"Tanya Huff - Keeper's Chronicles 1 - Summon the Keeper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huff Tanya)

ever been able to determine if cats were actually clairvoyant or merely obnoxious
little know-it-alls. "A bad feeling about what?"
"You know: this." He paused to rub a damp paw over his whiskers. "Aren't
you getting anything at all?"
She let her eyes close again. "I seem to be getting MTV on one of my fillings.
It's part of the Stomp tour." Flinching at a particularly robust bit of metaphor, she
sighed. "I'm so thrilled."
A furry, ten-pound weight sat down on her chest. "I'm serious, Claire."
"The summons isn't any more urgent than it was this morning, if that's what
you're asking." One-handed, she unbuttoned her jeans, pushing the cat back onto the
bed with the other. "Nothing else is getting through this headache except a low-grade
buzz."
"You should check it out."
"Check what out?" When Austin refused to answer, Claire decided she'd won,
tossed off her clothes, and got into a pair of cream-colored silk pajamas-standard
operating procedure suggested night clothes suitable for the six o'clock news, just in
case.
Tucked under the covers, the cat curled up on the other pillow, she realized
why the old man had looked so familiar. He looked like a gnome. And not one of
those friendly garden gnomes either.
Rumplestiltskin she thought, and went to sleep smiling.
"This is weird, my shoes are still wet."
Austin glared at her from the litter box. "If you don't mind!"
"Sorry." Claire poured liquid out of the toe of one canvas sneaker, hung them
back over the shower curtain rod by their tied laces, then made a hasty retreat from
the bathroom. "It's not that I expected them to be dry," she continued, dropping onto
the edge of the bed, "but I was hoping they'd be wearably damp."
It was starting out to be a six of one, half a dozen of the other kind of a day.
On the one hand, it was still raining and her shoes were still too wet to wear. On the
other hand, her sleep had been undisturbed by signs or portents, her headache was
gone, and the low-grade buzz had completely disappeared. Even Austin had woken up
in a good mood, or as good a mood as he could manage before noon.
Flopping back against a pile of bedclothes, she listened past the sound of
feline excavation to the hotel's ambient noise, and frowned. "It's quiet."
'Too quiet?" Austin asked, coming out of the bathroom.
"The summons has stopped."
Sitting back on his haunches, the cat stared up at her. "What do you mean,
stopped?"
"I mean it's absent, not present, missing, not there." Surging to her feet, she
began to pace. "Gone."
"But it was there when you went to sleep?"
"Yes."
"So between ten-thirteen last night and eight-oh-one this morning, you
stopped being needed?"
"Yes."
Austin shrugged. "The site probably closed on its own."
Claire stopped pacing and folded her arms. "That never happens."
"Got a better explanation?" the cat asked smugly.
"Well, no. But even if it has closed, I'd be summoned somewhere else." For
the first time in ten years, she wasn't either dealing with a site or traveling to one