“Maybe,” I said. “There’s no way to know for sure.”
“Weird,” she said. She passed the French fry to Mouse, who snapped it up. She picked up another fry, dipped it in mustard, and began to repeat what was obviously a well-rehearsed cycle. “If I do, will you teach me stuff? So no one gets hurt?”
“If you want me to,” I said.
She chewed her lip, looking intently at her fingers. “If … something happens to you, who is going to teach me?”
An invisible boxer socked me in the gut. “Nothing’s going to happen to me,” I said.
“It could,” Maggie said quietly. For those two words, her voice sounded older. Way too old for the little body it came from. “And maybe there wouldn’t be anyone. Maybe I’d be a warlock.”
I took a deep breath. She’d seen her foster family murdered. Horribly. And maybe she’d seen even worse. She knew what the world could be like sometimes. She’d probably seen worse than that kid in the black hoodie.
“Maybe,” I said.
“That could be me.” She nodded to herself several times and took a deep breath, as if getting ready to hold it. Then she looked up at me. “I can eat more French fries. Mouse will keep me company.”
“You sure?” I asked her. “It could … cut today kind of short.”
“If someone needs your help, you help them,” Maggie said simply. “Even when it’s really hard. Miss Molly told me that about you.”
Her eyes were searching, studying. I’ll be damned if the kid wasn’t assessing me warily, watching for my reaction. So young yet so cynical.
She must get it from her mother’s side.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling my face stretch into a smile. “Yeah. That’s right.”
I WENT BACK down the dark path, walking briskly. The thing about warlocks is that they really are damned dangerous. Without even knowing what they’re doing, they can turn their wills to the pursuit of black magic, and that has a degenerative, addictive effect on their psyches. Warlocks, caught in the grip of black magic, did the kinds of things that give coroners and psychologists nightmares. They don’t absolutely have to go completely off the rails, but most did. People in that frame of mind suddenly confronted by the White Council’s Wardens rarely chose to put up their hands and come quietly.
I remembered when the Wardens had come for me. Scary guys. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I’d have been just one more warlock slain while resisting arrest.
Maybe this kid was a dangerous monster. The sheer malice radiating from him was convincing enough.
Or maybe he was just a terrified kid.
I walked up to him quietly, my footsteps audible, cleared my throat, and said, “Hi.”
Hoodie turned to me, gave me half a glance, and snarled, “Get out of here.”
There was the force of magic in his voice, subtle power that tugged at my ear, made me want to lift my foot, pivot, and go the other way.
It wasn’t a very coherent compulsion. I waved it off with a defensive gesture of the fingers of my left hand. “Whoa, kid,” I said. “Save it for the tourists. You and I need to talk.”
That got his attention, pronto. His spine stiffened and he spun toward me on one heel, his shoulders tightening. He wasn’t tall, maybe five-six, and his shoulders were almost comically narrow, hunched up like that.
I sidled up and leaned a hip on the railing a few feet out of arm’s reach in front of him, crossing my arms. “When did it happen? Year ago? Year and a half?”
He had that wary poise of a wild animal, balanced and waiting to see which way would be the best to flee. His eyes were focused on the center of my chest. “Who are you?”
“Someone who had the same thing happen,” I said. “One day, things changed, and everything got weird. I thought I was going insane. So did my teachers.”
“You a cop?” the kid asked, his voice suddenly sharp.
“Kind of,” I said.
“I didn’t do nothin’,” he said.
I barked out a quick laugh. “Wow, are you not good at this. People who are innocent don’t have to walk around saying it.”
His face reddened and darkened at the same time. “You’d better be careful, asshole.”
“Or what?” I asked.
“Or something bad is going to happen to you.”
“Nah,” I said. “Won’t turn out like that.”
That ticked the kid off. His jaw clenched so hard that I thought he might crack some of his teeth. His fists clenched with audible popping sounds.
At the same time, the air grew thicker and tighter and more threatening, and there was a sudden rippling sensation against my skin, as if someone had abruptly torn a long strip out of the fabric of my blue jeans. Then there was a sound in the greenery, and my skin began to crawl on the back of my neck. I came on balance in an instant.
Remember those instincts I was talking about earlier? Mine were telling me that something dangerous had just come into the world.
The kid staggered suddenly and dropped to his knees, panting. Then his head came up, his eyes wide and everywhere. “Oh no,” he breathed. “Oh no, no, no, no.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I muttered, understanding what had happened.
The kid had a strong magical talent, and a gift for summoning. Magic is mostly in your head, and unfortunately for anyone who’s got to deal with us, human beings’ heads are murky, conflicted places. All kinds of things are going on in there, a lot of them under the surface, a lot of them not entirely in our own control.
Hoodie’s subconscious had gathered up all that anger and fear he’d been feeling and sent it spiking out of him like a kind of spiritual beacon; a beacon that had attracted the attention of something from the spiritual world—something that had just crossed into the shadows of the walkway.
The spirit world is the home of an unlimited variety of supernatural beings—but I was going to take a wild guess and assume that this one wasn’t a placid herbivore.
“Right here? In the park?” I demanded of the warlock in an aggrieved tone. “Hell’s bells, kid.”
Hoodie just stared at me with frightened, confused eyes. That spiritual dinner bell he’d just unconsciously rung had taken a lot out of him. “I didn’t mean to. I never mean to!” Then his eyes widened. “You have to get out of here. Run!”
“First lesson,” I said. I took a couple of steps back from the kid and peered around the thick greenery, relying more on my wizard’s senses than on sight or hearing. “Running away from your problems rarely gets them solved.”
“You don’t get it,” Hoodie babbled. “It’s coming. It’s coming for you.”
“You don’t get it, kid,” I responded. “I—”
I had a second’s warning, maybe a little more. It came through the greenery, staying in the heaviest shadow it could. It erupted from the dark and took Hoodie’s legs out from under him as it went by. I had the flickering impression of a wolverine’s squat, powerful legs; a head too wide to be anything from this world; a thrashing, scaled tail; and crocodilian teeth. It went through the kid and straight for me, bounding for my throat.
I was already moving as it came. I swept my arm up in a vertical line, fingers locked and rigid like claws as I channeled my will into them and barked, “Aparturum!”
My fingers peeled back reality as they swept up, tearing open the veil between the mortal world and the world of spirit. The berserk whatever-it-was from the Nevernever, the spirit world, let out an abrupt, abbreviated shriek of frustration as it hurtled directly into the opening, passing from the mortal world and back into the spirit realm again.
“Instaurabos!” I shouted, whipping my hand back down along the rend, this time inverting my will and sealing closed the opening before the vicious little thing could turn and leap back out again. I could feel the normality rushing back in to seal over the rend in the veil, and could faintly sense several thumping protestations from the hungry spirit creature as it found itself sealed away from the mortal world again.