Austin could never find out about this.

Holding the zipper clear of stray feathers, he quickly closed it.

The squawk was remarkably loud. Half a dozen heads turned toward him.

"Just caught my basilisk in the zipper," he explained, threw the bag over his shoulder and hurried for the door, his ears so hot he was sure they were leaving a thermal trail behind them.

Dean listened to the flat, definitive click in disbelief and then turned the key again, just in case. Another click followed by a silence so complete he could hear feathers being rearranged in the hockey bag now tucked behind the seats. "I don't believe this. The battery's dead."

"You were gone for a long time; I got bored." Austin licked his shoulder. "I was listening to the radio."

"But I have the keys, and you couldn't use a key if you had one." Click. Nothing. "How did you even turn the electrical system on?"

"It's a cat thing."

He laid his head against the steering wheel and jerked it back almost immediately as the black plastic branded the arc of its upper curve into his skin. "You're telling me cats can hot wire cars, then?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Austin snapped. "This is a truck."

"Right." Because that was all the explanation he was ever going to get. Okay. He got out of the truck and stared across the parking lot, watching the heated air rise up off the asphalt and shimmer like a curtain between worlds. If only it was that easy. Kevin had borrowed his jumper cables back in March and never returned them. He'd be smacking the buddy upside the head for that come Sat.u.r.day, but it wasn't going to do him any good now. A basilisk, a talking cat, and a dead battery walk into a bar . . .

Turning his back on the minivans, he banged his head against the hood of truck.

"You look like you're having a bad day. Is there something I can do to help?"

She was about his age, her name was Mary, she was up from the States for a music festival, and she had, not only a set of jumper cables, but a set long enough to reach from her battery to his. "My brother bought them for me," she told him tossing a waist-length braid back over her shoulder as she efficiently hooked the two vehicles together. "There, try it now."

The truck turned over on the first attempt. Dean hit the parking brake, put it in neutral, and got out to help Mary coil her cables.

"Is that your cat?" she asked as Austin put his paws up on the dashboard and peered out at them.

"Not exactly."

"Ah." She nodded wisely. "Your girlfriend's cat. You have the look of a man in over his head."

As she bent to put the cables in the trunk, Dean was horrified to see the hockey bag rise up from behind the seats and attempt to take flight. He gestured wildly at Austin, who made a rude gesture in return just as the bag slid forward, hit the seat, and knocked Austin's feet out from under him. On the bright side, bag and cat were out of sight by the time Mary turned. Dean thanked her in a hurry, shook her hand, yanked his feet out of the tar, and dove back into the truck.

The bag was on the floor on the pa.s.senger side. Austin was on the bag, smacking random bits of covered basilisk. "I'm getting too old for this kind of ..." A fast right, quickly followed by a left hook, quelled an incipient uprising. "... s.h.i.t."

"If you hadn't run down my battery, we'd be home by now!"

"Oh, so it's my fault you had to be rescued by a girl?"

"Yeah. It is. Your fault." He glanced up, noticed Mary frowning at him, waved, put the truck in gear, and started for home. In over his head. That pretty much summed up his life of late.

He needed Claire back in the worst way.

Sam knew he was supposed to be calm, cool, and collected, although he had no idea of just what he was supposed to collect. He knew that he, as a cat, should be an example of self-confident serenity to the horde of mall elves, armed and armored from sporting goods, who were about to go into battle against the forces of evil.

Sporting goods aside, this wasn't going to be battle by Disney.

He had a feeling that even as an angel, he'd sucked at serenity. Unfortunately, since that whole Soldier of the Lord thing would come in handy right about now, the more time he spent in fur, the less he remembered about his life bc. Before cat.

Back and forth across the top of the shelves that defined the open court around the fire pit. He couldn't stop pacing.

The unmistakable of sound of a two-fingered whistle echoed through the enclosed s.p.a.ce, instantly silencing the babble of conversation. A dozen heads of exotic hair turned toward the sound.

"Dudes! Listen up." Red braid swinging across the broad shoulders of his hockey pads, Will nodded toward Arthur, who stood beside him on a chair pulled away from a kitchen set in home furnishings. "Our fearless leader's got something to say!"

The Immortal King looked out at the crowd, his blue eyes sweeping from face to face, refusing to be hurried. Under his black leather jacket, he was wearing an umpire's padded breastplate. In his left hand, he held a pair of heavy leather gauntlets from gardening supplies. In his right, he held Excalibur.

It was so quiet Sam could hear only the faint creak of plastic padding. It was almost as though the mall elves were holding their breath, waiting for their leader to speak.

The ringing crash of the aluminum bat bouncing loudly across the tiles spun everyone around. They watched in unison until the bat finally hissed to a stop under Kith's raised boot. Then they all looked at Sam.

He hadn't even noticed the bat before he knocked it off the shelf.

Ignoring the pounding of his heart, and pretty sure he'd just lost the first of the alleged nine lives, he sat down and wrapped his tail pointedly around his front paws. Given the overwhelming, all encompa.s.sing level of noise, he didn't think he could pull off the cla.s.sic "I meant to do that" expression, so he settled for the slightly less difficult "What?" aimed directly at Arthur. Unable to help themselves, the elves turned again, searching for what he was staring at.

Poets knew that cats looked at kings because poets were no more immune than anyone else when it came to discovering what cats were staring at.

Arthur sighed. "You called me here," he said after a moment, "to make you one people. To stop the bickering that made you easy prey for the darkside. To teach you how to hold the line against the dark-side and say, this far you shall go and no farther. This I have done. You are one people. You act as one against the darkside. You hold the line. But it is no longer enough. The darkside has taken one of us and one of the Keepers who came to set us free. We cannot just hold the line while Kris and Diana are in the hands of our enemies. It is time we take the fight to them!"

"Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!"

Caught up in the rhetoric, it took Sam a moment to realize why the response made him so edgy. He'd seen much the same thing on a grade-school playground while waiting for Diana to close an accident site under the slide.

Tossing back his hair with one hand, lifting Excalibur above his head with the other, Arthur yelled out, "Who is with me?"

All the hair lifted along Sam's spine and in the second between the question and the answer, he shouted, "Wait!"

"Ow! Where are we?"

"In a refrigerator." Bent nearly double, Claire reached for the door, hoping it was still open. "I'd have told you to duck, but I didn't want to end up on an extended visit to Donald, Daisy, or Howard."

"So, Meryat's not in here?"

"No. Meryat's not in here." There was focused and then there was obsessive. Lance had crossed the line some time ago. "Hands off!"

"Sorry! There's not much room!"

"Well, it's a refrigerator," she muttered, flicking the edge of the egg tray and trying to remember if it was on the door in this particular model. They had more than the actual room available but not by much.

"Would this be a good time to tell you that I'm a little claustrophobic?"

"No." Okay. That was the b.u.t.ter thingy. Had to be the door. Both hands against it, Claire pushed.

"We need to get out now."