“Christmas isn’t until tomorrow,” he protested weakly.
Twisting free of his grip, she slid her hands up under his sweater until she could feel his heart slamming against his ribs so hard that the muscle sheathing them shivered under the impact. She shivered a bit herself and murmured, “Do you really want to wait?”
“Way to go, Dean! He’s carrying her up the stairs. Ouch, that had to hurt. Hit her head on the side of the garage.” Shaking her own head in sympathy, Diana shifted position slightly to get a better angle on the scene. “She seems to be okay—they’re carrying on. Probably has so many endorphins in her system she can’t feel a thing.”
“Diana!” Her mother twitched the curtains out of her grip. “That’s quite enough of that!”
The garage having just cut off her line of sight, Diana shrugged and stepped away from the window, raising both hands in exaggerated surrender. “Not a problem, Mom, your wish is my command.”
“Good.” Martha tucked a strand of graying hair back behind her ear and folded her arms. “Then let me make that wish just a little more specific—no more spying on your sister, period. No hidden microphones. No web cams. No scrying in any form; no mirrors, no bowls of water, and especially no entrails. I need those giblets for the gravy. You will leave Claire and Dean alone while they…”
Diana’s eyebrows rose to touch her hairline.
“Yes, well, just never mind what they’re doing. They’re adults, and it’s none of your business. Or mine or your father’s,” she added before Diana could speak. “When you’re out on your own, we will extend the same courtesy to you, so there’s no need to look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like your life is a never-ending battle against personal oppression. You’re seventeen, Claire’s twenty-seven.”
“And Dean’s twenty-one.”
“Which means?”
“Absolutely nothing. I’m happy she’s happy. I’m happy they’re happy. I’m happy you’re happy. But, all things considered, you might want to have the fire department on standby.”
“The fire department is on standby,” her mother pointed out dryly. “Or have you forgotten what happened last Christmas when the star of Bethlehem went supernova.”
Diana had long since stopped protesting that they’d have won the Christmas lighting contest had the fire department simply damped down the crèche like she’d asked them to instead of putting the whole thing out because her parents always answered with irrelevancies. The roof had been perfectly safe. Essentially safe. Slightly scorched…
A short time later, having been forced to eat a piece of fruitcake and talk to Aunt Corinne on the phone, she straightened up from the wall that separated her room from Claire’s apartment, set the empty glass down on her desk, and sighed. “That works on television.”
“So does David Duchovny but he’s got just as slim a connection to the real world,” Austin reminded her, eye narrowed as he watched her push a handful of pencils one at a time, into a mug. “I thought your mother told you to leave them alone.”
“She didn’t specifically say no eavesdropping.” Picking a pair of sweatpants off the floor, Diana poked her finger through a ragged hole in the knee.
“She didn’t specifically tell you not to feed the cat, but I notice you’ve managed to resist.”
“You just ate some fruitcake.”
“Your point?”
“Do cats even like fruitcake?”
“Does anyone?”
She threw the sweatpants into the laundry basket and dropped into her desk chair, spinning herself petulantly around and around. “You’re being awfully understanding considering that Claire’s shut you out, too—after we got them together.”
“If you think I’m interested in watching talking monkey sex,” Austin snorted, “think again.”
“That’s hot monkey sex.”
“You’re all talking monkeys from where I sit. And I’ve seen that friction thing; it never really changes.”
A six-car passenger train roared across the room and into a tunnel.
“Okay,” he said thoughtfully when the noise had died. “That was different.”
“Diana!”
Waving away the lingering scent of burning diesel, Diana opened her bedroom door, fingers hooked in the trim as she leaned out into the hall. “Yeah, Dad?”
“What the bloody blue blazes was that?”
“I think it was a euphemism.” The vibrations had knocked askew a set of family photographs hanging on the wall across from her. A previously serious portrait of Claire had developed a distinctly cheesy grin. “Or maybe a metaphor.”
“Well, don’t do it again!”
“It wasn’t me!” She closed the door, not quite slamming it, and walked to the bed. “Why does he always assume it’s me?” she demanded, scooping Austin up into her arms.
“It always is you.”
“Not this time.”
“Natural mistake, though. Close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“Trust me. Three, two, one…”
The possibilities opened.
Wide.
“Holy shit!” One hand pressed against the glass, Brent Carmichael turned away from the window and stared at the half dozen firefighters standing behind him. Behind them, the cards they’d abandoned lay spread out on the table. “Did you see that?”
“I’m still seeing it,” one of the others muttered trying to blink away afterimages.
“It came from the direction of the Hansen place.”
Someone whimpered.
The silence stretched past the point where it could be comfortably broken and then went on a little longer. Finally, the shift senior, a man with eighteen years experience and two citations for bravery, cleared his throat. “I didn’t see anything,” he said.
A mumbled chorus of, “Neither did I,” followed the collective sigh of relief.
“But…” Brent looked out into the darkness of Christmas Eve, at the starlit beauty of the velvet sky above, at the strings of brightly colored Christmas lights innocently mirroring that beauty below, and remembered other visits to the Hansen house. Or tried to. Most of the memories were fuzzy—and not warm and fuzzy either, but fuzzy like trying to pull in the WB without either a satellite dish or cable, picture skewed, one word in seven actually audible. And the harder he tried, the less he could remember.
Except for the incident with the burning bush. That, he couldn’t forget.
Denial became the only logical option.
Happy to have that settled, he turned back to the game. “What moron just chose Charmander against Pikachu?”
The light should have dissipated.
Should have.
Didn’t.
Instead, it found itself in an empty, cavernous room in a large, two-story brick building. Caught by the power woven into the snowflake pattern, it rose up through the crepe-paper streamers toward the ceiling, was filtered and purified, and poured back through the center hole.
More now than merely a glorious possibility, it hovered for a moment above center court, then, following the pull of need, it passed through the window, and out into the night.
Lena thoughtfully flicked her lighter on and off. She’d already taken the batteries out of the smoke detector in the hall, but after a certain point that became moot and her father would come charging down into her room demanding to know if she was trying to burn down the house.
There were six candles burning under her angel poster, nine among the angel figurines on her dresser, three votive candles in angel candle holders, and one in a souvenir Backstreet Boys mug on the bedside table.
Close to the limit.
One more, she decided, and started searching through the stubs of melted wax for something worth burning. Nothing. Unfortunately, that one more had gone from being an option to being a necessity during the search. Slowly, she turned to her bookshelf.