"Good for you."

"How come Claire screwed things up so badly?"

The cat shrugged. "She's a Keeper. She's trained to come in post-disaster and deal with the mess, so she has to make a mess of any potential relationships before she feels competent to deal with them."

"I'm a Keeper and I don't do that."

"Yet," Austin said, looking superior.

Golf had replaced the soccer game and Jacques was gone. Still steaming, Claire turned off the television and stomped through to the bedroom. In order to get far enough from her sister to keep from wringing Her neck, she'd have to leave the hotel. Yanking open the wardrobe door, she stepped inside.

Right at the moment, she'd enjoy dealing with a troop of killer Girl Guides.

Still sitting on the counter, Diana searched the cupboards for cookies, found three-quarters of a bag of fudge creams, and sat happily eating them while she worked out a way to fix Claire's life.

Obviously, Claire needed to leave the hotel.

Since no other Keeper had arrived to take over the site, the site had to be closed.

In order for the site to be closed, the exact parameters of the current seal had to be determined.

"And since there's only one remaining witness..." Scattering cookie crumbs, Diana jumped down off the counter. "... the logical solution would be to ask her." She snapped her fingers toward the kitchen and headed for the stairs.

Behind her, the crumbs cleaned themselves up and dropped into the garbage.

Paying only enough attention to keep from tripping over unexpected phenomena, Claire strode deeper into the wardrobe.

There were, Diana realized, a couple of ways to get into room six. The first involved pulling enough power to melt the locks, but that kind of heat would probably also burn down the building.

She went looking for a set of keys.

I should have told her flat out that it was none of her d.a.m.n... darned business. Her mind on other things, Claire moved toward a soft gray light. I am not an ageist.

"Hey, Dean, sorry to bother you, but I wanted to go poke around in the attic 'cept the door's locked and Claire's gone off with her keys."

"Claire's gone? Where's she at?"

"Oh, she stomped off into the wardrobe." Rocking backward and forward, heel to toe, Diana grinned up at him. "We had a fight, and she took off to think about what I said. I don't know if you've noticed, but Keepers have this tendency to think they're always right."

Dean's brows rose. "Aren't you a Keeper, then?"

"Well, sure, but that doesn't make Claire any less of a pedagogue."

"A what?"

"A know-it-all." Her eyes gleamed. "Although I'm leaving off a few choice adjectives. The attic?"

"Okay, sure." He pulled his key ring from his pocket dropped it in Diana's outstretched palm. "It's the big black one. You, uh, know about Jacques, then? The ghost? He might be in the attic."

"Yeah, Claire told me all about him." Closing her hand around the keys, she reached out and punched Dean lightly on the arm. "Don't worry, you're better off without her. She snores."

Don't worry? If Claire told her sister all about Jacques, Dean thought, watching Diana bound back up the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs, what did she tell her about you, boy?

"Don't stand around with your thumb up your b.u.t.t. What do you want?"

Claire's wandering attention snapped home. She was standing in a long room, lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Directly in front of her, sitting at a library table stacked with shoe boxes, was an older woman with soft white curls, wearing an ink-stained flowered smock. "Historian!"

"I know who I am," the Historian snapped. "Who the h.e.l.l are you?"

"Claire, Claire Hansen. I'm a Keeper."

"You wouldn't be here if you weren't. Wait a minute." The Historian's eyes narrowed, collapsing the pale skin around them into a network of grandmotherly wrinkles. "I remember now, you were here three years, twelve days, eleven hours and forty-two minutes ago looking up some political thing. Did you finish with it?"

"The site?"

"No, democracy."

"Uh, not yet."

"c.r.a.p. You wouldn't believe the amount of paperwork it generates." She sighed and pushed away from the desk, giving Claire her first good look at the computer system nearly buried in shoe boxes.

"Is that one of the new 200MHz processors?"

"New? It was obsolete months ago. History. That's why it's here. So, since I tend to discourage social visits, what can I do for you?"

It took Claire a moment to get past her anger at Diana and remember. "Kingston, Ontario, 1945; two Keepers stopped another Keeper from gaining control of h.e.l.l."

"How nice for us all."

"I need to know how they did it."

"d.a.m.ned if I know." When Claire frowned, the Historian sighed. "Keepers, no sense of humor." She pointed an ink-stained finger along the bookshelves. "The forties are about a hundred yards that way. The year you're looking for was bound in green." Then, muttering, "Hansen," over and over to herself, she opened up a shoe box that had once held a size nine-and-a-half cross trainer, and pulled out a digital tape. The plastic case appeared to be slightly charred. "When you get home, tell your sister I'd like to have a word."

The padlock slid into her hand with a satisfactory plop. Diana slipped it into her pocket and returned her attention to the key ring. Dean had the master neatly labeled with a piece of adhesive tape.

All she had to do now was push.

Heart pounding, she gripped the doork.n.o.b.

I'll just bring Aunt Sara up to partial consciousness, ask her a few questions, and take her back down again. Piece of cake.

What good was power if she never got to use it? Claire was going to be so p.i.s.sed when she got home and found her younger sister had all the answers.

Sara, herself, turned out to be a bit of a disappointment.

While the old adage, the more human evil looks the more dangerous it is, was undeniably true, Diana had been expecting at least some outward indication of the heinous crime Sara had attempted, small horns, visible scars, overdue library books, but from the look of things, she hadn't even been having a bad hair day. The only incongruous point about her whole body was that her very red lips glistened, dust free.

... but had there not been problems with the sacrificial virgin, the Keepers would never have arrived in time. Not until Aunt Sara had Margaret Anne Groseter suspended over the pit and had made the first cut did she realize that the girl, although only fifteen, was not suitable.