Meryat swatted him aside. Lost a little flesh tone in the use of power but quickly gained it back as Dean seemed to shrink in on himself.
“Hold hard, you ancient and perfidious evil!”
Her attention lifted off Dean. “What?”
Austin muzzily wondered much the same from where he sprawled against the headboard. When he was a kitten, perfidious and evil meant the same thing.
Bounding out of the wardrobe, Lance twirled a line of linen across the room.
Meryat stared at him in disbelief for a heartbeat, then laughed and raised a hand. “Foolish b…OW!”
As the linen looped around her neck, Dean slid off the edge of the bed. It had taken everything he had left to overcome the years of training that Meryat had called his tragic flaw but, in the end, he’d managed a solid kick in the ankle. Now his back hurt, he had an intense craving for prune juice, and he couldn’t actually hear what Lance was shouting. Wasn’t entirely sure it was English. That’s the trouble with kids today, talk a language all their own. It’s all the fault of that MT…Whoa. Suddenly, he felt a lot better.
Meryat wasn’t looking too good.
A finger dropped off and shattered to dust against the floor.
Lance wrapped another loop of linen around her body and kept shouting.
Another finger fell. The rest of her followed about seven syllables later.
Dean covered his mouth and nose as a fine particulate rose and settled.
“Dr. Rebik!”
The archaeologist now looked only five or six years older than his driver’s license picture. Which wasn’t exactly good, but he inarguably looked better than he had been.
“Lance!”
In turn, Lance no longer looked like he’d taken too many hits from a croc.
Although he still looked Australian.
As the professor and his grad student caught up, Dean stood and leaned over the bed. “You all right?”
Austin checked extremities, sneered in the general direction of the reunion, and reluctantly admitted he was fine.
“Good. I’ll be after getting the vacuum, then.”
The sheer enormity of what her sister—her older, responsible sister—had done shouldered its way past loss and grief. Diana felt as though she was thinking clearly for the first time since Kris’ sacrifice. And Claire so didn’t want to know what she was thinking. She’d been hurt before, upset, now she was angry. “I can’t believe you did that!”
“Believe it!”
When Rules were broken, there were consequences.
Claire slammed the door closed, counted to ten, and yanked it open. They stepped through together.
They stepped from the lower concourse into a children’s clothing store.
“You’ve permanently warped it,” Diana snapped as she tightened her hold on Sam and they ran for the next storefront.
“I had to save Dean!”
“Sure you did!” Because Claire could do what Claire wanted and too bad if anyone or what anyone else needed to do got in her way.
Jeans store.
Fabric store.
They ran past the watching elves and tried the other side of the concourse.
The doors opened only to their singular, prosaic destination.
They couldn’t cross back over.
When Rules were broken, there were consequences.
Squirming free, Sam jumped up onto the edge of a planter and looked from Claire to Diana. “So, we’re stuck here?”
“Looks like!” Diana’s lip curled. “Because Ms. I Always Have to Have My Own Way had to save Dean at the expense of everyone else!”
“I was not going to let him die!”
Less than an arm’s length between them now. Voices raised and getting louder. The mall elves started studying the tiles, the light fixtures, the cat.
“Did you even once think of me?” Diana snarled.
Claire snorted. “Do you ever think of anything but yourself?”
Sam dropped back onto the floor.
“Oh, fine talk from someone who goes on and on about sacrifice to the greater good and who just condemned my…condemned Kris to save her boyfriend!”
The shrieks of pain sounded pretty much simultaneously. In the silence that followed, Sam returned to the planter.
Claire rubbed at the blood on her ankle, looked up to see Diana doing the same, realized the tears were not from the cat scratches and reached out. “Oh, Kitten, I’m sorry.”
Things got a little damp and mushy for the next few minutes, embraces awkward because of the packs but determined.
“Well done,” Arthur murmured by Sam’s shoulder. “I had begun to think I should intervene.”
“That would have worked, too,” Sam admitted. “But you probably wouldn’t have liked the result.”
“Oh?”
“Common enemy.”
“But you…”
“Are a cat.”
“Right.”
Caught up in the circle of Claire’s arm, Diana sniffled and raised her head. “You haven’t called me Kitten in years.”
“You started hitting me when I did it.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“And then you filled my bed with butterscotch pudding.”
“Technically, I turned your sheets to pudding, but I can see why you stopped.”
They separated slowly, wiped tears, and mirrored watery smiles.
“Rough day.”
“Yeah.”
“Diana, Kris…”
“I know. We’ll save her. And I’ve figured out how to get us home.”
* * *
“Diana, I’m not a teenager.”
Diana straightened her pack straps, then bent down and scooped Sam off the floor. “Look, it’s after hours, you’re with a teenager and a cat, and we’ve got a mirror we definitely didn’t pay for—it’s covered.”
Shunk kree. Shunk kree.
“That certainly sounds like it’s covered,” Claire admitted. She closed her good hand around the edge of Jack’s frame. “Jack, are you sure?”
“I just want out of the mall. The guesthouse sounds fabulous and…Hello! Fingerprints on my glass!”
“Sorry.”
Shunk kree. Shunk kree.
Sam tucked his head up under Diana’s chin. “What’s taking him so long?”
They were alone on the lower concourse, Arthur and the elves back in the department store in an effort to minimize time distortions. Good-byes had been perfunctory at best.
“I’ll be back with Kris as soon as I find her. Now go away, or this will never work!”
Claire thought she could smell the fire, could definitely hear the music. Actually, now that the mall was nothing more than a place on the Otherside, they could probably hear the music at the Girl Guide camp. The mall elves were great kids, but she could see why Jack didn’t want to stay.
Shunk kree. Shunk kree.
The circle
