The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) (2 page)

Yes, you say so now, but can we trust you? Stay away from him. Let Odin and Gerd do the negotiating. Or Thor. Or Mook and Lummy. People he likes and trusts. Don’t let him see you. We want him to forget all the nasty things you did to him growing up.

*   *   *

T
HE
N
ORTHS WEREN’T
the only Family that spotted those YouTube videos—they were just the closest. The Illyrians, for instance, were already aware that there was a gatemage in the North Family. That’s why they were spying on the Norths constantly.

And when their own gatefinder, Hermia, went missing, their suspicions were confirmed. For a while, they thought the Norths’ gatemage had killed her—gated her to the bottom of the ocean, for instance, or out into space. But then one of their clants had spotted her, still very much alive, and she was using the gates.

Now the YouTube videos confirmed that the Norths’ gatemage was powerful—a Gatefather, able to raise a Great Gate all by himself, or perhaps drawing partly on Hermia’s abilities—and it was time to get Hermia back under Family control. Chances were good that the Norths’ gatemage could be turned, recruited into the Argyros Family. Hermia was their tool to accomplish that. To get Illyrian mages to Westil and back again.

Once mages were restored to their full power, who could stand against them?

Left to themselves for fourteen centuries, the drekka had made a mess of things, and they were only getting worse. It was time for Earth to be ruled by gods again.

2

T
HE
M
ORNING
A
FTER

It was early morning, and Coach Lieder was still at home, Danny had run here from the tiny cottage where he lived alone. He could have created a gate, but that would have made a mockery of his decision the night before, after confronting his family, not to make any more gates at the high school. Technically, Coach Lieder’s house wasn’t the school, but since his promise had been made only to himself, who would he be fooling?

Besides, he had hardly slept last night. He needed the run in the brisk—no,
cold
—morning air. It was better than coffee, when your goal was to become alert rather than jittery.

He knocked lightly on the door, avoiding the doorbell in case someone in the house was still asleep. He also waited patiently before giving another couple of raps. Then the door opened.

Coach Bleeder—sorry, Coach
Lieder
—stood there in all his half-dressed glory. Apparently he slept in boxers and an old tee-shirt—no one would change
into
such an outfit first thing in the morning. And he looked bleary-eyed, tense, worried. This surprised Danny, since at school Bleeder usually showed only two emotions: contempt and anger. Now Lieder seemed vulnerable somehow, as if something had hurt him or might hurt him; as if he were grieved, or expected to grieve.

“You,” said Coach Lieder. And now the contempt reappeared.

Danny expected Lieder to say something about the rope ladder incident yesterday in the gym. But he just stood there.

“Sir, I know it’s early,” said Danny.

“What do you want?”

Well, if he was going to act like nothing happened, that was fine with Danny. Only now he had to have a reason for being there. Instead of doing damage control from showing off his godlike powers in the gym, what else could plausibly have brought Danny here? “I wondered if you could time me.”

Lieder looked puzzled, suspicious. After all the months in which Danny had taunted him by never letting Lieder time his fastest runs, it was natural that Lieder would suspect a trick.

“I’m tired of the game,” said Danny. “I’m in high school. I should care about high school things.” And even as Danny said the words, they became true. It might be fun to be a high school athlete, even if Lieder was a complete jerk.

“Like waking up your teachers?” asked Lieder coldly.

Had Lieder really still been asleep? It was early, but not so early that someone coaching the first team of the day at seven shouldn’t already be up and dressed.

“I stepped off a hundred yards,” said Danny. Actually, part of his gift was a very good sense of distance, with reliability down to a foot in a hundred yards, or a twentieth of an inch in a foot. “Do you have a watch?”

Lieder held up his left wrist. “I’m a coach, I wear a stopwatch.”

Danny jogged easily down to his starting place. “Ready?” he called.

Lieder, looking annoyed, put his finger to his lips. Then he put his right hand to his watch, looked at Danny, then nodded.

Danny took off at a sprint. A hundred yards wasn’t that much—it’s not as if he had to pace himself. He gave it everything—or at least, everything he had at six-thirty in the morning after a night of no sleep.

When he came parallel to the walkway leading up to Lieder’s door, Danny burst through imaginary tape and then jogged to a stop and faced Lieder expectantly.

“Can you do it again?” asked Lieder.

“Do you want a couple of miles?” asked Danny.

“Just those hundred yards again.”

So Danny jogged back to the starting point, waited for the nod, ran again. This time he let his after-race jog take him up to Lieder’s porch.

“Do I make the track team?” asked Danny.

“On probation,” said Lieder.

“Because I’m only marginally fast?” asked Danny. “Or because you want me to suffer a little for being such an asshole so far this year?”

“Everybody starts out on probation, till I see whether you’ll listen to a coach.”

“So I’m not fast after all?”

“Even the fastest can get better,” said Lieder. “The fast ones are worth the time you spend working with them.”

“Just tell me. Am I any good?”

“You’ll be starting for us,” said Lieder. “Now can I finish my breakfast?”

Danny grinned. “Knock yourself out,” he said.

Lieder closed the door behind him.

As Danny headed back down to the street, Lieder’s door reopened. “Have
you
had breakfast?”

“I don’t eat breakfast,” said Danny.

“From now on you do,” said Lieder. “My athletes eat.”

“I’m not an athlete,” said Danny. “I’m a runner.”

Lieder stood there, looking angry, but hesitating.

“I have to stay light if I’m going to be fast,” said Danny.

“You’re either on the team or you’re not.” Lieder glanced into the house, then faced Danny again, looking like he wanted a fight after all.

Danny could see that Lieder wanted to yell at him. Something was keeping him quiet. There was someone in the house he didn’t want to wake. Or someone he didn’t want hearing him yell at a kid.

“Listen, Mr. Lieder,” said Danny. “I want to do my bit for the team. But I won’t belong to you. You just timed me. If the speed you clocked for me is good enough for me to compete, then I’ll compete for you. I’ll listen to your advice and I’ll try to get better. I’ll try to get stronger and build up stamina. Stuff that makes sense. But you don’t control what I eat, and you don’t control my time. I come to practice when I can, but when I can’t, I don’t, no questions asked.”

“Then forget it,” said Lieder. “I don’t need a defiant little asshole like you.”

“Your call,” said Danny. “I offered, and you turned me down. Now I don’t have to hear any more complaints from Mr. Massey.”

“You didn’t offer shit,” said Lieder, getting even quieter as he took a step down from the door. “If you’re on the team, then you have to play by the same rules as the other kids.”

So Lieder still wanted him. Danny must have been pretty fast.

“I can see how you wouldn’t want to have one student getting special treatment,” said Danny. “But I don’t have any choice. My time isn’t my own. I sometimes have to pick up and be somewhere. It’s not my call, and I don’t want to have to put up with crap about it if I miss practice.”

“So go, then. Thanks for waking me up, you little prick.”

“Cool,” said Danny. He turned away, headed back to the street.

“You haven’t heard the last of this,” said Lieder.

Danny turned around and came right back up to the porch. “Yes I have,” said Danny.

“You’re a student. Unless your parents provide you with a note for each and every absence, you aren’t going to get away with disappearing whenever you want.”

“I stay throughout the school day,” said Danny. “I don’t miss classes. But before and after school, there’s stuff I have to do. I offered to share that time with the track team, as much as I can. That wasn’t enough for you. I get it—I even agree with you. I shouldn’t be on the team. But that’s it. No more crap about it. I let you time me and you didn’t want me enough to take me on the only terms on which I’m available.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” asked Lieder, the bully in him at last coming out, his voice rising. “You sound like you think you’re some world-class star, negotiating with a pro team. You’re a minor, and a student, and the law says you belong in school, and the school says I’m a teacher with authority over you.”

“What is it?” asked a weak voice from behind Lieder. A woman’s voice—barely. It was such a husky whisper that it would have been hard to tell, if Lieder hadn’t whirled around, revealing a little old woman in the doorway.

A small woman—just the right size for bullying, thought Danny.

But no, Lieder had been trying not to disturb her. And now that Danny looked closely, he saw that the woman wasn’t old, just faded and sagging. Not his mother, as he had first supposed. Nor was she small—or at least, she wasn’t short. Average height, and since Lieder was no giant, they looked about right together as man and wife. Except that she was wasting away. Something was seriously wrong with her, her robe hung on her as if she were a child wearing a woman’s dress.

Cancer, thought Danny. At home Lieder deals with a wife dying of cancer or something just as bad. Then he comes to school and takes it out on the kids.

On Danny’s tall and skinny friend Hal. It was because Lieder was humiliating Hal that Danny had made a series of gates to help Hal get up the hanging rope to the ceiling of the gym yesterday. A series of gates that intertwined and turned out to be the start of a Great Gate.

It was too easy, to think that a dying wife was the reason Lieder was a bully. It came too naturally to Lieder, a habit, an aspect of his personality. He was probably always a bully. Only now he’s a bully with something else to worry about.

“It’s all right, Nicki,” said Lieder.

“Why don’t you invite this boy inside?” asked Nicki. “He looks cold.”

“I’m fine,” said Danny.

“He’s fine,” said Lieder.

“Come in and have some cocoa,” said Nicki.

“He has to get to school,” said Lieder, “and so do I.”

Danny had been willing to shrug off the invitation before, but the woman was insisting, and the trickster in Danny couldn’t help but enjoy the fun. Plus, he was tired and cold and pissed off at Lieder. “Actually,” said Danny, “I don’t have to be there till eight-thirty. I’m not on one of those teams that practices before school.”

“But cocoa’s not good for my athletes,” said Lieder.

“I think of it as an energy drink,” said Danny. “And I could sure use some warming up.”

“Come on in, then,” said Nicki.

As Danny came past him, heading for the door, Lieder gripped him harshly by the shoulder and whispered fiercely in his ear, “You’re not coming into my house.”

“What?” said Danny loudly. “I couldn’t hear you.”

Lieder didn’t let go. “You heard me,” he whispered.

Danny gated himself just an inch away. Yesterday morning he couldn’t have done that—created a gate and passed it over himself so tightly that it took only his own body and clothing, and
not
Lieder’s hand. But the gates he had stolen from the Gate Thief last night consisted of the outselves of hundreds of gatemages, and every one of them had been a trickster during his life, and every one of them had had more skill than Danny. He had managed to contain them in his hearthoard—his stash—but wherever that was kept inside him, he was able to access some of their knowledge, or at least some of their experience and reflexes and habits and talents.

He must have absorbed these things unconsciously, because he hadn’t thought of doing it, he had simply done it.

If I had known how to do this last year, in Washington, I wouldn’t have had to drag that murderous thug with Eric when I gated him out of the back room of that convenience store.

But there was something else that happened, something Danny hadn’t expected. When he gated himself an inch without moving Lieder’s tight-gripping hand, it moved his own body into space that Lieder’s fingers occupied. Lieder’s fingers were ejected from that space at such speed that the bones didn’t just break, they were pulverized.

Danny heard the gasp of pain, then saw the limp and empty-looking fingers and realized at once what had happened. Before Lieder had time to turn the inhaled gasp into an exhaled scream of agony, Danny passed a gate over Lieder’s body, which healed him instantly.

That meant Lieder no longer felt the pain, but he still remembered it, very clearly.

“Don’t ever touch me like that again,” said Danny.

“Come in and join us, daddy,” said Nicki from the other room. Apparently they were one of those married couples who still called each other mommy and daddy long after their children were grown. “You have time. The kids will just run laps till you get there.”

Danny knew that the kids would sit around chatting or napping, but he had no reason to disabuse Nicki of her fantasy. He had to deal with Lieder, whose face was still showing the shock and horror of that pain.

“Don’t you learn anything?” asked Danny softly. “When I tell you that there are some things I’m going to do, whether you like them or not, it’s a good idea to believe me and step aside.”

“This is my home,” whispered Lieder.

“And that was my shoulder you were gripping,” said Danny. “Boundaries, Coach Lieder.”

Danny walked into Lieder’s house.

Lieder stayed outside for a while. No doubt trying to figure out what it was, exactly, that Danny had done. What had it felt like to him? Agony, yes—but had he understood that for a moment, his fingerbones had become tiny shards inside limp sacks of skin? Had he felt Danny move by an inch, instantaneously, or had he registered it only as Danny pulling away with incredible strength?