“You wouldn’t get salmon.” She stroked a hand down his back. “Wait here.” Kith and Teemo glanced around as she approached the barricade and then returned to staring down the stairs into the lower level. As far as Claire could tell, it looked like the lower level of the West Gardner’s Mall. No eldritch mists. No skulking shadows. No shambling hulks of darkside muscle.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
That wasn’t good.
“Any sign of Diana and Kris?”
“Nada.” Teemo scratched in through the ripped armpit of his now sleeveless Spider-man T-shirt—looking less like the semimythical creature he was becoming and more like the fifteen-year-old he’d been. “There was some crap-ass music playing, but it stopped a while ago. Don’t worry about your blood, Keeper, Kris’ll keep her safe. She’s one sneaky bi…Ow!” He shot a pained glance over his shoulder at Kith. “I wasn’t gonna say bitch!” he protested. “I was gonna say…uh…”
Kith raised a remarkably sardonic eyebrow.
“Never mind what I was gonna say. I wasn’t talkin’ to you nohow.” He turned his back on the other elf with such exaggerated indignation, he reminded Claire of Austin. “Kris’ll keep your sister safe,” he repeated. “Arthur already said that if we see any shit happening, we should let you know.”
“Thank you.” She didn’t recognize the elf on guard at the hexagonal opening until she got close enough to see the features under the lime-green hair. “Daniel?”
“Hey, Keeper.”
She’d only walked down to the end of the small corridor, been outside for a minute, two at the most. Three on the absolute outside. How had he had time to…? “What did you do to your hair?”
He pulled a strand forward, looked at it, looked at her like she was asking a trick question. “Uh, dyed it. Wicked look, right?”
The second hand on her watch zipped around from the eight to the two, then slowed.
She hated time distortions.
“Right. It’s very…green.” And not something she was responsible for. “Listen, I was wondering, do you know where the access to the roof is?”
“The roof?”
Claire leaned back and pointed up. “There’s got to be an access. There’s parking and there’s handrails.”
“Okay.” Daniel squinted into the gray light currently substituting for actual sky. “I never seen any stairs, but there’s an elevator down by the security office. I seen the sign on food court runs.”
“Where’s the security office?”
Leaning over the Lucite barrier, he pointed down the left side of the lower level. “It’s not too far past the bottom of the stairs ’cept you go along the other hall.”
“It’s on the darkside?”
“Arthur says it’s sort of territory we both claim, but yeah.”
“Do you know if it works?”
“The security office?”
“The elevator.”
“No friggin’ idea, Keeper.”
“Okay…” This was very bad. “They could come through the skylight. You’ll have to watch up as well as down.”
“Through the skylight?” Daniel repeated, glancing up again.
“Yes.”
“That kinda sucks.”
“Yes. It does.” Pivoting on one heel, Claire headed for the department store and nearly tripped over Sam.
“I’ve been thinking.”
“Good. Think and walk; I have to warn Arthur.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Assassinating the Immortal King makes sense—cut the head off the snake and the snake dies.”
“What do snakes have to do with anything?”
“Sorry, angel leftover. We…they…use snake analogies a lot. You know, up there. Occupational hazard.” He jumped up onto the edge of a planter and hooked all five claws on one front paw into Claire’s skirt, dragging her to a halt. “If I was the darkside, and if this whole segue thing meant enough to me, I’d drop an assassin in during the battle when no one would notice. If the dark elf wins, the assassin helps the meat-minds pick off the mall elves. If the dark elf loses, then it finds a place to lay low until it gets its chance. Bada bing, bada boom.”
She pulled her skirt free. “Another leftover angel thing?”
“No, I’ve been watching The Sopranos with your dad. Look, it makes sense for the darkside to kill Arthur, but it doesn’t make any sense for them to drop an assassin in now after the battle when all the elves are on full alert.”
Claire looked back at Teemo and Kith on the barricade. At Daniel. Were there more shadows on the upper concourse than there had been?
It was definitely too quiet.
“You’re right,” she said. And started to run.
Sam jumped down and raced after her. “At the risk of sounding last millennia; duh.”
* * *
Sunlight streamed down through the skylight into the food court, bright enough to wash away the light spilling from the bulbs over each table. Bright enough to wash away the shadows.
Kris frowned. “There’s never been sunlight before.”
“It’s probably coming through from the real world. This end of the mall’s almost totally matched up. We haven’t got much time.”
“Is this the sort of stuff you and your sister need to know?”
“No. This is the sort of stuff we pretty much already knew. We have to go deeper in. We need to see who more than what.” Diana dunked her face into a filled sink, trying to rinse away the soap she’d used to remove the lipstick camouflage. Man, that stuff could remove freckles! When she surfaced, Kris was waiting with a paper towel. “Thanks.” The towel was only marginally less destructive than the soap, and they were both an exact match for supplies in women’s washrooms worldwide. Diana made a mental note to check the supplier when they got home. This could be a foothold situation that the Lineage had missed for years. And the toilet paper was definitely Hellish.
“So,” Kris grunted, leaning against a stall and watching Diana in the mirror, “what now?”
“Now, unless we open the door and there’s a power-of-darkness coffee klatch happening close enough for us to eavesdrop on, we need to get to the Emporium. It’s as close to the anchor as we’ve ever come.” She tossed the damp paper in the wastebasket and turned to face a skeptical mall elf.
“It’s where you two came through. They’ll be guarding it.”
“You’ve taken me
