Memory of Fire Page 19

  Make it look good. Make it look really good. Because somewhere a killer is watching us.

  Eric carried the child to the car; Pete marched Lauren to it, opened the back door, ushered her in. Eric handed her son to her. Pete slammed the door shut, went back to the house, locked it up, brought the box of stuff to the other car.

  Both cars, lights still flashing, paraded back to the station.

  Only when they were safely back in the station and away from anything that anyone might see did Eric take Lauren's handcuffs off.

  "You mind telling me what that was all about?" Lauren asked. She stroked Jake's hair. He clung to her, his head pressed against her shoulder, staring daggers at Eric.

  "You just got an unshakable alibi," Eric told her. "I now know that you aren't working with the Sentinels, and that you don't have a partner on the inside who is feeding you information."

  "Thanks for the show of faith. I told you that before you decided to throw a parade. What changed your mind?"

  "Someone killed one of the Sentinels—a friend of mine—and signed your name to the crime. The fact that you spent the night in jail with me watching you saved you from a whole lot of mess."

  "Then why make the pretense of arresting me, if you know I'm the one person in the world who didn't commit the crime?"

  Eric watched her face as he said, "You'll be a lot easier to keep alive if whoever it was that killed Debora thinks I bought the setup. Your story about your parents might have some merit—they might have been murdered, though I'm damned if I can figure out how to prove it at this late date. But say it's true. Say your parents were murdered. Debora was murdered, too, by someone who wants me to blame you for her death—to get you out of the way. Now, I don't like coincidences. Cat Creek is a mighty small town, and if someone is killing Sentinels, I'm inclined to think it could be the same person who was killing them before." He leaned back against the wall and hooked his thumbs into his uniform pants.

  "Imagine that the killer or killers are watching me to see what I do. If you're supposedly arrested for the crime, they may relax. I took their bait, I'm looking in the wrong direction, they know that you can't tell me anything that will give them away and for whatever reason, you're safely out of their way, too, and they can keep doing whatever the hell it is that they're doing, free from interference for a little longer."

  Lauren had gone pale at his words. She held Jake tight against her chest, her eyes squeezed shut, tears rolling slowly down both her cheeks. She didn't so much as whimper.

  Eric wanted to hug her.

  Instead, from up front, Pete called, "We're about to get company, boss."

  Lauren's eyes opened and stared directly into his. "Hide us," she said.

  He nodded. "Jail cell. It's out of sight of the front. Don't mention Sentinels to Pete, by the way. He doesn't know."

  Lauren nodded, followed him back to the cell, and took a seat with Jake on the narrow cot.

  The bell on the front door jangled, and Eric heard Pete say, "No sir, he's not making a statement to the press right now."

  Good Lord. That would be either Jim Mulrooney from the three-times-a-week Laurinburg Exchange or Baird McAmmond from up in Rockingham. Either way, damned fast. Like someone had tipped him off way in advance.

  "Heard you've already made an arrest on your murder."

  Eric headed out front and found Jim, hat pushed back and winter coat unzipped, leaning on the front counter, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. "Can't smoke in here, Jim," he said. "City property—you know the rules. And I'd love to know where you got your information, since we haven't officially announced the murder yet, pending notification of the next of kin, and we sure as shit haven't announced the arrest."

  "Anonymous tip."

  "There's a surprise."

  "Come on, Eric. You have a murder, you make an arrest just a few hours later…you're good, you've been suggested more than once as a replacement for Laurinburg's police chief, who's getting ready to retire. Work with me here. I'll make you look great. PR like this could make your career around here."

  Eric said, "And sell a whole lot of papers for you, right?" He smiled thinly. "I have the suspect, I have evidence, and I can't say any more than that right now. You know about due process, you know about admissibility. And before the lawyers get here, I'm not even going to give you a name."

  "I have a name. All you have to do is nod and tell me yes or no. I can speculate to my heart's content…"

  "And get yourself and your paper sued if you're not careful, Jim. Leave this one alone for a few hours."

  Jim grinned. "I've got time. We missed today's issue, and we don't go to press again until day after tomorrow."

  "Then come back late tomorrow. Maybe we'll have a bit more for you by then."

  * * *

  Lauren felt as scared as she had at any time in the last few days. As scared as when she'd gone through the mirror for the first time, as scared as when she'd found Embar nailed to the wall of her parents' house in Oria. Jake had fallen asleep in her arms, and she stared at his beautiful sleeping face and thought, There is someone out there who would willingly kill him.

  Her blood felt like ice in her veins.

  Eric came down the hall to her cell, shaking his head. "Pete is going to hold down the door with a steady stream of 'No comments.' Meanwhile, you and I are going to go through this notebook of your parents' and you're going to tell me what it was that they were working on."

  "I can't."

  Eric came into the cell carrying a folding chair, which he unfolded quietly and set on the floor beside her. She noticed that he was careful not to wake Jake, and that when he spoke, he did so in a soft, measured voice. "Lauren, you and I are all each other has right now. You're innocent—I know that. And I'm what stands between you and whoever killed Debora and tried to frame you for it."

  "I know that. I was here and you were here, so whoever killed her, it wasn't us. I'm not telling you that I won't help you, Eric. I'm telling you that I can't. I've been through the notebooks. I don't know what they mean."

  "How can you not know? Your parents had to have told you something…"

  "They told me all sorts of things. Then they took me into Oria and blanked my memory when I was ten so that I couldn't give away the fact that I'm a…that I could use the gates, because…" It was right there. She could feel it. The reason that they had blanked her memory was because her life would be in danger. Because. Because. Because she was a gateweaver, but why was that such a bad thing? Because someone had been killing the gateweavers, and would be only to happy to get rid of a little kid before she got big enough to be a real problem. Lauren looked at him, and said, "I just got another little fragment of the memories back. When I was ten, Cat Creek and the other Sentinel nexuses in the area started losing their gateweavers. They were dying in a lot of different ways, and a lot of different places, but everyone was pretty sure they were being killed. My parents already knew I could gateweave, but nobody else did. I wasn't supposed to be taught anything about the Sentinels until I was a teenager, but I'd already figured out the gates on my own, so my parents taught me how to use them the right way so I wouldn't get me and them and everyone else killed. When the trouble started, to save my life, they hid my gateweaving abilities from everyone, even me."

  "You're a gateweaver?" Eric shuddered.

  Lauren nodded.

  "When did you remember?"

  Lauren described her first encounter with her parents' mirror to him, and gave him a quick history of her first trip across.

  When she was finished, he just sat there shaking his head for a moment. "And you still don't know what they were working on?"

  "Not yet. And the notes make no sense at all to me."

  "They make some sense to me, but I can't get any feel for the big goal they were trying to accomplish yet. I spent most of last night reading through the first part, making notes and trying to put pieces together. You think they told you what this big
Plan of theirs was?"

  "I'm sure of it. But the memory is gone."

  Eric sighed. "Maybe it's only gone the way the other memories were. Maybe you just need something to jar it loose."

  She nodded without much hope. "Maybe. It would be nice to think that I'd get back everything I lost. But I'm not counting on it."

  "Me, either," he agreed. "We'll figure the whole thing out. And we'll watch each other's back, you and me, because I have the awful feeling that we're both in a world of trouble right now. It could be linked to whatever your parents were on to. It's surely tied up with the Sentinels and what started up in Rockingham."

  "What started up in Rockingham?" Lauren wanted to know.

  He hesitated. Then he told her.

  She shivered at the thought of the world ending, at the thought of her and Jake dead in a few days or weeks of something that would roll over them like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. She wished fervently that she hadn't asked. But she said, "I've got your back, Sheriff, so long as you've got mine."

  Eric held out a hand to her, and Lauren carefully shifted Jake in her arms so as not to wake him, and shook hands to seal the pact.

  CHAPTER 10

  16 NEW VICTIMS BRING FLU DEATH TOLL TO 35

  By Lisa Bannister, Staff Writer

  (Richmond County Daily Journal, Rockingham, NC)

  Richmond Memorial Hospital announced sixteen new deaths from the as-yet-unidentified flu that has hit Richmond County. Occurring within the last 24 hours, these deaths make this flu the deadliest to hit the county in the last 30 years, and the fact that almost all victims were in their twenties and thirties makes it the more unexpected….

  SCOTLAND DOCTORS INUNDATED BY NEW FLU

  By Jim Mulrooney

  (Laurinburg Exchange, Laurinburg, NC)

  Scotland County residents are under siege by a new bout of that winter staple, the flu, report ER physicians Mark Rogers and David Moore. "The ER is swamped with influenza cases, many of them requiring hospitalization," says Moore. "I've never seen our traffic jump so fast." Other county doctors, their waiting rooms jam-packed with flu victims, concur. "This is the worst flu season I've ever been through," says one doctor who requests not to be named. "And it's just getting started…"

  Copper House, Ballahara

  MOLLY WENT TO DINNER in the center of a column of elaborately dressed soldiers—all of them still pretending to be servants of the house. She wore the necklace that the Imallin had given her, but in spite of the careful inspection she'd given it, which had revealed nothing but an exquisite piece of jewelry, she had serious misgivings. The necklace had a weight to it beyond the solid heft of its gold. In it, Molly felt memories—other people's memories, and not happy memories, either. Wearing it, she seemed to catch ghosts at the corners of her eyes, walking beside her in the places inhabited by soldiers; wearing it, she caught herself imagining conflagrations and battlefields, grief and destruction, and death in endless lines and endless permutations. For all that it was a pretty piece of jewelry, Molly discovered that she didn't like it much. But when she thought about taking it off, she discovered that she didn't want to do that either. In ways she could not describe, its weight around her neck felt like a shield. Like security.

  Her life had been a little thin in the security department lately.

  She hadn't known what to expect in her dinner with the Imallin; she'd half anticipated a banquet table laden with food of every sort, with kitchen servants racing back and forth, maybe a roaring fire at one end of a great hall and musicians at the other. She figured the Imallin would be planning on pulling out all the stops, impressing the hell out of her. Convincing her with a great show of power and wealth that she should stay.

  But the grand arched doorway through which her escort at last ushered her led not to some magnificent hall, but to a pretty little atrium, filled even in the heart of winter with sweet-smelling flowers that she could not name, a tiny waterfall, and a pond with brightly colored fishes she could not identify, and a charming round table for two in the very center, lit by footlights and lanterns scattered throughout the garden, and, above her, by nothing but the stars.

  Seolar, still plainly dressed, but now wearing clean shoes, bowed deeply in greeting. "Vodi," he said, "you honor my world with your presence."

  Molly met his eyes and returned his bow with one carefully calculated to be equal to his. "Imallin. My thanks for the dinner—but I haven't forgotten yet how your world came to have the honor of my presence."

  He chuckled softly. "No. I don't suppose you would." He offered her a chair at the table, but did not pull it back for her; different customs from different cultures, she supposed. She took a seat, and he sat, and then he said, "Javichi, please. And the first course."

  A servant appeared on the path carrying a bucket of ice that held a large bottle in one hand, and in the other hand a little golden tray with two golden goblets and a tiny taster cup.

  The servant poured the drink, pale green and slightly bubbly, into the taster cup first, and drank it. Then he handed the goblets to the Imallin, who produced a little black rag with which he wiped out the insides of each glass. The Imallin studied the rag for a moment, nodded, looked at the servant, and nodded again. The servant poured the drink.

  Little chills skittered along the back of Molly's neck and between her shoulder blades, and the hair stood up on her arms. Welcome to the cozy life of power.

  The Imallin sipped from each glass, wiped the edge of hers, and presented it to her solemnly.

  "Is the fear of being poisoned always such an issue for you, or are these precautions especially for my benefit?"

  The Imallin sighed. "You are the Ninth Vodi." Molly could hear the emphasis in those last two words, and when he said them, the necklace she wore seemed to vibrate for just an instant. "The veyâr—and indeed all the True Peoples of Oria—embrace your arrival with great joy. But the True Peoples are not Oria's only inhabitants: there are in this world those who would do anything to put an end to you, and with you, to the prophecies that surround you."

  "Oh, Christ. Prophecies?" Molly pushed her seat back from the table. "No. Those little guys mentioned prophecies, too. The Dark, The Deep, and The Bright."

  "The Tradona."

  "Yes. Them. Look—I don't know who you people think I am, but I'm not. I have a talent, I admit. I'm an odd sort of healer—but that doesn't make me anybody's savior. If I were a doctor, no one would get all strange about me, so just think of me as a doctor with a better-than-average patient survival rate."

  But the Imallin said, "You must know better than that. Surely your mother told you something of your role in Oria—of what the Ninth Vodi would be, and do."

  She took a sip of her drink, and discovered to her surprise that it wasn't alcoholic, and that it was delicious.

  "I never met my mother. My father, either, for that matter. They gave me to strangers the instant I was born, and died when I was still a kid, long before I could have hoped to find out who they were or to track them down." She smiled sadly. "When I finally found them, I got to visit their graves."

  Seolar's eyes grew wider—something she would have thought impossible. "She'd dead?" he whispered.

  "My mother? For a long time now."

  "And you never met her. She never told you anything."

  "No."

  "That explains much. Very much. By the true gods, what a disaster. We're lucky we ever found you. You could have gone anywhere."

  "That would have been bad?"

  "That would have been the end of the veyâr." While Molly sipped her drink, Seolar leaned forward and said, "The Prophecies of Chu Hua have guided the veyâr for more than seven thousand years. Before that time, when the Old Gods came we mistook them for true gods, and worshiped them—and this, of course, was what they wanted. During the rise of the great veyâr empire of Tasaayan Seeli, though, a woman from your world and a man from my world gave birth to the first Vodi, and that Vodi—Chu Hua—who could summon
visions of the future, told the True Peoples of Oria the nature of the Old Gods, and foretold a time, far in the future, when the Old Gods would be scattered from the face of our world and sent back to the hells that spawned them. And that that time would begin with the arrival of the Ninth Vodi. You."

  Molly sighed. "How did you decide I, out of all the people on not just one, but two worlds, was going to be your Ninth Vodi?"

  "We did not decide. You were born the Ninth Vodi."

  "Yeah. You said that before, but I remain unconvinced."