The Second Summoning

It was mid-December by the time he arrived at his cousin’s apartment in Halifax. He’d intended to stay only until he could book passage on the ferry home, but for one reason or another, many of them having to do with beer, it didn’t happen.

Austin stretched out his paw and neatly hooked a French fry from Claire’s fingers. “You’re thinking about Dean, aren’t you?”

“No.” Except that the truck that had very nearly run her over as she closed a site at Highway Two and King Street in Napanee had been just like Dean’s. Except it hadn’t been a Ford. And it was red, not white. And Dean’s truck just had a standard cab. And was clean. But other than that . . .

The bed sagged under Claire’s weight, then kept sagging as the mattress came to an understanding with gravity. It wasn’t the most uncomfortable motel bed she’d ever slept in, but it was close. It reminded her of the bed in the motel just outside of Rochester. The bed that she and Dean had so briefly and so platonically shared. If she put out her hand, she could almost feel the heat of ...

... a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old cat.

“You’re thinking about Dean, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“You okay?”

“I’m fine.” Having reassured the dark-haired, blue-eyed, glasses-wearing young waiter, Claire put her fingers back in her mouth.

“Bar’s been almost shut down twice, you know, but I never seen a rat in here before.”

He still hadn’t seen a rat, but Claire had no intention of telling him that.

“Good thing you had your cat with you, eh?” Dark brows drew in. He scratched at stubble. “Actually, I don’t think you’re supposed to bring your cat in here.”

The possibilities were adjusted slightly. “It’s okay.”

“Cool. You want another drink?”

“Why not.” Since she’d already been distracted enough to nearly lose a finger, Claire figured she was entitled to watch as he walked away from her booth in the darkest corner of the nearly empty bar.

Austin hocked a dark bit of something up onto the cracked Naugahyde seat.

“You’re thinking about Dean, aren’t you?”

Fingers in her mouth, Claire ignored him.

He snorted. “Good thing you had your cat with you, eh?” Just outside of Renfrew, Claire stood on a deserted stretched of highway and stared at the graffiti spray painted twenty feet up a limestone cliff. The hole, situated between the “u” and the “c” had turned the most popular of Anglo-Saxon profanities into a metaphysical instruction.

Before Austin could ask, she shoved frozen fingers deeper into her coat pockets and sighed. “Yes. I am. Now, drop it.”

“I was only going to mention that Dean would know exactly what cleaning supplies you’re going to need to get that paint off the rock.”

“Sure you were.”

On the opposite shoulder of the road, someone slapped a handprint into the condensation covering the windows of their parked Buick.

Against all expectations, Diana enjoyed the decorating committee meetings.

“So it’s settled; for this year’s Christmas dance we use a snowflake motif.” Stephanie’s smile could cut paper. “And, Lena, I don’t want to hear another word about angels.”

“But angels . . .”

“Have been done to death by all and/or sundry. Get over it.” Watching Stephanie cut through the democratic process with all the precision of a chainsaw sculptor was significantly more amusing than watching the cafeteria’s hot lunch gel into something approaching a life-form.

“Diana . . .”

Jerked out of her reverie, Diana fought the urge to come to attention. Tall and blonde, Stephanie wouldn’t have looked out of place in jackboots, provided she could find a purse to match, and someday she’d run a Fortune 500 company with the same ruthless élan she used to run Medway High. Unfortunately for the world at large, Keepers weren’t permitted to make preemptive strikes.

“. . . since we’re trying to make this place look less like a gymnasium, I want you to make a snowflake pattern out of white-and-gold streamers about five feet down from those incredibly ugly ceiling tiles.”

Diana glanced up at the ceiling, then over at Stephanie. The gym was probably thirty feet high, and it would take scaffolding to reach anything higher than the tops of the basketball backboards. The odds of the custodians building that scaffolding were slightly lower than the odds of any member of the senior basketball team being picked up by the pros. At zero and thirteen, the senior basketball team couldn’t even get picked up by the cheerleaders. “You want me to what?”

“Try to pay attention. I want you to hide the ceiling behind a crepe-paper snowflake.” Stephanie met Diana’s incredulous gaze with a level blue stare, assuming compliance.

Although not the uninvolved stick in the mud Claire had been during high school, Diana had tried to give the whole Keeper thing the requisite low profile.

Given how generally pointless she found the whole public school system, it hadn’t always been easy, but she’d made it to her final year without anyone pointing and screaming “Witch!” Well, no one anyone who mattered listened to, anyway.

So what had Stephanie seen?

And bottom line, did it matter?