Irresistible Forces

by Catherine Ansaro et al

  And Raquel Eastwood was lying in a pool of her own blood.

  Margo bolted out of her hiding place and dropped down beside Raquel. Jared still had his gun on a cowering Millman. Until someone relieved him, he couldn't help Raquel or hold Margo.

  "Oh, my God!" an elderly woman wielding a bathroom plunger like a sword said from the open doorway. Steph Knutsen, armed with a mop, stepped in beside her.

  "Paramedics are on the way," Gary said. Two other agents entered the storage room and cuffed Millman, then dragged him outside. Gary inclined his head toward Charlie's body. "That one's dead."

  The moment Millman was out of there, Jared dropped to his knees beside Margo. Don't let me be too late. Raquel had risked her life to save him. He had absolutely no doubts about that. God only knew why.

  "Don't go yet," Margo said.

  Don't go? Jared supposed she meant don't die.

  Steph stooped on the opposite side of Raquel and helped Margo and Jared apply pressure to the gaping wound in the woman's chest. At such close range, it was a miracle she'd survived this long. It didn't look good.

  "Is she… going to make it?" the elderly woman asked, parting with her plunger.

  "I'm afraid…" Raquel opened her eyes. "It isn't PMS now."

  "Don't go. Not yet. Please?" Margo left the first aid to the others and grabbed Raquel's limp hand.

  "Who all is here?" Raquel's smile was weak.

  "Jared, Steph, Mrs. Brown, me."

  "That's all?"

  Jared looked around. Gary stood right outside the door, talking with other agents. What the hell was taking the paramedics so damned long?

  "They won't get here in time, Jar-O." Raquel turned her gaze on him. "I have that on the highest authority."

  Margo gasped. "I'm so sorry."

  "Don't be." Raquel grinned again. "I'm really not in any pain, you know. This is my Oscar-winning performance. Besides… somehow, you know. Don't you?"

  Margo nodded, tears streaming down her face. To Jared's amazement, Raquel winked.

  "What the hell?"

  "Séamus, since she's on to me anyway… ?" After a moment, a solemn expression crossed Raquel's face. "Hey, Jar-O, wanna see something really scary?"

  Jared watched Raquel's flaming red hair fade to blond. Her face changed from soft and feminine to hard and masculine. Blood stopped pumping from her wound, and her breasts became flat.

  He jerked his hands away, meeting Steph's gaze for a brief instant as they both realized there was no longer a wound to tend. He looked at Raquel's new face again, and recognition made him sway.

  "Nick?"

  "In the flesh, so to speak."

  Jared couldn't speak. A dead man was talking to him.

  "Margo," Nick said, "Mr. Honest-to-a-Fault here didn't cheat on you back at the university. I set him up." He sighed, remorse evident in his eyes. "I'm sorry for that."

  Margo remained silent, still holding Nick's hand.

  After a moment, Jared realized there was something he needed to say—something Nick needed to hear, though he never would have believed the need was there before this. "I… I forgive you. After all, who wouldn't love Margo?"

  Nick smiled. For a moment, he reminded Jared of the smart-assed kid who'd given Jared hell most of his life.

  "Not much time." Nick patted Margo's hand and looked at her. "I love you, but not the way he does. But if he screws up, I'm going to find a way to come back down here and kick his ass."

  Margo nodded. "You know I didn't buy into that affair garbage."

  "Ah, well…" Nick shrugged. "Thanks for that."

  Jared shook himself. I'm losing my mind.

  Steph took Nick's free hand and kissed the back of his knuckles. "I've missed you."

  "Ah, I've missed you, too, but don't be sad." Nick placed Margo's hand in Jared's. "You'll get to break in another brother-in-law. Make him suffer just a little, though. Will ya?"

  "You bet I will." Steph sniffled and smiled at the same time.

  "How about you, Mrs. Brown?" Nick looked at the older woman. "Have you missed me, too?"

  "I… I bought you tampons and evening primrose."

  Steph leapt to her feet to catch Mrs. Brown, but the woman shook her head and righted herself.

  Nick managed a weak smile. "And I'll never forget it either."

  "And you…" Nick turned his gaze on Jared, his expression solemn. "There's a letter for you in my desk. You won't like it."

  "What?"

  Nick blinked. "Our father should've told you, but I figure he's living his own kind of hell now."

  The air whooshed out of Jared's lungs. "We're…"

  "Brothers." He took Jared's hand and gave it a firm shake. Their gazes met and held. After a moment, he looked upward. "I hear you, Séamus." Nick looked at Margo again. "Name your first daughter Raquel. Okay? Hey, if it's a boy, name him after his uncle Nick."

  Nick's face transformed back into Raquel's. The blood returned, though no longer flowing. Her eyes closed, and she released her final breath.

  Jared remained at Raquel's side with Margo until the paramedics arrived. Nick—his brother—was already gone. Back, he'd said.

  "Do dead lawyers really go to Heaven?" Mrs. Brown asked, echoing Jared's thoughts.

  Margo smiled. "This one did."

  Epilogue

  "I never thought I'd say this to you, but I'm impressed," Séamus said upon Nick's return.

  Still numbed by all his experiences, Nick blinked several times before he realized it was all over. Raquel was dead, and he was back where he belonged. Resignation eased through him, and he gave Séamus a nod. "Thanks."

  Séamus patted Nick on the shoulder. "Well done. Your promotion is in the works."

  "Good to hear." Nick walked over to the monitor and peered down at the scene he'd left a few moments ago. Seeing Jared and Margo together didn't upset him now. Instead, it made him smile. This was as it should be. Fate. Destiny. More…

  "Not only did you learn about sacrifice, but also to forgive."

  Nick turned to face Séamus again, oddly at peace.

  The Trouble with Heroes by Jo Beverley

  1

  Refugees.

  A dead word from the Earth history books had shockingly come to life. Jenny Hart first heard it at the print shop as she was closing her station ready to go home.

  "… a queue of refugees that goes out of sight and beyond because the gates of Anglia are closed for the first time during the day in living memory."

  The office screen ran Angliacom most of the day and Jenny was used to treating it as background noise. It took a moment to register, but then she turned to stare at the wall. The screen was split into max cells, but Sam Witherspoon, the manager, had the volume pegged to the picture of a line of crowded vehicles on the road. Buses, lorries, even farmvees of one sort or another.

  "Refugees?" Sam echoed blankly.

  "Like from plague, famine, and war?" Jenny asked, and they looked at each other.

  She'd asked a question, but she knew. He probably knew, too.

  "The blighters," she said.

  He turned and picked up his case. "I'd better get home. Lock up, all right?"

  "Sure." Jenny was still staring at the screen, but she knew why he was rushing away. He had a family. Children. Probably her mother would be fretting about her.

  She picked up a phone and claimed a screen cell for it. Her mother liked to see her children when she was worried. Her younger brother's face came on first. He took one look and yelled, "Mum! Jenny!"

  Madge Hart appeared, red hair wild, eyes flashing. "Are you all right?"

  "Of course I am, Mum. I'm not outside, you know."

  "But isn't it awful? Those poor people. We should take them in. But they say there's more and more, and room elsewhere. But they'll end up out in the dark. I don't know."

  "It makes no difference, Mum. Blighters don't care whether it's night or day." All the same, Gaians didn't like to be outside at night.

  "It
's all panic," her mother said, clearly remembering her maternal duty to reassure her children. "If there was real trouble, we'd know."

  "That's right."

  "Are you coming home for dinner?"

  "Not right now. I want to see if I can find out what's really going on."

  "That's a good idea. Ask Dan. He'll know. Bring him home for dinner as long as it's not too late. He's been looking peaky."

  "Right, Mum."

  Jenny clicked off before she smiled. Her mother had fussed over Dan since he'd been a toddler, long before he'd been spotted as a fixer and sent off to the Gaian Center for Investigation and Control of the Hostile Amorphic Native Entities—generally known as Hellbane U. Now he was back and living on his own in the fixer's flat, she acted as if he might be starving to death. It wasn't as if he didn't have a family of his own here.

  She powered down the screen and checked the place over, then went out, coding the lock. Where to go for news? The Merrie England pub?

  No. She wanted to go up on the walls to see for herself. God knew why. A camera did a better job than human eyes, but she was sure the walls were crowded with gawkers. The Olde English battlements and turrets had always seemed like a pleasant whimsy, but as Jenny hurried toward the nearest steps, she wished they really could keep an enemy out.

  They couldn't. In nearly two hundred years, Anglia had only experienced one blighter attack, but one was enough to show thick walls and drawbridges were no protection at all. Sixty-eight years ago, in the lovely Public Gardens, a blighter had killed a child in front of her horrified mother. Rendered her into a pile of greasy ash amid her pink pantsuit. There were photos.

  A statue in the Gardens depicted a beautiful little girl holding a posy of flowers. Quite likely she'd been a pest, but she hadn't deserved to die in terror like that. No one did.

  "Hostile amorphic native entities." That was how the exploratory services had labeled the one, puzzling problem on an otherwise perfect settlement planet. HANES.

  Technically accurate, but it hadn't captured reality. Within a generation they had become known as hellbanes, and some settlements had their own name as well. Anglia, with typical wry humor, called them blighters. No coincidence that back on Earth blight had been a disease that turned plants to slime. But the Frankland "terreurs" was perhaps a better word. Jenny could feel it now, in herself and in the people all around, milling in gossip, heading to the walls, or hurrying home to protect or be protected.

  Fear. Deep, formless fear, as if something terrible were blowing on the winds from the south.

  An arm snagged around Jenny's waist and she whirled.

  "Gyrth!"

  Gyrth Fletcher was thin, long-faced, with blond curls and beard that made him look as if he'd stepped out of a medieval manuscript.

  "Want to come down a dark passageway with me, pet?" he asked in mock villain voice.

  She winked at him. "Depends what you're offering, don't it?"

  "A better view. From an arrowslit."

  "Lead on!"

  He worked for wall maintenance, so he'd know those passageways, but the main appeal was company. That'd blow away her creepy feelings.

  She couldn't help stating, "There's no real danger to being outside in the dark."

  "Right." He didn't sound any happier than she was about it.

  "Perhaps we should go and look for Dan. He'll know what's going on."

  "He's probably in a stuffy room with the Witan."

  "Oh, I suppose."

  Strange to think of Dan as official like that. They'd been born within weeks of each other three houses apart, and according to her mother, been stuck together like toffees until they reached that age when the other sex suddenly seems alien. Before they'd had time to get over that, he'd tested positive for fixing and been sent to Hellbane U.

  Bloody fixing. His three fortnights home each year hadn't been enough to keep the closeness over eight years, especially when Jenny had known he'd not come back in the end. Fixers didn't. They went where they were needed, and they always seemed to be needed far away. Anglia's fixer before Dan had been from Cathay.

  "You all right, Jenny?"

  "Sure. Where's this arrowslit? Perhaps we'll be able to hear what people are saying out there."

  They held hands so they wouldn't be pulled apart in the crowd, but Jenny was thinking about Dan. Her childhood friend. Anglia's fixer. The one who'd be expected to deal with any blighters who invaded here. Sure, fixers trained to fight blighters, but there weren't any. Not here, at least, or anywhere far from the equator. So they fixed other things. Broken machines. Broken bones. Broken hearts if the break was physical. Things that didn't fight back.

  "If there's trouble in the south, do you think Dan'll have to go to fight blighters there?" she asked.

  Gyrth stopped and shook his head at her. "Hellbane U'll deal with it. They're not going to leave the towns without a fixer, are they? Not short of something desperate. And it can't be desperate. Didn't Dan say that blighters are so rare they have to hunt them to find one for the graduates to zap in their final test?"

  "Yes, but then why the refugees?"

  "You're such a worrier! What did that old Earth politician say? We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Come on."

  Jenny went, but asked, "Have you ever thought it's strange that Dan came back here? Fixers don't."

  "He said once that he asked. Apparently most don't." He grinned. "You've got to admit that a lot of times the town wishes he hadn't. He's a right change from quiet Miss Lixiao."

  That he was. When Dan had left he'd been mischievous and thoughtful, and he'd come back wary and wild. It was a good wild, though, making him the burning heart of a group of lively twenty-somethings. Jenny wasn't sure she fit in with all the group, but she spent time with them because of Dan. She and he weren't toffees anymore, but they were still friends. Friends enough to worry.

  They reached High Wall Street and the width of it meant she could let go of Gyrth's hand. Thirty feet .wide, it was edged on one side by railings overlooking the lower street, and on the other by shops, pubs, and cafes that backed onto the wall. So how did they get to an arrowslit from here?

  Gyrth headed toward the space between Porter's Pies and Castleman's Ironmongery.

  "Down there?" Jenny asked dubiously.

  "It's safe."

  But then he stopped, waved, and shouted. Jenny saw his sister Polly and Polly's husband, Assam, who waved and walked toward them. Or rather, Polly waddled. She was pregnant and bigger every time Jenny saw her. It didn't seem she could swell any more and not burst, but she still had a few weeks to go.

  "We're going to get a better view from a slit," Gyrth told them. "Want to come?"

  "I'll stick!" Polly protested but let herself be persuaded.

  There was no real danger of Polly getting stuck, but it was definitely single file. Rubbish crunched under Jenny's shoes, some of it stinky, and despite the fact that the ginnel was open to the sky two stories above, she began to feel trapped. Or perhaps the faint pulse of panic was because of refugees, blighters, and war. It couldn't be true, but then, why all the people on the road?

  She was ready to give up, turn back, when they reached the maintenance passage, wide enough for two or three. As a bonus, it was either cleaned regularly or the rubbish didn't drift this far. Gyrth led them to an arrowslit directly above the gate. From here, the amplified official voice was clear, though the response was indistinct.

  Driven by her strange urgency, Jenny wasn't her usual polite self. She climbed first into the embrasure and worked forward to the slit. It was six feet high but only about a foot wide. Even so, she felt as if the world was spread before her, and all the voices outside were clear.

  "What's going on?" Gyrth asked.

  "Someone's asking distances to Skanda."

  Jenny wished she knew how far back the queue stretched, but it wove out of sight between a coppice not far away.

  "Didn't they used to keep the space around castles clear?"
she asked Polly, a history teacher. "So they could see an enemy coming?"

  "Certainly. But it's not as if anyone could see a blighter, or stop it if they did."

  "Shame. I see how these work. I could fire out at the enemy, and they wouldn't be able to hit me."

  "Seems a bit unsporting to me," Assam said, clearly teasing.

  Polly frowned at him. "War was not a sport."

  Gyrth jumped up into the space. "Let me have a look, Jenny."

  She gave way and climbed back out. There'd been nothing out there to settle whatever was bothering her. "I don't know about that," she said, joining the other two. "Tournaments and things. And didn't they have what they called 'war games' even in recent times?"

  "Probably still do," Polly said, rubbing her belly. "They still have war, though mostly robotic. Thank heavens for peaceful Gaia."

  Jenny hugged herself, suddenly cold in this dank, shadowy space. "I wish our ancestors had chosen a more peaceful design."

  "All part of good old Merrie England," Assam said.

  "Merrie? They used to pour boiling oil down on the attackers, didn't they, Polly?"

  "Well, probably not. Oil would have been expensive. But boiling water, and sometimes pitch, which would stick."

  "Ugh!"

  "And the attackers would hurl dead cows back with catapults," said Assam, clearly enjoying himself.

  "Ugh, again. Stop it, Assam! It was bad enough learning about all this in school."

  "But very necessary," said Polly in her best teacher manner. "Lest we forget."

  Then Jenny heard the gates opening beneath her. "Are they letting someone in, Gyrth?"

  "Yes. Must be an Anglian in the family. They can't keep native Anglians out, or their families."

  "Then I suppose I'll be able to go to Erin if things get bad here."

  "Not unless your mother's with you," Polly pointed out. She was always precise about such details. "And would you really want to leave?"

  "Of course not. It was just a thought."

  Jenny said it lightly. No one else seemed seriously concerned, but something was pressing on her mind. A kind of foreboding that defied words, as a half-remembered dream does.