The Silver Glove (15 page)

Not too likely. Why not nobble me right then and there while he had the chance, if he could? I didn't think he was the kind to put off till tomorrow anything he could gulp down today.

And I knew that he still didn't have any more idea where Gran was than I did.

If only I'd had the nerve—the presence of mind—whatever it took to just punch him in the middle of his smirking puss with the silver glove! Maybe that would have done some good, maybe he would have disappeared in a puff of smoke (so why hadn't Gran done that? She was the one with the magic, not dumb old me).

But once I'd chewed all that over a few times, my mind just dragged me back to the broader situation, which was awful. There was no comfort in it whatever.

This was the last day of my normal life. That night, somehow, I would have to try to keep Mom from going with her reflection-fetch to join Brightner in leaving the planet, and I would probably lose that struggle. There was no telling what would happen to me, or to her, let alone my Gran.

Now I knew what Brightner was. All that talk about great wizards and necromancy—he was here to shanghai innocent people into somebody else's horrible war. He was a slave dealer, and his victims were all doomed to die in some far-off battle.

They were cannon-fodder.

As for my mom's “special” place in his schemes, the idea of Brightner taking her away forever where nobody would be able to help her made my whole mind fly apart.

I sat there in the hot wash room with the book open in my lap, holding down the same page with my gloved left hand, thinking very un-urgently about eating the stale end of salami I'd brought to nibble on. I stared at the machines in front of me—bright colors swirling around in the cold wash, pale ones in the hot—and my thoughts flopped around getting nowhere, just the same way.

Then William walked in.

“Hi,” he said. “Thought I heard somebody in here.”

I said, “Hi, William.”

William was the new handyman for the building. He could fix anything, which is why nobody wanted him fired even though it was rumored that he drank.

He was a tall, gloomy-looking man in khaki work clothes and big yellow boots. He talked slowly and not much, and had the dirtiest hands I have ever seen. The kids in the building had decided that he probably just gave up washing them, considering the number of greasy, grubby jobs he had to do every day, fixing pipes and wires and locks and stuck windows in people's apartments.

He stood in the doorway gazing somberly at me. “Got something to show you, if you want to see. She come in this morning early, poor little thing.”

“She?” I said. “Who?”

“Come look.”

So I left the book and the laundry and followed William to one of the utility closets. He opened it cautiously, not very wide.

“Just take a quick look,” he said. “She's real shy, real wild.”

From the deepest, darkest corner of the utility closet, wide yellow eyes glared out at us. I heard a faint, dry hiss that ended in a string of minute coughs, like miniature explosions.

“What is it,” I said dully, not caring, really, “a cat?”

William nodded and shut the door again.

“Stray,” he said. “Found her in the boiler room this morning, sleeping near the warmth. Cold night last night.”

A cat. Something stirred in my mind, a breath of something: thought, hope, a rising edge of eager curiosity. A cat! Ushah, swinging a mop at a gray streak in Kali's Kitchen—

“I couldn't see too well in there,” I said. “What's she look like?”

He shrugged. “Not much. Little gray cat, kinda old I think, little bit old and slow or I couldn't of caught her.”

“What are you going to do with her?”

“Feed her up, maybe take her home when she calms down,” he said slowly. He looked consideringly at me. “ 'Less you'd like to take her. Don't think your mom would like it, though. A stray and all.”

Right at that time my mom wouldn't have minded if I'd brought home a nine-hundred-pound yak, but I wasn't going to go into that. So I thanked him for showing me the cat, and I watched him lope off to the elevators with his toolbox.

Then I opened the utility closet, and the cat shot out past my ankles and disappeared into the storage area.

Great. Good work, Val.

I don't have much experience with pets. Don't get me wrong: I like cats. I love cats. But I am a city kid, and pets are a little complicated for me.

I once convinced my mom to let me have a kitten from a litter in an apartment upstairs, on trial. So far, so good. Then I blew the whole thing. The same night that I brought the kitten into our apartment, my mom found me in the bathroom at eleven o'clock, bright red in the face, coughing and wheezing and throwing up.

Obviously, she deduced, I was allergic to cats. The kitten would have to go back.

I screamed and I cried and I denied over and over that I was allergic, making myself even sicker and more miserable. Mom, very sensibly, locked the kitten in the pantry and next morning she gave it back to the people upstairs. And that was the end of my pet-owning days.

What had actually happened—and you'll see why I couldn't tell my mom this—was that when I'd taken the kitten to bed with me that night, it had begun crying for its mother and its sibling kittens.

Logically, to make it feel at home I figured I should treat it as its cat mother would.

So I'd been licking the kitten's fur, and of course I'd swallowed some. I defy you to show me any kid who won't have an allergic reaction to actually eating a cat's fur.

I went back into the wash room and sat down again, wondering how to recapture William's gray cat. How could I lure her back?

With salami, of course! Cats love salty meats, everybody knows that!

Having no knife with me, I bit the salami end into little pieces and put them down on the floor, making a salami trail from the doorway. Then I opened my book and pretended to read.

What with the machines churning along and Danglars getting the comeuppance that he so richly deserved, I didn't know the cat was there until it sneezed a small, neat cat-sneeze from somewhere close by.

I glanced at it out of the corner of my eye, holding very still.

The cat crouched by the wall only a few yards from me. All but the last two bits of salami were gone. She was watching me and licking her chops with her narrow pink tongue.

This was my first real look at her, and she was just what William had said, small and bony, the color of the dust that gathers underneath furniture, with a torn ear, a bald spot over one hip, and a kink in the end of her tail as if somebody had slammed a door on it once.

She darted forward, grabbed a morsel of salami with a lightning right hook, and retreated again.

I sat like a statue, hardly breathing, and when the cat came for the last and nearest salami-bite, I made a grab for her, leading with the gloved hand, which at least had some protection.

As soon as I touched her—I am pretty fast—she let out a yowl in the midst of which I heard, with heart-stopping clarity, words, words uttered in a thin, distorted version of my grandmother's voice!

“Hang on, Valentine, don't let go!”

A wild, brief struggle followed. Somehow I stuffed the poor cat, kicking and writhing, into the smallest of the laundry bags, the white cotton one, and I yanked the drawstring tight.

The bag leaped and lumped around on the floor while I sort of danced around it, sucking my finger where one flailing set of claws had connected, and yelling, “Gran! Gran! Is that you?” like a lunatic.

As I said, it was very lucky that nobody else was washing clothes in the basement that afternoon.

Finally the bag got quiet and the small voice panted, “Heavens, what a dustup! Thank goodness I've finally found you, Val! Are you all right? Not scratched to pieces, I hope?”

I crouched down to talk to the bag, not daring to touch it. “I'm fine, I'm fine! Gran! That was you at Kali's Kitchen, wasn't it? What happened?”

“I went there with Rose, as planned,” said the breathless voice of Gran-the-cat, “disguised as the street person I might well be, in other circumstances. Seeing Ushah there threw me off balance, so to speak—”

“Ushah!” I said. “You talk as if you know her!”

“I do,” said the voice in the bag. “Or I did. She was a wild talent, like me, but she dropped out of Sorcery Hall. Didn't care for the discipline, charged off on her own, and now look at her! She didn't recognize me, of course. She doesn't pay attention to other women at all unless they're potential rivals. But I was so surprised that I did something very foolish: I ate some of the enchanted food she serves the poor there.”

“Oh no,” I groaned.

The bag surged slightly and settled again. “Well, yes; but I was hungry, and Rose handed me a little dish of colored candies, and before I knew what I was doing, I'd popped some into my mouth.

“Well, my own powers were roused up to protect me at once, of course, but the best I could manage under the circumstances was to switch forms, and at that only into some creature analogous to the sort of human being I appeared to be. So—stray old street-woman into stray old alley cat, I'm afraid.”

I said, “You mean there's no cat, really—this is you?”

“For the time being,” she said. “Very awkward, too. There I was in Kali's Kitchen and I couldn't get out because this little cat-brain was so crazed with fear that it was impossible to direct! I kept having this irresistible urge to hide when I should have been escaping. While I'm in cat form, to some extent I'm stuck with cat limitations, and they are considerable.”

I said, “But you got away.”

The voice said, “By luck. It was lucky for me, lovie, that you ignored my instructions! In her eagerness to get her hands on you, Ushah left the side door open, so I was able to slip out and make my way up here in search of you; and that's been an adventure, I can tell you. But I won't, not at the moment.”

This is embarrassing to admit, but I was crying with relief. I sort of blubbered and gulped while I talked. “Oh, Gran, listen—he's taking them tonight, all the captive souls, and Mom, too!”

And I told her all.

The bag lay still, mounded in a neat, small-cat shape and pointed over the ears.

Gran said, “So, it's as I thought; he's built your mother into his scheme. He's using her to fuel a very grand structure of evil magic indeed! But that gives him a weakness, as well as a strength.

“Using her powers, perhaps he's overreached himself, lovie. He might not be able to make it all work on his own. If we can win her back from him, the whole structure may come apart. So we do have a chance. Though it's not a very good one, to tell the truth, and if we fail—”

“If we fail, what?” I said.

Gran said slowly, “He'll try to take us as well, you and me, Val—to capture the rest of our family talent for his own uses. We mustn't let that happen! We must break his spell. Somehow.”

She sighed a sigh that turned into a cat-yawn that lifted the bag and sucked in the cloth a little.

“Easier said than done,” she went on briskly. “Never mind, we must do what we can.

“To start with, lovie, you can take me upstairs with you just as I am, here in this bag. If I get away from you again, I don't know that I'll be able to make my way back, being so subject to cat-fears while I'm cat-formed.”

“But why don't you just change back into your own shape?” I said. A horrible explanation occurred to me. “You're not—not
stuck
like this, are you?”

“No, not now that you've touched me with the silver glove,” came Gran's voice. “It's a great unlocker and tugger-loose, is the silver glove. But transformations are exhausting. I'll need everything I've got and then some before this night is out. Besides, I do have a use for this shape still. I think I'll keep it for a bit, limitations and all.”

“I wish you'd, you know, come
back
, Gran,” I moaned.

“Don't cry, lovie. We've done rather well, between us. Thanks to you, I slipped right out of his clutches, didn't I? Ushah is in for it if he finds out.”

“It's true,” I said, feeling more cheerful. “He has no idea where you are. Or, um, what you are, either.”

“Good thing Brightner himself wasn't supervising things at the restaurant,” Gran said with satisfaction. “That's the weakness of bad guys, have you noticed? Overreaching. Greediness. He does have all those other collection points to attend to, after all—like the ‘clinic' in Buffalo. No wonder he needs an assistant! He's such a busy fellow, with shadows to gather here and in Buffalo and perhaps other places as well. Not to mention the time he's taken off romancing your poor silly mother!”

Gloom invaded me. “You know all about that?”

“Indeed I do,” the cat said. “You did your best to protect her. No use blaming yourself, lovie.”

“Well, I won't,” I said. “If we can get Mom
back
.”

“Her, and the others, poor things,” said Gran's voice. The neck of the hag twitched slightly as the cat pawed delicately at it from inside. “We must stop the necromancer if we can.”

“If!” I said. “But you studied in Sorcery Hall, and he's just a—a renegade. He can't have more power than you do!”

“I am old, lovie. I don't know how this will come out. We will try, though, won't we? We must. And we have a deadline.”

My heart began to pound. Brightner had mentioned a deadline.

“Closing time,” I said. “At Kali's Kitchen, I guess. Closing time tonight. He was telling the truth about that, wasn't he—not just trying to scare me?”

“Oh yes,” Gran-the-cat said. “He told you his intentions, and you'd be a fool not to be scared.”

Well, I wasn't a fool and I sure was scared. I stood up and paced around, glaring at the quiet machines. “But even if we miss the deadline, you could find out where he took her. We could go after her and get her back!”