Memory of Fire

by Holly Lisle

  "So you told me. Now would be a perfect time to learn."

  She shrugged. Giddy from the wine and a wonderful supper of leftovers from the picnic, relieved to be out of the weather and off the back of the horse, she decided to be daring. She laughed. "Why not? If I step on your toes, just yell."

  Seolar took her hand and began to teach her the steps of a jig. A jump to the left, a jump to the right, kick in front, kick in back, clap hands and spin…

  She surprised herself by enjoying it. The three musicians were versatile, and they alternated their fast, blood-stirring jigs with slower dances that let her and Seolar catch their breath.

  At last, though, she felt the world beginning to fall out from under her feet. "That has to be all for me for tonight," she told Seolar.

  "Then let me show you to your room." He took her hand and held a small, glass-shielded oil lamp in his other hand and led her through one of the doors on the right side of the house. It opened into a hallway instead of into the room she'd been expecting. He chose the last of four doors on the left, saying, "If there is sunlight tomorrow morning, this room will get the best of it." A fire was already crackling in the hearth, the room was cozy and otherwise unlit, and someone had turned down the covers on the narrow bed and put out heavy white-cotton pajamas and thick white slippers.

  "Where'd the clothes come from?" she asked.

  "We keep spares in store," Seolar told her. He stood in the doorway, watching her. "We probably have almost anything you need here. Or anything you want."

  His voice changed on that last line, and she turned from admiring the little room to look at him.

  He stood studying her, and the intensity of his gaze and the way his eyes met hers sent a not-unpleasant shiver down her spine.

  She managed to smile, and hoped he would not notice how her lips trembled when she did, and said, "That's good to know."

  "If you need…anything…my room is just across the hallway from yours."

  She nodded, unable to find any words.

  He looked at her a moment longer, then seemed to come to a decision. "Good night, Molly," he said.

  "Good night, Seolar."

  He left, closing the door quietly behind him. She stared at it stupidly, trying to sort out her feelings and come to some sort of accommodation with herself over what had just happened.

  What had happened? Had he implied the possibility of a relationship between the two of them? Had he, possibly, made a pass at her? Had his mention of the fact that his room lay just across the hall been simply for information? Or had it been an invitation?

  Would she…could she…ever be interested in such a proposition, if he truly had made it?

  He's not human, she told herself.

  But the answer to that was plain enough. Neither was she. And maybe each of her short-lived and ill-fated relationships with human men had failed not because the men were lacking, or because there was something wrong with her, but because she had been looking in the wrong place all along. Maybe…maybe in Seolar she could find the chance at happiness that had so far eluded her.

  "Maybe. But not tonight," she whispered, and pulled on the too-big pajamas left for her, and climbed into the narrow bed, and, to the sound of the crackling fire and the sweet smell of burning wood, fell asleep.

  Cat Creek

  "I didn't tell you I was good at chess," Lauren said. "I just told you I knew how to move the pieces."

  Pete laughed. "Well…you didn't do too badly." He set up the board again.

  "How about checkers? I might have a chance at that?"

  At her feet, Jake looked up and said, "How 'bout checkers? How 'bout checkers? How 'bout checkers? How 'BOUT checkers? How 'bout checkers?"

  "Or maybe not," Lauren said.

  Pete grinned down at Jake, who was sliding a roll of duct tape across the floor with a ruler. "That'll drive you nuts in short order."

  "That's having kids," she agreed. "You have any?"

  "Figure I'd need a wife first, and I'm not likely to find one of those around here. At least, I haven't met a girl yet who can keep my attention."

  "Looking for a beauty queen, or one who can cook? Or both?"

  "Neither." Pete grinned at her. "Looking for a girl who's read more than three whole books without pictures in them in the last year, and who knows the difference between a black hole and a red dwarf, and who doesn't start every sentence with the word 'like.'"

  "You're picky."

  "Yep. I'd like to have kids. But I have a long way to go before I can even think about that."

  "At least you know what you want."

  He chuckled. "What I want right now is for the boss to call in and tell me he's at the scene, and everything is all right."

  "That would be nice. I wonder what's taking him so long?"

  "I don't know, but if we haven't heard from him in another fifteen minutes, I think I ought to hide you and Jake in the back of the cruiser and head out there to see what's going on."

  Lauren glanced at the clock. "You don't want to call him?"

  Pete shook his head. "If he's out of the car with his walkie-talkie on and in a position where he needs quiet, and I break radio silence, I could get him killed."

  "In that case, he'd turn his radio off, wouldn't he?"

  "Depends. Fifteen minutes, anyway."

  * * *

  Eric pulled into the dirt road that led back to Tucker Farm, which until twenty years earlier had been producing cotton and tobacco. It had gone under, though, when the last of the Tuckers died, and had fallen into disrepair while the crew of heirs had squabbled over the will. In the end, the winning heirs had sold off most of the land, but there'd been no takers on the house, an antebellum monstrosity that would have cost two fortunes to return to livable shape.

  What remained of the house sat well back from the road in a stand of pecan trees. Kudzu had now covered both trees and the ruins of the old place, almost giving it an air of ivy-covered respectability it didn't deserve.

  There were two ways in—the front way, where his approach would be visible from the house, and the back way, which approached through heavy woods that ran for a ways along a soybean field. Logically, he should have just taken the short, open approach, but he sat there for a second, studying the roof of the house and the shield of pecan trees, and his gut twinged. With a shrug, he turned down the hidden approach.

  Every sheriff who survives for long learns that there are times when you trust that quiet little voice at the back of your mind. Right then, Eric's was screaming that something about the call from Ernest Tubbs that had rung false. His nerves were so tight he could have played violin on them as he replayed the call. Ernest had been frantic. He'd sounded scared—his voice had the tightness that came from being about an inch away from screaming.

  Eric considered phlegmatic Ernest, a man who'd spent much of his life tromping through the swamps and sandhills of the region hunting its deer, doves, and other game. In all the years Eric had known him, he had never heard him sound genuinely frightened of anything except the things that could go wrong on the Sentinel end of the universe. Until this one call. Ernest found a body. He fell apart like a fifteen-year-old girl. Now that he had the chance to think, Eric didn't buy it.

  The overhanging canopy of scrub oak and dogwood and pine, choked by kudzu and dying, matched the ruined house for mood and appearance. The gray claws of the denuded trees reached heavenward and scrabbled toward the earth at the same time.

  He wished he had a dozen guys he could call for backup.

  He started to call in to Pete, to at least let him know where he was and what he was doing, but decided to hold off for a few minutes. He'd wait until he knew something—as soon as he announced where he was over the air, the busybodies throughout Cat Creek who lived with one ear glued to their police scanners would be on their way to Tucker Farm to revel in the latest disaster and gossip.

  So he headed down the drive, hearing the tall grass dragging along the undercarriage, and
brambles and branches scratching both sides of the car. He was musing on hunters, and what a strange lot they were to voluntarily drive into places like this, when a brilliant flash of light hit his eye from out at the point where the woods met the field—where no such flash should be.

  He stopped the car, pulled out his binoculars, and took a look. It took him a minute to make out what it was that had caught his attention, and when he did, his stomach twisted again. Someone had hidden a truck beneath weeds and branches and bits of netting and other crap. Whoever had put it there had done an expert job of hiding it—he'd done similar things during his stint in the National Guard. He wouldn't have seen it except for the reflection of sunlight off a tiny uncamouflaged patch of windshield glass.

  He debated going on, then coming back to the truck after he'd talked to Ernest and taken a look at the body. Then he decided that he was a lot closer to the truck. The body wasn't going anywhere; whereas, unlikely though it seemed right then, the truck might. Ernest would just have to understand.

  He put the cruiser into park, took the keys out of the ignition, and clambered through the underbrush to the truck—and nearly fell over half a dozen other vehicles, all equally well disguised. Up close he could tell what he was looking at—whoever had done the camouflage was good. Whoever was responsible had broken up every straight line from every possible angle, covered all the shiny places, given the whole project as natural a look as possible. And that made Eric pause. Maybe he was dealing with hunters, maybe with men with Special Forces or survivalist backgrounds, but whoever had hidden the cars felt dangerous. There was nothing of play about this scene, no polite acceptable explanation, no normal scenario that was going to make this all mean nothing important. This was trouble—big, ugly, and frightening.

  He looked up the road, toward the house. Ernest, waiting up there, could be right in the middle of whatever was going on. He could be a victim, he could be a participant—or he could be the traitor who had killed Debora and Molly and tried to set up Lauren. Eric might be walking into something way too big for him to walk back out of.

  He put his hand on the radio at his hip. He wanted to call Pete—but he didn't want to break radio silence. Pete knew where he was. If he didn't call in soon, Pete would pack Lauren and Jake into the back of the other squad car and come out to see what was going on—and when he came, he'd come with cannons. Pete believed deeply in staying alive.

  Eric caught a glimpse of a license plate—and got his second bad shock. The car belonged to Mayhem—no mistaking that personalized CHAOS 1 tag. Eric quickly moved from vehicle to vehicle. All of the cars and trucks belonged to Sentinels. Besides Mayhem's red 'Vette, Eric found Willie's old white Chevy pickup, the Tubbses' brown Chrysler sedan, and even June Bug's little blue Sunbird. Every Sentinel car except for Granger's, Debora's…and his.

  He swallowed hard. Then he went back to the cruiser, opened the trunk, and got out the twenty-gauge shotgun, his riot gear, and his tear-gas grenades and grenade launcher, and moved the weapons to the front seat and put on the riot gear.

  He tried to remember approaches that would get him all the way up to the house without being seen. If they weren't in the house, he could use the old Victorian tower on the house's front right corner as a lookout point. If they were in the house, he could scope it out and try to figure out what the hell was going on. But either way, he was going to have to cross through broken cover, and he had to assume that there were at least a few hostages along with the traitors—he couldn't just kick down the door and start shooting.

  And he couldn't wait. The traitor had already demonstrated a willingness to kill people. Eric had to assume that more were going to die—that this was the final step in whatever the traitor had been planning, and that getting the Sentinels who might stand against him out of the way was part of that plan.

  With dry mouth and clammy hands, he drove as close to the house as he dared. He left the car under cover of a stand of pines and started working his way toward the house. The scrub oaks still held on to their brown leaves—they and the pines made useful cover. The blackberry brambles and the dogwoods were worthless, though. Bare and stark, they gave him nothing to work with. For long sections, he crawled through the tall grass on his belly, keeping head and butt down and weapons up.

  As he neared the house, he heard voices. Tom Watson was shouting at someone, "He should have been here by now. Something's wrong, dammit. He's on to us."

  "Balls, Tom, he's sure that girl in the jail is the killer. He's not on to us. He's just taking his time. What's he got to hurry for? He's coming to see a dead body, right? That ain't going anywhere." Deever Duncan's voice. Eric couldn't believe his ears. Tom, the most gung ho of the Sentinels, and Deever, who'd been a Sentinel since Eric was a kid, and who was as loyal as a summer day was long. These were the people who were destroying the world and everyone in it?

  How could that be?

  He got up to the house, and with his heart hammering in his chest, he raised up and peeked through a gap in one of the boarded-over windows. Sentinels were all over the floor—bound, gagged, and by the looks of them, unconscious. Nobody looked dead yet; he saw chests moving. Deever stood by the front window, looking out. Tom crouched near a glowing mirror nailed to the far wall. Missing from the scene were June Bug Tate, Willie Locklear, and Granger Baldwin.

  The lights of a police scanner glowed on the mantelpiece above a boarded-over fireplace. So they were listening. Shit.

  "Might as well shove another one through," Deever said, not turning from the window. "Just be less for us to do after we take care of him."

  "Yeah," Tom said, and grabbed George Mercer under the armpits and dragged his unresisting body across the floor to the mirror.

  Eric had an idea. He dropped down, pressed his back against the house, and got on his radio.

  "Pete," he said, keeping his voice quiet so that only the radio would be heard in the house, "I am still 10-17 my previous destination—I've got a 10-68 blocking Scraggs Road."

  "10-68? You're kidding."

  "Wish I were. Scraggs's whole herd is standing right in the middle chewing their cuds, and Scraggs isn't going to be able to get them off the road by himself. They keep breaking away from the fence. We're going to have an accident if we don't get them out of the way, so I'm going to be a while helping him. You get out to Tucker Farm and tell Ernest I'll be along fast as I can."

  "10-4. What do I do with our…guest?"

  "Lock her up and throw away the key. She's killed two people already. Let's not make it three. Treat this as a signal twenty." Signal twenty was his and Pete's private code. It meant, "Everything I just said is bullshit, I am in real trouble, and get here as fast and as quiet as you know how."

  Pete was quiet for a second. Then he said, "Signal twenty…got it. I'm 10-4 on that and will be rolling in about two minutes. Where should I go?"

  "Just go in the front way. Ernest will be looking out for you there."

  "You sure about that?" Pete would take that to mean go in the back way.

  "Absolutely. I'm 10-7 until I finish chasing cows. Over."

  He turned the radio off and reviewed the layout of the room the hostages and their captors occupied. One door led directly to the front. The other led to the back, but through the kitchen and a back porch. It would be easier to be sure of the element of surprise if he could just get across the front porch without being seen and kick in the front door—but Deever was watching out that way.

  The back approach made him nervous. Old doors creaked, and even though the back door had been used, it was closed and might be locked. He would almost certainly make some noise getting it open. And once he got past it, he still had to get through the kitchen without being detected.

  Front door? Or back door? Tom was shoving Sentinels through the gate. Presumably Willie and June Bug were already in Oria with George Mercer. Granger was a question mark, but since his car wasn't hidden with the rest, Eric figured that for one reason or another, he wasn
't around. And he'd accounted for everyone else.

  Front door? Or back?

  * * *

  "Any chance you know your way around a gun?" Pete asked Lauren. He handed her a bulletproof vest and said, "You're going to have to go with me. You might have to help."

  "I have a Mossberg 20-gauge shotgun at home, and a Browning High-Power, and a Remington 30–.06. I'm reasonably accurate with all of them—best with the Browning."

  "Nice collection."

  "They were Brian's. I got plenty of practice with them, though."

  Pete stared down at Jake and said, "I hate taking you two into this, but Eric was clear about wanting you to come with me."

  "I didn't catch all the numbers, but I know I heard him say you were supposed to lock me up and throw away the key."

  "That was signal twenty. He meant that I should do the opposite of what he said. He's in trouble out there, and by the time I get backup from Laurinburg or the SBI or anyone else, he could be dead. I'm going to have to handle this, and I can't leave you two behind. He's afraid that whoever is behind this might break in and kill you and Jake. Besides, if I can count on you to stay by the radio with a gun in hand and watch my back, I'll feel a little better."