Gods old and dark

by Holly Lisle

  "The name will come to you," Heyr said. He glanced out the window. "As will the dawn, and too quickly at that. But you'll sleep better tonight, I think."

  Cat Creek

  One instant Lauren was sleeping soundly with Jake's back curled against her belly, and the next she was standing barefoot on the wood floor, a knife in her hand, with the absolute certainty that something moved toward her that had no business being there.

  Night Watch, a sort of second voice in her head whispered. Just about to come through your door.

  How did she know this? How had she woken up? Beneath a layer of alertness and ferocity, she was still a fuzzy-headed, bleary-eyed woman who had only had—she glanced at her clock—forty-five minutes of sleep.

  She almost swore out loud, but self-preservation and the warrior-skin that she seemed to have slipped into moved her toward the door instead. As if on cue, something slipped into her bedroom. That something carried a wickedly curved knife and moved soundlessly. The hunter had about it a reptilian stink that shot clear through the base of Lauren's brain.

  It wanted to kill her. And Jake.

  The reflexes might have been augmented by the knife, but the rage was all hers. Lauren struck, driving into the thing's throat, feeling the knife slam into bone as a jolt through her hand and her arm and her shoulder, into her spine, all the way down to her tailbone. She yanked the knife free, feeling hot blood spurt against her hands, and with the blade blocked her hunter's parry. Her knife sliced through the tendons at his wrist, and he dropped his weapon. He made a weird, gurgling sound, soft and terrifying.

  Belly, she thought, and drove the knife in low, gripping the handle with both hands, digging up through softer flesh.

  Heavy liquid heat spilled across her hands, and an unbearable stink filled the room. Lauren leapt back, feeling her skin burning, and the thing that had come after her fell forward, swiping at her with talons that caught her left arm at the shoulder and dragged through her skin. The pain was blinding, and in the back of her head, the phrase poisoned claws echoed.

  Poisoned claws.

  She didn't know if her would-be killer was dead, but she knew she didn't have time to wait to find out. She grabbed Jake from the bed and dragged him, protesting the disturbance and the stink, into the bathroom down the hall. She did not turn on the light—just sat Jake on the toilet and jumped into the shower with her clothes on, with the knife still in her hand, not even closing the shower curtain. She turned the water on full blast, and the cold as it first came out of the showerhead jolted all the way to her back teeth.

  "—shit, shit, shit, shit—"

  Lauren realized suddenly that the monotonously swearing voice was her own. The pain in her left arm got less horrible. Water pounded the wound clean and sluiced blood and guts and digestive juices and excrement and she-did-not-want-to-know-what-else from her clothes, her face, her hair.

  "Mama, I want to go back to sleep."

  "In a minute, Jake."

  "You are taking a shower with your clothes on."

  "I know."

  "You're silly."

  "I know, Jake."

  "I have to go to the potty."

  "Okay. Your potty chair is right there. You can pull down your pants by yourself. But hurry, okay?"

  "I'll hurry," he said.

  Most of the time she was grateful that he was finally potty-trained. She didn't have to deal with diapers anymore, which was pleasant. But diapers did have that one advantage—that when things were going bad in a big hurry, you never had to come to a dead stop because your kid was peeing. You could do what you had to do, he could do what he had to do, and at a time convenient for both of you, you could clean everything up.

  The pain was gone from her left arm, the stink from her body. She needed to go deal with the corpse on her bedroom floor, she thought, and tried to turn off the water with her left hand because the right one was still locked around the knife. And that was when she realized that her left arm didn't work anymore. At all. That the left side of her body was going numb. That when Jake said, "I'm all done. I hurried," and she tried to answer, the words came out thick and blurred because only half of her tongue was responding to her brain.

  Lauren grabbed Jake with her good arm, with the knife still locked in her hand; she pointed the blade outward—away from him—but she hoped to hell Heyr knew what he was talking about when he said the knife would not hurt her or anyone she protected. She didn't let herself worry that Jake's pajamas and his Spiderman underpants were still around his ankles, though he yelled and started tugging them up in midair. She didn't let herself think. She ran toward the stairs, thankful that her legs still worked. Then the left one started to go numb halfway down, and the first thought into her head was, My heart is on the left side of my body, too.

  The poison was spreading fast. When it hit her respiratory center or the nerve center that kept her heart beating, she was done for.

  Her gate would be ready—she should be able to open it into Oria and her parents' old place with a thought. She should. But, stumbling down the last few stairs, making the turn toward the back of the foyer and the mirror, limping, and then hopping when her left leg gave up, she realized that she could very easily not make it.

  She lost her balance and couldn't catch herself. She fell, Jake underneath her, only feet from the mirror. Jake shrieked, then ran to the huge old mirror and rested his fingertips on the glass. In an instant he had the gate open, with the cabin in Oria waiting on the other side.

  He grabbed her and tried to pull her toward the gate, but three-year-old strength and fear couldn't overcome the disparity in their sizes. If she could push, though….

  She did, moving her good arm, her good leg, flopping into the gate.

  Jake clung to her, dragging, a ferocious expression on his face. The green fire enveloped her and swallowed him, and for the time that she hung in the middle of nowhere and everywhere, suspended in the infinite, peace flowed through her, and with it, the awareness of the touch of her soul and the comforting sense of her nearness to the infinite. She had no body, no pain, no boundaries. She was, for that time, infinite and immortal and everything was okay.

  Then she fell through the other side of the gate into the first pale light of dawn, into heat and humidity and the sound of rain hitting the roof, and she thought, I have to heal myself.

  And darkness devoured her whole.

  CHAPTER 5

  Natta Cottage, Ballahara, Nuue, Oria

  JAKE LEANED OVER HER, poking her face with one finger. "Wake up now," he said. "Wake up." And he smiled at her, that happy-without-shadows little-kid smile that Lauren so loved.

  I'm not dead, she thought.

  She sat up, surprised that she could. Her clothes were still soaked, so she hadn't been gone long. She moved her left hand. It worked. Wiggled her left foot. It worked, too. Her heart was still beating, lungs were still moving air.

  "What happened?" she asked Jake.

  "I fixded you," he said. "I fixded your arm and I made you all better."

  Jake and magic and Oria. The concept scared her shitless, but she had to acknowledge that this time she would have been dead—and him an orphan—if he hadn't figured out how to do the right thing.

  Lauren wrapped her arms around him and hugged him. "Thank you," she said. She blinked back her tears, swallowed against the lump in her throat. "I love you."

  His arms were around her, his soft cheek pressed against her neck. "I love you, too," he said.

  She took them home. Held tight to Jake with one hand and to the knife with the other, and stepped back through the gate into her own house, into the first faint light of Earth's morning. The house smelled dreadful.

  "Eeeuwww!" Jake pulled the edge of his pajama shirt up over his face and said, "Gas-mask time."

  That came from a silly game they played together, pulling shirt collars over their faces while taking out the trash, wiping poop, dealing with other bad smells. In this case, she had to agree. "Ga
s-mask time," she echoed, and took the two of them to the kitchen phone. She dialed Pete, who sounded worse than she felt when he picked up the phone. "I have a dead or mostly dead monster in my house," she told him. "One of the Night Watch. He almost killed me. I need a cleanup crew and some help."

  "Not human?"

  "Not even close. That knife came in handy—I would have been dead without it. Almost was anyway."

  "I'll be right over."

  "Bring our friends," she said.

  The house was full of Sentinels in five minutes. They all looked at the dead thing on her bedroom floor and confessed complete ignorance of what it was. Lauren pointed out the gold ring embedded in the back of the monster's neck, and said, "We should burn the body, gather up the gold we find, and rasp it down to powder."

  June Bug said, "Then pour the powder into the Pee Dee River."

  Lauren nodded. Heard heavy footsteps in the hallway, and looked up to see Heyr. And waited for the fireworks.

  "It's a Beithan," he said. "From way, way upworld."

  Eric MacAvery turned and looked at the stranger with the shock he felt clear on his face. "Who the hell are you?"

  Heyr held out a hand. "Heyr Thorrson. West Sweden Sentinels, up in Wisconsin. "I've been tracking this guy and a whole nest of others like him; we managed to rout them from our area, but they're Night Watch, and working on whatever the current Night Watch problem is. So far, it seems to be hunting gateweavers."

  "That sounds about right," June Bug Tate said. She was puffing on a cigar, which Lauren didn't actually mind because it cut the smell of dead monster innards, and glaring at Darlene, who hadn't seemed to be bothered by the corpse-and-crap stench, but clearly resented anyone smoking in her presence. "I'd ask why here and why now, but Lauren seems to have made sure we wouldn't get the answer to that." June Bug grinned a little and looked over at Lauren. "Nice work," she said. "You're lucky he didn't kill you."

  "Luckier than you know." Lauren told them quickly about the thing's poisoned claws, about her rush for Oria, and about Jake's getting her through the gate and healing her.

  They all looked shaken when she finished, Pete especially. He pulled her into his arms and hugged her, then released her quickly. "You're still all wet."

  "Haven't had time to change. Or to sleep. Or anything. We got back, I called you, you all came, and here we are."

  Eric and Pete rolled the body into a black tarp, and while they and Heyr and Terry "Mayhem" Mayhew hauled it down the back stairs toward the kitchen, Darlene and Louisa Tate and Betty Kay started scrubbing. George Mercer looked at the stains that wouldn't wash away. "You're going to have to run a drum sander to get rid of those bloodstains," he said. "The wood absorbed a lot." He glanced around the house. "You probably want to go over all the floors with a good floor varnish," he added. "You don't want any more messes like this."

  And that, Lauren thought, was the hell of the thing. He was probably right. She needed better varnish on her floors because they were likely to end up having to repel even more blood and guts. She amused herself for just an instant by imagining walking into Pate's Hardware and asking which varnish they'd recommend for protecting her floor against stains from monster entrails. That image would have been funnier, of course, if the situation that spawned it hadn't been real.

  She felt sick. She wondered if she did need to think about moving into Copper House in Oria—or someplace even farther from home.

  Magic mattered. If the thing that had come at her had used magic instead of stealth, she would have had no defense. It was to her advantage that there wasn't much magic left on Earth—but that was exactly the thing she and Molly were working to change. They were bringing back magic. And the more successful they were, the more of an advantage her enemies would have against her.

  Daisies and Dahlias Florist, Cat Creek

  "Quiet, everyone. Sit down, and let's talk about this," Eric said.

  The Cat Creek Sentinels were gathered in their room on the top floor of the Daisies and Dahlias Florist. They sat in their folding chairs, with Mayhem doing gate duty over in the corner, sitting half in and half out of the gate and winking at Betty Kay every time she looked over at him just to make her blush. Eric had let Heyr attend, which Pete protested vigorously—but Eric had overruled him. "He's the one who knows what these things are and how they managed to get rid of them in Wisconsin."

  Everyone was there except for Lauren, who had begged off on account of having had no sleep in twenty-four hours. She'd assured everyone she'd be fine. Pete suspected that the minute they were gone she'd taken Jake and retreated to the little safe room she'd created inside of Copper House, but he wouldn't suggest anything of the sort to anyone else.

  Eric leaned on the edge of the old oak worktable and looked at all of them. "Things have been bad, and they seem to be getting worse," he said. "We've had some suggestions from among you that we're in the end times, and I can't say that's wrong. I'd like to, but I can't. I reckon if we aren't in the end times, these are bad enough to get our attention, anyway." He shrugged. "According to our Yankee colleague over there, the Sentinels are getting hit by more trouble, no matter where they are. We have upworlders hunting gateweavers, old gods leaving Earth to flee downworld. And the Night Watch has come to town. I cannot think of a time when any of the dark gods have chosen to attack us in our homes, our town, the center of our stronghold. I cannot think of a time when they've felt the need. But we've got the body of a dark god cooking in a couple of vats of lime in the old tobacco warehouse on Railroad Street, and when the flesh is off the bone, we're going to have the grim task of destroying whatever gold jewelry we may find and dealing with the magic from that, so that the dark god doesn't come back."

  He took a deep breath and stood up. "Someone changed the rules while we weren't looking. We've been trying to hold the line, but I do not think this line will hold. And this is a war we cannot lose, because if we lose, the whole world loses with us. We are going to have to take our fight to the enemy." His voice got softer, and Pete saw a sadness in his old friend's eyes that wrenched him. Eric said, "And I do not know how. I don't know where he is, or how to find him, or what to do with him once we do. In the War Between the States, our great-grandfathers fought against a side that was bigger and better-funded and better-armed. In spite of that, we nearly won—because we fought for what we believed in and for what we knew to be right. We fought for the sanctity of our homes and our land, and for the right of self-determination. Our leaders were men of integrity, men of honor, men with fire in their bellies and principles in their hearts."

  Eric was staring down at the floor. "The South knows what it feels like to lose a war that means everything. To fight on our own land, to watch our own cities burn, to watch our people die. We know what it means to fight for home and family and faith, and to lose. And now we face an enemy that is bigger than us, who has better weapons and power we do not—and cannot—have. We must win. If we have any chance at all, we must have leaders—men of integrity and honor, with fire in their bellies and the charisma of gods, men whom the brave will follow into the mouth of Hell. Because in this war, that may be where we have to go." He looked up at the Sentinels, and the sadness in his eyes burned deeper. "I don't know where to find such men as that."

  "I want to talk to you later," Heyr said. "Meantime, look in a mirror."

  "I'm no hero. I'm a small-town sheriff who ended up with more power than was good for him, and who is just smart enough to know to be scared of it."

  Heyr shook his head. "Heroes are made, not born. Heroes are the men who see a moment when they and they alone can make a difference, and who choose to make that difference even though doing so always has a price. I know heroes. They're sort of my stock-in-trade. And you have what it takes to make them—and to lead them. To be first among them."

  "You boys are leaving out women," Betty Kay said.

  June Bug Tate shook her head and leaned across Pete to tell Betty Kay—in a whisper that could have been
heard from the back row of a large theater—"You're so young you still think that's something to get riled about. Don't. Those two are old-school, both of them. They use men to mean human. It's an orator's grace note—when you say 'men and women' every time, the ear tires and the mind says, 'I already know that, thank you very much, and must you keep pounding me with the obvious?' They haven't forgotten about us, though. If they did, we'd run their nuts through a pecan sheller before either of them could blink."

  And that, Pete thought, was true old-school. June Bug and her I'm-old-and-hard-of-hearing whisper hadn't actually been meant for Betty Kay. It had been aimed straight at Eric and Heyr. She'd just demonstrated the art of chastising people while seeming to agree with them. No matter what they thought of women as heroes or warriors, neither Eric nor Heyr could disagree with her without looking like a complete ass.