The Silver Glove (19 page)

Down below, like a ghostly overlay across the stillness of the closed-down rink, I saw movement: darkness turning, a crowd of figures that were shadows still but each lit faintly from inside by imprisoned light. Brightner's captured souls skated in the phantom rink where Wollman should have been.

And at the center of their slow, gloomy wheeling, Brightner, his fists akimbo, looked up at us. Behind him I saw flashes of my mother's blue ski jacket, of her auburn hair. He hid her from us with his own bulk, except these glimpses as he took small, curving steps from side to side on his skates. Taunting, teasing.

His voice rang through the air: “How do you like it? Hey, old woman? Can you do as much?”

“I can do better!” Gran flung back, grabbing my arm and pulling herself to her feet. I tottered in the skates, but kept my balance. “Any wholesome living spirit could do better than a follower of the left-hand path, the path of fear and force and lies!”

“You told the kid you could beat me,” he shouted. “Isn't that a lie?”

“I told her we would try,” Gran retorted. “And that's true!”

“Come down and let's talk about it,” he answered in an oily tone. “The kid can use the skates. You don't need them. There are plenty of branches up there—make yourself a broom and fly down!”

“I'll fly a flag, not a broom,” Gran shouted, and her hand tightened on my arm. “A banner! A bridge! Look!”

She untied the kerchief from her neck and shook it out, a rectangle of cloth—the handkerchief that had been our flying carpet, its pattern all black and gray and white in the moonlight. From her upflung hand it unrolled in a changed shape, long and narrow, light enough to float on the air.

It had become a silky scarf.

Gran held the scarf high by both corners and snapped it above her head. The pattern vanished as if her motion had flicked it off. The shining white cloth soared, light as a leaf on the wind, arching away from us and down the side of the hill, holding its curved and graceful shape in the empty air. It made a pale, thin path that swooped past the dark rock and the tree branches—all the way to the edge of the phantom rink far below.

Holding her end of the scarf delicately in both hands, Gran said to me from between clenched teeth, “He's waiting, and it's all I can do to tend your path for you, lovie. You must do the rest.”

I couldn't see Brightner anymore. The swirling crowd of silent skaters had thickened and darkened, hiding him.

“But I don't know what to do,” I protested weakly. What
could
I do, standing there chilled through and shaking? How could I save my mom and the poor doomed phantoms? How could I stop Brightner, the necromancer, the slaver, the rogue?

“You must skate this path to Brightner's ice,” Gran said, “and bring your mother back. He's made her the keystone of this theft of souls, and we must hope that without her, what he's built will collapse around him. All—the theft of souls, the theft of your mother and her unused power! Otherwise—he'll take you, lovie, and reel me in at the end of this bit of magic of mine. It's not just your mother but you and me too that will go trailing off in Brightner's chains!”

“Bring Mom back how?” I quavered.

“Not my way,” Gran said. “Your way, which you must find for yourself. To start, step forward.”

She bent and held the scarf-end low off the pavement, and somehow or other, fighting the resistance of my terrified body, I put one foot on the gossamer surface, thinking shakily, if it's too hard, I can always change my mind.

The skates whipped me away down the silken path with my arms flailing and a scream trailing behind me.

I flew out beyond the hilltop, crouching over blades that carried me with soundless speed on the scarf-path—an icily glittering ribbon arched through thin air. Then down went the path and down I went, swooping at an impossible angle into the valley under the hill and up again, sickeningly, toward the jagged top of the chain-link fence, toward the phantom skaters massed beyond it.

I couldn't see my mom, but I knew where she was: at the center.

With him.

The wind of my speed tore water from the corners of my eyes as I flew up and over the high metal fence, and then down again, toward the wheel of shadows. I could have turned aside, I think; sheer speed would have carried me somewhere, anywhere, besides onto Brightner's ice.

But I no longer wanted to turn. I held my breath, lowered my head, and hit the wall of whirling shadow-figures like a human battering ram.

And shot right through. They flowed over my back like streamers. Their voices sighed in my ears. I felt faint, cold pluckings and tuggings at my hair and my sleeves. Shreds of darkness caught and clung to me, plastered to my face like black scarves. With my gloved hand, I tore at the silky layers that bound my eyes like the webs of giant spiders.

The darkness peeled away, and on my hand the glove blazed with a silver light as blinding as a star. I tucked my hand behind me, but my eyes were still dazzled. Terrified of rushing headlong to a crash, I flung my bare right hand out in front of me.

It was grabbed. I was checked and swung in a dizzying circle to a hard, stumbling stop.

“What about that!” Brightner said in that smug, plummy voice. “Here you are, as ordered! Well, don't just stand there—you're not to sleep in steerage, like these others. You travel first class, with your mother. Step into the magic circle, we have to go.”

I tried to pull away from him, but I was stuck—my left hand was caught, too, drawing my arm awkwardly out behind me. Heart pounding, I looked back.

The brilliance of the glove was completely quenched, hidden by a thick wad of hot, heavy shadow stuff that encased my forearm like a blob of black cotton candy spun out of lead.

Brightner's hold on my other hand was very light but it might as well have been a grip of steel. I sort of hung there off the tips of his fingers, just outside the ring of orange cones that marked off the center of the ice. I was trapped, pulled taut between him and his shadow-caught, captive souls.

He wore his gray suit and black skating boots with thin blue lines like lightning running up the sides. I looked up at his moist-lipped, twinkle-eyed smile. He was so big and solid and packed with a kind of darkly shining strength that I quaked. How had we ever thought to challenge him, Gran and me?

My ankles felt like caving in; my left hand was dragged down by dark, heavy weight while my right lay cool and boneless in his. My shoulders were killing me.

“That hurts,” I said, and it came out a sob.

“Not here in the magic circle,” he said. “I can heal pain, here. What's holding you back?” he mocked, “You should have listened to me and taken off that grimy old glove.”

“I want my mom,” I whimpered.

“Here she is, inside the magic circle,” Brightner said lightly. “Waiting for you.”

Behind him at the exact center of the circle, my mom turned slowly, eyes closed, arms lifted and floating like a bird's wings.

“Mom!” I wailed.

She didn't even open her eyes.

I twisted to look back up at the chess-and-checkers hill. My glittering path shot up into nothingness. A vast darkness shut me in on every side. With Brightner.

“Gran, help!” I cried.

“But she's with me,” he said. “Your Gran. Here in the magic circle. She gave in before you did. She tricked you into my hands as part of the price for the youthful mind that I can give her. Don't you see her?”

I did. I saw Gran in her tweed coat and cowboy boots, standing on the ice with her face turned away from me.

“Gran,” I choked.

No. She was wearing cowboy boots—the boots that had changed into the skates I was wearing on my feet! That wasn't Gran. It was one of Brightner's phantoms.

“Come along,” he said. “We can't wait forever. There are battles to be fought! Step forward. Just say, ‘I will,' and my new recruits will release your other hand. You'll see how good they are already at obeying orders.”

How else could I get to Mom? And that I had to do, at any price, even if—even if it meant being kidnapped by Brightner myself. I just couldn't let Mom be whisked away, helpless and enchanted, to some strange and horrible place all alone. My mom who was
afraid
of magic, who didn't have a clue about how to use her own abilities, who couldn't even begin to defend herself!

“I will,” I whispered. My left hand came suddenly free. I stumbled between the orange cones into the magic circle, hugging my burning hand to my chest.

The glove was gone. My fingers were bare, red, and stinging, curled together without any strength in them at all. I tried to pull my right hand away from Brightner, but it was as if I had wedged it into a crack in a boulder.

“How would you like to make the journey?” he said in the smooth, juicy tone of somebody savoring some particularly delicious flavor. “Now that you've given up the pathetic ‘protection' of the glove to my troops, there, everything becomes possible. Want to go in the form of a bad-mannered little cat shut up in a laundry bag? Or maybe as a fat, ragged bag lady, reduced to the size of a silver charm to hang on my watch chain?”

I was too scared to even wonder if he could really do those things to me. The bones in my right hand and arm felt as if they were melting and bending in his grip.

He twisted my hand and I slid to one side, squalling with pain. He turned gracefully on his skates, smiling into my face, twisting and crushing. I could no more resist than I could get an
A
in math. My feet, scrabbling for purchase on the ice, flew out in opposite directions. I was going to hit the ice hard because he wanted me to hit the ice hard, and he was strong enough to make it happen the way he wanted it to.

Turn his strength against him.

On a reckless impulse, I threw myself into the fall like a suicide leaping off a cliff. The back of my shoulders slammed into Brightner's legs, which shot out from under him.

Staggering backwards with a shout, he let go of my hand.

I slid on my belly like a collapsed starfish—free. I felt the tremor in the ice when he landed, and I gasped with joy.

I knew I'd done something, though I didn't dare to think what. I looked around, my eyes stretched wide like a scared animal's.

I saw Brightner, yards away, sit up slowly, holding the back of his head. The false image of Gran was gone. All around us Brightner's souls came pouring silently in toward the center of the ice, knocking the orange cones every which way. The only sound was the dry skittering of the cones on the ice.

I scrambled up and staggered toward my mom. I threw my arms around her—around nothing that I could hold.

I was stunned. He hadn't fetched my mom yet—this was only the reflection of her, not even as she really was, scrubbed and sleeping at home, but as she had been when she went skating with Brightner—dressed for the outdoors and made up to slay.

Could I reverse the magic—fetch the “fetch” back to the real woman? How would you take a reflection from one place to another?

With shaking hands I fumbled out of my shirt pocket the little makeup mirror Barb had given me. I wobbled backward on my skates, holding up the little oval of glass. “Look!” I sobbed. “Mom, you have to see how you look—for
him
!”

That did it. The dreaming eyes opened and looked: at the glass, and then, bewildered, at me.

In the space of about a second and a half, the fetch faded and was gone—into the glass, where a reflection belonged? I didn't dare look to see, for fear of canceling her reflection by laying my own over it. But my heart pounded with hope. He had saved the fetching of my mom till last, till Gran and I could be captured, too.

Maybe once the power at the heart of his whole scheme—my mom and her sleeping talents—actually stepped, as her real self, into his vortex-engine here at Wollman, that engine would take off, no longer in his complete control. He was greedy, just as Gran said—he wanted us, too, in the vortex. So he had waited.

And we had a chance. My mother was at home, and her fetch was caught in the little mirror, ready to be returned to her, by me.

I stuffed the mirror back into my shirt and got out of there—or tried to. The skates no longer carried me effortlessly along. I had to drive them with my bruised and wobbly legs, and keep my balance too.

The shadows, their inner gleams of light much brighter now so that “shadow” was not the word for them any more, drew aside for me and closed after me. There was a silvery shine to them, as if they had absorbed the glow of the glove they had taken from me, and suddenly I had no fear of them at all. I thought I felt them urging me on, toward the stark white path of Gran's scarf, which rose at the edge of the ice only twenty feet away.

Behind me Brightner roared, “Tina! Damn you, kid, you get back here to me
now
!”

A frantic glance over my shoulder showed me only the silver skaters: hiding me, shielding me! Could that be?

Something enormous crashed down near me, sending great black cracks jagging through the ice, and then whipped away through the air again, leaving me staggered as if by the wind-wake of a passing semi. Stunned and dismayed—what now, with escape so close?—I looked up.

The huge iron hook at the end of the crane cable hurtled through the air and smashed down again, a foot from me.

Beyond the edge of the ice, the squat yellow cab of the crane strained backward off its tanklike treads, tilting its long black latticework arm. The hook was jerked out of the ice with a dry, groaning sound, and it swung back through the dark in a ponderous arc. Then cab and arm dropped heavily forward again, and the cable lashed from the end of the arm across the sky. The hook hurtled toward me like a bomb.

The Claw!

I threw myself aside and hugged the ice. Everything shook. Flying ice chips stung my cheek.