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

cheekboned, feather-browed face, lovely and terrifying. The child’s tiny hand, poking free of the soft
blanket that swaddled her, had too many fingers, and each finger had too many joints. When Molly
looked up at the face of the father, those same eyes, those same pointed, off-angled, alien features stared
back at her.

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Then the last of the poison washed out of the little girl, and the fire that flowed through Molly, no longer
needed, flowed back to the heart of the universe that had spawned it, and the light died.

The child sat up, looked around, and in the liquid sounds that Molly’s mind knew, uttered a stream of
protests at incredible speed. She struggled away from Molly and held out her arms to her father.

Molly could hear the father weeping. His voice sounded reedy, and had she heard a human sobbing that
way, she might have mistaken the sound for choking. But Molly understood. The child’s father wrapped
his daughter in his arms, clutching her to him as if to pull her through his chest and into his heart.
Through his sobs, he said, “I have to get her home—out of this cold.” He pulled back from his daughter
for just an instant, and said, “When you need me most, I will be here for you. I swear it.”

Molly, in shock, stared at her hands as if they didn’t belong to her. Green fire had come from her touch,
and some alien monstrosity swore himself to her service. She wanted to hide. She wanted to scream, or
to faint. Instead, she whispered to him, “Take me home.”

“You are among friends,” he told her. “You must trust us. You go now to your castle. You will be a
goddess, Vodi. And if ever you need me, simply speak my name. Say ‘Yaner, Yaner,’ and will your
wish, and I will come to you.” He pulled his daughter close and dropped off the back of the wagon. And
then he ran away.

Molly lay back in the straw, too numb to do anything but stare at nothing, too numb even to cover
herself with the blanket again. She’d suspected the truth, but discovered that knowing this particular
truth was far more distressing than merely considering it as a possibility. She wasn’t in some third-world
country, a political prisoner, a hostage for some terrorist’s ideological crusade.

She had felt the green fire, but she had felt no pain.

Molly McColl stared at her hands and tried to understand what was happening to her. The tunnel of
green light, the aliens.

Above the peculiar muffled hiss of snow falling, Molly suddenly heard a sound out of place. A baseball
bat hitting a leather jacket, but slowly. And from overhead.

With no more warning than that, people grabbed her and began running through the woods with her, as
silently as if they were ghosts. Behind her, she heard the eruption of hell, and screams of, “Rrôn, rrôn!”

The sudden leathery thunder of enormous wings, and roars that shook the snow from the trees and
deafened her—the clash of metal, the screams of dead and dying, the stink of shit and blood.