Gift of the Unmage (21 page)

As Magpie had said, the door was unlocked. It swung open soundlessly, letting in a wash of cold air.

Thea shivered. “I should have thought about a sweatshirt,” she said. “It’s definitely October out there. Okay, it’s completely deserted. Go.”

She switched on her flashlight, letting the light play out from between her fingers. The girls slipped out of the residence, closing the door carefully behind them, and scuttled out of the paved area, across a stretch of lawn and into the friendly shadows of a nearby copse of trees. Somewhere near them an owl hooted, and Thea shivered.

“I feel like I’m being watched,” she whispered.

“You are,” Magpie said. Thea turned her head sharply to meet the beady gaze of the skunk, still quiet but definitely wide awake and contemplating possible mischief. Thea took an involuntary step backward.

“The sooner you settle that thing down somewhere, the happier I’ll be,” Thea said. “Let’s just get to the shed!”

Again, just as Magpie had said, they found the garden shed’s back door closed but not locked.
The shed had only one small and very filthy window that let in almost no light at all, and they could not risk showing any and exposing themselves to detection, so Thea wedged the flashlight between two shovels, facing the wall, almost but not quite touching it. A bare halo of light escaped, just enough for them to identify shadowed gardening implements by their shapes and locations.

In the back of the shed an old wheelbarrow with no front wheel sat propped on a cinder block. It held an assortment of things impossible to identify in the murk, but it definitely looked as though it hadn’t been touched for a while. There was a sense of cobwebs and abandonment about it.

“That will do,” Magpie said. “Can you help me clear a space?”

“I’m going to regret this in the morning,” Thea said, grimacing as she reached out and scrabbled with bare hands amongst cleaning cloths stiff with dirt, assorted rake handles, balls of string, sections of watering hose, and two or three old brooms.

There was just enough room in the back of the wheelbarrow for the skunk, wrapped in his blan
ket, to curl up. Magpie piled the junk in the wheelbarrow artistically about her patient in a concealing dome, and then stepped back and surveyed her handiwork critically, her hands on her hips.

“That’ll do until tomorrow,” she said at length. “I’ll have to come back with some newspapers or an old sheet or something to make it softer and more comfortable, but he’ll be all right tonight.” She reached out to pet the skunk on the head. It didn’t move.

Thea was wiping her hands ineffectually on her jeans, which were now dark with dust and pale with fluffs of cobweb stuck to them where she’d peeled them off her fingers. She had the uncomfortable feeling that she was crawling with cross and dispossessed spiders.

“Are you done?” she asked. “We’d better get back before anybody misses us.”

“They aren’t doing bed checks,” Magpie said.

“Yet,” Thea said darkly.

Magpie suddenly shivered. “Did you have to remind me?” she murmured. “I feel perfectly safe…as long as I don’t think about it.”

She gave her patient a last reassuring pat and followed Thea out into the night with a sigh.

It was a cold night. They could almost see the white cloud of their breath as they hurried back through the trees, the muted light of the flashlight bouncing on the ground. Goose bumps almost large enough to cast their own shadows stood out on Thea’s arms, and her teeth were chattering.

“We’ll get pneumonia,” she complained softly to Magpie.

“I’ve
never
had pneumonia, and I’ve been doing this for years,” Magpie retorted.

“There’s always a first time,” Thea said a little waspishly, and then gasped. She held her breath and thumbed off the flashlight just as Magpie blundered into her from behind.

“Hey! What are you…,” she began, but Thea silenced her with a gesture. Magpie subsided into silence, and then she, too, gasped as she heard soft voices ahead.

“We can’t get past them,” Thea hissed. “They’re between us and the back door.”

“Who is it?” Magpie asked, taking a careful step forward to stand beside Thea.

“I don’t know. I can’t see anything. Shhh…let’s go around to the side…that way….”

But the acoustics of the night were treacher
ous. They had barely started to sidle off to the edge of the woods closer to the corner of the residence before Thea came to a sharp halt and flung out an arm to stop Magpie from plowing into two people who stood less than a few paces away. Their voices were very low, but the night had the clarity of early winter to it, and sound carried as if through crystal. It was possible to make out every single word that was being said.

“I still think it will not come here,” a female voice said. “For weeks I’ve watched, and I’ve seen no sign of it. There isn’t enough here to sate its hunger.”

“You don’t know that—there is enough just in the ranks of the staff,” a male voice responded. “They’ve already called in a number of us. Who is to say there won’t be more, and there may well be those in the student body who might be in danger still.”

“But without magic…,” began the female voice.

“That’s Mrs. Chen,” Magpie hissed.

“And the principal,” Thea whispered back, making sure her own voice was muffled into her T-shirt against Magpie’s ear to prevent its own sound from carrying too far.

The principal could be seen to be shaking his head slightly. “You know how hard we have tried to keep this place clean of it,” he said. “But remember, we can’t know about everything that is brought in as contraband. Who knows what attracts the Nothing to people? We have thrown some of our best mages at it, and at least three of them have paid for it with their lives. The Nothing is impervious to magic. What’s more, it
feeds
on it—the more you throw at it, the stronger it becomes—but who knows that it won’t come for a hoarded bag of Sweet Spells in some junior’s bedroom? And the very worst of it is that I don’t know how to guard against that.”

“Then why are we still sending mages out?” Mrs. Chen asked. “What possible use is it to have good people lay down their lives only to strengthen the enemy for doing worse things to us?”

The principal shrugged his shoulders, lifted his hands in a gesutre of helplessness. “I don’t know,” he said. “I am awaiting Patrick Wittering’s report within the hour. Perhaps then we will know more.”

“How could you send him?” Mrs. Chen said, and Thea heard her voice tremble. It was the first time she had ever seen Mrs. Chen show fear, and
she felt its cold breath on her own skin, stirring the hair on the nape of her neck. She shivered, and this time it was nothing to do with the October night.

A hunger that can’t be sated…

“Everyone else thought they knew what the Nothing was. Everyone else was wrong,” the principal said gently. “It’s up to him now. We send those soldiers we can into our wars. Sometimes it is all we can do just to fight our battle; it is not given to us to choose where and how they are to be fought.”

When there is a battle to be fought, it is you who can choose the place of the battlefield
.

The echo of Cheveyo’s voice was a startling and thoroughly unexpected addition to the conversation. Thea could not suppress a small gasp.

The principal and Mrs. Chen both turned their heads a fraction. “What was that?”

An owl hooted very close to Thea, suddenly and unexpectedly, making her jump; turning around, she saw Magpie just letting her hands fall from where they had been cupped around her mouth to imitate the owl so perfectly. The girls exchanged almost invisible smiles in the dark.

“It’s late,” said the principal, relaxing the tense set of his shoulders. “You’d better get back to your charges. I still have some work to do tonight.”

“What’s going to happen, John?” Mrs. Chen said, lowering her voice even further, almost beyond the hearing range of the two in the woods.

“I don’t know,” the principal said, his voice startlingly bleak. “A day at a time, Margaret. We will take it a day at a time.”

They touched hands lightly, and turned away from each other—the principal toward the main administration block, Mrs. Chen, playing lightly with a bunch of keys on a key ring, back toward the residence.

“We’ll never get back so she doesn’t see us!” hissed Thea.

“Yes, we will! She’s going around by the front—by the time she gets there and unlocks the door, we can be halfway up the stairs! Come on!”

“Halfway up the stairs is right!” panted Thea, as she raced to keep up with Magpie across the open grassy area and into the paved yard at the back of the residence building. “She’ll throw
the door open and there we’ll be, like two skinned rabbits….”

“Not if you stop talking and hurry
up
!” Magpie flung back.

For all her haste she opened the back door very gently, just enough for both of them to slip through, and closed it with the barest click. They skidded out of the laundry area and rounded the edge of the main staircase just as they heard Mrs. Chen’s keys in the lock. Thea had no idea that either she or Magpie could move so fast; they tore up the staircase taking two or three stairs at a time, managing to be almost unnaturally silent about it. They only just made it, hearing the front door ease open and shut as they paused at the top of the stairs, peering back the way they had come.

“Is she coming up?” Thea mouthed, her heart beating a tattoo against her chest.

“I don’t know. Let’s go,” Magpie returned. They cast final wary glances down the stairs and half ran, half tiptoed down the corridor to their room. Magpie eased the door open with a practiced touch, they both slipped through and dived into their beds fully clothed, pulling the sheets up over their heads. Thea spared a brief pang of
self-pity for the mess her filthy jeans and sneakers were making of her clean bedding, and then held her breath as she waited for the door to be flung open and Mrs. Chen’s voice demanding to know just what it was they thought they were doing. But nothing happened. The night remained quiet and undisturbed, and in due course Thea drew a deep breath and realized her heart was no longer beating like a drum.

“Magpie?” she whispered from underneath her sheets. “What do you suppose it all means?”

But there was no response to her words…other than a gentle snore. Thea risked poking her head out from underneath the covers and peered over at Magpie’s bed.

Unbelievably, Magpie was fast asleep.

2.

T
he one class the whole group of friends had together the next day was math, and since Mr. Siffer was in a particularly unlovely mood they didn’t get much talking done. Thea and Magpie merely hinted at having important information, and it was Tess who finally got a note to everybody to meet at the computer lab later that evening after classes were over for the day. Terry
was running some sort of advanced project and had been given the access code for the computer lab by Twitterpat in case he wanted to put in some overtime.

They gathered there after supper, the five of them—Thea, Tess and Terry, Ben, and Magpie.

“Did you know Mrs. Chen’s name is Margaret?” Magpie asked mischievously.

“No,” said Terry, “but I would guess that isn’t the big secret. Spill!”

Magpie glanced at Thea, who shrugged and launched into an abbreviated account of the previous night’s adventures.

“Wow,” said Ben when she was done. “And I did nothing more interesting than go to sleep last night.”

“You think poor Twitterpat and the others are in some sort of real danger?” asked Tess, nibbling on a hangnail.

“I have no idea where they all went, but Mrs. Chen sounded really worried,” Magpie said. “And you know how serenely laid-back she always is.”

“I was following the newspaper reports all of last week,” Ben volunteered, “and there isn’t a thing in there that I can put a finger on, but—”
He sneezed, suddenly and violently, and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.

Magpie threw him a startled look. “You smell something, Ben?”

“Just your skunk,” said Tess, grinning. “Honestly,
Mag
. The things you do.”

“Maybe we can find out another way,” Terry said, whirling around and switching on his computer.

“What are you thinking?” Thea said, as they waited for it to boot up.

“Maybe I can get this thing networked,” Terry said.

“It is, with the rest of the class….”

“No, I mean Terranet. The News-Net. Not that there’d be anything drastically different in the mainstream media, but some of the alternatives might have better info. They cracked down on the use of computers in the library as soon as this broke; I tried logging on from there once, but some sort of alarm sounded at the librarian’s desk because I was off that machine as fast as she could flip a switch. I thought it was a glitch on one machine, but I tried it three times and every time they blocked me.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because they are denying the Nothing access to this place. Any way they can. If they can keep the school off the radar, then we are all out of the danger zone.”

“But we are supposed to be out of the danger zone anyway,” Magpie said stubbornly.

“You heard what they said last night,” Thea said. “You don’t know what triggers it. It could be anything at all. But Terry…how come you didn’t try it from here?”

“Because although all these computers are networked, they’re tied in to Twitterpat’s machine as the main Terranet gateway,” Terry said.

“Don’t you need his password to access that?” Magpie asked.

“Sure, but it isn’t his system password, it’s the network, and I could probably hack that—it would mean skimming off the IP address from the surface of his machine’s memory…but I hate doing that—I
like
the man, I don’t want to get him or me into any really hot water. It’s easy enough to do, from here—I don’t need to hack to any deep level. Besides, there’s the other thing. I didn’t want to be alone when or if I did it.”

“Why?”

“Because he could have said something inadvertently…or Twitterpat’s password is a spoken spell, or something….” Thea paused as Ben sneezed again. “See? Even you smell something.”