Fingers in her mouth, Claire ignored him.
He snorted. “Good thing you had your cat with you, eh?”
Just outside of Renfrew, Claire stood on a deserted stretched of highway and stared at the graffiti spray painted twenty feet up a limestone cliff. The hole, situated between the “u” and the “c” had turned the most popular of Anglo-Saxon profanities into a metaphysical instruction.
Before Austin could ask, she shoved frozen fingers deeper into her coat pockets and sighed. “Yes. I am. Now, drop it.”
“I was only going to mention that Dean would know exactly what cleaning supplies you’re going to need to get that paint off the rock.”
“Sure you were.”
On the opposite shoulder of the road, someone slapped a handprint into the condensation covering the windows of their parked Buick.
Against all expectations, Diana enjoyed the decorating committee meetings.
“So it’s settled; for this year’s Christmas dance we use a snowflake motif.” Stephanie’s smile could cut paper. “And, Lena, I don’t want to hear another word about angels.”
“But angels…”
“Have been done to death by all and/or sundry. Get over it.”
Watching Stephanie cut through the democratic process with all the precision of a chainsaw sculptor was significantly more amusing than watching the cafeteria’s hot lunch gel into something approaching a life-form.
“Diana…”
Jerked out of her reverie, Diana fought the urge to come to attention. Tall and blonde, Stephanie wouldn’t have looked out of place in jackboots, provided she could find a purse to match, and someday she’d run a Fortune 500 company with the same ruthless élan she used to run Medway High. Unfortunately for the world at large, Keepers weren’t permitted to make preemptive strikes.
“…since we’re trying to make this place look less like a gymnasium, I want you to make a snowflake pattern out of white-and-gold streamers about five feet down from those incredibly ugly ceiling tiles.”
Diana glanced up at the ceiling, then over at Stephanie. The gym was probably thirty feet high, and it would take scaffolding to reach anything higher than the tops of the basketball backboards. The odds of the custodians building that scaffolding were slightly lower than the odds of any member of the senior basketball team being picked up by the pros. At zero and thirteen, the senior basketball team couldn’t even get picked up by the cheerleaders. “You want me to what?”
“Try to pay attention. I want you to hide the ceiling behind a crepe-paper snowflake.” Stephanie met Diana’s incredulous gaze with a level blue stare, assuming compliance.
Although not the uninvolved stick in the mud Claire had been during high school, Diana had tried to give the whole Keeper thing the requisite low profile. Given how generally pointless she found the whole public school system, it hadn’t always been easy, but she’d made it to her final year without anyone pointing and screaming “Witch!” Well, no one anyone who mattered listened to, anyway.
So what had Stephanie seen?
And bottom line, did it matter?
“A crepe-paper snowflake?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
It was an ugly ceiling.
Meeting over, Lena fell into step beside her as they left the gym. “You’re the senior student on the committee, not Stephanie, so if you wanted angels…” Her voice trailed off suggestively, having applied the maximum emphasis allowed.
“It was the committee or a month of detention,” Diana reminded her. “But I don’t think angels are a good idea.”
Lena looked crushed. “Why not?”
“Flaming swords, smiting the ungodly…”
“Angels aren’t like that!”
“Maybe not the ones you run into, but the problem is, you can never be sure.”
“Of what?”
“Of what kind of angel you’re running into.”
Lena thought about that for a moment, then, as Diana headed into the first of her afternoon classes, muttered, “My mother’s right. You’re weird.”
With over three million people, Toronto had two working Keepers, one very elderly Keeper plugging an unclosable site out in Scarborough, and half a dozen Cousins monitoring the constant metaphysical flux—one of whom had made a small fortune following the stock market in his spare time. He said he found the relative calm relaxing.
The Summons took Claire to the College Park subway station on the University line where ninety-six hours previously a government worker from one of the nearby offices had been pushed from the platform. At the time, the old Red Rocket had been three hundred meters away grinding its slow way north. The intended victim had plenty of time to dust himself off, climb back onto the platform, and threaten the man who’d pushed him with an audit—but that was moot. Inept evil was still evil and a hole had opened at the edge of the platform.
For the next three days, it spewed bits of darkness out onto commuters in the morning and gathered them up again in the evening larger and darker. It was probably a coincidence that members of the Ontario government, arriving daily at the legislature building only a block away, proposed a bill to close half the province’s hospitals and cut education spending by 44% during those three days since it was highly unlikely that any member of the ruling Conservative party took the subway to work.
By the time Claire got to the site, the hole was huge and thousands of government employees had arrived at their jobs in a bad mood and left in a worse one—which was pretty much business as usual only more so.
Just after midnight, the platform was essentially deserted. A group of teenagers, isolated in headphones and sunglasses, loitered at one end and an elderly woman wrapped in at least four layers of clothing and surrounded by a circle of grimy shopping bags glared at her from the other.
With a sigh, Claire shifted the cat carrier to her other hand and walked reluctantly forward, wondering why she couldn’t see through the glamour. When she got close enough, and the scent of unwashed clothing and treasured garbage overwhelmed the winter-chilled metal, machine scent of the subway, she realized that she couldn’t see through the glamour because there wasn’t one.
“Hey, tuna!” A black nose pressed up against the screen at the front of the carrier, then suddenly recoiled with a sneeze. “Six days old, wrapped in a gym sock previously worn by someone with a bad case of toe rot, and I’d rather not be any closer.” He sneezed again. “Can we go now?”
“No. And keep your voice down. We’re in a public place.”
“I’m not the one talking to luggage.”
At the outer edge of the shopping bags, her eyes were watering. Nothing could smell so bad on its own, it had to have been carefully crafted. Claire was thankful she’d never had to study under this particular Keeper. This afternoon we’ll be combining the scents of old cheese and the stale vomit/urine combination found in the backs of certain taxis… Like life wasn’t already dangerous enough?
“You Claire?”
“Yes.” At least the other Keeper wasn’t insisting on using the traditional and ridiculous “Aunt Claire.”
“Are you Nalo?”
“I am. So, where is he?”
Claire blinked at the other Keeper. “Pardon?”
“Your young man. I heard at Apothecary’s that one of us made an actual connection with a Bystander.” She craned her neck, showing a remarkable amount of dirty collar. “Did he have trouble finding parking?”
There was absolutely no point in suggesting it was none of her business.
“We’re not traveling together anymore.”
“You’re not? Why not? I heard he was a looker and pure of heart, too.” One eye closed in an unmistakable wink. “If you know what I mean.”