by Tanya Huff
“Then let’s do it.”
Claire and Dean had opened the way for the light, but her crepe-paper snowflake hanging from the ceiling in the gym had held it together. Standing at the foot of the bed, Diana closed her eyes and reached into the possibilities until she could see Samuel lying in front of her. Slowly and carefully, she detached the parameters Lena and her father had placed around him. She took him back to what he had been in the gym, then wrapped the part that was Samuel in the possibilities and pushed him forward.
In the instant between Diana taking him back and shoving him forward again, Samuel thought he heard voices.
“So he’s off the duty roster?”
“Let’s just say he’s on an extended leave of absence.”
“Let’s just say?” The first voice snorted. “Oh, easy for you, Gabriel. You’re not the one who has to fill his post on the Perdition front.”
“Bitch, bitch, bitch.”
“Hey, there’s a war on, you know. Or maybe that’s something you guys in the band have forgotten.”
And then there was only light, and a question.
If he wasn’t an angel, and he wasn’t a human, what was he?
Diana blinked away afterimages and stared down at the towel she’d thrown over Samuel’s crotch. Whatever he’d become fit under it with room to spare. Fingers crossed, she bent down and flicked it back.
The marmalade tabby sat up and looked around.
“You’re a cat.”
“Well, duh. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that angels were like cats only with…” He cocked his head, trying to remember just what it was Ilea had said. “…you know, differences.”
Staggering back, Diana went to sit down on one of the chairs but, at some time during the proceedings, it had self-defined as a plant stand, and she hit the floor instead. It suddenly became painfully clear who Samuel had reminded her of as he’d made his reproachful way to the bathroom.
Austin.
TWELVE
SINCE DEAN HAD POLITELY but vehemently objected to her willing the truck faster, Claire let her head loll back against the headrest and closed her eyes. Extending her will toward Toronto, she slid past the permanently monitored sites, her passage noted only by the elderly Keeper at the site in Scarborough.
“Oh, sure, you can go by like a ship in the night, but you never write, you never call. A lousy birthday card would kill you? The best forty-two years of my life I give to you and you don’t even remember my birthday. You got a memory like a cantaloupe.”
“Excuse me?”
“Why? What did you do?”
Claire moved on into the possibilities a little faster. Keepers who essentially became the seal that stopped darkness from emerging out of an unclosable hole, became caricatures of their former selves. She’d narrowly missed becoming the youngest Keeper to ever hold such a position and shuddered at the sudden vision of herself at ninety-two in stretch capri pants and wedges, scarlet lips and crimson fingernails, badly dyed hair poofed out over way too much purple eye shadow—a cross between Nancy Reagan and Miss Piggy.
Didn’t happen, she reminded herself. Didn’t…
Wait.
Something was happening.
She heard voices…
“I’m warning you, Michael, don’t touch the horn.”
“Or you’ll what? Blow me?”
…then a sudden flash of light threw her back into her body. She stiffened and moaned. The Summons hit a heartbeat later.
“As much as I’m happy you two are back into it,” Austin muttered without opening his eye, “given that we’re speeding down a snowy highway with a bunch of lunatics who’ve forgotten how to drive since the last time the frozen white stuff fell, don’t you think Dean ought to keep both hands on the steering wheel?”
“I can feel the demon.”
“I thought you were calling it Floyd. Ow!” He turned his head and glared at her. “Don’t poke the cat, I’m old.”
“So Diana came through, then?” Dean asked, making a mental note to ask about this Floyd guy when the cat wasn’t around.
“I knew she would.”
Austin snorted. “You thought she was going to destroy the world as we know it, bringing upon us the Last Judgment and roller disco. Not that there’s a lot of difference,” he added.
Somewhat redundantly in Dean’s opinion. “Are we still after heading to Toronto, then?”
Claire checked the Summons. “So far.”
They drove in silence for a few moments.
“The angel’s gone, then?”
Curious about Dean’s tone, Claire turned to face him. “Yes.”
“And you can find the demon now?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And when you find the demon, you can get rid of it?”
“I’m a Keeper. Of course I can get rid of it.”
He glanced toward her and smiled suggestively. “No angel, no demon…”
“No problem.” Realizing where he was headed, she returned his smile and stroked one finger along the top of his thigh.
“Is it just me,” Austin asked, sitting up, “or are we suddenly moving a lot faster?”
The angel had changed.
Feeling suddenly exposed, Byleth ran into the only room in the mission where she’d be left alone—unexpectedly finding three other girls already in there sharing a cigarette.
The dominant member of the trio slid off the sink and turned to face her. “You want something, new girl?”
The part of her that was a seventeen-year-old girl wanted to protest that she’d just come in to use the bathroom and she wasn’t looking for trouble. Then the rest of her pushed that part down and stole its lunch money. “I want you to leave.”
“What?”
“Leave.” Breathing heavily through her nose, barely holding all the parts together, Byleth reached into the darkness. “I want you to leave.”
“Yeah? Well, I don’t give a half-eaten rat’s ass for what you want. I…What’s that?” Pierced brows drew in and scowled at the dripping bit of flesh hanging from the tail in Byleth’s hand.
“It’s a half-eaten rat’s ass. Take it and go.”
Eyes locked on the partial rodent, the other two girls sidled by and out the door. In the complex hierarchy of adolescence, having a rat’s ass conveniently on hand clearly trumped a pack of smokes and an attitude.
“What kind of retarded shithole do you come from?” their abandoned leader asked, taking an unconcerned drag. “That is so totally not what I meant. Now, me, I’m going to finish my cigarette and…” Her gaze locked on Byleth’s nose. “I never saw you light up.”
“I didn’t.”
“But there’s smoke…”
“Get. Out.”
“Hey, you’re not the boss of me.” Bravado winning over common sense, she flicked her butt toward the sink…
“NOW!”
…and was out the door before it actually touched the porcelain.
Byleth tossed the rat in the garbage and stared at her reflection. “Why is it so damned foggy in…oh.” Like thousands before her, she found it a lot harder to stop smoking than to start, but, after an extended struggle, she managed it. Not that it mattered, her cover had been blown. She might as well walk around in a pair of horns, carrying a pitchfork—if that particular look wasn’t so yesterday’s demon. Without equal and opposite coverage by the light, she’d be easy to spot by any Keeper and probably most Cousins. Metaphysical alarms would be screaming, “Demon in the world!” and every Goody Two-shoes in the area not currently helping little old ladies across the street would be zeroing in.
She should have changed with the angel. He was as much tied by the stupid body he was wearing as she was. Therefore, he couldn’t have changed on his own. He so cheated.
“Oh, yeah, he got a Keeper to change him so they could find me. Fine. You want to find me, Keeper, you’ll find me!” A light wisp of smoke drifted out of both nostrils. It felt great. “If I’m going out, I’m going out big. No more just ha
nging around and irritating people.” She spread her arms. “I’ll open a hole of darkness so big it’ll make the Home Shopping Channel seem like a cable network!”
Her reflection frowned. “It is a cable network.”
“Shut up!”
“And you can’t open a hole of darkness big enough to cause much trouble because the physicality of the body denies you access to that kind of power.”
“I am that kind of power.”
“Then you’ll have to destroy the body. You’ll cease to exist. Gone. No more reality than you can find in that stupid television program about those people on the island.”
“What do you mean?”
“Read your lips. You’ll be absorbed back into the darkness. No more you.”
“Oh, like it’s such joy to be a teenager.” But it was better than being nothing at all, better than being a lesser part of a greater whole—actually it was remarkably similar to being a lesser part of a greater whole. Byleth chewed thoughtfully on the edge of a thumbnail, spitting bits of navy blue polish into the sink. If she could open a big enough hole, cause enough mayhem and destruction, she could maintain her identity even in the darkness where individuality depended on being more of a shit than the next guy—and not always metaphorically.
She’d have to open the hole quickly, before the Keepers found her, so she’d need a spot where at least part of the work had already been done.
“And I know just the place.”
Unfortunately, her evil chortle fell flat as her reflection ignored her, concentrating instead on the dorky little flip ruining the right side of her hair.
“One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.”
“Are you all right down there?”
Samuel stopped counting and glared up at Diana, cream-colored whiskers bristling indignantly. “Why?”
“No reason,”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay.”
“This four legs walking stuff is a lot harder than it looks, you know.”
Diana bit back a snicker as she pushed the elevator call button. “It couldn’t possibly be. I think I should carry you,” she added as the elevator arrived. “I’ve set it up so people’s attention will slide right off you, but in an enclosed space you’d likely get stepped on.”
“Something tells me I didn’t think this transformation thing through,” Samuel muttered as she scooped him up. Still, it felt surprisingly pleasant to be held. He flicked his tail out into a more comfortable position as the door opened.
A small child stared up at them with widening eyes. “Kitty, Mama!”
“Yes, sweetheart,” his mother agreed, as Diana moved past her, “a stuffed kitty.”
“Who’s she calling stuffed?”
“Kitty talks, Mama!”
“Toy kitties don’t talk, sweetheart.”
A small hand closed around Samuel’s tail and pulled. “Ding dong!”
“OW!”
“Kitties don’t ding dong either, sweetheart.” Shooting Diana an apologetic smile, she grabbed her son’s wrist with one hand and pried his fingers free with the other. A bit of fur came free as well. “And it’s not polite to touch things that belong to other people.”
“Especially tails!” Hooking his claws in Diana’s jacket, Samuel swiveled around until he could stare down at the child, golden eyes narrowed to glimmering slits. “Listen to your mother, Ramji, because someday she’ll die and you’ll wish you had.”
Ramji wrapped his arms around his mother’s leg. “Kitty knows my name.”
He was still wrapped around her leg when the elevator reached the lobby, and she crossed to the hotel’s front door with a resigned shuffle.
“That’s a kid who’s going to need serious therapy down the road.” Diana shifted her grip. “What kind of an angel says something like that?”
“The kind that just got his tail pulled. Besides,” Samuel continued after a few quick licks at his shoulder, “it’s the truth and one day he’ll thank me for it.”
“One day he’ll spend thousands of dollars being convinced you were a metaphor for toilet training.”
“He grabbed my tail!”
“I know. I was there.”
“You said people wouldn’t be able to see me properly.”
“He was a proto-person.” She set him down in one of the lobby’s over stuffed chairs and stepped back. “I’m going to check out. Stay there.”
“Or what?”
“I haven’t got time to go into it right now, but why don’t you apply that Higher Knowledge thing to the joint concepts of can openers and opposable thumbs.” As she walked over to the counter, she considered all the things he could have become and asked the world at large, more in search of sympathy than enlightenment, “Why a cat?”
The world at large offered no answers.
Left to amuse himself, Samuel did a little kneading, claws moving rhythmically in and out of the corduroy cushion covers. Shoulders up, head down, his eyes began to close as he moved in a slow circle. He didn’t know what it was, but something about that yielding surface under his front paws created the most incredible feeling. Kneading harder, really putting his back into it, he heard a sudden loud noise and froze.
Two-stroke engine, single spark, gas and oil mix…oh, wait, it’s me.
Which was when he spotted the other cat.
A marmalade tabby, it had a cream-colored bib and the same color markings around both muzzle and eyes. The darker stripes down tail and legs made it look as if it was wearing footie pajamas—the effect emphasized by the way the legs were still a bit too long for the body.
Samuel stared at it.
It stared back.
Head cocked to one side, Samuel took a cautious step forward.
It took a cautious step forward.
Hoping he wasn’t rushing the introduction, Samuel leaned forward for a good long sniff.
The cinnamon triangle of his nose mashed flat against the mirror.
Leaping back, his back feet scrambled for purchase as he nearly went off the chair, only the barricade of Diana’s legs saving him from an embarrassing fall. Blinking rapidly, he leaned against her knees, looked up at her, and said in what he hoped was a convincing tone, “I meant to do that.”
“Okay.”
“I knew it was a mirror.”
“I believe you.”
“Right.” He took a few quick licks at the edge of a stripe. “So, where do we go from here?”
Diana sighed. “Home.”
“But what about the demon?” Samuel demanded. “I’m not blocking it now. We should go after it.”
“Yes, we should. But we can’t.” She dropped down onto the arm of the chair and scowled at her reflection, one hand absently rubbing the cat behind the ears. “I can feel that there’s a demon out there, but I still don’t know where she is. Which means some other Keeper has it sealed up. And, gee, I wonder which other Keeper?”
“Claire?”
“Good guess.”
Samuel could tell Diana was upset, although he wasn’t entirely certain why. “You don’t know that for sure,” he offered.
Diana snorted. “We—me and Claire—were responsible for you, which makes us responsible for the demon, which means we should have got the Summons, but since I didn’t, she must have.”
He frowned, ears saddling. “Then she must be able to handle the demon on her own.”
“Well, duh. What?” she demanded of an eavesdropping Bystander, shooting him the look that had made her the terror of intramural field hockey back before the school board decided it might not be the best idea to give hormonally hopped up adolescents weapons and carte blanche to break shins. “You’ve never seen anyone talk to a stuffed animal before?”
“Actually, no.”
Holding his gaze, she reached into the possibilities. “You still haven’t.” Scooping up Samuel, she stood and headed for the revolving door. Outside, on Carlton Street, she put the cat down on a cleared bit of sidewalk.<
br />
“Hey! I’m in bare feet here!”
“You’re a cat. That’s the only way your feet come.”
“Right. I knew that, but…”
As the pigeon back-flapped into a landing, Samuel whirled around and leaped. Had he been in the body longer, he would have had to have dealt with the small ethical dilemma of whether or not an angel could actually eat a pigeon he’d killed—not to mention the slightly larger health dilemma of whether or not anyone should eat a pigeon born and raised on the streets of Toronto. As it was, he hooked a tail feather, but the rest of the bird got away, dropping a large, white, hysterical opinion of the change on Diana’s shoulder as it passed.
“Go on, chicken, fly! There’s more where that came from!” He boxed the feather to the ground, flicked it up, and boxed it down again.
“Are you done?”
“One more time.” Both front paws finally holding the feather captive, he smiled up at her. “Okay, I’m done. Now what?”
“First, you can stop being so cute.”
“Actually, I don’t think I can,” Samuel admitted after a moment’s consideration.
Diana sighed. “Swell. Do me a favor; if I ever talk baby talk to you, claw my tongue out.”
“I don’t think I can do that either.”
“Not surprised.” Bending, she picked him up and settled him in the crook of her arm. “Come on, it’s the subway to the train station and the first train to London for us.”
“That’s it?” When she nodded, he looked thoughtful. “So essentially I became a cat in order to go home with you and live a pampered life devoid of responsibility while others take the risks and get the glory?”
“Looks like.”
“Kewl.”
The Bystander Diana’d adjusted in the hotel lobby never saw anyone speak to a stuffed animal again. Although his wife didn’t believe in the disability, his children learned to exploit it early on by muttering constantly into the ears of plush toys when struck with the need to do something like fit a frozen hamburger patty into the DVD player.
“Yes, I have a car.” Backed into a literal corner, panic rolling off him like smoke, Leslie/Deter saw no way out. “Why?”