"Huff, Tanya - Keeper 3 - Long Hot Summoning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huff Tanya)

“And what did he say?” asked one of her listeners.
“Oh, you know guys. He took it so personally. All like, ‘you would if you loved me.’ ”
“So what did you say?”
“That I loved my lipstick more.”
In the midst of the laughter and catcalls that followed her matter-of-fact pronouncement, Blonde Ponytail looked up and spotted Diana.
“Did you want something?” she asked icily.
“Uh, yeah.” Diana leaned a little closer; trying to get a better look at the heavy bangle Blonde Ponytail wore around her left wrist. “Please tell me where you got your bracelet.”
“This? At Erlking’s Emporium in the Gardener’s Village Mall. I got it last weekend when I was visiting my father in Kingston.”
Great.
Kingston. Where there used to be a hole to Hell.
Oh, sure. It could be coincidence.
“It’s silver, you know.”
Well, it was silver colored; the broad band embossed with large flowers each centered with a demon’s eye topaz. It was quite possibly the ugliest piece of jewellery Diana had ever seen. “No, it isn’t. It only looks like silver.”
“What? You mean that troll lied to me?”
Troll.
With any luck, that was a colorful exaggeration rather than the mystical version of a Freudian slip.
Diana didn’t feel particularly lucky. Stretching out a finger, she lightly touched the edge of one metallic petal.
A much larger flash of aubergine light.
A moment later, Diana found herself pressed face first into one of the cafeteria’s orange plastic chairs discovering far more than she wanted to about the olfactory signature of the last person sitting in it. Then she realized she was actually under the chair and heaved it to one side.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine. Just a little bruised.” Accepting the offered hand, she pulled herself to her feet. “Static electricity,” she explained, trailing power through the basketball team. “I must have completed some kind of circuit.”
Several heads, probably the ones who hadn’t passed physics, nodded sagely. The insistent trill of a cell phone broke the tableau.
“Mine,” Diana admitted, digging her backpack out from under the table. Eyes widened as she unzipped an outside pocket. After the unfortunate 1-800-TEACHME incident back in the spring of 2001, students were not permitted to use their cell phones while on school property. Oh, yeah, I’m a rebel, she thought flipping it open, then added aloud, “It’s my mother.”
When the team seemed inclined to linger, she threw a little power into, “Everything’s cool. You can go now.”
“Diana? What just happened?”
“You felt that at home?” She headed back toward the other cafeteria as the girls reclaimed their table, Blonde Ponytail muttering, “What a piece of cheap junk; I’m going to wring that troll’s neck.”
“Felt it? Yes, I’d say we felt it. Sam’s hanging from the top of the living-room curtains and the coffeepot’s bringing in radio broadcasts from 1520—apparently Martin Luther was just excommunicated. I missed part of Suleiman the Magnificent’s birth announcement as your father called to say he’d felt it in the next county. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I touched a piece of jewelry from the Otherside and there was a bit of a reaction. Don’t worry, I covered everything up, and the jewelry’s been totally nullified.”
“Where . . . ?”
“Was the jewelry?” Diana interrupted. “Around the wrist of a fellow student. How did she lay her hands on a bracelet—and an incredibly ugly bracelet, I might add—that came from the Otherside? She bought it in a store called Erlking’s Emporium. Just where exactly is Erlking’s Emporium? Kingston.”
“Oh, Hell.”
“Probably.” Leaving the cafeteria, she headed for the main stairs and the front doors. “I figure I just blew a crack through their shielding and that Claire ought to be getting the Summons any minute.”
“Claire’s not in Kingston right now; she’s answering a Summons in Marmora.”
“Well, if it’s important, I’m sure the id ... powers-that-be will give it to someone else.”
“You’re not getting anything?”
“Nope, nothing.” There was no one in the main hall. Another fifteen meters and she’d be out the doors and home free.
“Good. And while I have you, I thought we’d agreed you weren’t going to wear that T-shirt to school?”
“Sorry, Mom; the school has a ‘no cell phone’ rule. Gotta go.” Flipping the phone closed, Diana paused in front of her reflection in the glass of the trophy case. The writing across her chest—red on black— said, My sister’s boy toy went to Hell and all I got was a lousy T-shirt. She seemed to be the only one in the family who found it funny.
“Ms. Hansen.”
Phone still in her hand, Diana spun around and smiled up at the vice-principal. “It was my mother, Ms. Neal. I had to take the call.”
“Yes, I’m sure. But that’s hot what I wanted to speak with you about. You’re an intelligent young woman, Diana, and while your years here have not been without . . . incident . . .”
The pause nearly collapsed under the memory of the whole football team thing. Some changes lingered, even in the minds of the most prosaic Bystander.
“Yes, well, your marks are good,” the vice-principal continued after a long moment, “in spite of your frequent absences, and I can’t help but feel it’s a real shame that you’ve decided not to go on to college or university.”
Diana shuddered. More time spent under academic authority? So not going to happen. “I’m afraid I’m just not the higher education type, Ms. Neal.” Sliding sideways, she moved a little closer to the door.
“Job prospects . . .”
“I have a job. Family business. Pays well, chance to travel, making the world a better place and all that.” Also demons, dangers, and the possibility of dying young but it still beat pretty much any other profession as far as Diana was concerned. Well, maybe not sitcom star or Hollywood script doctor but everything else. “You might say it’s the kind of job I was born to do,” she added reassuringly.
From the sudden contentment on Ms. Neal’s face, a little too reassuringly.
“It’s nice to know that at least one of my students will be leaving the school for a bright and beautiful future,” she sighed. “I’ll never forget you, Diana.”
Diana smiled. “Actually, you’ll forget me the moment I step out the door.”
“I don’t think . . .”