The Lost Gate (23 page)

That's what I am, thought Danny. Nice to have a name for it.

10

I
NSIDE
M
AN

There was a greater-than-usual police presence in Georgetown, so Eric ruled it out for their “first” real burglary. “We didn't actually take anything,” Eric explained, “so the Wheelwright house doesn't count. That was a rescue, anyway, not a burglary.” Eric was talking now as if the whole rescue thing had been his idea.

“Calling
any
burglary our ‘first' implies that there'll be a second one,” said Danny.

Eric gazed at him with icy calm. “You won't be able to stop.”

“Who's going to make me?” said Danny. This was sounding more and more like an ordinary argument with one of the cousins.

“Not me,” said Eric. “I know I can't make you do anything.”

“Then I'll stop,” said Danny, “when I say I'll stop.”

“Say what you want to,” said Eric, “you're going to do it again because you actually like it.”

“You don't know anything about me.”

“To be inside a stranger's home, while they're there asleep, knowing you didn't trip any alarms because you didn't open any doors, knowing the motion detectors are off in case somebody in the family gets up to go to the john during the night, so you can go wherever you want, take whatever you want. You're like an angel, you're so powerful.”

“So you've done this before,” said Danny.

“A couple of times,” said Eric. “When I was about your age. Nobody had alarms or motion detectors, not in Buena Vista, not in the kind of neighborhood my family lived in. A lot of people slept with their windows wide open. Yeah, I walked around a little. Took a couple of things. Looked at a couple of girls who slept naked on a hot night. Who wouldn't?”

“Me,” said Danny.

“What are you going to be when you grow up, a minister?”

“Not a burglar,” said Danny.

“Gay, that's what you'll be, if you won't look at a naked girl in her sleep.”

“Keep it up,” said Danny, “and I'll decide the Wheelwright house was the last.”

“Lighten up, Danny,” said Eric. “I'm sorry if you think I'm irritating, but I promise you, I'm the normal one.”

“It's depressing, but I believe you,” said Danny.

They both pretended they were joking.

Eric led Danny to a neighborhood called Spring Valley, out Mass Ave, almost to the Dalecarlia Reservoir. There was a sidewalk running along one side of Sedgwick Street, and they strolled along like any ordinary teenagers, scouting the houses.

“Three dormer windows. Big house,” said Eric.

“Kids,” said Danny. “Lots of them—bikes and a tricycle. They won't have any money.”

“Or they have so much money they can
afford
kids.”

They went on like that around the corner onto Tilden. Suddenly the money kicked up a notch—a house with a pool, another with a three-car garage, then one with a boat parked in the driveway.

“Okay, we're home,” said Eric.

“All right,” said Danny. “Where do you want to be when I hand you the stuff?”

Eric started looking around for a likely place. “Long way from the bus stop,” he said.

“So what?” said Danny. “I wasn't talking about you waiting around here—what's the point? Then we have to carry everything a long way, plenty of time to get picked up by suspicious cops, right? So you pick a place near the store where our reluctant fence has his office, and I'll hand it to you there.”

Eric looked at Danny with consternation. “You can do that?”

“It's like punching a hole in the air,” said Danny. “I'm in the house, I punch a little hole, I reach through it and hand the stuff to you wherever you are.”

Eric shook his head. “Sounds too convenient to be true.”

“Yeah, well, it has its inconveniences, too,” said Danny. “My question is, how much do we want to get?”

“How much what?”

“How much money?” asked Danny. “How many of these houses should I hit? How many laptops, how many Xboxes, how many iPads? How much jewelry?”

“I don't know,” said Eric. “A lot. He's going to discount it all like crazy—lucky if we get ten cents on the dollar.”

“Lucky if we get anything at all,” said Danny. “I still think he'll just take the stuff and give us nothing.”

“He wouldn't stay in business very long if word of that gets around.”

“And the word would get around how? Are you all that connected to the criminal underbelly of the nation's capital?”

“You talk like the news,” said Eric.

“I just think that no matter how much I steal, you're going to need another fence.”

“He's the one we know about,” said Eric.

“All right, then.” And with that, Danny made a gate directly to a small townhouse garden he had taken note of on their visit to the fence. It was only two doors down from the store, and Eric could make a pile of stuff there, hidden by the bushes from anybody walking along the street.

Standing there on the street, it occurred to him that it was kind of rude to leave Eric to make the long trek back alone, so he popped back through the gate to Tilden Street, where Eric was standing right where Danny had left him.

“What did you do?” asked Eric.

“What I told you I would,” said Danny. “There's a gate now from here to there. I wish I could bring you through it. Save us the bus ride back.”

“When you disappear like that—what if somebody was watching?”

“What would they say they saw? ‘A boy just disappeared for a couple of seconds and then he came right back.' The cops'll believe them right away, and they'll stake out the spot all night waiting for me to come back.”

“You don't have to get snotty,” said Eric. “I just thought you didn't want to be noticed.”

“If you'll notice where we are,” said Danny, “nobody can see us except from
that
house, and nobody's there right now.”

“Tonight they might be.”

“And tonight it'll be dark. See any streetlights?”

Eric shrugged. “Your magic trick, you get to decide.”

“What about it?” asked Danny. “You want to come through the gate with me and save the trip home?”

“No,” said Eric. He shuddered. “I told you, I'm never doing that.”

“Mind if I go home that way?” asked Danny.

“Do what you want,” said Eric, sounding irritated.

“No, that's fine, I'll take the bus with you.”

“Oh, you sweet boy,” said Eric sarcastically. “Would you go to all that trouble for little old me?”

Danny would have kept him company, but not if he was going to be a complete jerk. He stepped back through the gate, then walked to the fence's store to get something to eat and drink. A bottle of orange juice and a Payday bar later, he was back on the street, walking home to Stone's house. He was sorely tempted to make a gate into the fence's office and see what he was doing, but decided against it. What if the guy saw him?

Then again, what if Danny didn't bring his whole body through? If he could push his hand through a small gate, why not his face?

He dodged into the garden where Eric would receive the stolen goods tonight. Then he made a small gate that debouched high up on the wall inside the fence's back office. He pressed his face into it, just enough that his eyes were inside the office and he could see.

The fence was at his desk, doing paperwork. Danny scanned the room. No obvious stolen goods here—everything looked like cartons of stuff for the store to sell. Maybe the fence didn't take deliveries here. Or maybe he just stashed stuff into one the cartons to have it hauled out later.

The door from the store opened and the clerk came in. “Thought you'd want to know—one of those kids came in just now and bought a candy bar and a coke.”

Orange juice, you moron, thought Danny. Not a soft drink.

The fence reached behind him and picked up an aluminum baseball bat. “I kind of hope they
do
come back,” he said. “I haven't smashed anybody up in a good while.”

“So you want me to let them in?”

“Buzz me first so I can be ready.”

“Why not just buy what they have to sell?” asked the clerk.

“They're cops,” said the fence.

“The little one looks twelve.”

Thirteen, said Danny silently. Can't you get anything right?

“They get young-looking ones so I'll do something stupid. Come on, you think those kids have ever done any kind of job? Even if they're not cops, they're gonna get on some camera somewhere, or steal something with a radio transmitter or something.”

“Then you better not mess them up too bad, Rico,” said the clerk.

Rico. So much for his being an Arab.

“I know my business better than you.”

“I like my job. How you gonna pay me, you in jail for assault? Or murder?”

“I won't kill them. Much.”

“I'll just make them go away, Rico. I won't send them back to you.”

“Do what you want,
Mother,
” said Rico.

“Somebody's gotta watch out for you, keep you from doing something stupid.”

“You're working as a store clerk, moron. What do you know from stupid?”

The clerk turned to go back out the door. Then he stopped and whirled back around so he could look up at the spot on the wall where Danny had his face pushed through the gate.

Danny backed out of the gate the moment he realized he had been seen. The expression on the clerk's face was memorable—horror, like he'd seen a decapitated baby or something. Though, come to think of it, what he'd seen was probably almost as horrible—a human face with working eyes, hanging on the wall without any head or body attached.

Danny sat down and laughed for a moment. He could imagine the clerk trying to explain to Rico the Fence what he had just seen on his office wall. No wonder so many mages couldn't resist playing pranks on drowthers—sending a misty clant to haunt a house, pretending to be a ghost. Making tiny clants out of leaves and petals, to flitter around a garden like fairies. Any mage who could handle their outself at all could make such apparitions at will.

Of course, Danny had no outself and therefore could make no clants. But he could make a gate and stick his face through, and that was sort of similar. He could get a taste of the fun. Considering how many mages played such pranks, it made no sense to Danny that gatemages had a reputation for being especially tricky and deceptive. Unless gatemages could do more stuff than Danny knew about, regular mages were all capable of more and cooler tricks.

He took a bite of his Payday bar and drank off the rest of the orange juice. Then, because he couldn't resist it, he made another tiny gate and pushed the empty orange juice bottle through it. When the clerk got back to the counter, he'd find it perched right in the middle. Then Danny unwrapped the Payday and pushed the wrapper through, as well. Let him freak out a little. Maybe Rico the Fence would think he'd gone crazy and fire him. It'd be the best thing ever happened to the clerk, to stop working for a creep like Rico.

Danny walked along the street until he'd finished the Payday and swallowed the last of it. Then he began to jog and then run all the way back to Stone's house. Gates were fine, but using his body at full speed still felt good, his legs loping along like an antelope's—or so it felt to him. Probably more like an ostrich.

If I were a beastmage, he thought as he ran, I'd want to have an ostrich or an emu as my heartbound. Two-legged, loping along on legs like stilts, faster than cars can go on these residential streets.

Of course, there weren't any ostriches or emus close by, except in zoos or on farms. He'd have to live in Africa or Australia for those to be convenient heartbeasts.

Maybe my heartbeast is a thirteen-year-old boy, thought Danny. No shortage of
those
around. Maybe I'm somebody else's heartbound, and he's been riding me my whole life and I never knew it.

But that would be manmagic, which was truly evil. To take possession of the mind and body of another human being? That would be slavery. Not that anybody would mind if one of the Family did such a thing to drowthers. But if you could turn a drowther into a heartbound, you could do it to a Westilian, and that's what made it an unspeakable crime.

Whatever magery such a Westilian had learned, the manmage could make use of it while possessing his body. So if a manmage had a stable of mages that he possessed and controlled, he'd have all their power. The most dangerous of mageries, manmagic was, to turn a Westilian into a slave. It might as well be cannibalism.

Being a gatemage carried a death penalty in all the Families right now, but it hadn't always been that way. There was nothing inherently evil about gatemagic. What if I had been born a manmage? What if I had taken possession of Gyish or Zog and made them do what I wanted? Danny felt a chill, even though his running had worked him into a sweat. Who'd want to be inside one of those nasty old coots, working the levers? But it would be fun to use their arms to beat Lem and Stem the way they used to beat Danny.

What kind of person am I becoming? thought Danny. I guess that once you do one forbidden kind of magic, the worse ones start looking better. They can only kill me once, after all. They might as well snap my neck for a goose as a duck.

Lana was waiting in the living room when Danny got home, sitting on the back of the couch with her feet on the cushions. She looked over at him only long enough to register who he was, then went back to staring at the television. Only it wasn't on.

“What are you watching?” asked Danny.

“The only good program on TV,” said Lana.

“It's my favorite, too,” said Danny.