“As it seems to us,” said Hermia.
“I hate to sound like one of the Family,” said Danny, “but … you’re just going to have to live with it till I get used to the idea. Maybe someday I’ll wish I had made gates that follow me around like puppies, so you can always find me. But right now I don’t know how to do that, and I don’t think I even want to, and so … I won’t.”
“Tough guy,” said Veevee.
“He’s not so tough,” said Hermia. “He sounds like he’s apologizing. Real assholes don’t even pretend to be sorry.”
“True,” said Veevee. “It isn’t in his nature, so he’s not good at assholery yet.”
“Thanks,” said Danny. “I think.”
“Well,” said Hermia, “I’d better go, or the Family will track me here.”
“You’ve got to get those trackers out of her,” said Veevee.
She was right.
Danny studied Hermia, and then passed a gate over her, one that left her exactly where she was.
“What was that about?” asked Hermia.
“I didn’t know what I might have gained by going to Westil,” said Danny. “For all I know, I might always have had the ability to attach gates to portable objects. And maybe going through a Great Gate doesn’t affect the mage who made it. But I think there is a difference. When you went through the gate I just made, I could feel a difference in you-the places where the gate was trying to heal you and meeting with resistance. Maybe that’s what it was, anyway. I counted five places like that.”
“You should just send her through an airport scanner,” said Veevee. “They’ll show you exactly where the trackers are implanted.
Danny laughed. “Of course. Veevee, will you come along and make a distraction?”
He took them to the Roanoke airport. Veevee got to the end of the security line and then started wailing. “Where’s my ticket? I had my ticket right here!”
Her noise drew everyone’s attention, and in the moment, Danny put Hermia right in front of the security gate, ahead of the person at the front of the line. Then he opened a peephole over the shoulder of the TSA official working the screen.
Veevee, seeing Hermia in place, took off on an elaborate charade of searching for her lost boarding pass. The guard waved Hermia into the machine.
Danny had been right about the trackers. Five of them, exactly where he had felt the gate trying and failing to heal her. The trip to Westil had given him more power. A sharper focus, a greater awareness.
He moved the porthole to a spot an inch from Hermia’s ear. “Gate to my house in Buena Vista,” he said. Then he gave the same message to Veevee.
In a moment they were all there. “I spotted all five trackers,” said Danny. “I think I can gate them out.”
“‘Think’?” said Hermia. “This is my body we’re talking about.”
“I’ll have a nice big gate ready for you to pass through so when I get each one out, you can heal yourself instantly. What can go wrong?”
“Famous last words,” said Veevee.
But after another minute of dithering, Hermia said, “Oh, just do it.”
“Are you sure?” said Danny.
“Do it, gate boy,” said Veevee. “Can’t you tell when a woman’s saying ‘yes’? You really are young.”
In about ten seconds, Danny was done. There were five chips on the table, and Danny had passed the healing gate over Hermia after removing each one. It was very quick.
“It did hurt,” said Hermia. “Surgery is surgery.”
“Sorry,” said Danny.
“I was just reporting, so you’d know,” said Hermia. “I never thought it would be painless, so it wasn’t a complaint.” She picked up one of the chips. “So my parents thought it would be a good idea to put these things in their baby girl.”
“The question is, what do we do with them?” said Veevee. “I say gate them to an incinerator.”
“Or implant them in somebody else,” said Hermia.
“That wouldn’t be nice,” said Veevee.
“I was thinking, what about the President? Or Prince Charles?” said Hermia. “Or some dictator somewhere. Make my Family go chasing them.”
“Or five different people,” said Veevee. “Make them go crazy trying to figure out which one is you.”
In the end, Danny gated one tracker under the skin of each of the Hittite-Armenian assassins and sent the other trackers about a mile deep in the Atlantic. Then he gated the two assassins from the jail to the Greek Family’s offices in Athens. “Let my folks deal with them,” said Hermia.
“Are you going to tell them what the bastards tried to do to you?” asked Veevee.
“No,” said Hermia. “Let them try to talk to each other. They’ll know we picked these clowns to receive exactly two of the trackers for a reason. They’ll know it wasn’t random. But if I tell my family, they’ll just kill them. Even if they’re seriously angry at me, they won’t approve of assassins from another Family going after me.”
“So you think the assassins won’t talk?” asked Danny.
“My family won’t dangle them upside down over the ocean,” said Hermia. “Or maybe they will-but they won’t do it as cleverly and magically as you did.”
“We are gatemages, aren’t we?” said Veevee with some satisfaction. “It’s so much fun to prank everybody at once.”
They went to Veevee’s favorite gelato place-Angelato, on Arizona Avenue in Santa Monica-and ate their gelatos on the Third Street Promenade. Then all three of them gated away to wherever they were going to spend the night. Veevee laughed in delight as she prepared to stick a finger into one of her rings. “Oh, I feel so powerful. Like the first time I got the keys to the family car.” Then she was gone.
Alone in his little house in Buena Vista, Danny could hardly believe what he had done in a single day. Went to Westil and met the Gate Thief. Created portable gates for his friends. Removed the tracking chips from Hermia. Ate dessert in California and got back before bedtime.
Botched a Great Gate.
He really wanted to think about Xena as he went to sleep. But all he could think about was the angry gate that Marion and Leslie were tending now. How could he do something that stupid?
And then, inexplicably, he thought of Coach Lieder’s daughter, Nicki. How was she doing? Had they realized yet that she was healed of her cancer?
That, at least, was something Danny hadn’t screwed up.
8
It should have been easy for Wad to find the windmage from Mittlegard whom Danny North had called Ced. Not only was there a swath of destruction across a long stretch of Hetterwee, making it easy to narrow down his location, but even if he tried to blend into the local population, even if he had acquired local clothing, his foreignness had to be obvious from his language.
Hetterwee was a broad plain that got heavy snow in winter but scant rain in summer. The grass was fast-growing and the sod was thick, but the whole world turned brown by midsummer and the grazing herds now stayed close to the many streams that flowed down from the Mitherkame, the High Mountains.
Mitherkame was high and thickly forested, a place where mages of stone and water, tree and eagle prospered and grew strong. Wind could whistle and whine through canyons and narrow passes.
But Hetterwee was a wide-open land where the wind made waves in the high grass, rippling for miles. There the wind could dance.
Deep in the grass, insects abounded, eating fallen seeds; birds and rodents came to eat the seeds as well, and to eat the insects too; and great grazing animals came in vast herds to slice or tear off the grass well above the matted sod. The predators-wolves and great cats-came to cull the lame and old and unprotected young from the herds. Here a mage of herding beasts and a mage of predators could equally find a home.
It was a place where a traveler could walk for days without any certainty that he had come any closer to his destination, or escaped any distance from the place where he began.