a8eb54fe2a7e7ca192cef2761fb9d6c0

“Every hero needs a fatal flaw. Now, for the last time, Dean, open the bag.”

“And what if I’m after saying no?”

“Then I’ll suck my darling Dr. Rebik dry, right in front of you.” A gesture brought the archeologist around to her side. She slid a slender arm through his and smiled. “Your choice.”

Dean set the hockey bag down on the kitchen counter and began fumbling with the zipper.“She’s killing you, you know!”

Dr. Rebik matched Meryat’s smile. “I die of love.”

“Yeah, right…” The bit of basilisk he’d caught back in the food court was jamming the zipper closed. If he kept his eyes shut…

Would Claire be able to fix him if he was turned to stone?

If she couldn’t, would she put him out in the garden?

Would pigeons shit on his head?

It’d be sea gulls back home, so he supposed pigeons would be an improvement.

“Are you stalling, Dean?”

Dr. Rebik moaned low in his throat and a patch of hair fell out, slid down the curve of his head and off his bowed shoulder to the floor.

“I’m going as fast as I can!” he cried, yanking at the zipper and fighting the urge to go for the whisk broom and dustpan. “It’s stuck!”

“I see. We’ll just have to…”

Out in the office, the phone rang.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m after answering…”

“No.”

“But this is a business,” Dean protested indignantly. “You can’t be letting the phone ring!”

“I can and I will.”

Four rings. Five. Six.

The machine should have picked up on five. As it didn’t…“Look, it’s Claire’s mum. As long as there’s someone here, it won’t stop ringing.”

Meryat frowned thoughtfully.“Is the Keeper’s mother also a Keeper?”

“No!”

Seven rings. Eight.

The frown lines deepened with a faint crinkling sound.“Then how does she know there’s someone here?”

“Claire’s her daughter!” Which was the absolute truth. Maybe not the whole truth but the truth, so with any luck at all, that whole lousy lying thing wouldn’t come into it.

Nine rings. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

“This grows very annoying. Go!” A fingernail flew off with the expansive force of her gesture. “Answer it!”

Dean took two grateful steps toward the office.

“Mr. McIssac, aren’t you forgetting something?”

Biting back a curse, he returned for the hockey bag.

Thirteen rings. Fourteen. Fifteen.

Closely followed by Meryat and Dr. Rebik—too closely followed as far as Dean was concerned—he set the bag on the desk and reached for the phone.

Sixteen.

“Elysian Fields Guest House.”

“Dean, it’s Martha Hansen. I’ve got this terrible feeling that the girls are in trouble. Not that the girls being in trouble is ever a good feeling, but this is remarkably strong considering that they’re still on the Otherside and I’m worried. You haven’t heard from them, have you? That’s not why you were so long answering?”

“Uh, no, it’s not.” He had no idea what, if anything a Cousin could do over the phone, but this was his one chance to get help. “You just called at a bad time. There’s…”

“…no need for further explanations,” Meryat said as Dr. Rebik’s shaking finger came down on the disconnect. “The noise has been stopped, and we have business to conclude.” She glanced around the office, and her eyes narrowed. “Although this is not the best place; we could be interrupted, and that has already happened once too often.”

Dean suddenly realized she wasn’t talking about the phone. “Lance.”

“Yes. When my binding came undone, he was partially caught by my counterspell. It seems to have unbalanced him.”

“He’s not Australian,” Dr. Rebik announced calmly.

Meryat rolled her eyes.“He might as well be. Now then, I think we’ll take this someplace more private.” Her gaze traveled slowly down the length of Dean’s body and he shuddered. Before Claire and he had…created an angel, he’d never noticed that sort of thing. After, he realized—to his intense embarrassment—it had happened a lot. “Let’s go to your bedroom.”

Suddenly, being a statue didn’t look like such a bad future.

He only hoped Claire remembered to dust him.

*

Claire stifled a sneeze against her shoulder unable to believe the amount of dust in the dropped ceiling. She stopped herself from wondering where it came from before the Otherside provided an answer, and concentrated on crawling after Teemo’s narrow backside.

Fortunately, Diana had already taken this route, so she didn’t need to worry about securing its reality.

The drop down into the bathroom was a little farther than she was comfortable with. One foot slid off the edge of the soap dispenser and into the sink, but Kith steadied her as she landed, averting disaster with a steady grip above both knees.

The room smelled of cleaners and disinfectants, and all at once she missed Dean so badly it was like a physical ache. In fact, it wasn’tlike a physical ache at all. It was a physical ache. Austin would do what he could, but a reanimated mummy was a just a little beyond what snark and sympathy could hope to deal with.

She had to defeat the darkside and return to them before it was too late. Or get Lance to them if that was all she could manage.

Save the world.

Save Diana.

Save Dean.