The Second Summoning

“Well, I don’t want my intestines sucked out my nose either,” Dean allowed.

Then he paused and blushed slightly, buffing an already spotless bit of dashboard.

“She thinks about my shoulders?”

“Shoulders, thighs ... as near as I can tell, she spends far too much time thinking about most of your body parts, sequentially and simultaneously, when she should be thinking about other things.”

“Like accident sites?”

“Like me.”

“Oh.” And then because the cat’s tone demanded an apology, he added,

“Sorry.”

“And accident sites,” Austin allowed graciously, having been given his due.

“Look, Claire tends to see things in terms of what she has to do to keep the world from falling apart. Close an accident site here, prevent the movie remake of

‘Gilligan’s Island’ there, keep you from being hurt, feed the cat, everything’s an absolute. She doesn’t compromise well, it’s an occupational hazard. Stay and teach her to see your side of things.”

“Only if she asks me to.” The steering wheel creaked a protest as Dean closed his hands around it and tightened his grip. “And since I know for a fact that Hell hasn’t frozen over, I’m not after holding my breath.” Austin sighed and turned so he could see Claire picking her way across the slush covered parking lot from the office. “She’s getting her own way, you’d think she’d be happier about it, wouldn’t you? She looks miserable. Doesn’t she? You don’t want her to be miserable? Do you?”

“She started this,” Dean muttered, eyes locked on the oil gauge. “If she wants me to stay, she has to convince me.”

“All right. Fine.” He put a paw on Dean’s thigh and stared beseechingly up into his face. “What about me? I’m old. It wasn’t that long ago that I lost an eye.”

“I thought it had mostly healed?”

“That’s not the point. It’s November, it’s cold. I don’t want to go back to using any old thing that happens by. I like being driven about in a heated truck! Okay, I would’ve liked a heated Lincoln Town Car with leather upholstery more, but the point is, what about me?”

“I’m sorry, Austin.”

“Not as sorry as she’s going to be,” Austin muttered as the Keeper opened the passenger door.

“The booth on the right has a longer line.”

“A longer line?” Dean had been avoiding conversation by maintaining the speed of the pickup at exactly fifty-five miles per hour regardless of the gestures other drivers flashed at him as they passed. He glanced down at the cat and tried not to notice the various bits of Claire that surrounded him. “Why do you want me to use the longer line, then?”

“It’ll take more time. And the more time we’re all together, the greater the odds are that you two will make up and I won’t be tossed out into the cold with nothing but a cat carrier between me and November.”

“There’s nothing to make up,” Claire told him impatiently. “We didn’t have a fight.”

“We didn’t?”

“No.” She threw the word across the cat to Dean. “I, as a Keeper, made a decision.”

“About my future without talking to me.”

“Sounds like a fight,” Austin observed.

Claire wriggled back in the seat and crossed her arms. “This doesn’t concern you.”

“Oh, no? I’m the one who’ll be riding in the overhead luggage rack . . .”

“You’ve never ridden in the overhead luggage rack!”

“. . . or the baggage compartment.”

“Or the baggage compartment!” she added, voice rising.

He ignored her. “Once again, I’ll be at the mercy of strangers. Forced to live from paw to mouth, dark corners as my litter box, cardboard boxes as my bed.”

“You like to sleep in cardboard boxes.”

“That’s not the point.”

“You have no point. And stop whining; you’re beginning to sound like a dog.”

“A dog!” He twisted around to fry her with a pale green glare from his remaining eye. “I have never been so insulted in my life. You’re just lucky I can’t operate a can opener.“ Moving slowly and deliberately, he stepped down off her lap, onto the center of the bench seat, and turned his back on her.

The smile his companions shared over his head was completely involuntary.

Suddenly aware of her reflection grinning out from Dean’s glasses, Claire dropped her gaze so quickly it bounced.

Teeth clenched with enough applied pressure to make his lone filling creak, Dean steered the truck carefully into the shorter line. The sooner this was over, the better.

Only two of the five Canada Customs booths were open. Only two of the five booths were ever open. On a busy day, when the line of cars waiting to cross the border stretched almost all the way back to Watertown, this guaranteed short tempers and a more spontaneous response to official questioning by Canadian Customs officials. Occasionally, on really hot summer days, responses were spontaneous enough to get the RCMP involved.

The constant low levels of sharp-edged irritation would have poked multiple holes through the fabric of the universe had government officiousness not canceled it out by denying that anything was possible outside their own very narrow parameters.