"Holly Lisle - World Gates 01 - Memory of Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

One checked her feet and discovered her no longer barefoot and bound—then checked her wrists. She
heard breath hiss out of him, and felt his steady gaze on her. After a moment, he said, “There are only
two of us left. Will you come with us?”

Molly cleared her throat and said, “yeah.” She was quiet for a moment.

“How many died?” she asked at last, as her two captors pointed her away from the road, deeper into the
forest.

“More than a hundred. Others of our…unit…will come tomorrow to retrieve the bodies, before the
yaresh haul them off to sell. Or eat.”

Molly decided she would not try an escape tonight. Maybe not for a long while.

Cat Creek, North Carolina

Lauren Dane finished scraping the last of the black paint from the antique mirror’s glass. She swore a
final time at the unknown vandal who had painted it over, then sighed and stood. Her legs ached from
crouching for so long—she stretched, hearing the creaking in her knees and feeling the cracking in her
spine, and she reflected that thirty-five was a lot harder than twenty-five had been. She was pretty sure
she was getting smarter, but she figured she was falling apart at about the same rate. By the time she was
seventy, she ought to be both brilliant and too decrepit to make any use of her hard-won knowledge.

But at least now the mirror looked good. Reaching from floor to ceiling at the back of the foyer—ten
feet high, framed by one of those ornate carved dark wood frames that collected dust in the crevices but
looked so pretty when rubbed with oil—it seemed a little out of place, too grand to be at the back of the
foyer in the old Southern farmhouse. But the mirror had always been there. Lauren remembered being
terrified of it when she was little—of refusing to walk past it in the dark, and of staring into it in the
daylight, certain that she could see ghosts moving within its silvered depths.

She smiled at her childishness and liked the look of the smile on her reflected image. She couldn’t resist
a little primping—this particular mirror had always been fairly kind with the images it reflected, unlike
the closet mirror in her old apartment, which had put twenty pounds on her and made her skin look
green no matter the lighting or the time of day. She thought she still looked decent for her age. No gray
in her hair yet, no real lines on her face—though she could see where she’d have crow’s-feet at the
corners of her eyes in a few more years—and when she stood sideways, her stomach was flat enough
and her butt still looked good in her jeans. The last year had been rough on the inside, but it hadn’t done
much to the outside.

She looked into her reflected eyes, and saw the faintest flash of green light shining back at her. Her heart
skipped a beat, and she smiled nervously, and turned and looked down the hall to see where the light had
come from. But the beveled-glass sidelights to either side of the front door showed nothing unusual

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outside. A North Carolina afternoon in mid-November, the scrub oaks still clinging to their brown