Memory of Fire Page 6

  Jimmy and Betty McColl scooped the child up and took her home, wondering at the odd coincidence of Molly passing out at the same moment that the old woman sitting beside her suddenly went crazy and believed herself miraculously healed. But Molly had been sick so often in her short life with things that had never amounted to anything that they didn't make the connection until days later, when Molly was better again and they heard that the woman had been cured—truly cured—and that her doctors were mystified.

  A short season of experimentation had followed, while Molly learned to eat death by being presented with a steady diet of it. Jimmy and Betty McColl had looked like good people on the surface, but beneath the veneer, they were nightmares; they found within the person of their adoptive daughter an unexpected gold mine, and their relative poverty coupled with the potential for vast wealth proved more of a temptation than their surface niceties could survive. They began offering Molly's services underground; they developed her healing as a cash-only black-market commodity, and they grew very rich from her pain.

  She ran away when she was fifteen, but Jimmy found her and brought her back, and she became a virtual prisoner. Her next chance to flee didn't come until she turned eighteen, when Jimmy and Betty were trying to decide how to keep her in the house now that she had reached her majority; after all, they had a lifestyle to support. She moved heaven and earth and got herself to a recruiting station and joined the Air Force. That was the day she said good-bye to eating boozer death. Said to hell with the drinkers, the pill-poppers, the gorgers, the bingers, the pukers, the mainliners, and the rest of the hide-from-the-world horde. Those who bought their own poison could keep its sting. She couldn't save the world and she wouldn't try.

  She used her time in the military and almost every penny she earned trying to find her real parents. She succeeded after four years, but what she learned was that they had died in a car crash when she was fifteen. She visited their graves, and found she liked the town where they had lived and died. It was tiny, it was quiet, and she found the people there easy to avoid. When she finished her second tour of duty, she bought herself a little trailer in Cat Creek and she made herself hard to find.

  But not hard enough, apparently.

  She paced through the lovely suite, restless, full of energy. These creatures would want her to heal. They would keep her in this cage, as Jimmy and Betty had kept her in a cage—they would profit from her talent, and use her until she dropped, and then wait until she could get herself up so that they could use her some more.

  No matter how reverent her guards, no matter how pretty her cage, that was what this was all about. They would come with their pain and their death, and because there was no end to pain and death, once they started coming, they would never stop. Nothing she did would ever be enough. They would set her before the ocean with a thimble and demand that she empty it, and as she had done before, she would empty herself trying. Unless she could find her way to freedom.

  She heard soft voices through the glass, and glanced out the window. Far below she saw creatures like her captors lining up across a stone courtyard. Some held babes or children in their arms. Some supported infirm elders. Some hobbled along on crutches; some limped; some coughed. And behind her she heard the ring of footsteps in the metal hallway outside her doors. They were coming for her—coming to make her drain the first few drops of her ocean. She bit her lip and waited for the sting of the waves.

  Six guards came—beautifully dressed, kind-voiced, patient. They led her from the suite, and she did not fight them. Not yet. She needed to get the lay of this place first. She would pretend compliance until she knew enough to get herself safely home.

  The guards were wary—they bore no weapons that Molly could see, but they had the gait and stance of martial artists and the edginess of the deservedly paranoid. They'd heard about her stunt with the blue guard; they clearly weren't hoping for a repeat performance.

  They took her into a vast stone room decorated with tapestries and covered with rich, deep blue carpets, and they sat her on a chair that she could only think of as a throne—a tall, wide chair cushioned with velvet but otherwise made either of gold or covered in a thick layer of it. She sat when they told her to sit, all the while figuring a plan of attack should this get bad enough that she needed to flee, and she watched as the first of the supplicants, the seekers of healing and release, crept across the floor to her, heads down, afraid.

  She waited for the pain to come, for the first touches of the poisons that were destroying the one who approached her to touch her, to bite her flesh and make her want to scream. But the creature—the woman—reached her and knelt before her and murmured a few words in her own language, and Molly felt nothing. No hurt. No suffering. No death. It was like the child brought to her when she rode in the wagon.

  "She says," the guard at her right side translated, "that a great snake eats through her belly, and she cannot eat or sleep, and she fears that she dies."

  No pain. No pain—Molly felt only the beating of her own heart, the movement of air through her own lungs, the smooth working of her own flesh. Tentatively she reached a hand forward and touched the woman and saw as a quick flash in the back of her mind, the twisting white tendrils of a huge cancer that knotted its way through the woman's bowels and vital organs, strangling them. The flash of insight vanished, and she willed that many-limbed octopus to oblivion, and she said, "Be well."

  The green fire that she had seen when she touched the little girl leapt from her fingers and spread into the woman's body from the contact point at her shoulder. The woman gasped, but the gasp was not of pain. Molly had seen that sudden joyous release before, but only through eyes blurred with agony. Now she watched the miracle as if she were merely an observer.

  The fire burned and burned and burned—and then it died. And the woman, her face radiant and suddenly, with her pain removed, years younger, threw herself at Molly's feet and babbled something that even the guards seemed to find incoherent. Two of them helped the healed woman to her feet and led her to the door that exited the chamber; the guard at Molly's right said, "She wished to thank you."

  "I guessed that," Molly said. Her mind was not on the woman she had helped, though. She was thinking about herself.

  She felt good. Strong. Alive. Filled with energy, as if she could run a hundred miles, as if she could fly. She had healed, but the fire that flowed through the dying woman had poured through her, too, and left her stronger than she had been before.

  Another woman approached, this one carrying a child. A boy, Molly guessed. A young boy. He was the size of a human eight-year-old. That, Molly knew, meant nothing, for she had no idea how these people aged, or how quickly they grew from childhood to adulthood, but something about his size and the way he lay in his mother's arms triggered a memory that Molly would have given anything to have forgotten forever.

  While she was stationed at Pope, she'd house-sat for friends for a couple of weeks. She relished time off base and away from her dorm, especially on the weekends when both her roommate and many of her dorm mates drank endlessly and she got hit with their hangovers. But off base, she wasn't protected; no gate and no guards stood between her and the people who knew who and what she was. Someone who knew her from her days with the McColls had spotted her—in a grocery store or at a bookstore, maybe—and had followed her. And had passed on her whereabouts.

  And in the middle of the night, Molly opened the door to a child, and to a mother with hollow eyes and lips drawn thin and bloodless by the constant helpless watching of her child's pain. The butchers and the poisoners had been at the boy with their radiation and their chemotherapy, even though they'd told the poor mother her son's type of cancer rarely got better with either chemo or radiation. They'd turned the child into a skeleton—a puking, hairless, aching skeleton—and when they were sure he hadn't the strength to enjoy another breath, when they were sure he was too weak and too broken ever to walk or laugh again, then they said, "We can't d
o anything more for him."

  The mother had no other hope, so she came—in the dark, in a car fifteen years old with peeling paint and a wrecked right fender. She stood in that doorway with her son in her arms, a boy who would have reached to her shoulder had he been able to stand on his own, but so thin she lifted him without seeming to notice.

  The second Molly opened the door, the boy's pain hit her like nails rammed through every organ of her body from the inside out and all at once. Molly looked at the kid and doubled over right there and started throwing up, and she couldn't stop until she was on her hands and knees with her head hanging almost to the floor.

  The kid had looked at her with sad, beautiful eyes, and she had hated him—hated him for the pain he was going to put her through, hated him for looking at her with such regret and such hope, hated him for wanting her to suffer so that he could live—and she had told the mother, "I'm too sick to see him tonight. Bring him back after my shift. Five. I'll see you at five."

  The mother didn't come back. Her son died in the middle of the night.

  Molly could have saved him. A touch, a word, and his poison would have been hers for a while, and then he would have lived.

  The world was full of people she could save, and she had fought her way to terms with the fact that she couldn't save them all. But she should have saved him. She tried to tell herself that he wasn't her responsibility just because he'd shown up at her door on the last night of his life, but his ghost rode on her back and whispered in her ear, "If you had touched me, I would still be alive today." He was heavier by far in death than he had ever been in life.

  She didn't even know his name.

  She touched the child in front of her, and said, "Be well," and the green flame flickered through and over his body, and he was well. I do this in payment for the one I didn't save, she told herself. In penance. But she felt no pain—the death that was devouring this gaunt, green-haired child couldn't touch her, and somehow she knew that she could not pay penance for that long-ago moment of callousness if she felt no pain and made no sacrifice. She would never escape that ghost, perhaps.

  But this child, at least, she had saved. He hugged Molly and ran away, his weeping mother hurrying behind him in a desperate attempt to keep up.

  And another hope-filled supplicant approached.

  Perhaps she was still trying to empty the sea with a thimble, Molly thought. Perhaps here she could no more fend off all death and pain than she could have in her own world. But here, at least, the thimble was not her own body. Energy filled her to the bursting point. Perhaps she could shed her dark memories here—forget her past. She could find good in the curse bestowed on her at birth. At that moment, joy and pleasure bubbled through her veins and sang beneath her skin. Any residual weariness she had felt when she entered the chamber had fled, vanquished by this glorious suffusion of magic.

  A line of the sick and the crippled, the twisted and the maimed and the dying stretched as far as she could see, and probably beyond. And for the first time in her life, she felt no dread. Sitting there facing them, she shed a little of her darkness, and felt the first faint glimmer of hope that her future, contrary to every expectation she'd ever had, might be better than her past. "Bring them on," she whispered. "Bring them on."

  Cat Creek

  Lauren woke with the electric feel of magic pulsing through her blood. The mirror called to her, painfully loud and inescapable. Her stomach knotted and her fingers twisted the sheets; she sat up, dreading what was to come but invigorated by it as well. A lifetime of uncertainty lay behind her. Ahead of her, she felt, were the answers she'd been seeking.

  She hurried into Jake's room. He was already awake and sitting in the middle of his floor, surrounded by blocks and books. He bounded to his feet when she opened the door and ran to her and hugged her knees. "Mornin', Mama." His smile was so big she got both dimples. She picked him up and hugged him tightly.

  "Good morning, monkey-boy."

  "Sekimos?"

  Sekimos were Eskimo kisses—rubbing noses. Jake was still transposing first consonants on most words that began with vowels, something Lauren knew she was going to miss when he outgrew it. She said, "You bet, Eskimos." She rubbed noses with him, and they gave each other big hugs, too, and kisses on the cheek.

  Then, having had enough of the mushy stuff, Jake got down to business. "Diaper. Soggy. B'ocks. Light. Biteys?"

  She translated that roughly as, "My diaper is soggy, I played with my blocks, I couldn't turn on the light in my room, and I'm hungry."

  She laughed and started putting things right in his very concrete world. An hour later, she and Jake, dressed for winter, with a picnic basket full of food and drinks, stood before the mirror together.

  I could back out now, she thought. This isn't the sort of thing a responsible mother does. I have no idea what's on the other side, and going through is just pure craziness.

  But she was still two people as she stood there—the sensible one who didn't know what she was getting into, and the other, the one who knew the secrets and would divulge only one: that she had to go through that mirror. Lauren had spent most of her life driven by compulsions she did not understand and could not decipher, wandering in search of things she could not define and could not find. She'd worked so many different jobs she'd lost count: She'd waited tables and mixed drinks, sung in restaurants and taught ballroom dancing and worked at a book bindery and built custom cabinets for new homes, a trade she'd learned from her father. She'd moved restlessly from apartment to apartment, from town to city to village and from state to state, hungry for something she couldn't find anywhere, couldn't name, couldn't even imagine. She wanted so much that she ached with the wanting, but nothing she tried touched that hollow, consuming need.

  Then she'd met Brian, and for three years the hollowness had left her. For those three sometimes blissful, sometimes loud years, she had loved and laughed and fought and created a family and happiness, and she had been sure she'd found what she'd been seeking. But Brian's death had left her both grief-stricken and haunted by the return of that burning, nameless ache.

  And all she could think was, I have to get home. I have to get home. The insurance money had come at about the same time that the people who owned her old family home were trying to unload it in a very slow market. She'd bought the place without really considering what it would mean to her and Jake to live in tiny Cat Creek; she'd moved back to the place she'd grown up in, driven by blind certainty that she was doing the right thing—knowing only that she had to have the house, that her life would never be complete without it.

  Blind instinct.

  Like salmon returning to their spawning beds. Or the San Capistrano swallows coming home to roost.

  Or lemmings flinging themselves into the sea in suicidal millions.

  Blind instinct. Not necessarily good.

  This was more of that blind instinct, more of that wordless imperative, more of that must. This was, she believed, part of the answer she'd been searching for her whole life. She had to know what lay on the other side of that mirror. She had to go through, even though the sane part of her thought she was crazy for doing it. She had to, because she would not be able to live another day in her home until she did.

  She held Jake on her left hip and rested the picnic basket full of food and other useful goodies on her right foot, and pressed her right hand to the mirror, worrying as she did that last night might have been her final chance. If the magic had died—

  But it hadn't. Beneath her hand, the mirror thrummed. In the reflection of her eyes, the first flickers of green fire sparked, and following those flickers, the long bright flashes, and in the back of her mind, the low, heavy roll of thunder building in the distance—

  —and then the resistance of the glass vanished from beneath the weight of her palm, and Lauren tightened her grip on her son, leaned over and picked up her picnic basket, and stepped through.

  A moment in which sound died, in which sh
e and Jake were utterly engulfed in cool, energizing, electrifying green flame, when every cell in her body felt both separate and vibrantly alive. In that moment she felt Brian beside her, and felt his lips brush the nape of her neck, and heard him whisper, "I told you I'd never leave you." And then she and Jake stood in darkness. In her ear, Jake's bright, excited laughter and his voice, suddenly very loud, saying, "Please…more?"

  And she thought, More for sure, kiddo. That was the best thing since sex.

  All she got was that one clear, wondering thought. Then the memories hit her, and with them, shock.

  Magic. She was heir to magic, she was a natural gateweaver, she was the child of Sentinels—though she could not at that moment remember what Sentinels did or why they mattered—her abilities had been kept secret from everyone, even her, and in a way she was a secret weapon. Her mother, not merely a schoolteacher; her father, not merely a mailman; her past as she had lived it and remembered it for nearly twenty-five years, a web of carefully constructed lies. Her parents—her own parents—had brought her here when she was ten and used the magic of this place to strip her memories and her understanding of magic from her and planted in the place of those memories—her memories, goddammit—two key suggestions. The first, that she would dread the gate-mirror in the foyer while she was a child and believe that she had always dreaded it. The second, that when she was old enough and able, she would find her way through it again. Stepping through to…Oria, she thought, suddenly knowing the name of the world on whose surface she stood…stepping through to Oria had been the trigger that broke the spell. Or launched the second half of it—the removing half.