by Tanya Huff
“Cannonball!”
* * *
“Lance!” Dean moved a little farther away from the propped-open door of the elevator and yelled again. “LANCE!”
“Maybe Meryat ate him.”
“Not funny, Austin.”
“Not joking.”
“He’s not answering and I don’t see…Austin!”
“I know, I know.” Austin stepped off the path and began digging a new hole. “Just because this place looks like the world’s biggest litter box doesn’t mean I should yadda yadda.” After checking depth, he stepped forward, positioned himself, and glared up at Dean. “Do you mind?”
“Sorry.” Ears red, Dean headed for the cabana. “I’ll be after checking if Lance is inside.”
“Yeah, you be after doing that, then.”
There were a suspicious number of footprints around the cabana’s flap. A large bootprint—Dean dropped to one knee and measured it against his hand—probably belonging to Lance, and a small bare print that appeared to have come up from the water.
“Hey, Claire’s been here.”
“Claire?” Heel, toes, instep; still anonymous to him. “How can you tell?”
“I’m a cat.” Flopping down, Austin rolled over on his back, sunlight gleaming on the white fur of his stomach as he rubbed his shoulders into the compacted sand. “And I’m generally a lot closer to the ground than you are.”
Hard to argue with. Leaping to his feet, Dean grabbed for the canvas. “Claire!”
“She’s not here, hormone-boy. Look there, the same footprints heading out. She’s been and gone.”
“How long ago?”
“About thirty-one minutes. She was walking quickly, carrying a ham sandwich, and humming The 1812 Overture.”
“You can tell all that from her footprints?”
“No, you idiot, I can’t. But I’d be just as likely to know the last two as the first.” Shaking his head, the cat slid through the break in the canvas.
Because he couldn’t think of anything better to do, Dean followed. “Still no Lance.” But there was a note on the beer cooler. “Just passing through. Still working on the mall. I agree with your assessment of Lance. Austin, you’re eating the geriatric cat food and that’s final. Love you both. Claire.” He folded his hand around the paper.
“Are you going to do something sappy, like hold the note up to your heart?”
“No.” Not now he wasn’t. “Do you think she took Lance with her?”
Wrapping his tail around his toes, Austin looked thoughtful. “They definitely headed off together, and she said she trusted your assessment of him.”
“Well, after hearing Lance’s story, it wouldn’t be hard for Claire to figure out that I sent him up here to get him safely out of the way.”
“So maybe she took him with her because this place is no longer safe.”
Dean’s brows drew in and he studied the cat. “Facetious comment?”
“Experienced guess.”
Fair enough. “And if this place is no longer safe…”
“…we should go.” Austin finished, jumping down and running for the cabana’s flap.
Dean caught up to him halfway back to the elevator. “Did you know there was a back way into this beach?”
“Sure.”
“You lying to me?”
“You’ll never know.”
* * *
“It’s like a fucking maze down here. What do they need all these tunnels for?”
“Nothing. It’s what we expected to find.” Specifically, it was what she’d expected to find, unable to shake the feeling that they couldn’t just go straight to the anchor—way too easy. About to suggest they stop wandering and start coming up with some sort of a plan, she snapped her mouth closed as Kris raised a silencing hand.
Voices.
Angry voices.
Not very far away but bouncing off the rock.
Head cocked, ears fanned out away from her skull, Kris slowly turned in place. Barely resisting the urge to make beeping sounds, Diana waited. After a long moment, Kris pointed to the left. “That way.”
“I guess Chekhov was right.”
“What does Star Trek have to do with this?”
“Not that Chekhov. The Russian writer—we studied him last year in English.”
“You studied a Russian in English?”
“Yeah. Go figure. He said that you never hang elf ears on the wall in act one, unless you’re going to use them in act three.”
“You’re not making any fucking sense. You know, that, right?”
The tunnels to the left slanted away on a slight downward angle—just enough to be noticeable. Heading down toward evil…it was annoyingly clinchéd and beginning to make Diana just a little nervous. She’d cop to the maze but not the slope, she just didn’t do symbolism that blatant. Which meant something that did was in control of this part of the Otherside.
The voices grew louder, and Kris pointed to an inverted, triangular-shaped fissure in the rock.
And this is why I get the big bucks, Diana reminded herself, kicking the toe of one sneaker into the bottom of the crack and heaving herself up into the passage. It took her a moment to figure out how to tuck herself inside, but she finally started inching sideways toward the distant argument. Rocks jutting out from the sides of the fissure scraped across her stomach, laying out what she was sure would be a fascinating pattern of bruises, and there were one or two places where she was positive she lost chunks of her ass. Memo to self: lay off the ice cream and thank God I don’t have much in the way of breasts.
She didn’t expect Kris to climb in after her but couldn’t do much about it since she’d reached a spot without enough room to turn her head.
Stretch out left arm, stretch out left leg, anchor both, and shimmy sideways.
And then she ran out of fissure.
Dipping her left shoulder, Diana forced herself close enough to the outside edge to get a look around.
They were in a crack about twenty feet up the wall of a huge circular chamber.
The generic nasty from the throne room was standing just off center.
In the center, in the exact center, was a hole. Not a metaphysical hole, an actual round hole. Like a well.
Before she could follow that new information through to any kind of a logical conclusion, a piece of shadow fell screaming from the ceiling. Shuddering, she had to admit it had reason to scream. Reasons. Reasons that started with the baby doll pajamas, worked through the lopsided braids, and finished at the residue of melted marshmallow, chocolate, and graham cracker crumbs.
No Name Nasty didn’t seem to have much sympathy for it.
“I don’t care how many boxes of cookies you have to sell! You’re pathetic. You were sent to assassinate the Immortal King…”
Diana felt Kris’ gasp by her right ear and managed to wrap a hand around the other girl’s arm. Now was not the time.
“…and you failed!”
There. It failed. Good news.
“YOU HAVE BOTH FAILED.”
Diana stiffened. “Oh, Hell.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to swear,” Kris muttered.
“I wasn’t.”
TEN
BACKING OUT OF THE FISSURE scraped and bruised a number of interesting new places, but given what she now knew, Diana found the pain a whole lot easier to ignore. There’s was nothing like finding yourself right back at a potential apocalypse to put a bruised boob in perspective.
“FEE, FI, FOE, FEEPER…”
That didn’t sound good. She poked Kris, trying to get her to move a little faster. Kris flashed her a one-finger answer.
“Feeper? What’s a feeper?” The guy from the throne room, now positively identified as a Shadowlord, had become a lot harder to hear.
“IF I COULD FINISH!”
“Sorry.”
“NOT YET, YOU AREN’T. BUT YOU WILL BE.”
With any luck, the punishing of the unnamed Shadowlord wo
uld distract…
“AS I WAS SAYING; FEE, FI, FOE, FEEPER, I SMELL THE BLOOD OF A NEARBY KEEPER!”
…or not.
Kris dropped down into the corridor.
“We have a Keeper in chains…” the Shadowlord began.
“NO, YOU DON’T.”
“Yes, we…”
“NO.”
“But…”
“YOU’RE AN IDIOT.”
Diana stumbled as she landed, cracked her knee against the stone floor, and told herself to ignore it. “Come on.” Grabbing Kris’ hand, she dragged the mall elf into a run. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Haven’t I been saying that?”
“Yeah, but now I’m saying it.” First, up the slope. Then, when the floor leveled out, she’d follow the signature of her scattered stuff back to the throne room. After that, a fast run through the construction site and into the access corridor. Granted, the last time she’d covered that particular bit of the escape route, she was being dragged by a giant bug, but she was fairly sure she remembered the pattern of water seepage on the ceiling.
As they turned the first corner, Kris leaned in close and said, in an urgent whisper. “Who was that talking?”
“I told you.”
“You said; oh, hell.”
“Close.” A short pause at the second corner to make sure the way was clear. “I said, oh, Hell.”
“And the diff?”
“Capital letter.”
“So that was really…?”
“Yeah.” At the third corner, the floor leveled out. Diana reached out, feeling for possibilities out of place. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t hard to pick up the signature of Keeper-designed weapons over the general hum of evil.
“But Hell’s a place. Places don’t talk.”
“It’s not so much a place as it’s a metaphor.”
“Whatever. Just so’s you know, I don’t believe in Hell.”
“Just so you know, that doesn’t matter.”
“It isn’t real!”
Diana sighed. “Six months ago, you were freezing your ass off, trying to survive on the streets during a Canadian winter. Now, you’re an elf, living in an evolving shopping mall, having been made the Captain of the Guard for an allegorical king. All things considered, I think you should be a little more open-minded about the parameters of reality.”
“All things considered, I think I have the right to be fucking terrified!”
On a list of bad times for a second kiss, a kiss intended to fall between attraction and relationship, standing in a torchlit tunnel, deep in territory controlled by the dark side of a segue that could allow Hell itself into the world, ranked up there near the top—above “during the funeral of one of the participants” but definitely below “in the holding cell at a maximum security prison.”
Figuring that there wasn’t likely to be a right time any time soon, Diana closed her eyes and leaned in. After a moment—a long moment of soft lips and gentle pressure and just a little tongue—she pulled back and murmured, “Still terrified?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh…”
“But if you were trying to distract me, I gotta say it was a better idea than more stupid stories about your cat.”
“Hey, that’s Claire! I don’t tell stupid stories abo…”
The third kiss involved a little more tongue and strong fingers cupped around the nape of her neck. Diana’s left hand buried itself in the warm mass of mahogany dreads and her right spread out to touch as much of a narrow waist as possible.
“I’m not sayin’ this is anything more than a reaction to that whole Hell thing.”
Still close enough that Kris’ voice was a soft warmth against her face, Diana murmured, “I’m not asking it to be more than a reaction to that whole Hell thing.”
“I’m not sayin’ that it isn’t either.”
“Okay.”
“I thought we had to get out of here?”
“We do.”
“You can beat this thing, right?”
“Sure.”
Kris’ eyes widened and she stepped back, breaking the heat between them. “You don’t know, do you?”
“Look, I’m the most powerful Keeper in the lineage right now, and Claire’s already closed this thing down once. Anything’s possible, so all we have to do is find the right possibility. Which we won’t find standing here.” Taking a deep breath, she added a little more distance between them. “Let’s go.”
By the time they reached the alcove where they’d been chained, they could hear the distant sound of pursuit behind them.
“I guess it’s stopped arguing,” Diana muttered as they began running faster.
“You mean they’ve stopped arguing.”
“No. The guy from the throne room is a Shadowlord, as much a shadow of Hell as the assassin; just bit more formed, is all.”
“Hell was arguing with itself?”
“It’s a thing it does. It doesn’t get out much.”
“And that’s good, right?”
Diana shot a quick, disbelieving glance at the elf. “Generally speaking, yeah.” They took a small flight of stairs two steps at a time. “This also explains why the Shadowlord thought I should know him and why he lacks a name. Bits of Hell don’t get names until they’ve really distinguished themselves in some truly disgusting way.”
“So Jerry Springer’s pretty much a gimme?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
They were running between walls of dressed stone now. Walls that had been built rather than carved out of the bedrock. They were very close to the throne room.
“Good thing…the torches are still…lit,” Kris panted.
“Yeah. They’re lit…because I expect them to…be. We need them…to get out of here.”
“Wouldn’t Hell…know that?”
“Probably. But I don’t…think it has direct influence…this far out yet.”
Between the time her right foot rose and she brought it under her body, ready to stretch it out front once again, the torches went out.
“Of course, I could be wrong.”
* * *
The bedroom was dark when Austin woke. The day just passed had grown overcast, although no cooler, and that overcast had lasted into the night, blocking starlight and moonlight and, very nearly, streetlight. Eye open the merest slit, he could see Dean’s darker-on-dark silhouette on the other pillow and not much else, but he knew they weren’t alone. Something stood beside the bed.
Something satisfied…
He sprang without warning, over Dean and off the edge of the bed. So positive that his claws would connect with linen bandages, he was taken completely by surprise when he hit the floor.
And was blinded an instant later.
“Austin?” One hand on the switch for the bedside lamp, Dean blinked down at the cat. “What’s the matter, then?”
“She was here. Just a second ago.”
“Who was?”
“Who do you think?”
“Meryat?”
“Give the man a rubber mouse.” He stalked stiff-legged out into the sitting room. “She’s gone.”
“I didn’t hear the door…”
“Neither did I.”
“So how did she leave without opening and closing the door? She couldn’t go through it—she’s touched me, you know. She’s solid. And slow. You’ve seen how she walks.”
“Maybe she’s just pretending to be slow.”
“I think I’d know if she was faking it.”
Austin snorted. “You’d be surprised.” He padded back to the bedroom and stared up at Dean. “I don’t know how she’s doing it, but she’s been sucking your life force!”
“You sound like Lance.”
“Yeah?” Hooking his claws into the edge of the mattress, he rappelled his way up the side of the bed and stood on Dean’s thighs. “You look exhausted. Explain that!”
Dean squinted at the clock. “It’s three forty-seven a.m.”
“I should still be sleeping.” Settling back against his pillow, he gently stroked the spot behind Austin’s left ear with his thumb. “Has it occurred to you that maybe you’re having mummy nightmares because you’re a cat and cats have this whole Egyptian connection going?”
Eye narrowed, Austin glared. “You know nothing about that.”
“Not true. When I had the new strut put in the truck, there were National Geographics in the waiting room and I read this article on cats in ancient Egypt.”
“How old was the magazine?”
“Some old, but they were talking about 1,500 BC; does it matter?”
“I am not having nightmares. I am not imagining things. And I did not tell you to stop doing that.”
“Sorry.” Dean started stroking again as Austin stretched out.
“I will get to the bottom of this,” he vowed, sweeping his tail across Dean’s legs.
“Sure you wi…OW! Lord t’undering Jesus, cat! I’m attached to those!”
“Then maybe you should consider where my claws are before you make another patronizing observation.” Having leaped safely away from any physical retaliation, Austin curled up into a tight ball on Claire’s pillow and closed his eye. “Turn out the light, would you. It’s the middle of the night.”
* * *
“Where are we?”
“Based on the cannons, the parapets, and that big guardhouse,” Claire hissed, grabbing a handful of Lance’s wet shirt and dragging him down behind the buttress, “I’d say we were in a fort.”
“Which fort?”
“I don’t know.” They were still on the Otherside, although which Otherside she wasn’t entirely certain—a concept she’d take the time to find disturbing the moment she was no longer personally responsible for an idiot Bystander. Motioning for him to follow, she murmured, “Stay close,” and led the way along the inside curve of the outer wall. When she paused in the triangular shadow of a small lean-to, he tucked up tight behind her. She reached back and shoved hard enough to break the contact between them. “Not that close.”
He inched in again. “What are we doing here?”
“You yelled cannonball as you hit the water and that influenced the path.”
“This is Meryat’s doing, isn’t it?”
