Diana swallowed and found her voice. “Poor Ba…”
THAT’S OUR PUPPY! IS HE GLAD HE’S HOME?
WHO’S A GOOD DOGGIE-WOGGIE, THEN? WHO’S A GOOD BOY!
“Doggie-woggie?” Claire repeated.
Before Hell could answer, Diana dug her nails into Claire’s arm. “Look! She’s still part of the pattern. If you tie the pentagram to her before it fades, she’ll pull the hole in after her!”
Still buzzing from the power she’d passed, it took Claire a heartbeat to understand. “I can close the site?”
“Yes!”
“Forever?”
“Yes!”
Sara’s name had begun to fray. “No.”
“Are you out of your mind? This may be your only chance!”
“No!” Claire yanked her arm free. “Dean’s in there and I’m not closing that hole until he finds his way out.” When Diana began another protest, she cut her off. “Hell can’t hold a willing sacrifice. They have to let him go.”
“They do?”
“If you paid more attention to what was going on and less to what you just happen to be powerful enough to do…” She bit it off. Now was not the time. “Yes. They do.”
“Okay, fine, but they’re not going to help him find his way or give him a boost out, and Sara’s name is already fading! You haven’t got time to wait. Don’t let his sacrifice be in vain.”
Claire reached for more power and poured it into the pentagram. From where she was standing, it was a long reach to the middle of the possibilities. Her vision was starting to blur, and she wasn’t entirely certain she could feel her toes. “I can hold it,” she snarled through clenched teeth. “I can hold it for as long as it takes.”
“All right.” Diana shrugged out of her jean jacket. “Then I’m going in after him.”
“Oh, no, you’re not!” Claire had a strong suspicion she sounded like their mother. At the moment, she didn’t much care. “This isn’t like going across the border for cheap electronics! You want to help, reactivate the conduit and start feeding me…” The “S” tried to straighten out. She forced it back into a curve. “…power.”
“That’d make me part of the seal and we could be stuck here together indefinitely. You want him out, someone has to go and get him.”
“Not you!” A subliminal growl snapped the second “a” back into line. “You’d never survive.”
“But Dean…”
“Dean has the strength of ten because his heart is pure.” Which was when Claire drew a second conclusion from Sara’s choice of sacrifice. Fortunately for Diana, she had other things to deal with at the moment. “The rules protect him.”
“What rules?”
“I know this is hard to believe at seventeen, but there are always rules.” She definitely couldn’t feel her toes and was starting to have doubts about her entire left foot. “It takes extraordinary conditions for the living to pass over and then come…The living!” Eyes locked on the pentagram, Claire grabbed her sister’s arm. “Find Jacques!”
“Jacques’ gone. She blew him into ectoplasmic particles.”
“Then gather him!”
“Me?”
“You’re always complaining how no one ever lets you do anything. Just be careful where you’re pulling power from this close to the pit.”
“You had to ruin it with advice,” Diana complained as she started to spin. “Couldn’t just assume I’d do it right.”
All things considered, Claire felt she had precedent for that assumption, but she let it go as the wind began to swirl around the furnace room. A moment later, a stream of tiny lights poured down from the basement.
“There’s two missing,” Diana panted as the lights refused to coalesce. “I don’t know where they are.”
Vaguely Jacques-shaped, the lights dove into the pit.
“NO!” Claire reached out but caught only a single light.
Teetering as the room continued to spin, Diana stared at her sister in astonishment. “I thought that’s what you wanted him to do?”
“He doesn’t know that! He doesn’t know Dean’s down there. Jacques has still got connections to her, she could’ve dragged him down.”
“So what do we do now?”
Claire gritted her teeth, clenched her fist around the single piece of Jacques she’d managed to save, and dug in. “We wait.”
“Wait?” Diana’s voice rose nearly an octave. “For how long?”
“Until we can’t wait any…” All of a sudden, Claire could feel a familiar twisted touch groping up toward the pentagram. “She’s using her name to pull herself free. Link with me!”
“No! I’ll be stuck with you, holding that thing, and there’ll be two Keepers lost because you can’t let Dean go. Because you feel guilty about how he felt about you when you didn’t feel the same for him and turned to Jacques, who you can’t possibly have a future with instead.”
“Diana! This is no time for relationship therapy!”
“You’ve lost them both. Let them go before she starts this whole thing all over again.”
Her connection to her name had strengthened. The sound of triumphant laughter boiled up over the edges of the pit.
“I’m not leaving them there!”
Diana laid her hand on her sister’s arm and to Claire’s surprise her voice was gentle as she said, “You’re a Keeper. Seal the s…son of a bitch.”
Down in the pit something that had once been Mrs. Abrams’ Baby barked as Dean rose up into the furnace room surrounded by a cloud of tiny lights. When both his feet were on the ground, and before either Claire or Diana could get their mouths shut to say anything, he opened his left hand.
Two lights few out.
Claire peeled her fingers back off her palm. The final light spun up into the air.
Jacques rematerialized.
Dean coughed once and stumbled forward. Together, Claire and Diana eased him down onto the bottom step, then Claire turned back toward the pit.
She could feel Sara clawing her way up her name, closer and closer to the edge of the possibilities. Holding tightly to the seal, Claire broke all the remaining links but Sara’s.
The building shook as the pentagram, etched into solid rock, slid toward the center of itself. The inner edges disappeared. Flickering through the visible spectrum and one or two colors beyond, hundred-year-old words of
