“The site?”
“No, democracy.”
“Uh, not yet.”
“Crap. You wouldn’t believe the amount of paperwork it generates.” She sighed and pushed away from the desk, giving Claire her first good look at the computer system nearly buried in shoe boxes.
“Is that one of the new 200MHz processors?”
“New? It was obsolete months ago. History. That’s why it’s here. So, since I tend to discourage social visits, what can I do for you?”
It took Claire a moment to get past her anger at Diana and remember. “Kingston, Ontario, 1945; two Keepers stopped another Keeper from gaining control of Hell.”
“How nice for us all.”
“I need to know how they did it.”
“Damned if I know.” When Claire frowned, the Historian sighed. “Keepers, no sense of humor.” She pointed an ink-stained finger along the bookshelves. “The forties are about a hundred yards that way. The year you’re looking for was bound in green.” Then, muttering, “Hansen,” over and over to herself, she opened up a shoe box that had once held a size nine-and-a-half cross trainer, and pulled out a digital tape. The plastic case appeared to be slightly charred. “When you get home, tell your sister I’d like to have a word.”
The padlock slid into her hand with a satisfactory plop. Diana slipped it into her pocket and returned her attention to the key ring. Dean had the master neatly labeled with a piece of adhesive tape.
All she had to do now was push.
Heart pounding, she gripped the doorknob.
I’ll just bring Aunt Sara up to partial consciousness, ask her a few questions, and take her back down again. Piece of cake.
What good was power if she never got to use it? Claire was going to be so pissed when she got home and found her younger sister had all the answers.
Sara, herself, turned out to be a bit of a disappointment.
While the old adage, the more human evil looks the more dangerous it is, was undeniably true, Diana had been expecting at least some outward indication of the heinous crime Sara had attempted—small horns, visible scars, overdue library books—but from the look of things, she hadn’t even been having a bad hair day. The only incongruous point about her whole body was that her very red lips glistened, dust free.
…but had there not been problems with the sacrificial virgin, the Keepers would never have arrived in time. Not until Aunt Sara had Margaret Anne Groseter suspended over the pit and had made the first cut did she realize that the girl, although only fifteen was not suitable.
Feeling as though the big green binder of 1945, Kin to Kip, had just smacked her on the back of the head, Claire read that paragraph again.
Margaret Anne Groseter.
“Mr. Smythe told me that she lived in the house next door her whole life. He said it used to be Groseter’s Rooming House and Mr. Abrams was a roomer who didn’t move fast enough and got broadsided.”
“It’s not possible.”
For Mrs. Abrams to have been fifteen in 1945, she had to have been born in 1930. Which would put her in her late sixties. With a virtual thumb blocking the bouffant orange hair of a mind’s eye view, Claire supposed it was possible.
“I used to be quite progressive in my younger days.”
It was, Claire reflected, occasionally terrifying knowing the exact measure of the fulcrum that Fate used to lever the world.
Stepping through the shield, Diana had a momentary qualm. The emanations rising from the sleeper were stronger than she’d expected. It wouldn’t be easy accessing power surrounded by such potent malevolence.
“On the other hand,” she cracked her fingers and moved up to the head of the bed, “if it were easy, everybody’d be doing it.”
…however, it took the combined strength of both Keepers to achieve the necessary balance of power between Sara and the pit, and even then she nearly broke free of their restraints.
Given the urgency of the situation, the Keepers on the scene felt it best to use a slam, bam, thank you, ma’am approach.
The Historian clearly believed in making history accessible to the masses.
Reaching carefully through the middle possibilities for power, Diana trickled a tiny amount into the matrix that held Sara asleep.
As the patterns in the dark emanations changed, a howling Austin raced into the room, trailing a cloud of shed fur. “Diana, stop! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
I TOLD YOU NOT TO WORRY ABOUT THE SECOND KEEPER. SHE’S HELPING US!
DO WHAT?
SHUT UP AND BE READY.
The cat gathered himself to leap just as Sara’s lips parted and drew a long breath in past the edges of yellowed teeth.
NOW!
At the top of an infinite number of voices, Hell shouted Sara’s name up the conduit.
With the seepage added to Diana’s power, the balance tipped.
Sara opened her eyes.
Her own eyes wide, Diana tried to block the power surge. One second. Two. A force too complicated for her shields to stop slammed into her, dropping her to her knees.
Yowling, Austin landed on the end of the bed.
Sara smiled and raised a finger.
The energy flare caught him full in the face, lifted him into the air, and smashed him against the wall between the two windows. The first bounce dropped him into the remains of the fern. The second dropped him unresisting to the floor.
“NO!” Unable to stand, Diana crawled toward the body. A warm hand clamped down on one shoulder stopped her cold.
“I don’t think so.”
As Sara’s grip dragged her around to face the bed, Diana put up no resistance. When Sara’s eyes met hers, she grabbed for all the power she could handle and smashed it down on the other Keeper like a club.
Sara didn’t even bother swatting it aside. She absorbed it, twisted it, and wrapped it around Diana like a shroud. “My mouth tastes like the inside of a sewer,” she muttered, running her tongue over her teeth. “Christ on churches, but I could use a cigarette.”
…unfortunately, as both Keepers were drawn from troops about to leave for the European theater, this temporary solution…
“Claire Hansen?”
“In a minute. I’ve almost got it”
“Suit yourself, Keeper, but I just got an e-mail telling me to reactivate that bit of history you’re reading.”
Claire looked up from the binder. “What do you mean reactivate?”
“Probably got a couple of loose ends tying themselves up.”
“Probably?” Claire scrambled to her feet. Any loose ends had come untied since she’d left. “What’s happening?”
“How should I know? I don’t mess with the present I do history. Put the book back on the shelf before you…” The Historian sighed and moved a black three onto a red four as Claire raced away through the ages. “And they wonder why I don’t like company.”
“Would it have hurt them to have dusted me on occasion? I don’t think so.” Lifting a thrashing Diana about three feet off the floor, Sara tied the laces of the young Keeper’s black high-tops together and used them as a handle to drag her through the air toward the door.
Chewing on the power gag that held her silent, Diana dug her fingers into the doorjamb.
“Let go or lose them, your choice.” It was clearly a literal offer. “I, personally, don’t care. I know what you’re thinking,” she continued as Diana reluctantly released the wood. “You’re thinking that all you have to do is delay me and sooner or later more Keepers will arrive. Well, they won’t. And do you know why? Of course not, you’re a child….”