Long Hot Summoning

Throwing her backpack over one shoulder, Diana raced out the front door and rocked to a halt at the sight of the orange tabby crossing the front lawn. Or more specifically, at the sight of what dangled from the cat’s mouth. With one of its disproportionately long arms barely attached and dragging on the grass, and something that looked like intestine wrapped around one bare ankle, the bogey was unquestionably dead. An eyeball bounced gently against its bloody forehead with every step. “Nice catch,” she noted, half her attention on the approaching bus. “Where did you find it?”

“Ood ‘ile,” Sam told her proudly, his voice distorted by the body.

“You know you can’t eat it, right?”

Amber eyes narrowed, he let the bogey drop and fixed Diana with an incredulous glare. “Do I look like an idiot?”

“No, but you haven’t been a cat for very long . . .” Six months ago, he’d been an angel. Angels didn’t concern themselves with the small things that slipped through the possibilities. “. . . and you know how my mother feels about that whole puking on the white wool rug thing.”

“Once! I did it once!”

“Yeah, so did I, and she’s never let me forget it either.” With a scream of abused brake linings, the bus stopped more or less at the end of the driveway. “I don’t have time to bury it now, so try to leave it where Mom’s not going to trip over it.” Turning, she took two steps and turned again, pulled around by the weight of Sam’s regard. “Oh, right. Sorry. You are a mighty hunter. Your skill with tooth and claw is amazing. Fast. Deadly. I stand in awe.”

“Hey! Sarcasm.”

“Not sarcasm,” Diana protested hurriedly. There were any number of imaginative places the dead bogey could be left. “But I’ve got to go. Mr. Watson won’t wait forever.”

“I’m amazed Mr. Watson stops at all.”

“Yeah, well, need provides and all that. Remember, I’ll be home early,” she added, trotting backward up the path, “just in case there’s anything you don’t want me to catch you doing.”

A presented cat butt made his opinion of that fairly plain.

Mr. Watson looked more nervous than impatient. He nodded a silent reply to Diana’s cheerful good morning, closed the door practically on her heels, and jerked the bus into gear. Had Diana not already been reaching into the possibilities, she’d have landed on her ass as he burned rubber trying to outrun half-buried memories.

Fully burying them would have messed with his ability to drive, so only the less likely edges had been fuzzed out, leaving him in a perpetual state of nearly remembering things he’d rather not. Which was actually a state fairly common among school bus drivers.

Diana tried not to resent his attitude, but it wasn’t easy. This semester alone she’d stopped a black pudding from devouring an eighth grader, saved Chrissy Selwick from a three-headed dog attracted to the aconite in the herbal body mist she’d been given for Christmas-might as well have had “eat me” tattooed on her forehead-and prevented a Gameboy™ from taking over the world. Handheld computer games were more competitive than most people thought.

She’d also stopped Nick Packwood from hanging a second grader out the window by his heels, but since she still wasn’t entirely certain the kid hadn’t deserved it, she usually left that particular incident off her “reasons Mr. Watson should thank his gods I’m on the bus” list.

Making her way back through the rugrats, Diana noticed without surprise that the last six rows-the rows reserved for the high school students on the route-were nearly empty. On this, the last day of the high school year, only two freshmen had been unable to find alternative transportation. “My brother was going to give me a ride/‘ said the first as she passed. ”But he had to go to work really early.“

“Yeah. I was going to ride my bike, but I had, like, an asthma attack,” the other explained, holding up his inhaler for corroboration.

Diana ignored them both. First, because a senior acknowledging freshmen would open up all sorts of possibilities she had no desire to deal with. Second, as the youngest, and therefore most powerful Keeper, as one of the Lineage who maintained the mystical balance of the world, as someone who had helped dose a hole to Hell and faced down demons, she didn’t need to justify her reasons for taking the bus.

Settling into her regular seat, she thanked any gods who might be listening that this would be the last day she’d ever be at the mercy of public education.

Frowning, Diana crossed the main hall toward the stairs, trying to get a fix on the faint wrongness she could feel. It wasn’t a full-out accident site; no holes had been opened into the lower ends of the possibilities allowing evil to lap up against closed doors leading to empty classrooms, but something was out of place and, as long as she was in the building, finding it and fixing it was in the job description.

Actually, it pretty much was the job description.

As far as Diana was concerned, all high schools needed Keepers. Nothing poked holes in the fabric of reality faster than a few thousand hormonally challenged teenagers all crammed into one ugly cinder-block building. Unattended, that was exactly the sort of situation likely to create the kind of person who developed an operating system that crashed every time someone attempted to download an Amanda Tapping screen saver.

The sudden appearance of a guidance counselor actually emerging from his office and heading straight for her nearly sent Diana running toward the nearest washroom. She didn’t want her last day ruined by yet another pointless confrontation.

Fortunately, she realized he felt the same way before her feet started moving.
Fuck it.

What’s the point?
flashed into the thought balloon over his head and he slid past without meeting her gaze.

The thought balloons had appeared back in grade nine when, after half an hour of platitudes, she’d wondered just what exactly he was thinking. An unexpected puberty-propelled power surge had anchored the balloons so firmly she’d never been able to get rid of them and she’d spent the last four years finding out rather more than she wanted to about the fantasy lives of middle-aged men.

Pamela Anderson.

And hockey.

Occasionally, Pamela Anderson playing hockey.

Some of the visuals were admittedly interesting.

The wrongness led her up the stairs, through the first cafeteria and into the second-weirdly, the hangout of both the jocks and the music geeks- empty now except for a group of girls who’d laid claim to the far corner by the northwest windows. A flash of aubergine light pulled her toward them. The senior girls’

basketball team, Diana realized as she drew closer. Probably hanging around in order to
remain
the senior girls’ basketball team. Over two thirds of them were graduating, so once they stepped out the door, they’d be a team no longer.

“... so I said to him, I’m not putting
that
in my mouth.” Tall, blonde, ponytail-Diana didn’t know her name. “First of all, I don’t know where it’s been and secondly, this lipstick cost twenty-one dollars.”

“And what did he say?” asked one of her listeners.

“Oh, you know guys. He took it so personally. All like, ‘you would if you loved me.’ ”

“So what did you say?”

“That I loved my lipstick more.”

In the midst of the laughter and catcalls that followed her matter-of-fact pronouncement, Blonde Ponytail looked up and spotted Diana.

“Did you want something?” she asked icily.

“Uh, yeah.” Diana leaned a little closer; trying to get a better look at the heavy bangle Blonde Ponytail wore around her left wrist.
“Please
tell me where you got your bracelet.”

“This? At Erlking’s Emporium in the Gardener’s Village Mall. I got it last weekend when I was visiting my father in Kingston.” Great.

Kingston. Where there used to be a hole to Hell.

Oh, sure. It
could
be coincidence.

“It’s silver, you know.”

Well, it was silver colored; the broad band embossed with large flowers each centered with a demon’s eye topaz. It was quite possibly the ugliest piece of jewellery Diana had ever seen. “No, it isn’t. It only looks like silver.”

“What? You mean that troll lied to me?”

Troll.

With any luck, that was a colorful exaggeration rather than the mystical version of a Freudian slip.

Diana didn’t feel particularly lucky. Stretching out a finger, she lightly touched the edge of one metallic petal.

A much larger flash of aubergine light.

A moment later, Diana found herself pressed face first into one of the cafeteria’s orange plastic chairs discovering far more than she wanted to about the olfactory signature of the last person sitting in it. Then she realized she was actually under the chair and heaved it to one side.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine. Just a little bruised.” Accepting the offered hand, she pulled herself to her feet. “Static electricity,” she explained, trailing power through the basketball team. “I must have completed some kind of circuit.” Several heads, probably the ones who hadn’t passed physics, nodded sagely.

The insistent trill of a cell phone broke the tableau.

“Mine,” Diana admitted, digging her backpack out from under the table. Eyes widened as she unzipped an outside pocket. After the unfortunate 1-800-TEACHME

incident back in the spring of 2001, students were not permitted to use their cell phones while on school property.
Oh, yeah, I’m a rebel,
she thought flipping it open, then added aloud, “It’s my mother.”

When the team seemed inclined to linger, she threw a little power into,

“Everything’s cool. You can go now.”

“Diana? What just happened?”

“You felt that at home?” She headed back toward the other cafeteria as the girls reclaimed their table, Blonde Ponytail muttering, “What a piece of cheap junk; I’m going to wring that troll’s neck.”

“Felt it? Yes, I’d say we felt it. Sam’s hanging from the top of the living-room
curtains and the coffeepot’s bringing in radio broadcasts from 1520
-
apparently
Martin Luther was just excommunicated. I missed part of Suleiman the Magnificent’s
birth announcement as your father called to say he’d felt it in the next county. Are you
all right?”

“I’m fine. I touched a piece of jewelry from the Otherside and there was a bit of a reaction. Don’t worry, I covered everything up, and the jewelry’s been totally nullified.”

“Where . . . ?”

“Was the jewelry?” Diana interrupted. “Around the wrist of a fellow student.

How did she lay her hands on a bracelet-and an incredibly ugly bracelet, I might add-that came from the Otherside? She bought it in a store called Erlking’s Emporium.

Just where exactly is Erlking’s Emporium? Kingston.”

“Oh, Hell.”

“Probably.” Leaving the cafeteria, she headed for the main stairs and the front doors. “I figure I just blew a crack through their shielding and that Claire ought to be getting the Summons any minute.”

“Claire’s not in Kingston right now; she’s answering a Summons in
Marmora.”

“Well, if it’s important, I’m sure the id ... powers-that-be will give it to someone else.”

“You’re not getting anything?”

“Nope, nothing.” There was no one in the main hall. Another fifteen meters and she’d be out the doors and home free.

“Good. And while I have you, I thought we’d agreed you weren’t going to
wear that T-shirt to school?”

“Sorry, Mom; the school has a ‘no cell phone’ rule. Gotta go.” Flipping the phone closed, Diana paused in front of her reflection in the glass of the trophy case.

The writing across her chest-red on black- said,
My sister’s boy toy went to Hell and
all I got was a lousy T-shirt.
She seemed to be the only one in the family who found it funny.

“Ms. Hansen.”

Phone still in her hand, Diana spun around and smiled up at the vice-principal.

“It was my mother, Ms. Neal. I had to take the call.”

“Yes, I’m sure. But that’s hot what I wanted to speak with you about. You’re an intelligent young woman, Diana, and while your years here have not been without .

. . incident . . .”

The pause nearly collapsed under the memory of the whole football team thing. Some changes lingered, even in the minds of the most prosaic Bystander.

“Yes, well, your marks are good,” the vice-principal continued after a long moment, “in spite of your frequent absences, and I can’t help but feel it’s a real shame that you’ve decided not to go on to college or university.” Diana shuddered. More time spent under academic authority? So not going to happen. “I’m afraid I’m just not the higher education type, Ms. Neal.” Sliding sideways, she moved a little closer to the door.

“Job prospects . . .”

“I have a job. Family business. Pays well, chance to travel, making the world a better place and all that.” Also demons, dangers, and the possibility of dying young but it still beat pretty much any other profession as far as Diana was concerned. Well, maybe not sitcom star or Hollywood script doctor but everything else. “You might say it’s the kind of job I was born to do,” she added reassuringly.