“And then we became friends,” said Danny. “But isn’t that how it’s done?”
“No!” said Pat. “It takes time!”
“I didn’t have time,” said Danny. “I’ve only got a couple of years of high school and look, don’t you know how I was raised? I’ve told you-I never met anybody outside the Family. When I went to DC I only met a handful of people and one of them became a dear friend, one of them was a user who thought I was his ticket to easy street, the perfect burglar. One was a girl who really has the memories that your shrink tried to implant in you, and so she was completely unpredictable and selfish. One was her husband, for reasons I never understood. And then there was the convenience store owner who tried to murder me and my burglarizing partner, and the store owner’s assistant who I talked into murdering him and-am I boring you?”
Pat was covering her face with her hands. She shook her head without uncovering. “I’m so stupid,” she said. “I want to die.”
“Please don’t,” said Danny. “The police would wonder why my fingerprints were all over your back.”
She laughed in spite of herself. “I’m coming to warn you and you know more than I do. You know more about everything.”
“No, I don’t know anything at all. Really, I just gave you a complete list of all the people I knew in DC, my complete resume as a friend-maker. Unless you count the Silvermans and Veevee, but they kind of had an introduction to me and believe me, I didn’t do all that good a job of making friends with them, either. But I had to, don’t you see? I was on the run, my Family was after me to kill me, I had no idea how to live outside the Family compound. I had to make friends with people and only find out later whether I could trust them. Like Hermia, at first I thought she was out to kill me, but-”
“That’s my point,” said Pat, uncovering her face. “That girl. She is not your friend.”
Danny shook his head. “You don’t know anything about her.”
“I know nothing about her. But she. Is. Not. Your. Friend.”
“This is about Hermia? You came here to warn me about Hermia?”
“I came here to beg you to be careful. You trust people that you shouldn’t trust.”
“I trust you,” said Danny. “I let you into my house late at night. I listen to you because I believe you really are my friend. Why should I trust you and not her?”
“What could I do to you?” asked Pat. “But she-she can hurt you.”
“I’m not falling in love with her, if that’s what you think,” said Danny. “She’s older than me. But she’s like Veevee-a fellow gatemage. She taught me how to lock my own gates-she took terrible risks to follow me and we teach each other. We help each other.”
“See, that’s it,” said Pat. “She’s using you.”
“And I’m using her.”
“No, she’s using you. It’s all calculation, it’s all-”
“And you know this how?”
“I just do! She needs you right now, but the minute she doesn’t, the minute she sees some advantage in betraying you-”
“But that might be true of anybody,” said Danny.
“No,” said Pat.
“Yes!” insisted Danny. “People are human, even people like me. You can trust people until you can’t. They mean what they say until they don’t.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Pat. “People aren’t all like that. There are people you can count on because they’d die before they’d betray you or even let you down.”
Danny thought about that. It was a strange way of looking at the world. “I’ve read a lot of history,” said Danny. “It filled the time when the other kids were learning magery. And I don’t think I remember ever reading about anybody who wasn’t human, with all the normal failings.”
“Then you better go back and read again,” said Pat. “Joan of Arc, for instance.”
“What about her?” said Danny.
“She was absolutely true to her voices. She never denied them.”
“Well, actually, she did.”
“She was tricked and trapped and she recanted and died for it because in the end she was true. There are people like that.”
“Lunatics?” said Danny.
“Don’t joke, buddy-boy,” said Pat, “because I’m serious. Your cynical attitude about people is mostly right, but there really are good people who can be counted on.”
“My attitude isn’t cynical, it’s realistic. Who else is on your list, besides the girl who heard voices?”
“And led armies, and created France as a nation.”
“I apologize to dead Jeanne d’Arc for speaking of her so lightly.”
“There was Jesus,” said Pat.
That took Danny aback. “What about him?”
“True to his word. A true friend.”
“To whom?”
“To everybody,” said Pat.
“You’re a Christian,” said Danny.
“What about it if I am?” said Pat. “Even if you don’t think he died for your sins, he thought he did. And he went ahead with it, he was true to his word.”
He didn’t bother explaining to her that the Families just thought of Jesus and Mohammed and Moses and Elijah as Semitics. Mages, but not from the Families, not from Westil. “Jesus and Joan of Arc,” he said. “Not a very long list.”
“They’re famous, that’s all,” said Pat. “The list is very, very long. There are millions of people who gave their word and then kept it, even at the cost of their own lives, at the cost of terrible agony. Soldiers who did brave things and died. Businessmen who kept true to bad contracts and lost everything, but they gave their word. There are people like that!”
“All right,” said Danny. “I believe it.” And when he thought about it, he wondered. “Am I one of them?” he asked.
“I think you are,” said Pat.
“I’m a prankster, I lie all the time, I’m good at it, I conned people out of their money all the way to DC. But I also try to keep my promises. This is so weird. Is it possible that I’m actually an honest man?”
“I don’t know,” said Pat. “That’s not my point.”
“I know,” said Danny. “You didn’t come to tell me that I’m virtuous. You came here to tell me that you are.”
Pat sat very still, thinking. “Yes,” she said. “That is why I came.”
“To tell me that you’re not Xena, who just wants to have a baby with the most powerful man she’s ever met,” said Danny. “And you’re not like Hermia, who’s just using me and letting me use her because by helping each other we both gain. With you it isn’t a bargain or a trade, and it isn’t because you want to get something from me.”
Pat was crying now. “Yes.”
Danny got up and sat on the couch beside her and she nestled against his shoulder and he put his arm around her and she cried. “You came here to tell me that you’re my true friend and that I can count on you in a way I can’t count on anybody else.”
She nodded against his shoulder.
“You came to tell me that you love me.”
She pulled away, turned and flopped down against the other arm of the couch and cried even harder. “I’m so stupid,” she said. “If I’d known that was what I came to say I wouldn’t have come!”
Danny put his hand on her back and she did not recoil. He stroked her gently and said, “You came to tell me that you’re the best of my friends, that you’re the truest, the most reliable. That you don’t think this magery is cool, you think it’s dangerous, and I’m in danger, and you don’t want anything bad to happen to me, because what you care about isn’t power or coolness. It’s me. You care about me.”
She nodded, and she wasn’t crying now. His hand was stroking her back, and when she sat up his arm stayed around her and she turned her tear-soaked, red-eyed face to him and he kissed her.
It wasn’t like with Lana. Yes, it was, in that his body approved of what was happening. But he wasn’t afraid. He took her at her word. He trusted her. And he realized that in all his conversations with his friends at high school, Pat was the only one he actually listened to with any expectation that her words would matter to him at the level of reality rather than entertainment.