“Let’s go, Leslie.” Dropping into the car, she slammed the door and reached for the seat belt. “Did I mention I was a demon?” she asked as they pulled into traffic.
His laugh carried distinctly nervous overtones. “I almost believe you.”
“Really?”
“You’re not like other girls. You’re not even like the other girls we help off the street. You’re not like any girl I’ve ever met. You’re not…”
“I get it. Jeez. And thank you.” She needed the reassurance as geeky as it might be.
It was getting harder and harder to touch the darkness.
As Nalo stepped off the bus, time slowed. She saw the slush ball approaching, the bits of rock and mud and ice standing out with unnatural clarity against the tiny bit of actual snow holding the thing together. She saw past it to the expression on the kid’s face as he realized what was about to happen. She saw past him to a 1973 Firebird pulling away from the curb.
Then time sped up, and she didn’t see anything at all for a few minutes.
Staggering forward, she clawed the slush ball from her face, reaching into the possibilities, past the pain and anger and certain knowledge that she was going to need to have her coat dry-cleaned again. Nalo had been a Keeper long enough that it would take more to distract her than a face full of frozen crap and the prospect of a twenty-two-dollar dry-cleaning bill.
But by the time she could see again, the car was gone.
The young man who’d exited the bus behind her, touched her lightly on one shoulder. “You okay, lady?”
“No. I have a sense of foreboding that can only mean darkness has found a way to corrupt the world, bringing down upon us a future of pain and pestilence. And I seem to have a piece of gravel up my nose.”
“Bummer.”
“Indeed.”
Taking her seat on the half-empty subway, Diana did nothing to keep the other passengers from noticing the cat. Given the invisible walls that Toronto subway passengers erected around them in order to avoid interaction with potential crazies, religious lunatics, and lost American tourists, she could have been carrying a platypus on her lap and no one would have said anything. In fact, it very much looked as if an elderly woman in the other end of the car was carrying a…
“Hey, there’s Doug!”
A talking cat, however, attracted a little attention.
“Hair ball,” Diana announced, carefully tweaking reality. When everyone accepted the explanation—and no one took it as an instruction—she breathed a sigh of relief. “Keep it down,” she muttered into the plush orange fur between Samuel’s ears. “Unless you want to end up on late night TV hawking kibble between the psychics and those live girl phone things.”
“1–800-U-CALL-ME,” Doug added as he sat down beside them, having left a trail of cheap wine fumes the length of the subway car. “How’s it going, Samuel?”
“Pretty good. Still haven’t figured out the tail, though.”
“It’ll come. I see you’re down to partial genitalia.”
Diana closed her teeth on the comment she was about to make and took a closer look.
“Hey!” Samuel spun around and glared at her. “If you don’t mind!”
“Sorry.” A self-neutering cat. Just what the world needs. “And keep your voice down.”
“No need, little lady. We’re in my cone of silence.” Doug stirred the surrounding miasma with expansive gestures, the cuffs of two jackets and three visible sweaters rising up on thin gray wrists.
Breathing shallowly through her mouth, Diana reached into the possibilities. They showed no cone of silence but, on the other hand, street people were ignored so completely by the rest of the city’s residents it amounted to the same thing.
“Any particular reason you decided to walk on the furry side, kid?”
“We needed to expose a demon.”
“A demon? In the world?”
While Diana rolled her eyes and wondered why it was taking so long to get from College Street to Union Station where they could lose Samuel’s fragrant buddy, Samuel explained the whole thing.
“A demon in the world,” Doug restated, frowning thoughtfully. “Well, now, that does explain things. And here I was blaming that bottle of aftershave I knocked back this morning. So you exposed a demon, and now you’re off after it, right?”
“Wrong,” Diana told him—or more precisely told the space next to him. She was finding it hard to focus on his face, but that could have been because of the pale green strand waving from his nose. “We’re off home. Someone else is off after the demon.”
“Her older sister,” Samuel added.
“And you got a few younger sibling issues with that sister of yours, don’t you? No need to deny it, it’s dripping from your voice. Well, you know what I think?” He leaned conspiratorially forward. “I think that TV dinners go best with a nice Chardonnay.”
“What?”
He blinked. “What did I say?” Diana repeated it and he sighed. “Whoa, train of thought got derailed. Toxic spills. Evacuate the women and children.” He drew in a deep breath and released it slowly. Samuel flattened on Diana’s lap, and it passed harmlessly over his head. “Okay. Let’s try that again: I think you should go after that demon yourself. You have to save her.”
“I what?”
“Save her. From your sister.”
“It doesn’t work that way. First of all, we don’t interfere. Second, you seem to be a little confused about the good guys and the bad guys. And third, I don’t even know why I’m talking to you about this.”
“Because he’s an angel,” Samuel pointed out.
“Yeah, right, and I’m a model for Victoria’s Secret.”
Doug’s eyes widened and he cupped both hands in front of his chest. “Hubba hubba!”
“Okay, that’s it.” Diana grabbed the cat and stood as the subway pulled into the King Street station. “I’m gone. We can walk from here.”
“If the demon is an exact opposite of the young man Samuel was, then isn’t she as much of a person?”
Doug’s quiet question stopped her at the door. Diana sighed and let it close in her face before returning to her seat which was, not surprisingly, still empty. “Yes, she is.”
“And is your sister likely to take that into account?”
“No, she isn’t.” If not for an angel, then definitely not for a demon. “I think she’s taking this whole thing personally. But Claire’s being led to her, and I don’t know where she is.”
“Does she know she’s being hunted?”
“She should.”
“So, a demon in the body of a teenage girl knows she’s being hunted; what would she do?” He leaned forward, eyes narrowed. “You’re a teenage girl, think like a demon.”
My cover’s been blown, I know I’m being hunted, I know I don’t stand much of a chance but I’ve been backed into a corner…
As though he were reading her mind, Doug nodded, the green strand bobbing emphatically. “You’ll never take me alive, copper.”
“If she’s got to go,” Diana said slowly, “she’s going to flip Claire the finger on the way out, leaving behind the biggest possible mess for Claire to clean up.”
The constant pound of the Summons changed tone and timbre. Claire shifted under her seat belt and brought both hands up to rub at her temples. There were times when being a Keeper resembled sitting next to the drum kit at a Moby concert. “It’s moving east.”
Glancing across the cab, Dean made a deductive leap. “The demon?”
Claire nodded.
“We aren’t after heading for Toronto, then?”