Long Hot Summoning (13 page)

“Your face wears an interesting expression. What are you thinking?” Her attention drawn back across the fire, Diana glanced up to find both Arthur and Kris watching her. The guard captain had settled a little forward of the Immortal King’s left hand in order to see around the edge of his chair. “Interesting?” she asked, trying to figure it out from the inside. There were, after all, a limited number of ways two eyes, a nose, and a mouth could combine.

“Speculative.”

“Okay.” It seemed to have something to do with eyebrows. “I was just thinking how much these guys would have livened up one of my high school dances.

You know, the kind where the DJ’s playing a dance mix from when
he
was in school so the music’s all at least three years old and almost no one’s dancing and the jocks stand with the jocks and the geeks stand with the geeks and someone always shows up drunk and pukes in the hall and half the kids who think they’re taking ecstasy are really taking baby aspirin and actually . . .” She frowned. “. . . so are the other half because that’s why the ‘rents force me to attend these things in the first place and the one guy who’s out on the dance floor grooving to the beat is being made fun of by the other guys. The air is heavy with angst and hormones and there’s enough hair spray in the girl’s can to open a new hole in the ozone layer.”

“It sounds . . .”

“Like major suckage,” Kris supplied when Arthur seemed stuck for a word.

He nodded. “Indeed. And you think my people could help?” Diana took another look. Feet planted, Will undulated hips and arms and scarlet braid in time to the music. “They sure couldn’t hurt.”

“But in your world, my people would have no reason to dance.” Street kids, CSA kids . . .

“Sure they would.” She answered Arthur, but her eyes locked on Kris. “Dance to escape. Dance to forget. Dance to lose yourself in the way your body works; it’s the one thing in your life a bunch of overworked bureaucrats can’t control.” Kris made a sound somewhere between a snort and a sigh. Not exactly agreeing but not dismissing the observation out of hand.

Arthur glanced from one to the other and then back at the dancers, nodding thoughtfully. “Here, they dance to celebrate their victory over the dark forces.”

“It’s only a temporary victory,” Claire reminded him grimly. “The dark forces will be back and they won’t stop until you’re all destroyed.”

“Way to be a downer,” Diana grunted, fishing a nectarine from her pack.

“Ignoring the problem won’t make it go away,” the older Keeper insisted.

“Jeez, Claire. Hair shirt much? They’re not ignoring the problem, they’re recharging so they can continue to fight.”

“Well, we don’t have that luxury. We have to deal with this segue and in order to do that, we have to know what’s happening at the other end of the mall.”

“And in order to do
that,
we’ll need their help. The food court’s at the other end of the mall,” Diana continued before Claire could voice one of her usual

“Keepers do it alone, yadda yadda” protests, “so they obviously know a way to get in and out again.” She wiped nectarine juice off her chin and glanced at Kris, who nodded.

“We do.”

Her gaze shifted from Kris to the King. “So we need to set up some kind of a recon mission. I suggest that Kris and I wander down for a quick look. She takes care of the navigating and any necessary bad-ass whupping, and I handle the metaphysical stuff.”

Sapphire eyes narrowed in confusion as Arthur leaned forward, arms braced across his thighs. “Badass whupping?”

“She means, sire, that I can smack any meat-minds we run across,” Kris explained, grinning broadly. “But don’t ask me why she’s talking like that.”

“Don’t ask me either,” Diana muttered weakly. She could only assume that the thought of spending time alone with Kris skulking through a dark mall had cut the circuit between her brain and her mouth. Claire was looking less than pleased with the suggestion and Sam . . . Sam was buried so deep in her backpack that only his butt and his tail showed. Grateful for the distraction, Diana tossed the nectarine pit into the fire, turned, and hauled him clear.

“Hey! I was just checking to see if you packed my hairball medicine!”

“You don’t have hairball medicine.” She pulled out a second tuna sandwich.

The wrapping had been holed and a fair bit of the tuna excavated. “You have your own food!”

“Yeah? So?” He licked down a bit of ruffled fur. “You going to eat that? I mean, since it’s kind of covered in cat spit ...” Diana sighed and handed over the sandwich.

“You shouldn’t let him get away with that kind of behavior.” As Sam retreated to the edge of the firelight, she turned a pointed look on her sister. “Like you’re the expert. Austin totally runs your life.”

“Austin and I have an understanding.”

“Yeah, that he runs your life.”

“A reconnaissance mission has merit,” Arthur announced suddenly. From his tone, Diana assumed he’d done some thinking about it while she’d been dealing with Sam. “But are either of you well enough to go? Both of you were injured in the recent battle; perhaps two of my scouts . . .”

“No.” Claire was using her don’t-even-bother-arguing-with-me voice. “It has to be one of us. Your people can’t see what we need to know.”

“And I’m fine,” Diana broke in. “Headache’s mostly gone, I had a nice nap, I have two working arms ... it has to be me.”

Claire nodded agreement. “You’re right.”

“And Claire obviously got hit on the head and we never noticed.” Arthur turned an anxious expression on the older Keeper, but she waved him off. “Diana’s just trying to be funny.”

“Now is not the time.”

Apparently a sense of humor was not a requirement to be an Immortal King.

“Sorry.” The apology slipped out before Diana remembered that Keepers never apologized.

Still suitably serious, Arthur nodded. “Then, as you request, Kris will accompany you. She has been into enemy territory many times and is therefore your best chance to not only get in but get out again.”

“Out again, that’s the tricky part,” Kris muttered.

“When should this . . .” He stumbled a bit over the shortened word. “. . . recon mission take place?”

Claire held out her good arm. The hands of her watch continued to spin wildly. “As soon as possible.”

Kris rose fluidly to her feet. “I’m good.” She raked a critical gaze over Diana’s clothes as the younger Keeper stood. “You’ll have to change. Dark colors, nothing to catch the light.”

“I brought jeans.”

She gestured back into the store, her rings glittering in the firelight. “We’ll find you something better.”

“You should have been there last night, Austin, those guys kicked tall ass!” Dean stepped back from hanging a signed picture of the team on the wall of the office and turned to grin at the cat. “You missed a great game.”

“I also missed being smuggled into the arena in a gym bag,” Austin muttered without lifting his head from his front paws. “Pass.” Before Dean could answer, the phone rang.

“If it’s three bears,” the cat announced as Dean’s hand closed around the receiver, “tell them we’re full. That one only ever ends well for the bears.” Black leggings, black tank, black zip-up sweatshirt, black socks, black canvas fanny pack, black leather driving gloves-Diana wore her own hightops and drew the line at using a black lipstick as camouflage paint. The line stayed drawn for about fifteen seconds.

“So you’re not as pale as your sister . . .” Finished wrapping the last of her dreadlocks up into one long tail, Kris reached for the tube. “. . . you’ll still show up in the shadows.”

“I’m a Keeper . . .”

“And I know what I’m doing. Hold still.”

“I’m sorry, Sam, but you can’t come.”

His eyes narrowed, flaying Diana with amber scythes. “You’re ditching me so you can be
alone
with your new
friend,
aren’t you?”

“No!” She dropped to one knee and beckoned him closer. “Look, I’m really worried about Claire. She’s not used to being without Austin. I mean, one of those meat-minds actually hit her with his little concrete bag thing. How weird is that?

Claire never gets hurt. I’m afraid of what might happen to her if there’s no cat around at all.“

Sam snorted. “What a load of crap.”

“Fine; I need someone here who can remind Claire that she’s not always right, that this was my Summoning. I’d rather you were with me, but I don’t want her screwing things up from this end.”

He thought about it for a moment. “Okay, that one I’ll buy. Be careful.”

“You, too. Remember, she gets cranky when she’s crossed.”

“Please, if Austin can handle her, how hard can it be?” They took the first set of stairs down to the lower level, past a pair of elves standing guard who might have been fifteen in the outside world but here were becoming ageless.

“It’s sort of neutral territory between these stairs and the next ones,” Kris murmured as they descended toward the lower concourse. “The meat-minds never go much farther than the stairs they chased you and your sister up, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some nasty shit hanging around. There’re a few storefronts you don’t want to get too close to.”

“In a way that’s a good thing.”

“Yeah? I doubt you’ll think that when the pieces start rolling out of the Body Shop.”

Pieces. Body Shop. Evil was remarkably literal-minded at times.

“You smell something like a seaweed emulsion,” Kris continued, “you haul ass. You hear me?”

“What’s a seaweed emulsion smell like?”

“Dead fish and seagull shit.”

“Okay.” Diana took a vigorous sniff but could only smell the perfume/plastic mix of the lipstick smeared all over her face. And maybe, just maybe something warm and spicy and slightly intoxicating rising off Kris which she was going to work very hard at not thinking about until they were safely back in King Arthur’s Court.

King Arthur’s Court. A legless armchair at a metaphorical fire.
Somehow, and she had no idea how, that wasn’t as lame as it should have been.

Two more steps. “Looking at the bright side, continuing weirdness means there’s still some time before the segue. The more normal this place is, the closer the bad guys are to success.”

“Yeah, well, if it’s all the same to you, I’m gonna worry about what’s going down
before
the muzak starts play . . . Fuck.” She spat the profanity between clenched teeth.

“What?”

They were standing at the west end of the lower concourse. Behind them, what should have been another entrance to the department store the elves had claimed was, instead, a solid wall of glass. Diana could barely make out the barricade beyond it. To their right, a Mr. Jockstrap. Sporting goods. She tried to remember if the original mall held a store by that name but couldn’t. In a world with Condom Shack franchises, she supposed it was possible. The lights were low, the only sound the bass beat of a fast hip-hop track pulsing down from the upper level. Nothing looked particularly dangerous.

“It’s night.”

“Okay.”

“He’s here at night.”

“Who?”

“Some old security dude.”

Diana felt a chill run down her spine and really hoped it was a gust from the air-conditioning. “Walks with a limp? Kind of weaves his head from side to side like a snapping turtle? Mutters things like lithe and lissome?”

“I never seen a snapping turtle, but that sounds like the guy.”

“But he’s not in this mall, he’s in the other mall. The real mall.”

“Yeah? Well, he gets around. Don’t let him catch you in his flashlight beam.

He nails you with that and you’re gone.”

“Gone?”

“Gone.” Kris rolled her eyes impatiently. “Speak English much? Gone. Not here. Now come on, we got some distance to cover.” They stayed to the darker shadows of the kiosks and the potted trees; Kris leading, Diana half a pace behind doing her best to mimic the other girl’s economical movements. Their path led down the center of the concourse until they neared the second set of stairs when Kris began to veer left. She tucked into the rectangular shadow of the last storefront before a side corridor and motioned for Diana to join her.

“Shoe stores are safe,” she whispered in answer to Diana’s silent question, her mouth close to the Keeper’s ear. “What’s gonna come out? They watch these stairs,” she continued, softening her esses. “It’s why we couldn’t use them. We have to get to that hall up there. Where the sign for the security office is.” The sign was across the side corridor and four storefronts farther east.

“We used to come down through the store at the end there ...” A quick jerk of Kris’ head, the motion felt rather than seen they were so close together, indicated the corridor. “. . . another big one, like ours, but lately it’s been locked at night. Good thing we didn’t fuckin‘ risk it.”

“Because it’s night.”

The elfin captain patted Diana lightly on one cheek. “Can’t put nothing past you Keepers.”

Diana felt her face heat up under its mask of lipstick. The store locked at night could only mean reality had found another foothold, but she decided not to mention that at the risk of being thought obvious as well as dense. She watched as Kris dropped to her belly and inched forward toward the corridor along the angle of floor and wall. Was she supposed to follow?

Apparently not.

Just as she began to seriously consider dropping to her knees, Kris began to back up. Feet under her, into a crouch, standing . . . warm breath against Diana’s ear.

She clenched her hands to keep from shivering.

“It’s clear. Move fast, don’t make any noise, and try to look as little like a person as you can.”

“What?”

“If they see you, you want to leave some doubt about what they’re seeing.” That made sense. Although “look as little like a person as you can” didn’t. Not in any useful sort of a way.

“All right. Let’s . . .”

shunk kree, shunk kree.

Kris slammed back against her as a line of light split the concourse.

He was coming from the west. From the same direction they had. He’d been behind them the whole time.

shunk kree, shunk kree.