“You look like you’re having a bad day. Is there something I can do to help?”
She was about his age, her name was Mary, she was up from the States for a music festival, and she had, not only a set of jumper cables, but a set long enough to reach from her battery to his. “My brother bought them for me,” she told him tossing a waist-length braid back over her shoulder as she efficiently hooked the two vehicles together. “There, try it now.”
The truck turned over on the first attempt. Dean hit the parking brake, put it in neutral, and got out to help Mary coil her cables.
“Is that your cat?” she asked as Austin put his paws up on the dashboard and peered out at them.
“Not exactly.”
“Ah.” She nodded wisely. “Your girlfriend’s cat. You have the look of a man in over his head.”
As she bent to put the cables in the trunk, Dean was horrified to see the hockey bag rise up from behind the seats and attempt to take flight. He gestured wildly at Austin, who made a rude gesture in return just as the bag slid forward, hit the seat, and knocked Austin’s feet out from under him. On the bright side, bag and cat were out of sight by the time Mary turned. Dean thanked her in a hurry, shook her hand, yanked his feet out of the tar, and dove back into the truck.
The bag was on the floor on the passenger side. Austin was on the bag, smacking random bits of covered basilisk. “I’m getting too old for this kind of…” A fast right, quickly followed by a left hook, quelled an incipient uprising. “…shit.”
“If you hadn’t run down my battery, we’d be home by now!”
“Oh, so it’s my fault you had to be rescued by a girl?”
“Yeah. It is. Your fault.” He glanced up, noticed Mary frowning at him, waved, put the truck in gear, and started for home. In over his head. That pretty much summed up his life of late.
He needed Claire back in the worst way.
* * *
Sam knew he was supposed to be calm, cool, and collected—although he had no idea of just what he was supposed to collect. He knew that he, as a cat, should be an example of self-confident serenity to the horde of mall elves, armed and armored from sporting goods, who were about to go into battle against the forces of evil.
Sporting goods aside, this wasn’t going to be battle by Disney.
He had a feeling that even as an angel, he’d sucked at serenity. Unfortunately, since that whole Soldier of the Lord thing would come in handy right about now, the more time he spent in fur, the less he remembered about his life BC. Before cat.
Back and forth across the top of the shelves that defined the open court around the fire pit. He couldn’t stop pacing.
The unmistakable of sound of a two-fingered whistle echoed through the enclosed space, instantly silencing the babble of conversation. A dozen heads of exotic hair turned toward the sound.
“Dudes! Listen up.” Red braid swinging across the broad shoulders of his hockey pads, Will nodded toward Arthur, who stood beside him on a chair pulled away from a kitchen set in home furnishings. “Our fearless leader’s got something to say!”
The Immortal King looked out at the crowd, his blue eyes sweeping from face to face, refusing to be hurried. Under his black leather jacket, he was wearing an umpire’s padded breastplate. In his left hand, he held a pair of heavy leather gauntlets from gardening supplies. In his right, he held Excalibur.
It was so quiet Sam could hear only the faint creak of plastic padding. It was almost as though the mall elves were holding their breath, waiting for their leader to speak.
The ringing crash of the aluminum bat bouncing loudly across the tiles spun everyone around. They watched in unison until the bat finally hissed to a stop under Kith’s raised boot. Then they all looked at Sam.
He hadn’t even noticed the bat before he knocked it off the shelf.
Ignoring the pounding of his heart, and pretty sure he’d just lost the first of the alleged nine lives, he sat down and wrapped his tail pointedly around his front paws. Given the overwhelming, all encompassing level of noise, he didn’t think he could pull off the classic “I meant to do that” expression, so he settled for the slightly less difficult “What?” aimed directly at Arthur. Unable to help themselves, the elves turned again, searching for what he was staring at.
Poets knew that cats looked at kings because poets were no more immune than anyone else when it came to discovering what cats were staring at.
Arthur sighed. “You called me here,” he said after a moment, “to make you one people. To stop the bickering that made you easy prey for the darkside. To teach you how to hold the line against the darkside and say, this far you shall go and no farther. This I have done. You are one people. You act as one against the darkside. You hold the line. But it is no longer enough. The darkside has taken one of us and one of the Keepers who came to set us free. We cannot just hold the line while Kris and Diana are in the hands of our enemies.
