The Gate Thief

21

Danny knew that his parents expected him to come back to the compound after everyone got back from their instantaneous trip to Westil. There was a war about to start, using magery with a scope and intensity that had not been seen in Mittlegard since the seventh century.

But Danny had no intention of taking part in the war-not the way they would expect him to. They would hold councils and plan strategies. They would be practicing to see what they could do with their newly enhanced magery.

Danny also knew that he couldn’t just go back to high school and sit it out. He would have to be involved in this war, like it or not.

But war or no war, he was not going to drop out of high school.

He had not slept in thirty-four hours when he came back to Parry McCluer just as school was letting out. Nobody noticed him, in their rush to get to the buses or the parking lot or just plain out.

That is, they noticed him enough to not bump into him, but few of them realized, as they passed him in the halls, that he had been absent all day. Whatever their normal response would be to seeing this normal kid on a normal day, they did. A wave, a nod, nothing.

He didn’t see any of his friends. Had they all ditched? Had something happened to them?

“Danny,” said a girl. Someone touched his back.

Danny turned. It was Nicki Lieder.

“Dad was so worried when you didn’t come to practice this morning and then you weren’t at school and nobody answered your phone.”

“Sorry,” said Danny. “Family emergency.”

“I was sure it was something like that.” Her hand was resting on his waist. He almost hadn’t noticed it, the move had been so subtle. But it was a girlfriend thing, he knew that-a possessive gesture that communicated to anybody passing by, “He’s mine, I have the right to do this.”

He didn’t want to hurt her feelings by removing her hand. So he turned partly away, then back again; it broke the contact. “I should have called,” he said.

“I understand completely. So will Dad. He’s so gruff, people don’t realize that he’s really very concerned for all his athletes.”

Yeah, and he’s a complete asshole to anybody who isn’t one of “his athletes.” But Danny didn’t say it.

The hand was back, except that because he wasn’t facing her, she was touching his waist right at the top of the zipper, her thumb hooked onto the waistband. It was a surprisingly intimate place to touch him. Maybe if he didn’t wear his jeans so low-but he had always worn hand-me-downs that were a little small on him, or way too big. The former had to ride low so there’d be room in the crotch; the latter rode low because they were on the verge of falling off. Now that was where pants felt comfortable to him. But it also put her hand very low on the front of his body and for a long moment that’s all he could think about.

And in the silence between them, he knew that’s exactly what she intended.

Innocent little Nicki wasn’t all that innocent. Whatever it was that had led her to kiss him that time, it was still there. She hadn’t given up. She was still offering.

Or was she demanding?

This didn’t seem like the same girl he had talked to that day in the Lieders’ kitchen, when he had healed her and changed her life. By not letting it end, of course, but also by restoring her to strength and health, and by talking with her like a normal person instead of an invalid. Apparently he had made much too great an impression on an impressionable girl.

He could just remove the hand, but the lingering presence of her hand so near his groin was obvious enough now that he felt the need to say something aloud. “There’s only one woman who has the right to touch me there,” he said, “and it isn’t you.”

She didn’t remove the hand. What girl wouldn’t remove her hand when the guy said something like that?

Instead she answered, “Who is it, then?”

“My wife,” he said.

“But you’re not married.”

Now, at last, he took her by the wrist. He couldn’t understand why he felt so reluctant to move her hand away. Or why, in the moment that he took her wrist, what he really wanted to do, what he almost did, was move her hand lower, to a place that was already eager to welcome her touch.

But he didn’t do it. He pushed her hand away, more roughly than he originally meant to, because it was so hard to do it at all. “I’m not married,” he said. “That’s the point.” And then he walked away. Which wasn’t all that easy. He needed to reach a hand inside his crotch to readjust himself, and couldn’t really do that in a crowded corridor.

Instead he ducked into an empty classroom and, not caring whether she followed him and found an empty room, gated himself to the spot on the hill where he and his friends regularly met.

And there they were.

“Well, hello,” said Laurette. “Where were you all day?”

“And what’s her name?” asked Sin.

“Whose name?” asked Xena.

Sin just rolled her eyes, looking at his bulging jeans, and laughed. Xena looked, too, and laughed.

Danny sat down at once. “You guys are twisted,” he said.

“Name,” said Sin. “Say who, or we’ll cut it off.”

“I was walking through the halls at school,” said Danny.

“Always a dangerous place,” said Hal, who clearly had no idea what they were talking about.

“When I ran into Nicki Lieder,” said Danny.

“Apparently very slowly,” said Sin.

“The coach’s daughter?” said Wheeler. “What about her?”

“She’s kind of a nothing person,” said Hal. “She never seems connected to anything.”

“She was at the point of death when she suddenly got better,” said Laurette. “Maybe it takes a while to rejoin the world.”

“She’s all for joining Danny, apparently,” said Sin.

He closed his eyes. “I didn’t sleep at all last night.” And, to forestall Sin’s inevitable lurid assumptions, he told them what had happened. And what it meant. War.

Everyone in the Families understood that Danny had made all the gates that anyone had used; everyone knew that if they offended him, Danny could gate anyone to anywhere.

That had always been true of any war that involved gatemages. “We’re like kickers in football,” Danny said to his friends. “We wear the uniform, but we’re not really part of the team. We play a completely different game.”

“Just beware of roughing the kicker,” said Hal.

“Do you even know what ‘roughing the kicker’ means?” asked Laurette.

“Just because I look like a goal post doesn’t mean I don’t understand the game,” said Hal.

Pat was the one who moved the discussion to a practical level. “How can you even think about high school when you know that the whole world is about to change?”

“I can’t,” said Danny. “But it’s the only thing I can think of to do. If I go to the Family, they’ll be all about how I can move the enemy mages all over the place, which I’m not going to do.”

“Why not?” asked Sin. “I mean, they’re your family.”

“I kind of thought you guys were my family,” said Danny. “You didn’t spend my whole childhood despising me and threatening to kill me if I couldn’t raise a clant.”

“The question isn’t whether you want to fight in a war,” said Wheeler. “It’s going to happen, and it’s going to involve you.”

“Why?” asked Xena. “Why does he have to get involved? Why can’t he just study for the SAT like everybody else?”

“First,” said Hal, “Danny doesn’t study for anything, ever.”

They all nodded their agreement.

“I study,” said Danny.

“Like, never,” said Laurette.

“I studied. When I was home schooled,” said Danny. “High school just hasn’t caught up to what I already learned.”

“Second,” said Hal.

“Thus proving that Hal can count all the way to two without losing his place,” said Sin.

“Second, and this is the actual point: When people start getting hurt, Danny’s going to get involved. Because he’s the only combat medical officer in the whole war.”

Danny remembered how carefully the family always avoided discussing why casualties had been so much higher in the wars since 632 A.D. Everyone’s powers were reduced, but there were no gatemages to heal people. Now there was Danny. And the North Family undoubtedly expected that Danny would use his healing gates only for the good-guy team.

“That’s why I don’t want to talk to my family about anything,” said Danny. “Because sooner or later they’re going to catch on that I intend to use gates to heal everybody.”

“On both sides,” said Pat, as if to make sure he really meant it.

“On all three sides,” said Danny. “Because whenever there’s a war among the gods, they end up using drowthers as surrogates. Mage-to-mage combat is rare and potentially destructive. So they’re going to get the Danae to come attack the Trojans.”

“‘Danae’ is what the Greeks in the Iliad called each other,” Wheeler explained to Xena.

“And where did you learn that?” asked Xena.

“From a role-playing game in fourth grade,” said Wheeler.

“I’m so tired I could die,” said Danny. “That’s one thing that passing through a gate doesn’t fix. I’m fit, I could run for miles right now and hardly feel it, but my brain needs to sleep. I think if I did run I’d fall asleep doing it.”

“What do you think these guys will do now that they’re, like, really powerful?” asked Wheeler.

“Is this going to be like NASCAR, Wheels?” asked Hal. “Are you going to pick your favorite Family and root for them in the wizard war finals?”

“My whole life, when I wanted a taste of something magical, I had to play a videogame or roll a bunch of dice in an RPG,” said Wheeler. “But Danny’s given us rides around the world. Or at least to places around here, but instantly. And that was cool, don’t get me wrong. But that’s, like, a transportation spell. Very convenient, but I want to see some really major combat spells.”

“There are no ‘spells,’” said Danny. “Just persuasion.”

“Yeah, well, I want to see a windmage persuade him a tornado,” said Wheeler. “And clants. I want to see a stonemage turn stone into a walking monster, like the Incredible Hulk.”

“A tornado’s a terrible thing no matter how it comes into existence,” said Danny. “And your stone clant isn’t going to care who it tramples.”

“I know that,” said Wheeler. “And I deplore it, abhor it, I roar it-”

“As you bore us,” said Hal.

“And we ignore you,” added Laurette.

“I didn’t make the magic come back into the world,” said Wheeler. “Can I help it if it’s exciting? All those extras in the movies who run screaming from Godzilla or wave like idiots when the aliens come to blow them up in Independence Day-sure, they get squished, they get barbecued, but they were there.”

“You’d buy tickets to anything,” said Sin.

“I would,” said Wheeler. “Once.”

Danny sighed. “I just wanted to go to high school.”

“Why?” said Laurette. “I mean, we’re glad you’re here, but why would anybody in his right mind choose to spend your days like this?”

“Sitting in the woods?” asked Pat.

“Down there in Parry McCluer,” said Laurette.

“Come on, Rette, you’ve got the system sussed,” said Xena. “You’ve got the teachers and the principal eating out of your hand, the office staff loves you, your grades are good, and you’ve got a great body. There is just no reason why you should be allowed to hate high school.”

“Because it’s not how I’d spend my days,” said Laurette. “If I had a choice.”

“But Danny does have a choice,” said Pat.

Danny was thinking that if Laurette came from one of the Families, her ability to make people from every group like her might be considered a sign of manmagery. Then Pat turned the conversation back to him, and he could barely remember what they’d been talking about. He was that sleepy.

“High school is boring,” said Danny, “and if anybody cared, you could finish the whole curriculum in a year. It’s mostly just a tool for keeping kids out of the work force and out of criminal activities for at least half the day. But I swear it looked like the coolest thing in the world when I was reading about it in young adult novels.”

“Young adult novels,” said Pat, “are no closer to reality than Wheeler’s videogames.”

Wheeler laughed. “Reality is so overrated. In between catastrophes it settles down to the most-boring-possible-explanation-for-everything. ‘That can’t happen,’ until it does. ‘Things don’t work that way,’ until they do.”

“Girls can never find a god to fall in love with,” said Xena, “until they do.”

“Girls find gods to fall in love with all the time,” said Pat. “Then they wake up pregnant and the god is gone. All that’s left is an asshole.”

Everybody laughed at that, even Danny, tired as he was.

“‘Who’s the father of your baby?’ ‘Oh, Daddy, it was a god,’” said Pat. “‘What does he look like?’ ‘Oh, Mother, he forbade me to turn on the light and see his face.’ Nobody ever wants to admit they fell for a lying moron. Every bastard ever conceived is the love child of a god.”

“Yeah, but there’s also been a lot of genuine drowther-boinking,” said Danny. “The Mithermages have a lot of descendants scattered through the human race. In fact, by now I’d say that every living human has a Westilian ancestor.”

“So why didn’t the Great Gate waken the mage in me?” asked Hal.

“Maybe it did,” said Danny. “It takes time to learn how to find your affinity and make things happen.”

Right then, a little dust devil formed in the middle of the group, stirring up a bit of dust. And then it was gone almost as soon as they noticed it.

“OK, who did that?” asked Danny.

Nobody said anything.

“We’re talking about finding your affinity,” said Danny, “and one of you shows the power of a windmage.”

The dust devil reappeared and then skittered over to spatter dust and leaves on Wheeler. He jumped up and brushed himself off. “Sneak attacks are against the rules,” he said, brushing himself off.

“You wanted to have a monster chase you,” said Hal.

“Seriously, who did that?” asked Danny.

Everybody acted innocent. They were all curious about it, looking at each other, but nobody fessed up.

“What’s the point of hiding who can do this?” said Danny. “That’s really good, that’s like what a second-year windmage learns to do. And dumping the stuff on Wheeler, if that’s who you were aiming at, that’s why I call it a second-year thing. Nobody can do that in their first year.”

Danny watched to see who showed pride when he said that. But nobody showed anything on their faces. Which is why Danny was reasonably sure that it was Pat. She was the only one who could keep her face a complete blank, when she wanted to.

But if she had some reason for not coming forward in front of the others, Danny would respect that.

“I know why you’re in high school, Danny,” said Sin. “It’s your secret identity.”

“Clark Kent at the Daily Planet,” said Laurette.

“Without the glasses,” said Sin.

“And you don’t even need a phone booth,” said Hal.

“He doesn’t wear a costume so he doesn’t need to change clothes,” said Laurette. “Or a bat cave to keep his car in. Or anything.”

“But it’s still his secret identity,” said Sin.

“‘By day, a mild-mannered high school track star,’” Laurette fake-quoted. “‘By night, Loki! Mercury! Thoth! Faster than a speeding bullet!’”

“Mightier than a thrown spitwad,” said Hal.

“Able to leap onto curbs in a single bound,” said Pat.

“And look inside the girls’ bathroom whenever he wants,” said Wheeler.

“Eeew, you could,” said Xena. “But why would you want to? It’s poo and pee, just like boys.”

“Not just like boys,” said Wheeler. “Most definitely not.”

“How did we get onto poop and peeping toms?” asked Pat.

“I don’t spy on people without a reason,” said Danny.

“Yeah, like you want to see whether they drop their dirty undies on the floor or put them in the hamper,” said Laurette.

Danny lay back and closed his eyes. “Wake me when it’s over.”

“It’s over,” said Pat. “Because we’re all growing up. Right now. I declare puberty to be finished.”

“I hope not,” said Wheeler. “I was really hoping for more body hair.”

All the girls but Pat said “eeeewwww” at once. Wheeler was delighted.

“I’m supposed to be at track practice but I’ve got to get home and sleep,” said Danny. “It’s getting cold and the sun is still up.”

“Supposed to be a storm coming through tonight,” said Xena.

“Not snow,” said Laurette.

“No, just rain,” said Xena. “To make little things grow.”

“Xena likes to make little things grow,” said Hal.

“As long as they’re attached to Danny North,” said Laurette.

Xena turned on Hal in fury. “Hal!” she growled.

Before she could say anything or throw something at him, Hal moved away. “Why are you going after me? It was Laurette who-”

“Girls can say things like that to each other,” explained Pat.

“I’ve got to go talk to my parents,” said Danny. “And I have to get Veevee to write out an excuse for my absence today.”

“You need to get a nap first,” said Pat.

“Do you think they’re going to do like Zog in Superman II and make the President kneel to them in the Oval Office?” asked Wheeler.

“If they feel like it,” said Danny. “If they even care.” And then Danny said, “They won’t make anybody kneel, but they’ll definitely want to get control of the army and navy and air force and all. Because we’re not immortal, and so we have to know where the weapons are so we don’t get blown up or beheaded while we’re trying to control a clant a hundred miles away. Especially because weapons got really powerful since the Gate Thief closed things down in 632. So you don’t necessarily get advance warning.”

“It really is going to be war,” said Hal.

“Yeah,” said Wheeler, grinning.

“Danny, take me home with you, just for a minute,” said Pat.

Several woos and wo-hos from the others.

“I need to talk with you,” said Pat, rolling her eyes.

“‘Please put your baby in me,’” said Hal in a falsetto.

“Let’s get out of here so they can gossip about us,” said Danny. He reached out a hand for Pat. She took it.

He gated to his living room and the moment she saw where they were she clung to him, her whole body pressed against his. Hungry. Frightened. “It really is war,” she said. “What you did with the Great Gate last night and this morning, taking all the mages in the world through it, because that disloyal bitch-”

She stopped herself. “No. If you’re not angry, I’m not going to get angry.”

“I’m angry,” said Danny. “I just can’t do anything about it, so why develop an ulcer?”

“People will die,” she said. “You could die. If somebody blows you up, who’ll put you through a gate to heal you?”

“It’s not likely, but it could happen,” said Danny. “I’m more worried about a completely different enemy, though. One who can take over people’s bodies and control them.”

Pat looked up at him, without letting go. “You’re talking about being possessed by the devil.”

“Who knew it was true?” asked Danny. “But it is. And I don’t even know if anyone would be able to tell if I was taken over.”

“I’d know,” said Pat.

“Would you?” asked Danny. “I’m worried that maybe I wouldn’t even know.”

“If somebody was inside you? Making you do stuff against your will?” Pat shook her head. “You’d know. And I’d know, because I’d test you. I’d ask you a question and if you didn’t know the answer, I’d know it wasn’t you.” She pulled on his head and neck to draw him down and kiss him. Then she licked the tip of his nose. “I’d ask what I did right after I kissed you.”

“What if he had access to all my memories?” said Danny. “What if he could answer all the questions?”

“I’d still know,” said Pat. She kissed him again, this time long and hungrily. Her hands moved across his back, gripped his buttocks.

He pulled away from her. “No,” he said.

“This isn’t a game for me,” said Pat. “Like for the others. I’m not playing ‘sleep with a god and tell your friends.’ I love you, Danny North. I’m not too young to know that. Girls married a lot younger than me. Juliet was thirteen.”

“That was fiction, and it didn’t end all that well,” said Danny.

“You’re going off to war. When you told us what you spent all night doing, I thought, what if something had gone wrong, what if Hermia had trapped him or tricked him and he simply never came back? And instead of crying when I thought that, my hands just instinctively went to my belly. My empty uterus. It’s an instinct, Danny. We want to be pregnant when our man goes off to war.”

“I’m not going to make any bastards,” said Danny. “Period, ever. You think your parents are ready to let you marry a high school kid with no job, who lives in a shanty like this?”

“I don’t care about marriage,” said Pat. “People don’t, they just don’t care about that.”

“The smart people do,” said Danny. “The people who want to raise a family, and not just get pregnant.”

She had her hands inside his waistband and was pushing downward on his pants. He thought of Lana the first time he met her in Stone’s house in DC. His body was responding the same way, only this time he wasn’t surprised and frightened. If anything, he wanted Pat more than she wanted him.

“I love you, too,” said Danny, “but I’m not one of those gods.” And, just as she got his pants down to his thighs, he gated her away, back to her own bedroom.

He wanted so badly to go through that gate after her.

Instead, he ate the gate so Hermia couldn’t use it to get into her house, just in case she decided to start going after his friends. And then, too tired to make a decision about pulling his pants back up or taking them off the rest of the way, he gated himself to his own bed and fell asleep exactly as he was.

He dreamed of her, though. He vaguely remembered dreaming of other things, forgotten things, strange things, he dreamed that she was on the bed beside him, pressing herself against him, naked, whispering to him. “I love you, Danny,” she whispered.

In the dream he held her, explored her body. He tried to kiss her but for some reason she evaded his kiss. He laughed and moved his hand up to her face and still she tried to turn her face away when he went to kiss her. He was ready to explode with desire for her. She didn’t want his kisses, she wanted his baby, and that’s all he wanted, was to give her that.

In the dream his body was poised over her. She was pulling his hips down. Then he kissed her before she could dodge.

It wasn’t Pat.

He opened his eyes.

It was Nicki Lieder, the coach’s daughter.

“I came to see you, the door was unlocked,” she whispered, “and here you were, so ready for me.”

It still felt like a dream. But it also felt completely real. Real, but with the cloudiness of a dream in his mind. Nicki Lieder. Not Pat at all. He didn’t love Nicki. But she was naked under him, and he knew how much she wanted him, and at this moment all he could think of was that he wanted her, too. Not her, but a woman, the woman here under him, the woman who had come to his bed. The woman in this extraordinary dream.

No, it’s not a dream, said something inside him. It’s not a dream, it’s someone who has the power to cloud your mind.

“You want me inside you,” said Nicki.

“Yes,” said Danny, even as something in his mind screamed at him, Listen to what she said, listen to what you just agreed to, it’s not you inside her, it’s someone asking to come into your body, and you said yes, you said yes, you fool.

And in the moment of ecstasy and release, he could feel it, this thing entering him at the groin and filling his whole body, taking control of his body. He tried to fight it, tried to move, but already he couldn’t, already it had him.

He could feel his body roll off the girl. He could see her lying there, gasping, looking confused. Looking relieved. And then weeping.

“That’s right, Nicki,” his own lips said, though he was not speaking, and only found out what they were going to say when they said it. “I’m gone now. You can have your body back, nicely healed by Danny North here. Maybe pregnant. Wouldn’t that be nice? Now be a good girl, get dressed, and go home.”

Danny’s body sat up and watched her as she gathered her clothing and put it on, still weeping softly.

“I enjoyed being inside you,” said Danny’s mouth. “You’re a sweet thing and you’ll find that this all becomes like a bad dream, and then like a good dream, and then you’ll miss me, you really will. They all do. The ones that live.”

And Danny was thinking: He was here for weeks. He found me weeks ago, when I came to Lieder’s house and healed his daughter. Was he already inside her then, or did he find her afterward, take control of her when she was clean of her cancer? Maybe Danny could have fought him off any other time, but now, asleep, exhausted, half in a dream, and then the Dragon asked him through Nicki’s mouth, asked him to let him come into Danny, and Danny said yes. But I didn’t realize what I was saying, I thought I was consenting to the sex, and it was sex in a dream, not real, nothing was real, it’s not …

Not fair.

Except this was war. Shaped like love, a moment ago, but it was the crucial battle in a war. The enemy had stolen a march on him, was suddenly in a place where he wasn’t supposed to be.

Now he has control of a gatemage.

But he doesn’t, thought Danny. Because I can still think these thoughts. I can still …

Danny tried to make a gate and pass himself through it, to see if he could shed this creature like a disease.

“Uh-uh-uh,” his own throat said, the glottal stops that said, No no no. “Let’s make a gate for her, to send your little girlfriend home.”

In that moment Danny learned several important things. The Dragon had no idea that Danny really had just gated his girlfriend home-the real one, the one that he hadn’t had sex with. The Dragon also had to use Danny’s mouth to talk to him-it couldn’t just put thoughts into his head. So it wasn’t completely in control, and didn’t even have complete access. He controlled movement and he controlled speech. But that was all a matter of muscles.

Except he could block Danny from creating the gate he wanted to create. Could he make Danny create one?

No, no, that’s not the question, not the question at all.

Inside Danny’s hearthoard, he now realized who had been warning him, screaming at him. Loki’s gates.

Loki knew. Loki had never been possessed, so his outself could not remember having been possessed by Set. That meant Loki was observing him from the outside. From another planet, however many lightyears away it was, Loki had realized what was happening, had seen past the fog in Danny’s mind, past the belief that it was an erotic dream, into the truth.

But what Loki’s gates did remember was being given. They knew how one Gatefather could give the obedience of his gates to another.

And so Danny tapped into their kinetic memory, and with their consent, Loki’s gates obeyed him and showed him how to give them back to Loki.

The act of giving back the gates didn’t move them or make them. Those would have been physical acts, apparently, and the Dragon who possessed him could have felt such an action, could have blocked it. But in all likelihood, the Dragon had never possessed a gatemage who gave a gate to another. It had no idea what was happening.

He felt his control over Loki’s gates slip away.

But now he knew how to do it.

So, again without moving or making his gates, leaving them wherever they already were, Danny gave all of his own gates, every one of them, to Loki.

And just like that, they were not under his control. He was still aware of them. They were still where they were supposed to be. But they weren’t his. They didn’t belong to Danny North.

Nicki was dressed now. Danny could feel it when the Dragon gave the command to make a gate to take her back to her home. He could sense that the Dragon knew how to do it, knew where both the mouth and the tail of the gate should be.

But no gate came rising out of the hearthoard at his command. No gate formed.

Danny felt a kind of blindness come over him. No, it was rage. Fear? It wasn’t an emotion of the body, it was a transformation of some kind within the Dragon itself, and then Danny’s own body responded to it. Blood flowed hard and hot, his face flushed.

“What’s wrong?” asked Nicki, sounding frightened.

Danny’s body rose from the bed and stood on the floor, pants dropping around the ankles, but definitely not aroused, not as it had been. No, it was filled with rage and terror and it screamed.

Nicki screamed back and then ran from the room, ran out of the house. Danny heard the screen door slam behind her.

“What have you done?” demanded the Dragon in Danny’s own voice, with Danny’s mouth and throat and lungs, his tongue and teeth.

I’ve done nothing, Danny said silently. I gave a gift to a friend.

“The gates are still there, I can feel them,” said the Dragon. It used Danny’s body to dance around the room, jump up and down, as if somehow this would jar something loose. “You’re a Gatefather, I took a Gatefather, why can’t I touch your gates!”

He ran to the kitchen, and Danny understood that his body was in search of a knife. It was the animal mind that sought for one-for the first time Danny could feel the distinction between animal intention and his own will, his own ka. The animal’s desire did not reach inside him and kindle any answering wish. The body wasn’t his to control now. But he was still inside it, still absolutely tied to it, feeling all its sensations.

The knife was in the hand.

It stabbed down, into Danny’s thigh. Again. Again.

The pain was excruciating. The Dragon felt it too; he groaned in agony.

“Make it better,” said his own voice. “Make a gate.”

But there was no gate that belonged to him.

Another stab. “You’ll bleed to death unless you heal this. Do you understand that?”

I do understand it, thought Danny. I understand that I’ll die. But what happens if I die with you inside me?

Nothing happens, thought Danny, despairing. Because Set isn’t tied to my body the way my ka is. When my body dies, I’m done, my ka moves away from here. But he will remain.

“I can keep it going after you bleed to death,” said Danny’s mouth. “Not terribly long, but long enough to get to somebody else. Someone you know.”

He was trying to call up a clear memory. Danny immediately thought of Hermia.

Hermia was the one. Let him find Hermia and take possession of her.

“I don’t want your enemies, I want your damn friends! I want to make you watch me kill them, slowly! Rape them and kill them! I’ll do it to everyone you love if you don’t let me use your gates! And then they’ll come for you and take you and execute you, and you’ll be dead, not me!”

It wasn’t even making sense. Was it crazy? I’ll let you bleed to death, I’ll keep your body going, and then they’ll kill you again? No, Set was confused. His rage was clouding his mind.

Because it was a human mind he was controlling.

The human brain, rather. Because Danny’s mind was still there, thinking his own thoughts. Hermia, he was thinking. Imagining her body in a way he never had before-with desire, with lust. Never mind that it was someone else’s body that he had felt all those desires for. The face he put into his memory, the name he thought of, they were Hermia’s.

One more time he stabbed. One more thrill of agony. But it didn’t hurt as much. No, it did hurt, every bit as much, perhaps even more. But Danny didn’t care as much.

I’m detaching. My ka is fleeing from the pain. From the threat of death. I can’t let that happen. I can’t let him drive me from my own body. I gave away my ba, my outself, all my unmade gates, but I can’t let him take away my body or I’m dead. Literally dead.

For a moment he had the idle thought: Then I’ll know. What happens to the ka after the body dies. Do I return to Duat, as the desert hermit said? Or do I go somewhere else, or just haunt the place I died? Or do I dissolve like smoke?

But he stifled his curiosity and forced himself to connect with the pain, to feel it with the greatest possible intensity. You won’t drive me out of my own body this way.

As if the Dragon could feel him dig his ka more deeply into his own body, the Dragon again gave a cry of frustration and rage. “Bastard!” he cried. “You’re no match for me! Give it up! No one ever withholds from me the thing I want!”

Obviously the statement was false, or it wouldn’t have needed saying.

But the pain in his thigh was a high price to pay for that small satisfaction. And Danny could feel the blood pumping out. This last time, Set had used Danny’s own hand to drive the knife deep enough to find the femoral artery.

I really am going to die.

They’ll rule it a suicide. Died by his own hand. Literally true, and yet utterly false.

In that moment he remembered that there were other gates. The captive gates. Not Loki’s and not Danny’s own.

Danny reached to make a gate and this time the Dragon let him, for now he felt for the first time the existence of the captive gates. Using Danny’s mouth, Set cried out with triumph as Danny formed a captive into a living gate, passed it over himself so it could heal him, and then … gave the gate to itself.

Just like that, the gate was gone.

But not before Danny himself was healed. No pain. No injury. No bleeding.

The other captive gates sensed what had happened, and the clamor began afresh, now with a new goal, a different goal. Give me to myself and set me free! cried every captive in his hearthoard.

“You bastard,” muttered the Dragon with Danny’s mouth.

It swung Danny’s body around and smashed his head into the corner of the kitchen counter with such force that Danny instantly lost consciousness.

He woke up hours later on the kitchen floor. Alone in the dark. His head throbbed.

He reached for another captive gate.

“No,” whispered his mouth.

What was he doing while I was unconscious? Was he unconscious, too? No, he isn’t as deeply tied into my body as I am. He was conscious and had nothing he could do but lie there feeling the agony. Or was it eased while I was asleep?

You won’t drive me out of my own head with pain, thought Danny. So if you refuse to let me use a gate to heal the body whose agony we both feel, then so be it. I can bear it. Or I can die. Whatever you choose. What you will not do is make a gate that lasts.

Finally Set relented and made a gate. Danny let him draw on one of the captives and then, the moment the gate had passed over Danny and he felt no more pain in his head, Danny gave the gate to itself and it was gone.

“What are you doing!” his own voice demanded. “I don’t know what you’re doing. How can the gate be gone?”

But my head feels so much better.

“Until you learn who is master in this house, I will make your life pure hell,” said Danny’s mouth.

I’m sure you can do that, thought Danny. What you can’t do is make gates that I don’t approve of. And when we run out of captive gates, then you’re done, because none of my gates belong to me anymore, and so you can’t use them.