The Silver Glove (7 page)

The kite sliced through the mob of birds, leaving two of them streaked with blood. I saw one flutter down silently and disappear into the river.

The gulls screamed and attacked. A wild melee filled the air with drifting feathers and scraps of paper. The sun glanced off white wings and darting eyes. Two more gulls tumbled down, crying.

Then the kite plummeted, pinwheeling, the gulls after it all the way. They burst outward in all directions over the water, yelling and swooping to snatch bits of paper from each other's beaks. The kite sank.

One by one, the gulls settled on the river. The water lifted them in a peaceful, bobbing motion. They dug their beaks into their feathers, rooting around disgustingly for bugs to eat. I loved them.

“I thought they'd never come,” Gran said. “Someone must have been feeding them over at the yacht basin.”

I was shaking all over. “What
was
it? The kite, I mean.”

“It was what you called The Claw,” she said, “in one of its many manifestations. Basically, it's a sort of evil impulse that Brightner can project out of himself and into objects like that little kite, to animate them and send them to do his will. Like the hangers at Kress's that he organized into a monster, and now this kite—brilliantly done, too. I'd rather not have used those old friends against that, but I couldn't see an alternative.”

“Friends?” I squinted to make out the gulls, pale spots riding the dark water.

“They're just birds, lovie, not spirits. I know how to get on their frequency, that's all. I wish I hadn't had to. They've a tough enough life as it is.”

“Can we go down now?” I said. My hands felt like two bundles of icy cramps and my ears ached from the wind.

“We have no choice,” Gran said.

We were flying very low, heading southeast, limping in off the river onto the west shoreline of Manhattan Island. We hopped over the West Side Drive, skimmed a parapet wall, and bounced in the air, just missing a big skylight of dirty, frosted panes. We landed with a bump in the middle of a rooftop.

I staggered upright and stepped off the wounded carpet.

We were on some kind of industrial roof with a row of skylights marching down the middle of it. The building—it looked like a warehouse—seemed to take up one whole end of a block. It was surrounded by streets on three sides. The fourth side was bounded by a narrow alley and a neighboring building. An old iron fire escape led down over the farther parapet into the alley.

Gran stooped and grabbed one edge of the carpet. “Come on, lovie, give me a hand with this.”

To my surprise the carpet was very light and easy to handle. It folded not only in half but in quarters and then again, and again, each time getting smaller and less bulky. In no time we were standing nose to nose and Gran was smoothing down something that looked like a handkerchief. She tucked it carefully into the baggy side-pocket of her tweed coat.

“Poor wounded carpet,” I said. “Can you fix it?”

“Oh, I think so,” Gran said, frowning absently.

“He tried to kill us!” I said, shivering, and then I blushed to have said something so stupid. I mean, this guy was stealing people's souls. Trying to kill me and my Gran would be like swatting flies to a person like that.

Gran kindly ignored my foolishness completely. “Let's get cracking, lovie, before he locates us again.” She set off down the roof toward the fire escape. “I must find Dirty Rose for our dinner at Collie's Kitchen. As for your mother, try to keep her out of Brightner's company.” She looked hard, at me. “This meeting they've already had—tell me, lovie, did you notice? Does your mother still have her shadow?”

“I think so,” I said, trying to remember. It's not as easy as you'd think, recalling whether a person has a shadow or not. I mean, it's not the kind of thing you look for.

“I imagine she does,” Gran said in a worried tone. “I'm very much afraid that he's preparing something special for your mother.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “I thought you said she's just somebody to use as a sort of hostage, to keep you from getting in his way.”

Gran gave me a thoughtful look. “And people sometimes let hostages go, when there's no more reason to hold them; is that what you're thinking?”

I couldn't exactly bring myself to say what I was thinking, which was that maybe we should let Brightner take his load of shadows with him, if only he would leave my mom behind. How could we fight him, Gran and me? We had just barely escaped alive, thanks to a bunch of greedy, rowdy sea gulls!

Gran leaned against the parapet. An ambulance went wailing by someplace way below in the streets. She said in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone, “Brightner is clearly willing to try to simply kill me outright, and you, too. So he doesn't need your mother as a hostage, does he? He must be interested in Laura in her own right.”

“You mean, really? As a—as a date? As a girlfriend?”

Gran said, “We must keep her from him, lovie.”

I groaned. “Gran,
she's
the mommie,
I'm
the kid. She's supposed to fuss about the people I go out with, not the other way around!”

“Do your best,” Gran said.

It sounded completely screwy to me. I said, “If he's such a hotshot wizard, he could go out with anybody he wanted. I mean, Mom is pretty and smart and everything, but she's no movie star. What's the attraction for somebody like him?”

“Her share of the family talent,” Gran said patiently. “Her unused potential. He's ambitious, he wants to pull off a real coup here, and evil magic is limited, you know. It's based on fear, after all, and lies. Your mother, now, has her share of our family gift, and captured good magic can extend the range of bad magic quite considerably.”

“Wait, now, wait,” I objected. “Mom has no power, she has no magic. She won't even
talk
about magic!”

Gran sighed. “I know she won't, but she is my daughter. She does have—capacities. The problem is, she's always ducked the whole subject. You've read about how the children of Hippies grew up to become stockbrokers? Which doesn't mean that her gift is wiped out, only that she neither uses it nor protects it. So her unused magic is up for grabs, and that attracts a man like Brightner.”

“Can't she see that?” I shook my head miserably. “How can she even
stand
him?”

“She doesn't know what she's dealing with,” Gran said grimly.

I said, “You said he works with fear. So why isn't Mom afraid of him? I am.”

Gran shook her head. “It's her own fears that he uses to draw her to him—fear of being left all alone, of being unloved.”

“What?” I said. “But I'm there, and I love her!”

Gran patted my hair with one gnarly hand. “Of course you love her, but you have your own life, Val. She wants what a woman is supposed to want, a man in her life. And she's at a touchy stage right now, you know that—striking out on her own and all. Life's not easy for a divorcée with a child, lovie. She's still hoping for a knight in shining armor, I'm sure, like most women in her position.”

“She goes out with a lot of guys,” I said, picking at the bubbles in the tar on the parapet. “She should have more sense by now.”

Gran said, “So she should, but obviously her vision's not too clear on this point. Well, it's partly my fault, I'm sure. Magic doesn't make one the perfect mother, alas. I made a mistake. For the longest time I didn't tell her anything about the family talent. I didn't explain anything. I wanted her to learn about life without it. She did, and she liked being ‘normal.' And I grant you, without a smidgin of magic she went out and got exactly what she wanted—nice, normal, hectic New York rat race, nice, normal divorce, and no simple
sense
.”

“She does okay,” I said. I mean, Mom's not always easy to get along with, but she's not a jerk.

“I'm glad you speak up for her,” Gran said, “but you can see as well as I can that ‘okay' is not good enough when you are a sorcerer's child. No amount of normality can cancel that.”

“I still don't see why he's after her,” I said stubbornly. I really just wanted Gran to say that he wasn't, I think. And I wanted to keep Gran there, talking about magic on a warehouse rooftop, so that she wouldn't be gone on her undercover mission, leaving me alone.

Gran frowned. “I'm not sure,” she admitted, “but it is possible, lovie, that he's expanded his plans from a minor foray into a major soul-stealing expedition on the basis of being able to use your mother's unrealized power himself. Building on her capacities, he could tear away a really great mass of souls to steal. He could make poor Laura his springboard to a triumph.”

I looked over the edge of the roof. The rusted metal steps seemed to descend into a slice of absolute darkness.

“But you're not sure,” I insisted. “You can't be sure that's what he's doing!”

“No,” said Gran, “but I'm going to find out. I'm just trying to prepare you, lovie. This could be a dreadful business, more dreadful even than it's been so far.”

I had nothing to say to that. I just wanted to cry.

Gran said thoughtfully, “Now, if by chance I do
not
get in touch with you in the morning, you are on no account to try to come after me. Whatever Collie's Kitchen is, it's no place for you. You can do more if you stick by your mother.”

The idea of not hearing from Gran, for whatever reason, froze my blood.

She went on, “And one more thing: I wouldn't say anything about today, about seeing me—and especially about my plans for tonight—to your mother.”

“Why not?” I said, stunned. “She'll be so glad to know you're all right, how could I not mention it?”

“Anything you tell her may get back to Brightner, and the less he knows, the better. You go down first, I'm slower than you are.”

So I went down the fire escape first, trying to get used to the idea of my mom as a kind of double agent against Gran and me, and herself, for Pete's sake, and not even knowing it! That made me really hate Brightner, for messing around with my mother's mind so that she couldn't even be trusted with knowing that Gran was all right.

How in the world was I going to keep all this from just bursting out of me, anyway?

On the bottom landing of the fire escape I had to heave the last ladder free and let it down to the sidewalk. It was almost rusted solidly to the frame of the landing, but as I jerked at it to free it, it gave suddenly and slid down with an echoing crash.

I stood there a minute at the head of the last ladder, steadying my wobbly knees. I mean, what if Brightner was waiting down there for us? But there was nowhere else to go, so down I went with my back to the alley, rust flaking off the iron rails under my hands.

As soon as I stepped off the bottom rung, a voice said, “Hold it right there, kid. Put your hands over your head and face the wall.”

Brightner's cops!

When I looked up the ladder, Gran was gone. There was just a grubby handkerchief patterned like an Oriental carpet, tied to the rail and fluttering lightly in the breeze.

 

7
Mom in Love

 

 

T
HEY WERE NOT BRIGHTNER'S MEN
after all. They were two ordinary cops who had been passing in their patrol car and heard the bottom ladder crash down.

I begged them to let me go and get “my Gran's handkerchief,” and one of them shrugged and got it for me. Then they took me in, as they say, and frankly that suited me. That part of town is not someplace you want to stroll in by yourself on a weekend, when there's hardly anybody around. So I ended up at a police station on the lower West Side, telling a story about wandering around in a state of gloom and confusion over the disappearance of my grandmother, looking for her. I said I'd noticed the handkerchief tied to the rail, a handkerchief (I said) that had looked like one of my Gran's. So naturally I had pulled down the fire escape ladder to get to the bit of cloth, which I took out of my pocket and showed to the police.

And I held my breath, too, while they looked at it. Suppose they—or I, for that matter—accidentally triggered its magic and it turned itself back into a flying carpet on the spot?

It just lay limp, however, and I tucked it back safely into my pocket.

So that was my story—your basic lame, limping lie, and they probably didn't believe me, but what the heck. The warehouse hadn't been broken into, after all. In the end they called my mom and she came and got me.

The first thing I checked for was did she have a shadow. She did. Sigh of relief.

Now, this is my mom I'm talking about, New York's most law-abiding citizen, who could not be expected to appreciate her only daughter getting picked up by the cops. She came breezing in, signed some papers, explained that I was a good kid but definitely under pressure about my grandmother, and yes, she would get me some counseling, and off we went in a taxi.

She hummed to herself the whole way home. The only thing she said was, “I hope this is the climax of whatever's going on with you, Valli, not merely the beginning.”

And there wasn't a thing I could tell her, not without her reporting it to Brightner the next time she saw him. So it was just as well that she didn't ask me any questions. Weird, but just as well.

Weird because it made me feel as if I'd climbed into a cab with a nice but totally strange person. I mean, your mother is the one who
always
asks you questions.

When we got home, she sent me to take a bath while she made us something to eat. When you have a working mom, you tend to do all your socializing together over the dinner table. Which probably meant I'd get the questions with my food. I was not looking forward to this.