The Lost Gate (19 page)

“I'm not gay, you know,” Ced assured them.

“Until this moment I didn't think you were,” said Eric. “But the fact that you felt a need to say it—”

“Go to the kitchen and get something to eat,” Ced told them. “By the time you get back I'll have her calmed down and you'll see that she's actually a sweet and funny girl. She just has trust issues with men. Her mother had a lot of boyfriends and if they paid extra, she threw in Lana as a bonus.”

“Oh,” said Eric.

Danny, for his part, wasn't quite sure what Ced meant. Or rather, he was, but he couldn't believe such a thing could be true. Then again, if someone had told him about a girl acting the way Lana had just acted, Danny wouldn't have believed it, either. His girl cousins were starting to seem normal now. When they knocked him to the floor it was always to pummel him or rub something in his face. It had never made him feel the way Lana had.

“Why would having ‘trust issues' make her … like that?” asked Danny.

“Well, it gives her control, see?” said Ced. “She had you completely under her power, didn't she?”

“She pushed me down onto the floor,” said Danny. “And she took me by surprise.”

“Took you by surprise?” asked Eric. “Or by something else?”

Eric and Ced were both laughing silently, presumably to keep Lana from hearing them.

“Is there somewhere I can go in this house to get away from you both?” asked Danny.

“Why not just disappear?” asked Ced, and then he and Eric laughed all the harder. Danny knew that Ced was laughing because he thought it was a joke, and that Eric was laughing because Ced thought it was a joke, and it wasn't, which was an even better joke. Danny didn't feel like laughing at all. In fact, he felt like disappearing and never seeing Eric again. Only then he would be back to begging and trying to find someplace to sleep in a strange city after dark.

“I'm tired,” said Danny. “We're not going to do anything tonight anyway, and I want to sleep. Without jerks like you laughing at me.”

Which triggered another burst of barely-contained laughter.

Danny walked out of the room and went up the stairs. He tried all the unlocked doors on every floor, hoping to find a bedroom that looked completely tidy and unslept-in, but there was no such room. Finally, in the attic, he ducked into a small storage room or large closet lined with boxes and racks of clothes. He took some of the clothes off the wheeled storage racks and spread them on the floor to make a bed, with a few more to cover him. Then he turned off the light, closed the door, and felt his way to the makeshift bed in the dark.

It took him a while to go to sleep, because he kept thinking of Lana, and then how Eric and Ced laughed at him, and then about Lana again, and then about home, which he now missed so badly that it would almost be worth getting killed just to go back. Finally, half-crying from homesickness and half-wishing Lana had stuck with molesting him just a little longer, he fell asleep.

He woke up in total darkness but it could have been morning for all he knew. There were no windows in the attic closet, so no kind of light from the street made it inside. He needed to pee. He had gone to bed without stopping in any of the bathrooms he had passed on the way up three flights of stairs. Now he was going to have to pay for that by creeping through a dark house.

Well, no, he didn't
have
to do that. He had seen the bathrooms, he could just make a gate to one of them and … no, what if somebody was
in
one and suddenly there was this thirteen-year-old boy? Then he remembered that the bathroom at the landing between the second and third stories had been kind of badly retrofitted into the landing and there was an alcove right near the door.

He had no more than thought of it before he had made the gate and gone through it. There was light here, though not much. The bathroom door was open. There was not a sound nearby, though there was some laughter and talking two floors down. Danny padded into the bathroom, closed the door, turned on the light, and did his business. He thought of using one of the toothbrushes—he had a nasty taste in his mouth—but settled for cupping water in his hand and swishing it around in his mouth. He flushed, washed his hands, dried them, and then put his hand on the door to leave. Only now he could hear that people were coming up the stairs. Maybe they were still far enough down the stairs that he could get to the gate and be gone before they got to this floor. And maybe not.

He unlocked the door and turned off the light, but left the door closed while he made a new gate and stepped through it.

He was in the attic room, right by his makeshift bed, which he could see was just as he had left it. He lay down and snuggled into it and rearranged the clothes on top of it.

He was almost asleep when he realized: When he left the attic closet, he hadn't been able to see anything. Now he could see.

Had his eyes gotten used to the darkness? No, that was stupid—when he first woke up, his eyes were totally used to the dark, but when he came back he was coming straight from a bathroom where a bright light had been on until a moment before he made the gate.

Danny opened his eyes. The door between the closet and the open part of the attic was open. It had been closed when he left. Who could have been up here?

He made a guess. “Mr. Stone?” he said, very softly.

“Don't worry,” said an even softer whispery voice. “Your secret is safer with me than it is with that idiot who brought you here.”

Danny could see the shape of a man get out of a chair not far from the door.

“Sleep well,” said the man when he was silhouetted in the doorway. Then the door closed behind him.

On the one hand, it was cool that Stone could see Danny materialize in the attic closet and not even freak out.

On the other hand, did that mean that he knew what he was seeing? That he was from one of the Families? Or maybe one of Thor's observers? And what did he mean that Danny's secret was
safer
than it was with Eric? Safer didn't necessarily mean
safe.

I really am the stupidest person alive, thought Danny. So stupid that I probably won't remain alive much longer.

So stupid that when I just realized that I'd probably get killed, my only thought was to wish Lana would come up here and hump my brains out before I die. I'm thirteen and I'm already completely evil and have no judgment. It will be darwinian justice if I die without ever having a chance to reproduce. An improvement of the gene pool by removing my genes from it.

Wouldn't that be ironic if I ran away from the Family because they were going to put me in Hammernip Hill, only to get myself killed here, saving them the trouble? Because that's what's going to happen. I'm going to burgle somebody's house and they're going to blast me with a shotgun. I don't think I'm quick enough to make a gate and get through it between the squeezing of the shotgun trigger and the arrival of the buckshot at my body.

His mind was in such a whirl that he was sure he'd never get back to sleep. And then it was morning, and he could smell coffee all the way up to the top of the house, and the door to his closet was open, letting in the light, and he actually felt kind of good for having slept so long, and also felt nowhere near as stupid as he had felt last night.

Which just proved he was so dumb that he couldn't even remember the lessons he had learned from his previous mistakes.

Eric was sitting bent over at the kitchen table, his head resting on his folded arms, an empty coffee cup beside him. Somebody had put some cut flowers down the neck of his shirt, so he was basically functioning as a vase. Danny smiled to see it.

“I'm glad you're feeling a bit cheerier today.”

A man of about fifty, slender and average in height, but with a rather distinctive salt-and-pepper beard, was standing near the fridge, drinking a tall glass of some hideous-looking dark-green concoction. Just as in the attic closet the night before, Danny hadn't been aware of him till he spoke.

“Are you Mr. Stone?”

“Stone is my first name.”

“What's your last name?”

“Stone is the only name I need in this house,” said Stone. “I see you like what Lana did with the table flowers. Are you in love with her?”

Danny shuddered. “I hope not. I don't think so. She's not in love with me.” And then, because he couldn't help looking pathetic, he added, “Is she?”

“She is definitely not in love with you or anyone, though she has a bit of a crush on her therapist. Danny? That's your name?”

“Yes,” said Danny. It was a little late to try and keep himself incognito in
this
house—he cringed to remember sticking out his hand and introducing himself to Lana the evening before.

“Well, Danny, I urge you to be very careful with Eric. He strikes me as being not quite bright enough to know that one doesn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

Eric didn't move. Apparently he really was asleep.

“I haven't laid any eggs yet,” said Danny, “but thanks for the advice. That was advice, wasn't it?”

“More of a heads-up. Advice would have been, ‘Ditch that loser Fagin, Oliver Twist, and get your rich grandfather to adopt you.' ”

“I knew all my grandfathers and grandmothers,” said Danny. “I left home because I don't want any of my Family to be my family anymore. Least of all my parents.”

“I'm sure you have your reasons, and they're none of my business.”

Danny took the hint. He had been on the verge of blabbing even more stuff about how the Family worked.

“Be careful when you go searching for lost objects in people's houses. Some of them get prickly about finding burglars there, and they can afford the very best weapons, whether legal or illegal. Since they hardly ever get to kill people in the normal course of their day, they will naturally have an extra impulsion to fire at you, just to satisfy their curiosity about how it would feel to fire the weapon in anger, so to speak.”

“Warning taken,” said Danny.

“Well, then, I'm off to work,” said Stone. “Remember not to bring anything you take from other people's houses here to my home. Not even for a few minutes while you use the john. If you do, I'll turn you in to the cops myself.”

“Got it,” said Danny.

“Then by all means, chow down on your breakfast. Or lunch, if that suits you better at this hideous hour of the morning.” And with that, Stone was out of the room.

8

S
AFE
R
OOM

Danny and Eric rode the Metro to Foggy Bottom and then walked to Georgetown. It made no sense that the Metro had no stop in the Georgetown area—how did the servants of all these rich people get to work?

“You think it's an accident there's no stop here?” said Eric. “The rich people made sure there was no cheap, quick way for the slum kids to get here and cause trouble. Why should they care how far their own servants have to walk? They're getting paid for it, right?”

Danny heard the resentment in Eric's voice and he knew he should probably feel the same way toward rich people. But what did he know about rich? The only world he had known before was the North Family compound and the woods and fields and hills. He had watched drowthers during his secret expeditions away from the compound, but there weren't any
real
rich people around Lexington and Buena Vista. Not like the mansions of Georgetown.

“Stop gawking,” said Eric.

“Kids gawk,” said Danny. “I'm acting like a kid.”

“Haven't you ever seen big houses before?”

“Let's see, there was VMI and SVU and some of the buildings at Washington and Lee. I mean, how many classes could you hold in one of these houses? You could put a Wal-Mart in that one.”

“No, actually, you couldn't,” said Eric.

“Be fun to try,” said Danny.

“Why are you so cheerful? Try taking this seriously.”

“What's to be serious about right
now
? It's daylight, we're just picking the houses we want to steal from.”

“We're not stealing, we're finding stuff lying around.”

“In their houses,” said Danny. “Come on, I'm new here, let me be a tourist.”

A patrol car came along the street and Danny saw how Eric stiffened up.

“I guess we didn't camouflage ourselves well enough,” said Eric.

“Maybe he's not going to stop,” said Danny.

The cop car stopped. A couple of cops got out.

“Hi,” said Danny, when they were still a long way off.

“Try to keep your clothes on this time,” said Eric softly.

“You guys know what's with all the flags on this house?” asked Danny.

The cop glanced at the house. “It's the Danish embassy.”

“Cool,” said Danny.

“We've had a couple of calls—you've been going up and down the streets, like you were casing the area.”

“Casing?” asked Danny.

“He means looking for which ones to rob,” said Eric. “Geez louise, what's the crime? Being teenagers without a car?”

“Not a crime yet,” said the cop. “Just a misdemeanor.”

Danny laughed.

The cop glanced at him and grinned. “Most people are too nervous to laugh at cop jokes.”

“So are we getting a warning or are you taking us in?” asked Eric.

“None of the above. I just want to know your business on a day as cold as this.”

“He walks me home from my singing lessons,” said Danny. “Only today I said, I've never seen the embassies.”

“Where do you live?” asked the cop.

Again Danny answered. “A couple of blocks off Wisconsin just past Nebraska.”

“And where was your, um, singing lesson?”

“East of the Capitol. Near Lincoln Park.”