The Golden Thread (10 page)

Lennie took another soft step.

The stag reared and flung itself backward. The double doors opened and spilled the scrambling animal down the steps onto the sidewalk. Lennie and I ran out after it, way too late. We watched the stag gallop down the avenue and veer westward, toward the park.

Lennie panted, “It's Peter, isn't it?”

“Got to be,” I said. “She turned Peter into a deer, Lennie. Right in front of our eyes. Now you have to believe me, about the Leaf-Taker.”

He said, “I do believe you.”

 

8
Sorcerer's Apprentice

 

 

M
IMI STARTED TO QUAKE AND GROAN.
“I want to go home, I just want to be in my own room until I can come back
down
, okay?”

Lennie and I put her on an uptown bus. Then we headed for the park, after Peter.

Poor Peter. The woman in the jeans store had been turned into some animal from another world—Bosanka's world—for about half a minute. But Peter—that deer was of our own world. It looked like a change that could stick because it belonged here. It fit. I still had the dried spit thrown from the deer's panting mouth on my hand.

Lennie walked alongside me. “Hey, Val. Say something.”

“In a minute,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “then I will. I didn't really believe that stuff you told me last fall about messing around with magic and your Gran being a—a
bruja
, a good witch, and all. But I do now. I also believe we're in trouble.”

We walked across the park toward the north side of the rowboat lake. Nobody was out there, of course; the lake was mostly iced over.

“It's all my fault.” I groaned out loud. I felt a wave of dismal anger: I needed Gran's help! How could she leave me on my own like this?

There's a little wooden gazebo on the west shore of the lake. I stumped inside and sat down, hunching deep into my coat.

Lennie put his books down on the bench next to me and stood looking out at the ice on the lake. There wasn't much to see, just the sawhorses lined up crookedly about fifteen feet out on the ice, with cardboard signs in red lettering hung on them that said
Danger
plus a lot of smaller print. I wondered who had walked out on the ice to set them there, and how come whoever it was hadn't fallen through because of the Danger.

“It's my
fault
,” I muttered.

Lennie sighed patiently. “Come on,” he said over his shoulder. “You didn't turn Peter into a deer, Bosanka did. I keep wanting not to believe it, but I saw those horns.” He let out a whistle. “They were
sharp
. And where did that thing come from, if it wasn't Peter?”

I said miserably, “I never should have called the meeting. I thought everybody would just naturally listen to me and act sensible because I told them to, right? And look what happened! Suppose a taxi hits him? I mean, he's such a jerk as a person, imagine how he's going to be as a deer!”

Hot tears began to run down my face. I didn't even try to hide them.

Lennie, who wasn't easily ruffled even by somebody crying, gave me a friendly bop on the shoulder. “Hey, come on. We'll work out something with the Brass Breastplate of Jefferson High. We'll be okay.”

“You don't understand,” I said, sniffling. “The family talent has always been dangerous, but it was also always sort of—I don't know, an
adventure
. Now it looks like my mom is right. It looks more like the family curse.”

He flopped down on the bench opposite, legs sprawled out. “Listen, mothers get nervous. They can't help it, it's programmed into them by Nature, you know?”

“No, really,” I said, calming down now and starting to think about what I was saying. “It's always been me and—well, somebody older, with magic of their own. Now it's just me, and other kids are involved, and I'm really worried, and I don't know what to do. I mean, look what just
happened
!”

Lennie waggled his high-tops, frowning in concentration. After awhile he said, “Another kid was involved once. That first time you told me about: the monster in Castle Lake, and the fighting statue. Joel was part of that, wasn't he?”

“Yes. I didn't even know him then. It was because of Paavo that Joel and I met.”

“Paavo,” Lennie said, nodding. “The street fiddler, only the fiddle was magical, and he was really a wizard from this Sorcery Hall, right? He needed you to help him with his magic because of your family talent, but what did Joel do?”

“Poor Joel, he was dying for Paavo to take him as a violin student,” I said. “What Joel did was to get himself stuck in the subway as a prisoner of a monster we called the kraken.” I sighed. “No, that's not fair. He tried to help when these three punks that were working with the kraken attacked us, up at Castle Lake. Joel kept the kraken from getting hold of the key that we needed. And then the kraken died, and Paavo died—”

There was no way to go past that fast enough. My eyes got all hot and swimmy. I snuffled into my coat collar again until I got back in control, but it was very shaky control.

Actually, I was feeling furious. What was the good of having beaten the kraken and then having outwitted Brightner the necromancer and his wife Ushah, only to end up being run ragged by some crazy teen-witch from another world?

I added, “Then Joel went away to school, in up Boston. End of story.”

“Not if Bosanka wants him in.”

I didn't have the heart to tell Lennie that I had already tried to involve Joel, or at least let him know what was going on, and the jerk had hung up on me. The prognosis, as the doctors kept saying about Gran, was not good.

Lennie reached under his jacket and scratched thoughtfully. One thing about him, he was always very casual about body things, which could be kind of embarrassing.

“What is it?” I snapped. “Have you got fleas?”

His eyebrows quirked in surprise. “Just an itch.”

“Well, spare me, will you?” I said.

“Sorry,” he said. He anchored both hands deep in his jacket pockets. “There's more, right?” he said after a minute. “
Without
Joel. The part about that guy who pretended to be our school psychologist for a little while—”

“Brightner, that pig!” God, how clearly all that came back to me now—the lush, juicy voice of the man, and his hound-dog smile!

Lennie cleared his throat delicately. “He came on to your mother, you said.”

I poked him in the knee with my foot. “Lennie, he was after her, and me,
and
my Gran. Control of the family talent was what he really wanted. I wouldn't call that exactly flirting, you know?”

He blushed. “Me, either. But you beat him, right?”

“Me and my Gran,” I said. “
We
beat him.”

“Well,
we
will beat this thing, too. Us. The Comet Committee.”

“What?” I squawked.

Some ducks in the puddles at the lake's edge flapped their wings and moved further away, to a less explosive neighborhood. Also less dirty. Right around the wooden pavilion there was more litter and trash than anywhere else along the shoreline.

I went on pretty hotly, “Lennie, were you there just now? Did you hear what Mimi said? Did you see what happened to Peter? And Joel thinks the Comet Committee is a load of crap anyway, so why should he help?”

“He's kind of snooty, isn't he?” Lennie said, not meanly, but thoughtfully. “I mean, he's not too good at fitting in with people he doesn't know.”

I frowned at the beat-up wooden floor of the gazebo. I didn't like to hear Lennie criticizing Joel. What did Lennie really know about him or about magic, anyway? It was Joel who had been a prisoner of the kraken, not Lennie, and it was Joel who had this mysterious hand-malady that was driving him to drink, a little anyway, and cutting him off from me when I could really use his help.

I said angrily, “I just said, I don't even know if I can persuade Joel to have anything to do with this.”

“Just don't strain yourself,” Lennie said mildly, “that's all I'm saying.”

I sighed. “You've got a lot to learn about magic,” I said. “As you said yourself, Bosanka wants him in, and she's calling the shots.”

Lennie drew his eyebrows together into a dark bar over his eyes. He looked away from me, out at the gray ice of the lake. “I guess she is, isn't she? It feels funny, taking orders from a girl.”

I snorted. “I don't like it any better than you do, but it has nothing to do with her being female. Bosanka the crazy alien just scares me to death.”

“Want a Life Saver?” He held out a grubby roll of candies. I took the top one even though it was only grape flavor and had some pocket fuzz stuck to it. Lennie popped a green one into his mouth and put the roll away. “You know what scares
me
? That we did do something real that night on the roof, or Bosanka wouldn't have noticed us.”

“Right,” I said.

“What I mean is, I guess you're used to thinking of yourself as, you know, talented this way,” he said. “I'm not. It gives me the creeps. But I have to admit, I'd sort of been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Since New Year's. I felt something connect up with us, hard, on the roof that night. I just couldn't figure out what it might be. Now I know, and I wish I didn't.”

I thought back to the falling sensation, the brightness, the interruption like a fist smashing our sending—Bosanka, homing in on what she saw as “power.”

“Hey,” I said, “do you think we
all
felt it—I mean, the comet or whatever it was we made, and then the shock when Bosanka glommed onto us like that? Mimi and Peter didn't seem to believe that anything had really happened.”

“Mimi's naturally spaced most of the time,” he said. “And Peter—well, anything he can't explain makes him angry, and we know where that got him. Yeah, I think we all felt it.” He paused. Then he said, “And I think Bosanka's business is really with all of us, the whole committee, just like she says. So this isn't only your family curse, Val. Other people are involved, with gifts of their own—the whole committee.”

“Baloney,” I muttered. “Magic isn't just another human gene, you know.”

“I'm not saying we all have magic, Val. But what happened on New Year's Eve—whatever energy we generated—happened because of what each of us felt, what each of us wished for. I'm sure of that.”

I wasn't, but I did want to believe that it hadn't just been me, lobbing off a firework of my family talent all by myself, that had gotten all of us in the soup and Peter turned into a deer. So I didn't say anything.

“Listen,” Lennie said, stretching out his arms along the rail of the gazebo. “Why did you bring us together to talk to Bosanka today? You must have thought we had something to contribute to the situation, right? Or what did you think was going to happen?”

“I
thought
,” I said, “that she'd take one look at the Comet Committee and realize that she had it all wrong, that we were just a bunch of high-school kids and there wasn't a thing we could do for her. That's what I thought would happen.”

In other words, I had been hoping that the total unmagicalness of the rest of them would camouflage me and deflect Bosanka from my family talent. Now that I thought it through, I felt embarrassed: I'd been trying to use the rest of them. Not very admirable. Gran would not be impressed, that was for sure.

“Come on. Val,” Lennie said, “come
on
! We're all for real, just like Bosanka says. The Comet Committee works.” His eyes glowed with a wonder that would have been beautiful to see, except that what had caused it could also get us all killed, or worse (I didn't know exactly what “worse” would be, but I knew it must be out there, lurking).

“Lennie,” I said, “I hate to bring you down to grubby old reality, but what good is a committee that's only half-together and a bunch of beginners at magic besides? And one of them's in Boston, and another one's a deer?”

He considered this for a moment, scratching vaguely at his neck until he remembered not to and put his hand down again quickly.

“I'm not sure,” he admitted. “I'm just trying to point something out to you. I'm trying to point out that you're not alone in this. I think you're used to being, like, the only kid on the block, the one and only sorcerer's apprentice. This time it's the sorcerer's opponents. The sorcerer is Bosanka, and our side—our side is a team thing, or it's nothing.”

Reluctantly I thought about this while I wiggled my toes inside my shoes to keep my circulation going.

Lennie knew me well enough to sense that it was time to ease off and leave me to think. He got up and leaned over the railing, looking down at the muddy margin of the lake. He bounced on the balls of his feet.

“Wow,” he said, “no wonder no fish live in this lake. You know what's down there?”

And in his Lennie way he began reeling off a list of what he saw. “Paper, broken glass, peanut shells, two cigarette butts, some crunched tinfoil, two feathers, a white plastic fork with broken tines, a matchbook cover, some sticks, three mashed-up soda cans, and an evil-looking wad of black clothing.”

I got up. “Thanks for the guided tour of the local dump. Come on, let's go. I'm freezing.”

“Look,” Lennie said as he swung around one of the corner posts, leaving the gazebo. He pointed at the outside wall.

Someone had drawn an animal on it, standing up on its hind legs and holding a blob in its front paws. The outline was drawn in a kind of dark grease, and it had the bold simplicity of a prehistoric wall-painting.

“Lipstick,” Lennie said, touching the outline and rubbing his fingers together under his nose. “Phew, cheap stuff, smells like Log Cabin Syrup. Funny kind of graffiti.”