... had trouble wi th th e vir g i...

"Oh, no!" One by one, faster and faster, the letters slid off the paper and into the brine. For a moment, Claire stared aghast at a journal of blank pages, then the paper turned into a gelatinous ma.s.s and shimmied off the spatula. The resultant splash sprayed a couple of dozen letters up over Claire's hand and sweater.

She staggered back until she hit the edge of the sink, too stunned to speak.

Jumping forward, holding his breath. Dean slapped the lid onto the container. When the seal caught, he hurried around into the kitchen, plucked the spatula from Claire's hand and tipped it almost immediately into the garbage.

"You must wash your hand, cherie," Jacques told her. "There is em's upon it. And other letters there upon your sweater."

"I don't think it'll wash out," Dean offered.

Jacques sniffed. "It does not amaze me you also do laundry."

Slowly Claire lifted her hand to her mouth and touched her tongue to one of the letters.

The two men exchanged a horrified glance.

Her lips drew back off her teeth.

"I do not think she is smiling," Jacques murmured.

"Spider parts," Claire snarled. "That rotten, little piece of h.e.l.l!"

Both men flinched but nothing happened.

"Don't you see?" Claire's glare jerked from one to the other and back again. "The imp introduced spider parts into the solution. It couldn't have opened the fridge, so it had to have dusted the onions in the bin under the counter just before I started the second batch. It ruined everything!"

OH, VERY WELL DONE.

DO WE GIVE COMPLIMENTS?.

WE GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE.

h.e.l.l was silent for a moment. NO, WE DON'T, it said at last.

"Mrs. Abrams is up to something; she's humming. It's an intensely scary sound. Why the long faces?" Austin asked, jumping up on the counter. He sneezed and turned a disgusted glare on the container. "Haven't you finished with that yet?"

"Oh, yes, I've finished with it." Claire pulled off her sweater and handed it to Dean who held it much the same way he'd have held a dead jellyfish. "It's all over. I'm not going to be able to undo what was done because I'll never find out what they did. I can't fix it. I might as well call the locksmith's cousin."

"What are you talking about?"

"Never mind." Moving mechanically, she turned, squirted a little dish detergent into her palm and washed her hands.

When Dean explained what had happened, the cat jumped down to rub against her legs.

"Spider parts can get onto onions a number of different ways; you don't know it was an imp. Or even that there is an imp."

"Don't start with me, Austin."

Wisely, he let it drop. "There's still the Historian," he reminded her.

"No, there isn't." She scrubbed her hands dry on a dish towel-which Dean retrieved to hold, two-fingered, with the sweater-and scooped Austin up into her arms. "I can't get out of that town she's built."

"The wardrobe Kingston?" Dean asked.

"Not quite Kingston," Claire told him bitterly. "There's a camp of killer girl guides to the north. When I take the bridge over the narrows and go east, I get hit with a snowstorm I can't get through. To the west there's a military academy. And south..."

"Un moment," Jacques interrupted. "Why can you not get by a military academy?"

"It's the men in uni..."

Claire put her hand over the cat's muzzle. "They think I'm one of their teachers and I'm AWOL. Attempting that route'll only get me stuffed into an ugly uniform and thrown in the brig until I agree to teach two cla.s.ses in military history."

"The sea's to the south," Dean said. "What about one of the ships?"

"Get on a ship crewed by the Historian's people?" Claire shook her head. "I don't think so. It'd be faster just to drown myself and save them the trouble."

"Austin thinks you're trying too hard."

"Does he? Interesting he should know so much about a place he's never been." The cat in her arms became very intent on cleaning between the pads of a front paw. "No, it's obvious. I can't get to the Historian, and this..." She stared down at the jumble of letters and the sludge of the journal. Her shoulders slumped. "... this is less than useless."

"But what about studying the actual, you know, spell?"

"What about it?" She'd been spending an hour with Sara every morning and, so far, she'd developed an allergy to dust. Her ten minutes every other afternoon, the longest she could spend so close to h.e.l.l and a running monologue she couldn't shut off, had taught her a number of things she'd have rather not known about the Spanish Inquisition, World War II, and the people who program prime time TV but nothing about how to deal with the unique situation surrounding the site. "It's time I faced it; I'm going to be stuck here for the rest of my life."

After a moment, when the silence in the kitchen stopped ringing to the slam of a metaphorical door, Jacques sighed and said, "Would that be so bad, cherie?"

Claire paused on the verge of plunging into a good long wallow in self-pity, realizing he was actually asking. Would it be so bad to spend the rest of your life here with me? "You're missing the point, Jacques. If I were needed to seal the hole, doomed to become an eccentric recluse years before my time, it'd be different, at least I'd be doing something useful. Here..." A toss of her head managed to take in the entire hotel. "... I'm a pa.s.sive observer, watching a system I can't affect, doing sweet d.i.c.k all. It's like, like having last year's Cy Young winner sitting in the bullpen in case one of the starters blows a rotator cuff." The ghost stared at her in bewilderment. "And that means?"

"It's baseball," Dean told him before Claire could explain. "It means she feels her abilities are wasted here."

"Wasted?" Jacques repeated. "Here where there is a hole to h.e.l.l in the bas.e.m.e.nt and unefemme mauvaise asleep upstairs? If there is something that goes wrong here..."

DEATH! DESTRUCTION!.

A FIVE HUNDRED CHANNEL UNIVERSE!.

"... your, what you call, abilities will not be wasted, cherie."

"But if nothing goes wrong..."

"We should all be so lucky," Austin interrupted, jumping out of her arms. He checked the dry food in his bowl and sat, tail wrapped around his toes. "You know this place needs to be monitored."

She waved a dismissive hand. "Well, yes, but..."

"And since you've been summoned here, this is where you need to be."

"That's the theory, but..."