Memory of Fire

by Holly Lisle

  Pete turned to Eric and June Bug and the other Sentinels, and Molly, all still sprawled on the floor, and said, "I need to do something useful for a while. Why don't you let me take care of these folks?"

  Lauren stroked Jake's blood-matted hair, and said, "I'll be upstairs giving him a bath if you need me."

  * * *

  Jake's diaper—what was left of it—was soaked with blood.

  Lauren pulled it off him and settled him into the tub, and stared at the diaper, trying to figure out what had happened. "Her clothes are soaked with blood, but I couldn't see any wounds, or any tears, or anything wrong with her except that she's dead. But your clothes are in shreds, your shoes and socks and the bottoms of your pants are gone completely, the back of your coat and your shirt are gone, and your diaper has enough blood in it to transfuse someone. The blood on her isn't hers, is it?"

  She rubbed shampoo into Jake's hair with shaking hands.

  "It's yours, isn't it? That's why you're so scared. Something terrible happened to you. She didn't get you out of there when I told her to, and something awful happened to you, and she died fixing it."

  Jake didn't fight her when she washed his hair, or when she scrubbed the blood from his skin. That was so out of character, Lauren wanted to scream. He hated having his hair washed, he hated being scrubbed, and he'd never been still in the tub. Now he sat like a little zombie, shivering in the warm air and the warm water. He seemed like a stranger to her; like someone else's kid.

  "Oh, sweetheart," she whispered. "I'm so sorry. I wish I could take back what happened to you. I wish I could make you forget it."

  She considered that for a moment. She could make Jake forget it—but what else would he forget in the process? Her memory hadn't been right after her parents' experiment, and they had much more experience with magic than she did. She could very well erase not just his memory, but his personality. She could leave him a drooling, unresponsive lump, instead of the busy, frustrating, delightful little boy he had always been.

  "No, I don't wish that. I wish I could make whatever happened to you not have happened, but I can't. And I won't play God with your brain." She kissed his cheek. "We'll get through this, you and I. We'll find our way back to where things are good, and where you can laugh and play. You're young, and you have me. You'll get better. I promise."

  She hoped her promise wasn't an empty one.

  When she went downstairs, with Jake once again clamped to her like a barnacle, she found Eric sitting on the floor of the foyer next to Louisa Tate. Both looked pale and shaky, but both were talking. Terry Mayhew, already on his feet, helped Pete pull bodies out onto the front porch. June Bug, on her hands and knees, scrubbed blood from the floorboards. Lauren didn't see George Mercer, but when she got to the bottom of the stairs, she heard his voice coming from the kitchen.

  "…That's right. More flu victims. Right…and one we're not sure of. The deputy is here—that's right—Pete Stark. We heard about the Sheriff, but the deputy has been here in town. Nossir—he's been busy as a one-armed paper-hanger. Don't think he's had time to kidnap the Sheriff and disappear into thin air." A long pause…"…Well, I've heard some nurses are crazy…Pete's already checked everything out and released the bodies…. An hour or more?…That's fine. We'll still be here. I know you have to get the people who have a chance first."

  Lauren heard his footsteps in the hall. George was only in his mid-forties, but he looked very old and frail right then. "I need to get home and check on my family," he said. "I tried calling, but didn't get an answer. The flu…" He didn't need to say anything else.

  "You want me to go with you?" Pete asked. "You shouldn't be going there alone."

  "I'll be fine. I…don't want to have anyone with me. Besides, you'd better stay here. An ambulance will be along to get the bodies when it can, but the dispatcher said they've been running straight for the last twenty-four hours, and they have to get live people first."

  "They're outside, and it's cold," Eric said quietly. "They'll keep."

  "Doesn't seem very respectful," George said.

  "I'll cover them," Pete told him. "I won't just leave them out there that way. Not much else we can do for them."

  June Bug said, "That's good enough."

  Lauren saw tears in her eyes, and realized that she'd lost a sister, too. She crouched next to June Bug and said, "I'm sorry about Bethellen."

  June Bug nodded. "So am I. And Molly. She was so like your mother, it was almost like having her back again." She wrung her sponge into the bucket of blood-red water, dipped it into the bucket of clean water, and went back to scrubbing the floor. "I'm tired. I'm tired of the Sentinels, I'm tired of the pain, I'm tired of life. I don't know why I lived, but right now I wish I hadn't."

  Lauren levered herself down next to June Bug, careful not to dislodge Jake, and put a hand on her shoulder, and waited until June Bug looked away from the bloody floor and up at her. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry you lost the people you loved. I know what that feels like. I wish I didn't—I wish I was just saying polite things here to try to make you feel better, but I do know what that feels like. I waited years to find Brian—years in which I made a lot of stupid mistakes because I was looking for something I don't think I had the capacity to find or even to define. Brian found me, not the other way around." She drew her hand back and glanced out at the bodies on the front porch, then glanced away again, because it hurt to look. "There's this pop song where a guy sings that he doesn't want to go to sleep because if he does he'll miss a minute of his time with the woman he loves—and until Brian came into my life, I would have told you that the lyrics of that song were just sentimental bullshit. That no one ever really felt that way." She felt the lump growing in her throat, but she plowed on. "But when he found me—when we first got together—I remember him coming home to the little apartment we shared after a full shift on the flight line, and staying awake all night—and keeping me up, too—because he was afraid that if he went to sleep, he'd miss something. He went to work on two hours of sleep a night for a month, and then he went TDY and I felt like I couldn't breathe because he was gone." She closed her eyes. "We had each other for a few years, and now he's gone forever, and I haven't been able to really breathe since he died. There isn't enough air in the world for me to breathe, and the only reason that I'm alive at all is because of Jake. Without him…" She shook her head.

  June Bug had tears running down her cheeks. She was staring down at her hand still wrapped around the sponge, her gray hair hanging loose around her face. "It doesn't get better," she said. "A year…five years…ten years. I wish I could say that it did, but there's never going to be enough air again."

  Lauren felt Jake's cheek against hers and swallowed the lump in her throat, and said, "I know. Real love found me, and I knew it, and I knew how lucky I was the whole time he was in my life. I knew it. I always thought it was the people who didn't appreciate what they had who lost it—and I knew what I had and I was grateful, and I thought that because I knew what a miracle Brian was, I would get to keep him. And I lost him anyway." She thought about the place between the worlds, where he had found her again for a while, and how he was now gone from there. Gone. She couldn't find him; she'd lost him again in a different way.

  Then Jake raised his head, and leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, and patted her softly on the neck with one little hand. "Daddy loves Mama," he said. "Daddy…say…love you, Mama." He wrinkled up his face, frowning fiercely, concentrating on something. And then he added. "We okay. Daddy say…fings be okay." The frown got deeper. He was fighting to get something, and she could see his frustration, and finally he blew out his cheeks, and shook his head, and said, "Daddy here. Be okay." He kissed her on her cheek again, and laid his head on her shoulder, and wrapped his arms around her neck.

  Lauren stood there staring at June Bug. "He doesn't remember his daddy," she said. "He doesn't say anything about Brian except when he looks at the picture I keep of him beside my bed. And that's
only sometimes. He's…"

  What did Jake mean, that Daddy was here? That things would be okay? What was going on?

  "Brian?" she whispered, looking around the foyer. "If you're here…give me a sign."

  Jake, heavy on her shoulder, drifted toward sleep.

  "Brian?"

  And from Jake's lips, in a voice that was partly Jake's but partly someone else's, came clear, impossible sentences. "I didn't die for nothing. Today it counted. I can't stay. But…I wanted to say good-bye, Lauren. There's another side. I'll be there, waiting. For both of you."

  "I love you," she whispered.

  "Forever," he said. Then Jake's eyes closed completely, and his breathing grew deep. And Lauren knew that her miracle had run its course.

  CHAPTER 20

  UNSEASONABLE TORNADOES DEVASTATE SOUTHEAST

  Reuters—Charlotte, NC

  A line of tornadoes running from Kansas down to Florida's Gold Coast erupted without warning yesterday afternoon, leaving 734 dead and thousands injured and still missing, and meteorologists across the nation are left scrambling for an explanation.

  "We had a uniform high-pressure front over the entire area, and have for the last week, and we got nothing on radar anywhere until these things just erupted," says Steve Billings of the National Weather Service. "None of our current models offer any explanation for what happened yesterday. 'Freak storm' just about sums it up." Others working in the field were quick to agree.

  (Tornadoes—on 2-A)

  FLU ENDS AS ABRUPTLY AS IT BEGAN

  UPI

  Worldwide reporting of new influenza cases has returned to normal levels and normal demographics overnight, as the Carolina flu that left more than four million dead over a course of mere weeks has seemingly vanished. Hospitals, short-staffed from losses of their own, watch gratefully as their overflowing halls begin to empty, and the weary doctors and nurses who have survived the onslaught look toward the possibility of going home to families and beds they haven't seen in days.

  "Viruses sometimes do this," says Dr. Fenton Willoughby, of the Mayo Clinic. "They erupt abruptly, burn through the susceptible population too fast to sustain their own spread, and die out as quickly as they appeared. We can be grateful, of course—as horrible as this was, it could have been much, much worse.

  "Which doesn't change the fact that this is the most lethal outbreak of influenza since the epidemic of 1917," he added.

  (Flu on B-4)

  ABRUPT CESSATION OF PEACE TALKS—EGYPT AND ISRAEL ON BRINK

  Geneva, Switzerland—AP

  In an abrupt about-face, Egyptians and Israelis who were rumored close to signing a collaborative agreement just yesterday have walked away from the table. The agreement, which would have paired the two nations in a wide range of health-care, education, and scientific programs, offered what many observers thought was the best hope of stabilizing the region put forward in years.

  No definite word on the cause of the schism, but both sides have arrested members of their own delegations, charging treason. Following the breakdown in negotiations, both nations have placed military personnel on alert, troops are massing along both sides of the border, and civilian violence has erupted…

  (Middle East Traitors on 9-D)

  Cat Creek

  LAUREN BURIED HER SISTER, Molly, on a bright North Carolina morning with the first crocuses peeking above the ground. Pete attended the service, as did Eric and June Bug. The rest of the Sentinels stayed home. Lauren was relieved. She and Pete had taken their oaths, but she still didn't feel like a Sentinel, and she didn't feel like fielding the false condolences of people who had wanted her sister dead.

  She and Jake stood by the grave after the service, and she said, "Thank you, Molly. I'm going to miss you, and I wish we could have done all the things we were supposed to do together. But thank you for saving my son." Jake turned to her and raised his arms. "Up," he said.

  She picked him up and he clung to her again. He still wasn't back to being himself. Unexpected noises scared him, he was suddenly terrified of bright lights, and for the first time in his life, he was utterly terrified of strangers.

  "You need some company?" Eric asked her, as they walked through the cemetery, back to their cars.

  "I'll be all right. I have some thinking to do—our parents had a plan for Molly and me, and now I have to figure out what I can do about it alone. I'll see you later."

  "I'm here for you," Eric said, and she caught the extra nuances in his voice and in his eyes. He would be there in a lot of ways if she gave him the sign.

  She said, "Thank you. I appreciate that." And kept her face friendly and her voice neutral. And she hoped that he got the message. They might have once had a chance of being friends, but he'd been willing to see her sister dead, and that would never go away.

  "Call if you need me," he said, and turned without another word and walked to his car alone.

  Pete said, "That goes for me, too, you know. Say the word, and I'll be there."

  She smiled. "Thanks, Pete. Have a really good beer for me, okay? And don't let Eric run you too ragged. That speech of his about one Sentinel doing the work of four until he recruits help didn't sound promising…and I saw him looking at you when he said it."

  "Me too," Pete agreed. "I'm not sure that signing on was the right thing to do…but I didn't see how I could go through all of that and then just walk away. You know what I mean?"

  Lauren had taken the Sentinel oath along with Pete. She nodded and shifted Jake from one hip to the other. "Unfortunately."

  Pete stood beside her car and watched her tuck Jake into his car seat. "If you need more than just a friend, Lauren…" He stopped. "Yeah. I guess I won't make a complete fool of myself today. But if you need anything, you know where to find me."

  She nodded, ignoring the fact that her pulse was racing and her mouth was dry. Brian had said that he would be waiting for her on the other side. And she wanted Jake to know that Brian had been his father. She wanted to give him everything she had of Brian. But perhaps he had more of Brian than she did.

  She felt lost.

  "I'm not really…looking, but…" She gave him a tiny smile and got into her car. He was still standing by the side of the road watching her as she turned the corner and drove out of sight.

  Forever. Brian had come to her from the other side of death itself to tell her that he would be waiting for her, and that he loved her, and he had promised her forever. How could she hope to find another love like that? How could she even consider looking? And if the impossible happened and she found someone she could love as much as she loved Brian, what then? Would Brian still be waiting for her? Would she have to leave behind the other love?

  For just a moment, she could almost feel Brian's arms around her, and could almost hear Brian whispering in her ear, "Don't worry. Everything's going to be all right."

  She took a steadying breath, and turned into her driveway. Don't worry. Everything's going to be all right.

  She didn't have to do anything right then. Play with Jake, make a meal, get some sleep. So she wouldn't worry. And maybe everything would be all right.

  Copper House, Ballahara

  Seolar had draped the whole of Copper House in black and declared a year of mourning—for Molly, for his people, for the future that was no more. He sat in his study at his desk with a book opened before him, and when anyone walked by he pretended to read, but he had read nothing since Yaner brought the news to him. He thought he would never read again. In a single blow, he had lost everything—future, people, world, and love. In his darkest moments, he considered orchestrating his own death.

  He was thinking of just that when he heard movement from the balcony, and froze.

  Nothing should be on the balcony—only his study opened onto it, and his doors were locked. He looked at them just to be sure. Yes. Locked.

  Something tapped on the glass.

  Curtains blocked his view—after Molly's death he had blocked light from
the room, wanting to see nothing of the hateful sun. Firelight was enough, and sometimes more than enough, for his mood. But now he regretted the window covers. He would have liked to see what waited on his balcony.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Persistent.

  And then a voice. "Seolar? Are you in there?"

  He thought he could not be hearing that voice, but it came again.

  "Seolar? Seo?"

  His hands shook and he thought he might die of fear, but he went to the door, moved back the curtain, and looked out.

  Molly stood there. Molly, with the Vodi necklace about her neck, otherwise naked as she came into the world. Her long copper hair whipped around her, burnished fire red by the setting sun. She looked more veyâr than she ever had before, as though most of the human had been purged out of her. But she was Molly.