Last Call (Last Call 1)

A minute passed, during which all that happened was that the rain abated a little and the air got colder. The puddles around her feet were fizzing and bubbling, as if she were bathing in soda water. She shivered and clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering.

What am I doing? she asked herself suddenly. I'll be arrested out here. None of this is true.

She turned toward where her clothes hung in the darkness, then paused.

Ozzie believes it, she thought. You owe him a lot; can't you make yourself believe it, too, just for a few minutes?

And what other chance have you and your children got?

What do I believe, anyway? That I'm able to find a man to share my life with? That Scat is okay, really? That Oliver is actually a normal boy? That I am able to have the one thing I need like flowers need sunlight, a family that's something more than a pathetic caricature of a family? What reason have you ever had for believing any of that?

I will try believing this, she thought as tears trickled into the cold rainwater on her face. I am the daughter of the moon goddess. I am that. And I can call her.

Again she looked up into the cloudy sky. The rain suddenly came down even harder than before and stung her face and shoulders and breasts, but now, even when the gusting wind made her step back to keep her balance, she wasn't cold. Her heart was pounding, and her outstretched fingers tingled, and the twenty-nine-story abyss beyond the roof edge, which had made her nervous when she had first forced the roof door and stepped out here, was exhilarating.

For a moment an old, old reflex made her wish her foster-brother Scott could be out here experiencing this with her, but she forced the thought away.

Mother. She tried to throw the thought up into the sky like a spear. They want to kill me, now. Help me fight them.

Dimly through the rushing dark clouds above her she glimpsed for a moment a crescent glowing in the sky.

The clouds seemed now to be huge wings, or capes, and under the hiss of the rain she thought she could hear music, a chorus of thousands of voices, faint only because of titanic distance.

Another hard gust of wind made a horizontal spray of the rain, and all at once she was sure that she wasn't alone on the rooftop.

She braced herself against the taut cable, for the gust had made the tar-paper surface of the roof seem to sway like the deck of a ship. And then her nostrils flared to the impossible briny smell of the sea, and the booming thunder sounded like tall waves crashing against cliffs.

Salt spray stung her eyes, and when she was able to blink around again, she saw, numbly and with a violent shiver, that she was on a ship—she was leaning on a wooden railing, and the forecastle ladder was a few yards ahead of her across the planks of the deck. Breakers crashed on rocks somewhere out in the darkness.

It happened when I thought of a ship, she told herself frantically. Something really is going on here, but it's dressing itself with my imagination.

Again she could see the glowing crescent above her, but now she saw that it wasn't the moon—and it couldn't have been when she'd seen it a few moments ago, for she remembered that the moon was at its half phase tonight. The crescent was on the crown of a tall woman standing up there on the high forecastle deck. The woman was robed, and her face was strong and beautiful but without any trace of humanity in the open eyes.

The chorus was louder now, perhaps on the shore out in the darkness, and the sounds in the sky were clearly the rushing of wings.

When Diana's forehead touched the wet planks of the deck, she realized that she had fallen to her hands and knees.

For she had realized in the deepest, oldest core of her mind that this was the goddess. This was Isis, who in ancient Egypt had restored the murdered and dismembered sun-god Osiris, who was her brother and husband; this was Ishtar, who in Babylonia had rescued Tammuz from the underworld; she was Artemis, twin sister of Apollo, and she was also both Pallas Athena, the goddess of virginity, and Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth.

To her the Greeks had sacrificed a maiden before sailing to Troy; she had restored life to her son Horus, slain by the bite of a scorpion; and though wild animals were sacred to her, she was the huntress of the gods.

This was Persephone, the maiden of the spring and the lover of Adonis, who had been stolen away to the underworld by the king of the dead.

Then the awe had washed through Diana, or had been broken for her, and again she was aware of herself as a woman named Diana Ryan, resident of a city called Las Vegas.

She stood up, carefully, on the shifting deck.

The woman on the higher deck was looking into her eyes, and Diana realized that the woman loved her, had loved her as an infant and had continued to love her during these thirty years of their separation.