The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) (3 page)

Danny walked into the house and quickly found the kitchen, where apparently the cocoa was already made, for Nicki was pouring it into three cups. She moved slowly. She held the pitcher with two hands. It trembled in her grip—if it could be called a grip. Danny half-expected it to slip out of her fingers at any moment. No wonder Lieder didn’t want his wife trying to show him hospitality.

It was not deliberate, not planned. More of a reflex, as if Danny had seen the pitcher slipping from her grasp and lunged out to catch it. Only the pitcher was not slipping, and he didn’t lunge with his hands. Instead, he sent out a gate, passed it over her, around her, and brought her out of it without having moved her more than a hairsbreadth from where she stood.

She seemed to register it as a shudder. “Oh, someone stepped on my grave,” she said, with a tiny laugh, and then flinched as if she expected to cough, only she didn’t cough.

Because passing a gate over her had healed her. It always did. Whatever was wrong with a person, passing through a gate always healed it, as long as their body parts were still attached and they weren’t fully dead.

Not that she immediately became strong and hale—she looked completely unchanged. Except that her hand didn’t tremble holding the pitcher, and there was color in her cheeks and she didn’t seem so fragile as she continued pouring. “Isn’t that odd,” she said. “I felt a chill, and yet now I’m suddenly warm. I’m never warm anymore, but I am right now.”

“Furnaces are like that,” said Danny. “One minute you’re cold, the next you’re hot. But remember, you’re holding a pot of hot cocoa.”

“Of course,” she said. “No wonder I’m warm! I should feel downright
hot
.”

“It’s nice of you to give this to me,” said Danny. “I don’t usually eat breakfast, but it’s cold enough today that even a good run didn’t warm me up the way it usually does.”

She laughed as she set down the pitcher. The cups were full. Then covered her mouth. “I don’t know why I laughed,” she said. “Nothing you said was funny.”

“But I said it in a funny way,” said Danny.

“You say everything in a funny way,” she said.

“I lived in Ohio for a while, but I didn’t think I picked up an accent.”

“No, not an accent,” she said. “You talk as if you got the joke, but didn’t really expect me to get it. Only just now I think I
did
get it. Isn’t that funny?”

Danny smiled. And as he looked at her, he realized that the hand to the mouth, the way she was looking at the cups instead of at him—this woman was shy.

Not really shy. Just sort of generally embarrassed. He saw this all the time, but not with adults. No, he saw it at high school. He saw it with girls when some guy talked to them. A guy she kind of liked, or maybe liked a lot, and she couldn’t believe he was paying attention to her.

This isn’t Coach Lieder’s wife, thought Danny. This is his daughter.

She called him daddy, not by the habit of a husband and wife, but because he really was her father.

“Do you mind if I ask how old you are?” asked Danny.

“How old do you think?” she asked. But her face showed that she hated the question.

“I’m deciding between sixteen and eighteen,” said Danny.

“What’s wrong with seventeen?” she asked. But there was relief in her voice. Nobody had guessed so young an age in a long time. How could they?

“Seventeen is a nothing age,” said Danny. “Sixteen is driving and eighteen is voting.”

“You can get into R-rated movies by yourself at seventeen,” said Nicki. “Not that I go anywhere.”

“Not that there’s a theater worth going to,” said Danny.

“Not in BV,” said Nicki. “But there’s a theater in Lexington. I just … don’t go out much. I don’t even watch movies on TV anymore. I lose interest, somehow. I fall asleep. No point in renting a movie just to sleep through it.”

“You’ve been sick.”

“Oh, I’m dying,” she said. “There are ups and downs. Right now I think today might be a good day. A very good day. But probably that’s just because of the company.”

“This is very good cocoa,” said Danny.

“Daddy buys me only the best. There’s not much he can do for me, but he can get me first-rate cocoa. He’s so gruff with other people, but he’s really very kind to me. I like to think that only I get to see who he really is.” She looked at him over the cocoa cup as she took a sip. “I know he was angry with you. That’s why I came to the door.”

“Thanks for saving me,” said Danny. “I think your father has a low opinion of my team spirit.”

“He cares so much about his teams,” said Nicki. “He wants everyone to do their best, but Parry McCluer High School isn’t noted for the ambition of its students.” Then she touched her mouth again. “I can’t believe I said that. I haven’t … I haven’t been sarcastic in years.”

“Then you’re probably overdue,” said Danny. “I think everybody needs to say something sarcastic at least once a week. Of course, I’m years ahead.”

“And I’m years behind,” said Nicki. “But it’s getting late. I don’t want you to be called in to the vice-principal’s office on account of me and my cocoa.”

“I’m far more afraid of Coach Lieder than of any vice-principal. Besides, when I get in trouble I end up talking to Principal Massey.”

“Only the best for you,” she said.

“Or else it’s only the worst for him,” said Danny.

She laughed. So did he; but he also got up and carried both their cups to the sink. Coach Lieder’s cup remained untouched on the table.

“I’m sorry you only know my father in his grumpy moods.”

“I’m glad to know that he has any other. I’m assuming you’ve seen nongrumpy moods yourself, and aren’t just repeating a rumor.”

“That would be gossip,” said Nicki. A moment’s hesitation. “Will I see you again?”

“I doubt it,” Danny answered truthfully. “I think your father is very unhappy that I accepted your invitation this time.”

“But if I invited you again?”

“Does your father own a gun?”

“Yes, but he doesn’t know how to use it. I think he bought it to make a political statement.”

Or because he was afraid of some student coming to assassinate him some dark night, thought Danny. “Thanks for the cocoa. I’m very warm now.”

“Me too,” she said.

He made it to the door unescorted, but Coach Lieder was waiting outside by his car. Danny expected to be yelled at, but instead Lieder only said, “Get in. I’ll drive you to school.”

Danny tried to assess what Lieder was planning—was he only speaking softly because he was afraid Nicki could hear him? But then he thought: If I don’t like what he says, I can always gate away.

Then he rebuked himself. I’ve already made three gates today, and it hasn’t been a full day since I vowed never to make another here in BV.

Except the one that would take him to Marion and Leslie in Yellow Springs, and the one that Veevee used to get back and forth between his house and Naples, Florida. He’d reconstructed those last night, when he got his gates back from the Gate Thief.

Inside the car, Coach Lieder was strangely silent. But when he spoke, he sounded as menacing as ever. “What do you plan to do with my daughter?”

Danny wanted to say, You mean besides healing her of whatever was killing her? Instead, he answered, “I don’t plan to do anything. She invited me in for cocoa. I drank cocoa. We talked. That was it.”

“She likes you,” said Lieder.

“I liked her,” said Danny. “But no, in case you’re worried, I don’t like her
that
way, she’s just nice and we had a nice conversation and that’s it. Nice. So you don’t have anything to worry about.”

Lieder was silent for a long time. Not till they were going up the last steep hill to the school did he speak again. “I’ve never seen her talk so freely with anyone.”

“I guess she was having a good day,” said Danny.

Silence again until the car came to a stop in Lieder’s parking place. Apparently even coaches who didn’t have a lot of winning seasons still got their own named parking space.

“You haven’t asked me what’s wrong with her,” said Lieder as Danny opened the car door.

“Nothing’s wrong with her,” said Danny, letting himself sound puzzled.

“She’s obviously sick,” said Lieder, sounding annoyed.

“It wasn’t obvious to me,” said Danny, lying deliberately, since by the time he got home tonight she would be markedly improved, and in a week she would probably look fantastic, compared to before, and Danny wanted Lieder to think it had already been happening before Danny even got there.

“Then you’re an idiot,” said Lieder.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure of that,” said Danny. “Thanks for the ride.” Then he was gone.

It occurred to him as he walked into school that Lieder was thinking that Danny might be useful to brighten his daughter’s spirits during her last weeks of life. While it might be amusing to watch Lieder try to be nice to him—it was clearly against the man’s nature—it wouldn’t be fair to Nicki. Especially because Nicki was not going to die. At least not of her disease, whatever it had been. When Lieder realized this, when the doctors told him she was in complete remission, he’d very quickly want to be rid of Danny. So Danny would spare them both the trouble and never go back there again.

The real problem today was going to be dealing with the kids in gym class, who had no doubt spent the whole evening last night telling everybody they knew about the experience of going up the magical rope climb and ending up viewing the whole Maury River Valley from a mile high. Whatever Lieder had seen yesterday, he hadn’t mentioned it today. Yesterday, he had seemed to blame Danny for the whole thing. “They’re riding it like a carnival,” he had said. “You did this,” he had said. But today he hadn’t mentioned it at all.

And as Danny walked through the halls and went into his first class, he didn’t see any unusual excitement and didn’t hear any mention of the magical rope. It bothered him—how could high school kids
not
talk about such a weird experience? But he wasn’t going to bring it up himself.

It wasn’t till he saw Hal in his next class that Danny was able to ask about it.

“Are you kidding?” asked Hal. “Nobody’s telling anybody about it because they’ll all think we’re crazy. Hallucinating.
On
something.”

“But you know it really happened.”

“I do
now
,” said Hal, “cause
you
apparently remember it. What
was
that, man? What happened?”

This was so weird. People claimed miraculous things happened all the time, even though nothing happened at all. But this time, when it was something real, they weren’t talking about it. It’s as if when something really scares people, the blabbermouth switch gets turned off.

“I don’t know any more than you do,” said Danny. One of the gifts of gatemages was that they were good tricksters, which meant they were good liars, since it’s hard to bring off any kind of trick if you can’t deceive people.

Hal looked hard at him. “You look like you’re telling me the absolute truth, but you’re the one who told me to hang on to the bottom of the rope and spin, and then I shot up to the top. You’re the one Coach Bleeder told to get me up the rope, and so what am I supposed to think except that
you
did whatever it was.”

“And if I did,” said Danny, “what then? Who would you tell? How far would the story go?”

“Nowhere, man,” said Hal. “You saved my ass all over the place, you think I’m going to do anything to hurt you? But you took off yesterday, you went outside when the rope trick stopped working, and when I went out after you, you were gone. Vanished. What are you, man? Are you, like, an alien?”

“A Norse god,” said Danny.

“What, like Thor?” Hal laughed.

“More like Loki,” said Danny.

“Is this your final answer?” asked Hal. “Am I really supposed to believe this one?”

“Believe what you want,” said Danny. “Class is about to start.” He went to the door and Hal followed him into the classroom.

*   *   *

H
ERMIA WAS SITTING
in the Applebee’s on Lee Highway, looking out the window at cars pulling in and out of the BP next door, when her mother slid into the booth across from her.

“Have you already ordered?” Mother asked.

Hermia felt a thrill of fear. She was too far from the nearest gate to make any kind of clean escape. Mother was a sandmage, which should have meant she was powerless in a place as damp as western Virginia, but as Mother often pointed out to her, her real affinity was for anything powdered or granulated, from snowflakes to dust, from shotgun pellets to salt and pepper and sugar. The table was full of things that Mother could use.

Besides, wherever she was, Father would not be far away, and he was a watermage—a Damward, able to choke her on her own saliva, if he chose. If they wanted Hermia dead, to punish her for running off and not reporting to them about the gatemage she had found, she could do nothing to stop them or avoid them.

So apparently they didn’t want her dead. Yet.

“They’re getting me a hamburger,” said Hermia. “There’s not much you can do wrong with a hamburger.”

“They could leave it on the counter for twenty minutes, letting it get cold while the bacteria multiply,” said Mother. “And then they bring it to you, without apology, assuming that you’re the mousy little thing you seem to be and won’t utter a word of complaint.”

“I’m not mousy,” said Hermia.

“They don’t know that,” said Mother. “And you look so Mediterranean—they know you don’t belong here in this hotbed of Scotch-Irish immigration.”

“So you’ve made a study of American demographics and genealogy?”

“I study everything,” said Mother. “People are like grains of sand—from a distance, they all look alike, but when you really study them, each is a separate creation.”

The waiter came over and Mother ordered a salad. But before the waiter could get away, she said to him, “What do you think of a daughter who suddenly disappears and doesn’t tell her mother and father where she’s going and whom she’s with? What would you call such a girl?”