Free To Visit the Queen by Diane Duane

tortured for an eternity out of time. Rhiow wondered how the Lone Power had managed to give them such ideas about the One without being stopped somehow. Such ideas would explain a lot of the things some ehhif did.
    Rhiow stood at the corner of Seventieth and Second, by the corner of the dry cleaner's there, waiting for the traffic to finish passing so that she could cross. They're scared, she thought: they feel they need protection from the Universe. Nor does it help that though they may know the Powers exist, ehhif aren't sure what their role is. They're not even sure what happens to them when they die. There was an unsettling sense of permanence about ehhif death, in which Rhiow was no expert despite her recent brush with it. The ehhif themselves seemed to have been told a great many mutually exclusive stories about what happened After. Her own ehhif was somewhere benevolent, Rhiow knew. But where? And would Hhuha ever come back, the way you might expect a Person to, during the first nine lives at least? Not that, certainties aside, it wasn't always a slight shock when you looked into the eyes of some new acquaintance and suddenly saw an old one there, and saw the glint of recognition as they knew you, too. Rhiow's fur had stood up all over her the first time it had happened, a couple of lives back. You got used to it, though. Some People tended to seek out friends they had known, finishing unfinished business or starting over again when everyone had moved on a life or so, in new and uncontaminated circumstances.
    She came to Second and turned south, trotting down the avenue at a good rate, while above her, against the brightening sky, the last yellow streetlights stuttered out. Rhiow crossed Second diagonally at Sixty-seventh and kept heading south and west, using the sidewalk openly for as long as the pedestrian traffic stayed light. It was unwise to attract too much attention, even this early: There were always ehhif out walking their houiff before they went to work. But you can't really feel things as clearly when you're sidled, Rhiow thought, and anyway, there's no houff I couldn't handle. If the sidewalk got too crowded, Rhiow knew five or six easy ways to do her commute out of sight. But she liked taking the "surface streets": more of the variety of the life of the city showed there. There were doubtless People who would feel that Rhiow should be paying more attention to her own kind, but by taking care of the ehhif, she took care of People, too.
    Southward and westward: Park Avenue and Fifty-seventh. Here there was considerable pedestrian traffic even at this time of morning, people heading home from night shifts or going to breakfast before work, and the two greenery-separated lanes of Park were becoming a steady stream of cabs and trucks and cars. Though she was fifteen blocks north of Grand Central proper, Rhiow was now right on top of the terminal's track array: at least the part of it where it spread from the four "ingress" tracks into the main two-level array, forty-two tracks above and twenty-three below. As she stood on the southwest corner of Fifty-seventh and Park, beside one of the handsome old apartment buildings of the area, Tower U was some fifteen or twenty feet directly below her. From below came the expected echoing rumble, the tremor in the sidewalk easily felt through her paw-pads— one of the first trains of the morning being moved into position.
    Five twenty-three, Rhiow thought, knowing the train in question. She looked up one last time at the paling sky, then headed for the grate in the sidewalk just west of the corner by the curb.
    She slipped in between the bars, stepped down the slope of the grainy, eroded concrete under the grating, and paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust. Ahead of her the slope dropped away suddenly.
    It was a moderately long drop, ten feet: she took a breath, jumped, came down on top of a tall cement-block wiring box, and jumped from there another eight feet or so