“Good thing you had your cat with you, eh?” Dark brows drew in. He scratched at stubble. “Actually, I don’t think you’re supposed to bring your cat in here.”
The possibilities were adjusted slightly. “It’s okay.”
“Cool. You want another drink?”
“Why not.” Since she’d already been distracted enough to nearly lose a finger, Claire figured she was entitled to watch as he walked away from her booth in the darkest corner of the nearly empty bar.
Austin horked a dark bit of something up onto the cracked Naugahyde seat. “You’re thinking about Dean, aren’t you?”
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,
