A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition (26 page)

“You
may be the one making the mistake, depending on my power right now,” Dairine said.

Nita rolled her eyes. “I don’t know if I’m exactly a model of stability at the moment either. But I can’t afford to just stand around wondering. Will you help, or am I going to have to do this without a net? Because more depends on this than just me or Kit. Darryl’s apparently…”

Nita trailed off. She was uncertain exactly how much she wanted to tell Dairine about why Darryl was special.

“Something unusual,” Dairine said. “With a lot of power. Or something else. He’d have to be special, to be getting so much attention from Tom and Carl.”

“Yeah.”

Dairine sat quietly for a few seconds, then nodded. “I’ll set something up for you.”

Nita nodded. “Thanks,” she said, got up and turned away.

“It kills you, doesn’t it?” Dairine said. “Asking me for help.”

Nita gave her sister a very slight smile. “Better it should kill me than Kit.”

Then she went back into her room to start yet another futile search for the ace of hearts.

***

We have to go.

Kit sat up suddenly on the bed, looking around him. His glance wandered past the clock on his wall; it was around four-thirty in the afternoon.
Where did the day go?
part of him wondered, but that part seemed very remote. Much more important was the need to go looking for Darryl. Darryl was in trouble, he was stuck, and Kit had to help him. In a world where nothing much seemed to matter, that suddenly mattered a great deal.

He could almost see that other world, here in the room with him, as if he were in two places at once. The world had changed again, or rather,
he
had changed it, Darryl had changed it, to keep putting the One who was pursuing him off the scent. It always caught up with him eventually, always just before It realized that Darryl had It trapped. And then, just this side of that crucial tipping point, Darryl would change everything again, constructing a new world, a new inner self, in which the Pursuer, whipsawed by Its own rage and pride, would once again lose the plot—wasting energy chasing him that would otherwise have been used to wreak Its habitual destruction on the world. Each new world was better at distracting the Lone One than the last, with new rules to impede Its power and to keep It occupied for longer. Each new scenario sucked more energy from It, and fueled the rage that blinded the Lone One to what was actually happening.

It was brilliant, what Darryl was doing. And it was beyond brave. But Kit wished Darryl didn’t have to keep doing this again and again, for it gave him no time to find out what else wizardry might be
for
. If it
was
for anything else…

We have to go,
Kit thought. He got out of bed—

—and tripped over Ponch, who was lying on the rug, watching him.
Boss!
Ponch yelped.
Where are you going?

“We have to go,” Kit said. The bedroom was already beginning to fade a little, like something that didn’t matter. What mattered was elsewhere. The Pursuer was coming again; all his attention now had to be given to the creation of the new illusion, at the expense of the old one.

You promised you wouldn’t!
Ponch whimpered, jumping up and down.
You told Carl you’d stay here!

But it seemed now as if a different person entirely had made that promise. In fact, someone different
had
made it: another person, in another place… the only reality that really mattered, now reforming itself in its newest form around him. The last time, he’d gotten a little careless, and the dark Other had found Its way in and out again too easily. This time the place to which It found Its way had to be more challenging. The idea had come to him that morning in the bathroom, as once again he faced what caused him pain every day—his own gaze, helpless to make itself free of the dark Other looking out of it and mocking him.
But this is just a weapon It’s purposely using against you,
the thought had come to him,
the knowledge of Its presence at the bottom of your soul. So use the weapon It’s put in your hand: turn the weapon against It
…

That other reality, glassy, gleaming, was becoming more and more real around Kit as he stood there. It was only a matter of moments before he would be able to step wholly into it, such was the other’s power and his need for help. Distressed, Ponch said,
The leash! Boss, let me get the leash! Wait for me—

The voice in his head seemed to Kit to come from almost too far away to matter.

Stay there, boss! Kit—stay!
Stay!

The urgency of that voice was just enough to keep Kit where he was, to prevent him from taking the single step forward that would bring him into the gleaming maze now being constructed for the Other’s confusion. That was all that could be hoped for—to befuddle It, wear It down until he had time to rest and construct a better plan. There was no telling whether the hope would ever be realized. But it was the only hope in the world, and hence worth clinging to.

The sound of paws scrabbling up the steps was as distant as everything else. Kit watched the shining unreality forming around him, watched his bedroom fade away, a backdrop without meaning. Into that backdrop burst something that shone, a line of blue light around a dark creature’s collar. The creature looked up at him, urgent, desperate.
Boss, take the leash! Take it, put it around your wrist.

Kit couldn’t see the point, but the creature’s eyes were so beseeching that he did as he was told. As he looped the other end of the line of light around his wrist, the world in which he was standing finally became totally irrelevant. Kit took the step forward into the real world—or rather the one that had become real, and the black creature beside him stepped through, too…

***

“Kit,” his mama’s voice said from down the hall, “I’m going out now. You call me if anything comes up here. Can I bring you anything back on my meal break?”

No reply.

“Kit? Sweetie, are you asleep?”

No reply.

Kit’s mama came down the hall. “You know, I brought that cold medicine home, the one with the zinc in it,” she said. “I wonder if maybe you should just take some, so you can head this thing off—”

She stood in the doorway of his bedroom, looking in at the empty bed.

“Oh, no,” she whispered.

***

At Nita’s house, the phone rang. Her dad, sitting at the dining room table and working his way through the Sunday paper with a beer and a salami on rye, reached out for the handset lying on the table beside him.

“Hello? Oh, hi, Marina… No, he’s not, as far as I know. Wait a minute.”

Nita’s dad looked around the corner into the living room, where Nita was sitting on the rug, playing an extremely frustrated game of solitaire as relaxation from nearly an hour of utterly unsuccessful attempts at getting a simple “guess the card” trick to work. “Nita?” her dad said. “Is Kit here?”

Nita was surprised. “No.”

“His mom’s looking for him.”

Nita’s heart went cold inside her. “He was going to be home all day today.”

“He’s not there, his mom says.”

Nita sat still for a moment.
Kit?

There was no answer.

She broke out in a sweat. There was no way to be absolutely sure where he was, but she thought she could guess. And it upset her to be right so quickly “I don’t hear him nearby,” she said. “Wait a minute, Daddy.”

She went to get her manual, paged through it to the messaging section, and said to it, “Kit, where are you? Urgent!”

Send message?
the manual page said.

“Send it!”

Recipient is out of ambit. Please try again later.

Nita swallowed. She got up and went into the dining room. As she did so, she suddenly started to hear something she hadn’t been able to hear in the living room; the sound of dogs howling a few streets away, more and more of them.

She took the phone from her dad. “Mrs. Rodriguez? It’s Nita. I just called him, but I don’t get any answer. And the manual says he’s not in this universe. He’s gone again.”

There was a long, frightened pause on the other end. “He said he wasn’t going to do that until Tom and Carl gave him the word,” Kit’s mama said. “But he hasn’t been himself, these past couple of days.”

That was exactly Nita’s worry at the moment: that Kit wasn’t himself, but halfway to somebody else. She’d started wondering last night, as she wrestled with the cards, what possible effect an abdal’s ability to be two places at one time might have on someone who’d been inside his head a few times.
A non-abdal’s soul won’t be able to handle that kind of thing for long: it’s just not wired for it. It’ll get hung up in finding some way to make sense of it when there
is
no sense, and the brain attached to the soul is going to twist itself out of shape trying to cope. And maybe not be able to twist back again—

She held still.
Got to keep my cool here,
she thought.
It’s the only way I’m going to find Kit.
“I’m going to go look for him,” Nita said. “It may take me a while to find him. I can’t do it the way he does it with Ponch; I’ve got to be asleep.”

She heard Kit’s mama take a long breath, the sound of someone controlling herself as tightly as Nita was doing right now. “I have to go to work,” she said. “I’ll be back around midnight. But if you hear anything before then, will you call me? I think Kit gave you my work number.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Mrs. Rodriguez, please… don’t worry.”
It’s going to be all right,
Nita wanted most desperately to say, but she couldn’t say it. It might not be true.

“Okay,” Mrs. Rodriguez said. “Thank your dad for me, sweetie. Good-bye.”

Nita hung up the phone. Outside, faint but clear, the howling continued. Her father was looking at her in distress.

“Where
is
he?” he said.

Nita shook her head. “I don’t have a name for it, Daddy. It’s not another planet or anything like that. I wish it were, because it’d be easier to get to. It’s inside Darryl’s mind somehow… so it’s closer than another world or continuum, but a lot more dangerous, in its way. If Kit’s stuck in there, and I can’t get him out…”

She began to shake. Here it was, full-blown, what she’d been most afraid of—a crisis she was afraid she couldn’t handle.
And you’re all y yourself on this one,
she thought.
Dairine may be able to support you, but
you’re
going to be the one who has to figure out what to do with what she adds to the equation. And if you
can’t
figure it out
…

Her father saw the look on her face and came over to her, put his arms around her. “Nita,” he said. “Listen to me.”

She looked up at him, rather shocked at his tone of voice. It was unusually stern for him.

“You’re tough,” her dad said. “Tougher than you think. You have to hand onto that now. That’s what
I’ve
been hanging on to the best I can, and as far as I can tell, it turns out to be true every time if you just don’t let the idea go. You have to take one thing at a time now. Don’t let the stress overload you. Will Tom or Carl know what to do? Call them.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. She picked up the phone again, dialed it hurriedly. A moment later, Carl’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Carl,” Nita said, “Kit couldn’t hold it. He’s gone again.”

Wizards tend not to swear, since the results are likely to be unfortunate if they slip into the Speech while doing it. But Nita distinctly heard several swearwords in Carl’s silence. “When did he leave?”

“Might have been just a few minutes ago.”

“Okay. Wait a second.”

Carl put the phone down. She could hear him going to the table where his version of the manual usually lay hidden, then flip one volume open and start going through it. Listening carefully, she could hear a hiss, the little breath-between-teeth noise that Carl made when there was trouble.

A moment later he picked up the phone again. “He’s out of ambit, all right,” Carl said. “And the energy signatures are too vague to track him. But this much we do have in our favor. Ponch went with Kit.”

“I bet Ponch made Kit take him,” Nita said, feeling sure of this without knowing why. “Carl, I’ll go try to find them.”

“I wouldn’t do that right this minute,” Carl said. “They might still be in transit. I can’t tell. Give the situation an hour or two to settle.”

Nita could see his point, but she didn’t like it. “Carl, he’s been really spaced since he came back from his last time in Darryl’s universe. Anything could happen to him in a few minutes, let alone an hour!”

“Nita,” Carl said, “take a breath or two and get a grip. I know how you feel. But even if you’d already done the presleep preparation you need to do for a lucid dreaming session, which I don’t think you have, you’d still need to get to sleep after that. And you know you can’t induce it with a sleep spell when you’re going lucid. You’re going to have to relax a little, enough to doze off, or you won’t be able to do anything.”

She let out a long breath. “I hate it when you’re right,” Nita muttered.

“All right,
there’s
the wizard I know.”

She had to grin, for Carl had taken to teasing her about her temper lately. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll call you later and let you know what I find.”

“Do that. And if I’ve got something you need, don’t hesitate to ask. I’ll be up late.”

“Thanks.”

Nita hung up, looked at her father. Dairine had come downstairs and was leaning in the dining room doorway, looking alert, with Spot peering into the kitchen from behind her legs. To Dairine, Nita said, “He’s gone. Let’s start building that power-feed spell; I’m going to need it in a couple of hours.”

She and Dairine headed up the stairs.

***

It took Nita nearly four hours to get ready to go after Kit, and even then she couldn’t sleep. Part of the problem was that she was very much a daytime person and found it tough to get to sleep before eight in the evening. The rest of the problem was her nerves.

When Nita first lay down, Dairine was still sitting in the chair by Nita’s desk, looking over the lifeline spell she’d constructed. At any other time, Nita would have been annoyed enough by the elegance and speed with which Dairine had constructed it to try to find at least some fault with it. But there wasn’t time for that, and right now she was simply grateful that Dairine was so talented in this kind of work. The bed was surrounded by a long, tightly knitted cord of blue-glowing words in the Speech, rather like Kit’s leash for Ponch, but both more intricate and thicker. The wizardry had to handle much higher power levels than the leash did, and had no life-support functions as such—those Nita would be carrying with her on her charm bracelet, in a suite of interconnected shielding and atmosphere-maintenance spells.