Таня Хафф - Long Hot Summoning

“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 braced 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.