Memory of Fire

by Holly Lisle

  The power coursed beneath her fingertips, surging, swelling, humming. She communed with it, offering it everything she knew of Brian, everything she remembered and had ever loved. She asked the void and the vastness only one thing—If he is in there, if he still exists, if he still knows me and loves me as I know and love him…bring him to me.

  She was certain that if she stepped into the gate, she would be able to feel the answer more clearly; she had no doubt that, pouring directly through her flesh and nerves and sinews and blood, the magic would speak to her clearly. But while Jake slept upstairs in his bed, helpless and tiny, she would not separate herself from him even to that extent. She would read the answer of the magic only with her fingertips, only at a distance. And if the void returned no answer to her, in the morning she would take Jake and ask the question again.

  She waited, watching the magical storm in the mirror, feeling and somehow hearing in the silent creaking of the house the thunder of a tempest a world and a time away. She shivered from the cold, and perhaps from more than that.

  And suddenly in the glass, eyes that were not hers but were as familiar to her as her own looked out at her. No sound, no warning; one instant she saw only herself, and in the next, she saw Brian. She almost screamed.

  He rested his hands against the other side of the mirror as if he were looking at her through a regular window. He looked just as she remembered him; tall and lean and handsome, dressed in the black T-shirt and BDUs he'd worn the last time she saw him alive. He smiled at her, and she started to cry.

  "Brian."

  His lips moved, but she couldn't hear him.

  "I can't hear you," she said, and then she managed to read his lips. He was saying, "I can't hear you."

  The wall of a universe stood between them, but if she could pass through it, could he? The gate could work both ways. Left open, it would not close again until something went through in one direction or the other. If the something that came through was Brian…

  She pressed her hands into the surface of the mirror and recklessly willed the gate open.

  The storm was, for just an instant, upon her. The green fire flashed across the surface of the mirror and illuminated the room, the seductive thrum of magic begged her to immerse herself in its embrace. But this time she stepped back, beckoned Brian to come to her.

  The mirror bowed outward beneath his pressing hands, then poured away from him as he stepped through, almost as if he were rising out of a glass-smooth lake face first. The green fire died, and he was standing before her so close that she could feel the warmth of his skin, that she could smell his aftershave, so close that she could reach out and touch him. With a trembling hand, she did, and her fingers touched the warm, solid flesh of his forearm—the soft furring of golden hairs, the hard muscles, the smooth, perfect skin.

  Suddenly she couldn't breathe and couldn't see, her throat was so tight and her eyes so full of tears. "Oh, Brian," she whispered, and fell into his embrace, wrapping her arms around his neck and sobbing into his shirt. "Oh, God, Brian, you're really here." She felt the strength of the arms that wrapped around her, the hands that held her, the chest against which she pressed herself, and she tipped her head back to kiss him, as she had dreamed of kissing him, as she had yearned to kiss him. And he pulled away, slowly shaking his head no.

  "Brian," she whispered, stunned, aching.

  "I'm not your Brian," he told her in the voice that she would never forget, that she would never stop loving.

  "You are. You are. You're back with me now, and everything is going to be okay." But he was shaking his head. No.

  No.

  She wanted to scream. "Yes!" she said. "I got you back. You're mine now. Death loses. I don't have to let you go."

  And he said, "I wasn't dead. I've never been dead." He frowned, and she could see hurt in his eyes as he told her, "You're a Lauren, but you're not my Lauren. My Lauren is six months pregnant with our second child. I'm separating from the Air Force in three weeks, and we're moving back to Charlotte so I can start the security business."

  Brian's security business. His dream, the thing he wanted to do when he got out. He'd talked about it endlessly. And now he said he was going to make it happen. Except not with her. With some other Lauren. Some pregnant Lauren.

  "How can this be?" she whispered. "Where have you been, and what do you mean you aren't my Brian, that you have some other Lauren. Look at me." She spread her arms wide. "Look at me."

  He said, "My Lauren is a gateweaver. You are, too, or I wouldn't be here. I've been through the gates with her a lot of times." He smiled. "She's giving it up for a while—give us time to spend with the kids, her parents, my parents—"

  "Her parents?"

  "Sure."

  "My parents are dead."

  "I'm sorry. Different universe, different rules."

  She was shaking. "Tell me. Tell me what you know."

  He nodded. "I don't have long. The more time I spend here, the closer my presence pulls your world and mine—I'm an anomaly. You know about the upworld, the downworld, fronttime, backtime, sideways?"

  "Upworld and downworld. I've only been downworld that I can remember, though when I was a kid. The rest…" She shrugged.

  He frowned. "You should know this. You should already know the danger you face in calling me."

  "There have been some problems," she said, but didn't elaborate.

  "Quickly, then. Fronttime is the world that runs ahead of yours timewise, but on the same track. You can only reach the parts of it that exist after you die—but those parts change from day to day. If you take up smoking one day, you may find that you can reach a spot twenty years closer to you than you could reach the day before—the result of your decision will, if things remain as they are, cut your life shorter by twenty years. If you give up smoking the next day, you may find those same twenty years inaccessible again. Fronttime is dangerous to enter—you arrive solid, and you can interact and make changes…but if you do, you're barred from going back. All of the time behind the moment when you changed things becomes your past. Backtime is the same. You can only go to the times when you didn't exist. You're barred from the moment of your conception on. And you don't arrive in solid form—you're almost a spirit, same as you would be going upworld."

  "I know about upworld."

  "Okay. You can't make physical changes in backtime, but you can sometimes influence decisions, make suggestions. No magic—you can't do any more in either fronttime or backtime than you can do here."

  "Sideways?"

  "Sideways is where you called me from. Worlds that exist in parallel with yours. The ones close to yours are pretty much the same. The ones farther out become increasingly different. You cannot go into a sideways world in which you are already alive."

  "Which is why you're here, but you aren't my Brian."

  He nodded. "I'm sorry. And you can't stay in any of your sideways worlds. The link between the two starts tearing at reality."

  "So even if I could find a Brian who had lost his Lauren, and who wanted to be with me…"

  "It wouldn't work out. At most you would have a couple of hours together before things started to break through. You could only dare to see each other rarely."

  "How rarely?"

  "A few times a year, I would guess. Repeated crossings start thinning the fabric of reality between the two worlds, and breakthroughs become more and more common even as the duration of your safe visits becomes shorter and shorter."

  "Is there any way I can get him back?"

  Brian bit his lip. "Not in any form that you would want him."

  "But I can feel his presence sometimes. I can feel him when I cross between the worlds, watching over me. I can hear his voice. I can feel his touch."

  "I can't explain that. I don't know any more about what happens to us when we die than you do. But from Lauren—my Lauren—I know this: Death is the door you dare not open."

  "He's right there and I can feel him and I ca
n't have him back? I can't do some sort of magic to bring him all the way back?"

  "No."

  "There are an infinite number of worlds in which he lives—"

  "And an infinite number of worlds in which he has died. That truth is the same for each of us."

  "Infinite."

  "Yes."

  "And I can't have him back?"

  "That's right."

  "I would move Heaven and Hell to be with him again."

  Brian—the Brian who was not her Brian, who studied her with compassionate eyes but without the love that she had felt from her Brian—said, "And on the far side of Heaven and Hell, perhaps he waits for you. But you cannot bring him back from there. You can only go to meet him."

  "I can die."

  "Someday. Not right now."

  "I can die."

  "That's all."

  "I can create with a breath, with a thought—I can build and destroy with just a wish and the blink of my eye. I can walk between the worlds, I can summon storms and level mountains. And you're telling me that I cannot have my Brian back?"

  "You and your world and your universe pay a price for every action you take. You can walk between the worlds and you can summon storms and you can level mountains, Lauren, but you…are…not…a…god." His voice grew soft. He rested his hands on her shoulders and they were the hands she had known and loved and lost, and her knees went weak and her eyes blurred with tears. They were the hands she wanted to have back, and in the voice she wanted to hear whispering to her from the other side of the bed every morning for the rest of her life, the man who was not hers told her, "You are only human, but because you can reach beyond your own world, you can screw things up for yourself and everyone in it so completely that the entire planet might not survive. Your action could destroy it."

  "The whole planet?"

  He nodded.

  She wanted to scream, It isn't fair! She wanted to point a finger at him and say, You will be my Brian from now on. She wanted to unmake the world she lived in and remake it as a world in which her Brian still lived.

  But she was not a god. And somewhere in her core, somewhere deep inside where the buried memories had not all resurfaced, an absolute conviction that this man was telling her the truth surfaced. She could not raise the dead—or perhaps she could, but what she raised would not be what she wanted. Her Brian was gone, gone somewhere beyond her farthest reach. Nothing she could do would restore him to her as he had been, as she wanted him to be again. He had been mortal and he had died, and she was mortal and she would have to live with that truth, and the pain, until she too died and found out whether anything waited for her beyond the dark void of Death.

  She hung her head and fought to control her breathing; clenched her fists tight to her sides and gritted her teeth and squeezed her eyes tightly shut until the tears stopped forming. "Why did you come when I called?" she asked when at last she had control of her voice.

  "Because I love your…twin, for lack of better words…with all my heart and soul. Because she heard you and begged me to respond before someone—or something—else came in my place."

  At his words, Lauren's flesh crawled, and her blood chilled. "What do you mean?"

  "Any Brian from any of an infinite number of worlds could have responded to your call, depending on how loudly you called and how hard you pushed. But not every Brian loves you. Not everyone who would come to your summons would wish you well. For every Brian who would move the world to love you if he could, there is a Brian who would move the world to hurt you. And you cannot know when you call who will come."

  She thought of Jake, lying innocent and trusting in his bed upstairs, and of how quick she had been to let the man who looked like Brian step into her home. How ready she had been to trust him, to want him. He could have been anyone, anything…but because she wanted so much to have Brian back, she would not have questioned him until it was too late. Had he wanted to hurt her, this Brian could have stepped through the mirror, destroyed her and Jake, and vanished without a trace. She shivered, and Brian nodded.

  "You see the danger."

  "Yes," she whispered, wrapping her arms around herself, staring at him.

  "Good." He turned. "I don't dare stay any longer. Things begin to fall apart quickly in both worlds when we step sideways—I won't jeopardize my Lauren and my Jake. I need to get back."

  She nodded, not speaking. She stared at the back of his neck, at the vulnerability of it—the curve down to his shoulders, the close-cropped line of his hair. She could have drawn that gentle slope in her sleep; she could close her eyes and know what it would feel like to lie in bed, her arm thrown over him, her face pressed to that spot at the back of his neck, breathing his scent. So close. So close she could reach out and touch him, but he was not hers and could never be hers again. "Do I need to send you home?"

  "If you'll open the gate for me, I can find my own way home."

  She moved past him, being careful not to brush against him; at that moment she could not bear the thought of his touch, of knowing it would be the last touch. She pressed her palms to the mirror and willed the fire and the storm to her, and when the glass blazed with the otherworldly flames, she stepped back.

  "Thank you," she managed to tell him. Her voice was in control, her shoulders were back, her head held high. She did not try to smile—that would have been too much for her to carry off.

  He rested a hand lightly on her shoulder, and said, "For every door that closes, a window opens somewhere else."

  Brian's saying. Her Brian's saying. Her fists clenched again, and she nodded, unable to speak around the lump that had returned to her throat.

  Then he was gone.

  CHAPTER 8

  Cat Creek, North Carolina

  ERIC, HEADING INTO the tiny renovated storefront that served as headquarters for Cat Creek's Sheriff's Department, caught a glimpse through the front window of Pete Stark, with his feet up on the desk and his nose buried in a book. By the time the door slammed shut and he got around the corner, though, Pete's feet were on the floor and he had paperwork spread out in front of him.

  "I don't care if you read."

  Pete blushed. "I know."

  "Not too crazy about you having your feet up on the desk, though—doesn't look too good to the people who see you when they drive by. And since they're the ones who pay your salary—and mine…"

  Pete sighed. "I got in early. Hoped you'd heard something about the Molly McColl case."

  "I'm still not even sure we have a case. Girl hasn't been back home, but there's nothing to say she didn't just go out of town for a week to visit family and think that she shut her door behind her when she didn't."

  "I know. Doesn't feel like that to me, though."

  Eric nodded. "Doesn't feel like that to me, either. I have some errands I have to run today—you're going to have the place to yourself for a while."

  "Anything big?"

  Eric shrugged. "Mostly, no. I have one possible lead on what might be the Molly McColl case if we do have a case, and I'm going to check that out in a while, but mostly I just have some housekeeping to do."

  "I'll give you a call if things get interesting."

  Eric raised an eyebrow. "And interesting would be…?"

  "Riots in the streets, vagrants on the benches, naked women on the green." Pete grinned just a little and said, "Though if we had naked women on the green, I could probably handle that myself."

  Like Eric, Pete was single, though unlike Eric, he had never been married. He was a good-looking kid, burly and easygoing, and Eric gave him another two years in Cat Creek before the boredom of the place and the lack of young, single women drove him to a bigger town.

  "I'm certain you could." He yawned and shook his head. "For anything but naked women, then, you give me a call, all right?"

  Pete tipped his head and studied Eric through narrowed eyes. "You all right, boss?"

  "Not sleeping too well lately."

  "Had compan
y?"

  "I wish."

  "You want to go home and get some rest, I'll hold down the fort."

  "Appreciate it—but today is not the day."

  By the time Eric was back in the cruiser, Pete's nose was back in the book. At least this time his feet weren't on the desk.

  * * *

  Granger had the watch when Eric went into the upper room of the flower shop.

  "Quiet?"

  "Not on my shift. I took over from Willie at one—he said he didn't have a blip. But a rogue gate opened twice on my watch, and there was a power surge. Vectors point to the same house."