The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) (17 page)

Her words were so out of proportion to anything that had come before that Danny couldn’t imagine what was going through her mind. “Is that what I think?”

“For your information, no, I wasn’t molested as a child, no, I wasn’t abused, no, I don’t have any repressed memories of terrible things that now interfere with the natural development of my sexuality. I’m just a private person who doesn’t like to be touched.”

Danny just stood there for a couple of seconds. “It’s so good of you to come all the way over here and tell me that,” he finally said.

Pat sat there, looking at him in surprise. It was as if she was only hearing now what she herself had just finished saying. “That’s not what I came here to say,” she said. Her face turned red and she looked away. “I can’t believe I went off like that, I don’t know what I was…”

Danny pulled up one of the kitchen chairs across from her—he didn’t even have to take a step to do it, the kitchen being the other end of the living room—and sat on it. “Let’s pretend I didn’t touch you and so you didn’t react the way you reacted for whatever reason you reacted that way, and let’s just say that I asked you to come in and take a seat and here we are.” He put on an air of jovial welcome. “Pat, my good friend, what brings you here so late at night, considering that you don’t want to sleep with me or have my babies?”

Pat was not amused at his humor. “My parents made me see a shrink because I like to be left alone.”

“Well, that explains the ‘repressed sexuality’ thing.”

“She had an M.D. and a Ph.D., but that just shows they’ll give those degrees to any bonehead who puts in the time. She was a fake who wanted to hypnotize me and put false memories into my head. She actually thought she
had
hypnotized me and started suggesting all kinds of sexual things my father had snuck into my room and done to me when I was three. She was, like, a volunteer hypnotic pornographer. Serious child porn. Ugly.” Pat shuddered. “My parents kept making me go back until I finally told my dad what that bitch was trying to get me to ‘remember’ he had done to me.”

“But you hung on to the vocabulary.”

“Whenever people go off on how I don’t like to be glad-handed or stroked, she comes to mind. Being an introvert isn’t a pathology, you know.”

“I know,” said Danny. “I don’t like to be touched either.” He thought back to the way Lana had accosted him when he first came to Stone’s house, and he realized that he hadn’t spoken the actual truth. He hadn’t liked Lana touching him at the moment, because it was such a surprise and because he didn’t like her having control over him. But his
body
very much liked being touched, and he still remembered that encounter with Lana. He remembered it a lot, and he had imagined several different endings to the event that he much preferred to the way it had actually ended.

But he knew that was nothing more than the impulse of his DNA to replicate itself. In fact, like Pat, he didn’t like to have people touch him. At least not without an invitation. “I have no idea why I did that,” said Danny, “and I’m sorry. I’m also sorry your parents didn’t get you, and I’m sorry the shrink was a schmuck. Can we please get on to whatever you actually came for?”

Pat turned red again and curled up onto the couch, turning her body partly away from him. He had never seen her look vulnerable before. “What am I doing? Why am I saying these things?”

“Really. Please,” said Danny. “Tell me what you came for.”

“I’m worried about you,” she finally said. Still not looking at him. Still embarrassed. “You’re so. So.”

“Stupid?” Danny prompted.

“Yes,” she said. “Not school-stupid, not even people-stupid. I mean, you’re actually very clever and kind of sweet and I think you don’t have a malicious bone in your body, though your sense of humor is sometimes kind of on the mean side.”

“Senses of humor usually are,” said Danny. “But I see your point. Thanks for the counsel.”

“See?” she said. “You’re joking, but you’re also making fun of the fact that I came here at night, alone, and I’ve said everything wrong until I feel so stupid I could die, and yet you’re also sitting there waiting so patiently for me to finally say what I came to say, because you
are
sweet, and that’s why I’m so afraid, because I don’t think you know how evil some people can be.”

Pat had no idea what it was like to live inside a Family. “I know a little more about evil than you think.”

“I’m not talking about your family,” said Pat. “You’re the expert on mages or gods or whatever you people are. I’m talking about—people in general. Regular people. Even people who mean well. You’re so trusting! You came here to Parry McCluer and you decide you’re going to be friends with us, and why? Because the principal assigned Laurette to be your guide on your first day, and you just had to tease her and sit down with us and how
did
you choose us?”

Danny had no answer to that. “I was going with the flow. If I hadn’t liked you guys, I wouldn’t have stayed around.”

“But you didn’t like us,” said Pat. “I mean, how could you? We’re a
mess
, every one of us, weird on the outside and certifiably insane underneath that repellent exterior.”

“But Laurette has nice cleavage, and I am of the heterosexual persuasion,” said Danny. “Maybe that’s all it is.”

“You’re
not
one of those panting morons,” said Pat. “And in fact we really
are
pretty decent people, so you could have chosen a lot worse friends. My point is that you didn’t know, you had no idea who we were, but you plunged right in as if we were friends and. And.”

“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.

Which wasn’t strictly true, he realized. He respected Hal and liked him and he thought Hal was also worth listening to. But he wasn’t like Pat. He didn’t see as clearly and harshly and truthfully as Pat did. Hal told the truth as far as he knew it—but Pat was far more likely to know true things, so her honesty was more valuable. More reliable.

Meaning I can use her.

Danny hated the thought as soon as it came to his mind. It was an ugly bit of self-knowledge. He broke off the kiss.

“Please,” said Pat, and tried to resume it.