wreck of heaven

by Holly Lisle

  "Certainly not. Why?"

  "Because I would love so much to listen to some beautiful music and dance with you. Could we do that?"

  "You had only to ask, my love." Seolar looked toward the main door to the solar, and started to say something. Birra's voice floated back to them before he could utter a sound. "I am on my way to get the musicians, Imallin. They shall be only an instant."

  Molly sighed and smiled into the silence, truly content.

  In that silence, in the stillness of her mind, she heard the heavy, slow flap of a leathery wing, and her happiness melted away like snow on hot pavement. She froze, concentrating. Had she heard something, or had she only imagined it?

  She closed her eyes and concentrated. And there it was again. Flap. A pause. Flap. It came from a distance, and she knew she did not yet hear it with her ears, but she could not doubt that it was real. She opened her eyes and looked at Seolar and said, "Something coming."

  "Something?"

  "Hunters," she said. "they're coming. They know I'm here, and they're looking for me."

  "What kind of hunters?"

  Molly dreaded even saying the word. "The rrôn," she whispered.

  Cat Creek, North Carolina

  Crocuses on the lawn, the first hints of daffodils pushing heads above the dirt, and a splash of insanely yellow forsythia running along the side of the house next to the driveway. It looked so cheerful, and so ordinary, Lauren Dane thought as she pulled into the drive.

  "Okay, puppy boy," she told Jake. "You're going to help me carry groceries into the house this time, right?"

  Jake gave her a little smile. "I help," he said. "I'm a big boy."

  He sat quietly in the car seat while she unfastened him, then stood still while she put the plastic bag that held the bread over his arm. She loaded up with most of the rest of the bags, clamped her keys between her teeth, and said, "C'on, Jake. Ess go."

  He followed close behind her, like an obedient little lamb. Lauren wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. Jake had never been an obedient little lamb. Never. In fact, he'd always seemed to her to be a cross between a caffeine-hyped kitten and the cartoon Tasmanian devil. She hadn't seen any part of the little boy she recognized for the last two weeks—not since something awful had happened to him going through the world gates and Molly had died in the process of fixing it.

  Lauren wanted her busy, stubborn, fun little guy back. She wondered if he'd ever make it back—he'd finally started talking again, but he didn't chatter. He didn't get into things. He didn't run around. He stayed where she put him, did what she told him, and nothing more.

  Lauren shifted bags to one hand, unlocked the front door, shoved it open with a hip, and swung the groceries down to the foyer floor.

  She turned to find Jake plodding up the front steps to the porch, the arm with the bread on it carefully lifted to keep it from dragging on the ground.

  "You doing all right?" she asked him.

  "Yes." He held the rail with the opposite hand and was doing what Lauren thought of as the Modified Wedding Walk going up the stairs—left foot, step together; left foot, step together. Cautious.

  "I'll be right back, then," she told him as she ran down the stairs. "I have to get the rest of the groceries." Lauren hurried—loaded the rest of the bags on one arm, praying that the flimsy plastic handles wouldn't break, slamming the trunk, and hurrying back to the house at as close to a run as she could manage.

  She needn't have worried. Jake, once inside the door, went to the foot of the stairs leading up to the second floor and sat on the first step.

  "All right," Lauren said. "Let's get all this stuff into the kitchen. Come on."

  He shook his head and sat watching her.

  Lauren sighed. "Jake, I have to put the food away. The ice cream will melt, and a lot of this needs to go in the refrigerator. Can you carry the bread to the kitchen for me?"

  He still sat where he was, shaking his head.

  Well, okay. He was obedient except for that. He wouldn't go down the hall—not for love, not even for ice cream.

  She leaned down, kissed him, and took the bag of bread. "Okay. I'll put things away and then be right back. Stay there."

  "Nooooo!" he wailed as he saw her start to leave.

  "I'm just going down the hall. Everything is okay, monkey-boy. Really."

  "Nooooo," he said. The back of the foyer terrified him. The giant mirror that hung on the wall there terrified him. She could get him into the kitchen if she picked him up and carried him, and the only time she got a show of spirit from him anymore was when she tried to carry him down the hall. Then he turned into a hellcat, if only briefly, and she felt like she had her little boy back.

  She had too many groceries to put away to voluntarily engage in a fight, though. "I have to, kiddo. I'll be fine. And so will you."

  "NOOOOO!"

  Lauren took a deep breath, preparatory to just picking up the bags and heading down the hall and letting him scream. Behind her, someone knocked on the front door. She turned. Pete Stark stood there, still in his deputy's uniform.

  Pete was second-in-command of the two-man Cat Creek Sheriff's Department. He was, as well, a newcomer to the Sentinels, which had been—until Lauren returned to Cat Creek—a closed and secretive cell of a hereditary group of guardians, whose family associations had reached back for generations. Lauren's own family had been Sentinels longer than they'd been Americans—and they'd been Americans well over a hundred years.

  The Sentinels stood at the world gates and fought to prevent—and if necessary, repair—damage from magic that rebounded from other worlds in the worldchain back to Earth. They lived dangerous lives, and frequently died young. Hidden away in small towns, spending their days as florists and insurance salesmen and bank clerks and housewives, they kept the ancient secrets of the world gates and the magic that lay on the other side of them—because anyone could be taught to use the gates, and those who traveled down the worldchain gained the power of gods, if not the wisdom.

  And magic used downworld rebounded upworld, often with horrific results.

  The Cat Creek Sentinels had suffered major losses recently. Nine of fourteen Sentinels—including the traitors who caused a magic-borne plague that had killed over three hundred people in Cat Creek alone, and millions worldwide—had died in the past month. The survivors had sworn Lauren in as their replacement gateweaver, and had taken Pete mostly because he was a friend of Eric MacAvery—Cat Creek's sheriff and the head of the Cat Creek Sentinels—but partly because he knew too much about the Sentinels and world gates to be permitted to walk away.

  In spite of the somewhat shotgun-marriage manner in which he'd joined, Pete had taken to the duties and responsibilities of a Sentinel with an enthusiasm and a dedication that surprised everybody.

  Only Lauren seemed to wonder at his competence in tight spots. Only she seemed to notice layers to him that lay below the surface, or to suspect that he was more than he seemed. She thought he was trustworthy, for what it was worth. Actions spoke truth where words lied—and he'd saved Eric's life, and had risked his own many times in many ways.

  She liked the look in his eyes. Her gut said, He's okay. He's one of the good guys.

  But which good guys?

  "Hey," she said, opening the door. "Are you where you could take a minute or two and sit in the hall with Jake so that I could put groceries away?"

  He looked startled. "Well…I suppose. I came by to talk to you, but…" He shrugged at her, smiled at Jake, and sat down on the stairs beside him. "You want to play? Cars? Or horsey? Or something?"

  Jake sat there staring at Pete like Pete had two heads.

  "Right back," Lauren said, and hauled her groceries down the hall before Pete had second thoughts.

  He'd been by almost every day since the funeral. She saw him when she answered calls to check on the Sentinel gates around the town, too, and when they bumped into each other on the street. In a town that—since the influenza epidemic—hou
sed only a few more than seven hundred people, not running into someone became difficult.

  He wanted to be with her, to spend time getting to know her; he wanted to help her get past all the awfulness of the past couple of months—and maybe the year before that, too. He liked her. For that matter, she liked him.

  But he wasn't Brian, and could never be Brian. And Brian had reached back from death to save Jake's life, and had told Lauren that he would always love her, and that he would be waiting for her. That didn't leave Lauren with a lot of room to move on with her life.

  She was at such loose ends. She owned the house outright, and with government money that came in monthly, she and Jake could afford to live without her working, even though to do so they had to live very small lives. It wasn't such a hard thing to live a small life in a place like Cat Creek.

  But her life had been planned to be so much more. Until Molly's death, she had been one-half of a partnership born to save Earth from self-immolation and prevent the escalating collapse of the worldchain of which Earth was just a single bead. She'd spent thirty-five years of her life heading toward a destiny of unimaginable wonder, had in a single day at the end of that thirty-five-year trek discovered not only who she was and who Molly was, but what their parents had planned for the two of them, and that her life mattered in huge ways she couldn't even fully conceive…and in the same day, Molly had died and she'd lost the sister she'd only just found and the future she'd spent her entire life hungering for. And that same bitter death had rendered her parents' sacrifice of their lives years before futile—for if Lauren and Molly couldn't carry out their parents' plans, Lauren's mom and dad had died for nothing.

  Lauren jammed cans onto the shelves of the pantry and the fruit into big wooden bowls lined along the counter and refused to let the tears come. Shit happened. It happened to everyone, and if it didn't seem fair that so very much of it had happened to her, well, no one with any sense had ever tried to claim that life was fair, had they? Or even that anyone ought to try to make it fair. She still had Jake. She had a place to live, a little bit of money, the time to give her little boy what so many young mothers didn't have. She had a lot, and she would not succumb to the temptations of self-pity. She would not. She loathed whiners.

  She could hear Pete out in the foyer talking to Jake. Reading him a story, she realized. "The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything"? She winced. That had been one of Jake's favorite books prior to…well, everything. But he couldn't seem to stand the suspense anymore, and when the pumpkin said, "Boo, boo!" he always burst into tears, even if the pumpkin said, "Boo, boo!" very quietly.

  "He hasn't been doing too well with that one lately," she yelled.

  "He's hanging in with it right now," Pete called back. "Has his hands over his eyes, but I'm going light on the dramatic presentation."

  "He cries at the pumpkin."

  "I'll take it easy."

  Suit yourself, Lauren thought, annoyed. If he has a fit, though, you're going to deal with both of us.

  Bread in the freezer, muffin mix on the shelves, flour and Toll House morsels and brown sugar on the baked goods shelf at the top.

  "He DOES NOT!" Lauren heard Jake shout suddenly.

  "The very scary pumpkin say, 'BOO! BOO!,' not 'I gots a cookie!'"

  Lauren stopped putting things onto shelves and listened.

  "Right here," Pete was saying. "See—it says, 'The very big, very orange, very scary pumpkin says, "I have a cookie in my tummy." '"

  "You a dumbass," Jake said. One of Brian's words. Usually Lauren found a little bit of comfort in hearing Jake using Brian's words, in the same way that she found comfort in knowing that he now remembered his father—but she wasn't sure how Pete would take being called a dumbass by a three-year-old.

  Pete was laughing. And an instant later, so was Jake. She leaned against the counter and put her head down on it and cried. It was the first time Jake had laughed since the accident, since the awfulness—and by all rights she or Jake's father should have been the ones to make him laugh, and instead, he was laughing at the man who seemed to want to take his father's place.

  Lauren wanted to be happy with that breakthrough. A part of her was—hearing Jake laugh again was like music from heaven. But a big part of her was hurt and jealous and—yes, she admitted—bathing in self-pity.

  Dammit.

  She straightened up, wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and took slow, deep breaths until she got over it. Brian was dead, and he couldn't be there for his son anymore, though he sure as hell had been there when it counted. Molly was dead, and she couldn't be there for Lauren, or the plan. Mom and Dad were dead, and shitty as that was, they'd been dead for a long time.

  And if Lauren didn't get her ass in gear, the ice cream was going to melt all over the floor.

  She heard footsteps in the hall and turned to see Jake riding on Pete's shoulders—and Pete had gotten him through the back end of the foyer and past the dreaded mirror without so much as a whimper.

  "Mama, Pete did the story wrong," Jake said, and he had a real smile on his face. "He said…he said…" Jake started to giggle, "that the very big, very scary, very orange pumpkin said he gotted a cookie in his tummy." He wrapped his arms around Pete's eyes and leaned over his head, laughing again, laughing so hard his head bobbed up and down and his belly shook. "But the pumpkin…to say, 'BOO! BOO!'" Jake did those 'boos' with the tremendous vigor Lauren always used to give them when she read the book. "An' I say Pete is a dumbass."

  Lauren winced and said, "I heard."

  Pete grinned at her. "He has his opinions, doesn't he?"

  "He does." She smiled at his son. "This is the happiest I've seen him. Since…" She shrugged.

  "He's a tough little guy," Pete said. He swung Jake down to the floor, and Jake ran to her and hugged her around the thighs.

  "Can I help?"

  Lauren handed him a soup can and pointed him toward the floor of the pantry. "Right there," she said. "Put it away, and come back for the next one."

  Pete said, "I wanted to let you know that a new Sentinel came in today. Girl named Darlene Fullbright. Eric asked me to stop by and let you know, maybe run you by so you can set up her gate. She was going to be staying with June Bug, but apparently Darlene is allergic to smoke, and June Bug said that at her age she's not going to be told to go outside her own doors to smoke—the two of them did not get off on the right foot at all."

  Lauren smiled a little. "I don't see June Bug being any too happy about someone suggesting that she make any changes, frankly. And anything involving those damned cigars of hers…"

  "She's a character," Pete agreed. "Want me to run you by? Soon as you put up the rest of your groceries, of course."

  Lauren shrugged. "I might as well. I have to give Jake a bath this evening, but that's the biggest event I have going."

  "We could do something together. Go get something to eat—over in Rockingham or Laurinburg or down in Bennettsville. You don't need to be spending every evening alone. You've been through a lot—and I have the feeling that, like ol' Jake there, you could stand to laugh a bit."

  Lauren thought wistfully of the evenings that she and Brian had gotten dressed up—Lauren in a pretty dress, Brian in his blues with his service ribbons proudly displayed—for special events on base at Pope. She could close her eyes and see him standing in the living room of their little base housing duplex, flight cap in hand, smile on his face. She hadn't worn a pair of hose or a dress for anything other than funerals since Brian's death.

  Maybe it wouldn't hurt to take Pete up on his offer—maybe it was time that she thought of high heels as something other than shoes to wear when people died.

  But would that be leading Pete on? She wasn't a free woman. She was a widow, but a widow under special circumstances—she would never be a free woman.

  Yes, she decided. Knowing that Pete liked her, and would like to date her, she couldn't accept something that he would look at as a date with a
clear conscience. "That's sweet of you," she said.

  "But…you're going to turn me down." Pete smiled sadly. "I swear, Lauren, I could see the whole thing running across your face while I was standing here looking at you. You wanted to go, you considered going, and then something changed your mind. What?"

  "Brian."

  Pete closed his eyes, took a slow breath, and blew it out with the air of a man trying to find patience he didn't have. Lauren expected him to tell her that Brian was dead, that wedding vows were only until death—and instead he just nodded. "All right, then," he said.

  Lauren discovered that she'd wanted him to try to argue her out of it. What the hell did that mean?

  She turned away, put the last of the groceries in their places, balled up the plastic bags, dumped them into the trash, and wished that she could understand herself.