Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (23 page)

Del was a transfer from the high school over in Oceanside. There were all kinds of stories about the transfer, since almost no one had been willing to get close enough to her to find out what was really going on. One set of rumors claimed that her folks had moved here, to what was a less expensive suburb of the county, because her dad’s business had failed. There were whispers of some kind of vague white-collar wrongdoing—extortion, embezzlement, no one knew what. Others said that Del herself was the problem, that she’d been causing trouble at her old high school and they’d thrown her out. The rumors about what
that
trouble might have been were even worse than the ones about Della’s dad.

Nita had started to be infuriated by the whispering campaign when she’d first seen the very pretty, very lonely looking girl, always in the same beat-up denim jacket and boot-cut jeans, sitting all by herself in her history class during her first week at Nita’s school—hardly glancing up, interacting exclusively with the teacher, plainly nervous about looking anybody else in the face. That feeling Nita knew all too well from the time before she’d become a wizard, the time when she’d first come to understand it was unlikely that anything she did to her clothes or her hair would ever change the way the other kids saw her—as a nerd—and every passing day had left her more hopeless and angry about it. Now, far more certain of herself and far less concerned with what most of her classmates thought of her, Nita was in a better position to feel concern for anyone else caught in the same trap. As soon as that class had finished, she’d gone over and introduced herself.

This had not been without its penalties, for Nita knew the whispering would start about
her
within minutes. The most popular kids in school saw her simply as a bottom feeder, a geek with so few friends that she’d purposely befriend a newcomer and outcast so that she’d have someone to be more normal than.
Let them think that,
Nita had thought.
When I’m dealing with them, I have to do right by them … but, otherwise, after we all graduate in a few years, with luck I’ll never see most of these people again.

“Hey, Del,” Nita said, wandering over to where Della was leaning against the chain-link fence, doing something with her smartphone.

“Hey,” Della said. She glanced up just long enough to look up past the school, down toward the parking lot, which was almost empty at this time of day. The juniors and seniors who had cars had pretty much all pulled out half an hour before. Then she dropped her gaze back to her phone again, scrolling its screen with one thumb.

“You okay?” Nita said.

Della turned her head, looked at Nita slowly. Though the look was unsmiling, over time Nita had come to know that it wasn’t actually hostile. This was just the way Della defended herself from people, refusing to reveal anything they could use against her; usually the flatness of the look was enough to scare them off.

“You look depressed,” Nita said, and leaned against the fence as well.

Della sighed and looked away. “The news all sucks,” she said. “Nothing but bomb scares and fighting and airports being evacuated because of terrorists, and security alerts everywhere. The world’s going to shit all around us, and everything else on TV besides the news is just dumb, and my brother’s really getting on my nerves.”

Her voice was surprisingly resigned and bored. “You’ve got a sister,” Della said. “What do you do when you feel like killing her?”

“Try to get her to go to some other planet,” Nita said.

Della smiled a rather bitter smile. “Have much luck with that?”

“Not as much as I’d like,” Nita said. “But sometimes she gets the hint.”

They leaned there in a companionable silence for a few moments. A teacher came out one of the side doors of the school carrying a briefcase and an armful of books, and headed for his car. “I hate just lurking around here,” Della said, watching the teacher get into the car and start it up, “but lurking around home is worse. There’s nowhere to hide. Even when I’m in my room, I know my mom and dad are just waiting for me to come out so they can look at me that way they do, like there’s something I’m supposed to do to make everything turn out all right.” And Della manufactured a sort of creepily threatening cross between a scowl and a smile. The expression looked to Nita so much like something that would normally appear on a cartoon character that she had to laugh.

Della snickered, too, then. “See, not even you take me seriously,” she said, and pushed the long curly blond hair out of her eyes. “Come on, give me a hint: what am I supposed to be doing to make it all right? What is it They want?”

Nita’s eyes widened. She looked more closely at Della, but Del’s face was unrevealing. “I’m not sure,” Nita said.

“But you’re supposed to know,” Della said, gazing across at the school doors as if she was intent on not meeting Nita’s eyes. “You’re the one who’s been left in charge. You’re supposed to have all the answers. Help me out here!”

Nita looked thoughtfully at Della, looked hard. The wind blew the hair across Della’s face again. Annoyed, she lifted a hand to push it aside.

Not a hand. A claw—

Nita’s eyes widened. Then she started violently as something she couldn’t see struck her in the side of the head. She flinched and flung her right hand up, and the lightning-bolt charm with a particularly aggressive “blaster” spell bound into it glinted on her charm bracelet in the late-afternoon sunlight. Nita opened her mouth to say the twenty-third word of the spell and turn the force-blast loose against the thing that had hit her; and as she did, Della pressed herself back against the fence, the darkness that surrounded the claw shimmering up around her, abolishing the blond hair, the face—

Something came down over Nita’s mouth, so that she couldn’t speak. Something else stuck itself in her ear. Nita’s eyes narrowed; she started to simply think the twenty-third word of the force-blast spell instead of saying it. It was a long one. Light twined around it, paired serpents of fire—

Don’t do it!

And abruptly the thing in her ear was a tongue, one she knew entirely too well.

Ewwwww,
Nita thought, opening her eyes, her heart still beating hard. Kit stood at the head of the couch, looking down at her anxiously; he’d just removed his hand from her mouth. Ponch, meanwhile, had finished washing her ear and was now enthusiastically working on her face.

“Thanks for not blasting me,” Kit said.

“Good thing you moved fast, ‘cause I didn’t know it was you,” Nita said, pushing Ponch away. “Did I oversleep? It’s morning already?”

“It’s not just morning. It’s
Monday
morning.”

“
What?
” Nita’s eyes went wide. She sat straight up, or tried to; as usual, the crocheted throw had wrapped itself around her like a cocoon. “It can’t be! We were only gone—oh, four or five hours, there was the stuff on the Moon—and then we did the transit, and we slept here, yeah, but it should still only be—”

“
Normally
it should still only be,” Kit said. He looked at Ponch.

Ponch looked guilty.
I brought us straight here…

“But it took longer than usual,” Nita said, struggling to get out from under the throw. “Ponch, don’t worry! It wasn’t your fault. It’s got to be the expansion—it’s throwing everything off.”

“Tell that to your dad,” Kit said, sounding rather grim. “I get to do it with
mine
in a minute. Or if my luck runs out, with my mama.”

Nita swallowed. Her dad—who knew if he’d been trying to reach her? And if he had, why hadn’t her phone gone off?
Tom and Carl did the wizardry on it,
she thought,
it should be okay!
But if wizardry wasn’t behaving correctly in some of the places they were going—And then again she saw it, the shimmer of a hand that was a claw, and eyes that willingly blinded themselves behind a sheen of darkness—

She covered her face with her hands and tried to pull everything together so that it made some kind of sense.
This may take a while…
“Okay,” she said to Kit, pushing her hair back, “give me a minute or two to kick my brains into shape. What’s everybody else doing?”

“Getting up,” Kit said, “like they had a choice.” He glanced in Ponch’s direction with a slightly exasperated look. “I kept him out of here as long as I could. But Ponch had himself a good time with everyone else first. Don’t even ask what he tried to do to Filif.”

Ponch, who had spent the past few moments investigating everything in Nita’s pup tent that he could stick his nose into or under, now bounded back wearing an expression of complete innocence.
I wasn’t really going to do that!
he said.
It was just kind of funny for a moment…

Kit gave Nita a skeptical look. “Let me get the humorist out of here,” he said. “You want something to eat before we go?”

“I’ll grab something,” Nita said. “You go ahead.”

Kit and Ponch went out. Nita finally managed to get completely free of the throw. She got up, folded the throw and chucked it over the back of the sofa, then pulled on jeans and sneakers and a soft shirt, shrugged into the vest-with-too-many-pockets that she’d brought along, and started going through the pockets in search of a candy bar.
Sugar,
she thought,
I really need some sugar.
Nita turned up, in rapid succession, a wad of shredded facial tissues, an empty gum packet, a clear plastic mint box with one lone mint left rattling around in it, an extremely sticky ice-cream wrapper, and, finally, a slightly squashed chocolate-and-peanut bar. She unwrapped it and ate it in three bites.
Hand. Claw. An eye goes dark—

Nita crumpled up the wrapper of the candy bar and shoved it in yet another pocket. Making notes on what she’d seen was going to have to wait, but at least she wasn’t likely to forget
that
image in a hurry. She went fishing among the pockets for her phone, and finally turned it up.

Nita hit the “dial” button and waited. The somewhat altered dial tone of a cell phone running wizardly routines came on, and then cut out… and Nita broke out in a sweat.
Oh, please don’t let this be broken. This really needs to work right now—

“Hello?”

“Daddy!” Nita said. “It didn’t ring.”

“It rang here,” her father said, “which I’ve been waiting for it to do
for four days!
You said you were going to keep in touch—”

Nita could understand how annoyed and upset he sounded; she was annoyed herself. “Dad, I’m sorry, but for once it’s not our fault,” she said. “For us it’s just been eight hours or so since we left. It looks like the dark-matter expansion is screwing up our transit times.”

“Well, that’s just great,” her dad said. “Is this going to keep happening?”

“I don’t know,” Nita said, and rolled her eyes.
I wish somebody would ask me a question I know the answer to.
“I’ll call you as often as I can, but if time’s running weirdly for us, I don’t want to wake you up in the middle of the night and worry you even more.”

“I’ll take my chances with that,” Nita’s dad said. “Has anything bad happened? Are you all safe?”

“We’re fine,” Nita said. “We’re just getting up. We had a few hours’ sleep. Not as much as I would’ve liked.”

“Well, I didn’t get as much last night as
I’d
have liked, either.”

Nita made an unhappy face. “Daddy, what time is it for you?”

“It’s twenty-five after six.”

“Did you have a bad time in the shop today?”

“Why?” Just as it had sounded like he was calming down a little, her dad sounded angry all over again.

Nita’s eyebrows went up. “Uh, you just sound… really on edge.”

She heard her dad take a long breath and let it out again. “Not that I wouldn’t have reason to be,” he said, “what with what’s going on with you, and the way everything else is here at the moment, but—” He paused. “Yes, you’d be right to say that I’ve been feeling the strain a little more than I usually would.”

Nita swallowed. “Us, too,” she said. “I’m sorry. That’s all I wanted to say, I guess. I’m sorry all this is happening this way.”

“It’s hardly your fault,” her dad said after a moment. “And I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’m sorry, too. But I’m really relieved to hear from you.”

Nita had to admit that the relief was mutual. Her dad’s matter-of-fact groundedness was one of the things she’d come to count on to help keep her on course when everything else in her life seemed to be going to pieces. “Look,” Nita said, “I’ll call as often as I can. But we may get to places where it won’t be safe to do that. When that happens…”

There was a silence at the other end.
I wish I could see his face,
Nita thought, feeling a little nervous. “I’ll try to give you advance warning,” she said. “But I may not be able to. When we get where we’re going, we may have to operate undercover for a while.” She swallowed. “And if wizardry starts acting up, too, the phone connection might just stop working until we fix what’s broken.”
Until. Just keep thinking “until.
”

“You’re telling me that I’m just going to have to tough this one out,” her dad said.

“We all are, Daddy.”

He sighed. “Well, if that’s all we can do, I guess we may as well get on with it,” her dad said. “Speaking of ‘all’: have you heard anything from Dairine? I haven’t heard from her, either.”

“Nothing so far,” Nita said.

“Okay. Well, if you do, tell her to get in touch.”

“I will.”

“I know that tone of voice,” her dad said, with a sigh. “You’ve got something to do. Go do it, sweetie.”

“Okay, Daddy. Love you.”

“Love you, too, kidlet. Go kick old What’s-Its-Face around the block for me.” There, at least, was a flash of her dad’s normal humor.

“First thing on the list, Dad. Talk to you later.”

“Bye-bye.”

Nita hit the hang-up button and stared at the phone. Finally she shoved it into one of the vest’s many pockets, then reached sideways into her otherspace pocket and pulled out her manual. “You need to be a
lot
smaller,” she said.

Obediently the manual reduced itself to the size of a pocket notebook, and Nita shoved it in another of the vest’s pockets. As she did, she glanced down at the lightning-bolt charm on her bracelet, the slight glow around it showing that it was still undischarged. As she did so, she got a sudden flash of that image of intertwining light.