by Tanya Huff
“I know.” Closing the carrier, Claire turned to face the conscripted Bystander’s cheery wave and wondered if maybe Hell hadn’t gotten free after all.
THREE
IT WAS POSSIBLE TO DRIVE from Kingston, Ontario, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in seventeen hours. Dean knew someone who’d done it—admittedly in the opposite direction, but the principle was the same. It did, however, require a number of factors working in the driver’s favor.
First of all, the varying police forces in charge of the highways stretching through Ontario, Quebec, Vermont, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia needed to be off the road. Second, nothing could go wrong with the vehicle. The glove compartment inexplicably deciding not to close was one thing. Dropping the entire exhaust system onto the asphalt just outside of Fredericton was something else again. But then, it usually was. Thirdly, the driver had to be so pissed off at an ex that his anger would keep him awake and alert to the dangers of the Canadian highway system—which was pretty much like the American system only with more moose—for the entire seventeen hours.
Fortunately, government cutbacks on both sides of the border had accomplished what a Tim Hortons on every corner hadn’t, making the odds of being stopped by a moose were significantly higher than being stopped by the police. And Dean’s truck might be pushing the ten-year mark, but both muffler and glove compartment were in top condition although the latter now held a hairbrush, two lipsticks, seventeen packets of artificial sweetener, a fast food child’s toy, a pink plastic pouch he thought held a pressure bandage until he realized to his intense embarrassment that pressure bandages didn’t have wings, half a bottle of water, and an open can of geriatric cat food.
He just wasn’t angry enough at Claire to drive for seventeen hours straight, although it had been a narrow miss when he’d found the cat food. Until they’d parted ways, he’d assumed the smell had been coming from Austin who was, after all, a very old cat.
Kingston to Halifax could be done in seventeen hours, but the trip took Dean three weeks. Just across the border into Vermont, he stopped to help a stranded motorist and ended up with a job in his diner while the regular cook worked out a small problem involving a cow, two liters of ice cream, and a tourist from New Hampshire. Dean didn’t ask for details; he figured it was an American thing. He thought about Claire every time he saw a young, dark-haired woman, or a cat, or anything weird on the news. He thought about her when he picked up after the waitress, when he told customers to wipe their feet, and when he went to bed alone at night.
He thought about her when the waitress suggested he didn’t have to go to bed alone at night. He thought about her as he thanked the waitress politely for the suggestion but declined. He wasn’t actually thinking about Claire when the waitress asked if he was gay.
“No, ma’am. I’m Canadian.”
That seemed to explain things to everyone’s satisfaction.
He thought about her pretty much all the rest of the time, though, and when the regular cook returned, he actually paused for a moment before getting back on the highway, wondering if maybe he shouldn’t head back into Ontario and try to find her. Didn’t leaving make him as incapable of compromising as he accused her of being?
The shriek of brakes from the semi coming up behind him not only ended the moment but very nearly solved the problem. Heart pounding, he put the truck in gear and continued east.
He’d seen Claire deal with Hell. And Austin. If she wanted to, she could find him.
It was mid-December by the time he arrived at his cousin’s apartment in Halifax. He’d intended to stay only until he could book passage on the ferry home, but for one reason or another, many of them having to do with beer, it didn’t happen.
Austin stretched out his paw and neatly hooked a French fry from Claire’s fingers. “You’re thinking about Dean, aren’t you?”
“No.” Except that the truck that had very nearly run her over as she closed a site at Highway Two and King Street in Napanee had been just like Dean’s. Except it hadn’t been a Ford. And it was red, not white. And Dean’s truck just had a standard cab. And was clean. But other than that…
The bed sagged under Claire’s weight, then kept sagging as the mattress came to an understanding with gravity. It wasn’t the most uncomfortable motel bed she’d ever slept in, but it was close. It reminded her of the bed in the motel just outside of Rochester. The bed that she and Dean had so briefly and so platonically shared. If she put out her hand, she could almost feel the heat of…
…a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old cat.
“You’re thinking about Dean, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.” Having reassured the dark-haired, blue-eyed, glasses-wearing young waiter, Claire put her fingers back in her mouth.
“Bar’s been almost shut down twice, you know, but I never seen a rat in here before.”
He still hadn’t seen a rat, but Claire had no intention of telling him that.
“Good thing you had your cat with you, eh?” Dark brows drew in. He scratched at stubble. “Actually, I don’t think you’re supposed to bring your cat in here.”
The possibilities were adjusted slightly. “It’s okay.”
“Cool. You want another drink?”
“Why not.” Since she’d already been distracted enough to nearly lose a finger, Claire figured she was entitled to watch as he walked away from her booth in the darkest corner of the nearly empty bar.
Austin horked a dark bit of something up onto the cracked Naugahyde seat. “You’re thinking about Dean, aren’t you?”
Fingers in her mouth, Claire ignored him.
He snorted. “Good thing you had your cat with you, eh?”
Just outside of Renfrew, Claire stood on a deserted stretched of highway and stared at the graffiti spray painted twenty feet up a limestone cliff. The hole, situated between the “u” and the “c” had turned the most popular of Anglo-Saxon profanities into a metaphysical instruction.
Before Austin could ask, she shoved frozen fingers deeper into her coat pockets and sighed. “Yes. I am. Now, drop it.”
“I was only going to mention that Dean would know exactly what cleaning supplies you’re going to need to get that paint off the rock.”
“Sure you were.”
On the opposite shoulder of the road, someone slapped a handprint into the condensation covering the windows of their parked Buick.
Against all expectations, Diana enjoyed the decorating committee meetings.
“So it’s settled; for this year’s Christmas dance we use a snowflake motif.” Stephanie’s smile could cut paper. “And, Lena, I don’t want to hear another word about angels.”
“But angels…”
“Have been done to death by all and/or sundry. Get over it.”
Watching Stephanie cut through the democratic process with all the precision of a chainsaw sculptor was significantly more amusing than watching the cafeteria’s hot lunch gel into something approaching a life-form.
“Diana…”
Jerked out of her reverie, Diana fought the urge to come to attention. Tall and blonde, Stephanie wouldn’t have looked out of place in jackboots, provided she could find a purse to match, and someday she’d run a Fortune 500 company with the same ruthless élan she used to run Medway High. Unfortunately for the world at large, Keepers weren’t permitted to make preemptive strikes.
“…since we’re trying to make this place look less like a gymnasium, I want you to make a snowflake pattern out of white-and-gold streamers about five feet down from those incredibly ugly ceiling tiles.”
Diana glanced up at the ceiling, then over at Stephanie. The gym was probably thirty feet high, and it would take scaffolding to reach anything higher than the tops of the basketball backboards. The odds of the custodians building that scaffolding were slightly lower than the odds of any member of the senior basketball team being picked up by the pros. At zero and thirteen, the senior baske
tball team couldn’t even get picked up by the cheerleaders. “You want me to what?”
“Try to pay attention. I want you to hide the ceiling behind a crepe-paper snowflake.” Stephanie met Diana’s incredulous gaze with a level blue stare, assuming compliance.
Although not the uninvolved stick in the mud Claire had been during high school, Diana had tried to give the whole Keeper thing the requisite low profile. Given how generally pointless she found the whole public school system, it hadn’t always been easy, but she’d made it to her final year without anyone pointing and screaming “Witch!” Well, no one anyone who mattered listened to, anyway.
So what had Stephanie seen?
And bottom line, did it matter?
“A crepe-paper snowflake?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
It was an ugly ceiling.
Meeting over, Lena fell into step beside her as they left the gym. “You’re the senior student on the committee, not Stephanie, so if you wanted angels…” Her voice trailed off suggestively, having applied the maximum emphasis allowed.
“It was the committee or a month of detention,” Diana reminded her. “But I don’t think angels are a good idea.”
Lena looked crushed. “Why not?”
“Flaming swords, smiting the ungodly…”
“Angels aren’t like that!”
“Maybe not the ones you run into, but the problem is, you can never be sure.”
“Of what?”
“Of what kind of angel you’re running into.”
Lena thought about that for a moment, then, as Diana headed into the first of her afternoon classes, muttered, “My mother’s right. You’re weird.”
With over three million people, Toronto had two working Keepers, one very elderly Keeper plugging an unclosable site out in Scarborough, and half a dozen Cousins monitoring the constant metaphysical flux—one of whom had made a small fortune following the stock market in his spare time. He said he found the relative calm relaxing.
The Summons took Claire to the College Park subway station on the University line where ninety-six hours previously a government worker from one of the nearby offices had been pushed from the platform. At the time, the old Red Rocket had been three hundred meters away grinding its slow way north. The intended victim had plenty of time to dust himself off, climb back onto the platform, and threaten the man who’d pushed him with an audit—but that was moot. Inept evil was still evil and a hole had opened at the edge of the platform.
For the next three days, it spewed bits of darkness out onto commuters in the morning and gathered them up again in the evening larger and darker. It was probably a coincidence that members of the Ontario government, arriving daily at the legislature building only a block away, proposed a bill to close half the province’s hospitals and cut education spending by 44% during those three days since it was highly unlikely that any member of the ruling Conservative party took the subway to work.
By the time Claire got to the site, the hole was huge and thousands of government employees had arrived at their jobs in a bad mood and left in a worse one—which was pretty much business as usual only more so.
Just after midnight, the platform was essentially deserted. A group of teenagers, isolated in headphones and sunglasses, loitered at one end and an elderly woman wrapped in at least four layers of clothing and surrounded by a circle of grimy shopping bags glared at her from the other.
With a sigh, Claire shifted the cat carrier to her other hand and walked reluctantly forward, wondering why she couldn’t see through the glamour. When she got close enough, and the scent of unwashed clothing and treasured garbage overwhelmed the winter-chilled metal, machine scent of the subway, she realized that she couldn’t see through the glamour because there wasn’t one.
“Hey, tuna!” A black nose pressed up against the screen at the front of the carrier, then suddenly recoiled with a sneeze. “Six days old, wrapped in a gym sock previously worn by someone with a bad case of toe rot, and I’d rather not be any closer.” He sneezed again. “Can we go now?”
“No. And keep your voice down. We’re in a public place.”
“I’m not the one talking to luggage.”
At the outer edge of the shopping bags, her eyes were watering. Nothing could smell so bad on its own, it had to have been carefully crafted. Claire was thankful she’d never had to study under this particular Keeper. This afternoon we’ll be combining the scents of old cheese and the stale vomit/urine combination found in the backs of certain taxis… Like life wasn’t already dangerous enough?
“You Claire?”
“Yes.” At least the other Keeper wasn’t insisting on using the traditional and ridiculous “Aunt Claire.”
“Are you Nalo?”
“I am. So, where is he?”
Claire blinked at the other Keeper. “Pardon?”
“Your young man. I heard at Apothecary’s that one of us made an actual connection with a Bystander.” She craned her neck, showing a remarkable amount of dirty collar. “Did he have trouble finding parking?”
There was absolutely no point in suggesting it was none of her business.
“We’re not traveling together anymore.”
“You’re not? Why not? I heard he was a looker and pure of heart, too.” One eye closed in an unmistakable wink. “If you know what I mean.”
Claire made a mental note to smack Diana hard the next time she saw her. “We’re no longer together because I decided that he wasn’t safe traveling with me.”
“First of all; you decided? And second, he’d already been to Hell, girl. What did you think could happen that was worse?”
“How about asphyxiation?”
Nalo pointed a long, dark finger in a filthy fingerless glove at the cat carrier. “If you can think of a better way to keep Bystanders far away from this hole, then I’d like to hear it. Until then, I don’t take attitude from no cat.”
It was probably fortunate that the approaching subway drowned out Austin’s response.
The teenagers got on, and out of the door closest to the hole stepped a large young man in a leather jacket, a tattoo of a swastika impaled by a dagger nearly covering his shaved head. Pierced lip curled, he swaggered toward the two women. He sucked in a deep breath, readying himself to intimidate, then looked appalled, and choked.
“You know what I think when I see a tattoo like that?” Nalo murmured as the sound of violent coughing echoed off the tiles. “I think, he’s gonna look like a fool when he’s eighty and in a nursing home.”
“Maybe he’ll regrow his hair.”
“Won’t help, he’s got male pattern baldness written all over him.”
Claire couldn’t see it, but she could see the words “hate” and “kill” written into the backs of his hands. Reaching into the possibilities, she made a slight cosmetic change. Then she reached a little farther.
His eyes widened and, still coughing, the hand that said “male pattern” gripping the crotch of his jeans and the one that said “baldness” outstretched to clear the way, he ran for the stairs.
“Will he be back?”
“Depends on how long it takes him to find a toilet.”
“He could just pee in a corner.”
“That’ll take care of half the problem.”
Nalo grinned. “Very clever. You’re subtler than your sister.”
“Public television pledge breaks are subtler than my sister.”
“True enough. Well, that was the last regular train past this station, so let’s get to work before the maintenance trains hit the rails.” Nalo shrugged out of her coat, peeled off the gloves, and was suddenly a middle-aged black woman in a TTC maintenance uniform. A lot of her previous bulk had come from the tool belt around her waist.
“You do a lot of work in the subways?” Claire asked, setting Austin’s carrier down and opening the top for him.
“Hundreds of thousands of people ride them every day, what do you think? Most of
the holes close on their own, but enough of them needed help that it finally got easier just to buy the wardrobe—we’ve got a Cousin in the actual maintenance crew who picked it up for me.”
“Was he monitoring the site?”
“This one and a couple of others.” The older Keeper glanced at her watch. “Security’ll be here shortly. I’ve dealt before, so I’ll deal again; why don’t you and your younger legs jump down on the track and map the lower parameters.”
Yes, why don’t I? Although she tried, Claire couldn’t actually think of a good reason, so she stalled. “What about the camera? I should adjust it to show a different possibility.”
“Already done.”
So much for stalling. Pulling her kit from her backpack, she walked over to the edge of the platform and sat, legs dangling. “You coming, Austin?”
“Not likely.”
“There’s mice down there.”
“I should care?” But he trotted over for a closer look. “Not just mice.”
A group of tiny warriors no more than two inches high, their dark skins making them almost impossible to see, were silently surrounding an unsuspecting rodent. The kill was quick, the prey lifted in half a dozen miniature arms and, to Claire’s surprise, thrown against the third rail. There was a sudden flash, a wisp of smoke, and tiny voices chanting, “Bar. Be. Que! Bar. Be. Que!”
“What’s the delay?” Nalo asked, walking over. “Oh, Abatwa. I don’t know when they came over from South Africa, but they’ve adapted amazingly well to the subway system. You know what to do if you’re challenged?”
As far as Claire could tell, they all seemed to be males. “Flattery?”
“That’s right. Watch where you’re stepping, it makes them cranky.”
Given the nature of some of the debris, Claire figured stepping on one of the Abatwa would be the least of her problems. She didn’t even want to consider how some of it had gotten down there. About to push off, she caught a memory and froze. “You said something about maintenance trains?”