A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition (34 page)

“Not bad at all,” Millman said. “Do I get to pick another?”

Nita gave him a look. “I wouldn’t push your luck if I were you,” she said.

He grinned a little and sat back. “You look a whole lot better,” he said.

“I feel a whole lot better,” Nita said. “And I think I don’t need to be here anymore.”

“What, school?” Millman said, raising his eyebrows.

“Not school here.
Here
here,” Nita said.

“Oh, you’re cured then?” he said.

Nita cracked up. “Cured of what?”

“You’d be the one to tell me that,” Millman said.

Nita was quiet for a moment. “Not sure anything’s been going that needed curing,” she said at last. “If you mean, am I over my mom dying? …No way. She’ll always be part of me. It’s going to hurt for a long time that she’s not somewhere I can grab her and hug her. But nothing can take her out of my life. Am I over wanting to just sit and suffer and let life go by?” She swallowed. “Probably. Yeah.”

“Then I would say,” Mr. Millman said, “that my work here is done. Insofar as any of it was
my
work. Which is debatable.”

He reached out and turned over the top card on the middle pack. It was the ace of spades. “Aha,” he said.

“What?”

“Highly symbolic.”

“Of what?”

“Well, that would be a long story. That little leafshaped thing, the ‘spade’..,” Mr. Millman picked up the card, looked closely at it. “The history of the word is tangled. But it goes back at least as far as the Greek
spatha.
That was a sword, once upon a time. Of the four suits, that’s the one that has most to do with power. Air, the sound the sword makes in the air, the spoken word; the weapons held by the Power that faces down the Power That Fell…”

He picked up the ace and the three cut packs, shuffling them together again.

Nita looked at him.

“So,” Mr. Millman said, putting the deck down on the desk and doing a credible riffle—much too credible, now that Nita thought of it, for a man who claimed that he couldn’t get the cards to stay up his sleeve. “Any last questions before we finish up here?”

She looked at him, thought for a moment, and found a question it would never before have occurred to her to ask him. The answer would have been in her manual, but she wasn’t going to consult that right now. Considering the question, Nita first made sure that she had the wizardry she wanted ready in the back of her head. If you were going to remove someone’s memory, the less time you spent dithering over it, the better.

“Are you on errantry?” Nita said.

He raised his eyebrows again in that expression she’d learned could mean almost anything but surprise.

“No,” Mr. Millman said. “But I know some people who are.”

Nita sat there, astonished, trying not to exhibit it. Millman sat there and kept shuffling.

“You don’t have to be a wizard to know one,” Millman said, “once you know what you’re looking for. And when you’re willing to
see
what you’re looking at. Not many people are, but that’s humans for you.” He fanned out the cards for her. “Pick a card, any card.”

Nita picked one, turned it over. It was the joker.

Mr. Millman grinned, folded the hand up, tapped the cards back into order, and pushed the deck back toward Nita, meanwhile glancing at the door. “You know where to find me if you need me,” he said. “And I’ve had a word with your sister’s counselor: she’ll be introducing me to Dairine later in the week. Meanwhile, go well.”

Nita got up and took back her pack of cards, grinning, too. She headed for the door.

There she paused as something occurred to her. “‘Supposed to
have
been
counseling?’” she said.

Mr. Millman shrugged.

Nita shook her head again. “
Dai stih
ó,
” she said, and left.

***

That night Nita had a dream. In the dream she stood at the edge of darkness, looking in. Out there in the dark was a spotlight shining on a dark gleaming floor. In the light, something was wobbling around and around, while somewhere off in the near distance a single drum held a drumroll.

The thing in the spotlight was a clown doll on a little bicycle. The doll had purple clown hair, and a little derby hat, and baggy patched pants, and it was riding around and around in circles. It had a painted black tear running down its face, and its red-painted mouth was turned up in a lopsided grin. But the eyes in the doll’s white “greasepaint” face were alive, and pale with fury. The expression in them shouted,
I can’t make it stop! I can’t make it stop!

Nita watched this with dry amusement.
Just couldn’t resist, could you,
she thought.
And there you are, so very very stuck! Wonder how long he can get away with keeping you sidelined?
Probably not nearly long enough to teach you a lesson.

…Probably not,
the answer came back.
Got way too much to do right now, and it’s a nuisance to spend the power it takes to bottle even just this avatar up. But who knows
… maybe things’ll be just a
little
quieter around here until I have to turn It loose.

The drumroll went on and on. Beyond the light, a heartless crowd laughed and clapped and cheered. But there was no sound of growling now, no tiger waiting to pounce. Its pouncing days were over, in this tiny territory anyway: and the clown was no longer victim, but cage.

Nita woke up to the bright daylight, reflected from snow onto the ceiling of her bedroom, let out a long breath, and smiled.

***

The doorbell rang. Kit glanced up from the business of throwing books into his book bag and would have started moving to get the door himself, except that his sister plunged past him. “What?” Kit said, looking all around to try to understand why Carmela was suddenly so hot to answer the door.

No answer came back. Kit could do little but shrug and finish packing his book bag. He stood up from the sofa just in time to look out the window and see the UPS truck pull away.

His sister closed the front door and nearly danced past him into the kitchen. “
What?
” Kit said.

Carmela got a particularly large knife out of the knife rack and began slitting the packing tape on the large box she’d been carrying. Kit fastened his bag and wandered over.

“It has to be clothes,” Kit said, resigned. After a childhood during which Carmela’s major occupation had been ruining the OshKosh overalls that were all their parents dared buy her, Carmela had suddenly discovered clothing as something besides protection from the elements. Now all her pocket money went in this direction, either down at the mall or via various strange mail-order firms. “Nothing but clothes gets you this excited anymore,” Kit said. “Except maybe Miguel.”

And having said that, Kit prepared to protect himself from the explosion that was sure to follow.
I can’t believe I said that to her while she was holding a knife!

But the explosion didn’t follow. Carmela, grinning all over her face and singing a little la-la song, put the knife aside, opened the top of the box, and started removing the contents. These seemed to be only a shower of escaping Styrofoam peanuts for the first thirty seconds or so. But then Carmela reached in and lifted out something wrapped in bubblewrap.

“It’s not clothes,” Kit said, astonished.

“Nope,” Carmela said.
“Much
better.”

This statement left Kit completely confused. Carmela carefully started unwrapping the bubblewrap from around the object.

“It’s some hair thing,” Kit said. “One of those hot curlers.”

Carmela just smiled and kept on unwrapping.

The last bit of wrapping fell away. Carmela held the object up delightedly, admiring it in the morning light, and then thrust it into Kit’s hands.

“Let’s see what the directions say,” she said. She turned back to the box and started digging through the Styrofoam peanuts again.

Kit looked at what he was holding. It looked very much like an eggbeater, except that eggbeaters don’t usually have pulse lasers built into them.

Neets?
he said silently.

A moment later the answer came back.
What?

Can I please move in with you?

There was a pause … and then laughter.

I’ll be right over
…