by Tanya Huff
“We do.” She told him about the bracelet as they pounded upstairs.
“Kingston?” Sam jumped up on the end of the bed. “Shouldn’t it be Claire’s Summons, then?”
“No. It’s mine.”
“Yeah, but…you know…it’s just…”
“Austin.” Diana dumped assorted end-of-year crap out of her backpack and shoved in her laptop, a pair of clean jeans, socks, underwear, and her hiking boots. There were places Otherside where even heavy rubber sandals wouldn’t be enough. Actually, there were places where hazmat suits wouldn’t be enough, but she planned on staying away from the Girl Guide camp. “You’re afraid to go onto his territory.”
“I am not afraid. But he doesn’t like me.”
Zippered sweatshirt. Pajama bottoms. Tank tops. “He’s old. He doesn’t like anyone except Claire.”
“He likes you,” Sam protested following her into the bathroom.
“He tolerates me because I can operate a can opener.” Shampoo. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Soap. Towel. “Don’t worry. We’ll be in and out before Claire and Austin even know we’re there.”
Eyeing the toilet suspiciously—who knew porcelain could be so slippery—Sam jumped up onto the edge of the sink. “You know, a hole big enough to pass physical objects through might be harder to close than you think.”
Diana snorted, threw in a couple of rolls of toilet paper just in case, and headed for the kitchen where she packed a box of crackers, a jar of peanut butter, a nearly full bag of chocolate chip cookies, and six tins of cat food.
“Less chicken, more fish,” Sam told her.
“Fish gives you cat food breath.”
He looked up from licking his butt. “And that’s a problem because…?”
“Good point.” She made the change, pulled the small litter box and a bag of litter out of the broom closet and packed them as well. “I think that’s everything. Now I just need to leave a note for the ’rents.”
“Make sure they can see it.” A few moments later, his pupils closed down to vertical slits, Sam stared up at the brilliant letters chasing themselves around the refrigerator door. “That seems a little much.”
“Well, they’ll be able to see it.”
“Yeah; from orbit.”
“Some cats are never happy.” About to pick up the pack, she paused. “You want to get in now? Our first ride’ll meet us at the end of the driveway.”
“Might as well.” He flowed in through the open zipper, and the green nylon sides bulged as he made himself comfortable. “Hey…” Folded space distorted his voice. “What’s with the rubber tree and the hat stand?”
“They’re holding open the possibilities.” Zipping up all but the top six inches, Diana swung the pack over her shoulders and headed for the road.
Their first ride took them into Lucan.
Their second, to London.
In London, they got a lift from a trucker carrying steel pipe to Montreal. Diana spent the trip strengthening the cables that held the pipes to the flatbed—a little accident prevention—and Sam horked up a hairball on the artificial lamb’s wool seat cover. Which was how they found themselves standing by the side of the road in Napanee, a small town forty minutes east of Kingston.
At Sam’s insistence, they stopped for supper at Mom’s Restaurant…
“No, that’s not a cat in my backpack. It’s an orange sweater that just happens to enjoy tuna.”
…where they met someone willing to take them the rest of the way.
* * *
Her back to the West Gardener’s Mall parking lot, Diana waved as the metallic green Honda merged into Highway Two traffic. “That was fun. I don’t think I’ve ever heard ‘It’s Raining Men’ sung with so much enthusiasm.”
“My ears hurt,” Sam muttered, jumping out onto the grass.
“I suppose you’d rather have angelic choirs?”
“Are you nuts? All those trumpets—it’s like John Philip Sousa does choral music.” Carefully aligning his back end, he sprayed the base of a streetlight. “It’s all praise God and pass the oom pah pah.”
“I’m not even sure I know what that means, but just on principle, please tell me you’re kidding.”
“Okay, I’m kidding.”
She turned to face the mall. “Now say it like you mea…” And froze. “Oy, mama. That’s not good.”
The circles of light that overlapped throughout the parking lot had all been touched with red, creating a sinister—although faintly clichéd—effect. At just past nine, with the mall officially closed, the acres of crimson-tinted asphalt were empty of everything but half a dozen…
“Minivans. It’s worse than I thought.”
* * *
He had stood at this door, at this time, every Friday night for the last twenty-one years. There had been other doors in the long years before, but there would be no other doors after. He would make his last stand here. The door was open only to allow late shoppers to exit; he, a human lock, protected the mall from those who would enter after hours.
He watched the girl stride toward him. His lips curled at the sight of bare legs between sandals and shorts. His eyes narrowed in disgust at the way her breasts moved under her T-shirt. He snorted at her backpack and her youth.
Were it up to him, he’d never let her kind into the mall. He knew what they got up to. Talking. Laughing. Standing in groups. Standing in pairs. Pairs tucked away in Bozo’s School Bus using lips and hands.
He stiffened as she stopped barely an arm’s length away.
“The mall is closed. It will reopen tomorrow at nine a.m.”
Pink lips parted. “Please move out of my way.”
Twenty-one years at this door. “The mall is closed. It will reopen tomorrow at nine a.m.”
Dark brows rose and dark eyes tried to meet his, but he stared at the drop of sweat running down her throat to pool against her collarbone and refused to be drawn in.
“Okay, fine. We’ll just have to do this the hard way.”
“The mall is closed. It will reopen tomorrow at nine a.m.”
“Yeah, gramps, I got it the first time.”
His eyes burned and he blinked, only a single blink, but when his vision cleared, the girl was gone.
* * *
Good. It was good that she was gone. Gone with her shorts and her breasts and all her infinite possibilities.
Diana stopped just the other side of Bozo’s School Bus, set her backpack down on the yellow plastic kiddie ride, and waited while Sam climbed out.
“That was creepy,” he muttered, licking at a bit of ruffled fur.
“Very. And aren’t people that old supposed to be retired or something?”
“Or something,” the cat agreed. “Hey.” Front paws on the Plexiglas window, Sam peered into the bus. “This thing has seat belts. They don’t take it out of the building, do they?”
“Uh, no.”
“Then why seat belts?”
“I have no idea. But you know what’s really whacked? My bus—the one I rode down potholed dirt roads at a hundred and twenty klicks every morning and afternoon with a whole lot of very small bouncy children—no belts.” Swinging her pack back onto her shoulders, she headed for the main concourse. “Stay close and no one will see you.”
Sam fell into step by her right ankle. “Considering what that thing smelled like, I can think of one reason for seat belts. This place is huge. How are we going to find the Erlking Emporium?”
“Easy. We find the you-are-here sign. It’s probably at the end of this side hall.”
It wasn’t.
Although the side hall and one of the huge anchor stores spilled out into the main concourse at the same place, there was nothing to help mall patrons find their way through the two-story maze of stores they now faced.
“Maybe someone from the Otherside took it,” Sam offered when it became clear they were directionally on their own.
“It’s possible.” Motioning for Sam to be quiet, Diana froze as
a final shopper slipped through the partially barricaded Kitchen Shop storefront, clutching a cheap manual can opener and trailing the ill wishes of the teenage clerk like black smoke behind her as she hurried down the side hall. “She feels like the last one in here. We’d better get moving before that creepy old security guard heads this way.”
Sam butted his head reassuringly against her leg. “You can take him.”
“Well, yeah. But I’d rather not. Come on. Blonde Ponytail said…”
“Who?”
“The jock with the bracelet. I never got her name. She said the store was on the lower level, so let’s find some stairs.”
Behind reinforced glass or steel bars, the stores themselves were places of shadow.
Unless the bracelet was the only piece of the Otherside they were selling, Diana should have been able to sense the Emporium, her Summons directing her like a child’s game of Warm and Cool where the parts of “Warm” and “Cool” were played by “I Can Live With the Headache if I Have to” and “Shoot Me Now.” Unfortunately, the Summons was unable to poke through the interference from the back rooms where a hundred part-time teenagers counted up a hundred cash drawers and ninety-seven of them came up short. By the time the cash had to be counted for the third time, the emanation of frustrated pissiness was so strong Diana couldn’t have sensed a trio of bears if they were sneaking up beside her.
“Hey, Rodney River has orange polyester bellbottoms on sale for $29.99.”
“Is that good?” Sam wondered.
Diana shuddered. “I can’t see how.” Pleased to see that the escalators had already been turned off—cat on escalator equaled accident waiting to happen—she led the way to the stairs.
Only the emergency lights were lit on the lower level, and the footprint of the mall seemed to have subtly changed.
“There’s too many corners down here. And if I can smell the food court, why can’t we find it?”
“I don’t…Someone’s coming.” Scooping up the cat, Diana backed into a triangular shadow and wrapped the possibilities around them both half a heartbeat before a flashlight beam swept by.
“I know you’re here.” One shoe dragging shunk kree against the fake slate tiles, the elderly security guard emerged from a side hall. Massive black flashlight held out in front of him, he walked bent forward, his head moving constantly from side to side on a neck accordion-pleated with wrinkles.
Diana would have said the motion looked snakelike except that she rather liked snakes.
Shunk kree. Shunk kree. “I will find you; never doubt it. I know you’ve hidden your lithe bodies away in the shadows.”
Sam twisted in Diana’s arms until he could stare up at her. His expression saying as clearly as if he’d spoken, “Lithe?” She shrugged.
“Long, loose limbs stacked unseen against the wall.” Shunk kree.
Who was he looking for? It couldn’t be her and Sam—he thought they were gone.
The flashlight beam flicked up, caught the pale face of a store mannequin, and stopped moving.
“Can’t run now, can you?” He shuffled past so close to her hiding place that Diana could almost count the dark gray hairs growing from his ear. “Can’t run with your muscles moving inside the soft skin.”
Diana gave him a count of twenty, then prepared to slip out and away. She had a foot actually in the air when cool fingers wrapped around her upper arm and held her in place.
Shunk. The security guard pivoted on one heel, turning suddenly to face back the way he’d come, flashlight beam exposing circles of the lower concourse. “Not too smart for me with your young brains,” he muttered, turning again and shunk kreeing his way toward the mannequin.
The cool fingers were gone as though they’d never existed. Since Diana was certain she and Sam had been alone in their sanctuary, the logical response seemed to be that they never had. That they’d been a construct of self-preservation. Her own highly developed subconscious holding her back from discovery. On the other hand, logic had very little to do with possibility, so Diana murmured a quiet thanks to the fingers as she left the shadow.
Cat in her arms, staying close to the storefronts, she raced down the concourse toward a side hall they hadn’t tried, at least half her attention listening for the shunk kree following behind her. After weaving through a locked-down display of hot tubs, she sagged against a pillar, adding its bulk to the space she’d already put between them and the old man.
“Okay,” she whispered into the top of Sam’s head. “I am officially squicked out. Where did they find that guy? He’s like every creepy, clichéd old man rolled into one wrinkly package and wrapped in a security guard’s uniform. I mean, I know he’s just a Bystander and I handled him at the door, but still…”
“Still what?”
“You know, still.”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked,” Sam pointed out, squirming to be let down. “And by the way, we’ve found the food court.”
Only six of the seven food kiosks were currently occupied. Directly across from them, a poster on plywood announced the future site of a Darby’s Deli. At some point, a local artist had used a black marker to make a few additions to the poster’s picture of Darby Dill, creating a remarkably well hung condiment. Tearing her gaze away from the anatomically correct pickle, Diana spotted yet another hall on the far side of the food court, the rectangular opening tucked into the corner between Consumer’s Drug Mart and a sporting goods store.
“It’s got to be down there.”
“Why?”
“Because it isn’t anywhere…What are you eating?”
Sam swallowed. “Nothing.”
As they entered the hall, the tile turned to a rough concrete floor. The bench and its flanking planters of plastic trees, although outwardly no different from other benches and other trees, had a temporary look. Only three stores long, the hall ended in a gray plywood wall stenciled with a large sign that read, “Construction Site: No Entry.” The last store before the wall was the Emporium.
Tucked into another convenient shadow, Diana studied the storefront through narrowed eyes. “I can’t sense a power signature, so I’m guessing the power surge only went one way.”
“If they’d known you were coming, they’d have baked a cake?”
She stared down at the cat. “Something like that, yeah. Who…?”
“Your father.”
“Well, do me a favor and don’t pick up any more of his speech patterns because that would be too weird.”
“Why?”
“Sam, you sleep on my bed. Just don’t, okay?”
He shrugged, clearly humoring her. “Okay.”
Diana turned her attention back to the store. “They’re not being very subtle, are they? If any of the Lineage had ever window-shopped their way down here, the name alone would have given the whole thing away.”
“The Lineage is big into window shopping?”
“Not my point.”
“Okay. But I think Erlking Emporium has a marketable ring to it.”
“Marketable? First of all, you’re a cat; marketable for you involves a higher percentage of beef byproducts. Second; do you even know what an Erlking is?”
Sam shot her an insulted amber glare, the tip of his tail flicking back and forth in short, choppy arcs. “According to German legend, it’s a malevolent goblin who lures people, especially children, to their destruction.”
Which it was. “Sorry. I keep forgetting about that whole used-to-be-an-angel had-higher-knowledge thing.”
“Yeah, you do. But I learned that off a PBS special on mythology.”
“While I was where?”
“Cleaning the splattered remains of a history essay off your bedroom walls.”
“Right.” A lapse in concentration and the Riel Rebellion had spilled out of her closet. It had taken her the entire weekend to clean up the mess, and most of it had turned out to be nonrecyclable. “I think I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.”
The purely
physical lock on the door took only a trickle of power to open.
Sam radiated disapproval as he slipped through into the store. “Breaking and entering.”
“Technically, only entering.” Locking the door behind them, Diana tried not to sneeze at the overpowering odor of gardenia coming off the display of candles immediately to her left. A quick glance showed that the gardenia had easily overpowered vanilla, cinnamon, bayberry, lilac, belladonna, monkshood, pholiotina, and yohimbe. Unless the Colonial Candle Company was branching out into herbal hallucinogens, at least half the display had clearly been brought over from the Otherside.
Not just the bracelet, then.
Rubbing her nose, she moved cautiously into the store, skirting a locked glass cabinet filled with crystal balls, and ending up nearly treading on Sam’s tail as, hissing, he backed away from…Diana bent over to take a closer look and had no better idea what animal the pile of stuffed creatures was supposed to represent. In spite of neon fur, they looked remarkably lifelike—given a loose enough definition of both life and like.
“I was just startled,” Sam muttered, vigorously washing a front paw.
“If I was closer to the ground, they’d have startled me, too.”
“I wasn’t afraid.”
“I know.” She stroked down the raised hair along his back as she straightened. “I think we can safely say the hole’s not out here. Let’s check out the storeroom.”
“It’s not back there either.”
Not Sam. Not unless Sam’s voice had deepened, aged, and moved up near the ceiling.
Diana dropped down behind a rack of resin frogs dressed in historical military uniforms and began to gather power.
“Think about it for a minute, Keeper; if I wasn’t on your side, I’d have already sounded the alarm. Why don’t you drop the fireworks and come over here so we can talk.”
He—whoever he was—had a point. Diana stood, slowly, and looked around. The shadows made it difficult to tell for certain, but she’d have been willing to bet actual cash money that she and Sam were alone in the store. “Where are you?”
“Up in the corner.”