All the Gates of Hell (31 page)

"Boiled in..." Jin kept staring. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm on the right side."

Teacher smiled "There's only one side and we're all on it, Jin. Even Shiro, though he's confusing the goal with the symbol at the moment. Now, the love I feel for you and everyone else I've mentioned is what allows me to help them, and makes me
want
to help them, painful as that help sometimes is. It's the same for you, Jin."

"But not Shiro?"

"No, Jin. Shiro is a man who escaped hell with his own determination and my bad judgment to be with the one he loves. In human terms that's an incredible love story, a romance for the ages. In karmic terms, however, it's a bloody disaster."

Jin sighed. "All right, already. I get that.

"Good, because otherwise I'm still explaining karma to Guan Yin. If this wasn't so dangerous, it'd be funny. Blast it, Immanent One, why did you do this?"

Jin didn't have to ask what he meant by that last bit. "I wish I knew," Jin said softly.

Teacher took a deep breath. "Sorry, Jin. Sometimes the ridiculousness of this situation just hits me. I've said before that you were in great danger, but I don't think I knew the half of it."

"Is that all love is? An obstacle? Something to be avoided?"

"No, only when it becomes an end in itself, and not a step along the journey, that it becomes an obstacle. It's an obstacle for Shiro, make no mistake. What is it for you?"

Jin blinked owlishly. "Me?"

Teacher watched her face closely. "Are you in love with Shiro, Jin? Please tell me the truth."

Jin thought very long and carefully before she answered. "For awhile I thought I was. Yet I remember love, Teacher, through the feelings of a girl dead a thousand years. I felt it. Touched it, tasted it, just as Michiko did. I also felt what it was like to be in love, as the first mortal incarnation of Guan Yin. It was like that... and it wasn't like that. No, Teacher. I am not in love with Shiro."

Teacher let out a great sigh of relief. "Praise All for that much... all right, Jin. You've had a close call. Now what? Do you have a plan?"

"No." As much as it pained her to admit it, Jin did not. She sat there for a moment, looking glum. Teacher glanced at his strange watch, but made no move to leave. Frank and Ling remained at the same discreet distance they had maintained since Jin first sat on the bench.

"Are you thinking about Shiro?" Teacher asked finally.

"Actually," Jin said, "I was thinking about being in love. I mean, I don't want another lecture, but before... you know, before I found out who I was, it was always something I thought would happen. I even went looking for it a time or two. And with all the hassles and disappointments, there's a part of me that feels very sad to give up the idea of ever being in love."

"Karma doesn't care about romantic love one way or another, except for the cause and effect aspect," Teacher said. "And yet I'm mortal now too, and there's a part of me -- not the Emma-O King of the First Hell me, but the sixty-six years old homeless and ugly Teacher Johnson me -- that still wants to believe in love. For what little that's worth to either of us."

Jin leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. He rubbed the spot, thoughtfully. "What was that for?"

"No reason," Jin said. "Though I do think I owe you a thank you.'"

"You're welcome."

"One thing I forgot to mention." Jin told Teacher about the fact that, for a while, she had a connection with Shiro just as if he'd been ready to move on. "He gave me the slip, finally, and when I saw him next the connection wasn't there."

"I don't know anyone else who could do that. If you want my opinion, it means that somewhere there's a deeper, wiser side of him that can still be reached. Maybe that's my optimism talking."

Teacher was looking at his watch again. "No rest for either the wicked or the judgmental; I've got to go. Oh, by the way." Teacher reached into his duster and pulled out a rather wrinkled piece of torn newsprint. "I know you've been busy. I've got the details here for Joyce's funeral. It's tomorrow. I thought you'd want to know."

Teacher left her holding the scrap of paper and walked off into the trees. Jin stared at the announcement for a little while.

"You're going, aren't you?" Ling asked. It sounded like an accusation.

"Of course I am."

"Why?" Ling asked. "I have it on good authority that the person you knew as Joyce Masters was reborn into Medias just this morning."

"That doesn't matter. My friend is gone, and I'm going to mourn that properly. It's a human thing, I guess. Teacher understood that."

"Teacher is trapped in his own body at the moment. His advice may not be the best," Frank said. "With all due respect to his Hellish Majesty."

Jin just stood up. "I'm going to take a walk. You two aren't coming."

"What do you wish of us?" Ling asked.

At the moment she just wanted the both of them out of her sight, but she didn't say that. "For now just do whatever you want."

Ling and Frank exchanged one more of those glances that made Jin think they were talking behind her back in front of her face and then both vanished, this time through the same portal of light. When she was certain they were gone, Jin sat back down on the bench. She looked at the funeral announcement again. There wasn't a lot to it. Four column inches about Joyce and her work for the Legal Aid Office, and no cause of death listed. Then the date, place, and time: April 23rd, Willowbrook Memorial Chapel, 2:00 PM.

You'd think there'd be more
.

Jin wasn't really sure what she'd expected, she just knew that this wasn't it. There was so much more to Joyce's life. How could anyone sum it up in four inches of newsprint? Or forty, for that matter? Yet here it was, short and to the point. A life gone. They may as well have said, "She's dead and you're not. Say goodbye and get on with it." Maybe that was the point. Maybe they were even right, given all that she had learned in the past few weeks. That didn't change the need to mourn.

Jin felt a tug at her wrist. She ignored it as long as she could, but that wasn't long. It was rather insistent. Jin peeked with her Third Eye and there was the golden thread, right where she knew it would be. She sighed.

No rest for the merciful. Just don't look for mercy from two to four o'clock tomorrow
.

She got up slowly and let the cord guide her. When she emerged from the entrance to the park the tug was to the left, down Elysian toward Pepper Street. Jin didn't need the cord to guide her for a while after that. She only paused when Elysian crossed Pepper Street to be sure that the cord was, in fact, pulling her toward the Gateway to All the Hells and not onward to a destination in Medias itself.

The tug got even more insistent. Jin frowned. She didn't remember any of the previous instances feeling like this, even the ones that had been fairly time critical. She thought of summoning either Frank or Ling in an attempt to speed things up, but that was no good. Jin knew from before that only Guan Yin -- or rather, her current incarnation -- could get direction from the cord. Frank and Ling could see it but they couldn't go directly to where it led because they didn't know where that was any more than Jin did, at least until she had followed the cord to its end. Jin found herself almost at a trot, trying to match the pull of the cord as she ducked into the alley. When she emerged in the Gateway she was running.

"Where?"

Jin realized she'd asked the question aloud even though she hadn't expected an answer. She still got one, of a sort. The Guardians sounded unhappy. IMMANENT ONE, WE CANNOT...

"You can't... mark the way?" Jin said, already short of breath.

NO.

Jin understood what that meant. "Bloody hell..."

She took off at a dead run and the cord kept pace. She passed through the door without bothering to opening it. Jin felt the familiar instant of
shimmer
and disorientation that followed and then she was off down the corridor with barely a pause.

Don't let me be late, not this time. This is my chance
!

Jin knew the corridor itself wasn't real; she didn't need another disorienting peek of the Third Eye to remind herself of it. She also knew that the distance she was covering was at once illusory and yet far vaster than it appeared. She didn't know how to travel instantly the way Frank and Ling did, but she also knew that being in a hurry actually did help. She focused on reaching the door at the opposite end of the corridor and, though her impatience made it seem a very long time indeed, in seconds she was there and through the door and out into --

The Mountain of Needle--oww
!

Jin staggered and nearly fell. She leaned against a bare spot of stone long enough to tug a wicked-looking thorn about an inch long from the bottom of her foot. Her blood trickled into the rubble and debris at the bottom of the mountain even as the cord pulled her to go higher. Jin changed to demon form but that only helped a little. The spikes were cruel even to her hard scaly demon feet and when they touched the fresh wound on her foot it was even worse, but she kept moving. She moved through a forest of spikes as she climbed; changing to demon form had at least given her a second wind. Up ahead she heard what sounded like a fight.

Jin did not understand this. The victims of demons might wail and writhe and protest, but she had yet to hear of any of them fighting back. Jin hobbled along as fast as she could. She emerged from a thicket of spikes on a high plateau and found the battle.

Shiro
?

Shiro was the only one Jin recognized at first. He was changing rapidly from human form to shadow as he tried to avoid his attackers, but he was losing. Two luminous beings floated in the air above him. One bore a trident of light that pierced and tore at the shadow that was Shiro and he cried out in pain, the other struck as well with extended claws and also found its mark.

The other, Jin realized dully, was a dragon.

Shiro became aware of her first. He smiled bitterly. "Come to see your handiwork, Jin?"

The dragon glanced in Jin's direction and she could almost swear that it uttered a curse.

"STOP!"

The force of Jin's demon voice actually shattered several spikes like glass, and in that instant everyone did stop, frozen in place like a photograph, but it didn't last. Shiro reverted to purely human form and fell to his knees, bruised and bleeding. Lung Nu and Shan Cai, for their part, looked at once defiant and as guilty as children caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

"We were so close!" Lung Nu said, ruefully.

"You damn well were. What were you two thinking?"

"We were thinking," Lung Nu said, "that we would obey your command."

"I never told you to attack Shiro!"

"You told us to do what we wanted," Frank said. "We've wanted to do this for a very long time."

"And if the Guan Yin That Was had wanted it settled this way she'd have done it! Don't try to tell me you two didn't understand her wishes!"

"There are mysteries," Frank said righteously, "even to the Enlightened."

"I can see," Jin said very slowly and distinctly, "that I'm going to be much more careful of what I say around you two. Shiro, listen, I -- " she began, but there was no one to talk to. Shiro had vanished.

"Blast it, he got away," Lung Nu said.

That was plainly true. Jin checked the cord on her wrist, but she didn't really need the glance of the Third Eye to know what she already knew -- the cord was broken once more. What she still didn't understand was why it was there in the first place. And why, specifically, was it there when Shiro was in trouble? The time it had happened before, Ling and Frank were with her; it couldn't have been them. Was he threatened then, or --

Jin remembered the way Shiro had looked at her before she'd stopped her servants. That wasn't love in his eyes then, that was anger. Betrayal. Hurt.

Cause and effect. That's karma
, Jin thought grimly. She looked at Guan Yin's servants. She no longer really thought of them as hers.

"Did you two tell Shiro you were here on my command? And get down here; I'm getting a stiff neck looking up at you!"

Frank had actually looked embarrassed, but Ling didn't bat an eyelid, even after she had reverted to human form and floated down to hover just over the spines of the mountain.

"Of course we did, Immanent One. It was the truth," she said.

Jin sighed. "Maybe, but you stretched it almost beyond recognition. If that's not lying its close enough."

"Immanent One -- " Frank began but Jin held up a hand.

"Right now my foot hurts, my head hurts, I'm tired and I'm thoroughly pissed at the both of you. I'm sure you can justify your actions nine ways from Sunday but I just don't want to hear it, ok?"

Ling and Frank kept a sullen silence while Jin tried to think about what had just happened. From a human perspective it made perfect sense; such a betrayal would give any human being second thoughts about their beloved, if not convert that love directly into hate.

Jin smiled.

Cause and effect. No more and no less
.

Frank frowned. "Immanent One, may one ask why you are smiling?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"Because it frightens me," Frank said grimly and Ling, for all that Jin could tell, seemed to agree.

"Take me home," Jin said. "And I promise I'll stop."

(())

Chapter 25

Stopping smiling was the easy part. Jin spent a big part of that afternoon in her kitchen with her violated foot in a tub of hot water and rock salt, and even longer after that sitting on the couch with her foot bandaged and elevated on a throw pillow as she went back to her neglected books. After a while she remembered why she'd stopped her studies in the first place; her head was in almost as much pain as her foot.

Jin hadn't forgotten how simple it all was at heart: Whether it was called the Divine Consciousness or Nirvana or Heaven, it was all the same. Everyone started as part of it and everyone now separated from it for whatever reason and trapped in the Cycle of Death and Rebirth was just trying, no matter how clumsily, to get home. Yet she knew one case where it emphatically was
not
true.