Long Hot Summoning

by Tanya Huff

  “You okay?”

  Ears saddled, he looked as though he was trying to back away from his own feet. “Word of advice, don’t stick your claws in those things!”

  The meat-mind ignored him, pounding off after the tiny female elf in the PVC corset.

  “I thought those things got easily discouraged?” Diana protested.

  Claire pointed to a tall, slender figure in black armor. The red plume on his helm bobbed over the battle. “Meet their motivation.”

  The figure turned to meet Arthur’s charge.

  “A dark elf?”

  “Given what the kids are turning into, it almost makes sense.” On one knee beside her pack, Claire rummaged out her bag of prepared possibilities.

  “It looks like the barricade at the stairs is intact,” Diana told her, yanking a bulging belt pouch out from under the half a dozen cans of cat food in her pack. “They must have come through another way.”

  “The access corridors?”

  “No. Arthur said they’re guarded. Someone would’ve given the alarm.”

  A pair of charging meat-minds crashed to the floor for no apparent reason. A pepper grinder in one hand, Claire glared at Diana.

  “Totally subconscious, I swear; they just look really clumsy!” Here and now, she wasn’t going to risk feedback. It was one thing to break a Rule with only her own life hanging in the balance, it was another entirely to risk Claire and Sam and a group of teenagers she’d only just met. With a powerful enemy on site, any power she released would, at the very least, be sucked up and used against them. Definitely embarrassing. Probably fatal.

  One of the meat-minds stepped on its own hand as the two she’d dropped scrambled to their feet. It bellowed in pain and swung what looked like a plastic tote bag at its companion, knocking it down again. One of the mall elves darted in, wielding an aluminum baseball bat, and it stayed down.

  “You’ve got to like the kid’s enthusiasm.”

  “I don’t have to like anything about this,” Claire snapped. “I’m going to try and take a few of those things out. You find out where they’re coming from and close the door!” Waving the pepper shaker, she plunged into the fight.

  “How is seasoning going to help?” Sam demanded as Diana buckled the belt pouch around her waist.

  “Peppercorns are seeds.” She stuffed the wand into a pocket, just in case. “Seeds carry certain distinct possibilities.” A running dive took her past a meat-mind’s outstretched arms. “Claire has hers rigged for sleep,” she grunted, sliding into one of the plastic wood planters.

  “But why pepper?” Sam jumped up onto the planter’s edge.

  “Except for the Minute Rice, it was the only seed Dean had in the kitchen and Minute Rice comes with that unfortunate time restriction.” Scrambling to her feet, she joined the cat and took a moment to study the battle. The clash of blade against blade and the distinctly less musical clash of aluminum against meat, echoed under the twenty-foot ceilings. From her vantage point, she could see that the meat-minds in the main concourse were fighting in a random pattern, but by the entrance to the short hall—the one leading to the entrance where Claire’d left Dean way back when—they all faced one way. Into the concourse. Even the bulky body stretched flat at Kris’ feet and being efficiently bludgeoned pointed in the same direction.

  Then, between one swing and the next, a meaty hand snaked out and closed around a slender ankle.

  Kris’ next swing went wide.

  Then the meat-mind was on its feet and Kris was swinging, dreadlocks sweeping back and forth across the floor.

  * * *

  Darting into the melee, Claire pounded one of the meat-minds on the shoulder—given the location, it was probably a shoulder. When it turned, she ground fresh pepper into its face. It looked affronted, then blinked onyx eyes, scrunched up its nose, and sneezed, covering Claire in a dripping patina of snot before falling backward to the floor.

  Teemo, his orange-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt clutched in bratwurst-sized fingers, went down with it. “Is it dead?” he panted, bracing red hightops against the meat-mind’s stained sweat suit and yanking himself free.

  “No,” Claire spat, scrubbing at her face with the hem of her skirt. “Asleep.”

  “Bummer.” Switching to a two-handed grip, he set about changing that.

  Given her sudden, desperate need for a shower, Claire wasn’t at all surprised when the sprinklers went off.

  * * *

  “Geez, these guys are clumsy,” Diana muttered, as she ran. “Clumsy, clumsy, clumsy.” But it was hard to hold the thought when the only thing she could see was Kris dangling by one foot. Her mouth might be saying clumsy, but her brain kept insisting, don’t stop her.

  Closely followed by: Would you stop whaling on it! You’re just pissing it off!

  Closely followed by: I guess that answers the ‘do they or don’t they’ genitalia question. as Kris’ flailing bat impacted between the creature’s legs with no effect.

  Its knees were significantly more sensitive.

  Howling in pain, it whipped Kris twice around its head then threw her toward the concourse.

  Diana rocked to a halt, spun around as Kris sailed by, yanked open her pouch, and broke a lime-green feather in half.

  The mall elf floated gently to the floor as the sprinklers came on.

  A tote bag whistled past Diana’s head fast enough to part her hair, the letters on the bag a red-on-white blur. Heart pounding, she raced past the furious meat-mind while it struggled to recover its balance, the force of the swing having nearly tipped it over.

  “Diana! Over here!” Sam paced in front of the optical shop, tail lashing marmalade lines in the air. “Something’s happening!”

  Inside the store, a multicolored fog had begun to swirl.

  A familiar multicolored fog.

  Diana skidded to a stop by Sam’s side. “The travel agency?” All of a sudden, the whole attack made a horrible kind of sense. The red plume on the dark elf’s helm, the tote bags. The darkside had chartered a trip into the mall elves’ territory. “Who’s coming up with this stuff!” she snarled, reaching back into her pouch.

  “Hurry!”

  As the fog grew thicker, a familiar trio of shapes began to take form.

  “Not this time, bologna for brains.”

  As the three meat-minds charged toward the door, Diana dropped to her knees and slammed a key down on the threshold. Slamming into the barrier with enough force to vibrate glass all the way to the exit, they bounced back into the fog and disappeared. It was probably imagination that provided the crash of impact at the travel agency, one level down and a quarter of a kilometer away.

  “You sure that’ll hold them?” Sam demanded, looking dubious as he checked out the key.

  “Hey, when I lock a door, it stays locked.” She rocked back on her heels and stood. “Why aren’t you wet?”

  “Why should I be?”

  “The sprinklers…”

  He stared up at her, amber eyes challenging.

  “…never mind.”

  A quick run back to the end of the hall.

  Out on the concourse, about two thirds of the meat-minds were down, those parts of their faces not being covered by the impact of baseball bats, covered in fresh ground pepper. Claire sat slumped against the art supply store, cradling one arm. Scattered, brightly colored heaps marked fallen elves, Kris and Colin weaving among them pulling downed comrades to safety.

  Wet blades glistening, Arthur and the dark elf fought on.

  As Diana stepped forward, Arthur danced sideways to avoid a lunge and tripped over a discarded tote bag.

  He began to fall. His sword rose to block a descending blow, but the angle was wrong and everyone could see it.

  The Immortal King was about to die.

  A simple “no” could prevent disaster.

  Diana could feel the word rising.

  But that “no” could provide the enemy with power enough to complete the segue.

>   She had nothing in her pouch, nothing that might…

  The wand. The wand belonged on the Otherside.

  Yanking it from her pocket, Diana pointed the pink star at the dark elf, tried very hard not to think of how stupid this had to look, and opened herself up to extreme possibilities.

  The sudden spray of pink power froze him in place, his dark sword no more than a centimeter from Arthur’s throat. Glistening lines raced over his armor, connected the water droplets, and flared into a rose-white light too bright to look at.

  When the light finally faded and everyone had blinked away the aftereffects, the dark elf was gone.

  The few meat-minds still standing threw themselves over the barrier to the lower level, landing five meters down with a disconcerting splat.

  “Wicked.”

  Diana turned to see Kris smiling at her admiringly.

  “And thanks for that, you know, feather thing.”

  Diana would have liked to have spent a moment basking in Kris’ admiration, but the wand dropped from numb fingers and a heartbeat later she followed it to the floor, not entirely certain if she wanted to puke or pass out. Unable to decide, she did both.

  * * *

  Dean brushed his palm over a depleted spray of lime-green feathers and sighed. “Austin, what happened to my feather duster?”

  “Don’t look at me.”

  “I thought you knew everything.”

  “I do.” Rolling over, he exposed his other flank to the square of sunlight. “I just don’t want you to look at me.”

  FIVE

  “IT’S BEEN THREE DAYS.”

  “Four,” Austin corrected morosely from his place on the counter. “They left Saturday, it’s now Tuesday.”

  “They left at nine-thirty Saturday morning. It’s only eight forty-five.” Dean expertly worked the broom into a corner of the office, capturing an elusive clump of cat hair. “Technically, it hasn’t been four days.”

  “You’re amazingly anal about a lot of things, aren’t you?”

  “If I’m going to do something, I’m after being accurate.”

  Austin sighed and dropped his chin down onto his front paws. “You missed a spot.”

  Dean bent to push the broom under the desk. He knew he was displacing his anxiety, but even the hand-waxed shine on the old hardwood floor seemed less, well, shiny than it had. “I miss Claire.”

  “I miss her more,” the cat muttered.

  “I’m not arguing.” Mostly because he’d finally learned there was no point in arguing with a cat but also because, in this particular instance, there really wasn’t anything to argue about. Austin probably did miss Claire more than he did. The two of them had been through a lot together over the last seventeen years. In fact, given what the three of them had been through over the last nine months, Dean was willing to bet that “been through a lot” didn’t even begin to start covering the highlights of the previous sixteen years.

  Straightening, he glanced over at the counter. “I bet you’ve got a lot of great memories.”

  “Great memories, good memories, and a few ‘holy crap I can’t believe we survived that’ memories,” Austin agreed. “But don’t get your hopes up, broom boy; I’m not sharing stories of what a cute little Keeper Claire was. Nothing against you personally, it’s just not something cats do.”

  “Why not?”

  One black ear flicked disdainfully. “Hey, I don’t write the rules.”

  “You don’t even follow the rules,” Dean pointed out, frowning down at a set of parallel scratches gouged out by the desk chair. “Before Claire went in, she said they could be in there for a couple of days. We’re already past that estimate.”

  “True. But they could still come out yesterday.”

  That was enough to pull Dean’s complete attention from the floor. “What?”

  “Time on the Otherside runs differently: four days here isn’t necessarily four days there, so they could come out at any time.”

  “What?”

  Austin sighed and sat up. “If they can come out any time,” he reiterated slowly and distinctly, “then as long as they don’t come out before they left, they can come out yesterday.”

  “But we’ve already lived yesterday and part of today without them.”

  “Doesn’t matter, we won’t know that we did. This particular reality will simply disappear, a new reality with Claire and Diana and that orange thing replacing it and becoming the only reality.”

  “Really?”

  “Nah. I’m just messing with your head.” He looked significantly more cheerful than he had for days. “Once time’s been used, it’s done. Nobody wants time with turned-over corners and pencil scribbles in the margins.”

  “Do cats get senile?” Dean asked the room at large. When the room didn’t answer, which around the guest house wasn’t always a given, he knelt to whisk the pile of dirt and cat hair—mostly cat hair—onto a dustpan. Still on his knees, he heard the outside door open and half a dozen people tromp in. Without wiping their feet. Wondering why Newfoundlanders seemed to be the only people in Canada who grasped the concept of not tracking dirt inside, he called, “I’ll be right there.” He spilled the dustpan into the garbage and stood.

  A young woman waited in the lobby, half leaning on the counter and stroking Austin. Tied back off her face with a ribbon, her shoulder-length hair was so black the highlights were blue. Her skin was very pale, her fingers amazingly so against Austin’s fur, and her lips were a dark red…red as blood. Dean looked out the window and once he was certain the sun hadn’t set early and no unscheduled total eclipse had darkened the sky, he exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The continuing presence of daylight came as a distinct relief. He had nothing against vampires in general, but they always drew groupies and those guys just weirded him right out.

  He smiled what Claire called his innkeeper smile. “Can I help you?”

  “We were wondering if you had rooms available.”

  We? Dean leaned forward and found himself staring down at seven muscular men in shorts and tank tops. The largest of them barely cracked four feet tall. “Uh, we only have six rooms and they’re all doubles…”

  She waved off his protest. “Not a problem. Four rooms are fine; we’re not made of money, so we’re used to sharing. It’s just we’ve been on the road all night and we’d like to catch some sleep before the game.”

  “Game?”

  “Yeah, we’re basketball players,” one of the men announced belligerently, weight forward on the balls of his feet as though daring Dean to make something of it.

  “Okay.”

  “They’re the Southern Ontario Midget Basketball champs,” the young woman announced proudly. “I’m their manager, Aurora King.”

  Dean shook her hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “We have an exhibition game this evening at the community center.” Leaning toward him, she dropped her voice and added, “If you can knock a little off your room rates, I’m sure I can score you some tickets.”

  To a midget basketball game. Were people even allowed to say midget anymore? Dean wondered. Although all things considered, he had to assume Ms. King would know the politically correct…label? Word? Description? Realizing she was waiting for his answer, he shrugged. “Uh, sure.”

  “Come on, come on, enough of the chitchat,” yawned a member of the team. “I’m so tired I’m going to sack out right here.”

  “Low blood sugar,” snorted the young man standing beside him.

  “Premed,” Aurora murmured as Dean pushed the registry toward her. “He diagnoses everything. Drives us nuts.” Her voice rose back to more generally audible levels. “You guys work out who’s sleeping where and with who.”

  A strangled cough drew everyone’s attention to a redhead blushing almost the exact same shade as his hair.

  “Lord fucking save us, the new guy’s shy,” muttered the first player who’d spoken.

  Teasing the new guy kept everyone
amused while Dean finished the paperwork and reached for the keys. “I’d just like to point out that there’s no smoking in the rooms.”

  The entire team turned to stare at a diminutive blond.

  He pushed short dreadlocks back off his face and shrugged. “Hey, man, I’m cool. No mellow the day of a game. I know the rules.”

  “Strangely enough,” Aurora laughed as Dean’s eyebrows rose, “he’s one of the best guards we ever had.”

  “That’s because I control my own space, Dude.”

  After a short tussle over the keys and a little more teasing of the new guy, they started up the stairs. Six steps up, one of them sneezed violently. “I think I’m allergic to the damned cat.”

  “Well, he won’t be in the damned room,” Aurora mocked, slipping her arm around the shoulders of the last man standing in the lobby. He wrapped his arm around her waist and they walked in lockstep up to the second floor.

  “I’m guessing that one’s happy,” Austin murmured as they heard the fourth door close.

  Dean removed his glasses and polished them against the hem of his T-shirt. “I’m not going there.”

  “Probably wise.”

  * * *

  Struggling up through a pounding headache and the kind of nausea that made even breathing seem like a bad idea, Diana opened her eyes. The ceiling—a long, long way up—didn’t look familiar. Where was she? Mattress and pillow under her. Blanket over. She was obviously in a bed. In her underwear. So she’d been here for a while.

  Her head flopped to the left and she could see a row of beds stretching off across a…store?

  To the right, baby and toddler pajamas were twenty percent off.

  Okay. Got it now. Otherside. Mall. Meat-minds. Mall elves. Battle. Wand. Ow.

  The two nearest beds were also occupied. She identified Colin by his pale hair but didn’t know who the second wounded elf was.

  Raising her head, she could see another row of beds facing the first. Since all the beds were made—bedding, aisle fifteen—she assumed the elves were using it as a dormitory slash infirmary.