Long Hot Summoning

by Tanya Huff

  “Now, Claire! Or are you tired of Dean already?”

  Even the ambient noise of bells in elvish hair quieted. Lance opened his mouth. Arthur shook his head. He closed it again.

  There were also a number of things Keepers didn’t say to other Keepers. Claire made a mental note to say most of them to her younger sister at a later time. “I’m going to allow for the stress you’re under,” she said quietly. “Pick a door.” Any door would take them back to the access corridor in the actual mall. The point of departure remained the point of return regardless. “Let’s go home.”

  “Fine!” Pivoting on one heel, shifting Sam’s weight against her hip, ignoring the little voice that told her she’d gone too far, Diana scanned the lower concourse stores. “There, that kid’s store, the Rainbow Wardrobe. Nothing bad should come out of it.”

  “How responsible of you.”

  “Don’t patronize me!”

  “Fine.” Claire turned toward Arthur. “The mall is no longer a segue, so we can come and go the same way we can from any other place on the Otherside. I’ll be back to check on things.”

  The Immortal King glanced at Diana, his blue eyes sympathetic, then turned his gaze back to her. Less sympathy, more understanding, Claire noticed. “When?”

  Her watch appeared to be keeping time to a rhumba beat. “Unfortunately, I have no idea.”

  “Claire! Now, or I’m going without you!”

  Under no circumstances was Claire allowing Diana back into the world unsupervised. Even standing right beside her, it would be hard enough to keep her from making a foolish attempt to rescue Kris the moment she could manipulate the possibilities—on the other side of reality, it would be impossible. Claire picked up her pack, wrapped her good hand around Lance’s arm, and hurried to join Diana at the store.

  When the door flew open on its own, they stepped back together. Jumped back together. Fortunately, Lance was in hiking boots.

  A sound spilled out first—like a terrified chicken being chased by a snake.

  Dropping her grip on Lance, Claire shoved her hand into her belt pouch. She hadn’t closed the zipper after the throne room and for one, heart-stopping moment she thought it was empty. Then her fingers closed around a peppercorn. Enough? It had to be. Releasing the contained possibilities, she yelled, “Everyone close your eyes!” as something squawked and exploded out into the lower concourse.

  A moment.

  Two.

  Cats hunted by sound. “Sam?”

  “I don’t hear it.”

  “I can’t open my eyes!”

  She signed and opened hers. “Yes, you can, Lance.”

  “Oh, this is just great…” Diana would have thrown up her hands had she been willing to put Sam down. “…Hell’s gone, and this place makes even less sense. I don’t see the connection between a basilisk and a children’s st…”

  “So you’re saying that while your body stayed in the room, your ka moved around sipping off bits of Dean’s life and spying on us?”

  Austin’s voice ghosted out the open door.

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I knew everything you had planned from the instant you planned it.”

  “Meryat!”

  Claire and Diana together grabbed Lance as he surged forward.

  “Wardrobe-to-wardrobe connection?” Diana asked, brow furrowed, curiosity momentarily flattening the peaks of other emotions.

  “Seems like.”

  “I think that fulfills my part in this foolishness, cat. I have explained, I have gloated, now I will have what I want.”

  The sound of a struggle.

  “A valiant attempt, Dean. But you are mine.”

  “I don’t think so, bitch!”

  Diana’s eyes widened as her head snapped around toward her sister. “Claire!”

  “Lance…” Claire yanked him free of Diana’s grip, her fingers dimpling his arm. Yanked him around to face her. “…can you stop Meryat?”

  He pulled a roll of ancient linen out of his right front pocket with his free hand. “Yes!”

  “Then go!”

  Diana grabbed too late as Lance raced for the storefront, so she grabbed her sister’s shoulder instead. “Claire, that isn’t where he came in. There’s no way to be sure he’ll come out in your bedroom! Not without…” Her voice trailed off at the look on Claire’s face.

  Claire reached into the possibilities and set Lance’s feet on a single path.

  Rules broke.

  * * *

  Dean’s hair had begun to gray.

  Since it seemed to be his only remaining option, Austin launched himself from the top of the wardrobe, screaming a challenge.

  Meryat swatted him aside. Lost a little flesh tone in the use of power but quickly gained it back as Dean seemed to shrink in on himself.

  “Hold hard, you ancient and perfidious evil!”

  Her attention lifted off Dean. “What?”

  Austin muzzily wondered much the same from where he sprawled against the headboard. When he was a kitten, perfidious and evil meant the same thing.

  Bounding out of the wardrobe, Lance twirled a line of linen across the room.

  Meryat stared at him in disbelief for a heartbeat, then laughed and raised a hand. “Foolish b…OW!”

  As the linen looped around her neck, Dean slid off the edge of the bed. It had taken everything he had left to overcome the years of training that Meryat had called his tragic flaw but, in the end, he’d managed a solid kick in the ankle. Now his back hurt, he had an intense craving for prune juice, and he couldn’t actually hear what Lance was shouting. Wasn’t entirely sure it was English. That’s the trouble with kids today, talk a language all their own. It’s all the fault of that MT…Whoa. Suddenly, he felt a lot better.

  Meryat wasn’t looking too good.

  A finger dropped off and shattered to dust against the floor.

  Lance wrapped another loop of linen around her body and kept shouting.

  Another finger fell. The rest of her followed about seven syllables later.

  Dean covered his mouth and nose as a fine particulate rose and settled.

  “Dr. Rebik!”

  The archaeologist now looked only five or six years older than his driver’s license picture. Which wasn’t exactly good, but he inarguably looked better than he had been.

  “Lance!”

  In turn, Lance no longer looked like he’d taken too many hits from a croc.

  Although he still looked Australian.

  As the professor and his grad student caught up, Dean stood and leaned over the bed. “You all right?”

  Austin checked extremities, sneered in the general direction of the reunion, and reluctantly admitted he was fine.

  “Good. I’ll be after getting the vacuum, then.”

  The sheer enormity of what her sister—her older, responsible sister—had done shouldered its way past loss and grief. Diana felt as though she was thinking clearly for the first time since Kris’ sacrifice. And Claire so didn’t want to know what she was thinking. She’d been hurt before, upset, now she was angry. “I can’t believe you did that!”

  “Believe it!”

  When Rules were broken, there were consequences.

  Claire slammed the door closed, counted to ten, and yanked it open. They stepped through together.

  They stepped from the lower concourse into a children’s clothing store.

  “You’ve permanently warped it,” Diana snapped as she tightened her hold on Sam and they ran for the next storefront.

  “I had to save Dean!”

  “Sure you did!” Because Claire could do what Claire wanted and too bad if anyone or what anyone else needed to do got in her way.

  Jeans store.

  Fabric store.

  They ran past the watching elves and tried the other side of the concourse.

  The doors opened only to their singular, prosaic destination.

  They couldn’t cross back over.

  When Rules
were broken, there were consequences.

  Squirming free, Sam jumped up onto the edge of a planter and looked from Claire to Diana. “So, we’re stuck here?”

  “Looks like!” Diana’s lip curled. “Because Ms. I Always Have to Have My Own Way had to save Dean at the expense of everyone else!”

  “I was not going to let him die!”

  Less than an arm’s length between them now. Voices raised and getting louder. The mall elves started studying the tiles, the light fixtures, the cat.

  “Did you even once think of me?” Diana snarled.

  Claire snorted. “Do you ever think of anything but yourself?”

  Sam dropped back onto the floor.

  “Oh, fine talk from someone who goes on and on about sacrifice to the greater good and who just condemned my…condemned Kris to save her boyfriend!”

  The shrieks of pain sounded pretty much simultaneously. In the silence that followed, Sam returned to the planter.

  Claire rubbed at the blood on her ankle, looked up to see Diana doing the same, realized the tears were not from the cat scratches and reached out. “Oh, Kitten, I’m sorry.”

  Things got a little damp and mushy for the next few minutes, embraces awkward because of the packs but determined.

  “Well done,” Arthur murmured by Sam’s shoulder. “I had begun to think I should intervene.”

  “That would have worked, too,” Sam admitted. “But you probably wouldn’t have liked the result.”

  “Oh?”

  “Common enemy.”

  “But you…”

  “Are a cat.”

  “Right.”

  Caught up in the circle of Claire’s arm, Diana sniffled and raised her head. “You haven’t called me Kitten in years.”

  “You started hitting me when I did it.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “And then you filled my bed with butterscotch pudding.”

  “Technically, I turned your sheets to pudding, but I can see why you stopped.”

  They separated slowly, wiped tears, and mirrored watery smiles.

  “Rough day.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Diana, Kris…”

  “I know. We’ll save her. And I’ve figured out how to get us home.”

  * * *

  “Diana, I’m not a teenager.”

  Diana straightened her pack straps, then bent down and scooped Sam off the floor. “Look, it’s after hours, you’re with a teenager and a cat, and we’ve got a mirror we definitely didn’t pay for—it’s covered.”

  Shunk kree. Shunk kree.

  “That certainly sounds like it’s covered,” Claire admitted. She closed her good hand around the edge of Jack’s frame. “Jack, are you sure?”

  “I just want out of the mall. The guesthouse sounds fabulous and…Hello! Fingerprints on my glass!”

  “Sorry.”

  Shunk kree. Shunk kree.

  Sam tucked his head up under Diana’s chin. “What’s taking him so long?”

  They were alone on the lower concourse, Arthur and the elves back in the department store in an effort to minimize time distortions. Good-byes had been perfunctory at best.

  “I’ll be back with Kris as soon as I find her. Now go away, or this will never work!”

  Claire thought she could smell the fire, could definitely hear the music. Actually, now that the mall was nothing more than a place on the Otherside, they could probably hear the music at the Girl Guide camp. The mall elves were great kids, but she could see why Jack didn’t want to stay.

  Shunk kree. Shunk kree.

  The circle of light swept across the concourse.

  Swept back.

  * * *

  His eyes widened as he stared at the two girls and the cat. Twenty-one years he’d been patrolling this darkness, finding the hidden ones, dragging them out to face the consequences. Girls. Boys. Young bodies. Lithe bodies. Hard bodies. All their possibilities caught and held.

  They thought they were better than him. They laughed. Here, in the darkness, he made sure they stopped laughing.

  Not the first time he’d caught two at once.

  Not even the first cat.

  The first pair with a cat. And a mirror?

  Caught himself, he stared at his reflection and almost saw something stare back.

  * * *

  “That was unpleasant.” Although she hadn’t actually touched the old man, Claire wiped her fingers against her thigh as they hurried toward the nearest exit, Jack riding the possibilities behind them.

  “Yeah, lots of waxy build up in there. How much did you wipe?”

  “His memory of us.”

  “And that whole ‘geeks that hunt the night’ thing?”

  “Couldn’t touch it. It was tracked in too deep.”

  “That’s almost…sad.”

  “Might be for the best, though; Arthur will have an easier time with the elves if they continue to face a common enemy.”

  “That’s an interesting definition of ‘for the best.’”

  “Remind me to check at Children’s Aid tomorrow and find out where they’re holding Stewart.”

  “You’ll send him back?”

  “Of course I will. If he wants to go.”

  “Can’t see why he would,” Diana snorted. “I mean, reality’s just so much more meaningful than a life you’ve made for yourself.” Barely slowing, she popped the lock on the exit’s inside door and held it open. “How’s your finger,” she asked as Sam raced through their legs and off the concourse.

  Claire flicked it at her sister. “Good as new.”

  Grinning, Diana flipped a finger back as Claire dealt with the outside door. “Sam, she’d be a little faster if you weren’t quite so underfoot.”

  “I just want to get out of here.”

  “I hear you.” Bending, she picked him up again and rested her chin between his ears. “I’m totally web shopping from now on.”

  Jack glanced up at the security mirror as he passed between the doors. “Is that what I looked like on this side?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  He frowned. “Did that curvature make me look fat?”

  The heat outside the mall hit them like a wet sponge.

  “Oh, man, I so didn’t miss this.” Diana waved the hand not holding Sam between their black-on-black outfits. “And we’re so not dressed for it.”

  “Not a problem. First, it’s the middle of the night. Second, if anyone does say anything, we’ll tell them we’re from Toronto.”

  “Works. Now…” Deep in Diana’s pack, her cell phone began to ring, the sound remarkably loud in the empty parking lot. She touched the possibilities. “That’s Mom.”

  Claire winced. When Rules were broken, there were consequences. “I don’t suppose…”

  The ringing stopped. “Battery must’ve gone dead.”

  “Thanks.”

  “De nada.”

  “It’ll be something when your mother catches up to you,” Sam muttered.

  Diana ignored him. “So, like I was saying; now what?”

  “Home.”

  “The guest house?”

  “Yes, because…”

  “Because the residual power signature in the furnace room will lead us right to Kris! And you have to check on Dean and Austin,” she added hurriedly as Claire’s brows drew in. “I understand. But you know; two birds, one stone. Let’s move!”

  Claire reached into the possibilities and called a cab.

  * * *

  Chin resting on one hand, Dean covered a yawn with the other and watched Austin eat a sausage he wasn’t supposed to have. After everything they’d been through, it was reassuringly norm…“Austin?”

  Both ears were up. His head turned suddenly toward the front door. A heartbeat later the rest of his body followed.

  With a shriek of wood against wood and a crash as his chair hit the floor and bounced, Dean followed.

  * * *

  Claire stepped out of the taxi and bra
ced herself as a black-and-white streak flew down the front stairs of the guest house and into her arms. She winced as claws sank deep into both shoulders but only murmured reassurances into the top of a velvet head. After a moment, Austin calmed enough to pin her in an emerald gaze.

  “Never go away for that long again!”

  “I missed you, too.”

  “We could have been killed!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If you hadn’t sent Lance back…”

  “I know.”

  “I had everything under control.”

  “Of course.”

  “If that’s Dean I hear pounding toward you, put me down before I get crushed.”

  It was, so she did.

  Sitting on the sidewalk, Austin finished smoothing rumpled fur and looked up to see Sam watching him, head cocked to one side. “I’ll make her pay later,” he said.

  The younger cat nodded. “I never doubted you.”

  “I assume there’s a story behind the whole ‘dressed like they’re heading out to do some second-story work’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, skip it.”

  Diana wrestled Jack out of the back seat—bending half a dozen or so possibilities in the process—and shoved him toward the guest house as the cab roared off, the cabby remembering only the twenty percent tip. The possibilities were cheaper, but their mother had called twice more on the ride home. Once on the cabby’s cell phone. Once using a phone booth near the intersection where they were waiting for the light.

  Sooner or later, one of them would have to answer.

  Claire would have to answer, Diana corrected glancing over at her sister and Dean. About to suggest Claire leave tonsillectomies to the medical profession, another phone rang. Actually, not another phone. Her phone. In her pack. Mom had clearly found a way around the dead battery.

  At this point, the fastest route to Kris might be to answer it. While she hadn’t broken any Rules, at this point in the proceedings, she was likely to catch just as much Hell. Leaning Jack carefully against the porch railing, Diana slipped off her pack and began to search for her cell. Finding it at last under a tunaless tuna sandwich, her thumb was poised over the connect button when the sound of squealing tires drew all eyes to the street.