“I will be shortly.”
“Austin…”
“Okay. I’m done.” He took a quick lick at a flawless shoulder. “How about five concrete lady dwarfs?”
“Why not? I’ll just put an ad in the personals.” Claire shoved her hands into her pockets and glanced around at the broken bottles, the scattered garbage, the senseless vandalism. She didn’t even want to think about what the inside of Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater’s wife’s house looked like—give some people a dark corner, and they’d do one of two things in it.
Well, maybe three things.
Or four.
“Ow!” Kicked a little too hard, Sleeping Beauty’s head rolled off the concrete and clipped Claire’s ankle. “Yuck it up,” she snarled, scooping up the head and taking aim at the clump of snickering dwarfs. “It’s about to be game over!” As she released her makeshift bowling ball, she had visions of a five/two split, an easy spare, and a quick end to the stalemate.
“You missed,” Austin pointed out, his tone mildly helpful.
“I know!” She had to shout to be heard above the laughter. Two of the dwarfs were propping each other up as they howled, one had fallen to the ground and was kicking little concrete heels in the air, and the last two were staggering around in increasingly smaller circles as they mocked her athletic ability.
It wasn’t what she’d intended, but it had the same effect.
A quick dash, a fast sidestep over a pile of stained feathers that suggested at least one of the pigeons had been slow to get away, and a graceless but adequate leap put her up on the bier.
Keepers learned early on that the repair didn’t have to be pretty as long as it did the job. Claire had personally learned it while closing a site at a book launch for a writer who very nearly acquired a life as interesting as his fiction—although it wouldn’t have gone on as long. In the end, she’d been forced to evoke the paranormal properties of a crab cake, two stuffed mushroom caps, and a miniature quiche. The caterer had been furious.
Though not as furious as the dwarfs.
Who were too short to climb up on the bier themselves. The stream of profanity this evoked made up in volume what they lacked in size. Claire assumed they’d learned the words from the vandals and not the children—but she wouldn’t have bet on it. Fortunately, concrete dwarfs were not fast thinkers. She had the parameters of the site almost determined when one of them yelled, “Pile up the broken bits. Build a ramp!”
As the first of the little men rose into view, Claire pulled a stub of sidewalk chalk from her pocket and scrawled the site definition across Sleeping Beauty’s one remaining smooth surface. Reaching into the possibilities, she closed the hole, turned, and came hip to face with the advancing dwarf.
“Before the energy fades,” he growled, “we’ll rip you limb from limb.”
Had they not been fighting each other to get up the ramp, they might have. As it was, Claire jumped off the other side of the bier and sprinted to the safety of the grass unopposed. The first dwarf to leap off after her, stumbled and smashed.
They were visibly slowing.
“Gentlemen!”
Four heads ground around to face her.
“You’ve got less than thirty seconds left. If I were you, I’d arrange myself so that I was making a statement when I solidified.”
“Who’d have thought those concrete breeches would even come down?” Austin murmured as Claire carried him back toward the parking lot.
She half expected Dean to be there waiting for them.
He wasn’t.
Of course he isn’t, you moron. You sent him away.
She could barely feel the beginning of the new Summons over the incredible sense of loss. “I feel like I’m missing an arm or a leg,” she sighed as she set Austin down beside the cat carrier and turned up the collar of her coat.
He snorted. “How would you know?”
“What?”
“The only thing you’re missing is a sense of perspective. Some of us are missing actual body parts.”
“I’m sorry, Austin. I keep forgetting about your eye.”
“My eye?” His remaining eye narrowed. “Oh, yeah, that too. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go behind this building where I believe I saw a litter box shaped like a giant plastic turtle.”
“That’s a sandbox.”
“Whatever. While I’m gone, why don’t you answer the phone?”
“What phone?”
The pay phone on the other side of the parking lot began to ring.
Weight on one hip, Diana cradled the receiver between shoulder and ear and rummaged in her backpack for a pen. The odds were extremely good that Claire had paid no attention to her warning, but—having given it—she was curious about the outcome.
“Hello?”
“So, did you do it?”
On the other end of the phone, she heard Claire sigh. “Did I do what?”
“Make the huge mistake.” Moistening the tip of one finger, she erased the phone number at the end of the ubiquitous for a good time call and replaced it with the number of the original graffiti artist. Erasing it entirely would only leave a clear space for some moron to refill and it was balance, after all, that Keepers were attempting to maintain.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Diana. I’ve just closed a small site and I’m about to move on to the next one.”
“I’m talking about my precog. This morning’s phone call. My timely warning.” Brow furrowed, she tapped the pen against her lip, then rubbed out the punctuation and added forest fires in the same handwriting as Rachel puts out changing it from nasty to inane and thus maintaining the high school status quo. If there was a place more inane, Diana didn’t want to know about it. “I bet you didn’t even take precautions.”
“That is none of your business.”
Diana shook her head. No one did self-righteous indignation at the mere possibility of a double-entendre as well as Claire. And no one gave away so much doing it. “You ditched Dean, didn’t you?”
“I did not ditch him. We’re just not traveling together any longer.”
“Dork.”
“A Keeper has no business involving a Bystander in dangerous work.”
“Think highly of yourself, don’t you? You didn’t involve him, he got involved all on his little lonesome. And, as I recall, his lonesome ain’t so little.”
“Diana!”
“Claire!” Suddenly depressed, she hung up. In her not even remotely humble opinion, Dean had been the best thing that had ever happened to her older sister. Just by existing, he’d managed to shake up that whole lone Keeper only-I-can-save-the-world crap that Claire believed. Apparently, he hadn’t shaken it hard enough.
Sighing, she filled in the last blank space on the wall by the phone with a quick John loves Terri in a somewhat lopsided heart. It wasn’t her best work, but at least it would keep something harmful out of the spot.
“A word, Ms. Hansen.”
Pushing a strand of dark hair out of her eyes, Diana turned and forced a fake smile. “Yes, Ms. Neal?”
The vice-principal’s answering smile had a certain sharklike quality about it. “If you think the school needs adornment, why not put your talents to use on the decorating committee for the Christmas dance.”
“I’d love to, Ms. Neal, but I just don’t have the…that wasn’t a suggestion, was it?”
“Actually, it was an alternative to a month’s worth of detention.”
After the incident with the football team, her parents had forbidden her to open anyone’s mind to new possibilities—although to give them credit, they’d admitted that two of the linebackers and a defensive end had been significantly improved.
“The committee has their first meeting tomorrow at lunch, on the stage. Be there.”
“Yes, Ms. Neal.”
“Now, if you’re finished for the day, go home.”