Got To Be A Hero

by Paul Duffau

  Staring out the car window as they drove home, Kenzie looked at the oncoming sunset and wondered if it were any more real than the lagoon.

  Her father drove, threading through the traffic along the most efficient lines. In the rearview mirror, Kenzie saw his eyes flick from the dash to the road ahead. Her mother, sitting in front of her, maintained a rigid posture, face straight ahead, mouth downturned. Silence piled on itself and turned the atmosphere palpably anxious.

  “How do the wards work?” Kenzie asked, making her father jump. He sent her a searching glance before getting his eyes back on the road and the vehicles around them.

  “Why do you want to know?” asked her mother.

  “Hush, it’s a fair question,” Raymond said in response to his wife, who visibly tensed. To Kenzie, he said, “In principle, the ward is a barrier of magic. It acts as a physical barrier, though a lighter web can be used as an alarm. The important part is that the ward must be connected to an object.”

  “So it’s like an amulet,” said Kenzie, thinking of the round stone she’d purloined from the Glade.

  “Not quite. A ward doesn’t alter the object of attachment, while an amulet is created by changing the item, whatever it is, at a fundamental level and imbuing it with magic of its own.” As he lectured, Raymond relaxed. “Wards are simple enough that almost any wizard of reasonable capacity can fashion one.”

  “Can you teach me?” asked Kenzie.

  He tipped his head to see her in the rearview. “I can,” he said in a pleased voice.

  “I think you should be considering how the council is overreacting to MAGE,” said her mother.

  Kenzie’s ears perked up at the mention of the amplifier. News?

  Her father’s lip curled at the edge of his mouth. “I don’t consider an electronics device that can locate the Family nearly as benignly as you and the other technocrats seem to. Aric made it clear that MAGE is a dangerous progression into the realms of magic.”

  Kenzie felt her eyes widen. Her father rarely spoke against her mother in such a direct manner.

  “We’ll discuss this later,” said Sasha.

  Kenzie caught the implication. It was an adult conversation and not for her ears, which was stupid after Aric had shot off his mouth at dinner . . . yesterday?

  It seemed so much longer.

  Like a bolt, a thought hit her and made her jerk. Trying to keep the apprehension she felt from her voice, she asked, “Are there any other companies that are doing this kind of research?”

  Because sure as heck, Lassiter had a detector, which meant that the secret her mother thought was safe had already been discovered by someone.

  Her father sent her a probing glance, but her mother answered first.

  “No, it’s a relative backwater for research, since there’s no money in it. If we were involved in a politically popular field, like climate research, there would be significant competition for the federal funding. There is nothing there for you to worry about.” The last bit was directed at her father, in a frosty voice.

  They don’t know.

  Panic clutched at her. Down at the emotional level, she felt abandoned, as though her parents, by not divining the threat Lassiter posed, had let her down, even as her brain, at the intellectual level, argued in their defense. Not just Lassiter, evil as he was, but their failure to find the lagoon. And, as she admitted to herself, the way she kept slipping from magic to the mundane world frightened her.

  She didn’t know what was real anymore.

  “McKenzie, did you still want to learn to set a ward?” Her father stood at the doorway of her room, a reprise of their positions after the kidnapping, him there, her on the floor in the corner. The thought appeared to occur to him, too. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yes,” Kenzie said, the weariness she felt oozing into the word. She struggled to her feet and forced a smile. Even the muscles in her face felt tired. “That would be cool.”

  He gave her a searching look and turned, the momentary crack in his professional demeanor forgotten. She followed.

  Once they were downstairs, he faced her. “The process is not complicated, but you do need to be precise. More magic is not better in this case, as the ward will act as a steady drain on your energy.” He hesitated. “You’ve used up considerable reserves in the last day or so, first with the . . . incident last night and then the lessons Harold taught today.”

  “Did he tell you?”

  “About the amulet? Of course.” He shrugged. “Harold should keep better control of the neophytes.”

  So much for expecting praise.

  “Now, as I was saying, it doesn’t take much power.” His pointer finger first etched a pattern of the Linius spell and then described an arc like an igloo, and then traced along the bottom. As he closed the circumference of the circle and clenched his fist, she felt the ward come up.

  “If it doesn’t use much energy, how come I can feel it when you put it up?”

  Her father’s forehead furrowed. “Can you ‘see’ it, too? Not with your eyes, but with your magic?”

  She tipped her head. She’d never really tried, but recalling the way she’d broken the binding spell last night, she let loose the lease of her senses. Dimly set, as though the lines of force were a double-exposure picture laid over the rest of the room, the gridwork of the ward materialized. She stuck out a hand. A tracer leapt from her fingertips and attached to the existing spell by the living room windows. She tugged at her end, and the whole ethereal firmament retreated in size toward her.

  A squeal from the kitchen and the sound of breaking glassware shattered her composure. Kenzie let the web expand back to its original dimensions.

  “Raymond!” came the shout from Kenzie’s mother in the kitchen. An aggrieved Sasha appeared at the doorway. “What in the name of—”

  She stopped both walking and speaking when she saw Kenzie. A heated flush reached her mother’s cheeks.

  “Teach her control.” Sasha spun on her heel. Two seconds later, they heard the tinkle of glass being swept with vigorous strokes of a broom.

  “Now,” said her father, “you don’t have to use a capture spell. The ward is a combination of two or more spells, with the first defining the nature of it”—he reiterated the Linius, but without calling magic—“with the second, which places it into a stasis.” He completed the motion.

  “As you grow, you’ll learn to include warnings to go with the spell. In the event of absolute need, you can take a tingle spell that delivers a mild shock and dial it all the way up to a charge that will knock a rhinoceros on its butt.”

  Tingle spells were taught to the little kids and the Wilders when they first joined the Family. Harold used them occasionally as an attention-getter when the students lacked the appropriate focus on lessons. Like sticking your tongue on a nine-volt battery, it emitted more of a shock than any actual damage. It was an aimed spell, the same as the air spells, and unlike the frame of the ward.

  “Astrapius,” Kenzie said, giving the spell its proper name, and demonstrating it with a flick of her fingers without any energy attached, “is a kid’s trick. All of us tried to boost the shock, but it always stays the same no matter how much magic you put into it.” She waited for an explanation.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “You were taught a scaled version of the spell. Having Wilders electrocute each other seemed like a bad idea.”

  Kenzie sent a sidelong glance at her father at the atypical hint of humor. His demeanor remained studiously serious.

  “Some of them could use it,” she ventured, a picture of one person firmly in mind.

  “True,” he said. “Watch. This is the way to conjure the full power of Astrapius.” The motion was substantially more complicated than the flick she knew. “You try, but don’t use any energy. Go through the process.”

  He spent the next ten minutes correcting small flaws in her casting, reminiscent of the way Jules would adjust her arm for a block or strike. Finally, he seem
ed satisfied.

  “Why are you teaching all this to me?” asked Kenzie. “I mean, not that I don’t want to learn, it’s . . . ”

  Her father stared directly into her eyes. The glint of determination in his eyes, so familiar, almost caused her to miss an underlying uncertainty. Seeing her father not fully in command of a situation was unsettling.

  “You said you wanted to learn.” He shifted his gaze to the kitchen doorway. With a lowered voice, he said, “Trouble is brewing. I can feel it—”

  Not brewing, it’s here, she thought. Still, it was spooky how he could read the vibes that way.

  “—you can, too, or you wouldn’t have asked to learn how to ward. It’s not the attempt at abducting you, though I still haven’t found the man that ordered your kidnapping. There are other powers at play.” He transferred his gaze to a point over her shoulder and broke off.

  “Dinner is ready,” said her mother in a peevish announcement from the doorway.

  “Be right there,” said her father.

  Kenzie turned. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Kenzie felt a hand on her shoulder. She faced her father.

  “I know Jackson is looking after you, but some of our enemies have no respect for the sanctity of the living. They’re worse than the lifelong criminals I catch, because they’re not only totally amoral but intelligent and gifted.”

  A trembling shook the hand on her shoulder.

  He’s scared, too, she thought, and he doesn’t know the half of it. The implications of “gifted” settled on her. Lassiter was not of the Families.

  Her father was warning her of someone who could do magic, that would use the Arts as a weapon. That’s why he was teaching her the full power of Astrapius. To defend herself.

  “You need to be ready,” he said, the intensity of his eyes piercing as he delivered his instructions. “Keep yourself safe, even if it means you sacrifice Jackson.”

  Kenzie readied for bed. Her phone sat on her dresser, inert as a lump of clay. Mitch still had not sent her word about when they would meet. The silence made her anxious. Plus she wanted to see if he had any ideas on how to break into the safe.

  Her mind dwelled on the hidden compartment in the floor of the master closet. It was big enough to hold some electronics. She clenched her jaws at the thought that Lassiter couldn’t give her some idea of what the heck she was looking for. Until she was alone in the house again, she couldn’t play with the safe and figure out the combination. And then, even if she did stumble onto the right turns of the intricately marked dial, there was no guarantee that it held the treasure she sought.

  Feeling overwhelmed, she switched off the bedside lamp and tucked herself deep into the white comforter. As emotional exhaustion claimed her, an image of the gytrash stalked her sleep. Her last recollection was the supernatural canine stepping between her and Mitch, as though on guard.

  Chapter 42

  Mitch waited until after dark to slip in through the door at Mercury’s place. Shutting the unlocked door behind him, he called out.

  “Yo, Mercury?”

  The inside of the shop wore the darkness like a cloak and muffled his voice. Mitch fumbled for the light switch to his right and came up empty. Patting the wall on the other side of the door proved equally fruitless.

  Well, okay.

  Mitch closed his eyes and pictured the room as he’d seen it that morning. Two steps to get past the cases to his right. He let his knuckles trail along the wood until they left the edge.

  One step more forward and his other hand found the center cases. Turn right, again letting his hand track the picture in his head. He felt the corner at the end where the junction of the side passage was.

  Time to turn left. He stuck his right arm out, making contact with jars on the shelves. He retracted his hand, touched the front edge of the shelf, noticed the cool and smooth texture under his fingertips.

  It should be about eight steps to the door that led to Mercury’s lair. He took a breath and counted as he walked. At “four,” his shin collided with something solid. The impact sent red waves of sudden pain to his eyes. The clatter suggested a small stepstool. Wincing in the dark, he reached down to rub his abused lower leg while he waited for Mercury to come investigate. Nothing doing, so he dropped to a knee. Finding the object, a low chair based on the wood spindles he touched, he carefully put it to the side.

  It took five more steps to get to the next door. This knob turned freely in his hand, too. Mitch wondered if Mercury ever worried about people breaking in.

  The library stood as he remembered it, right down to the lit lamps on the table. Outside, though, had transformed from a jungle to a surreal glade with a waning moon glittering down onto the dark grasses and trees. Mitch squinted at the moon. Yesterday’s moon was normal sized, as big as a quarter, and full, not a silver half-dollar and halved. This moon, strung from the heavens, seemed odd. An optical illusion?

  Shaking his head, Mitch reminded himself not to trust anything he saw. The whole magic thing was screwy, even if, against all logic, it was real. He went to the nearest bookcase and perused the titles. A pair of shelves were devoted to the classics, from Plato to Melville. The next shelf down held tattered copies of books with titles like The Sworn Book of Honorius and Magical Treatise of Solomon. Next to these was a three-volume set with the tantalizing title Three Books of Occult Philosophy. He pulled the Solomon book from the shelf and creaked it open. The pages exuded the odor of time, and the curled letters of print were unreadable, Old English or High Latin or something. He snugged it back into the hole he had pulled it from.

  He selected a ragged copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls on the second bookcase to read while he waited for Mercury. With a half-audible groan, he eased down onto the polished leather seat. His body ached like a cranky ogre with a meat-hammer had tenderized every square millimeter of muscle. Getting Tased was on his never-do-again list. He shoved the self-pity out of his head and opened the book to the first page.

  The click of a door latch woke him. Bleary-eyed, he saw a door swing wide where a blank wall had been, and Mercury enter. The door swung the other way and disappeared once more into the featureless wall.

  “Ah, good, you're here,” said the wizard, as though he had been expecting Mitch to show up. “Everything is nearly set for the removal of Mr. Jackson. The Jacksons will find out on Monday that they have received an all-expenses-paid trip to Aruba. I'll give them a little prod to move them along, but by Tuesday morning, you can stop worrying for them.”

  Mitch labored to get up, still feeling groggy. The muscles on his face tightened as the period of immobility in the chair turned the aches into spikes stabbing into his arms and legs. He wobbled and held on to the top of the seatback.

  “That’s good,” he managed to say as he wobbled. He succumbed to an overpowering pressure to yawn. “Sorry,” he said from behind the hand he used to cover his mouth.

  “You look like hell,” observed Mercury. The wizard’s eyes swept up and down Mitch’s body.

  “Lassiter doesn’t like disobedience,” said Mitch.

  Mercury gave him a long, considering stare. “I imagine not.”

  They both fell silent. Fuzzy thoughts trickled across synapses in Mitch’s head as the old man watched. Finally, the question that kept bugging Mitch forced its way to the front.

  “Can you tell me more about magic? Not how it’s done, but the history of the people.”

  “Most teenage boys would want to know how to do it.”

  “Can anybody learn?”

  “Magic is very selective,” Mercury said after a brief hesitation.

  Natch, thought Mitch. “So what about the people, the wizards? How does Lassiter fit in the framework, because I’m not seeing it.”

  The hesitation this time was palpable. “I can’t answer the last. Mr. Lassiter is an anomaly, a man who does not appear to belong to a Family and does not, to the best of my ability to determine, work for one.”

  Mercury peered at
Mitch. As at their first meeting, Mitch was struck by the aliveness within those green orbs.

  The wizard continued. “Those circles are very small. The Families are not large. For whatever reason, those that practice the Arts do not often have offspring. The larger part of each Family is made up of what some call Wilders, those who spontaneously demonstrate or manifest magical ability. To complicate matters, the Families are not unified. If you thought of them as tribes with different cultures, you would have a decent idea of the structures. Some cultures are modestly permissive, as is McKenzie’s, others are much more rigid in the way that they view the mundane world.

  “At one point, the tribes numbered about two dozen, before they consolidated. Now there are two dominant ones, at least in this area. For rather obvious reasons, they don’t advertise.”

  “You keep saying ‘them,’ Mercury. What Family do you belong to?” asked Mitch.

  The wizard weighed his words. He wore a pensive expression as he answered. “I have no Family. Some of us are solitary wizards, bound by oaths to perform a duty that supersedes the life of Family and friend.”

  Mitch sensed a chasm of loneliness in Mercury’s words. The wizard picked up the thread of the lesson.

  “The people chosen to work for the Families are an even smaller group, and number in the handfuls. These are almost always selected for specific skills that they possess. In the earliest days of our awareness, we sought out the protection of the lords. As our ranks grew, and especially after the nobles sacrificed us to the mobs, we retreated into enclaves. Behind the myths of the druids and covens lay kernels of truth. The Families take advantage of people that can advance the species—”

  Mitch raised an eyebrow at the term. He doubted Kenzie was a totally different species from a biological perspective.