The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) (11 page)

“Don’t go there, Xena,” said Hal.

“Even if you
are
a warrior princess,” said Wheeler.

“Jealous?” asked Xena.

“Yes,” said Wheeler.

Everyone looked at him in surprise.

“It’s just Danny, and all of a sudden you’re getting all kissy with him,” said Wheeler.

“Yeah,” said Laurette. “Just because he’s a
god
, why would you want to
kiss
him?”

“You’re right,” said Xena, clinging to Danny all the more tightly. “I want to have his baby.”

At that, Danny pulled away. Joking around was one thing. This was something else. “I just have to think,” he said.

“He can’t think if all his blood has rushed out of his head,” said Laurette.

“I’m just trying to figure out if there’s a way I can keep you guys safe,” said Danny.

“We’d be safe in Disney World,” said Sin. “It’s the safest place on earth.”

Danny thought of what he needed his friends to do. Gate them as emissaries to the Families, to explain the terms they’d have to agree to in order to pass someone through a Great Gate. Danny couldn’t go himself, and he couldn’t send Veevee or Hermia, either. The Families would set traps for them. But what would be the point of trapping drowthers?

That was the problem. Since the Families didn’t regard drowthers as having any value, they wouldn’t hold them as hostages. If they got annoyed, they’d just kill his emissaries.

In fact, as soon as anyone realized that Danny
had
friends, they might try to use them against him. Threaten them. Follow them. Kidnap them. Kill them. Without waiting for Danny to send them anywhere.

He couldn’t concentrate on all of them at once. He couldn’t keep them safe. “What have I done to you guys?” asked Danny.

“What are you talking about?” asked Laurette.

Danny explained his worry.

“Cool,” said Wheeler. “It’s like being inside a comic book.”

“Except we’re collateral damage,” said Hal.

“We’re the red shirt guys,” said Pat.

Danny made a gate, a very small one, and put it directly above a small stone lying in the clearing. “Hal,” said Danny. “Would you pick up that stone?”

Hal didn’t bother looking to see exactly which stone. He just lunged for the general area, reaching for any stone, and when his hand brushed the gate, he fell into it and he was sitting ten feet away. “
That
is disorienting,” he complained.

“That wasn’t what I wanted,” said Danny. “I’m trying to see if I can tie a gate to a thing instead of a place. Just move the stone, somebody. Laurette, keep your hand low and move it slowly and I’ll tell you which stone.”

She moved carefully—though Danny also noticed that she bent over at such an angle that her considerable cleavage was aimed right at him. Was that because it was her habit, or because she was thinking the same way Xena was, that because Danny could do magery he was suddenly cool enough to be worth flirting with?

“That one,” said Danny.

Laurette picked up the stone.

The gate stayed in the air above where the stone had been.

“Damn,” said Danny.

“Didn’t work?” asked Laurette.

“I was hoping I could do it because I went to Westil. The enhancement of my powers.”

“Bummer,” said Hal. He was back in the circle now.

“Who cares?” asked Sin. “It’s just a rock.”

“He wants us to be able to carry gates around with us,” said Pat. “So we can stick a finger in a gate and be somewhere else.”

Sometimes she surprised him. Sour as she was, she was always thinking. Maybe when you don’t care whether other people like you, you have more brainspace for analysis.

“Well, there’s no reason it shouldn’t work,” said Hal. “Whether you went through a Great Gate or not.”

“What do you know about magic?” said Xena contemptuously.

“What I know about is physics,” said Hal. “Basic, elementary, pathetic, every-semi-educated-moron-should-know-it-level physics.”

“Xena slept through the physics unit in eighth-grade science,” said Laurette.

“Danny always attaches his gates to small moving objects,” said Hal. “He’s never done anything else.”

Danny looked at the gate he had just made, the mouth and tail of it, and couldn’t figure out what Hal meant.

“The surface of the Earth is spinning one complete revolution per day,” said Hal. “At the equator, that means it’s moving at a thousand miles an hour. Here, it’s about eight hundred miles an hour. The Earth is also moving around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour. So when Danny’s gates seem to stay in the same place, they’re really moving incredibly fast—so they’re attached to
something
.”

“You said ‘small moving objects,’” said Laurette.

“Compared to the Sun, Earth is a small moving object,” said Hal. “Compared to the galaxy, Earth is a blip. The only reason we think it’s big is because we’re even smaller.”

“Thanks for the info, Science Boy,” said Xena.

“Like he said, everybody knows that,” said Wheeler.

“Oh,
you
had sixty-seven thousand and eight hundred miles an hour sitting there in
your
brain?” said Pat.

“No, but I knew that the Earth spins completely around once a day,” said Wheeler. “And I knew it went all the way around the Sun once a year. That means it’s a seriously fast-moving object. Duh.”

“If you’re so smart, how fast is the solar system moving around the center of the galaxy?” Pat asked Hal.

“Four hundred eighty-three thousand miles an hour,” said Hal.

“And how fast is the Milky Way moving toward Andromeda?”

“That’s impossible to say,” said Hal, “because they’re moving toward each other and there’s no stationary point of reference.”

“The whole galaxy is moving one point three million miles an hour, compared to the CBR,” said Pat triumphantly.

“What’s the CBR?” asked Sin.

“Cosmic Background Radiation,” said Hal, “and that’s not what you asked, Pat, you asked about how fast the Milky Way was moving toward Andromeda.”

“This is all so sad,” said Sin. “While other boys were memorizing football players’ stats, Hal was memorizing the stats of astronomical objects.”

“I wonder if Earth will make the playoffs this year,” said Laurette.

“And you girls memorize what George Clooney eats for breakfast,” said Wheeler.

“That walking fossil?” said Xena.

“The cast of
Twilight
, then,” said Wheeler.

Apparently the girls couldn’t argue with that one.

It was no secret that Hal was smart. And Pat was the smartest of the girls. And Danny knew all this stuff too—he knew everything he had ever read. The difference was that Hal had realized it applied to this situation.

“I get the point,” said Danny. “I’m attaching the gates to a point on the surface of a spinning, moving object, so there’s no reason I can’t attach it to a pebble except that the pebble is smaller.” Danny gazed steadily at the stone, trying to figure out how to attach a gate to it the way he had attached the gate to a spot in the air above the stone.

Meanwhile, Sin had a question. “How do you wizards or whatever you are, how do you know
we
don’t have magic?”

“Don’t talk to him, he’s making gates,” said Laurette.

“We
don’t
know you don’t have magic,” said Danny. “Our blood has been mixing with the rest of the human race for thousands of years, so you probably have some Mithermage ancestry.” He tried to hold the image of the stone in his mind and create a gate solely in relation to the stone, not distracted by any other surrounding feature.

“So send us to Westil,” said Sin. “Maybe we’ll come back with superpowers.”

“Yeah,” said Hal.

“Cool,” said Wheeler.

Danny’s concentration broke. He was impatient with himself, but they only saw that he was annoyed.

“Sorry,” said Laurette.

“Stop distracting him!” said Xena protectively.

“Why don’t you hold it in your hand and really focus on it?” asked Pat. “Disconnect it from the ground.”

Laurette handed him a stone. Danny took it, bent over it, stared at it, made a gate.

He moved the stone a little to the left.

The mouth of the gate moved with it.

It was that simple. Remove the pebble from its context, concentrate a little, and he had an enchanted stone.

“You look happy,” said Xena. “Does that mean you’re thinking of me naked?”

“It means he attached a gate to the stone,” said Pat. “We all try
not
to think of you naked.”

“So … what now?” asked Hal. “You give us each a stone to use if we need to make a quick getaway?”

“A stone’s a lousy idea,” said Laurette.

“Why?” asked Danny. He had thought it was a pretty good idea.

“First,” said Laurette, “what if we drop our stone? How could we tell which one was ours, except by brushing our hand against it and taking off like Hal just did? And then we
still
don’t have the stone—but maybe whoever was chasing us finds it and follows us.”

“Don’t drop the stone,” said Wheeler.

“Right, like none of us ever drops anything,” said Pat.

“Second,” said Laurette, “suppose somebody handcuffs us and searches us and finds a stone in our pockets or purses or whatever? How many people our age carry rocks around?”

“Okay,” said Danny, “Not a stone. I was just learning how to do it, and there are plenty of stones.”

“A ring,” said Sin.

“A nose ring,” said Xena. “Then every time you blow your nose, you’ll transport somewhere.”

“Or you sniff and you get sent to the moon,” said Wheeler.

“‘One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,’” intoned Hal. “‘One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.’”

“Are you saying we’re on Sauron’s side?” asked Wheeler, a little angry.

“Sauron doesn’t have a side,” said Danny. “You forget, the Families are all the gods, all the fairies, all the elves and ghosts and werewolves and poltergeists and everything. Good and bad, the Families are on both sides of everything. There’s no good or evil with them. Just … whatever they feel like doing, and have the power to do it.”

“That sounds like as good a definition of evil as I’ve ever heard,” said Pat.

“Well, look what I just did,” said Danny. “I felt like attaching a gate to a stone, and when Xena suggested that I really focus on it, then I could do it. Was that evil?”

Pat shrugged. “Depends on whether you throw the stone at some other high school’s quarterback and jump him ten yards back and drop him on his ass.”

“That’s just a prank,” said Wheeler. “Can you do it?”

“He wouldn’t need a stone,” said Hal. “He could just do it.”

“And it would be evil,” said Pat. “Hurting somebody else just for the fun of it.”

“So was it evil when I messed with Coach Lieder?” asked Danny.

“A little bit maybe,” said Pat.

“But mostly funny,” said Hal.

“And he deserved it,” said Wheeler.

Danny remembered the men he had terrified into submission out over the Atlantic, and then stashed in a jail. They were murderers, or meant to be. They deserved worse than he had done to them. But it didn’t make him feel all that great about the fact that he had the power to torture them like that. And that he had just
done
it, the moment he thought of it.

“Something you already carry with you,” said Danny. “And I’ll try to put the gate on it in such a way that you don’t just accidentally pop through it. So don’t give me your wallet.”

“Wheeler can give you the condom he always carries,” said Hal. “He’s
never
going to use that.”

Wheeler glared at him. “They gave it to me in fifth grade. It’s like a rabbit’s foot, I’m not going to
use
it, it’s older than my dick by now.”

“Ew,” said Laurette. “You made me think of your weenie.”

“Said the girl with the constant cleavage,” said Wheeler.

“Please,” said Danny. “Something you carry but you don’t touch, but you
could
get to it in an emergency.”

Pat already had a tampon out of her purse.

“Our turn to say ‘ew,’” said Hal.

“Every girl carries them and nobody thinks anything about it,” said Pat.

“I don’t,” said Sin.

“I carry extras,” said Laurette, getting two tampons out of her purse.

“Then I
am
using my condom,” said Wheeler, reaching into his pocket.

“I don’t carry a purse,” said Sin. “What am I supposed to do, tuck it behind my ear?” She handed the tampon back to Laurette.

“You don’t carry a spare just in case?” asked Laurette.

“I’m never early and I’m not afraid of a little blood anyway,” said Sin.

“Are you afraid of a little vomit?” asked Hal. “Because this is making me sick.”

“Welcome to girlville,” said Pat. “But since you’re never going to have a girlfriend
or
a wife, it won’t matter if you’re squeamish.”

“What if I’m rummaging in my purse for something else and I brush against it?” asked Xena, looking doubtfully at the tampon she was holding. “And should I unwrap it?”

Danny took it out of her hand.

“He’s touching one,” said Hal.

“Girl cooties,” said Wheeler.

Danny studied the thing. Squeezed it. Pushed his finger against the end. “Just give me a second,” he said.

He made a really tiny gate completely inside the end of the tampon. He tossed the tampon around on his hand and nothing happened. But when he pushed his finger into the end, he jumped through the gate—this time only a few inches away. But it still made him lose his balance.

“Oh, a three-inch gate,” said Pat. “That’ll show ’em. ‘Better be nice to me or I’ll move another three inches!’”

“I’m just testing,” said Danny. “You have to push your finger into the end before the gate will work.”

“What happens if you forget which one is the gate and you use it?” asked Hal.

“I thought you didn’t like talking about messy girl stuff,” said Laurette.

“I can’t help what pops into my head,” said Hal.

“Please tell me you’re not picturing
me
using it,” said Pat.