by Tanya Huff
“Yeah, like you.” She missed a step, would’ve fallen except Dean grabbed her arm. “Thanks.” Charging out into the second floor hall, she banged on the door to room one with her fist “Mrs. Abrams! Professor Jackson! Stop what you’re doing and open the door! Now!”
“Cherie…” One hand stretched toward her, Jacques disappeared.
“No!” Whirling around she reached through the possibilities for power, but before she could blow the door off its hinges, Dean stepped back and slammed the sole of his work boot into the lock. The effect was much the same.
Professor Jackson stood in the midst of a blazing vortex of tiny lights dancing on a manic wind—although stood wasn’t entirely accurate as his feet dangled a good six inches off the floor. Sitting on the corner of the bed, the card table pulled up over her knees, Mrs. Abrams stared wide-eyed, one hand pressed up against her mouth, the other making shooing motions toward the lights.
“What’s happening?” Although the hall had been silent, one step over the threshold, Dean had to shout to make himself heard.
“It looks like Jacques is more than he can handle.”
Dean’s eyes widened. “Jacques is attacking him?”
“Jacques is not doing anything. The professor started something he couldn’t control.”
“Then where is he?”
“Who?”
“Jacques!”
Claire waved a hand toward Professor Jackson. “He’s in those lights. Bits of him may even be in the professor!”
“Connie!” Mrs. Abrams’ shriek cut through the ambient noise like a vegetarian through tofu. “You’ve got to do something!”
Which was true.
“Dean! Try and keep Mrs. Abrams calm.”
“While you do what?”
“While I rescue Jacques!”
“Be careful!” Body leaning almost forty-five degrees off vertical, he fought his way through the wind to the bed.
“It’s the residual power from when she made him flesh!” Ears flat against his head, Austin had tucked himself into the angle between floor and wall, claws hooked deeply into the carpet. He stared up at Claire through narrowed eyes. “Can you bring him back?”
“I think so!” Reaching for calm, Claire shuffled quickly forward, never breaking contact with the floor, at about half Dean’s weight, she couldn’t risk being blown away. A little better than an arm’s length from the professor, she marked her spot and started to spin. She moved slowly at first, barely managing to keep her balance; then the power lifted her and she began to pick up speed as she rose into the air. The room whirled by, faster, faster, until the walls began to blur and the tiny points of light were pulled from their orbits around Professor Jackson. Oh, dear; I really wish I hadn’t had that third slice of pizza….
“Catherine! What do you think you’re doing? You’ve got to save the professor!”
“She’s trying to, Mrs. Abrams!” Dean wasn’t entirely certain Mrs. Abrams had heard him. With Claire picking up speed, the winds had doubled in intensity. He ducked as the lamp from the bedside table flew by, cord dangling. The table followed close behind. On one knee beside the bed, he was horrified to feel it begin to shift. Throwing possible consequences, as it were, to the wind, he flung himself down beside the old woman, grabbed her around the waist with one arm, and blocked the professor’s flying suitcase with the other. Under him, the bed bucked and twisted, fighting to throw off the extra weight that kept it on the floor.
The card table never moved. The flame of the single candle never flickered.
Even behind the protection of his glasses, the wind whipped the moisture from his eyes. Lids barely cracked, Dean watched the little lights leave the professor and move to circle Claire. Sometimes singly, sometimes in clumps, they did one figure eight around both spinning figures, then settled down in their new orbit. When all the lights had shifted, including a few pulled painfully from under the professor’s skin, he breathed a sigh of relief and almost got beaned by a worn leather shaving kit sucked out of the bathroom and into the maelstrom.
It wasn’t over yet.
Now the lights began to orbit a new position equally distant from both spinners. The third point on the triangle. Once again they traced a single figure eight and then began to spin in place.
The bed lifted, four inches, five, six, then banged back down onto the floor.
A familiar form began to take shape in the center of the lights. And then the lights began to spiral inward.
Muscles straining, Dean somehow managed to keep a protesting Mrs. Abrams on the bed. At least he thought she was protesting—he couldn’t hear a thing she was shouting over the roaring of the wind, the pounding of his heart, and the cracking of her heels against his shins.
One by one, the drawers were sucked out of the bureau.
With every light that disappeared Jacques grew more defined.
Dean frowned. Too defined, “Claire! His clothes!”
She didn’t seem to hear him but maybe the clothes came last.
More and more lights were absorbed until only a few remained. Jacques seemed more solid than he ever had.
Dean’s gaze dropped. He almost let go of Mrs. Abrams in shock until he remembered the force of Jacques’ spin had to be distorting reality.
The last light slid in under Jacques’ left arm.
Nothing happened. All three bodies continued to spin. The wind continued to howl.
Although it was difficult to tell for certain with her face flicking in and out of sight, Dean thought that Claire frowned. The index finger of her right hand curved up to beckon imperiously.
One final light, almost too small to see, sucked free from the professor, circled Claire and smacked Jacques right between the eyes. Which opened.
The wind quit.
The candle flame went out.
“…member of the Daughters of the Parliamentary Committee and if you don’t stop this, this moment, I’ll be speaking to my MP!” Mrs. Abrams’ ultimatum echoed in the sudden silence. “Well.” She tossed her head, the lacquered surface of her hair crackling against Dean’s chin. “That’s better.”
In the confusion of three bodies and various pieces of furniture hitting the floor, Dean managed to get across the room to Claire’s side before Mrs. Abrams could react to his presence. One of the bureau drawers bounced off his left shoulder, but he considered bruising of minor importance compared to being caught with his arm, uninvited, around her waist She might thank him for keeping her out of the whirlwind, but the odds weren’t good.
“Claire! Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine when the room stops whirling,” she muttered.
“The room isn’t moving.”
“Says you.” But she opened her eyes and lifted an arm. “Help me sit up.”
“Candice! I demand an immediate explanation!”
With his left arm supporting her back, Claire shifted her weight against Dean’s chest. “Mrs. Abrams,” she sighed “Go to sleep.” They winced in unison at the sound of another body hitting the floor. “Put her back on the bed, would you, Dean.”
The warmth of the sigh had spread through fabric to skin.
“Dean?”
He released her reluctantly. “But you…”
“I’m okay. Nothing wrong that a little vomiting couldn’t cure.” Dragging a dented wastebasket out from under the lamp and cradling it in her arms, she smiled wanly up at him. “No problem.”
“If I could help, cherie?”
This was not something Dean could face on his knees. He stood, then turned, to find Jacques shrugging into a red-and-gray-checked flannel bathrobe. Reality, he noticed as the robe closed, appeared to have returned to normal proportions.
“Help Dean,” Claire instructed from the floor. “I’ll crawl over and check the professor.”
“But cherie…”
“I know. But not until we’ve got this mess cleared up.”
About to add his protest to Jacques’, Dean suddenly realize
d that if the ghost—or whatever he was now—was with him, he wouldn’t be with Claire. “Come on.” He jerked his head toward the bed. “You take her feet.”
“Cherie…”
“Not now.”
As Claire started crawling toward the professor, Jacques shrugged and, stroking both hands down the nap of the robe, followed Dean.
Austin had reached and done a preliminary diagnosis on the sprawled body of Professor Jackson by the time Claire arrived. “He’s having trouble breathing.”
“He’s got a ten-pound cat sitting on his chest.”
“I’m big-boned,” Austin amended, primly stepping off onto the floor. “I think he’s blown a fuse or two.”
“Serves him right.” Setting the wastebasket to one side, Claire bent over the professor and lifted his left eyelid between her thumb and forefinger.
“So giving Jacques flesh was the only solution?”
“If you had a better one…?”
“Me? Oh, no.”
Letting the eye close with an audible snap, Claire glared at the cat. Traces of the matrix Aunt Sara had created to give Jacques flesh had been causing the problem; it made logical sense, therefore, to use those traces to solve the problem. She couldn’t have come up with a faster or more efficient solution. That was her story and even in the relative privacy of her own mind, she was sticking to it. “What are you implying?”
“Me? Nothing.” As the professor’s head gently lolled toward him, Austin reached out a paw and pushed it back. “Hadn’t you better pay attention to what you’re doing?”
Teeth clenched, Claire carefully pulled power. After a moment Professor Jackson moaned and opened his eyes. “Where am I?” he asked breathily.
In ten years as an active Keeper only one person had asked a different question upon regaining consciousness and since, “Do it again,” was actually a statement Claire had always assumed it didn’t count. “Never mind,” she said, brushing his eyes closed. “Go to sleep.”
When he, too, had been laid out on the bed, at a respectable distance from Mrs. Abrams in spite of Dean’s protest and Jacques’ alternative suggestion, Claire told the two men to leave the room.
“Cherie, we have not so much time.”
“I know. But I gave you flesh to save you—and to save him,” she added nodding toward the bed. “Not to…um…” Very conscious of Dean’s presence, she couldn’t finish, but when Jacques took her arm and turned her slowly to face him, she didn’t resist. His fingers, lightly stroking her cheek, were cool. His mouth had twisted up in the smile she found so hard to resist. When his lips parted, she mirrored the motion.
“Ow! Austin!”
“May I remind you,” he said as she stumbled backward and would have fallen had not Jacques and Dean both grabbed an arm, “that the bodies already on the bed need tending; memories need changing.”
“I was going to…”
“Please, no details. Just take care of these two first.”
Lips pressed into a thin line, she jerked free and nodded toward the door. “Fine. Everyone out.”
Not even Jacques argued.
“You take this calmly,” he said thoughtfully to Dean, as the door closed behind them.
Dean shrugged. He didn’t feel calm. He didn’t know how he felt. “You don’t seem very affected either,” he pointed out as they followed Austin down the stairs. “Except that you’re walking kind of carefully…”
“I am not use to feeling the floor.”
“…and you keep touching yourself.”
Jacques drew himself up to his full height, which, with both feet on the ground was considerable shorter than it had been. “Do I make these personal comment about you, Anglais?”
“Sorry.” Ears red, Dean shoved his hands in the front pockets of his jeans. “So, uh, what do we do now?”
“I do not know.”
“I do.” Leaping down the last three stairs into the lobby, Austin turned and stared up at them. “Forgetting for the moment that one of you is dead and one isn’t and refusing to borrow trouble since none of us has any idea of how this is going to turn out I think you should feed the cat.”
“Wasn’t there a half a slice of pizza left?” Claire asked, dropping onto the sofa almost two hours later. “I’m starved.”
On the other end of the sofa, Austin opened one eye. “I let the mice take it,” he said. “I didn’t think anyone wanted it.”
Pinching the bridge of her nose with one hand, Claire waved away the information with the other. Mice. Fine. Whatever. “Where are the guys?”
“Here I am.” Jacques emerged from the bedroom, fiddling with the belt of the professor’s robe. “I forget how many sensation in the world; old, new…”
Then the bathroom door opened and Dean came out glasses in his hand, the edges of his hair damp. Claire opened and closed her mouth a time or two, but no sound emerged.
Dean’s ears turned scarlet as he hastily shoved his glasses on. “I’m sorry, Claire. I used your towel. It’s just it was getting late and the game just ended and I was after waiting up for you…”
“Game?”
“Oui. Hockey with ducks,” Jacques explained, lip curled.
“Hockey,” Claire repeated.
Austin snickered. “I know what new sensations you were thinking about.”
“Shut up.”
“Someone’s got a dir…”
Dragging him onto her lap, she cupped her hand over his mouth. “Someone also has opposable thumbs,” she reminded him.
The sound of voices in the lobby diverted attention.
“Mrs. Abrams leaving,” Claire explained, covering a yawn. “She remembers a lovely seance where Professor Jackson contacted the ghost of the young man she’d seen standing in the window of room two as a girl and then more recently in the dining room, and the lobby, and the office, and back in the window of room two.”
Jacques winced as her voice picked up an edge toward the end of the list. “I am sorry, cherie. I thought she see me only once.”
“You thought she saw you and you didn’t tell me?”
“I did not think it important.”
“If I’d known, I could’ve prevented this whole incident from happening.”
“Oui, but then I would not have flesh.”
Claire decided to avoid that issue for a few moments longer and slid right on by without even pausing. “Well, now she believes that you’ve gone happily to your final rest, passed over into the light, so…” She managed energy enough to jab a finger at the ghost. “…stay away from windows!”
“I will.”
“And if she happens to accidentally see you…”
“I tell you, immediatement.”
“Good.” Yawning, Claire sagged back into the sofa. “The funny thing is, I’m not the first Keeper to mess with her head. There’s a whole section of early memories that’ve been dramatically changed.”
“Mr. Smythe told me that she lived in the house next door her whole life,” Dean offered. “He said it used to be Groseter’s Rooming House and Mr. Abrams was a roomer who didn’t move fast enough and got broadsided.” When Claire lifted her head to stare at him, he shrugged apologetically. “That’s what Mr. Smythe said. Anyway, she’s always saying things aren’t like they were when she was a girl. Maybe she was poking around and saw something she shouldn’t.”
“You mean besides Jacques?”
Without an actual exhalation, Jacques’ sigh lost emphasis, but he made up for it with the peripherals. Bending over the back of the sofa, he tucked a curl behind Claire’s ear. “I am sorry the old woman cause you problems, cherie, but I am a long time dead and I am not surprise someone sees me.”
“Not surprised.” She started to move into his touch and when she realized, jerked her head away.
He smiled. “Oui.”
“I think…” Reaching up, she flicked the curl back where it had been. “I think she probably wandered into the furnace room, maybe followed the Keeper down.”
“Her?” Dean asked, jerking a thumb toward room six.
“Probably Uncle whoever. During the months she was Keeper here, Mrs. Abrams was a teenager; too old to go poking around the neighbor’s…” Another yawn cut off the last word. “…basement.”
“Time for bed, cherie.”
Dean jerked up onto his feet “Yeah, I, uh, should get down, um, downstairs.” Unable to say what he wanted to say—and not entirely sure what that was—he couldn’t seem to put a coherent sentence together. “It’s, uh, been a long, you know, day.” Feeling the blood rise in his cheeks and wishing that the floor would just open up and swallow him whole, he headed for the door.
“Dean, wait.”
With one foot in the office and one foot still in Claire’s sitting room, he waited. Because she asked him to. He wondered if she knew how much he’d do for her if she asked him to.
To his surprise, he felt her hand in the small of his back, moving him out into the office. She followed and closed the door.
“After everything we’ve been through this last month, I thought you should know that Jacques and I aren’t…that is, I’m not…I mean, we won’t…”
“Why not, then?”
Claire stared up at him in astonishment. “Why not?”
Overcoming the urge to grab her and shake her, Dean nodded. “Yeah, why not? You gave him the flesh he’s been bugging you for.”
“Only to save him and the professor and only until dawn.”
“Okay. But since you both want to…” He raised a hand to cut off her protest “I’m not blind. I can see the way you two are together. Why shouldn’t you take advantage of it?”
“He’s dead?”
“Are you asking me if that’s a reason?”
“No,” she said slowly. “I guess not. Even though Jacques’ body died, his passion, his personality, even his physical appearance, they stayed. And now they have substance.” Standing so close she could smell the faint scent of fabric softener that clung around him, Claire looked up and tried to see past her reflection in his glasses. “And you’re okay with this?”
Dean blinked. The way he’d played out this scene, he asked her, “Why not?” and she said, “Because it’s you I really want,” and things moved to a satisfactory if somewhat undefined conclusion from there. He hadn’t intended to talk her into it. Since that’s what he seemed to have done, although he wasn’t entirely certain where things had gone wrong, there seemed to be only one way out. “Sure. Go ahead.”