"Holly Lisle - World Gates 03 - Gods Old and Dark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

An observer looking at the two of them would never have guessed how much they had
looked alike before the events that had changed Molly. Lauren, in her mid-thirties, looked
like the girl next door all grown up, with scruffy jeans and dark eyes and a lean prettiness
that was holding up well as she got older. Molly’s change following her death had brought
out the veyâr in her blood and mixed it with the human; her hair was copper with a
metallic sheen, braided to her waist, her eyes were enormous and the color of emeralds,
and she had become thin to the point of attenuation, her body reshaping itself along alien
lines until by human standards she looked like she might blow away in a good spring
breeze. By veyâr standards she was still short and solid, but Molly didn’t think in veyâr
standards. Her body had been purely human for a quarter of a century, and sometimes the
reshaping and the differences it made in the way she moved still caught her off guard.

“I’m so sorry,” Lauren said, and hugged Molly. “I hate what you have to go through. What
we both have to go through. But there isn’t anyone else who can do what I do, and there
sure isn’t anyone else who can do what you do. You can find them, Molly. You can feel
them. And you can destroy them. The Night Watch can’t hide from you the way it can
from everyone else.” She paused and cocked her head to one side. “And I only knew about
four times that you’d died.”



file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Lisle,%20Holly%20-%20[Wo...tes%2003]%20-%20Gods%20Old%20and%20Dark%20(v1).htm (18 of 292)23-7-2007 19:24:41
 file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Lisle,%20Holly%20-%20[World%20Gates%...0[World%20Gates%2003]%20-%20Gods%20Old%20and%20Dark%20(v1).htm


“I just made it back from this last one. I took out a major cell of the Night Watch over on
the other side of Oria. Managed to locate their resurrection rings. The damn things hide
themselves if you don’t get to them fast enough. They actually burrow into the ground or
anything else that’s soft.” She tried not to feel the living gold knotting tight in her belly as
she said that, and tried not to compare herself to the monsters she hunted. “I had to rip the
last ring out of a mattress. I destroyed the members of the cell, and then the rings, and as I
was leaving I tripped a deadfall.” She shrugged off the memories of pain, of fear, of
waking up again when it was over, naked on cold earth, in darkness, hungry for something
she couldn’t describe. “I’m changing, Lauren. There’s less of me, and more of them. I
know the monsters of the Night Watch better, and none of them but Baanraak can hide
from me, but now I can feel the same hunger they feel. It’s all the time, Laurie, and it’s
getting stronger, and it’s horrible. As what I remember of life washes away, I’m filling up
with death, and all death wants is more death.” She closed her eyes. “The magic pouring
down from Earth into Oria—that poison of war and genocide and hatred and destruction—
is starting to…God, how do I put this?…It’s starting to smell like Thanksgiving, and I
haven’t eaten. Ever.”

Molly turned and looked at her sister and saw the fear in Lauren’s eyes. But it wasn’t fear
of her, though Molly thought perhaps it should have been. It was fear for her.

“You can’t give in to it,” Lauren said. “You have a chance to create a new soul for
yourself. To be alive again for real, not because of that damned necklace.”

The Vodi necklace, its clasp broken during one of Molly’s previous deaths, now coiled