The Copper Gauntlet (2 page)

Call felt his heart sink. They’d had this conversation, or variations of it, a hundred times already, and it never went well. “I think I should probably go back,” Call said as neutrally as possible. “I already went through the First Gate, so I should finish what I started.”

Alastair’s expression darkened. “It’s not good for children to be underground. Kept in the dark like worms. Your skin growing pale and gray. Your Vitamin D levels dropping. The vitality leeching from your body …”

“Do I look
gray
?” Call rarely paid attention to his appearance beyond the basics — making sure his pants weren’t inside out and his hair wasn’t sticking up — but being
gray
sounded bad. He cast a surreptitious glance at his hand, but it still appeared to be its usual pinky-beige color.

Alastair was gripping the wheel in frustration as they turned onto their street. “What is it about that school that you like?”

“What did
you
like about it?” Call demanded. “You went there, and I know you didn’t hate every minute. You met Mom there —”

“Yes,” Alastair said. “I had friends there. That was what I liked about it.” It was the first time Call could remember him saying he’d liked anything about mage school.

“I have friends there, too,” said Call. “I don’t have any here, but I do there.”

“All the friends I went to school with are dead now, Call,” said Alastair, and Call felt the hair rise up on the back of his neck. He thought of Aaron, Tamara, and Celia — then had to stop. It was too awful.

Not just the idea of them dying.

But the idea of them dying because of him.

Because of his secret.

The evil inside him.

Stop,
Call told himself. They were back at their house now. Something about it looked wrong to Call. Off. Call stared for a minute before he realized what it was. He’d left the garage door closed, Havoc tied up inside, but now it was open, a big black square.

“Havoc!” Call grabbed at the door handle and half fell out onto the pavement, his weak leg twanging. He could hear his father calling his name, but he didn’t care.

He half limped, half ran to the garage. The rope was still there, but one end of it was frayed, as though sawed through by a knife — or a sharp wolf tooth. Call tried to imagine Havoc all alone in the garage, in the dark. Barking and waiting for Call to answer. Call started to feel cold all through his chest. Havoc hadn’t been tied up a lot at Alastair’s, and it had probably freaked him out. Maybe he’d chewed the rope and thrown himself against the door until it opened.

“Havoc!” Call called again, louder. “Havoc, we’re home! You can come back now!”

He whirled around, but the wolf didn’t come out of the bushes, didn’t emerge from the shadows that were starting to gather between the trees.

It was getting late.

Call’s father came up behind him. He looked at the torn rope and the open door and sighed, raking a hand through his gray-black hair. “Call,” he said gently. “Call, it’s gone. Your wolf’s gone.”

“You don’t know that!” Call shouted, spinning to face Alastair.

“Call —”

“You always hated Havoc!” Call snapped. “You’re probably glad he’s gone.”

Alastair’s expression hardened. “I’m not glad you’re upset, Call. But yes, that wolf was never meant to be a pet. It might have killed or really hurt someone. One of your friends or, God forbid, you. I just hope it runs off into the woods and doesn’t head into town to start snacking on the neighbors.”

“Shut up!” Call told him, although there was something vaguely comforting about the idea that if Havoc ate someone, Call might be able to find him in the commotion. Call pushed that thought firmly out of his mind, consigning it into the Evil Overlord column.

Thoughts like that didn’t help anything. He had to find Havoc
before
awful stuff happened. “Havoc’s never hurt anyone,” he said instead.

“I’m sorry, Call,” Alastair said. To Call’s surprise, he sounded sincere. “I know you’ve wanted a pet for a long time. Maybe if I’d let you keep that mole rat …” He sighed again. Call wondered if his dad had kept him from having a pet because Evil Overlords shouldn’t have pets. Because Evil Overlords didn’t love anything, especially not innocent things, like animals. Like Havoc.

Call imagined how scared Havoc had to be — he hadn’t been on his own since Call had found him as a puppy.

“Please,” Call begged. “Please help me look for Havoc.”

Alastair nodded once, a sharp jerk of his jaw. “Get in the car. We can call for him as we take a slow drive around the block. He might not have gotten far.”

“Okay,” Call said. He looked back toward the garage, feeling as though he was overlooking something, as though he’d see his wolf, if he just stared hard enough.

But no matter how many times they went around the block and no matter how many times they called, Havoc didn’t come out. It got darker and darker and they went home. Alastair made spaghetti for dinner, but Call couldn’t force any of it down. He got Alastair to promise to help make
LOST DOG
posters for Havoc the next day, even though Alastair believed a picture of Havoc would do more harm than good.

“Chaos-ridden animals aren’t meant to be pets, Callum,” Alastair said after clearing away Call’s untouched plate. “They don’t care about people. They
can’t
.”

Call didn’t say anything to that, but he went to bed with a lump in his throat and a feeling of dread.

A high-pitched whining noise roused Call out of a restless sleep. He shot upright in bed, grabbing for Miri, the knife he always kept on his nightstand. He slid his legs off the bed, wincing as his feet touched the cold floor.

“Havoc?” he whispered.

He thought he heard another whine, distant. He peered out the window but all he could see were shadowy trees and darkness.

He slipped out into the hallway. His dad’s bedroom door was shut and the line between it and the floor was dark. Though he could still be awake, Call knew. Sometimes Alastair stayed up all night fixing things in his workshop downstairs.

“Havoc?” Call whispered again.

There was no answering noise, but gooseflesh spiraled up Call’s arms. He could
feel
that his wolf was nearby, that Havoc was anxious, was scared. Call moved in the direction of the feeling, though he couldn’t explain it. It led him down the hall to the top of the cellar stairs. Call swallowed hard, gripped Miri, and started to descend.

He’d always been a little creeped out by the basement, which was full of old auto parts, broken furniture, dollhouses, dolls that needed repairing, and antique tin toys that sometimes whirred to life.

A bar of yellow light peeked out from under the doorway that led through to another of Alastair’s storage rooms, full of even more junk he hadn’t gotten around to fixing yet. Call gathered his courage and limped across the room, pushing the door open.

It didn’t budge. His father had locked it.

Call’s heart sped.

There was no reason for his dad to lock away a bunch of old, half-repaired stuff. No reason at all.

“Dad?” Call called through the door, wondering if Alastair was in there for some reason.

But he heard something very different stir on the other side. Fury rose up in him, terrible and choking. He took his little knife and tried to press it into the gap on the door, tried to push back the bolt.

After a tense moment, the tip of Miri pressed the right place and the lock sprung. The door opened.

The back of the cellar was no longer the way Call remembered it. The clutter had been removed, leaving space for what looked like a very spare mage’s office. A desk stood in one corner, piles of old and new books surrounding it. There was a cot in the other. And in the center of the floor, bound by shackles and gagged with a horrible-looking leather muzzle, was Havoc.

The wolf lunged toward Call, whining, only to be snapped back by his chains. Call sank to his knees, fingers ruffling Havoc’s fur as he felt for the release on the collar. He was so happy to see Havoc and so overwhelmed with rage at what his father had done that for a moment he missed the most important detail.

But as he scanned the room for where Alastair kept the key, he finally saw what he should have noticed first.

The cot against the far wall had shackles attached to it as well.

Shackles just the right size for a boy who was about to turn thirteen.

C
ALL COULDN’T STOP
staring at the shackles. His heart felt like it was too small in his chest, desperately pumping away without making the blood move in his veins. The shackles were forged out of iron, inscribed with alchemical symbols, obvious mage-work, sunk deep into the wall behind them. Once they were clapped on, it would be impossible to get free….

Behind Call, Havoc made a whimpering sound. Call forced himself to look away, to concentrate on freeing his wolf. The muzzle was easy to get off, but the moment he did so, Havoc started barking wildly, as though trying to tell Call the story of how he’d wound up chained in the basement.

“Shhhhhh,” Call said, grabbing Havoc’s nose in panic, trying to keep him quiet. “
Don’t wake up Dad
.”

Havoc whimpered as Call tried to pull himself together. The floor of the storage room was concrete, and Call reached down into it for a jolt of earth magic to break the wolf’s chains. The earth magic, when it came, felt weak: Call’s concentration was all over the place and he knew it. He just couldn’t believe his father would pretend to be sorry about Havoc being missing and drive him around, letting him call for Havoc when he knew the whole time where he was, after he had chained him in the basement.

Except he couldn’t have chained Havoc in the basement himself. He’d been with Call the whole time. So someone else must have done it. A friend of his father’s? Call’s mind whirled. Alastair didn’t have any friends.

His heart sped up at the thought, and the intense combination of fear and magic split Havoc’s chains — the wolf was free. Call darted across the room to Alastair’s desk and grabbed at the papers there. They were all covered in his dad’s fine spidery handwriting: pages of notes and drawings. There was a sketch of the gates of the Magisterium, and of a pillared building Call didn’t know, and of the airplane hangar where the Iron Trial had been held. But most of the drawings were of a weird mechanical thing that looked like an old-fashioned armored metal gauntlet, covered with strange symbols. It would have been cool if something about it hadn’t sent a chill of creepiness up Call’s spine.

The drawings sat beside a book explaining a weird, upsetting ritual. The tome was bound in cracked black leather, and the contents were horrifying. They explained how chaos magic could be harvested and used by someone other than a Makar — through the removal of a chaos creature’s still-beating heart. Once in possession of the gauntlet and the heart, chaos magic could be pushed out of a Makar, destroying the Makar completely.

But if they weren’t chaos mages, if they weren’t Makars, they’d survive.

Looking at the shackles on the cot, Call could guess who was going to be experimented on. Alastair was going to use chaos to perform a dark form of magical surgery on Call, one that would kill him if he really was the Enemy of Death and possessed the Enemy’s Makar ability.

Call had thought Alastair suspected the truth about him, but it looked like he’d moved beyond suspicion. Even if Call survived the magical surgery, he’d know this was a test he was supposed to fail. He possessed Constantine Madden’s soul and his own father wanted him dead because of it.

Beside the book was a note in Alastair’s spidery handwriting:
This has to work on him. It must.
“Must” was underlined several times, and next to it was written a date in September.

It was the date Call was supposed to return to the Magisterium. People in town knew he was home for the summer and probably figured he was returning to ballet school around the same time the local kids went back to public school. If Call had just disappeared in September, no one would have thought anything of it.

Call turned around to look at the shackles again. He felt sick to his stomach. September was only two weeks away.

“Call.”

Call whirled around. His father was standing in the doorway, dressed — as though he’d never planned on sleeping. His glasses were pushed up on his nose. He looked totally normal, and a little sad. Call stared in disbelief as his dad reached out a hand to him.

“Call, it’s not what you think —”

“Tell me you didn’t lock up Havoc here,” Call said in a low voice. “Tell me none of this stuff is yours.”

“I’m not the one who chained him up.” It was the first time Alastair had called Havoc a
him
and not an
it
. “But my plan is necessary, Call. It’s for you, for your own good. There are terrible people in the world and they’ll do things to you; they’ll use you. I can’t have that.”

“So you’re going to do something terrible to me first?”

“It’s for your own good!”

“That’s a lie!” Call shouted. He let go of Havoc, who growled. His ears were flat to his head and he was glaring at Alastair through swirling, multicolored eyes. “Everything you’ve ever said was a lie. You lied about the Magisterium —”

“I didn’t lie about the Magisterium!” Alastair snapped. “It was the worst place for you! It
is
the worst place for you!”

“Because you think I’m Constantine Madden!” Call shouted. “You think I’m the Enemy of Death!”

It was as if he’d stopped a tornado midspin: There was a sudden, charged, horrible silence. Even Havoc didn’t make a sound as Alastair’s expression crumbled and his body sagged against the doorway. When he replied, he spoke very softly. It was worse, in a way, than the anger. “You
are
Constantine Madden,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

“I don’t know!” Call felt adrift, bereft. “I don’t remember being anyone but me. But if I really am him, then you’re supposed to help me know what to do about it. Instead, you’re locking up my dog and …”

Call looked over at the boy-size shackles and swallowed the rest of his words.

“When I saw the wolf, that’s when I
knew
,” said Alastair, still in the same quiet voice. “I guessed before, but I could convince myself that
you
couldn’t possibly be like
him
. But Constantine had a wolf just like Havoc, back when we were your age. The wolf used to go everywhere with him. Just like Havoc does with you.”

Call felt a cold shiver pass across his skin. “You said you were Constantine’s friend.”

“We were in the same apprentice group. Under Master Rufus.” It was more than Alastair had ever said about his time at the Magisterium before. “Rufus chose five students at my Iron Trial. Your mother. Her brother, Declan. Constantine Madden. Constantine’s brother, Jericho. And me.” It hurt him to tell Call this — Call could see. “By the end of our Silver Year, only four of us were alive, and Constantine had started wearing the mask. Five years later, everyone was gone but him and myself. After the Cold Massacre, he was rarely seen.”

The Cold Massacre was where Call’s mother had died. Where his leg had been destroyed. It was where Constantine Madden had removed the soul of the child called Callum Hunt and put his own soul into the child’s body. But that wasn’t even the worst thing Call knew about it. The worst thing was what Master Joseph had told him about his mother.

“I know what she wrote in the snow,” Call said now. “She wrote ‘
Kill the child
.’ She meant me.”

His dad didn’t deny it.

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

“Call, I’d never hurt you —”

“Seriously?” Call grabbed for one of the drawings of the gauntlet. “What’s this? What were you going to use it for? Gardening?”

Alastair’s expression turned grim. “Call, give that here.”

“Were you going to chain me up so I wouldn’t struggle when you pulled out Havoc’s heart?” Call pointed at the shackles. “Or so I wouldn’t struggle when you used it on me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

Alastair took a step forward, and that’s when Havoc leaped at him, snarling. Call shouted, and Havoc tried to arrest himself midjump, twisting his body desperately. He hit Alastair side-on, knocking him backward. Alastair crashed into a small table that broke under him. Wolf and man slammed against the floor.

“Havoc!” Call called. The wolf rolled off Alastair and resumed his place at Call’s side, still snarling. Alastair pushed himself up onto his knees and gradually stood, his balance unsteady.

Call lurched automatically toward his father. Alastair looked at him and there was something on his face that Call had never expected to see:

Fear.

It made Call furious.

“I’m leaving,” he spat. “Havoc and I are leaving and we’re never coming back. You missed your chance to kill us.”

“Call,” Alastair said, holding out a warning hand. “I can’t let you do that.”

Call wondered whether there had been something off for Alastair every time he’d ever looked at Call, some creeping horrible sense of wrongness. He’d always thought of Alastair as his dad, even after what Master Joseph had told him, but it was possible that Alastair no longer thought of Call as his son.

Call looked down at the knife in his hand. He remembered the day of the Trial and wondered whether Alastair had thrown Miri
to
him or
at
him.
Kill the child.
He remembered Alastair writing to Master Rufus to ask him to bind Call’s magic. Suddenly, everything Alastair had done made a horrible kind of sense.

“Go on,” Call said to Havoc, tipping his head toward the door that led to the sprawling mess of the rest of the basement. “We’re getting out of here.”

Havoc turned and padded away. Call began to carefully back out after his wolf.

“No! You can’t go!” Alastair lunged for Call, grabbing his arm. His father wasn’t a big man, but he was lean and long and wiry. Call slipped and went down hard on the concrete, landing the wrong way on his leg. Pain shot up his body, making his vision swim. Over Havoc’s barking, Call heard his father saying, “You can’t go back to the Magisterium. I have to fix this. I promise you I
will
fix it —”

He means he’s going to kill me
, Call thought.
He means I’ll be fixed when I’m dead
.

Fury overcame him, fury at all the lies Alastair had told and was telling even now, at the cold knot of dread he’d been carrying around since Master Joseph had told him who he truly was, at the thought that everyone he cared about might hate him if they knew.

Rage poured out of him. The wall behind Alastair cracked suddenly, a fissure traveling up the side of it, and everything in the room began to move. Alastair’s desk went flying into one wall. The cot exploded toward the ceiling. Alastair looked around, stunned, just as Call sent the magic toward him. Alastair flew up into the air and hit the broken wall, his head making an awful thudding sound before his entire body slumped to the ground.

Call stood up shakily. His father was unconscious, unmoving, his eyes closed. He crept a little closer and stared. His father’s chest was still rising and falling. He was still breathing.

Letting your rage get so out of control that you knocked out your father with magic definitely went in the bad column of the Evil Overlord list.

Call knew he had to get out of the house before Alastair woke up. He staggered out of the room, pushing the door closed behind him, Havoc at his heels.

In the main basement there was a wooden chest full of puzzles and old board games with missing pieces sitting to one side of an odd assemblage of broken chairs. Call shoved it in front of the storage room door. At least that would slow down Alastair, Call thought, as he made his way up the steps.

He darted into his bedroom and threw on a jacket over his pajamas, shoving his feet into sneakers. Havoc pranced around him, barking softly, as he stuffed a canvas duffel bag with some random extra clothes, then went into the kitchen and grabbed a bunch of chips and cookies. He emptied out the tin box on top of the fridge where Alastair kept the grocery money — about forty dollars in crumpled ones and fives. He shoved it into the bag, sheathed Miri, and dropped the knife on top of his other belongings before zipping everything up.

He hoisted the bag up on his shoulder. His leg was aching and he felt shaky from the fall and the recoil of the magic that was still echoing through his body. The moonlight pouring in through the windows lit up everything in the room with white edging. Call stared around, wondering if he’d ever see the kitchen again, or the house, or his father.

Havoc gave a whine, his ear cocked. Call couldn’t hear anything, but that didn’t mean Alastair wasn’t waking up. Call shoved down his wayward thoughts, grabbed Havoc by the ruff, and crept quietly out of the house.