by Holly Lisle
Heyr's immortals, though, were a problem for another reason. Of all of them, only Pete was already on his feet, and he was down in South Carolina with the shadow of Baanraak that Molly had mentioned. And a bizarre fuzz of energy surrounded Pete, blocking Heyr's attempts to reach him. Of the remainder, Eric was in the best shape, and he was rolled into a fetal position on his bed, moving only occasionally, and then only to lean over the bed to vomit into a trash can. Mayhem, Darlene, Betty Kay, June Bug—all of them were so lost in the haze of the world's horror they would be worthless for days.
The first days of immortality, when every lapse in attention let the whole weight of the world pour over the new immortal, were the worst. Had Baanraak held off for just another week, Heyr would have had a force strong enough to stand against him.
Another goddamned handful of days, and instead, Heyr was going to end up in this thing alone, with the mortal he had to save at all costs at stake and a dark god he didn't trust as his only backup.
Now he wished he hadn't pissed off Loki.
Cat Creek
Seven P.M., and Pete was feeling better. He'd discovered that he could drink prodigiously and wash drunkenness out of his system with the tiniest application of his will, leaving only a pleasant burr that dulled the edges of the pain that being in Hal's presence didn't quite alleviate.
Feeling cheery and mildly beery after he knew not how many brews, he leaned an elbow on the table and in a low voice told Hal, "It isn't just that I want to get laid, but God knows getting laid would be good. You know?"
"In theory, I know. Beyond the merely theoretical, however, I haven't screwed in so long, I've forgotten how," Hal said, laughing, and Pete laughed with him. Hal's voice was louder than Pete's, his movements broader and giddier, and the cop part of Pete noted this, and that Hal wasn't going to be driving himself home. But Hal had been matching Pete drink for drink, and Hal wasn't a god. Pete didn't believe for a minute that Hal wasn't getting laid, though, either. The guy was good-looking, had a car that Pete could only dream of, clearly had money and lots of it. Pete figured the no-sex story was just an attempt at drunken bonding—if he'd talked about having had a dozen women in the last week, he figured Hal as the kind of guy who would have claimed two dozen.
Hal took a long swig of his beer and lit up another cigarette. "My thing…it isn't really about sex, anyway. It's about…" He sat there, staring off into the distance, and the strangest look crossed his face. "You know, I don't have the faintest clue what it's about. She's a drug to me, and she is my disease and my addiction and my cure, and probably my death. And she is the first glimpse I've had in longer than I can remember of any sort of idea that something is lying on the other side of death, too." He shook his head. "And I can only conclude that I want this because I'm stupid."
"She's magic," Pete said, actually getting it.
Hal nodded. "More than you could know."
"So why is she not interested in you?" Pete asked.
"She is. But not in a good way."
Pete waved over the waitress and said, "Two more beers." He turned to Hal. "I'm buying now. Why isn't she?"
"Because." Hal made a face. "I'm not a nice guy. I've done some bad things in my life."
Pete didn't let his expression change or let any glimmer of his sudden interest show, but the guy with the broken heart faded into the background and the FBI agent perked up his ears. Drunken confessions were confessions nonetheless, and Hal wouldn't be the first man to solve somebody's open case over a long night of hard drinking. For the first time Pete wished he could read Hal the way he could read everyone else in the room. "She doesn't approve?"
"Some of those things I did to her," Hal said. "She's good. Not fluffy or sweet, not that sort of surface goodness that is all about appearances. But deep-down good. She's…I don't know how this is going to sound to you, or if it will make sense, but she loves life, even though it hurts her." Hal smiled a little. "She's a devil fighting on the side of the angels."
"And you're…"
"I'm finding out that I might be the same. But she knew me as a devil, and she hasn't seen the part of me that is like her. I need to show her. I need her to understand."
"Don't hold your breath," Pete said. "They hang on to the past, you know. Maybe because it's safer than the present. I don't know. But getting a woman to see you in her present can be damned near impossible."
He closed his eyes and thought of Lauren, and found that sitting in that South Carolina bar, he could touch her.
She was scared.
He hadn't planned to spy on her, but something was wrong—badly wrong—so he brushed just the surface of her thoughts.
"Baanraak," he whispered, and Hal said, "What?"
Pete opened his eyes. "How fast does that car of yours go?"
"About one-sixty on the straightaways. Why?"
"I need to get back to Cat Creek. Right now."
"Something wrong? You forget something?"
"Yes," Pete said, wishing to hell that he'd been able to get his mind around Lauren's several attempts to teach him to weave a gate. He didn't have it, he never would, and mostly he was fine with that. Gateweavers were rare and strange creatures, and he wasn't rare or strange. His mind didn't bend the way a mind needed to if it wanted to thread a path between realities. "Fuck," he muttered. "And there's that huge mirror in the bathroom, too."
Hal stood up. "A mirror. And Baanraak. And a sudden need to be someplace else in the middle of a pleasant conversation." He looked Pete in the eye, all drunkenness fallen away, and said, "I'll put a card on the table if you will."
A little chill of warning skittered down Pete's spine. "You first."
"I'm a gateweaver. If you tell me what's going on, I can make use of that big bathroom mirror. Though I will have to come pick up my car later."
"You're an old god," Pete said as the pieces fell into place. "That's the reason I can't read you. That's the reason everything is quiet around you—you're an old god, and maybe an immortal, and you have all the pain blocked out."
"I'm not an immortal," Hal said, "not a pain-eater. But…the gate—the hurry. What's going on?"
"They're prepping for a fight in Cat Creek. Baanraak—you know of the dark gods?"
"I know that one."
"Baanraak is on the outskirts of Cat Creek. Coming in from the north, looking to destroy Lauren and Jake and Molly. They need my help. Yours, too, if you want to give it."
Hal looked unconvinced. "North of Cat Creek."
"I'm reading Lauren and Heyr. Molly's there, too, but I can't get anywhere near her. She might as well be invisible."
Hal stood there for just a moment with a blank look on his face, his eyes unfocused. Then his brows knit together and he said, "Bathroom. Now."
"You feel what's going on?"
"No. I sense something I know to be impossible. That's worse."
He stood and looked past the few other drinkers and said to Hal, "Lead on."
Hal went into the bathroom. It had one stall and on the opposite wall one urinal, but Pete stayed outside to make sure no one else came in.
After just a moment, Hal opened the door. "Gate's ready. Go on."
The gate led into a room Pete didn't recognize at first. "I'm not going through there. It doesn't go into her house."
"It goes into the workroom out back. Right now going straight into her house would be a bad idea. They're all three armed, and they look like they're on a"—Hal paused, trying to find the right word—"a filed trigger."
"Hair trigger?" Pete suggested.
"Yes."
Pete nodded, and out in the hallway, someone pounded on the door. "That's enough of that, faggots! Get your asses out of there now! And then get out of my bar—we don't tolerate that shit in here!"
"Go," Hal said.
Pete climbed up on the lavatory, and crouched and squeezed into the gate, and the sounds of the world dropped away. The universe embraced him and erased the pain he carried, and silenced the six
billion sorrows that seeped into his flesh and the poison of death sought and nurtured. For one timeless moment peace flowed through him. This was the universe as it should be. This was the taste of Eden. Then he stepped through the gate into Lauren's workshop.
The pain was gone. All of it. He felt light. He felt wonderful. Pete stretched and looked around, wondering if he'd landed in the wrong place, if he'd somehow ended up in a sideways Earth that lay in a healthy chain unplagued by the Night Watch.
Then he realized what had happened. He'd stepped between the worlds, and his connection to the Earth had broken. He was still an old god, but no longer immortal. The pain was waiting for him, like a heavy coat he needed to put on.
He wanted to cry. Instead, he lay on the dirt floor of the workshop, faceup, and spread his fingers out on the cool earth and sought the life of the planet, and made it his own. The pain tore into him like starving rats caged inside him, gnawing their way out, and for a moment it was so bad it blinded him. He rolled over to his hands and knees and vomited, and tried to focus on life—the clean, pure streams of life that he and Lauren had brought into the world. He got sludge—poison-silted death, wars and corruption, evil—and then, like a pulse in a dying man, he found a single spot of pure, welling life. He pulled that to him and linked to it, and some of the pain receded. Enough that he could stand again.
Was this waiting for him every time? His head throbbed, and he crawled to his feet and rested for a moment against the wall. It couldn't be this bad every time. Heyr would never have moved anywhere by gate if it was.
Maybe you just got numb to it.
He took a slow, shaky breath and headed for the house. And then he realized that Hal hadn't come through the gate with him. Pete turned around and looked at the mirror he'd stepped through. The gate was gone. Shut tight. So Hal wasn't coming.
Well, there you go. The old gods heard the name Baanraak and fled in the opposite direction. The extra help would have been nice, but Pete realized he should have known from the look on Hal's face that he wasn't going to volunteer for the fight. Well, of course not. The mortal old gods lasted because they hid.
Pete, bound to the Earth again and again immortal, suppressed his regret. He would have liked to have Hal fighting with him. But he turned and trudged to the house, carrying a single drop of Heaven in an ocean of Hell within him.
Night Watch Control Hub, Barâd Island, Oria
Rekkathav had been watching the woman the Master wanted to have him watch. Well enough. Good enough. Watching, just watching, while she natter natter nattered. He watched, he was bored, but boredom was no great issue to him—his life for some time had fluctuated between the extremes of boredom and terror with little in between. Of the two, he preferred boredom.
Natter natter. He fidgeted, yearning for his sandbox, desperate for sleep.
And the woman and the old god started talking about Baanraak, and about Baanraak's being there.
Rekkathav's stomach quivered in his throat.
At almost the same instant, the little peripheral alarms he'd set around the house to warn him of problems went off. Boredom to terror—and this was terror. He used every tool in his arsenal, every diagnostic trick, every little spell-breaker, trying to find out what had set off the alarms, and he managed to unravel the shielding on an attacker going in hunting for the woman.
And the attacker was Baanraak.
"No," Rekkathav whimpered. "No, no, no…"
Baanraak was going to kill the woman. And then he was going to hold Rekkathav responsible for her death because Rekkathav hadn't informed him of the danger to her, which he had charged Rekkathav to do. Was going to use this as an excuse to devour Rekkathav with a barrel of beer.
"Runner!" Rekkathav screamed, and one of the little mortal runners popped into the room almost immediately.
"Go to the arena. Tell Baanraak the woman he bade me watch is under attack and in mortal danger. Run, damn you. Fly!"
The runner would find no Baanraak, of course. But Rekkathav could dissemble—he could claim that he had been unable to penetrate the disguise of the Master, that he had only seen a rrôn attacking, and that he had, therefore, made his best attempt to warn the Master, and more than that could surely not have been expected of him….
Something else moved around the house. Something else that gave off the message that it was hunting for the woman.
This was something not trying particularly hard to hide itself, yet for all that doing a better job than the Master was doing. It was another dark god, oe wearing an exquisite second skin of manflesh and wrapped in light. Most observers—most dark gods—would have been fooled, but Rekkathav's talent, that one thing for which the dark gods had recruited him, was his ability to get to the truth of anything. He called it researching, but it was really stripping every person and every situation down to component parts, pulling out all the lies and deceptions, and discerning how those pieces that remained fit. And in this second intruder, he could read faint shadows of a deeper, real self, a core personality that lay beneath a very fine disguise and bore no relationship to it whatsoever.
Rekkathav started peeling away at the layers, carefully, cautiously—and deep within the core of the creature, he suddenly connected with its essential self.
Its essential self was Baanraak. A much more savvy, much more dangerous Baanraak—yet still Baanraak, entirely and completely.
Rekkathav swallowed his stomach and clenched his jaws tight against the terror that consumed him.
And suddenly a huge head thrust itself over his shoulder and stared at Rekkathav's displays, and a third Baanraak, an angry, bloodied Baanraak who was neither the first Baanraak to appear in Rekkathav's displays pursuing the woman, nor the second, snarled, "What the fuck do you want, Snacklet, and how dare you interrupt me in the midst of shredding traitors?"
Rekkathav, senses overwhelmed, did what any sensible creature would have done in that situation.
He fainted.
CHAPTER 21
Cat Creek
THROUGH THE WEIGHT of her own pain, June Bug could still feel the trouble heading toward Lauren and Molly over at the old Hotchkiss place. Godhood gave her an exquisite sensitivity to movements and intent around her, and though she was too weak and sick to act on anything, she was entirely capable of reading the situation that was shaping up over there.
It was bad. Because what was getting ready to happen was worse than what Lauren or Heyr expected—and what they knew was coming was bad enough.
The surprise bomb waiting to go off and destroy Lauren and Jake and any hope the world had was worse.
Molly had given up.
She was ready to die. And she was playing with a plan that would end her existence. And the means to put her plan into action had just arrived.
June Bug lay there, an old woman with an eternity she did not want stretching before her, feeling Molly's despair layered on top of her own, and she thought of Molly's mother, Marian, and how June Bug had both loved and failed Marian. She thought of the world she had fought so long to save, and she realized that she could not fight as an immortal—the chains of it bound her to the bed on which she lay. But Marian's daughter needed her—Marian's daughter, who had so much of Marian in her. Marian's daughter, on whose shoulders half of Earth's future rested.
I have the magic of a god here now, June Bug realized. Age is a trapping I choose to wear—and Sentinels' rules be damned.
If she were stronger, maybe she would be able to withstand the weight of immortality better. Maybe she would be able to get up and fight, do something to prevent Molly from destroying herself out of fear of what she might become. Making that kind of difference would be worth the breaking of some rules.
June Bug lay on the bed for a long moment, closing out as much of the noise as she could and filling the little spaces she cleared for herself with memories of what it had been like to be young, to wear tight supple skin and strong muscles, to breathe easily and move without pain. She led her body
back through time to the place where she was once again twenty years old, and she willed her flesh to conform to that memory, focusing not on specific changes but on a total-body rejuvenation.
Pain became a fire within her, immediate and terrible and unblockable, and she lost her hold on some of the walls she'd built to ward off the pain of strangers. Like a dam crumbling, the walls came down, and the anguish of the world poured in on her again. She writhed in the bed, her body melting and twisting and changing inside and out, and a scream tore itself from her throat as she fought for some peace within the horror.
She scrabbled like a drowning woman for any bit of floating debris that she might cling to—and she found one of Lauren's siphons, pouring live magic into the Earth from someplace far down the worldchain. Someplace still full of life and hope. She latched on to that, and the thin trickle of healthy magic washed into her. It wasn't enough, but it was something. It gave her a couple of planks that she could hang on to; it helped her pull her head above water long enough to start rebuilding her walls.