its thin shoulders hunched forward and its knobby spine curved in a perpetual stoop. It wore, however, an elegant wool tunic and pants and beautiful beaded boots with thick leather soles; the phrase "shoes on a pig" ran through her mind before she could stop it.
It licked its lips and glanced from Jake to her. "Cute kid, Lauren," it said, and the voice could have belonged to Orson Welles.
She froze, caught between a scream and bewilderment, and stared at the thing in the middle of her floor, trying to place it…him…Yes. Him.
"Embar?" she whispered.
"Who else?" Into her stunned silence, he gave the magically redecorated room a single wary glance and shook his head. "You want to watch this sort of thing, Lauren. The feedback can be a bitch. Or have you forgotten? And what the hell took you so long to get back here?"
* * *
They sat behind closed doors in the converted upstairs of the Daisies and Dahlias Florist—fifteen men and women perched on metal folding chairs in a semicircle, with their gateweaver sitting half in and half out of the gate-mirror that ran from floor to ceiling on the north wall and glowed with green fire. They all held hands as if they were part of some old spiritualist cult in the midst of a séance; they all had their eyes tightly closed. All of them glowed faintly with a green light. They waited and watched with senses other than their eyes—had been waiting and watching for hours. From time to time one of them would get up to go to the bathroom; the choreographed ritual that accompanied this looked like a cross between Musical Chairs and Blind Man's Bluff with, perhaps, a bit of London Bridge is Falling Down thrown in for good measure.
In the room with its walls lined with florist's foam and boxes of vases and plastic-wrapped bundles of silk flowers, with its single flat file and its single old oak worktable shoved beside the mirror, they held their silence, and the air curled thick around them, heavy with weariness and fear and expectation.
Then Eric felt the flick as an unauthorized gate opened and closed again far too quickly. He had only the vaguest impression of direction, but he let go of the hands he held, opened his eyes, and quickly drew an arrow on the floor with chalk. He opened his eyes and noted that others among the waiting Sentinels were also marking their impressions.
"Fairly close," Willie said.
"Not as strong as I'd expected," June Bug Tate said.
Tom's expression grew defensive. "Wasn't anything like that when the last one came through. This one you barely felt. The last one…it threw me clean out of the mirror. Knocked me on my ass." He flushed. "Pardon my French," he said in quick apology to the women present.
June "June Bug" Tate, who, now in her late sixties, had been smoking cigars since she was twelve, glanced around the circle at the four other women there and rolled her eyes. "We've all of us heard the word 'ass' before, boy. We all even have one. Do us the favor of not apologizing."
Her sister Bethellen, Tom's mother, flushed, and said, "I taught you better than that," and Louisa, the other Tate sister, just snorted and pursed her lips in disapproval. Nancine giggled, but that was Nancine's usual response. Debora Bathingsgate rolled her eyes but said nothing.
Tom sighed.
Eric had a sheet of paper out and was adding up all the angles of his people's directionals and averaging them for an approximate vector. "First we're going to need a reading from a second location so that the next time a blip goes through we can triangulate the position. The second thing we're going to need is ranging. I don't remember offhand; who else besides me and Willie has successfully ranged a target before?"
To the people who indicated previous success in this area, he said, "Then you're also on the short list for off-site watch until we find out what's going on here." He leaned forward and looked from one grim face to the next. "We don't know what we're dealing with. We don't know if it's tied in with the disappearance of Molly McColl. I'll remind you that you don't prepare for what the enemy might do, but for what he can do. If you don't know who the enemy is, you must prepare for what any enemy can do—because the worst one possible might be the one you have to face. With that in mind, remember that more than just your own life is on the line here. Everyone and everything you love lies in your hands, and if you falter, they fall. Until and unless we find proof to the contrary, the enemy has made his opening gambit in a covert operation, and we have been fortunate enough to intercept early signs. But right now the enemy knows everything, and we know nothing. Therefore, we are at war. You will keep that foremost in your minds and conduct yourselves appropriately."
He rose, and the rest of the Sentinels rose with him. "Who has the first watch, then?" Deever Duncan asked.
"You rested?" Eric asked.
Deever yawned and stretched, then straightened his shoulders. His combed-over hair sat across his bald spot like a greased spider, his paunch wobbled, and the bags under his eyes stood out clearly in the light of the room's single naked bulb. He looked weary, ten years older than the early forties that he actually was; he looked like if he slept for a week, that would only be a good start in the right direction. But he nodded. "Good as I'm going to get, I reckon."
"It's all yours."
"I can take it until two—I have to be into work by three." Deever owned Cat Creek's hardware store, and had a problem with getting reliable help. But the boy working for him at the moment looked promising.
Eric filled in the rest of the revised schedule quickly, and said, "Everybody go home. Or to work—whichever. Stay close to your phones. First one who hears anything calls the rest."
Willie waited to be last out so that he could walk with Eric. He was smiling faintly. "There's an upside to this, you know."
Eric arched an eyebrow. "I couldn't find one."
"We were all there when the gate opened and closed this time. So it looks like we don't have any traitors—and that's a relief."
Eric shook his head. "Doesn't clear a one of us, Willie. Not a single soul."
Willie glanced at him from under bushy gray brows, and said, "How not?"
"If the gatecrasher is human, then one of ours had to teach him or her how to open it. The fact that near about anyone can learn to open a gate doesn't mean anyone can teach it."
Willie said nothing while he gave that his due consideration. Finally, he said, "I don't see how any of 'em could be traitors—how any of 'em could sell their own race and their own world to the Orians."
"We don't know if the Orians are involved. Could be a traitor has taken up with refugee upworlders or another Sentinel nexus that's getting ready to run, could be we're dealing with outsiders who stumbled on a gate like the Heidelmann group put together back in the thirties. We don't know anything," Eric said. He jammed his hands into his pants pockets and walked with his head down, staring at the gravel his work shoes displaced as he crunched across the parking lot. "Except that the temptations could get to anyone after a while. Any one of us could break. Work law enforcement a few years, and you lose a lot of your faith in your fellow humans—and the faith you have in fellow humans who could be gods for nothing more than the price of their honor…that becomes real damn thin indeed."
"I do not envy you your cynicism, my friend. You might be right—but I have to believe in the triumph of good over evil in order to keep doing what I do."
Eric reached his car and opened the door. He braced a foot on the car's door frame and gave Willie a weary smile. "Believe all you want. Just be sure you watch your back."
