“So what should I do? No, wait.” A raised hand cut off his reply. “Don’t tell me. I should feed the cat.”
“Good choice.” Jumping from the bed to the dresser, he sat down again by his food dish. “You see how much easier life becomes when you concentrate on the essentials?”
The hair Diana had found in Father Harris’ house was very dark at the bottom and very blond at the tip. The style was popular with the male trendies at her school, but she’d never considered it an especially angelic look. Apparently, Lena did.
Technically, the angel—Samuel—was none of her business. Technically, he wasn’t Keeper business at all.
“Mom? Do you have any clear packing tape?”
Attention on breakfast preparations, Martha pointed across the kitchen with the spatula. “It’s in the junk drawer.”
Junk accumulates. Even those with very little, those chased from their homes by war or natural disaster, those for whom home is no more than a rough shack or a circle of barely roofed thatch, even they find themselves accumulating odds and ends for which they have no immediate need. In North American kitchens, the junk drawer can be found two drawers below the cutlery, just above the drawer holding the clean dish towels.
“It’s jammed.”
“Jiggle it.”
Even in houses with no more metaphysical content than could be found in a frozen, microwavable dinner—which at that, has more metaphysical content than actual food content—these drawers contain far more than is physically possible.
“Dart of Abaris, elf shot, scissors, string, Philosopher’s Stone, half a dozen ponytail elastics…” Diana’s eyes widened as she dumped the cloth-covered elastics into a small golden chalice. “Do you even care we could get big bucks for this thing on eBay?” she demanded, brandishing a tiny beanbag polar bear with a maple leaf on his chest.
Her mother glanced up from the toaster. “E what?”
“Gack. Am I the only person in this family who pays attention to this century?”
“Yes.”
“Explains a lot,” she muttered, shoving three plastic forks and a discolored envelope of dried mugwort aside to finally pull out the packing tape. “I’ll be heading into the closet later, so don’t worry if you can’t find me.”
“Diana, we talked about this…”
She sighed and grabbed a piece of toast on her way out of the kitchen. “I’m not going to consciously impose my will on the Otherworld.”
“Again.”
Continuing down the hall, she raised her voice without turning. “It was an accident, Mother.”
“It’s always an accident, Diana, but no one likes replacing all their closet doors.”
“It’s not like I didn’t apologize,” she muttered, shoving the last of the toast in her mouth and grabbing her coat and boots from the front hall. “And, hey, not my bad the tabloids got involved; if you don’t want people to know you have skeletons in your closet, don’t keep skeletons in your closet.” It had been sheer bad luck for that British Keeper that the force of the explosion had blown the tibia out the window and onto the street.
Back in her bedroom with the door securely closed and warded behind her, Diana threw her coat on the bed, pulled off a piece of tape about twenty centimeters long, picked up the angel hair with it, and wrapped it around her wrist. While she hadn’t exactly lied to her mother—she was going into the closet—she’d neglected to mention that she planned on going out the other side, a maneuver generally considered too dangerous to attempt.
The only reason Keepers exited at the same place they entered was plain old lack of imagination as far as Diana was concerned. So what if there were no other geographical references to the real world—she had that covered.
And all she had to do was make a phone call.
“Isn’titabeautifulmorning!Lookatthewaythesnowsparkles!”
Doug sucked muffin out of his teeth. “First cup of coffee, kid?”
“Ican’tbelieveI’vebeenherefortwodaysandIonlyjustdiscoveredthis.” Grinning broadly, Samuel raced down the front steps of St. Mike’s and back up again.
“You have to remember to breathe, kid.”
“I do?” Well, now he did. Sucking in a huge lungful of cold air, he started to cough.
“Cough into your cupped hands,” Doug told him. “Then you breathe in the warmed air.”
It took Samuel a minute to catch on, then another minutes for his lungs to get the idea. Finally, eyes watering, nose running, he looked up and gasped, “Ow.”
Doug nodded agreeably. “Life’s a bitch.”
“A female dog?” Samuel asked, wiping various bodily fluids off his face before they froze.
“Oh, yeah.”
And things were just starting to make sense.…Trying to work out this new worldview, Samuel turned, stiffened, and raced down to the sidewalk. “Are you crazy?” he demanded, yanking the cigarette out from between cracked lips and throwing it on the ground. “You’re destroying your body! You only get one, you know.”
Craig Russel, who’d been smoking since he was twelve and in better economic times had maintained a two-pack-a-day habit, peered out at Samuel from between the tattered ear flaps of his deerstalker, then down at his cigarette lying propped almost on end by a bit of dirty snow. Not entirely certain what had just happened, he squatted and extended fingers stained yellow-brown with nicotine.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Samuel ground the cigarette into pieces and the pieces into the snow. “Those things are bad for you!”
Grizzled brows drew in. “You smashed my smoke.”
“Well, yeah. It’s poison.”
“You smashed my smoke.” Craig stood, slowly, and leaned forward to stare into Samuel’s face. “My last smoke.”
Eyes beginning to water again, Samuel leaned back. “Do you have any idea how bad those things made your breath sm…” His mouth opened and closed a few more times, but no sound emerged. Up on his toes, back arched, he pushed at the air with stiff fingers.
“Let him go, Craig.”
“He smashed my smoke. My last smoke.”
“Yeah, I know, but you keep hold of his balls any longer and people’ll start to talk.”
Craig stared down at his right hand as though he recognized neither it nor the crushed fabric and flesh it held. “He smashed my…”
“No shit. But I bet he’s really, really sorry.” Scratching at a scab buried
