by Holly Lisle
Eric leaned back against the upholstery and closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. A headache was forming behind his eyeballs, the pressure building and squeezing like storm clouds growing inside his skull. He wasn't getting enough sleep. The sleep he was getting wasn't restful. The nightmares that plagued his dreams had moved out into the real world, and if he didn't figure out what was going on fast—and how to fix it at the same time—the world as he knew it was going to end.
And it was going to be his fault.
"One of them is one of us," Eric agreed. "If we can keep the one who is from finding out that we know that, we might be able to discover what he's done and undo it."
"Wait a minute." June Bug looked genuinely bewildered. "One of them is one of us? What makes you think there's more than one?"
"Couple of things. Lauren Dane has suddenly appeared in town; a gate is open in her house that was closed until she arrived; her parents betrayed the Sentinels; and no sooner did she get here than Molly McColl disappeared and the problem up in Rockingham started."
"Lauren never had a touch of ability with magic. I'm one of the ones who tested her, way back when. She was a magnet for trouble, even when she was little, but she couldn't do what either of her parents could. It was one of their biggest disappointments."
"What if she could?"
"I'm telling you, she couldn't. Children can't hide things like that."
"No. They can't. But if their parents are traitors, maybe they could."
June Bug said, "Her parents were in the good graces of the Sentinels back when I tested Lauren. It was right after we had all those gateweaver deaths, and we were looking for anyone to fill in the holes; we were ready to start training even small children if we could just find someone to back up Willie."
Eric gave her a meaningful look.
She frowned at him. "What?"
"You aren't a mother. Pretend you are. Pretend that gateweavers have started dying like fish in a poisoned stream, and you have a child with gateweaver potential—someone who, when she got older, would be able to blast open a gate that had been shut and sealed by one of the finest and most proficient gateweavers the Sentinels have ever had. You love your kid. You don't want anything to happen to her—and as long as no one knows she could become a gateweaver, nothing is likely to. What would you do?"
June Bug considered. "I'd find some way of hiding her potential. But you don't understand—adults can hide things from other adults, but children are lousy liars. She hadn't been tampered with. I would have known."
"From everything I have heard, her parents were brilliant. They could have been on the Northern Council; they could have been representatives to the European Council…they were way too good to have stayed here. But they stayed. Even after they were thrown out of the Sentinels they stayed."
"You're saying they tampered with her, that they did such a brilliant job of hiding it that I never saw a clue, that even back then they had ulterior motives for her, that she is here now to carry out some vast conspiratorial plan which they concocted a quarter century ago, and that she is in cahoots with one of our people…which would mean that we've had a traitor in our midst for at least twenty-five years."
"No. I'm saying that she's here, her gate is open, and as far as I can tell no one else had been in her house. And that since she's come back to town, things have been going wrong in a very big, very bad way." Eric's head felt like it truly might explode. He cupped his palms over his eyes and pressed inward, hoping to deaden the pain, but it didn't work. "I can't say anything more than that without talking to her. But I think I need to talk to her."
"And if she doesn't know anything about the Sentinels, or the gates, or the flow of magic between the worlds…?"
"Then she's going to think I've been doing drugs. Which is what I suspect she thought of me when she knew me before."
"Some truth in it back then."
Eric opened his eyes and turned the key in the ignition. "Some. I wasn't a perfect kid. I like to think I grew up to be a decent man, though."
June Bug laughed softly and patted his hand. "You've done all right." She said, "You know, I've been thinking about that spell of yours that went wrong in the circle today."
"Christ."
"It was bad. But I found myself almost wishing it would come to me."
Eric had been ready to put the car in gear, but he took his hand away from the shifter and looked at her. "You have something you want to tell someone, June Bug?"
"Not everyone. But someone, I reckon. Secrets you keep too long get pretty heavy to carry."
"You want to tell me, I'll treat it as privileged information. Won't tell anyone unless you ask me to."
He watched her turn and stare out the window, and watched her start fidgeting with the zipper of her jacket, running it up and down the little metal teeth. "I know. I want somebody to know. Dammit all, how long have you known me?"
"All my life."
"Ever wonder why I didn't get married?"
"Not really. Heard some young traveling salesman back in the Depression came calling on you, then disappeared back the way he'd come, and that you and your broken heart just never went looking for love again."
"That was one of my better stories."
Eric turned to find her looking straight at him, an odd defiance in her expression.
"If it's a story, it's a good one. Heard descriptions of the fella from some of the good ol' boys around town, heard about how your father went looking for him with a shotgun—heard all sorts of things."
"You tell a lie long enough and people become so convinced it's true that they start adding their own embellishments to it. There wasn't any salesman. Wasn't anyone. Not ever."
"That's sad."
June Bug pursed her lips and looked away. "Yes. Well. I've been in love a couple of times in my life. Just couldn't have the someone I wanted—not and live in Cat Creek and do my duty as a Sentinel."
Eric, as much in love with gossip as anyone, found himself fascinated by this confession. "Who?" he asked her, expecting the name of a Catholic priest from up in Laurinburg or some married man who had never given her the time of day.
She said, "Back when she was still alive, Marian Hotchkiss. The last few years, Charlise Tubbs."
She said it so softly he wasn't sure at first whether she'd actually said what he thought he heard, or whether his mind had just thrown those outrageous suggestions into the wind. "Lauren's mother and Nancine's older sister?"
"The same."
He considered that for a good long time, and all the implications of it. "Well," he said at last, and then couldn't think of anything else to say.
June Bug's sidelong glance sized him up. "Going to avoid me on the streets from now on?"
Eric smiled a little. "Not at all. Just a little funny thinking you and I might be looking at the same person and thinking the same sort of thoughts."
"Never acted on the way I felt," June Bug said after a bit. She stared out at the brown stubble that was all that remained of the summer's cotton crop. "Wasn't brought up that way—never thought it was right. Now…I sort of wish I had. If the world's going to end anyway, it would have been nice to…know. Just once."
* * *
Jake finally fell asleep for the night, and Lauren, with a sigh of relief, stretched out on her bed with her parents' notebook and a pen and tablet of her own. She was determined to make sense of the legacy they had left her—determined to unravel the tangled mess of her past and find the truth at the end of all those skeins of lies.
The notebook, when read front to back, made a bit more sense than it had when she'd started in the middle, and that at least reassured her. Her parents laid out their objective—to develop a method of running the magical energy from the world of Oria through Earth and into the world they referred to as Kerras without any loss or transmutation. She could make some sense of that—she knew where Earth was and she knew where Oria was, and she had some personal experience now with magic. Kerras remained a
blank to her, but it was a funny sort of blank. She could feel the tampered places inside of her mind every time she thought of it, and she realized that her memories regarding Kerras were intact behind the barrier that her parents had created. To reach those memories, she only had to find the tool that would remove the wall.
She kept reading, while the hour grew later and the quiet around her became so thick it had a darkness all its own. Beyond the yellow light that puddled around the lamp on her bedside table, outside with the cold, pale stars and the faint sheen of frost on moon-spun grass, she could feel the weight of movement, the unblinking intensity of watching eyes, the patient breath of someone or something that waited for her to fall into a trap; and she sought through the yellowed pages for the shape and the texture and the mechanism of the trap that had been set for her.
When she closed her eyes for a moment, she could feel the magic again—the rumbling storm in the distance, the ecstatic green lightning that she could ride from one world to the next. She could see Brian smiling at her from within the heart of the storm. He seemed so close that she could reach out and touch him—so close that she could walk across the chasm of death and bring him back with her. So close she could almost lose herself in his embrace.
She drifted in the comfort of that nearness, in the sense of safety it spun around her, until she could almost see his face…could almost hear his voice.
He stood close to her. Another step, a few more inches, just lean a little more, reach out her hand, hold her breath and try. She pushed, fought for that extra something that would take her to him, and as if she were in a dream, she stumbled. And caught herself.
And the illusion that he was with her shattered like sugar glass. She lurched upright, her eyes flying open, tears streaming down her cheeks. She was sobbing as she had the night she received the news of his death; in that moment, her loss was as fresh as it had been that very first day, and she almost couldn't breathe with the agony. He'd been pulled away from her a second time.
When she could catch her breath and dry her eyes without them immediately refilling with tears, she looked at his picture, which smiled at her from the nightstand. She had never spent a night where she could not see that picture. Not before his death. Not after it. She looked at him now, and he seemed farther away than he had ever been, as if she had somehow failed a test, and because of her failure even her memory of him was being stretched thin and pale and hollow.
His dress blues bore ribbons from tours in Germany and Italy and Saudi Arabia—testament to his love for his country; the jaunty angle of his flight cap told of his eternal optimism; and the warm reassurance in his eyes spoke of his love for her. He'd told her he'd been thinking of her when the picture was taken; that he'd wanted her to know that he loved her and that he would always be with her.
That smile and those eyes had seemed like a betrayal the night she received the news that he was dead.
It had been a stupid, pointless accident. He was on his way home, taking a bus from the base, and the bus skidded on a patch of black ice and rolled. It was a bad accident; the bus looked like a tin can run over by a truck. But everyone walked—or at least crawled—away from it, except for Brian. It could have been anyone else. It should have been anyone else. But it wasn't.
The doctor told her Brian had been killed instantly, that he'd experienced no pain; the base chaplain offered her what little comfort he could; Brian's friends cried and told her what a great guy he had been; the other Air Force wives came around with baked goods and hugs and tears.
The funeral was closed-casket, but she knew Brian was really in there. Really gone. She could feel it in the emptiness of the planet, in the hollowness of her heart, the way the world no longer had enough air in it. He was gone, his promise broken, and the dream that had hung so tantalizingly before her was a lie.
Then here, lying in her bed feeling something of him hanging close to her, feeling the magic that was her birthright flowing through her veins, she had thought perhaps his promise had meant something more than the words lovers tell each other to hold the darkness at bay—that perhaps she might have him back again, might cheat death, might truly win him from Death's grasp.
Death laughed instead. It was the ultimate reality, and Brian was gone forever, and she had been foolish to think that even magic might let her see him again, touch him again, make her even for one more moment the complete human being she had been only when he was in her life. The echoes she felt of him when she moved between the worlds were just that, weren't they? Echoes.
She wanted to scream and throw her parents' book across the room. She wanted, for just an instant, to die. She wanted to believe that Brian would be waiting for her on the other side of Death. She wanted to hate him for leaving her behind, alone, when after a lifetime of emptiness and loneliness she had finally found the love she had hungered for. If magic couldn't give him back to her, what good was it?
She got out of bed, shivering in the cold room, and walked to the window. The bare trees in front of her clawed at the moon; nothing soft or friendly about them now. The harsh white moon glared down at her. No sound echoed into the well of silence in which she stood.
She studied the darkness outside, the icy, fierce world beyond her little puddle of warmth and light. She glared up at the stars, spattered through the infinite velvet black of space, promising worlds and wonders beyond her reach. She thought, I never wanted much. My little bit of time and space, my small corner of order and love and direction, my few people to give my universe boundaries and borders and a reason for existing. Brian…Jake…me. I accepted the loss of my parents. I accepted that we three were all we had.
But I want him back, and I can feel him out there, and I won't just stand idly by and concede defeat if there is any way, any way, that I can undo the awful injustice that stole him from me.
She understood the Greek hero who strode into Hell to win back his love. She would have gladly faced the rigors of a quest that had a clear objective and clear rules. Go into Hell, take what you want, fight your way out, don't look back.
She could have done it. She would have.
Just tell me what to do.
That wouldn't happen—her parents' book mentioned nothing about raising the dead, summoning lost loves, giving flesh to ghosts. No simple quest, no clear-cut rules, nothing but a slippery feeling that she might be able to do…something.
She lifted her chin and pulled back her shoulders. "Might be able to do something." How many widows ever got even that much?
She kicked her feet into terry slippers and pulled on a thick robe and strode down the front stairs. She walked to the mirror in the foyer and stood there, glaring into it, willing the green fire to come to her. At first the mirror stayed dark; perhaps she was not hungry enough for the touch of the other world, or perhaps she was still too shaken by her dream of Brian. She touched the dark mirror, pressing her face close so that she could look into the black pools of her reflection's eyes. What knowledge had her parents hidden inside of her? What secrets lay buried within her scarred memory? And of what importance was her information to anyone else? According to Embar, her parents had died for it. Again according to him, there were people who would be willing to kill her for it.
She had to find out what it was.
She thought of Jake, wondering what would happen to him if someone came after her. Fear warred with anger—and in her reflection's eyes, the green fire crackled and faraway thunder rumbled.
She kept the fire at a distance this time—she did not summon it all the way to her. The gate remained closed, but when she held her palms in front of the mirror, she could feel the energy crackling through them, willing her to pull it closer, willing her to join with it. She wanted only to feel the magic, to listen to the storm running through her veins.
With the cold green fire thrumming against her fingertips, she closed her eyes and let herself simply feel the movement of the magic. At first she could feel nothing but the surge and crackl
e of the bit that brushed her palms—but with her eyes closed and her senses open, that began to change.
Almost as if while entranced by the touch of a single wave she slowly allowed herself to hear the crashing of the surf, she discovered that once she let herself experience the flow of the magical energy, she could see it as a web that spun all around her, lines of brighter energy spinning out in all directions. She might have been the tiny spider in the heart of a vast web, but the spiderwebs she knew had a delicate order, a coherent shape, a sense of direction and purpose. The web of magic that surrounded her had none of those things. The brighter areas all connected to each other, crossing from her world down into Oria without any apparent barrier, then stretching deeper than that. The web flowed upward, too—but the upward-reaching tendrils seemed stunted and shriveled and terrifying in a way she could neither define nor comprehend.
She concentrated on the one thing she wanted within the energy flow: She called to Brian.
