A Little Rhine Must Fall (6 page)

“Granny! Granny!” Megan and Cassidy can hurtling into the room and threw themselves at Carolyn. This was why I put up with her. She loved my kids and they loved her. Kids should have a good relationship with their grandparents and if it meant that I had to eat mud every time she came over, it was worth it. Just chalk it up with dirty diapers, and snot, and sick children vomiting on the floor. Some things were unspeakably disgusting but you had to put up with them if you wanted to have kids.

:Why are you grinning?:
Bastet had followed me into the living room.

“Agh!” Carolyn squealed. “There’s a strange cat in your living room! Call Animal Control!”

I swallowed my first response, rethought my second, and finally went with my third. “This is Bastet. She’s our …umm … new pet.”

Bastet hissed at me. I stuck my tongue out at her when Carolyn wasn’t looking.

“Does Mark know about this?” she asked. As if I was in the habit of sneaking new animals into the house and hiding them from Mark.

“Yes,” I said through tight lips. “He is the one who wanted to keep her.”

“Well, I suppose it’s all right.” Her voice implied the exact opposite with an added dash of “you are a complete idiot and have ruined the life of my son.” It’s amazing what you can say with just a little vocal inflection.

The girls wanted to show Carolyn something in their room and ran off to get it. This gave her far too much time to turn her attention to me. I shuffled uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

“Well,” I started, “if that’s all …”

“Are you gaining weight?” she asked suddenly.

“What!”

“Are you trying to gain weight? You’re getting a little chunky about the waist.” She smiled acidly. “I’m glad to see you embracing your age and realizing how ridiculous it is for an older woman to try to look like a teenager.”

“I’m not trying to gain weight.” If my teeth were clenched any tighter they would crack.

“Really?” Carolyn sounded surprised. “Then are you watching what you eat? You know how easy it is to balloon up when you let yourself go!” She tittered as if she had said something witty and charming.

I looked down at my jeans and baby-doll t-shirt. I thought I looked nice. I wasn’t wearing matching heels and nail polish like Carolyn, but I wasn’t exactly letting myself go.

I saw a thought strike her brain like a lightning bolt. She jerked, stared at me, mouth open, in shock. “You’re pregnant!” she gasped.

I blinked. What to say? Tell the truth? Lie? I waited too long to deny it and had to settle with giving her a wry smile. “Surprise?”

“Does Mark know?” she demanded. Why did she always think that I was hiding stuff from Mark and lying to him? It was insulting! Of course, I
was
hiding stuff and lying, but
she
didn’t know that and shouldn’t assume the worst about me!

“Not yet,” I said hurriedly, “so please don’t say anything to him yet. I want to plan a good surprise.”

“Good? I hardly think it’s
good
news! Aren’t you taking precautions? Why haven’t you been more careful? I don’t have time for another grandchild! Why didn’t you consult me?” She was genuinely outraged.

Sometimes when I get mad I scream and jump around and throw things. Okay.
Most
of the time when I get mad I yell and throw stuff. I was beyond mad this time. I actually saw red.
I
was allowed to worry about the sanity of having another kid. She was only allowed to be encouraging and supportive. I was going to rip her head off.

A yowl stopped me.

Bastet was sitting in front of me. Otis appeared out of nowhere and twined in-between my legs.
:We don’t have time for you to kill her:

I swallowed and returned to reality. I couldn’t kill my motherin-law. No, change that. I
wouldn’t
kill my motherin-law. At least not today.

“You are, of course, entitled to your opinion,” I said stiffly. “Now, if there is nothing else, I need to go. I’ll call and let you know when I’m on my way back.”

Megan and Cassidy finally found the stuffed animals they wanted to show and returned to drag their grandmother off. “We will talk about this later,” she mouthed over their shoulders.

Yeah. I was looking forward to it.

Chapter Six:

Stargate

The next hour was a little confusing for me. As a human I am used to it taking a certain amount of time to get from one spot to another. It does weird things to your brain, popping in and out of places around the world. My brain is fragile enough as it is, I don’t need any help making it odder.

The WAND had created a great system of travel, for all its mind boggling strangeness. They called it a Zipline. It wasn’t quite “Beam me up, Scotty,” since you had to walk into a specific spot and then were instantly transported to a different spot, rather like a cosmic elevator. I have no idea how it worked. I’m assuming magic, but then, I also have no idea how a radio works (I’m assuming science), so I’m not the best judge of what is technically possible in this world.

Several months ago, the WAND had set up a Zipline between Melbourne, my hometown, and Orlando, for the United Supernatural Beings conference. This was now the first leg of our trip. Bastet advised me to park the car since, as she said, we would be traveling on “smaller” Ziplines after we reached Orlando.

I didn’t know what that meant, but I was getting much better at believing six impossible things before (or even after) breakfast and decided to just go with the flow. I was having this conversation with a cat who was talking inside my head, so I couldn’t really quibble about the size of magical Ziplines.

The abandoned gas station, where the first Zipline portal was located, still gave me the heebie-jeebies. It was much harder to approach on foot, even with a goddess curled around my shoulders. I paused before the open garage bay in the back and was promptly stabbed with a sharp set of claws.

“Ow!” I yelled. “Stop it or you’re walking!” She’d fed me some cock-and-bull story about having a long way to go on short legs and needing a ride.

She hopped down, scoring me again with her claws, and stalked forward. Her tail was high and she sniffed the air cautiously. At that moment, if she had said “run” I would have been halfway back to my house in seconds.

“Is there someone here?” I quavered. I still remembered the spectral figure that had admitted us last time. Something about how
humans
who trespassed were turned over to the WAND and never seen again.

:No:
her tail lashed.
:The Zipline is decaying. We think it better that you carry us through. It should hold enough for one trip:

“Whoa! Hold your horses!
One
trip?
Should
hold? What if it doesn’t? What if it does and then we can’t get home?” I was micrometers away from full blown hysteria.

Bastet leaped back up on my shoulders, managing not to poke me this time.
:The Zipline is unattended but still stable. We prefer to only travel on fully charged Ziplines, but that cannot be helped now. If it doesn’t hold then you have nothing to worry about ever again. If it
does
hold, then chances are we won’t make it back from the moon and we won’t have to worry about the return trip:

Ok. There was a lot to take in. The ‘not having to worry about anything again’ was disturbing, but not as disturbing as what was facing me on the moon. So, the good news was that, if I survived the trip out, and the alien encounter on the moon, the most I would have to worry about was dying on the way home.

:Piper? Piper? Are you there?:
Bastet deliberately clawed me.

“Ouch! I said to stop that!”

:Your eyes were open but there was no one home. Cecily said …
sukham wa lutam
!:

That didn’t sound good. I might not speak Arabic but I know a curse word when I hear it.

:Four. We forgot the child. We have to take four of us through. Perhaps we will need to arrange for a different return option:

“Four?”

“Hello, Piper,” came Cecily’s voice from behind me. “Sorry I’m late. I had stop and grab a drink.”

:About time:
Bastet said testily.
:We suggest we enter the Zipline before it decays any further. We don’t mind taking chances but stupidity is another matter entirely:

Cecily cocked her head to one side and studied the empty bay. I have no idea what she was looking at. It looked like any old dirty garage to me.

“It should hold the three of us,” she announced.

:Four:

“Four?”

I grimaced and pointed to my belly. “Pregnant. Remember?”

Cecily smiled, her face transformed to soft gentleness. She took a step forward, placed her hand upon my stomach, closed her eyes and whispered, “Hello, little one.”

I pushed her hand off. I had never cared for people touching my tummy (what is it about a pregnant belly that makes perfect strangers feel comfortable about walking up and touching you?), and the way Cecily smiled at my baby made me get all teary-eyed and emotional.

“Are we going to step in or what?” I growled.

Bastet gripped even tighter with her claws, making me wince, and said
:It’s not going to get
more
stable:

We stepped through and the garage subtly shifted to
another
rundown garage, presumably in Orlando.

I looked around. “That wasn’t so bad,” I ventured.

Cecily brushed some invisible lint off her perfectly creased slacks, flashed me some fang and gripped my hand in her cold one, “That was a short zip, this will be the long one.”

She pulled me another step into the garage and I had time to mentally scream, “We’re all going to—” before we were there.

“—die!” I gasped aloud.

:What?:

Cecily gently pried her hand lose from my death grip and grinned. “I have given up on trying to figure out what goes on in Piper’s mind. It is a mystery best left for another date.”

I stuck my tongue out and looked around. We were
not
in Orlando. “I don’t think it’s Kansas either,” I muttered.

:What?:

“I tried to warn you,” Cecily said under her breath.

The light was different. It was still daytime and very, very hot, but the sun was clearly setting, and we had left Melbourne in the morning. We were in some sort of deserted ally. Brown clay walls with open doorways clued me in to the fact that, not only was this not Kansas, it also wasn’t the Continental United States. Maybe the sun should have told me that too, but sometimes my brain can be a little slow when pulled across the globe in a flash.

“Where are we?” I asked.

Bastet jumped down from my shoulders and gave the nearest wall a loving rub.
:Home:
she purred.

“Home?” I looked around. Down at the other end of the alley I could catch glimpses of people strolling by. The women were wearing brightly colored scarves over their hair. I followed Cecily down to the alley mouth and gasped. Poking over the top of the buildings was a huge triangular shape.

“Egypt!” I squeaked. “We’re in
Egypt?
”

Cecily looked back over her shoulder at me. “Ziplines to the moon are not easy to create.”

“Meaning?”

:The power has to be funneled. For jumps around the globe, any shape will do. But the moon …:

I followed Bastet’s gaze to the Great Pyramid. My eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to tell me that we have to
climb
that?”

Cecily nodded. “And we’d better get a move on. The pyramid complex should be closing now.”

“Then how are we going to get in?”

She gave me a pointed look.

“Oh, no! No. No. No! I am
not
using the Voice here! We don’t even know if it works in a foreign language!”

:All the antiquities guards speak English:

“No!” I protested, not that anyone was listening.

Cecily took off down the road. I was happy I’d decided to wear tennis shoes this morning. It made it easier to keep up with her long stride.
She
was wearing four-inch spike heels and was still leaving me in the dust.

The road slanted up and I was almost too busy panting and gasping for breath to watch all the tourists milling about. Skeletal horses strained to pull heavy tourist carts up and down the hill. I about tripped over my feet as a camel swayed by. The colors, the movement, it was hypnotizing.

Cecily turned impatiently and motioned me forward. We entered a flat parking lot. A tall stone wall blocked my view of the bottom of the Pyramids. They were
huge
! I mean, I’d seen pictures, but I’d never imagined how
big
they were! And I was going to have to climb one.

Several uniformed guards were ushering people out of a gate and preparing to lock it.

“Hurry up!” Cecily hissed. “I don’t want to have to jump the wall in this skirt.”

I looked at her skirt. Then I looked at the wall. It was twenty feet tall if it was an inch. I shook my head.

“Move your rear, Piper!” Cecily called.

Move my rear! I’d show her ‘move my rear.’ After I caught my breath. And had a heart attack. Being a full time mom does not give you a lot of time to hit the gym.

“How is everyone else getting in?” I panted, bent over at the waist, hands on knees, trying to draw more oxygen into my lungs.

“Get us past the guards and then I’ll answer anything you want,” Cecily said.

I looked around. “Where’d Bastet go?”

Cecily grinned. “She has her own ways of getting in. Now, get us past the guards!”

She dropped a few feet behind me as I approached the gate.

“No entrance! No entrance!” the guard said in a bored voice. He probably was tired of riding herd on a bunch of stupid tourists all day long.

“We will go in,” I commanded in the Voice.

He blinked at me and stopped pulling the gate closed. “You will let us in,” I commanded again.