"Ung-ung-ung."
The sound was so close now I knew the creature was right in front of us, just off to my left, where Eve stood. The noise stopped, replaced by a dry snuffling.
"It's okay, Paige," she whispered. "Just let it sniff you, and it'll—" A chomping sound. Then a gasp. "You fucking—!"
She cast a spell, something I didn't recognize. A high-pitched shriek rent the air, then a bellow, and fast footfalls through the mud.
"You'd better run," Eve said. "Goddamned—"
"Ung-ung-ung!" The cry, loud now, came from somewhere to our left, immediately followed by another to our right.
"Holy shit," Eve whispered.
She snapped the binding spell and I stumbled forward, my sight returning just in time for me to see the ground rushing up. Eve grabbed my arm and yanked me upright. I made out three, maybe four humanoid shapes rushing at us before Eve whipped me around and we started to run.
***
We raced, slipping and sliding and scrambling, through the swamp. Apparently unaccustomed to moving fast, the creatures were having just as much trouble. We retraced our steps through the path we'd cut coming in, which made it easier.
As we rounded a corner, Eve skidded across a muddy patch. I caught her before she fell.
"I hate running away," she muttered as we plowed forward again. "Hate it, hate it, hate it."
"Should we stop and fight?"
"As soon as we get enough of a head start to cast. They're falling behind, aren't they?"
"Seems like it."
"Good. Fucking bastards. I can't believe they attacked me."
"Look on the bright side," I said as we tore around another curve. "At least they can't kill us."
Eve's laugh rang through the swamp. "This is true. Being dead has its—"
Eve's body jerked, as if someone yanked her legs out from under her. Her lips parted in an oath, but before any sound came out, she was sucked into the swamp.
"Eve!" I shouted.
Something grabbed my left foot. I pulled my right foot back to kick it, but a tremendous yank pulled me off balance, and the swamp sailed up to swallow me.
Busted
Before I had time to panic, the swamp vanished, and I was plunked down onto a cold, hard surface. Back to the rocky plain? I looked around, but a mist surrounded me. Unlike the cold fog in the way station, this was warm and almost tangibly soft. As I child, I'd often lain on the grass, stared up at the clouds, and wondered what they'd feel like. The mist around me was almost exactly what I'd imagined. A sudden image of clouds and harps and trumpeting angels sprang to mind. Had I died—again—and gone to heaven?
"Ah, shit," Eve muttered somewhere beside me. "Busted."
Okay, not heaven. Whew. Monotonous bliss was not what I had in mind for my eternity.
As the mist withdrew, it contracted, growing denser. For a split second, something like a face appeared in the mist. Then it stretched into a pale ribbon, twisting as it wended toward the roof and disappeared.
"Damn Searchers," Eve muttered. "There's gotta be a way to outsmart them. Gotta be." She glanced over at me. "Don't worry. Everything will be okay. Just keep quiet and let me do the talking."
The mist now completely gone, I looked around. What I saw was so overwhelming that, for a moment, I could only stare, uncomprehending. The room we were in—no, it wasn't a room, there couldn't be a room this large. The bluish-white marble walls seemed to extend into infinity, the dark marble floor stretching to meet it like the earth reaching to the horizon. The vaulted white ceiling and huge pillars gave it the look of a Grecian temple, but the mosaics and paintings decorating the walls seemed to come from every culture imaginable. Each frieze portrayed a scene from life. Every part of life, every celebration, every tragedy, every mundane moment seemed to be pictured on those walls. As my gaze passed a bloody battle scene, a rearing horse's front leg moved, infinitesimally. I blinked. The rider's mouth opened, so slowly that the casual glance would miss it.
I was about to say something to Eve when the floor began to turn.
"An audience has been granted," Eve muttered. "About time."
The floor rotated until we were faced with an open space at least as inconceivably huge as the one on the other side. Across the expanse, vines hung from the ceiling, thousands, tens of thousands of them, suspended from every inch of space. The sight was so incongruous that I blinked and rubbed my thumb and forefinger over my eyes. When I looked again, I saw that they weren't vines at all, but pieces of yarn, colored every shade in the rainbow, and all exactly the same length.
"What the—?" I began.
"Shhh," Eve hissed. "Let me talk, remember?"
It was then that I saw the woman. She stood on a dais, behind an old-fashioned spinning wheel. Neither young nor old, ugly nor beautiful, thin nor fat, short nor tall, she was a perfect average of everything female, a middle-aged matron with skin the color of honey and long graying dark hair.
Her head down, she pumped a length of yarn from the wheel until it looked the same length as those hanging all around her. Then in a transition so fast and seamless it seemed a trick of the eyes, the woman aged fifty years, becoming an elderly crone, back bent, long hair as coarse and gray as wire, the simple mauve dress now white with the palest hint of violet. Her sunken eyes gleamed, dark and quick, like a crow's. One wizened hand lifted the length of yarn. The other, wrapped around a pair of black scissors, reached up and snipped it off. A man—so pale he looked albino—appeared from the jungle of dangling yarn, took the newly cut piece, and disappeared back into the dark depths of wool.
I looked back at the crone, but in her place stood a child no more than five or six, so small she couldn't see over the spinning wheel. Like the others, she had long hair, but hers was gleaming golden brown, and her eyes were cornflower blue. Her dress was an equally vivid purple.
The girl threaded the wheel, standing on tiptoes to reach it. Once it was ready, she changed to the middle-aged woman, who began to spin the yarn.
Beside me, Eve sighed loudly. "See? Even the Fates aren't above petty sadism, making us sit here and stew."
The woman, now the old crone, pinned Eve with her sharp eyes. "Petty? Never. We're enjoying a rare moment of peace, when we don't need to worry what you're up to."
She clipped the yarn. As the albino man retrieved it, the girl appeared. Before she could load the wheel, she stopped, her head cocked, a frown flitting across her pretty face. The albino appeared, holding a length of yarn in his hands. The girl nodded gravely, then morphed into the middle-aged woman, who took the yarn. She slid it through her fingers, then closed her eyes. A single tear squeezed out as her fingers slipped up the yarn nearly to the top. The woman became the crone, who looked at the tiny length of yarn pinched between her fingers.
"So young," she murmured, and clipped it off.
She handed the tiny piece of yarn back to the albino, who took it and walked into a hallway to our left. The old woman turned into the girl.
"So this is the problem we heard about," the girl said, her voice high and musical. "And you're involved, Eve? Shocking."
"Hey, I didn't—"
The girl smiled. "Didn't do anything? Or didn't cause the original problem? We're well aware of your innocence in the latter, but we'd beg to differ on the former. Exactly how many rules have you broken today, Eve? I'm not sure I can count that high."
"Sarcastic deities," Eve muttered. "Just what every afterlife needs."
The girl changed into the woman. "We'll discuss your transgressions later, Eve. Right now—" Her voice softened as her gaze moved to me. "We have a more distressing situation to contend with. Not that you're to blame, child, but we must fix this immediately. We'll send you back, of course. You'll still remember your visit. We hate to tamper with memory, and we see no need for it in your case." A smile. "You're not the type to turn this experience into a best-selling memoir. Now, all we need—"
"Is Lucas," I said.
Eve elbowed me. I ignored her.
"We need Lucas. We left him—"
The woman shook her head. "He can't go, child. He died. He must stay here."
"No, he didn't—"
"We know you don't want to believe that, but—"
"Wait," I said, lifting my hands. "I'm arguing the fact, not the interpretation. The bullet hit Lucas and he fell into the portal."
"We know what happened."
"Then you know it takes longer than that split second to die after being shot in the chest. Therefore, when he fell through the portal, he wasn't dead."
The woman shook her head, smiling. "Always the logical one, aren't you? I'm afraid it's a matter of semantics, child. The shot would have killed him. We know that."
My heart seized in my chest, but I pushed on. "Okay, you know that because you know it was his time, but—"
"His time?" the old woman said as she appeared. She swept a hand at the yam jungle behind her. "It's never anyone's time, girl. We don't make that decision. What happens happens, and what happened was that Lucas Cortez died—"
The middle sister cut in. "Which is a tragedy, of course. But here he'll be able to continue his work. There's good and evil in this world, too. We can use Lucas here and, when you die, you will join him. You'll be together. That's already been determined. That's why you came through to the same dimension. You just have to wait—"
"I won't wait. If he stays, I stay."
The woman's lips curved in a sympathetic smile. "That's not a choice you really want to make. It won't go the way you hoped."
"I'm not hoping for anything. I'm making a statement of fact. Lucas stays, I stay."
"Don't do this," Eve hissed in my ear. "You can't trick them."
"It isn't a bluff."
The crone appeared. "Whether you go or stay isn't your decision to make, girl."
"But if you send me back, I can make it my decision. You've said there's no predestination, so I can choose my own time of death."
"Doesn't matter. Even if you kill yourself, there's no guarantee you'll ever see him again."
"Of course there is. You said so yourself. It's been decided—we'll be together. I suppose you could change things, but that would be petty, and you said you're never petty."
The woman appeared with a sigh. "I do so prefer the ghosts who cower and quake in our presence."
"Oh, she's awful, isn't she?" Eve said. "Been like this since she was a child. Always questioning everything and everybody. No respect for authority. My advice? Send her and Lucas back and spare yourselves sixty, seventy unnecessary years of grief."
"Thank you, Eve, for considering our feelings in the matter. However, your bias in the matter is well known. You want Paige for your daughter's guardian."
"Have you considered that, Paige?" asked the old woman, popping back to fix me with that soul-piercing stare. "If you stayed here, you'd abandon Savannah, after all you've—"
The middle sister cut in. "No, that's not fair. We won't make you choose, child. The decision must be ours. That is the only truly equitable—" She stopped, head tilted. "Yes, sister, that's an idea."
The woman vanished, then the child appeared, then the crone, then the three began flipping so quickly I couldn't tell who I was seeing. Snatches of conversation flew past, meaningless, out of context. Then the middle-aged woman took over.
"Eve, you want Paige and Lucas as Savannah's guardians. Would you be willing to barter for it?"
Eve lifted her chin, meeting the other woman's gaze squarely. "I am. You want me to obey the rules, right? Send them back—both of them—and I'll do it."
The woman smiled and shook her head. "Obedience without acceptance is meaningless. When you understand the rules, you'll obey them. Until then—" She shrugged and waved at the yarn hanging behind them. "You make your own mistakes. You determine your own fate. We don't do that for you."
Eve frowned. "Then what's the price?"
"You will owe us a favor. A chit, which we may call in whenever we wish."
"I'll do it."
"Are you sure?"
"No, but I'm agreeing anyway. Do this for me, and I'll owe you one. Now, we left Lucas—"
The Fate cut Eve off with a wave. "We know." She closed her eyes and the three forms flipped past in a blur, then returned to the middle sister. "There. Lucas is back in the living world. Paige, we'll see you again someday, hopefully after a long and—"