by IGMS
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.
The Norths 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
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 t-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 his showing off of 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 heart-hoard -- 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?
Danny walked into the house and quickly found the kitchen, where apparently the cocoa was already made, for Nicki was pouring it into three cups. She moved slowly. She held the pitcher with two hands. It trembled in her grip -- if it could be called a grip. Danny half-expected it to slip out of her fingers at any moment. No wonder Lieder didn't want his wife trying to show him hospitality.
It was not deliberate, not planned. More of a reflex, as if Danny had seen the pitcher slipping from her grasp and lunged out to catch it. Only the pitcher was not slipping, and he didn't lunge with his hands. Instead, he sent out a gate, passed it over her, around her, and brought her out of it without having moved her more than a hairsbreadth from where she stood.
She seemed to register it as a shudder. "Oh, someone stepped on my grave," she said, with a tiny laugh, and then flinched as if she expected to cough, only she didn't cough.
Because passing a gate over her had healed her. It always did. Whatever was wrong with a person, passing through a gate always healed it, as long as their body parts were still attached and they weren't fully dead.
Not that she immediately became strong and hale -- she looked completely unchanged. Except that her hand didn't tremble holding the pitcher, and there was color in her cheek and she didn't seem so fragile as she continued pouring. "Isn't that odd," she said. "I felt a chill, and yet now I'm suddenly warm. I'm never warm anymore, but I am right now."
"Furnaces are like that," said Danny. "One minute you're cold, the next you're hot. But remember, you're holding a pot of hot cocoa."
"Of course," she said. "No wonder I'm warm! I should feel downright hot."
"It's nice of you to give this to me," said Danny. "I don't usually eat breakfast, but it's cold enough today that even a good run didn't warm me up the way it usually does."
She laughed as she set down the pitcher. The cups were full. Then covered her mouth. "I don't know why I laughed," she s
aid. "Nothing you said was funny."
"But I said it in a funny way," said Danny.
"You say everything in a funny way," she said.
"I lived in Ohio for a while, but I didn't think I picked up an accent."
"No, not an accent," she said. "You talk as if you got the joke, but didn't really expect me to get it. Only just now I think I did get it. Isn't that funny?"
Danny smiled. And as he looked at her, he realized that the hand to the mouth, the way she was looking at the cups instead of at him -- this woman was shy.
Not really shy. Just sort of generally embarrassed. He saw this all the time, but not with adults. No, he saw it at high school. He saw it with girls when some guy talked to them. A guy she kind of liked, or maybe liked a lot, and she couldn't believe he was paying attention to her.
This isn't Coach Lieder's wife, thought Danny. This is his daughter.
She called him daddy, not by the habit of a husband and wife, but because he really was her father.
"Do you mind if I ask how old you are?" asked Danny.
"How old do you think?" she asked. But her face showed that she hated the question.
"I'm deciding between sixteen and eighteen," said Danny.
"What's wrong with seventeen?" she asked. But there was relief in her voice. Nobody had guessed so young an age in a long time. How could they?
"Seventeen is a nothing age," said Danny. "Sixteen is driving and eighteen is voting."
"You can get into R-rated movies by yourself at seventeen," said Nicki. "Not that I go anywhere."
"Not that there's a theater worth going to," said Danny.
"Not in BV," said Nicki. "But there's a theater in Lexington. I just . . . don't go out much. I don't even watch movies on TV anymore. I lose interest, somehow. I fall asleep. No point in renting a movie just to sleep through it."
"You've been sick."
"Oh, I'm dying," she said. "There are ups and downs. Right now I think today might be a good day. A very good day. But probably that's just because of the company."