Teemo, his orange-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt clutched in bratwurst-sized fingers, went down with it.“Is it dead?” he panted, bracing red hightops against the meat-mind’s stained sweat suit and yanking himself free.
“No,” Claire spat, scrubbing at her face with the hem of her skirt. “Asleep.”
“Bummer.” Switching to a two-handed grip, he set about changing that.
Given her sudden, desperate need for a shower, Claire wasn’t at all surprised when the sprinklers went off.
*
“Geez, these guys are clumsy,” Diana muttered, as she ran. “Clumsy, clumsy, clumsy.” But it was hard to hold the thought when the only thing she could see was Kris dangling by one foot. Her mouth might be saying clumsy, but her brain kept insisting,don’t stop her.
Closely followed by:Would you stop whaling on it! You’re just pissing it off!
Closely followed by:I guess that answers the‘do they or don’t they’ genitalia question. as Kris’ flailing bat impacted between the creature’s legs with no effect.
Its knees were significantly more sensitive.
Howling in pain, it whipped Kris twice around its head then threw her toward the concourse.
Diana rocked to a halt, spun around as Kris sailed by, yanked open her pouch, and broke a lime-green feather in half.
The mall elf floated gently to the floor as the sprinklers came on.
A tote bag whistled past Diana’s head fast enough to part her hair, the letters on the bag a red-on-white blur. Heart pounding, she raced past the furious meat-mind while it struggled to recover its balance, the force of the swing having nearly tipped it over.
“Diana! Over here!” Sam paced in front of the optical shop, tail lashing marmalade lines in the air. “Something’s happening!”
Inside the store, a multicolored fog had begun to swirl.
A familiar multicolored fog.
Diana skidded to a stop by Sam’s side. “The travel agency?” All of a sudden, the whole attack made a horrible kind of sense. The red plume on the dark elf’s helm, the tote bags. The darkside had chartered a trip into the mall elves’ territory. “Who’s comingup with this stuff!” she snarled, reaching back into her pouch.
“Hurry!”
As the fog grew thicker, a familiar trio of shapes began to take form.
“Not this time, bologna for brains.”
As the three meat-minds charged toward the door, Diana dropped to her knees and slammed a key down on the threshold. Slamming into the barrier with enough force to vibrate glass all the way to the exit, they bounced back into the fog and disappeared. It was probably imagination that provided the crash of impact at the travel agency, one level down and a quarter of a kilometer away.
“You sure that’ll hold them?” Sam demanded, looking dubious as he checked out the key.
“Hey, when I lock a door, it stays locked.” She rocked back on her heels and stood. “Why aren’t you wet?”
“Why should I be?”
“The sprinklers…”
He stared up at her, amber eyes challenging.
“…never mind.”
A quick run back to the end of the hall.
Out on the concourse, about two thirds of the meat-minds were down, those parts of their faces not being covered by the impact of baseball bats, covered in fresh ground pepper. Claire sat slumped against the art supply store, cradling one arm. Scattered, brightly colored heaps marked fallen elves, Kris and Colin weaving among them pulling downed comrades to safety.
Wet blades glistening, Arthur and the dark elf fought on.
As Diana stepped forward, Arthur danced sideways to avoid a lunge and tripped over a discarded tote bag.
He began to fall. His sword rose to block a descending blow, but the angle was wrong and everyone could see it.
The Immortal King was about to die.
A simple“no” could prevent disaster.
Diana could feel the word rising.
But that“no” could provide the enemy with power enough to complete the segue.
She had nothing in her pouch, nothing that might…
The wand. The wand belonged on the Otherside.
Yanking it from her pocket, Diana pointed the pink star at the dark elf, tried very hard not to think of how stupid this had to look, and opened herself up to extreme possibilities.
The sudden spray of pink power froze him in place, his dark sword no more than a centimeter from Arthur’s throat. Glistening lines raced over his armor, connected the water droplets, and flared into a rose-white light too bright to look at.
When the light finally faded and everyone had blinked away the aftereffects, the dark elf was gone.
The few meat-minds still standing threw themselves over the barrier to the lower level, landing five meters down with a disconcerting splat.
“Wicked.”
Diana turned to see Kris smiling at her admiringly.
“And thanks for that, you know, feather thing.”
Diana would have liked to have spent a moment basking in Kris’ admiration, but the wand dropped from numb fingers and a heartbeat later she followed it to the floor, not entirely certain if she wanted to puke or pass out. Unable to decide, she did both.
*
Dean brushed his palm over a depleted spray of lime-green feathers and sighed.“Austin, what happened to my feather duster?”
“Don’t look at me.”
“I thought you knew everything.”
“I do.” Rolling over, he exposed his other flank to the square of sunlight. “I just don’t want you to look at me.”
FIVE
[Êàðòèíêà: img_4]
“IT’S BEEN THREE DAYS.”
“Four,” Austin corrected morosely from his place on the counter. “They left Saturday, it’s now Tuesday.”
“They left at nine-thirty Saturday morning. It’s only eight forty-five.” Dean expertly worked the broom into a corner of the office, capturing an elusive clump of cat hair. “Technically, it hasn’t been four days.”
“You’re amazingly anal about a lot of things, aren’t you?”
“If I’m going to do something, I’m after being accurate.”
Austin sighed and dropped his chin down onto his front paws.“You missed a spot.”
Dean bent to push the broom under the desk. He knew he was displacing his anxiety, but even the hand-waxed shine on the old hardwood floor seemed less, well, shiny than it had.“I miss Claire.”
“I miss her more,” the cat muttered.
“I’m not arguing.” Mostly because he’d finally learned there was no point in arguing with a cat but also because, in this particular instance, there really wasn’t anything to argue about. Austin probably did miss Claire more than he did. The two of them had been through a lot together over the last seventeen years. In fact, given what the three of them had been through over the last nine months, Dean was willing to bet that “been through a lot” didn’t even begin to start covering the highlights of the previous sixteen years.
Straightening, he glanced over at the counter.“I bet you’ve got a lot of great memories.”
“Great memories, good memories, and a few ‘holy crap I can’t believe we survived that’ memories,” Austin agreed. “But don’t get your hopes up, broom boy; I’m not sharing stories of what a cute little Keeper Claire was. Nothing against you personally, it’s just not something cats do.”
“Why not?”
One black ear flicked disdainfully.“Hey, I don’t write the rules.”
“You don’t even follow the rules,” Dean pointed out, frowning down at a set of parallel scratches gouged out by the desk chair. “Before Claire went in, she said they could be in there for a couple of days. We’re already past that estimate.”
“True. But they could still come out yesterday.”
That was enough to pull Dean’s complete attention from the floor. “What?”
“Time on the Otherside runs differently: four days here isn’t necessarily four days there, so they could come out at any time.”
“What?”
Austin sighed and sat up.“If they can come out any time,” he reiterated slowly and distinctly, “then as long as they don’t come out before they left, they can come out yesterday.”