The Lost Gate Read online

  Danny pulled away from her, but since he was on his knees it’s not like he could have done anything but rock backward. Which was apparently what she was counting on, because she basically rode him down onto the carpet. In a moment she was pinning his shoulders to the floor with her hands, but since his knees were still folded under him, his body was arched, with his pelvis at the apex. The pertinent fact, however, was that she was straddling him, and he was feeling things that he’d never felt before. The only girls he knew were his cousins, whom he’d been raised with. They were like sisters. Less than sisters, since he knew them well and also despised them. Lana was not his sister, and he didn’t despise her, he was incredibly fascinated with her and what she was making him feel. Yet with every movement of her body under the white shirt, he was also feeling more frightened. What kind of magic was this, that worked on people instead of animals or plants or the elements? Was this the forbidden “manmagic” that was only whispered about?

  “Come on,” said Eric. “I didn’t bring him here to catch whatever disease you’re carrying.”

  She turned the upper half of her body so she could give him some kind of withering glare. Danny couldn’t see her face, but with the twisting of her body she let up on his shoulders and he propped himself up on his elbows. Almost at once he wished he hadn’t, because seeing how her body pressed on his intensified everything he was feeling to the point where he was getting light-headed.

  “Like what you see?” asked Lana.

  “He doesn’t even know what he’s seeing,” said Eric.

  “He doesn’t have to know,” she said. “I’m the only one who has to know.” She knelt up higher, reached behind and between her own thighs, snaked her fingers into Danny’s waistband on both sides, and started to pull down his pants and underwear.

  Danny was so surprised and scared that he cried out and tried to scramble backward on his elbows. But that only helped her pull down on his pants and instead he wriggled the other way, toward her. It kept his pants on.

  “Help me get her off him before she rapes him,” said Eric to Ced. Eric hooked her under one armpit and had her halfway up before Ced joined in on the other side.

  “You boys will just have to wait your turn,” she said. But in a moment they had her up and off of Danny.

  “Pull your pants up,” said Eric with withering scorn.

  “I’m trying,” said Danny. But in fact she hadn’t pulled his pants down very far at all, and it occurred to him that maybe she had never intended to, that maybe what she really wanted was what she was getting right now—Ced pushing her roughly out of the room.

  “I’m the boy’s education,” she was saying, with a giggle. “He got a scholarship to my private school!”

  Ced had her out of the room. Danny could hear him say, more sadly than angrily, “Sometimes you just got no judgment, Lana.”

  Danny was relieved when she was gone. And disappointed. But definitely more relieved than disappointed.

  “Who is she?” asked Eric, as Ced returned to the living room. “A one-woman government welfare program for the horny?”

  “She’s my wife,” Ced replied. He sighed. “But don’t feel sorry for me. She was like this before I married her.”

  “Then why did you bother?” asked Eric.

  “Believe it or not, she’s a lot calmer now than she used to be.”

  Then, to Danny’s surprise, he heard a woman crying in another room. “Is that…”

  “Yeah, it’s her,” said Ced. “Now she’s totally ashamed and filled with self-hatred and all, so I get to spend the next hour or two talking her out of jumping into the Potomac or volunteering to be a suicide bomber for Greenpeace or PETA.” Ced padded back out of the room.

  As soon as he was gone, Eric flopped onto the couch and laughed silently, rolling around as if he were screaming instead of stifling it.

  “I don’t think it was funny,” said Danny.

  “That’s because you couldn’t see your face.”

  “I don’t want to stay here,” said Danny. “What if she tries that again while we’re sleeping?”

  “See?” said Eric. “You’re already fantasizing about it.”

  “No I’m not, I’m—”

  “You’re about ready to explode,” said Eric. “She was just teasing you, don’t you get it? Because you’re so young and a virgin.”

  Ced and Lana came back into the room. Lana was smiling shyly and wearing some kind of athletic shorts now that stuck out below the hem of the shirt. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, but Danny thought she had stopped awfully quickly, if the tears were all that real.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Eric. “Danny’s from the farm, he just wasn’t used to doing it with girls.”

  Danny had no idea what that meant, but it set Lana and Ced to laughing and Danny was pretty sure they were laughing at him. “What are you talking about?” Danny asked.

  “You and the sheep, of course,” said Eric. “Come on, you can’t tell me you didn’t get some quality time with that special ewe.”

  Danny’s face was burning now with shame and rage. “That’s not—that’s not even possible,” he said.

  “I think that means he’s done it a lot,” said Eric, still laughing. “But she broke up with him.”

  Danny was thinking of how the beastmages would react if anybody in the Family did such a thing to one of the animals. “Animals are—they’re looked after, they—if one of us did something like that, Grandpa Gyish would have him killed. Great-uncle Zog would do it himself.”

  They laughed right through what he was saying. But when he was done, they stopped laughing and just stared at him.

  “Really?” asked Lana softly. “Your own family would…?”

  “And then they’d bury him in the family graveyard on Hammernip Hill,” said Danny.

  “That’s just … sick,” said Lana.

  “It’s a crime,” said Ced. “It’s abuse. Worse than abuse, it’s murder.”

  “Calm down,” said Eric. “He didn’t say they’ve ever done it, he said they would do it if somebody started humping the sheep. Come on, this has all gotten so totally out of hand. I didn’t bring him here to be sexually molested. He’s so underage that you could find yourself with a sex-crimes rap.”

  “I wasn’t going to do it,” said Lana.

  “You were already doing it,” Ced corrected her. “You were way past going-to or not-going-to.”

  “Can we please just go somewhere else, Eric?” asked Danny. It wasn’t because he feared further approaches from Lana. It was because he was now completely ashamed of the way they all regarded him—as a joke instead of a person. And also very worried about how much he had said about the Family. He had even told them Zog’s and Gyish’s names. Why didn’t he just give them a printout of Google Maps directions to the compound while he was at it? All he wanted now was to get away.

  “Lighten up,” said Eric. “Come on, if you didn’t like it on some level, you would have just … left, wouldn’t you?”

  Danny didn’t know what was worse—that Eric was once again talking about Danny’s gatemagic in front of these two strange people, or that Eric was kind of right. Why hadn’t he just made a gate and gone through it? Of course, with their bodies in contact, Danny might have taken Lana with him right through the gate. That would have gotten her to stop.

  But that was not why he hadn’t made a gate and left. It just hadn’t crossed his mind. He didn’t have it down as a reflex yet. If she’d been stabbing him with a knife or slashing him with a razor, he still would have forgotten about his ability to gate himself away, probably. Was there ever anybody as stupid as Danny?

  What had he even done since he found out he had this power? Run away from home, which he kind of had no choice about, after the Greek girl as much as caught him red-handed. But everything since then—he’d stolen, he’d begged, and he was going to break into people’s houses now and steal their stuff. And he’d also blab
bed. And been caught—Eric had seen him going and then seen him come back. It was a miracle the Family hadn’t caught up with him already.

  “Can I trust you to let him sleep here tonight without having some demon attack him in his bed?” Eric asked Lana.

  “I’d worry more about Ced than me,” said Lana. “Ced’s gay, you know. That’s the only reason I married him.”

  Ced rolled his eyes. “This is how she punishes me for helping you pull her off the kid.”

  “Come on, Eric,” said Danny. “Let’s get out of here and find something to eat.” Not that Danny was hungry—he just hoped he could get Eric alone somewhere and then refuse to come back to this place, ever.

  “Stone keeps the fridge completely stocked,” said Lana. “Frozen pies and dinners. Ice cream. Juice—but nothing with preservatives or MSG or high-fructose corn syrup. Also lots of fruits and vegetables. Cucumbers are my favorites.”

  “Lana,” Ced warned her.

  “Well, they are. I like to eat them whole. Bite down on them and hear the crunch.” She turned to Danny. “Did you know that vegetables scream when you eat them raw? It’s a little-known fact, because it’s so hard to hear, but scientists have picked up the screaming on very sensitive instruments and it’s true. But I don’t care. I think their sappy little bodies deserve to suffer.”

  “Is she off her meds?” asked Eric.

  “She doesn’t take meds,” said Ced.

  “Obviously,” said Eric. “But is she supposed to?”

  “She’s just trying to be colorful and free-spirited. Somewhere between Madonna and Mae West and Britney Spears.”

  Danny had read the names “Madonna” and “Britney Spears” on the internet and knew they were singers. Mae West was a name that meant nothing to him.

  “I’m above and beyond any of those bitches,” said Lana as she flipped off her husband—really, her husband?—and sashayed out of the room again. As she walked away, the athletic shorts, which were too big for her, slid down her legs. She stepped out of them and kicked them back into the room as she left. This time there was no crying from the kitchen; they heard her storm on up the stairs.

  “See what I have to live with?” asked Ced.

  “Actually, except for the child-molesting, what I saw looked pretty tolerable,” said Eric.

  “I’m not gay, you know,” Ced assured them.

  “Until this moment I didn’t think you were,” said Eric. “But the fact that you felt a need to say it—”

  “Go to the kitchen and get something to eat,” Ced told them. “By the time you get back I’ll have her calmed down and you’ll see that she’s actually a sweet and funny girl. She just has trust issues with men. Her mother had a lot of boyfriends and if they paid extra, she threw in Lana as a bonus.”

  “Oh,” said Eric.

  Danny, for his part, wasn’t quite sure what Ced meant. Or rather, he was, but he couldn’t believe such a thing could be true. Then again, if someone had told him about a girl acting the way Lana had just acted, Danny wouldn’t have believed it, either. His girl cousins were starting to seem normal now. When they knocked him to the floor it was always to pummel him or rub something in his face. It had never made him feel the way Lana had.

  “Why would having ‘trust issues’ make her … like that?” asked Danny.

  “Well, it gives her control, see?” said Ced. “She had you completely under her power, didn’t she?”

  “She pushed me down onto the floor,” said Danny. “And she took me by surprise.”

  “Took you by surprise?” asked Eric. “Or by something else?”

  Eric and Ced were both laughing silently, presumably to keep Lana from hearing them.

  “Is there somewhere I can go in this house to get away from you both?” asked Danny.

  “Why not just disappear?” asked Ced, and then he and Eric laughed all the harder. Danny knew that Ced was laughing because he thought it was a joke, and that Eric was laughing because Ced thought it was a joke, and it wasn’t, which was an even better joke. Danny didn’t feel like laughing at all. In fact, he felt like disappearing and never seeing Eric again. Only then he would be back to begging and trying to find someplace to sleep in a strange city after dark.

  “I’m tired,” said Danny. “We’re not going to do anything tonight anyway, and I want to sleep. Without jerks like you laughing at me.”

  Which triggered another burst of barely-contained laughter.

  Danny walked out of the room and went up the stairs. He tried all the unlocked doors on every floor, hoping to find a bedroom that looked completely tidy and unslept-in, but there was no such room. Finally, in the attic, he ducked into a small storage room or large closet lined with boxes and racks of clothes. He took some of the clothes off the wheeled storage racks and spread them on the floor to make a bed, with a few more to cover him. Then he turned off the light, closed the door, and felt his way to the makeshift bed in the dark.

  It took him a while to go to sleep, because he kept thinking of Lana, and then how Eric and Ced laughed at him, and then about Lana again, and then about home, which he now missed so badly that it would almost be worth getting killed just to go back. Finally, half-crying from homesickness and half-wishing Lana had stuck with molesting him just a little longer, he fell asleep.

  He woke up in total darkness but it could have been morning for all he knew. There were no windows in the attic closet, so no kind of light from the street made it inside. He needed to pee. He had gone to bed without stopping in any of the bathrooms he had passed on the way up three flights of stairs. Now he was going to have to pay for that by creeping through a dark house.

  Well, no, he didn’t have to do that. He had seen the bathrooms, he could just make a gate to one of them and … no, what if somebody was in one and suddenly there was this thirteen-year-old boy? Then he remembered that the bathroom at the landing between the second and third stories had been kind of badly retrofitted into the landing and there was an alcove right near the door.

  He had no more than thought of it before he had made the gate and gone through it. There was light here, though not much. The bathroom door was open. There was not a sound nearby, though there was some laughter and talking two floors down. Danny padded into the bathroom, closed the door, turned on the light, and did his business. He thought of using one of the toothbrushes—he had a nasty taste in his mouth—but settled for cupping water in his hand and swishing it around in his mouth. He flushed, washed his hands, dried them, and then put his hand on the door to leave. Only now he could hear that people were coming up the stairs. Maybe they were still far enough down the stairs that he could get to the gate and be gone before they got to this floor. And maybe not.

  He unlocked the door and turned off the light, but left the door closed while he made a new gate and stepped through it.

  He was in the attic room, right by his makeshift bed, which he could see was just as he had left it. He lay down and snuggled into it and rearranged the clothes on top of it.

  He was almost asleep when he realized: When he left the attic closet, he hadn’t been able to see anything. Now he could see.

  Had his eyes gotten used to the darkness? No, that was stupid—when he first woke up, his eyes were totally used to the dark, but when he came back he was coming straight from a bathroom where a bright light had been on until a moment before he made the gate.

  Danny opened his eyes. The door between the closet and the open part of the attic was open. It had been closed when he left. Who could have been up here?

  He made a guess. “Mr. Stone?” he said, very softly.

  “Don’t worry,” said an even softer whispery voice. “Your secret is safer with me than it is with that idiot who brought you here.”

  Danny could see the shape of a man get out of a chair not far from the door.

  “Sleep well,” said the man when he was silhouetted in the doorway. Then the door closed behind him.

  On the one hand, it was cool that
Stone could see Danny materialize in the attic closet and not even freak out.

  On the other hand, did that mean that he knew what he was seeing? That he was from one of the Families? Or maybe one of Thor’s observers? And what did he mean that Danny’s secret was safer than it was with Eric? Safer didn’t necessarily mean safe.

  I really am the stupidest person alive, thought Danny. So stupid that I probably won’t remain alive much longer.

  So stupid that when I just realized that I’d probably get killed, my only thought was to wish Lana would come up here and hump my brains out before I die. I’m thirteen and I’m already completely evil and have no judgment. It will be darwinian justice if I die without ever having a chance to reproduce. An improvement of the gene pool by removing my genes from it.

  Wouldn’t that be ironic if I ran away from the Family because they were going to put me in Hammernip Hill, only to get myself killed here, saving them the trouble? Because that’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to burgle somebody’s house and they’re going to blast me with a shotgun. I don’t think I’m quick enough to make a gate and get through it between the squeezing of the shotgun trigger and the arrival of the buckshot at my body.

  His mind was in such a whirl that he was sure he’d never get back to sleep. And then it was morning, and he could smell coffee all the way up to the top of the house, and the door to his closet was open, letting in the light, and he actually felt kind of good for having slept so long, and also felt nowhere near as stupid as he had felt last night.

  Which just proved he was so dumb that he couldn’t even remember the lessons he had learned from his previous mistakes.

  Eric was sitting bent over at the kitchen table, his head resting on his folded arms, an empty coffee cup beside him. Somebody had put some cut flowers down the neck of his shirt, so he was basically functioning as a vase. Danny smiled to see it.

  “I’m glad you’re feeling a bit cheerier today.”

  A man of about fifty, slender and average in height, but with a rather distinctive salt-and-pepper beard, was standing near the fridge, drinking a tall glass of some hideous-looking dark-green concoction. Just as in the attic closet the night before, Danny hadn’t been aware of him till he spoke.