“Who knew it was true?” asked Danny. “But it is. And I don’t even know if anyone would be able to tell if I was taken over.”
“I’d know,” said Pat.
“Would you?” asked Danny. “I’m worried that maybe I wouldn’t even know.”
“If somebody was inside you? Making you do stuff against your will?” Pat shook her head. “You’d know. And I’d know, because I’d test you. I’d ask you a question and if you didn’t know the answer, I’d know it wasn’t you.” She pulled on his head and neck to draw him down and kiss him. Then she licked the tip of his nose. “I’d ask what I did right after I kissed you.”
“What if he had access to all my memories?” said Danny. “What if he could answer all the questions?”
“I’d still know,” said Pat. She kissed him again, this time long and hungrily. Her hands moved across his back, gripped his buttocks.
He pulled away from her. “No,” he said.
“This isn’t a game for me,” said Pat. “Like for the others. I’m not playing ‘sleep with a god and tell your friends.’ I love you, Danny North. I’m not too young to know that. Girls married a lot younger than me. Juliet was thirteen.”
“That was fiction, and it didn’t end all that well,” said Danny.
“You’re going off to war. When you told us what you spent all night doing, I thought, what if something had gone wrong, what if Hermia had trapped him or tricked him and he simply never came back? And instead of crying when I thought that, my hands just instinctively went to my belly. My empty uterus. It’s an instinct, Danny. We want to be pregnant when our man goes off to war.”
“I’m not going to make any bastards,” said Danny. “Period, ever. You think your parents are ready to let you marry a high school kid with no job, who lives in a shanty like this?”
“I don’t care about marriage,” said Pat. “People don’t, they just don’t care about that.”
“The smart people do,” said Danny. “The people who want to raise a family, and not just get pregnant.”
She had her hands inside his waistband and was pushing downward on his pants. He thought of Lana the first time he met her in Stone’s house in DC. His body was responding the same way, only this time he wasn’t surprised and frightened. If anything, he wanted Pat more than she wanted him.
“I love you, too,” said Danny, “but I’m not one of those gods.” And, just as she got his pants down to his thighs, he gated her away, back to her own bedroom.
He wanted so badly to go through that gate after her.
Instead, he ate the gate so Hermia couldn’t use it to get into her house, just in case she decided to start going after his friends. And then, too tired to make a decision about pulling his pants back up or taking them off the rest of the way, he gated himself to his own bed and fell asleep exactly as he was.
He dreamed of her, though. He vaguely remembered dreaming of other things, forgotten things, strange things, he dreamed that she was on the bed beside him, pressing herself against him, naked, whispering to him. “I love you, Danny,” she whispered.
In the dream he held her, explored her body. He tried to kiss her but for some reason she evaded his kiss. He laughed and moved his hand up to her face and still she tried to turn her face away when he went to kiss her. He was ready to explode with desire for her. She didn’t want his kisses, she wanted his baby, and that’s all he wanted, was to give her that.
In the dream his body was poised over her. She was pulling his hips down. Then he kissed her before she could dodge.
It wasn’t Pat.
He opened his eyes.
It was Nicki Lieder, the coach’s daughter.
“I came to see you, the door was unlocked,” she whispered, “and here you were, so ready for me.”
It still felt like a dream. But it also felt completely real. Real, but with the cloudiness of a dream in his mind. Nicki Lieder. Not Pat at all. He didn’t love Nicki. But she was naked under him, and he knew how much she wanted him, and at this moment all he could think of was that he wanted her, too. Not her, but a woman, the woman here under him, the woman who had come to his bed. The woman in this extraordinary dream.
No, it’s not a dream, said something inside him. It’s not a dream, it’s someone who has the power to cloud your mind.
“You want me inside you,” said Nicki.
“Yes,” said Danny, even as something in his mind screamed at him, Listen to what she said, listen to what you just agreed to, it’s not you inside her, it’s someone asking to come into your body, and you said yes, you said yes, you fool.
And in the moment of ecstasy and release, he could feel it, this thing entering him at the groin and filling his whole body, taking control of his body. He tried to fight it, tried to move, but already he couldn’t, already it had him.
He could feel his body roll off the girl. He could see her lying there, gasping, looking confused. Looking relieved. And then weeping.
“That’s right, Nicki,” his own lips said, though he was not speaking, and only found out what they were going to say when they said it. “I’m gone now. You can have your body back, nicely healed by Danny North here. Maybe pregnant. Wouldn’t that be nice? Now be a good girl, get dressed, and go home.”
Danny’s body sat up and watched her as she gathered her clothing and put it on, still weeping softly.
“I enjoyed being inside you,” said Danny’s mouth. “You’re a sweet thing and you’ll find that this all becomes like a bad dream, and then like a good dream, and then you’ll miss me, you really will. They all do. The ones that live.”
And Danny was thinking: He was here for weeks. He found me weeks ago, when I came to Lieder’s house and healed his daughter. Was he already inside her then, or did he find her afterward, take control of her when she was clean of her cancer? Maybe Danny could have fought him off any other time, but now, asleep, exhausted, half in a dream, and then the Dragon asked him through Nicki’s mouth, asked him to let him come into Danny, and Danny said yes. But I didn’t realize what I was saying, I thought I was consenting to the sex, and it was sex in a dream, not real, nothing was real, it’s not …
Not fair.
Except this was war. Shaped like love, a moment ago, but it was the crucial battle in a war. The enemy had stolen a march on him, was suddenly in a place where he wasn’t supposed to be.
Now he has control of a gatemage.
But he doesn’t, thought Danny. Because I can still think these thoughts. I can still …
Danny tried to make a gate and pass himself through it, to see if he could shed this creature like a disease.
“Uh-uh-uh,” his own throat said, the glottal stops that said, No no no. “Let’s make a gate for her, to send your little girlfriend home.”
In that moment Danny learned several important things. The Dragon had no idea that Danny really had just gated his girlfriend home-the real one, the one that he hadn’t had sex with. The Dragon also had to use Danny’s mouth to talk to him-it couldn’t just put thoughts into his head. So it wasn’t completely in control, and didn’t even have complete access. He controlled movement and he controlled speech. But that was all a matter of muscles.
Except he could block Danny from creating the gate he wanted to create. Could he make Danny create one?
No, no, that’s not the question, not the question at all.
Inside Danny’s hearthoard, he now realized who had been warning him, screaming at him. Loki’s gates.
Loki knew. Loki had never been possessed, so his outself could not remember having been possessed by Set. That meant Loki was observing him from the outside. From another planet, however many lightyears away it was, Loki had realized what was happening, had seen past the fog in Danny’s mind, past the belief that it was an erotic dream, into the truth.