by Holly Lisle
Molly and Jake were long gone, of course, Lauren thought. But the gate would still be open. She couldn't let them follow. She switched her weapon from stun to kill. Nothing changed.
The three creatures hovered over the tent, and it erupted into flame, and each of them dropped an egg-shaped object. Three explosions tore through the clearing, throwing Lauren to the ground. She lost her grip on her weapon—but she still had the handgun in its shoulder holster. Brian's gun. She pulled it out, switched the safety off, and fired at one of the monsters.
Her first shot, carefully aimed at the head, registered a hit. Screaming, twisting, writhing, the monster fell from the sky. The other two beasts turned to stare at her, and her mouth went dry and her heart pounded in her chest like the heart of a rabbit caught in the gaze of a hunting hawk. She aimed again, for the second nightmare, and her finger trembled on the trigger, but she squeezed.
This time the bullet hit center mass on the monster—it shrieked, and the darkness around it coalesced, and it and its partner vanished. Lauren looked at the ground where the first one had fallen, and discovered that it, too, had vanished.
And then, from behind her, shots that tore into the rocks to the left of her. The traitors, with the bigger threat eliminated, had decided to take her out. She thumbed the safety on and jammed the Browning back into its holster. It didn't have the range to hit the castle. She dove for the magic weapon, came up with it, and had the satisfaction of seeing one of the traitors go down.
And then she realized the weapon was still set on kill.
* * *
Molly hadn't gone through the mirror back to Earth. She had been standing there in front of it, trying to convince herself that she didn't really need to leave; that anything she needed to do, she could do in Oria. And then she'd heard Yaner and Lauren's friend Pete coming toward her, and Lauren shouting that she had them covered, and she realized she had to be out of the tent before they got there, because she'd promised.
She had promised her sister—and now she had to keep her promise, no matter how much she didn't want to, no matter how much she resented taking this kicking, fighting, crying kid to a place she never wanted to go to again.
She had promised.
She'd turned sideways so that she could fit herself and Jake through the narrow mirror together, and they were partway into the gate, with the lower half of Jake's body and the right side of hers still in Oria—with one of her feet still on Orian soil because she couldn't quite force herself to take the next step.
And the tent erupted. Fire. Explosions. She felt the blast, but the necklace at her throat seemed to vibrate, and the heat and the force of it washed around her.
It didn't wash around Jake. One minute she was holding a fighting kid, and the next, she was carrying the rags of a child. He didn't even cry out. He lay limp in her arms, a bloody, shuddering piecework of skin and bone and flesh, bleeding everywhere, and she clutched him tight against her as the path dragged her through green fire, away from Oria, back to Earth.
He breathed. Against all odds, against all possibility, he breathed, and she realized that he was not alone. That some force within the fire itself had embraced him and fed him its own life, kept him breathing in this place between worlds where her magic was helpless to save him. She could feel thoughts around her—"Hang on, Jake. Don't die. Your mother needs you. Hang on—I'm with you"—but she could not find the source of those thoughts. To all appearances, she and Jake slipped between the worlds alone, but she could hear that voice. She could feel that power. And Jake lived.
In the instant and the infinity in which she and her sister's child hung in that place out of time, Molly realized that once she stepped through the other side of the gate, he would die. The force that fed him was not healing him—he was still in tatters, still unconscious, still bleeding. When the two of them stepped through the gate on the other side, Jake was going to die.
She had time to think about Seolar. About her promise to return to him; about her people, the veyâr, who needed her. She had time to think about her promise to Lauren, to keep Jake safe. She even had time to hate herself for failing to move as quickly as she needed to.
But most of all, she had time to think of the boy whose mother had brought him to her on the last night of his life, and how she had turned him away. She could still see his eyes. And the unblinking eyes that stared through her from Jake's shattered body held that same mute plea. "Help me. I didn't ask for this. I didn't deserve this. I am innocent of any act that would make this fate justly mine."
Echoes of her past, the pain of her present, ghosts of a future that might have been hers.
She could not turn back to Oria, where she could heal him without cost. The path carried her in one direction, and no matter how she willed it, she and Jake kept moving in that direction. She would not have time to figure out how to go through the gate again—if it would even accept her a second time. Jake was a breath away from death. She could feel it in every cell of her body, and the closer she came to Earth, the more fiercely she felt it. The being with him held the breath in the child's ruined body by sheer force of will, but she understood somehow that its power and influence would end at the gate, and she and Jake would be on their own.
She could save Jake, but she would pay with everything she had. Her future, her dreams, her duty, and her life. She could let him die, and have the life that was better than anything she could have ever dreamed of—but if she let him die, she would carry not one child's ghost with her through the rest of her life, but two.
And then she was out of time.
The path expelled her into the foyer of a nice old house, and the pain of Jake's injuries consumed her. The choice was upon her. She had only seconds to do what had to be done, or it would become impossible.
* * *
Lauren switched the weapon over to stun and kept firing, but she knew she'd killed someone. The air around her changed, and clouds pulled in over the sun, and she knew a storm was building, and felt herself at its heart. Eric had said there would be consequences if they used magic to kill, and she felt those consequences coming.
She clenched her jaw and kept firing, praying that the traitors would stay low, that they would keep out of the way while Pete and Yaner got the Sentinels out of harm's way.
"Is the gate still there?" she yelled to Pete.
"Hang on!" Pete, who had also been thrown to the ground by the explosion, had helped Yaner up, and the two of them were dragging the woman—June Bug, Lauren thought—toward the place where the tent had been.
A moment later he yelled, "Still here. Still open. The frame is charred, but the gate itself doesn't look like it's been touched."
"Hurry, then. We have to get out of here."
She heard nothing for a moment, then he was running past her. "I'm going to grab them all. The only one I can be sure won't make it is Jimmy Norris. There isn't enough left of him to put in a shoe box."
Lauren could have done without knowing that, but she said, "Run, then. We have trouble coming."
"Shit," Pete yelled, taking her at her word, and ran. Yaner, longer-legged by far than any human, was already halfway back to the gate with the next body draped over his back, its arms over his shoulders like handles, its legs dangling. Lauren couldn't even begin to guess who he had.
Pete, though, grabbed Eric next, and got him up onto his back in a modified fireman's carry. Lauren only caught a glimpse of the two of them moving toward her; then she saw a head poking over the parapet, and she shot at it.
Pete and Yaner ran back and forth, and she kept up a steady stream of fire. And then a bolt hit her, and pain seared her, and she toppled to her side and stared in horror at the stump where her leg had been. The pain tried to devour her—but she pulled from the magic, not caring about later price, about the rules of Sentinels, about anything but that she would never get home to Jake if she died on this field, and she healed the stump. Watched her leg re-create itself out of green fire. Stood agai
n, and said, "The hell with caution. Bring on the storm," and switched her weapon back to kill. Come hell or Armageddon, she would get home to Jake.
In her hands, the weapon began to change shape. It got bigger, and began doing more damage with each hit. It stretched longer, as well, and became more accurate. She realized her will was reshaping it for her purposes—she wanted to destroy the men on the castle and the castle itself, and she was doing it. The parapets began to crumble, and one dark shape toppled to the ground stories below. She caught movement from both sides as the surviving traitor ran for new cover.
The castle parapet rebuilt itself—and as quickly as it did, she shattered it with a single hit from the weapon that had become a cross between a mortar and a handheld nuke launcher. Two volleys of green fire arced toward her, and she blasted both out of the sky. She became an avenging angel. One of the Furies, bent on the utter destruction of her enemies.
The storm that had been building erupted all around her—lightning and thunder, twisting winds that screamed through the trees and ripped stones from the castle wall and picked up the last of the traitors from the roof and sucked men out of the lower floors and dragged them high into the air. Pete was screaming at her to knock it off, that he still had people to get, but the storm fed deep inside of her. It didn't listen to logic, to reason, to anything but the rage she felt at those people who had tried to take her away from her son. She could not turn off her rage, and so the storm grew wilder. She'd stopped firing—the men hung high in the air, spinning inside the cyclone that she had given life. They couldn't touch her. The cyclone could, though—so she abandoned her weapon and ran with Pete and Yaner for the last of the Sentinels, and dragged them through screaming wind and rocketing debris, pelted by stones and sticks and leaves and branches.
The cyclone held its position on top of the castle—or what remained of the castle—long enough for the three of them to get everyone shoved through the gate.
"Are you going to leave it like that?" Pete shouted above the howling winds.
"No! I have to finish this! There's no telling what it will do on Earth if I let it die down on its own. If magic done here always has echoes there, then I don't even want to think about what this is doing right now. If I walk away and leave it…"
"How can I help!" Pete shouted over the roar.
Lauren shook her head. "Go back! Help Molly with the Sentinels and Jake. I'll get there as fast as I can."
"It's coming from you!" Pete yelled. "If you leave, maybe it will die down on its own."
Lauren considered that. Nodded. "Let's go. I'll come back in a minute and see if it worked. If it didn't—I'll deal with it then."
Yaner stepped through the mirror. Then Pete. Lauren followed him.
For a moment she felt the delicious embrace of the green fire that burned between the worlds—but this time she was alone. She couldn't feel Brian, whose touch had been with her every time except when she stepped though to Kerras. She reached for him, tried to find him in the timeless instant when she floated in the fire. The path spit her out into her foyer before she was ready—and threw her into chaos.
She landed in a pile of limbs, and from deep within it, she heard weak sobbing. And a single faint wail. "Mama."
Pete and Yaner, a second ahead of her, were already pulling bodies off the pile.
Lauren started dragging people away from the center of the pile. Warm bodies, and cool ones that she shuddered to touch. Somewhere beneath them lay Jake. "What the hell happened?"
"I don't know. I've yelled for Molly, but she isn't here."
"She didn't want to come back," Lauren snarled. "She shoved Jake through the gate alone—she abandoned a little guy in a house all by himself…"
She was tugging at bodies, heedless of whether they were alive or dead, with visible injuries or without. "Mama!" Jake cried again.
And then she found him, and with him, Molly.
Both were covered in blood. Jake's clothing hung in tatters. Molly's, blood-soaked, seemed intact, but she didn't move. "Ma-MA!" Jake howled, and reached up his arms to her.
Lauren snatched him out of the pile and checked him. He seemed fine. Terrified. Bloody. But fine. She clutched him tight, buried her face in his hair, and vaguely realized that tears poured down her cheeks, and that she almost couldn't breathe, she was crying so hard.
Pete knelt by Molly, fingers at her pulse. "She's dead," he said softly, looking up at Lauren. "I don't see any external injuries, but she's bled from her mouth and her ears—I'd say she had bad internal bleeding."
Yaner, a thin ghost of himself, let out a wail and flung himself on the floor beside Molly's now-completely-human body. A mist rose around him, and the air grew icy. His keening set Lauren's teeth on edge and made Jake scream.
Lauren couldn't understand what she was seeing. "Molly could heal. Even here on Earth, she had the magic to heal. Why would she be dead?"
"I don't know. But she is." Pete looked at Jake, and at Lauren, and then at the hysterical Yaner. "You need to get the little guy out of here for a few minutes. Go get him cleaned up, and I'll take care of all of this."
Lauren nodded. Then she remembered the storm. "Shit. I need to go back through the gate to make sure the storm is slowing down. And then I need to take each of the Sentinels who is alive back to Oria to see if I can do anything to heal them."
Pete winced. "Go check on the storm, and then come back and take care of your little guy. Let the rest wait for a minute. The ones who are alive have strong pulses, warm skin, no bleeding—we aren't going to lose them, and the less magic you do over there, the better for us over here. Right?"
Lauren knew he was right. The events of the day—of the past few days—terrified her, and she felt out of control and overrun by things bigger than anything she could have imagined. She wanted to fix everything. To make right all that had gone wrong. Only she couldn't. She couldn't bring back the dead, she couldn't erase the magic that had caused so much heartache and loss, she couldn't save her dead sister, so recently found.
She could check on the mess she'd left behind. And then she could come home.
She went to the mirror, with Jake clinging to her neck. And as she started to hand him over to Pete, he screamed—a wordless high-pitched shriek unlike anything she'd ever heard from him. His arms clamped around her neck like vises, his legs wrapped around her torso, and he buried his head against her cheek.
"He's scared," Pete observed.
Lauren patted and bounced him, cooing, "It's okay, it's okay, everything's going to be all right." But he didn't loosen his grip, and when she tried to force his arms from around her neck, he shrieked again.
She looked at Pete. "He's absolutely panicked. I can feel his heart pounding against me, he's so scared. I can't leave him with you, and I don't want to take him back there again. Not with things so uncertain."
"Hold the gate open for me. I'll go through and check," Pete said. "If there's a problem, I'll come back and tell you, and we'll figure out what to do about it from there."
"Thanks." She held her hand to the gate, and it glimmered to life. "Go. Come straight back. I'll hold it open as long as I have to, but I don't want anything to happen to you over there."
"I'll be fine."
He stepped through the gate, and she watched him shimmer across the fire road, and step out into Oria. She could see him crouch, raise his hand to shield his eyes, and then he was running toward something, leaning over, and after a moment she thought, but couldn't be sure, that he was throwing up. He had his back to her. He stared again, but she couldn't see what he was looking at without disturbing the gate. He pulled something out of his pocket, made a quick move, ran a ways away, did something else—always with his back to the gate, shielding his actions from her sight. Then he stepped away from whatever he'd found. An instant later, he was making his way through the mirror and back to her. When he stepped back into the foyer, he was ash-gray, with his forehead and upper lip beaded with sweat.
&n
bsp; "What did you find?"
His mouth formed a tight, grim line, and he wouldn't meet her eyes. "The storm is over. Your leaving did the trick."
"Good. What did you find?"
"The traitors are all dead," he said. "And the natives who were with them." She could see in his face that he would not tell her what he'd found. And she could see in his eyes that she did not want to know.
But he had blood on his hands—blood that she felt sure had not been there when he crossed over. And she saw streaks of blood on his right pocket, as if he'd shoved a bloody hand into it and pulled it out.
She stared at him until he actually looked at her, and she held Jake, and rocked him, and said nothing.
Pete said, "Even rabid dogs deserve a quick, merciful death."
In Lauren's memory, the traitor and the veyâr in the castle spun in the air, caught in the cyclone. She thought about the storm dying away suddenly, as if turned off by the flip of a switch. Maybe that had happened. Or maybe the cyclone had flung each of its victims free before it died away. Ugly. An ugly fate.
