by Tanya Huff
What she’d had with Jacques had been simple. He’d been dead. The possibilities between them had been finite. The possibilities with Dean, however, were…
She saw them suddenly, stretching out in front of her.
Driving together from site to site, squabbling over what radio station to listen to and/or listening in perfect accord to a group they both liked. And if anything was possible, there had to be a group they both liked. Somewhere.
Sharing endless hotel rooms like this one, same burnt-orange bedspreads in a vaguely floral pattern, same mid-brown stain camouflaging indoor/outdoor carpeting, same lame attempt to modernize the decor by pasting a wallpaper border just under the ceiling, same innocuous prints screwed to the wall over both beds.
Sharing one of those beds.
They’d work together. They’d laugh together. They’d clean up after Austin together—although the possibility of Dean doing the actual cleaning all by himself was significantly greater than them doing it together.
And one day, she’d forget he wasn’t a Keeper, or even one of the less powerful Cousins, and something would come through the barrier, and she’d forget to protect him from it. Or it would try to get to her through him. Or he’d try to protect her and get squashed like a bug. Okay, a six-foot-tall, muscular, blue-eyed, glasses-wearing bug from Newfoundland, but the result would be the same.
All of a sudden, the future with Dean seemed frighteningly finite.
I might as well just paint a target on him now and get it over with.
“Claire? Boss?” It took an effort, but Dean resisted the urge to wave a hand in front of her face. If she was in some sort of Keeper trance, he didn’t want to disturb it.
He’d seen a number of amazing things during the three months he’d worked for her at the Elysian Fields Guest House—up to and including Hell itself—but nothing had prepared him for time spent on the road in Claire Hansen’s company. He’d expected her to be a backseat driver, but that had turned out to be Austin’s job. She didn’t eat properly unless he placed food in front of her—he was beginning to understand both why Austin was so insistent about being fed and why Claire was so thin. And she actually preferred watching hockey with that stupid blue light the American television stations were using to help their viewers locate the puck. Trust the Americans not to realize that knowing the position of the puck was the whole point of the game.
He liked the way she felt in his arms, and he liked the way her face lit up when she looked at him. He liked looking at her just generally, and he liked being with her. And he was becoming fairly certain that liked wasn’t quite the right word. When he thought about his future, she was a part of it.
“We can’t travel together anymore.”
Or not. Dean looked around for help, but the sounds of vigorous excavation from the bathroom suggested Austin was in the litter box. “What did you say?” He felt as though he’d just been cross-checked into the boards and should be staring through Plexiglas at a row of screaming faces instead of across the remains of a takeout breakfast into a pair of worried brown eyes.
“We can’t travel together anymore.”
“But I though we were…? I mean, aren’t we…?” he shook his head, trying to find a question he could actually articulate. “Why not, then?”
“Someday I’ll run into something I won’t be able to keep from hurting you.”
He was about to tell her that he was willing to risk it in order to be with her when she continued, and the conversation headed off in a new, or rather an old, direction.
“It’s why Keepers don’t travel with Bystanders.”
“I thought we’d moved past that Keeper/Bystander thing?”
“We can’t move past that Keeper/Bystander thing.”
The sudden quiet resonated with the sound of clay particles being flung all over the bathroom floor.
“Dean? Do you understand?”
“Sure.”
She’d been working on the various meanings men gave to sure for some time now. This one escaped her. Sure, I understand, but I don’t agree with you was way too obvious as was, I’ve stopped listening, but since you’re waiting for me to say something, sure.
“Dean?”
When he looked up, it didn’t help. For some strange reason he looked angry.
“What about us, then?”
“An us will end with you dead because of something I didn’t do, and I won’t allow that to happen.”
“You won’t allow?”
“That’s right.”
He folded his arms. “So there’s no us, and we know where you stand. What about me, then?”
“You?”
“Or do I have no say in this?”
“I’m the Keeper…”
“And I’m not. I know.”
“I’m doing this for you!”
“And because you know best, I’m supposed to just walk away?”
“I do know best!” Claire shoved her chair away from the table. “And it might be nice if you realized I just don’t want you to get hurt.” The scene should have played out as sad and tragically inevitable, but Dean continued to just not get it.
“You know what I realize?” He mirrored her motion. “I realize, and I’m amazed it took me so long, that it’s always about you. You’ve got no idea of how to…to compromise!”
“A Keeper can’t compromise!”
“And I suppose a Keeper can’t wipe her feet either?”
“Unlike you, I have more important things to worry about than that, and,” she added with icy emphasis, “I have more important things to worry about than you!”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
Silence descended like a slammed door.
“Well, that doesn’t get any easier as I get older.” Austin jumped up onto the end of the bed nearest the bathroom and turned to face the table, swiveling his head around so he could look first at Claire and then at Dean. “So, what did I miss?”
TWO
“BUT I BROUGHT YOU INTO AMERICA, I should take you out.”
“It’s not necessary.” Claire shoved her makeup bag into the backpack—she used to carry a suitcase as well until Dean had asked her why. If she could fit a desktop computer, a printer, two boxes of disks, and the obligatory stale cough drop in the backpack, why couldn’t it hold everything else? She owed him for that as well as for a thousand other things her brain insisted on listing. For doing the driving. For giving her all the red Smarties. For cleaning the litter box. For patiently explaining the difference between offside and icing yet again. For being a warm and solid support at her back. For…
“This is upper New York State, not Cambodia,” she continued, almost shouting to drown out the list. “Canadians come here daily to buy toaster ovens.”
“Fine.” Dean jerked the zipper shut on his hockey bag, suddenly tired of being shouted at for no apparent reason. “You can catch a ride with one of them, then.” He swung the bag up onto his shoulder, but Austin stepped in front of him before he could make it to the door.
“I don’t want to ride with a toaster oven,” the cat declared. “I want to ride with Dean.”
“Austin.” Claire growled his name through clenched teeth.
He leaned around Dean’s legs to glare at her. “Is the site you’re Summoned to on this side of the border?”
“No, but…”
“Then he won’t be in any danger giving us a lift. And that is why you don’t want him around, isn’t it? To keep him out of danger?”
“Yes, but…”
“And we’re going to need a ride.”
“I know, but…”
“So say thank you and go settle the bill while we load the truck.”
“While we load the truck?” Dean asked a moment later, settling the cat carrier on the seat beside him and opening the top.
“Please.” Austin poured out and arranged himself in the shaft of sunlight slanting through the windshield. “Like you didn’t know I wanted to
talk to you.”
“You need to talk to Claire, not me.” He started the engine, checked that it was in neutral and the parking brake was on, took his foot off the clutch, then began polishing fingerprints off the steering wheel with the sleeve of his jacket. “I sure didn’t expect to break collar so soon.”
“Break what?”
“Lose the job.”
“Job? You weren’t doing a job, you were just living your life. If it was a job,” the cat snorted disdainfully, “she’d have been paying you.”
“Then I didn’t expect this part of my life to be over so soon.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“Yeah, it does.”
“You’re just going to let her tell you what to do?”
“No. But I’m not staying if she thinks she has the right to make decisions about my life as though I wasn’t a part of it.”
“Of your life?”
“Or the decision.”
“So you’re leaving not because she told you to but because she thinks she has the right to tell you to?”
“Yeah.”
Austin sighed. “Would it make a difference if I told you she’s honestly afraid of you having your intestines sucked out your nose because she was thinking about your shoulders and misjudged an accident site?”
“Well, I don’t want my intestines sucked out my nose either,” Dean allowed. Then he paused and blushed slightly, buffing an already spotless bit of dashboard. “She thinks about my shoulders?”
“Shoulders, thighs…as near as I can tell, she spends far too much time thinking about most of your body parts—sequentially and simultaneously—when she should be thinking about other things.”
“Like accident sites?”
“Like me.”
“Oh.” And then because the cat’s tone demanded an apology, he added, “Sorry.”
“And accident sites,” Austin allowed graciously, having been given his due. “Look, Claire tends to see things in terms of what she has to do to keep the world from falling apart. Close an accident site here, prevent the movie remake of ‘Gilligan’s Island’ there, keep you from being hurt, feed the cat—everything’s an absolute. She doesn’t compromise well, it’s an occupational hazard. Stay and teach her to see your side of things.”
“Only if she asks me to.” The steering wheel creaked a protest as Dean closed his hands around it and tightened his grip. “And since I know for a fact that Hell hasn’t frozen over, I’m not after holding my breath.”
Austin sighed and turned so he could see Claire picking her way across the slush covered parking lot from the office. “She’s getting her own way, you’d think she’d be happier about it, wouldn’t you? She looks miserable. Doesn’t she? You don’t want her to be miserable? Do you?”
“She started this,” Dean muttered, eyes locked on the oil gauge. “If she wants me to stay, she has to convince me.”
“All right. Fine.” He put a paw on Dean’s thigh and stared beseechingly up into his face. “What about me? I’m old. It wasn’t that long ago that I lost an eye.”
“I thought it had mostly healed?”
“That’s not the point. It’s November, it’s cold. I don’t want to go back to using any old thing that happens by. I like being driven about in a heated truck! Okay, I would’ve liked a heated Lincoln Town Car with leather upholstery more, but the point is, what about me?”
“I’m sorry, Austin.”
“Not as sorry as she’s going to be,” Austin muttered as the Keeper opened the passenger door.
“The booth on the right has a longer line.”
“A longer line?” Dean had been avoiding conversation by maintaining the speed of the pickup at exactly fifty-five miles per hour regardless of the gestures other drivers flashed at him as they passed. He glanced down at the cat and tried not to notice the various bits of Claire that surrounded him. “Why do you want me to use the longer line, then?”
“It’ll take more time. And the more time we’re all together, the greater the odds are that you two will make up and I won’t be tossed out into the cold with nothing but a cat carrier between me and November.”
“There’s nothing to make up,” Claire told him impatiently. “We didn’t have a fight.”
“We didn’t?”
“No.” She threw the word across the cat to Dean. “I, as a Keeper, made a decision.”
“About my future without talking to me.”
“Sounds like a fight,” Austin observed.
Claire wriggled back in the seat and crossed her arms. “This doesn’t concern you.”
“Oh, no? I’m the one who’ll be riding in the overhead luggage rack…”
“You’ve never ridden in the overhead luggage rack!”
“…or the baggage compartment.”
“Or the baggage compartment!” she added, voice rising.
He ignored her. “Once again, I’ll be at the mercy of strangers. Forced to live from paw to mouth, dark corners as my litter box, cardboard boxes as my bed.”
“You like to sleep in cardboard boxes.”
“That’s not the point.”
“You have no point. And stop whining; you’re beginning to sound like a dog.”
“A dog!” He twisted around to fry her with a pale green glare from his remaining eye. “I have never been so insulted in my life. You’re just lucky I can’t operate a can opener.” Moving slowly and deliberately, he stepped down off her lap, onto the center of the bench seat, and turned his back on her.
The smile his companions shared over his head was completely involuntary.
Suddenly aware of her reflection grinning out from Dean’s glasses, Claire dropped her gaze so quickly it bounced.
Teeth clenched with enough applied pressure to make his lone filling creak, Dean steered the truck carefully into the shorter line. The sooner this was over, the better.
Only two of the five Canada Customs booths were open. Only two of the five booths were ever open. On a busy day, when the line of cars waiting to cross the border stretched almost all the way back to Watertown, this guaranteed short tempers and a more spontaneous response to official questioning by Canadian Customs officials. Occasionally, on really hot summer days, responses were spontaneous enough to get the RCMP involved.
The constant low levels of sharp-edged irritation would have poked multiple holes through the fabric of the universe had government officiousness not canceled it out by denying that anything was possible outside their own very narrow parameters. As a result, most border crossings between the U.S. and Canada were so metaphysically stable, unnatural phenomenon had to cross them just like everyone else—although it wasn’t always easy for them to find photo ID.
Later, they’d swap stories about how custom officials had no sense of humor, about how someone—or possibly something—they knew had been strip-searched for no good reason, and how they’d triumphantly smuggled in half a dozen toaster ovens, duty-free.
As Dean pulled up beside the booth’s open window and turned to smile politely at the young guard, Claire reached into the possibilities. When the guard looked into the truck, her gaze slid over Austin like he’d been buttered, over Claire almost as quickly, and locked itself on Dean’s face.
“Nationality?”
“Canadian.”
“Canadian,” Claire repeated although she suspected she needn’t have bothered as the guard’s rapt attention never left Dean.
“How long were you in the States?”
“Four days.”
“What is the total value of the purchases you’re bringing into Canada?”
“Six dollars and eighty-seven cents. I bought a couple of maps and a liter of oil for the truck,” he added apologetically.
“You’re from back East.” When he nodded, she continued, startling Claire who’d never seen anyone who worked for Canada Customs look so happy. “I’m from Cornerbrook. When’s the last time you were back?”
“I’m heading back now.”
Their discussion slid into shared memories of places and people. Newfoundlanders, chance met a thousand miles from home, were never strangers. Occasionally, they were mortal enemies, but never strangers. After it had been determined that Dean had played junior hockey against a buddy the guard’s second cousin had gone to school with, she waved them on.
“You never told me you were going back to Newfoundland,” Claire pointed out as they pulled away from the border.
“You never asked.”
“Oh, that’s mature,” she muttered. Now they were both ignoring her, Dean and the cat. It was the sort of thing she expected from Austin, but Dean usually had better manners. Fine. Be that way. I know I’m right. A sideways glance at his profile showed a muscle moving along the line of his jaw. A sudden urge to reach out and touch him surprised her into lowering her gaze.
That didn’t help.
Two spots of heat burning high on each cheek, she turned to stare out at the pink granite rising in mighty slabs up into the sky.
Neither did that.
Think of something else, Claire. Anything else. Three times nine is twenty-seven. Fried liver. Brussels sprouts. Homer Simpson…
The insistent under-tug of the Summoning suddenly rose to a crescendo. Claire’s hand jerked up and pointed toward a parking lot entrance for the Thousand Islands Sky Deck and Fantasy Land. “Pull in there.”
Responding to her tone, Dean managed to make the turn, back end of the truck fishtailing slightly in the light dusting of wet snow. “It’s closed,” he said, coming to a stop by the entrance to the gift shop that anchored the Sky Deck.
“Not to me.” This was it. The end of the line. Claire felt strangely unwilling to get out of the truck. And not only because it was beginning to snow again. You’re doing this for him, she reminded herself. He’s only a Bystander, and you have no business putting him in danger.
When he moved to turn off the engine, she steeled herself and stopped him, restraining herself from keeping a lingering grip around his wrist. “There’s no point, you won’t be here long enough.” She undid her seat belt, pulled her toque over her ears, and grabbed the cat carrier from its place behind the seat. “Come on, Austin.”