Gods old and dark Read online

  "I just made it back from this last one. I took out a major cell of the Night Watch over on the other side of Oria. Managed to locate their resurrection rings. The damn things hide themselves if you don't get to them fast enough. They actually burrow into the ground or anything else that's soft." She tried not to feel the living gold knotting tight in her belly as she said that, and tried not to compare herself to the monsters she hunted. "I had to rip the last ring out of a mattress. I destroyed the members of the cell, and then the rings, and as I was leaving I tripped a deadfall." She shrugged off the memories of pain, of fear, of waking up again when it was over, naked on cold earth, in darkness, hungry for something she couldn't describe. "I'm changing, Lauren. There's less of me, and more of them. I know the monsters of the Night Watch better, and none of them but Baanraak can hide from me, but now I can feel the same hunger they feel. It's all the time, Laurie, and it's getting stronger, and it's horrible. As what I remember of life washes away, I'm filling up with death, and all death wants is more death." She closed her eyes. "The magic pouring down from Earth into Oria—that poison of war and genocide and hatred and destruction—is starting to…God, how do I put this?…It's starting to smell like Thanksgiving, and I haven't eaten. Ever."

  Molly turned and looked at her sister and saw the fear in Lauren's eyes. But it wasn't fear of her, though Molly thought perhaps it should have been. It was fear for her.

  "You can't give in to it," Lauren said. "You have a chance to create a new soul for yourself. To be alive again for real, not because of that damned necklace."

  The Vodi necklace, its clasp broken during one of Molly's previous deaths, now coiled inside Molly like a snake. It was malevolence made solid, a thing of gold and gems and poisonous magic that had crawled beneath her skin during one resurrection and that lay within her, exuding its parasitic evil, giving her a hellish sort of immortality that came without invulnerability, and that, death by death, was ripping everything she valued in her life from her.

  "You say that, but I'm on the inside and I can't feel any chance. Or any hope. I can't see or feel anything except the darkness closing in on me. And how would someone whose whole reason for being is to destroy going to earn a soul? I'm the Grim Reaper, Laurie. You're the Angel of Light, and I'm Death on the hoof."

  "I know what…what…I don't know what to call it. God? The universal mind?" Lauren blew out a breath and spread her hands wide. "You know where I went. You felt the River of the Dead. You saw. I touched whatever it is on the other side. And I know this, as sure as I know I'm breathing. You have a chance, and you have a choice. You'll know the right thing; you'll know the wrong thing." She laced her fingers together and bit her lower lip. "You have the hard path. But you can do the right thing. Just do the right thing, Molly, and you can win this."

  Molly smiled a little. She played with the pommel of the dagger Seolar had given her shortly after the nearly successful attempt on Lauren's life, and noted that Lauren still wore hers, too. They weren't innocent anymore, either of them. They'd lost their naïveté a while back, and some of their illusions, and most of their hope. And yet they soldiered on, both of them, through fear and pain and despair, because there was a rainbow at the end of the tunnel if they could avoid getting run over by all the damned trains.

  They could save their world. They could save all the worlds. All they had to do to succeed was risk everything they'd ever loved and everything about themselves that had ever mattered.

  Molly thought of Seolar, with whom she had discovered love for the first time in her life. She could remember in an academic way the breathless passion she had felt for him, the excitement at his touch, the joy she took in each glance from him, each smile. And now…

  She still cared for Seo. She was still capable of love—at least in a limited fashion, at least for a while. For how long, she didn't know.

  Molly understood losing everything. She didn't want to lose it for no reason. She studied Jake, building a pretty nice little block tower on the floor, and she said, "I have to know you're safe."

  Lauren gave her a tiny smile. "There is no 'safe, 'Molly. In place of safety, we have vigilance. And I'm vigilant."

  "You can't be awake all the time; you can't be on guard all the time. No one can. I know you can't be safe. But you can be safer. Please. Please. For me, bring Jake to Oria, stay at Copper House, let the guards watch over you both and allow me this one little bit of peace of mind."

  "That's why you asked me to meet you here? To ask me that?"

  Molly nodded. "I died again. No warning, no one who knew where I was. While I was dead, you were unguarded. And having me living on Oria most of the time and you living on Earth all of the time isn't helping matters."

  "We both have our reasons, Molly. You don't want to be away from Seolar. I don't want to see magic change Jake into someone I can't raise. I have to be on Earth; you have to be here. But we're doing okay."

  "Only because you haven't come into anyone's sights yet. That's all going to change when they track the live magic back to you."

  "I'll deal with it when it happens," Lauren said.

  Molly said nothing. She couldn't think of anything she hadn't said already. Instead, she hugged Lauren, hugged Jake, and walked out the front door, not sure where she would go or what she would do. Sure only that she had found no peace from Lauren, and peace was the thing she most needed.

  Cat Creek

  Lauren and Jake stepped through the mirror-gate into the foyer of Lauren's house in the middle of the worst storm Lauren had ever seen. A police car waited in the driveway out front, and in the flashes of lightning, she could see that Pete Stark was sitting in the car, waiting.

  Burly, open-faced, sandy-haired, Pete looked tired and frustrated and worried. On his face, those expressions were out of character, but Lauren had been seeing them more and more in the last few months. Well, maybe this time his frustration wasn't about her, or because of her. Pete had been so sure, six months earlier, that the worst of the obstacles were behind them, and that the two of them were going to build a life together.

  At first, Lauren had thought so, too.

  But things had gotten in the way. A wariness had developed between the two of them as they tried to get to know each other better; Lauren kept running into places in Pete's life that he wouldn't talk about, and Pete was first awkward and then defensive as she tried to find out what he was hiding. But there was more to it than that, too. A lot more, and the biggest part of the problem Lauren could blame on no one but herself. Faced with the prospect of a real relationship with someone who wasn't Brian, she'd locked up inside. She stalled, and she was still stalling, torn between the living man she cared for and might even be able to love, and the dead one she knew she would love forever—and who she knew still loved her and always would.

  And while she tried to find some way to make peace between her past and her present, Pete became more tense and more frustrated.

  Thunder shook the floor beneath Lauren's feet, slamming her out of her reverie, and lightning crackled so close the thunder came only an instant after each strike. Tree branches and whole trees lay scattered in the street in front of the house, which had become a muddy river. Jake looked around, interested. "Wow," he said.

  "Wow is right." Lauren considered taking both of them back through the gate into Oria until the storm was over, but if Pete was waiting for her in his official capacity, she probably needed to stick around. She went to the front door, opened it, and waved to him. He saw her, opened his car door, and shot from the black-and-white as if propelled by cannon fire.

  He was soaked to the skin in the handful of steps it took him to get to the porch.

  "Why didn't you just come inside to wait?" Lauren asked him, watching him drip on the foyer rug. She hurried to the downstairs bathroom and got him a towel.

  "I was hoping this would slow down by the time you got home," he told her.

  Lauren frowned. "How long have you been waiting out there?"
r />   "Over an hour."

  "It's been doing this for over an hour?"

  He nodded. "No letup. I've never seen anything like it."

  "We under a tornado watch?"

  "No. Nobody else is even having rain. Well—Laurinburg and Bennettsville are both getting some rain, but they're on the outside edges of this. The rest of the state is experiencing a beautiful, sunny day."

  "And this has just been sitting here?"

  Pete nodded. "That's not the worst of it."

  "It wouldn't be," Lauren muttered. She wanted to touch him as he stood there dripping. Just reach out with one finger and touch his lower lip as he was talking. She wanted so much to have that human touch again; she wanted arms around her at night and someone to whisper that everything was going to be all right, even if it wasn't true. She wanted more than that, too, and when she looked at Pete she could feel the hunger in her belly.

  But twin ghosts walked beside her. Brian, dead and gone and waiting for her beyond life, had set her free. But her guilt, that she had outlived him and wanted someone else; and her fear, that if she ever let herself love again she would lose the second love as she had lost the first, held her back.

  So she did not reach out that finger to touch Pete. She just stood there, her hands at her sides.

  "All the gates in town are down."

  Lauren stared at him. She was the Cat Creek Sentinels' gateweaver—one of the rare people capable of seeing connections between her Earth and the worlds that existed in the same space but remained separated by forces she could manipulate, even though she did not understand them. The gates permitted the Sentinels to track magic use, watch out for problems that could affect Earth's survival, and in emer gencies walk the fire road between the worlds, though they did not take those paths lightly. Most of the time, keeping the gates in working order was a simple enough job—Cat Creek had a population of less than a thousand people, and not much happened there. Sparse population and little change from day to day were the key elements in keeping world gates stable.

  Lauren had not been tending gates long, but she'd never experienced anything that had caused all of them to crash.

  "What happened?" she asked him.

  Pete gave her a worried look. "We don't know. All the gates are down—even the tiny ones like June Bug's viewing mirror and my pocket mirror. We're sitting here blind and deaf, while something huge is going on around us."

  "So I have work to do."

  "Lots of it. And fast. We have to know what's going on."

  Lauren looked out into the storm. "God, I hate taking Jake out in this." She ran to the coat closet and got Jake's raincoat and her own. She put him into it, tied his hood to keep it in place, and shrugged into her own coat. "You have other things you have to do?" she asked.

  "Haven't had any calls yet, but I could get one at any time. We should probably go in separate cars."

  Lauren nodded. "I'm going to need your help for something later—once we get this all put away, I need to do some of my work." She started to give him the usual, intentionally vague code that she had to use when asking for his help with one of her special projects. But all the gates in town were down. None of the Sentinels would be listening. For once, she could just tell him what was on her mind. "I'm ready to create the siphon upworld to Kerras. Molly…" She faltered, and decided this time she had to lie. Pete was already wary of Molly—telling him that Molly was having doubts about what they were doing and that she was fighting off the call of the dark gods would not help matters at all. "She's after some of the Night Watch, and she can't come with me. So you'll be it. Can you help me?"

  Pete looked uneasy. "I'm off duty at seven. Give me until seven-thirty to throw some food in my stomach, and meet me in front of my place with your kit."

  Lauren nodded.

  Pete leaned over and gave her a wary kiss. He looked like he wanted to ask her something—instead, she heard him sigh. "I'm glad you're back," he said.

  "Me, too."

  But she felt the guilt for that kiss deep in her gut.

  Cat Creek

  June Bug's house smelled like cigar smoke and English Red Oil, and it was big and elegant and faded around the edges. It had been in her family for generations, a tradition that would end with her. She and Louisa were the last of their line of Tates. She'd never even considered the end of their line until Bethellen, her youngest sister, and Bethellen's boy, Tom, died. Then, of course, it was too late.

  In less than a year she went from knowing the family would go on to knowing that it wouldn't. That knowledge pained her in places she hadn't even known she had.

  June Bug watched Lauren lugging her little boy up the stairs to her gate-mirror. Lauren looked a lot like her mother with quite a bit of her father thrown in, but June Bug closed her eyes and remembered Lauren's half sister Molly walking into the library one day and thinking that she was seeing a ghost. Molly had looked exactly like her mother, Marian. It had been so uncanny that for a moment June Bug hadn't been able to breathe.

  And now Molly was dead, too. A few times, June Bug had walked out to Molly's gravesite at night, just to stand there wishing that she had been the sort of woman who, grown old, regretted the things she'd done and not the things she hadn't.

  "Once the gate is up, I need you to fix my viewing mirror, too," she said, shaking off her ghosts and her regrets. "The auxiliary gate in the library rest room can wait, I reckon."

  "I reckon," Lauren agreed.

  "Can I have that?" Jake asked, pointing to June Bug's cigar, and June Bug laughed.

  "Not yet," she said. "But I'll give you a whole box of them when you turn twenty-one, all right?"

  "No she won't," Lauren said to her son. "Those things smell like dirty sweat socks." Lauren looked sidelong at June Bug, and for just that moment, with that expression of mixed amusement and exasperation, she looked just like her mother. June Bug sat down in one of the old horsehair chairs, the weight of old loss and fresh loss and loss of any sort of future hitting her. She covered her eyes.

  "June Bug?" A light step. Slender fingers on her shoulder, and a worried voice by her ear. "What's wrong?"

  And that just made it worse—this taste of what she had denied herself her whole life, this faintest hint of what it would have been like to have someone with whom to share her life.

  The lump in her throat choked her. "I…miss them," she said, and her voice broke. "Your mother, mostly, but others, too. Others that might have been…And seeing Molly, who looked just like her and sounded just like her and walked just like her. And knowing that I tried to save her but that I failed."

  "Molly?"

  "Your mother."

  Lauren crouched down so their eyes were level and said, "You tried to save my parents. You're the only one who tried, and that matters."

  "But I lost her…them…anyway. Not that I ever had her…but…" June Bug took a long drag on the cigar and gathered her composure. "It all falls away," she said after a while. "You start feeling worn around the edges and thin through the middle, as if the sun would shine right through you if you stood in it."

  "That's what Molly says, too," Lauren said, pressing her fingers to the glass and summoning green fire from it.

  "Who?"

  "M——" Lauren stopped, and June Bug saw color rush to her cheeks. "Molly—what she said. Before she died. Damn!" she muttered, and the green fire flickered out. "Something still not right in there. Hold on."

  Lauren made a production fixing the gate a second time, but June Bug wasn't fooled. The first statement had been the truth, the second a lie to cover it up, and the crash of the gate a manufactured diversion. Molly wasn't dead. No matter what June Bug had seen in the foyer that day, Molly had somehow managed to survive. She was alive somewhere—and Lauren was still in touch with her. Which was why Lauren kept disappearing—dropping downworld to Oria or completely out of reach.

  The two of them were still working together.

  June Bug watched Lauren finish the gat
e, and carefully close it, then take June Bug's hand mirror and turn that into a little gate as well.

  "Don't despair," Lauren told June Bug when she finished. "Getting old, moving on, losing the people we love—we haven't lost them. We've just misplaced them for a while."

  And June Bug showed her out the front door with a polite smile and a sincere "Thank you."

  And then she turned to the stairs that led up to her room and the gates there. Molly, still alive. Both of Marian's daughters still alive. She went upstairs to get her little viewing gate; she needed to know what that meant.