Memory of Fire

by Holly Lisle

  Lauren waited. He didn't say anything, and after a moment she said, "Well…?"

  "Look." Embar sighed, the sound oddly whispery and fragile, "Let's go looking for your parents' notes. I'll go through the walls and the floors and you can walk through the rooms. Knock on walls and look for hidden doors and panels and secret compartments in built-in shelves and cabinets. And while we're doing that, I'll see if I can figure out how to put all these other things that you need to know."

  She felt a chill coming off him, a grim, unhappy dampness of the mind, like a miserable, icy, rainy day carrying itself on entirely within the confines of her skull. "It's bad news, isn't it?"

  He nodded. "But old bad news," he said, his expression faintly hopeful.

  "DOWN!" Jake had tired of waiting patiently; he began kicking vigorously.

  Lauren put him down and he ran to Embar and put his hand through the goroth's torso. He shrieked and pulled his hand back, then did it again. This time he laughed.

  Embar arched a scraggly eyebrow at him.

  Lauren said, "Does that hurt you?"

  "No. Tingles a bit." Jake had pulled his hand back again, however, and was staring thoughtfully at the goroth. Without another word, he walked back to Lauren's side and sat at her feet. "Not a problem, really. I simply convinced him he doesn't want to do that anymore."

  "To my knowledge, no one has ever successfully convinced Jake to do anything he didn't already want to do."

  "Gods' boiled balls, you have forgotten a lot." Embar shook his head sadly. "This is basic, basic stuff. Gates, Lauren. The natural gates are constantly opening and closing, and the force that keeps all the universes alive flows through them. Inspiration flows from downworld to upworld; energy flows from upworld to downworld."

  Lauren frowned. "I don't get it."

  "When you—when anyone—travels through a gate to your downworld, you become a wizard. You can affect almost anything physical and use the energy of the downworld to do magic. Like you did in Oria. But when you travel upworld, you can't affect the physical in any but the weakest of ways. No magical spells, not even much in the way of moving physical objects." To demonstrate, he walked over to a toy truck Jake had left on the foyer floor. He tried to pick it up, and Lauren could see him struggling. After a moment, the truck's rear wheels lifted off the ground. He shoved, and the truck slowly moved forward a few inches. "You see what I mean. But in your upworld, you have other strengths. You can affect the mental and the spiritual. You become a…a muse, for lack of a better word in your language. You whisper directly into the souls of those you contact. You can do it while they see you, or if you choose, while they can't." To demonstrate, he faded to invisibility. "This comes in handy from time to time," he said. His voice washed away to the faintest of whispers. "It's also takes less effort."

  "But it's unnerving."

  He reappeared like washes of watercolor poured into an Embar-shaped jar. "Unnerving, yes. Useful, also yes. I convinced Jake that he didn't want to stick his hand through me anymore, and that sitting on the floor playing quietly would be a lot of fun."

  "Well, it's a nice trick." She said, "I wish I could do it. But it's also beside the point. Let's get back to what you wanted to tell me. I don't like to have things sugarcoated. Why don't you give me the old bad news now so that I don't have the dread of it hanging over my head while we search? Then we'll go through the house and find my parents' notes. And if you think of anything else I need to know, tell me as you think of it."

  Embar sighed. "You were an impatient child, too." He shrugged. "All right. The bad news, without sugarcoating. Your parents were murdered. My friends and I think one of the Sentinels killed them, or at least that the Sentinels were involved in covering up the cause of their deaths." He stared at her, the stance of his body and the defiance in his eyes telling her that he expected a scene; that he expected her behavior to prove him right in wanting to dance around his news and soften the blow.

  Lauren had no intention of falling to pieces. However, she didn't believe him either. "Bullshit. My parents died in a car accident; their brakes failed and an eighteen-wheeler rolled over them."

  "Their brake lines were cut. We came in through their secret gate after they didn't return to Oria when they told us they would and found out they were dead; my friends and I investigated everything we could to discover why they had died and who was responsible."

  Lauren sat down on the floor beside Jake, who was still uncharacteristically quiet. "Surely someone would have noticed a cut brake line."

  "Someone surely did. But if the person who was supposed to notice was in on the murder, he wouldn't say anything about it. Right?"

  "Who, then? Who did this, and why?"

  "I don't know that. We couldn't find out anything that pointed us in the direction of who. But I do know that you don't dare trust anyone in this town. Not anyone. Don't let an old friend watch Jake for you, don't tell your next-door neighbor any of your secrets, don't say a word about any suspicions you have about your parents' deaths. Whoever killed your parents might still be around. If he knows you're looking for him, he might come after you. You and Jake."

  Lauren shivered.

  Embar was suddenly staring past her. "Trouble," he said flatly, and faded out of sight. "I hope to the gods you're a good liar."

  Lauren saw the reflection of a man in a tan uniform with a silver six-pointed star pinned to his chest at the same time she heard his heavy footsteps crossing the porch. He looked familiar—solid, powerful, with dark hair and a plain, honest, tired face that she was sure she knew. And then she realized she was looking at Eric MacAvery, who had been two years behind her in school. So he was with the Sheriff's Department. That was the other side of the law from the one she would have expected him to end up on.

  She turned as he tapped on the door; she nodded and rose and crossed the foyer to greet him, and on his badge she could read the word "Sheriff." So he wasn't merely with the department; he was in charge. More surprise, that. Last she'd heard, old Paulie Darnell had still been in office.

  She opened the door and leaned against the frame. "Eric MacAvery," she said, and gave him a friendly smile. "Didn't have any idea you'd become the sheriff."

  He was studying her face with some puzzlement. "Been in office going on three years now," he said, and suddenly surprise replaced the uncertainty. "Lauren Hotchkiss?"

  "Lauren Dane now, but yes—that's me."

  "Lord have mercy. I would never have recognized you."

  She smiled. "I spent all those years since I left remaking myself."

  "I always thought you were pretty good to start with." In his eyes she saw frank approval, but that clouded quickly, replaced by the worry that had been clear on his face when he walked up to the door. "I didn't know you'd moved back to town, and sure didn't know you folks were the ones who bought your parents' old house. Any case…may I speak with you and your husband for a few minutes?"

  "My husband's dead," she said, getting those hated words out of her mouth without stumbling over them. "You can talk to me. You want to come in out of the cold?"

  He nodded. "I appreciate that."

  He stepped across the threshold, and his eyes were moving—quick, intense glances into the living room, the parlor, down the hall to the mirror. He glanced into the parlor again, and she realized at the same moment that Jake had disappeared; in the next instant, Eric was giving a second long, hard look at the mirror. "One of your neighbors thought she saw a man breaking into your house," he said, but his glance kept drifting from her face to that mirror. "I got the call about five minutes ago."

  Where was Jake, she thought, and glanced in the parlor, and then in the living room. "Breaking in," she asked in a distracted tone.

  "Dark shape at the back door, your neighbor said. Hard to see through the bushes, she said, but she thought I ought to check it out." He smiled a little. "Marcelle may not be the most reliable soul, but we've had a missing person the last two days, so I'm being very s
erious about any calls I get—even from the ones who are prone to see dancing elephants, if you know what I mean."

  Lauren said, "I haven't heard anything." Where was Jake? Where was Jake? She hadn't heard Jake go up the stairs, she hadn't felt the mirror-gate open, he wasn't in the parlor, he wasn't in the living room. That left the kitchen.

  In confirmation, she heard Jake say, "Play, doggie! Hi, doggie." Eric jumped just a bit and looked toward the kitchen. At that instant, the kitchen erupted with an incredible racket, as Jake began to pound on pots and pans with a metal spoon while singing at the top of his lungs. "Spi-i-i-i-i-i-der!…Spou-ou-ou-out!…Rai-ai-ain!…OUT!"

  "My son," she yelled over the racket, and hurried to the kitchen. "Part of the reason I'm afraid I couldn't have heard much of anything."

  Eric followed her, nodding, a bemused smile on his face. "I reckon you could have had the elephant parade with hundred-piece marching band going through your attic and you wouldn't have noticed," he yelled back, and Lauren pulled the spoon from Jake's hand. Jake shrieked with instant affronted fury and yelled, "Foooon! Foooon!"

  "You can't have the spoon right now. I'm talking to someone." Jake gave Sheriff MacAvery a wary look, rose with two-year-old gracelessness, and moved behind her legs. "Say hi, Jake," she told him.

  He studied Eric for another moment, then waved his fingers and said, "Hi." He did not move out from behind her legs.

  "I thought I ought to look around, with your permission," Eric said.

  "Hi," Jake said again, a bit louder.

  "Hi," Eric answered. He grinned at Jake and waved, and Jake waved back. "How old is he?"

  "He's two. He's very two."

  "He's really cute."

  "Thank you. He's…busy." She considered what Eric had asked her, and as she did, more old memories shook loose. Eric's father had been a friend of her parents, back when she was seven or eight. A good friend, she guessed, because he'd come over to this house all the time. And he had been, she realized, a Sentinel. She remembered snatches of conversation between her parents regarding James "Mac" MacAvery. She couldn't recall the content of those conversations, but she could recall them laughing about Mac and talking about gates in the same breath. Those memories and Eric's fascination with the mirror-gate cemented her suspicion of his sudden arrival at her front door. His presence was somehow related to her use of the gate, and maybe to what had happened to her house in Oria.

  She'd let him look around the house if he wanted—she didn't have anything to hide. Yet. But she'd be damned if she'd let him look around without her supervision. "Go ahead," she said, managing to sound a little unsure. "I'll bring Jake and come with you."

  "I'd rather you stayed put. If I run into someone—"

  "You have a gun," she interrupted. "If a man has broken into my house, I don't want him to show up down here with us while you're up in the attic."

  He nodded, watching her—and she saw her own suspicion reflected in his eyes. Don't trust anyone, Embar had said. Eric seemed to have taken a similar admonition to heart. "All right, then. But stay well back," he told her. "I don't want either of you in the line of fire."

  They went through the house quickly, but Lauren noticed that Eric was tensing at all the wrong spots. His body language told her he was completely at ease going through doors and around corners, but his shoulders drew in and his spine stiffened every time they passed a mirror. And he made sure he moved close to every single mirror in the house—feeling for the thrum, she realized. He wasn't obvious about it. If she hadn't discovered the mirror-gate in her foyer, she would never have suspected his movements.

  But she had, and she did. She'd made some sort of mistake, had triggered something, and here he was. Looking.

  But evidently not finding. When at last he said, "Everything seems fine. You might want to keep your doors and windows locked for a while—at least until we find out what happened to our missing person," she simply nodded and thanked him and walked him to the door and watched him drive away.

  "He didn't miss a thing," Embar said behind her, and Lauren jumped.

  "Doggie!" Jake yelled gleefully, and Lauren put him down.

  "No?"

  "He knows your parents' old gate is unlocked again. That's not good. He can't tell that you did it, which is lucky for you, and he doesn't even know if you're involved in anything going on here, but he knows something is going on here, and he thinks you're the one making it happen. And he's scared."

  Lauren stared at the ghostly goroth. "How could you possibly know all of that?"

  "I read him when he walked through me. He was distracted enough that he didn't notice me, even though he knows what to look for. Something very bad is happening, Lauren, and he thinks you're the person causing it. You and Jake need to be careful."

  "What I really need to do right now is understand what's going on."

  "Then I suggest we start by locating your parents' notes."

  CHAPTER 6

  Sentinel Nexus, Cat Creek

  "THE OLD HOTCHKISS GATE is open and in perfect order," Eric told the assembled Sentinels. "The Hotchkiss daughter…Lauren Dane now…has moved in. She and her baby went through the house with me. I get the feeling she's hiding something, but I didn't find anything that I could charge her with. No signs of Molly. No signs of anything unusual." He sighed. "She's still unpacking, though. It might be a different story when she gets her things out of those boxes. If we could take her through to Oria, we could check her for magic residue—see if she's the one who cast that spell we undid today. And speaking of that spell—" He turned to June Bug. "What's the news on the rebound breakthrough? We reverse it?"

  June Bug, he realized, was as gray-skinned and dead-eyed as a corpse. Very quietly, she said, "Things are a tangled mess in Oria. I'm still working on it."

  He chewed on the corner of his mouth for a moment, then said, "Keep at it; let me know when you get something." He turned to the rest of the Sentinels. "Any rebound from our work in Oria that we didn't completely buffer?"

  Granger sighed. "Unfortunately. We managed to rebound an approved subdivision construction project in Laurinburg all the way to oblivion."

  George Mercer, who'd arrived while Eric was at Lauren's, said, "One of my clients paged me about ten minutes ago; when I called him back, he was three inches from killing someone. Blue's Farm Estates was ready to roll—permits, money, backing, everything. And right after we got back, the whole damned thing fell through from top to bottom. Loan got canceled, backers dropped out, Billy started getting calls that his permits weren't in order and he was going to have to reapply but that any new application would have a hard time getting approved because he hadn't done things right the first time through. Except he had. He's chewing nails."

  "We crashed a subdivision?"

  "It makes sense," Granger said, "in a stupid sort of way. When I untangled the spells, the majority of them felt like nothing more than home redecorating. Path of the rebound's least resistance after we failed to buffer it all would be through home construction."

  "Lord have mercy," Eric whispered. "That lightning storm and the explosions and the kick of that thing were home redecorating?"

  "Spellcaster was a complete novice," Granger said flatly. "Too much energy, no direction, and everything but the kitchen sink tangled up in the middle of the mess." He managed a weak smile. "Or in this case, everything including the kitchen sink."

  "So how did a novice's home-redecorating spell precipitate a class-five rebound breakthrough?"

  "It didn't," June Bug said from over in her corner, where she still stared into the glowing hand mirror. "It doesn't look like we touched that at all."

  The whole world seemed to hang suspended in utter silence for one long, terrible moment. Three billion people, Eric thought, trying to grasp what he and the other Sentinels faced. Three billion lives would cease to exist in the next three months unless they could find the source of the breakthrough and reverse it. Roughly one out of every two people he kn
ew would die—and the roll of Life's dice being what it was, perhaps everyone he knew would die. Perhaps he would die. And unraveling that nastiness in Oria—that nastiness that had kicked the shit out of five veteran Sentinels—hadn't helped at all.

  "We cleared that source of magic completely?" he asked.

  "Yes. Now I'm trying to untangle a mess." June Bug's voice was cold and hard and angry.

  "What sort of a mess? What have you found?"

  "We have a source of massive magical expenditure southwest of us. Absolutely enormous. It's clear, unshielded, and has the marks of being done by a novice. But I can't find any sign of breakthrough from it, or even of rebound. On the other hand, I read very faint, very dark traces of an entirely different sort of magic with an iffy directional of north and west. This magic feels like the source of our trouble; it's small and tight and professionally neat. But it has also been very carefully shielded and disguised."