wreck of heaven Read online

  She pulled her arm back, and the fire she'd summoned died away. She turned to find Jake curled up on the bottom stair, his arms wrapped around his face. He was whispering "No, no, no…"

  "Oh, Christ," Lauren whispered. She hurried to his side, crouched beside him, and pulled him into her arms. "Hey. Monkey-boy. Jake-puppy. It's okay. It's all right. Nothing's going to hurt you. I have you." She kissed him, and rocked him, and waited.

  After a long, long time, she felt him relax.

  Lauren wanted to throw up. This was the kid she was going to drag through a gate; this was the kid she was going to put face-to-face with the woman who'd almost gotten him killed, in the world that had almost killed him. She closed her eyes and tried to think of anyone, anywhere, that she would trust with the life of her child. And there was no one. Not one single person. Pete came closer than anyone else—but Lauren suspected Pete of harboring a secret, and until she knew what it was, she wouldn't take any chances with him, either.

  We have to go, she thought. I have to do this, because if Molly and I succeed, we will save this world for all the generations that follow—and revive the worlds above it, and protect the ones below it. If I don't go, the next screwup, the next disaster, the next slip, could be the last, and everyone on the planet but the few who can find or create gates will die.

  I have to go.

  I cannot leave Jake behind.

  I cannot wait until he's ready, because he might never be ready, and Molly and I don't have forever to do what we have to do.

  She held her son, and rocked him in her arms, and silent tears ran down her cheeks. She hated what she had to do, and what it would do to Jake, and she hated feeling like a bad mother, and she hated her lack of options. For a moment she hated her parents for giving her such a burden to bear.

  Then, because she knew the weight she carried, and because she would not shirk her responsibilities, she carried Jake back to the mirror and rested her free hand on the glass and summoned the fire that would carry her through realities. She summoned the world of Oria with its vast, ancient forests, and closed in on the walled village built around the magnificent Copper House, and drew herself a circle of fire in the center of the cobblestone street in front of the palace, between the two tall, blue-skinned veyâr guards who stood at either side of the door.

  Then, her little bag of personal items on her shoulder and Jake clinging to her hip, frozen rigid with panic, she pushed gently against the mirror glass, and felt it give, and the universe beyond welcomed her into its embrace.

  For a time that was no time and an eternity, while the music of the universe vibrated and strummed every cell of her body, she fell and floated and soared and the universe streamed by her, and she touched her own immortality and her soul commingled with Jake's. It's okay, she told the universe and Jake, all in a breath and a thought, and somehow she made it okay. She moved within the pain and the terror he held in his tiny body, and smoothed off the edges so that it was still his pain, which he had earned, and which was his by rights—but now he could face the pain.

  Magic. Through the gates lay magic; the building blocks of the universe and the birthplace of godhood. For that time outside of time, she was pure spirit, the weight of her body fallen away to nothing, and she and Jake flew like eagles and angels.

  Then the universe pushed them out the other side, and she and Jake were standing in front of the two veyâr guards, who, unprepared for their eruption from nothingness, howled and lowered weapons into attack positions.

  "I'm the Vodi's sister," Lauren screamed, and clutched Jake tight. Should have thought of something besides her own convenience in making the gate, she realized. Those spears had hellish sharp points, and they were too close. She could summon a spell and blast both of the guards to oblivion—but they were supposed to be on her side. She willed them to move their spears to an upright position, and when they did, though she could see their muscles bulging as they fought to keep her at spearpoint, she said again, "I'm the Vodi's sister. I'm here because she sent for me."

  They stared at her, and one of them turned his head fractionally, while still staring at her, and shouted, "Guest for the Vodi; claiming to be her sister."

  She didn't push past them. She could have, but she didn't choose to make enemies. Something had them frightened and on edge—she should have recognized the signs as she watched them through the mirror. Guards walked the parapets of Copper House and squatted atop the towers along the wall that ringed the city. Soldiers, armed and watching the skies, and now some of them watching her.

  Lauren looked up.

  Dark shapes soared high overhead. She would have thought them vultures, or maybe ravens, but the scalloped trailing edges of their wings and the whiplike length of their tails made her realize how very high above they soared. She counted a dozen before she turned to the guards who watched her. "Rrôn," she said, and shivered.

  They nodded. "Gathering since the Vodi returned. They want nothing good."

  "No," Lauren agreed.

  Humans called them dragons, and had known them as dragons when they lived on Earth, and had feared or worshiped them. With reason. They were creatures out of nightmare. She'd seen three one terrible day, and had killed one. She was tempted to use the magic she controlled in Oria to create some weapon to shoot them out of the sky. Except magic that dealt death had echoes that flowed upworld; if she killed one of the rrôn here, something terrible would happen to a dozen innocents back on Earth—or perhaps to a hundred or a thousand who were less innocent. No one understood how magic moved between the worlds well enough to predict the echoes that any action could cause. But everyone could point to correlations—a healing spell that spawned remissions, a murder that spawned a killing spree.

  She would kill nothing using magic unless she had no other choice. She left the rrôn to their circling and turned her attention to the front gate, where an amber-skinned, golden-haired veyâr stepped through the front arch of Copper House and walked toward her.

  King of the castle, she thought. Master of an empire. He wore a simple tunic of deep red velvet, black breeches and soft, low black boots, and he had neither crown nor scepter. But he wore power, and that gave lie to the simple clothes, the unadorned braid hanging down his back, the fact that he carried about him no symbols of power.

  His men turned to him and offered deep bows; he responded with a nod.

  This, then, would be Seolar, Molly's love.

  Lauren waited, not bowing. Seolar, when he reached a spot between the two guards she still held at bay, stopped and studied her for a long, still moment. Eyes of jet black, enormous, without scleras, looked into hers and she felt as if her life had been laid bare for everyone to see. She was, to the veyâr, one of the old gods. But, dammit, the veyâr had presence. She could roast this fellow with a word and a wave of her hand, but he outclassed her on a scale that defied measurement.

  "You favor her in a hundred ways I cannot even define," he said after a moment. Then he bowed to her, gracefully and deeply, and said, "Quickly, please. Inside—the rrôn arrived a while ago, and the Vodi has not been herself since their coming. They watch all we do, and I fear they may know the Vodi's Hunter has arrived."

  Lauren spared another glance at the sky and saw that the rrôn now circled closer. She held Jake tighter, clutched her shabby little carry-on bag, and hurried after the master of the castle, feeling small and insignificant and nervous.

  Through doors of solid copper, beneath arches bound in copper, over floors banded in copper, past copper spun into lamps and fountains and banisters and balustrades, she followed the veyâr, who set a fast pace.

  She stepped at last into a generous library, with books that lined the walls to a height of three stories, with walkways all around and spiraling staircases up and down, and in the corner one fine, grand fireplace. And in front of the fireplace, taller than she had any business being, and with the delicate bones and impossibly green eyes that marked her as having veyâr blood, stood Mol
ly.

  Lauren saw her sister, and tears filled her eyes. Molly hurried across the room and hugged her and Jake.

  They stood that way for a while, rocking back and forth, and finally Molly pulled away a little. Lauren swung her bag to the ground and shifted Jake over to her other hip. She shook her head and smiled, lost for words.

  "Kind of hard to figure out what to say, isn't it?" Molly offered at last.

  "Aside from 'Jesus, it's good to see you,' yeah. Kind of hard." Lauren shook her head. "But…Jesus, it's good to see you."

  Cat Creek

  Pete got home late. He hadn't intended to stop by work, but after Lauren turned him down again—and then shooed him out of the house in such an abrupt fashion—he didn't feel like going home and brooding about it. And Eric had needed help with one thing and then another, and they'd gotten to talking and had a few laughs, and then had taken off for Bennettsville for a couple of drinks and a couple of steaks.

  He thought he'd go straight to bed. But on his way past the kitchen, he caught a glimpse of something out of place from the corner of his eye. He stopped, internal alarms going off. Put his hand on the butt of his Browning, held his breath, and listened. He could hear nothing. He tried to figure out what about the dark kitchen had set him off, and narrowed it down to a splotch of white on the kitchen table.

  He hadn't left anything on the kitchen table. More than once, knowing exactly how he'd left a place and being able to spot changes had saved his life. And he hadn't started getting sloppy.

  He edged back around the corner into the kitchen. It was empty, but someone had been there. He saw a piece of paper and a key ring.

  Check for bombs first? Dare a light switch?

  He decided to read the note. Put on gloves and a filter mask, because stuff that just showed up where it had no business being could turn out to be lethal.

  Preparations taken, he read the note. He felt better—after all, at least Lauren had liked him enough to trust him with her stuff for a few days. But just when he'd decided to feel flattered, he looked at her keys and his stomach knotted and the hair on the back of his neck stood up.

  She hadn't just left her house key. Or even the house key and a key to the mailbox. She'd left her full key ring—including her car key. And this wasn't a spare key ring. This was her key ring, the one with the picture of the Sainted Dead Husband in one side of a Lucite frame and Jake as a baby in the other.

  Pete started running scenarios in his head—no one had come through the door, disturbing the little telltale he always left. The only way in through the windows was to break one, and after a quick inventory of the rest of the apartment, he cleared windows as a possible point of entry. So Lauren had used her little mirror trick to deliver the note. That wasn't the problem. The problem was, had she done it of her own free will, or under duress? And if under duress, then from whom? Another rogue Sentinel? One of the enemies Lauren had no doubt left in Oria? Or one of his problems, who'd seen him with her and decided she and Jake would make nice leverage?

  Or…had she just made a dumb mistake? Left him her ring and taken her spare? He wasn't immune to tendencies to assume the worst, to seeing disaster where none existed, or even to going off half-cocked—though he'd gotten better about that over the years.

  So what should he do?

  First, he decided, he'd check her place. Look for signs of forcible entry to the house, her car, out back in the storage shed; check for evidence of a struggle inside.

  Next, check out the in-laws. Where were they, what was their story?

  Then…well, depending on what he found, maybe a visit to a few old friends. Carefully, of course. But for certain sorts of problems, especially people going missing for nasty reasons, he had just the right sort of friends.

  CHAPTER 3

  Above Copper House, Ballahara, Oria

  THE RRÔN SPUN and spiraled in the sky above the hunkered-down copper-clad dwelling, with Rr'garn over all of them. Master of the dark rrôn—the hunters, the destroyers—Rr'garn wore the scars of a hundred deaths between his wings; each had burned him and hardened him until he was cold as death itself, free from the burdens and the hungers and the dreams of life. He breathed power, sang power, flew power; he no longer even slept, and so had shed the last frailty of dreams.

  He arched his neck and set his wings to best advantage, knowing the spectacle he made as he soared and enjoying the awe he inspired.

  He would ascend to Master of the Night Watch. He had decreed it, and his rrôn would fight to put him in the seat of power. He drank the deaths of worlds, and already his belly cried out for the next great meal. Never had a rrôn been as magnificent as Rr'garn, nor would another ever equal him. Even his allies trembled in fear at his passing.

  Cowering inside the copper barriers, the first real threat to the aims of the Night Watch in more than a hundred years shook off the lingering pains of her first death. He yearned to feel her heart beating, to feel the air moving through her lungs, to hear the mouse-quick dance of her thoughts. But she and her thoughts eluded him. He knew she waited inside the barriers of Copper House; his spies swore to that. He heard she had an ally—a sister with terrifying powers of her own. His spies swore to that as well. What he did not know was what this new Vodi and her sister would do. He felt trouble coming; he sensed that this Vodi was not the timid, shy little creature the previous Vodian had all been. Everything about these two new players reeked of uncertainty.

  In that uncertainty lay the potential for disaster.

  If the problem stood to be disastrous, the cure was simple enough. Destroy the Vodi, slaughter her sister. And promptly, before they started to work against the Night Watch.

  Rr'garn held in his mind a memory of the Vodi's thoughts, that he had caught before she found a way to shut the dark gods out of her mind. The one his spies called the Hunter was another matter. Neither he nor any of his could mark the Hunter at all; she still resided among the truly living.

  But subtlety would be best if his warriors could manage it. Treaties with the other dark gods hung in the balance; and if he were too zealous, Rr'garn could give away his hunt for the head seat on the Night Watch before he was ready for the war that would ensue when he decided the time was right to claim it. So—no armies of rrôn sweeping down and leveling Copper House. Instead, one special soldier, sent alone into the halls of Copper House, who could neatly destroy the Hunter and bring out the Vodi, whose death would take a great deal more effort.

  Rr'garn liked that plan. And he knew which soldier would be able to accomplish the task.

  "Watch the place," he told his wing-second, Trrtrag. "If anything changes, shout me. I'm after Baanraak."

  Trrtrag eyed him as if Rr'garn had lost his mind. "Baanraak? He stepped away an eon ago. He'll devour you before he returns to the Night Watch."

  "Devour Rr'garn?" Rr'garn said. "Baanraak has grown large in your mind after all these years. And he is clever, or I would not spend the necessary time to seek him out. But…fearsome? I think not. I hear he suns himself like an old lizard, and has reduced himself in his old age to eating voles and insects." Rr'garn added, "I don't want him to return to the Night Watch. I just want to hire his…talents. He stands to lose even more than we do if these blisters undo our work or re-life Kerras."

  "Luck, then, that you find him," Trrtrag said, "and that you make him see reason before he rips out your throat and melts down your gold."

  Rr'garn thought Trrtrag lacking in reverence toward him. He had heard one among his number might be disloyal, harboring plans for his own advancement. "I'll take your luck," he said, thinking he would deal with Trrtrag upon his return. He set his wings into the last of the day's thermals and spiraled upward, nostrils flared wide, mind and body stretched tight as bowstrings, searching for the oldest of the dark rrôn, the deadest of the dead.

  Copper House

  Molly sat in her suite across from Lauren, resting in a broad, soft chair, but she held her body rigid with tension. She stared o
ut the window closest to her, looking up, and said nothing.

  "What are they doing out there?" Lauren asked.

  Seolar, standing at the window, shrugged. "They're flying. Circling. There are neither more nor less of them than there were an hour ago."

  "There's one less," Molly said, and both Seolar and Lauren jumped. She'd said almost nothing since they entered the suite—and Lauren guessed that had been half an hour earlier.

  Seolar turned away from the window. "I have good eyes, and I didn't see one leave. My vantage point is better than yours. How can you be sure?"