by Tanya Huff
“Eat it! Are you out of your mind?” Coriz sat back on her tail, shifting her hold on the boy. “It’s still a filthy egg-sucker no matter how clean it is. People get sick from eating those vermin!”
“Hey!” The insult broke through the terror. “Who’re you callin’ vermin?”
Both lizards stiffened. The boy continued struggling.
“Look, this whole thing is a major misunderstanding.” It took an effort to speak calmly with five small, painful holes in each arm, but Dean managed. Coriz stared at him—with no nose, nor eyebrows, nor lips to speak of, he couldn’t read her expression, but he could feel the weight of Jurz’ gaze on the top of his head. He obviously had their attention. All he had to do was stall until Claire arrived to save him. “Why don’t we just talk this over….”
“Talk?” Coriz squeaked and dropped the boy.
Who took off at a dead run, occasionally using his hands against the rock for better speed as he escaped.
“Talk?” she repeated, rearing back on her tail. “It TALKS?”
“Of course it doesn’t talk,” Jurz muttered nervously. “It’s just making sounds, imitating speech.”
Although he couldn’t be positive, Dean thought the female lizard looked relieved. “No! You’re wrong!” Struggling drove the talons in deeper. “I’m talking!”
They ignored him.
“Imitating speech, of course.” Coriz sighed, the tension leaving her narrow shoulders.
“I’m not imitating…”
“Still, it does seem somehow more evolved than the others we’ve caught.”
Jurz’ grip shifted, poking new holes into his left arm. Without the talons filling the punctures, the originals began to dribble blood. “Do I kill it?”
“Of course you kill it.”
“Hey!”
“Hopefully, it hasn’t bred. Just imagine if the egg-suckers started to think.” She shuddered. “They do enough damage to the nests now.”
On cue came the horrible sound of smashing shells.
“MY BABIES!”
Jurz dropped Dean, smacked him toward the lava pit with his tail, and raced after his howling mate. Fortunately, he misjudged either the distance or the weight of the object he was attempting to sink.
Legs out over the pit, bottoms of his jeans beginning to scorch and his feet inside the steel toes of his workboots uncomfortably hot, hands abraded by the hardened lava, Dean stopped himself at the last possible instant. Rolling forward, he collapsed as flat as the terrain allowed, trying to catch his breath.
“Come on!” Claire knew she didn’t have a hope of lifting Dean if he was actually injured, but that didn’t stop her from grabbing at his arm and hauling upward. “Jacques isn’t going to hold them for long.” The fabric compacted warm and damp under her hands.
Sucking in an unwelcome lungful of air, Dean shook her off and, coughing, heaved himself up onto his feet. “Jacques?”
“He’s dead. They can’t hurt him.” Claire gaped at the smear of red across her palms. “How bad is it?”
“Not bad.”
“Can you run?”
He shoved his glasses back into place. “Sure. No problem.”
Side by side they pounded back toward the elevator propelled by enraged howls and French Canadian invective.
Twenty feet from safety, Jacques caught up. “I have no smell,” he explained, effortlessly keeping pace. “Les lezards, they count the eggs but that should not take them…”
The howls changed timbre.
“…long.”
When Dean stopped to roll a hunk of obsidian away from the door, Claire hip-checked him over the threshold, grabbed the rock, and flung it toward their pursuers.
The howls changed again.
“OW! Coriz, they hit me with a rock!”
“Egg-suckers don’t use weapons.”
“But I’ve got a bump!”
The door cut off further diagnosis.
“What part,” Claire gasped, dropping the gate into place and turning to glare at Dean, “of no one leaves the elevator did you not understand?”
“They were about to kill the kid.”
“So? He was robbing their nest. Stealing their eggs. Making omelets.”
“I couldn’t just watch him die!”
“Then we should have closed the door.”
“You don’t mean that.”
She did. Or she thought she did until she met his eyes and discovered that he believed she’d have gone to the rescue herself had he not been there. “Forget it. Go straight to the basement. No arguments.”
Dean pushed the lever all the way to the left “No arguments,” he agreed. Passing the second floor, he glanced over at Jacques. “Did you really break one of their eggs?”
“And how do I do that?” the ghost asked, pushing his hand through the wall of the elevator. “I touch nothing.”
“I stomped on a bunch of shells that had already hatched,” Claire explained. “Jacques stayed behind to distract them.”
“Why didn’t you…”
“Use magic? Because the possibilities were different there and, since you decided to play hero, I didn’t have time to work out a way through. Look at me, I’m filthy. I had to lie down on that black stuff with my feet still in the elevator to reach a rock for the door, and if you ever pull such a stupid, boneheaded stunt again, I’m leaving you to cook in the lava pit! Do I make myself clear?”
Ears burning, Dean ducked his head. “Yes, Boss.”
“When we reach bottom, I want a look at those arms.”
“It’s nothing.” A drop of blood traced a trail over the back of his hand, down his index finger, and dripped onto the floor.
She glared at him through slitted eyes. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
“A glass of rum in the belly and one on the wounds. He will be fine, Claire.”
“I have antibiotic cream in my bathroom,” Dean offered hurriedly. “I can take care of it.”
“Bring the cream to the dining room.” As the bottom of the elevator settled into its concrete basin, Claire tossed up the gate, picked up the doily, and stomped out into the basement.
“You stink like an active volcano,” Austin complained, jumping down off a shelf. “Have a nice time?”
All three brushed by him without answering. Dean went into his apartment. Jacques followed Claire up the basement stairs.
“Guess not.” He stuck his head over the threshold and sniffed at the bit of tentacle lying on the floor. His ears went back. “Who let the sushi out of the fridge?”
“So stoic,” Jacques murmured sarcastically as Dean, sitting on the dining room table, tried not to jerk his arm out from under Claire’s ministrations. “So much a man.”
“Stuff a sock in it,” Dean grunted.
“So articulate.”
“Stop it. Both of you.” Shirtless, Dean had pretty much lived up to Claire’s expectations. Eyes locked on the wounds instead of the rippling expanse of bare chest, she dabbed antibiotic cream on the punctures and fought to keep her mind on the job. “None of these are deep. You were lucky. He could’ve ripped your whole arm off. Both arms.” She was babbling. She knew it, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “Ripped both your stupid arms off and thrown them on the ground.” He not only looked great, he smelled terrific. Which had nothing to do with the matter at hand. Nothing at all. “You’d have bled to death before I could get to you. You could have been killed.”
Jacques snickered. “Such a magnifique manner beside the bed, cherie.”
“I’m just saying,” she began, and stopped. “I’m just saying,” she repeated, “that I need him to run this hotel and…” If she hadn’t looked up and seen Dean watching her, his expression teetering halfway between hope and disappointment, she could’ve left it at that. “…I’ve gotten used to having him around and I don’t…” The end of one finger covered in cream, she poked at the last three punctures. “…want him dead.”
“Ow.”
“Sor
ry.”
“About what?” Austin asked, jumping up onto the table beside Dean. “And what happened to your arms? And, just out of curiosity, why don’t you have any chest hair?”
While a blushing Dean shrugged into his shirt, Claire answered the first two questions.
“And the chest hair?” the cat prodded when she finished.
She picked him up and dropped him on the floor.
“You’re just mad because I was right,” he muttered as he jumped back up again. “I can see the sign now. This elevator holds a maximum of…How many dimensions?”
“That’s not important.”
“It will be to the elevator certification guys.”
“I’ll get some drywall and reseal the doors tomorrow,” Dean offered.
“No.” When three pairs of eyes locked on her, she shrugged. “I’d like to study it for a while, maybe I can fix it. It’s perfectly safe if you all stay off it.”
“And if you stay off it cherie.”
“I know enough to stay in it.”
“Penny for your thoughts?” Austin asked from the other pillow.
Claire rolled onto her side and stroked his head. “That only works if you hand me the penny,” she reminded him.
“If I had hands…”
She smiled. “I was thinking about…” How Jacques and I make a good team. How I felt when I saw Dean lying on the rocks. How one of them’s too young and the other’s too dead. How a Keeper should be able to keep her mind on the job even if it has been six months which is a bit of personal information relevant to absolutely nothing. “…the elevator.”
“Really?”
Why doesn’t Dean have any chest hair? “Uh-huh.”
“Liar.”
ISN’T THAT OUR LINE?
TEN
BY THE LAST SATURDAY IN OCTOBER, it was obvious that the seepage had been successfully contained. Hell had tried directing it, spreading it, and cutting it off completely; nothing worked. When a sudden cold snap drove Claire into the furnace room to adjust the heat, she found Hell hunkered down and sulking.
It continued to make personal appearances, however. As long as evil existed, Hell explained wearing Dean’s face in Claire’s mirror, personal temptation would be its stock in trade.
Cautious experimentation with the elevator determined that if the door was opened by someone outside in the hall, passengers could actually exit onto the desired floor. Seepage, or lack of it, affected neither the mechanical functioning nor the variety of destinations. As far as Claire could determine, the elevator had no actual connection to Hell and only a tenuous connection to reality.
But there was one unfortunate casualty of the seepage slowdown.
“I guess this’ll be the next thing you’ll get rid of,” Austin sighed, perched on the silent bust of the king of rock and roll.
The sitting room, emptied to essentials, had a lobotomized look, as though all personality had been surgically removed. Stripped of their accessories, Augustus Smythe’s florid, oversized furniture seemed self-consciously large.
Although she’d had every intention of removing the plaster head, Claire surrendered to the pale green stare making unsubtle demands from the top of the high-gloss pompadour. “If it means that much to you, it can stay.”
“Will you start it up again?”
“No.”
“You could adapt it to run off the middle of the possibilities.”
“No.”
“But…”
“I said, no. It’d be easier to go out and buy a complete set of CDs and a stereo.” Either Augustus Smythe had taken his stereo with him when he’d abandoned the site, or, unlike most men, who tended to buy stereo equipment before unimportant things like groceries or clothing, he’d never owned one.
“If you’re afraid of a bit of hard work….”
“Don’t start with me, Austin. Elvis has left the building.” Before the cat could claw his way through her resolve, Claire turned on a heel and headed for the bedroom. The bust hadn’t been the only amusement in Augustus Smythe’s rooms to run on seepage. Grabbing the fringed curtain hanging over the postcard, she flung it open and barely managed to bite back a startled scream.
“What?” Diana twisted far enough to see that nothing particularly startling had slipped into the space behind her. When she saw that nothing had, she shrugged and directed her attention back out of the postcard. “You don’t look so good, Claire. Maybe you ought to sit down.”
Not really hearing her sister’s suggestion, Claire staggered backward until she hit the edge of the bed and sat. “What are you doing in there?”
“Practicing postcards. Mom said you had one running so I thought I’d see if I could tap into it…”
Claire began breathing again. Diana’s room had not been part of Augustus Smythe’s dirty little picture gallery.
“…that way you could see me, too, and I couldn’t be accused of spying on you.”
Theoretically, that wouldn’t be possible; as a Keeper, Claire would know if she were under observation even by another Keeper. However, since Diana had just tapped into a powerless postcard with no apparent difficulty, something that Claire doubted she could have managed even with nearly ten extra years of experience, she wasn’t about to declare it couldn’t be done. So she did the next best thing: “You postcard me, and I’ll rip your liver out and feed it to you.”
Diana grinned. “As if. You think I’m stupid enough to get that close?”
“Speaking of close, when did you get back from the Philippines?”
“Last week. I landed in San Francisco, stuck my two cents into a site Michelle was dealing with by Berkeley, took Amtrak to Chicago, helped One Bruce seal two small sites—both of them in the middle of major intersections, can you believe it—and flew home from there. I can’t wait until I get to do this stuff on my own.”
Claire couldn’t remember hearing about any earthquakes or train derailments, and since Chicago seemed to be functioning at least as well as it ever did, she breathed a sigh of relief. “What about school?”
“I’ll catch up.” Dropping into an ancient beanbag chair that she’d long outgrown but refused to get rid of, Diana leaned left until she had to brace herself against the floor, then repeated the movement to the right.
“What are you doing?”
The younger woman straightened. “I was trying to get a better angle on your room. Mom says Dean’s a major babe, so I was looking for him.”
“Mom said Dean was a major babe?”
“Not exactly; she said he was ‘quite an attractive young man’ and I translated.”
“This is my bedroom.”
Diana snorted. “So that’s why you have a bed in it.”
“I don’t even want to know why you think Dean might be in here.”
“Well, jeez, Claire, I hope I don’t have to explain it to you. At your age.” After a self-appreciative snicker, she crossed her legs and settled back until it looked as though she’d perched on the crushed remains of a red vinyl flower. “Go and get him, please.”
Even through the postcard, Claire felt the pull of power her younger sister laid on the magic word. “No,” she said, folding her arms. “I am not putting Dean on display to fulfill your prurient interests.”
“Ooo, prurient. Big word. So are you guys getting it on?”
“Diana!” Righteous indignation propelled her onto her feet “Dean’s a nice guy who does most…” Diana’s left eyebrow rose. There was as little point in lying to her as there would have been in her lying. “…almost all…okay, all of the work around here. A nice guy. Do you even know what that means?”
“Sure, I know. It means he’s not getting any.”
“Diana!”
“Relax, I’m just yanking your chain.” Lips pursed, she made a disgusted face. “Man I hope I’m not as big a prude when I’m almost thirty. I told One Bruce and Michelle about you getting stuck on an unsealable site and they both said that Keepers are sent where they’re n
eeded. Not very helpful, I thought Anyway, since you’re settled, I gave them both the phone number. They seemed to think that with you in one place and me still in training and us in contact because we’re family, we have a chance to actually lay some lines of communication between Keepers. Which reminds me, the Apothecary is thinking of setting up as an online server so we can start using e-mail to stay in touch. Here we are, joining the twentieth century in time for the twenty-first.”
Carrying on a conversation with Diana was often like shopping in a discount store: piles of topics crowded the aisles, stacked ceiling high in barely discernible order. The trick was pulling one single thing out to respond to. “The Apothecary doesn’t even have electricity.”
“I know. He says he can work around it. So what about you and this Jacques guy Mom mentioned?”
Claire sighed. “Jacques is dead.”
“I know. But if the Apothecary can run e-mail without electricity…” She let her voice trail off but her eyebrows waggled suggestively up and down. “It sounds like what you really need is Jacques possessing Dean’s body.”
HELLO.
“That is never going to happen.” Although Claire directed her response as much at Hell as at her sister, only her sister acknowledged it.
“I know.”
“You know, you know, you know; you’re beginning to sound like Austin.”
Diana fixed Claire with an exasperated stare. “Keeping the peace, fulfilling destiny, that doesn’t mean we can’t be happy.”
“I am as happy as I can be under the circumstances.”
“Now who’s sounding like Austin. What makes you think I’m talking about you?”
Claire winced. That had been incredibly insensitive of her. “I’m sorry, Diana. Did you have a problem you want me to help with?”
She grinned and shook her head. “No. But if you want, I’ll come by and figure out how to deal with Sara, seal the pit, and get your butt on the road again.”
“Diana!”
“Oh, chill, Claire.” Dark brows dipped into a disdainful frown. “I’m five hundred and forty-one kilometers away, she’s not going to hear me.”
“Your butt is in a sling if she has!” Claire could feel nothing through the shield. Unfortunately, that only meant she hadn’t yet gone through the shield. “If you’ll excuse me, and even if you won’t, I’m going to go check and see if you’ve started Armageddon.” Ignoring protests, she closed the curtain with one hand and pulled at the neck of her cotton turtleneck with the other, telling herself that the room hadn’t suddenly gotten warmer. She wasn’t quite running as she crossed the sitting room.