The Lost Gate (24 page)

Lana looked at him coldly. “If you think I'm going to put out just cause you're being cute, you can forget it.”

Danny was appalled. “Is that the
only
thing you think about?”

“It's the only thing
you
think about.”

“You don't know what I think about.”

“I think I settled that the first time you walked through that door.”

Angry now, Danny could say things plainly that he would ordinarily have been too shy to talk about. “Oh, right, you're half-naked, you press yourself against me, breathe in my face, push me down to the floor, what
else
can I think about? Why didn't you try a
conversation
?”

“You would have been thinking about boffing me the whole time,” said Lana.

“Maybe I would,” said Danny. “Maybe when all you're wearing is a white shirt that I can partly see through, maybe I sit there wondering how hard it would be to undo the buttons. But right now? Dressed like a regular person?”

“Right now you're thinking about how I looked when you first saw me.”

“You're such a piece of work,” said Danny. “What I
was
thinking when I came in just now was how cool it was that you were looking at a turned-off television and then had something funny to say about it, and I thought I was joining in the joke, and then
you
turned the conversation to ‘putting out.'
You're
the one who can only think about one thing, and I don't care how hard a life you've had, you're still the creepiest girl I've ever known, and I've known some seriously creepy girls.”

“Creepy?” she said mockingly. “Oooh, I'm so
creepy.
”

Danny suddenly darted toward her and threw himself on the couch, landing against the back of it and using his weight and momentum to rock it over backward. He had done that more than once with the even-heavier old couch on the back porch of the schoolhouse at home. He could tip it over with just one of his girl cousins sitting on it. If there was more than one, he'd have to coordinate the raid with one of the other boys, but they were always happy to do it. Finally the girls started getting up from the couch whenever they saw him running toward them, and that was fun, too.

Lana, however, was not prepared at all, so she toppled over backward with a scream. Danny was on top of her at once, tickling her mercilessly. She laughed until she cried.

“Stop it, I'm wetting myself! Stop it, you little bastard!”

Danny stopped and knelt up to look down at her. “I'm thirteen years old, Lana,” he said. “
That's
what I come up with to do with girls.” Then he got up and walked to the kitchen.

Ced was sitting at the table, reading a thick book with tiny print. “Tickled her, eh?”

“She liked it,” said Danny. “I could tell.” He went to the fridge and decided that after the o.j. and Payday he wasn't hungry after all.

He heard the door swing open and Lana was there, braced against the doorframe.

“You made me wet myself, you stinking little brat!”

“That's just what I expect from a
girl.
All that girls can think about is pee. ‘I need to go to the bathroom.' ‘I've got to take a potty break.' ‘Who's coming with me to the little girls' room.' Girls make me want to
urinate.
”

She ran to the dishdrain and picked up a table knife. “I'm gonna kill you, you little prick!”

“With
that
knife?” said Danny. “All you can possibly do is spread me with mayo or something.”

Ced was laughing now, and Lana whirled on him. “If you were any kind of husband, you'd protect me instead of laughing!”

“You're the one with the knife,” said Ced.

“You know I hate being tickled!” Lana screamed in his face.

“Well, maybe the kid hates being half-raped,” Ced answered mildly. “So now you're even.”

“Now I have to change my pants!” she said.

“Bet
he
did, too,” said Ced.

“I did not,” said Danny.

“Oh, bad news, Babe,” said Ced. “You're losing your touch.”

Lana lunged at Ced with the knife, but he caught her wrist. It looked to Danny like she hadn't really been stabbing at him. Like she wanted him to stop her.

Ced dragged her down onto his lap and kissed her. Or, rather, kissed
at
her, since she kept dodging her face out of the way. So he kissed her neck.

“Stop slobbering on me!” she shouted.

“I'm going to go up to my room now,” said Danny.

Ced picked her up and set her on the table in front of him, right on top of the book.

“If that's a library book, they're going to make you pay a fine,” said Danny.

By now Lana and Ced were locked in a kiss so deep that Danny was surprised they weren't gagging on each other's teeth.

“Are you guys vampires?” asked Danny. “Trying to bite each other's necks from the inside?”

They paid no attention to him.

Danny went down the hall toward the stairs. “I'm never getting married!” he said loudly as he left. “It's just too sickening.” But actually he was feeling kind of triumphant. He had gotten a little of his pride back, what with tickling her so she lost control of herself. Even steven now, he said silently.

Well, almost even. Because while he was tickling her, he enjoyed touching her body, even through her clothes. She kind of had a point about what boys think about. Apparently it never switched completely off, once he'd started thinking of her that way. He hadn't known that, what with the only girls he knew being his cousins who despised him.

Danny only made it to the top of the first flight of stairs. Stone was waiting in his doorway, brandishing a piece of stationery-size paper. “I've got a name and address for you.”

“Already have a name,” said Danny, “and I was kind of hoping this was my address.”

“A teacher,” said Stone. “And a place you can live. None of the Families know about them. And you'll notice that I'm not saying their name out loud. Please do likewise.”

Danny walked to him. “I don't know if I want to leave DC,” he said. “I like this town.”

“Or you don't want to leave Lana?” said Stone. “She's married.”

“I know,” said Danny. “I got that. But what I said was, ‘I like this town.' Why should I go?”

“Suit yourself,” said Stone. But he still folded the paper over and pushed it into Danny's pants pocket.

Danny backed away. “Put it in my hand,” he said. “Keep your hands out of my pockets.”

Stone rolled his eyes and handed it to him. “Not everyone in this house wants to molest you.”

Danny unfolded the note and looked at it. “Marion and Leslie? Is either one of them a man?”

To Danny's shock, Stone slapped him across the face—hard. Danny staggered to the side and he couldn't help it that tears came to his eyes.

“You think it's all a joke?” said Stone. “How do you know somebody's outself isn't in this room, listening to what you say? These people are willing to take in and train a gatemage, even though it might bring the wrath of all the Families down on their heads, and you treat it as a
joke
?”

“If they could hear me,” said Danny, “they could read your stupid note.”

“You think I don't know how to keep their outselves away from me?”

“Then why do you think they're here to listen?”

“Because if you knew anything, you'd know they could be in the next room and still hear you, and I wouldn't know they were there.”

“Still didn't give you the right to
slap
me.”

“It's somebody else's life on the line, you selfish little pig,” said Stone. “Get it through your head that other people matter besides yourself.”

“I'm a Westilian,” said Danny scornfully. “Nobody matters as much as me.” He had meant the words to be ironic, maybe even apologetically so, but they clearly hadn't sounded ironic to Stone.

“You're not a Westilian,” said Stone. “Any more than all those Americans out there are Celts or Germans or Italians or Poles or Russians or wherever their family came from. It's been nearly fourteen centuries since any of your ancestors lived in Westil.”

“I know,” said Danny. “Look, I'm sorry I said their names. I honestly forgot that I wasn't supposed to say them.”

“I just told you not to!” said Stone.

“Like I told Lana, I'm thirteen! I forget things as soon as you tell me. The Aunts always complained about it, but I wasn't the only one, you know.”

“Being young and stupid doesn't excuse anything. If you get them killed or even hurt, I'll kill you myself. Get it?”

“I didn't say their address,” said Danny. “I didn't say their last name.”

Stone reached out and snatched the note out of Danny's hand. “I take it back. I'm not sending you there. I'm not sending you anywhere, except back out on the street. You're too selfish and stupid to be worth helping.”

“I'm a gatemage,” said Danny, “so I matter to you and your Orphans even if you think I'm stupid.”

“Maybe I'd rather we wait another millennium to get a smart one.”

“I'm sorry,” said Danny. “I'm really, truly sorry. I won't be careless like that again. I'll take it seriously. I take a lot of things seriously, you know. There's a reason I wasn't killed a long time ago.”

“It seems to me that the only reason you're not dead is that your Family was too lazy to kill you.”

“You have an ugly mean streak in you, Stone,” said Danny.

Stone refolded the note and handed it back toward him.

Danny refused to take it.

“Take it,” said Stone. “I shouldn't have gotten angry, you just seemed so flippant about it.”

“I don't need it,” said Danny.

“Don't be defiant, kid. You won't last long here in DC. Word's going to get out about a disappearing kid, and the Families are going to figure out it's a gatemage and come after you.”

“I meant that I don't need the note,” said Danny. “I already memorized it.”

“Oh,” said Stone.

“I'm sorry,” said Danny. “I keep screwing up without meaning to. I really don't mean to be flippant. Things just come out that way.”

Stone nodded. “I forget that that's just how gatemages are. Never taking anything seriously, like it's all a big joke.”

“But I do take things seriously.”

“Story is that a lot of people already hated Loki before he closed the gates,” said Stone. “Most gatemages have a hard time making any permanent friends, at least among the Westilians.”

“Yeah, well, the tribe of Slapping Horticulturalists probably doesn't make a lot of friends, either.”

“I kind of left a mark on your cheek,” said Stone.

“How interesting,” said Danny. “A bruise, maybe?”

“Maybe. But it isn't bleeding.”

“You got to learn to put your weight behind it,” said Danny.

“Flippant. See?”

“So slap me.” Danny turned away and trudged up another half flight and stopped at the bathroom. This was turning out to be a really fine day. He'd probably get shot in one of the houses.

But he didn't. Eric came home, tired and out of sorts from his walk and bus ride. They watched television and had dinner and watched TV again, this time with Ced and Lana, who made fun of all the shows with equal fervor. Finally it was dark, and they walked down toward Rico's store. Danny showed Eric where to stand, and then he went through the gate to Tilden Street.

Nobody was home at the house with the pool, which meant there might be motion detectors. Danny went in anyway, and simply gated his way from room to room so he never walked down the halls. He found a safe and reached through a minigate to pull out what was inside—some serious-looking jewelry and a bunch of cash and bearer bonds, along with birth certificates and other worthless personal papers and pictures. Danny held out what he wanted to keep and put the rest back inside. Then he gated out of the house instead of prowling around looking for fencible electronics.

Back on the street, Danny tucked the bearer bonds and cash into his clothes, then made a new gate into the house on Sedgwick with the three dormers on the roof and all the bikes in the yard. This house was full of sleeping people, except for the mother and father, who were watching a movie in their bedroom.

That was fine with Danny. He located two Xboxes and two Wiis. With each one he found, as soon as he unplugged it from the television, he made a minigate and pushed the item through to Eric. He waited until he could feel Eric tugging on it before he let go. He also pushed through all the game disks he could find. It would do the kids good to live without their brain candy for a while—at least that's what the Aunts always said when they explained why the Family only had one game system, an old Sega, and three games, and even then hardly anyone got permission to play them.

There were three laptops in that same house, two of them in kids' rooms and the other one in a briefcase. They went through minigates, too. In the garage, Danny looked at the Mercedes and the giant SUV and wondered if he could
drive
something that big through a gate. That'd be a wake-up call for Eric, if suddenly a Mercedes started backing through the gate.

But Danny knew they had no way to get cash out of a car—that was a whole different kind of operation, and he didn't want to meet the people who were in the stolen-car business. Besides, it probably wouldn't work—he had no idea how he'd do it. Maybe
he'd
go through the gate, but the car would be too big so when he disappeared it would just keep going. Then again, without his foot on the accelerator, it would probably slow down and stop. Not for the first time, Danny wished anybody had let him learn how to operate a car. Or even the tractor they used for hauling stuff.