Summon the Keeper

by Tanya Huff

  Sara ignored them both. “Please, go to sleep, Margaret Anne.” As Mrs. Abrams slumped forward, Sara glanced down at the Doberman, still desperately trying to rip her to pieces. “You,” she said, “have got a single-minded way of going after a goal I rather like.”

  Nearly throttling himself, Baby made an unsuccessful lunge for her ankle.

  “In fact you remind me of me. Good dog.”

  The words meant nothing. The tone sent Baby into a frenzy of barking.

  Dragging Dean and Diana behind her, Sara started down the basement stairs.

  With seven doors to go, Claire paused in the center of the hall.

  She could hear barking.

  The distinctive, just barely sane barking of a big dog forced to live a lapdog’s life. Who, with the fraction of brain that hadn’t been bred out of it, intended to get even.

  Laying her ear against each door only long enough to check for a rise in volume, Claire moved quickly down the hall.

  Three doors. Four.

  She opened the fifth door and flung herself out of the wardrobe. The volume of the barking didn’t so much rise as expand to fill every available space with sound.

  Baby was in the hotel.

  Under normal circumstances, that would have been a problem, but being torn apart by a psychotic Doberman would be significantly preferable to life with Sara controlling Hell. Claire leaped over a pile of laundry, raced through the sitting room, and slid to a halt in the office.

  Baby ignored her. Toenails scrabbling against the lobby floor, he dragged the ruin of the porch and the snoring Mrs. Abrams another inch closer to the basement.

  Unwilling to scan the hotel lest she give her presence away, Claire decided to follow Baby’s lead. Adding up the dog, the porch, and Mrs. Abrams, the odds were good Austin hadn’t been responsible; not one hundred percent, but good.

  Her back against the wall, she slid past, losing nothing more significant than a percentage of her hearing, and sped down the basement stairs, grateful that Baby’s barking would cover any possible noise she might make.

  The door to the furnace room was open.

  Her heart beating so loudly she could hardly hear herself think, Claire paused by the washing machine and reached for calm.

  A Keeper without self-control could control neither the power accessed nor where in the possibilities that power was accessed from.

  Evil favored the chaotic mind.

  Whites and colors should be sorted before washing.

  Claire blinked, breaking contact with the box of laundry detergent. This was as calm as she was going to get.

  Wiping damp palms against her thighs, she slipped behind the masking angle of the furnace room door and peered inside.

  Still wearing the dusty clothes she’d been put to sleep in so many years before, Sara stood on air over the pit, back to the door, both hands raised, head bowed. Her fingertips were red where the blood had dripped down from her nails.

  Suspended horizontally over the pit in front of her, shirtless, blood dripping from a number of shallow cuts on his chest, Dean appeared to be unconscious but still alive. It took a moment to spot Diana wrapped in overlapping bands of power and propped, mummylike, against the wall.

  Wait a minute…Dean was over the pit and Diana was up against the wall?

  Claire took a closer look at the power holding her sister. Most of it held her in place and kept her quiet but threaded throughout it, head to toe, was a conduit set up to pour Diana’s considerable power into Sara—already in place because there’d be no opportunity to stop the invocation and set it up later.

  Which meant that Dean was over the pit because…

  No wonder he was always blushing.

  But at twenty? Looking like a young, albeit myopic, god?

  Hey! she told herself sternly, now is not the time. The problem was, it was easier, much, much easier to think about Dean than to come up with a plan to save the world.

  It had taken two Keepers to stop Sara the first time she’d tried this. How could she possibly do it alone?

  Not alone—if I can reach Diana without attracting Sara’s attention, I can use the conduit myself. With Diana’s power joined to mine, Sara’s extra twenty years of experience shouldn’t count for much.

  As the evil Keeper began a new chant, Claire realized that were two small problems with her plan. The first was that Sara sealed Hell. With Sara removed, Hell would surge free. Claire would have to sign herself onto the site so that her power would become the seal when Sara’s power was removed. Which meant, if there wasn’t power enough left to close the hole, she’d be stuck here. In the hotel. For the rest of her life.

  And Dean was leaving.

  She didn’t even know where he kept the toaster.

  The second problem was that Sara also held Dean. Literally. Attacked from behind, Sara would let go and Dean would fall into the pit.

  When she hooked up with Diana, Sara would know. She’d have to strike immediately. If she saved Dean first, Sara would have time to marshal a defense.

  If she let Dean fall…

  What point in saving the world if she let Dean fall?

  She’d just have to find a way to save him, and that was that. Timing her footsteps to Baby’s frenzied barking, she crept down the stairs toward Diana.

  Down in the pit. Hell gloried in the strength it gained from each drop of sacrificial blood.

  THERE ON THE STAIRS, the rest of Hell pointed out to itself, IT’S THE OTHER KEEPER.

  SO?

  SO SHOULD WE TELL HER?

  Another drop of blood evaporated in the heat. Hell breathed it metaphorically in and laughed. YOU MEAN, SHOULD WE HELP HER? WE DON’T HELP. ANYONE.

  Baby had managed to drag the whole mess another three inches toward the basement stairs. Tongue hanging out, collar cutting into the thick muscles of his neck, he kept barking and pulling in the certain belief that he had his enemy on the run.

  And then, in the fraction of a second between one bark and the next, a familiar voice told him to be quiet.

  The barking stopped. Claire froze.

  Sara drew her fingernails along Dean’s side. As blood welled up from four parallel lines, she began a new chant.

  Claire recognized the guttural Latin. There wasn’t much time left. Lower lip caught between her teeth, she started moving again.

  A sterile dressing wrapped around his head and over his left eye, Austin had the rakish look of a wounded pirate. Breathing heavily, slightly scorched, he lay on his side on a litter made of an old silk scarf carried by twelve mice wearing multicolored frock coats, breeches, and tricorn hats.

  This was so far outside Baby’s experience, he sat panting and stared.

  Still a safe distance away, the mice stopped and Austin opened his one good eye. “Somebody,” he said without lifting his head, “is going to have to undo that collar.”

  Dean didn’t so much regain consciousness as hijack it; consciousness wanted nothing to do with the whole situation.

  HOW YA DOIN’ GORGEOUS?

  He’d have jerked back at the sound of the voice, but he couldn’t figure out how to operate his body. Which scared him a lot more than Hell. He had a friend, Paul Malan, who’d gone into the boards at the wrong angle and now Paul played ball hockey from a wheelchair.

  HE’S IGNORING US!

  CAN HE DO THAT?

  HEY, BUDDY! IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T NOTICED, THIS IS A LOT WORSE THAN BALL HOCKEY!

  Thankful that somewhere along the way he’d lost his glasses, Dean ignored the voices because Claire had asked him to. She’d even said, “please.”

  He blinked, hit by a sudden realization. The voice he’d heard yesterday in the hall had been the voice of the pit.

  BINGO.

  And he’d listened. He’d hesitated.

  OH, FOR…SIX SECONDS OUT OF TWENTY SQUEAKY CLEAN YEARS!

  He deserved to go to Hell.

  YOU’RE KIDDING, RIGHT?

  Except he didn’t want to die.
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  Over, or maybe under, the voices in his head, he could hear the drone of words chanted in a language he didn’t understand. Slowly, working within the invisible bands that held him, he turned until he could see along his left arm. Gazing past his clenched fist, out over the edge of the pentagram, he could see Diana Hansen. She was just a kid, he realized, she’d never have believed that she’d set this whole mess in motion. If by some miracle he got out of this, he was after kicking her right in the butt.

  Her back against the wall, barely daring to breathe, Claire crept the last few feet to her sister’s side. Once she took Diana’s hand, she’d control both their power.

  Dean’s eyes widened as Claire slid into his field of vision.

  Rescue!

  Claire saw the word in Dean’s eyes and flinched.

  Dean saw her flinch.

  Sara chanted louder, spitting out consonants. The pentagram began to glow.

  Maybe because he was suspended over a hole to Hell. Maybe because he’d been breathing the fumes of his own evaporating blood. Maybe because he’d spent almost a year next to a metaphysical accident site.

  Maybe just because he could read it on Claire’s face.

  Dean knew.

  She couldn’t save him and the world.

  He’d hesitated.

  He was being given a chance to make up for that.

  Hell could have him, but it couldn’t have the world.

  Do it, he told Claire silently.

  Claire shook her head. There had to be another way.

  The pentagram began to dissolve.

  It was almost worth it to know she was willing to risk the world for him.

  Do it.

  Because she had no other choice, she did.

  Claire grabbed Diana’s hand and opened the conduit Quickly retracing the pentagram, she etched her own name into the pattern.

  Sara turned.

  Dean fell.

  Claire hit the other Keeper with everything both she and Diana had.

  Suddenly finding herself in a sphere of blinding white light, Sara flung up a bloodstained hand to cover her eyes. Lips too red parted…

  …and she laughed.

  Designed to prevent any sort of metaphysical power from waking a Keeper bent on cataclysmic evil, the shield Sara had worn for more than fifty years held.

  Stepping down to the floor, Sara straightened her jacket and nodded toward Diana. “I thought our friend here too young for this site. Not,” she added after a critical inspection of Claire, “that you’re so much older.” Her smile was frankly patronizing. “You killed him for nothing, you know. Power can’t pass into this shield.”

  Claire dragged Diana aside as a bolt of red light blew chunks of rock out of the wall.

  Sara’s smile broadened. “How nice for me that it passes out of it just fine.”

  Teeth clenched against rising nausea, Claire stepped forward, but before she could speak, Sara raised her hand again.

  “Oh, yes, you can enter the shield physically, pummel me if you like, but don’t expect me to stand here and allow…”

  Which was when Baby launched himself from the top of the stairs.

  Sara had time to scream as she fell back but only just.

  Clinging to each other for support, Claire and Diana walked to the edge of the pentagram and cautiously leaned forward.

  GOT HER!

  OW! BE CAREFUL, SHE KICKS!

  Claire felt her power fill the pentagram, holding Hell off from the world. That was it, then. A lifetime in the Elysian Fields Guest House.

  Diana swallowed and found her voice. “Poor Ba…”

  THAT’S OUR PUPPY! IS HE GLAD HE’S HOME?

  WHO’S A GOOD DOGGIE-WOGGIE, THEN? WHO’S A GOOD BOY!

  “Doggie-woggie?” Claire repeated.

  Before Hell could answer, Diana dug her nails into Claire’s arm. “Look! She’s still part of the pattern. If you tie the pentagram to her before it fades, she’ll pull the hole in after her!”

  Still buzzing from the power she’d passed, it took Claire a heartbeat to understand. “I can close the site?”

  “Yes!”

  “Forever?”

  “Yes!”

  Sara’s name had begun to fray. “No.”

  “Are you out of your mind? This may be your only chance!”

  “No!” Claire yanked her arm free. “Dean’s in there and I’m not closing that hole until he finds his way out.” When Diana began another protest, she cut her off. “Hell can’t hold a willing sacrifice. They have to let him go.”

  “They do?”

  “If you paid more attention to what was going on and less to what you just happen to be powerful enough to do…” She bit it off. Now was not the time. “Yes. They do.”

  “Okay, fine, but they’re not going to help him find his way or give him a boost out, and Sara’s name is already fading! You haven’t got time to wait. Don’t let his sacrifice be in vain.”

  Claire reached for more power and poured it into the pentagram. From where she was standing, it was a long reach to the middle of the possibilities. Her vision was starting to blur, and she wasn’t entirely certain she could feel her toes. “I can hold it,” she snarled through clenched teeth. “I can hold it for as long as it takes.”

  “All right.” Diana shrugged out of her jean jacket. “Then I’m going in after him.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not!” Claire had a strong suspicion she sounded like their mother. At the moment, she didn’t much care. “This isn’t like going across the border for cheap electronics! You want to help, reactivate the conduit and start feeding me…” The “S” tried to straighten out. She forced it back into a curve. “…power.”

  “That’d make me part of the seal and we could be stuck here together indefinitely. You want him out, someone has to go and get him.”

  “Not you!” A subliminal growl snapped the second “a” back into line. “You’d never survive.”

  “But Dean…”

  “Dean has the strength of ten because his heart is pure.” Which was when Claire drew a second conclusion from Sara’s choice of sacrifice. Fortunately for Diana, she had other things to deal with at the moment. “The rules protect him.”

  “What rules?”

  “I know this is hard to believe at seventeen, but there are always rules.” She definitely couldn’t feel her toes and was starting to have doubts about her entire left foot. “It takes extraordinary conditions for the living to pass over and then come…The living!” Eyes locked on the pentagram, Claire grabbed her sister’s arm. “Find Jacques!”

  “Jacques’ gone. She blew him into ectoplasmic particles.”

  “Then gather him!”

  “Me?”

  “You’re always complaining how no one ever lets you do anything. Just be careful where you’re pulling power from this close to the pit.”

  “You had to ruin it with advice,” Diana complained as she started to spin. “Couldn’t just assume I’d do it right.”

  All things considered, Claire felt she had precedent for that assumption, but she let it go as the wind began to swirl around the furnace room. A moment later, a stream of tiny lights poured down from the basement.

  “There’s two missing,” Diana panted as the lights refused to coalesce. “I don’t know where they are.”

  Vaguely Jacques-shaped, the lights dove into the pit.

  “NO!” Claire reached out but caught only a single light.

  Teetering as the room continued to spin, Diana stared at her sister in astonishment. “I thought that’s what you wanted him to do?”

  “He doesn’t know that! He doesn’t know Dean’s down there. Jacques has still got connections to her, she could’ve dragged him down.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  Claire gritted her teeth, clenched her fist around the single piece of Jacques she’d managed to save, and dug in. “We wait.”

  “Wait?” Diana’s voice rose nearly an octave. “For how long
?”

  “Until we can’t wait any…” All of a sudden, Claire could feel a familiar twisted touch groping up toward the pentagram. “She’s using her name to pull herself free. Link with me!”

  “No! I’ll be stuck with you, holding that thing, and there’ll be two Keepers lost because you can’t let Dean go. Because you feel guilty about how he felt about you when you didn’t feel the same for him and turned to Jacques, who you can’t possibly have a future with instead.”

  “Diana! This is no time for relationship therapy!”

  “You’ve lost them both. Let them go before she starts this whole thing all over again.”

  Her connection to her name had strengthened. The sound of triumphant laughter boiled up over the edges of the pit.

  “I’m not leaving them there!”

  Diana laid her hand on her sister’s arm and to Claire’s surprise her voice was gentle as she said, “You’re a Keeper. Seal the s…son of a bitch.”

  Down in the pit something that had once been Mrs. Abrams’ Baby barked as Dean rose up into the furnace room surrounded by a cloud of tiny lights. When both his feet were on the ground, and before either Claire or Diana could get their mouths shut to say anything, he opened his left hand.

  Two lights few out.

  Claire peeled her fingers back off her palm. The final light spun up into the air.

  Jacques rematerialized.

  Dean coughed once and stumbled forward. Together, Claire and Diana eased him down onto the bottom step, then Claire turned back toward the pit.

  She could feel Sara clawing her way up her name, closer and closer to the edge of the possibilities. Holding tightly to the seal, Claire broke all the remaining links but Sara’s.

  The building shook as the pentagram, etched into solid rock, slid toward the center of itself. The inner edges disappeared. Flickering through the visible spectrum and one or two colors beyond, hundred-year-old words of summoning poured into the hole.

  “Claire!” Stretched out like smoke in a wind, Jacques streamed toward Hell, caught in the binding.

  Even if there was time, unraveling the binding would free Sara’s name.