The Copper Gauntlet (14 page)

There was a hand on Call’s shoulder, and Aaron was drawing him up to his feet. The scary expression was gone from Aaron’s face; he just looked grim, watching as Automotones gave a last howl and vanished into a speck of darkness that singed across the air.

“What happens to it?” Jasper asked, running up. “Where is it now? Is it dead?”

Call looked back at the burning building, at the wreckage of cars. He didn’t care where Automotones had gone. The important thing was that they were all safe.

“It’s in the void,” Aaron said, his voice flat. “It won’t come back.”

“Come on,” said Tamara. “We need to get away from the fire.”

They began to make their way back toward the barn, Havoc running ahead of them. The air was filled with smoke, and the glow from the burning fire behind them turned the sky as light as day.

“What we need to do is go back to the Magisterium,” Jasper said breathlessly. “Show them what we found. Call’s dad has been in
direct contact
with the
Enemy’s servants
, remember? He’s going to bring them the Alkahest. We need help.”

“We’re not going back to the Magisterium,” Aaron said. His voice was still the same, flat and rigid. Call had the sense that he was holding back whatever he was feeling, tamping it down hard. “
They
sent that thing after us.”

“After Alastair, you mean,” Tamara corrected. “You don’t believe what that old woman said, do you?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“She’s got no reason to lie,” Call agreed.

Now Aaron’s voice started to crack a little. “If they didn’t send it, why did it attack Mrs. Tisdale? Why did it attack us? It ought to have been given instructions not to hurt us.”

“Maybe they decided that if they couldn’t get us back, it was better to have us dead than in the Enemy’s hands,” said Jasper. They all looked at him in surprise. “It’s the sort of thing the Assembly would do,” he added, with a shrug.

“I thought you wanted to go back,” Call said.

“I do. But you guys have messed up royally.” Jasper rolled his eyes at Call like he was an idiot, an expression Call was very familiar with. “The longer we’re away, the more convinced they’re going to become that they have to cut their losses. Wipe out Aaron first, then wipe out us so there are no witnesses, and it’s just a tragedy. If Constantine Madden got hold of Aaron, he could kill him — or he could brainwash him. Maybe they’re afraid of that. Maybe they’re afraid that losing Aaron to Constantine could lose them the war.”

“Not having Aaron would lose them the war!” said Tamara. “He’s the Makar!”

They had reached the barn. Jasper’s face looked like cut stone in the flickering light. “I don’t think you understand how they do math.”

“Enough,” said Call, turning to face the others. “You guys go back to school. I think I can stop my father, so long as I can get to him in time. I have to talk to him. I have to try. But this is getting too dangerous for you to come along.”

They’ll never get it
, he thought.
My dad wants his son back. He thinks if he trades the Alkahest to Master Joseph, Joseph can fix me. Can make me Callum Hunt again. But Master Joseph’s tricking him, trying to lure him in. He’ll probably kill him once he gets the Alkahest.

But Call couldn’t tell them that, any of that.

You can’t outrun the Enemy of Death.

“No way,” Tamara said, crossing her arms over her chest. “It’s not safe for you to go — it’s not safe for any of us. You don’t even know where Alastair’s headed.”

“I think I do, actually,” Call said. He slid the barn door open and limped inside. The rest of them, even Havoc, waited in the doorway as he retrieved Master Joseph’s letters. When he returned, he held one up to the light.

“There are numbers under Master Joseph’s name,” he said. “In every letter.”

“Yeah, probably the date,” Jasper said.

Call read the numbers off. “45. 1661. 67. 2425.”

“That’s not a date, except maybe on Mars,” said Tamara, crowding closer. “It’s …”

“It’s coordinates,” said Call. “Latitude and longitude. That’s how my dad used to program the GPS in his car. It tells you how to find something. Joseph is telling my dad where he is.”

“Then we know where we’re going,” said Aaron. “We just need to find something we can plug the coordinates into….”

“Here,” Tamara said, taking out her phone. But when she touched the screen, it didn’t come on. “Oh. I guess I’m out of charge.”

“A computer in any Internet café would work,” said Call, folding up the papers. “But there’s no ‘we.’ I’m doing this alone.”

“We’re not leaving you alone and you know it,” Aaron said. He held up a hand against Call’s protest. “Look, by the time we get back to school, your father could already have reached Master Joseph. There might not be enough time to do anything, even if we could convince the mages we knew what we were talking about.”

“And if we go after Joseph and get the Alkahest back, then we go back in glory,” Tamara added. “Besides, they already sent a monster after us. Until we know whether we can trust them, the only way is forward.”

Call looked over at Jasper. “You don’t have to come.” He actually felt bad now for having dragged Jasper into this mess.

“Oh, I’m coming,” Jasper said. “If monsters are hunting us, I am sticking with the Makar.”

“How can the mages of the Magisterium be the good guys if they’d send a monster to murder us just for running away?” Aaron asked. “We’re kids.”

“I don’t know,” Call said. He was starting to worry that there weren’t any good guys. Just people with longer or shorter Evil Overlord lists.

Tamara sighed and scrubbed a hand through her hair. “Right now, we need to find a town, somewhere where we can get new clothes and some food. We look like we set ourselves on fire and then rolled around in the mud. We don’t exactly blend in.”

Havoc, hearing the words
roll around in the mud
, began to do just that. Call had to admit Tamara was right. They were dirty, and not like actors in movies who had one artistic smear of dirt across a cheekbone. Their uniforms were ripped and bloody and soaked with oily metal elemental goop.

“I guess we start walking,” said Jasper, sounding dispirited.

“We’re not going to walk,” said Aaron. “We’re going to drive. There are three hundred cars here.”

“Yeah, but most of the ones that haven’t been eaten don’t exactly
work
,” Call pointed out. “And the few that
do
work don’t have keys waiting for us.”

“Come on,” said Aaron. “I don’t have a dad in prison for nothing. I think I can hot-wire one of these.”

He strode off toward the field of cars with a confident set to his shoulders.

“That’s our Makar,” said Jasper. “Chaos magic
and
grand theft auto.”

“I thought you said your dad ran off,” Call said to Aaron, running after him. “And that you didn’t know where he was.”

Aaron shrugged. “I guess no one likes to admit their dad is in jail.”

Right then an imprisoned dad didn’t seem like the worst thing to Call, but he knew better than to say it.

Call helped Aaron select the least broken car he recalled Alastair buying. A Morris Minor, its swooping exterior a deep emerald green that contrasted with its red leather seats. It was one of Alastair’s newer cars, manufactured in 1965, and unlike lots of the others, didn’t need a new engine.

“It’s still not fast,” Call warned. “Like, we probably need to stay under forty miles per hour, even on the highway. And it doesn’t have a GPS. He might have installed one eventually, but he didn’t get around to it.”

“What happens if we don’t stay under forty miles per hour?” Tamara asked.

Call shrugged. “Maybe it explodes? I don’t know.”

“Great,” Jasper said. “Can any of you numbskulls drive?”

“Not really,” Aaron said, crouching down under the seat, cutting wires with Call’s knife and wrapping them back together in a new combination.

“How can you know how to hot-wire a car but not drive one?” Jasper asked, heaving a massive sigh.

“That’s a good question,” Aaron muttered, sticking his head out from under the seat. He looked sweaty and a little shaky. “Maybe you should take it up with my dad. He didn’t get around to teaching me before he got locked up.”

“I’ve driven golf carts before,” said Tamara. “How different could it be?”

The engine sprang to life, revving under Aaron’s capable hands.

“I’ll drive,” said Call, whose father had shown him how — sort of. He was in enough trouble that driving an unregistered, uninsured vehicle without a license was hardly going to make much of a difference. Besides, he was the Enemy of Death, an outlaw, a rebel — breaking the law should be the mere tip of his iceberg of evil.

Havoc barked, as if agreeing with him. Havoc had taken the front passenger seat and didn’t seem inclined to let anyone else have it.

Aaron leaned against the hood, looking exhausted. He glanced in Call’s direction, but his eyes didn’t seem to focus. “It’s weird, huh? Everyone expecting me to be a hero and my father a convicted criminal.”

“Well, since we’re tracking down my dad because he stole some kind of magical artifact, I’m not exactly in a position to judge.” Call smiled, but Aaron didn’t seem to notice.

“It’s just — I don’t know. Constantine Madden was a bad Makar. Maybe I’ll turn out bad, too. Maybe it’s in my blood.”

Call shook his head, so surprised by the thought that at first he didn’t know how to respond. “Uh, no … I don’t think that’s you.”

“Come on, everyone, get in the car,” Tamara said. “Aaron, are you okay?”

Aaron nodded, climbing unsteadily into the backseat. Jasper and Tamara loaded the Morris’s trunk up with their remaining stuff. Thankfully, since they’d gotten out of bed to fight Automotones, their backpacks had remained safely in the barn.

Now all Call had to do was not crash. Alastair had let him drive before, steering one of the old cars when Alastair was towing it, or driving around the farm to park a new acquisition. But none of that was the same as driving all by himself. Call got in and adjusted the driver’s seat, shoving it forward so his shoes reached the pedals.
Gas
, he told himself.
Brakes
.

Then he adjusted the mirrors, because that’s what Alastair always did in a new car — he hoped it would give Aaron and Tamara and even Jasper confidence that Call knew what he was doing. But the familiar movements made him think of his dad, and a helpless panic settled over him.

He was never going to be the person his father loved. That person was dead.

“Let’s go,” Jasper said, climbing into the backseat. Tamara climbed in after him. Apparently they’d decided to let Havoc keep shotgun. “If you even know how to drive.”

“I know how,” Call said, letting out the clutch and sending the car rocketing down the road.

The Morris Minor clearly needed new shocks. Every bump in the road threw the kids into the air. It also guzzled gas so fast that Call knew they were going to have to make a lot of stops. He clung to the wheel, squinted at the road, and hoped for the best.

In the backseat, Aaron fell into a kind of fitful sleep, not seeming to mind the roughness of the ride. He thrashed around a little but didn’t wake.

“Is he okay?” Call called into the back.

Tamara touched the inside of her wrist to Aaron’s forehead. “I don’t know. He doesn’t have a fever, but he’s kind of clammy.”

“Maybe he expended too much magic,” Jasper said. “They say the cost of using void magic is high.”

It took them twenty minutes to find the edge of a small town. Call pumped gas into the Morris while Tamara and Jasper went into the station to pay.

“Do you think he noticed how weird you looked?” Call asked when they came back. They were, after all, wearing burned, muddy clothes. And they were kids, all barely thirteen. Definitely too young to be driving cars.

Jasper shrugged. “He was watching television. I don’t think he cared about anything except that we paid.”

“Let’s go,” said Tamara, climbing into the back to sit next to the still-sleeping Aaron. “Before he thinks about it.”

Tamara used the map to direct Call through the town until they came to a closed sporting goods store with a big, empty parking lot. Call very slowly and carefully pulled into a vacant spot. Aaron was still asleep. Tamara yawned.

“Maybe we should let him rest,” she said.

“Yeah,” Jasper said muzzily. “You’re right. I am totally awake and alert in every way, but chaos magic is hard on Makars.”

Call rolled his eyes, but he was as exhausted as the rest of them. He allowed himself to doze, leaning across the center console to pillow his head on Havoc. A moment later, he’d fallen into a fitful sleep. When he woke up, Aaron was awake and Tamara was asking him if he was okay and lemony daylight was filtering through the window.

“I don’t know,” Aaron said. “I feel a little weird. And dizzy.”

“Maybe you need food,” Call said, stretching.

Aaron grinned as Jasper and Tamara climbed out of the car. “Food does sound good.”

“Stay here, boy,” Call said to Havoc, scratching behind his ears. “No barking. I’ll get you a sandwich.”

He left the car window cranked open, in case Havoc needed fresh air. He hoped nobody tried to steal the car, mostly for the thief’s sake. No regular person, even a car thief, was prepared for a surprise faceful of angry Chaos-ridden wolf.

The street had a few other shops, including a used-clothing store that Tamara pointed to with great enthusiasm.

“Perfect,” she said. “We can pick up some new clothes. Aaron, if you don’t feel up to it …”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. He still looked exhausted but managed to grin anyway.

“No amount of clothing is going to make that car of yours stand out less,” said Jasper, who knew how to bring down any mood.

“We can buy it a scarf,” Call told him.

The store was full of racks of used and vintage clothes, and all sorts of secondhand knickknacks that Call recognized from his dad’s forays to antiques fairs and junk shops. Three Singer sewing machine stands had been turned into a counter. Behind it sat a woman with short white hair and purple cat-eye glasses. She glanced up at them.