The Mage - Bit 1

The teenager in the Mazda's passenger seat kept her arms tightly folded and the headphones of her Walkman clamped down immovably over her ears. Her mother should have known better, really. You can't force a fifteen-year-old to move away from all of her friends and expect her to be happy about it.

Somehow, though, that seemed to be exactly what her mother was expecting. She chattered away at the unresponsive girl. “And we'll be able to go hang out on the Riverwalk,” she was saying, as though the San Antonio Riverwalk was the be-all, end-all reason for moving anywhere. “And we'll be so much closer to your Aunt Cecilia, and there's the Alamo, and the culture is just so unique... Kim, are you listening?”

Kim was not listening. She was rolling her thumb across the Walkman's volume knob so she wouldn't have to listen.

They followed the big moving truck around Loop 1604 and off into the wilds of San Antonio. It was virtually frontier land, Kim thought. It was tiny for something called a “city”. It would never hold a candle to Houston.

The truck snaked through a tangle of residential streets, beneath a tangle of dark, old live oaks. The ground was thick with their powdery, yellow-brown pollen. It lay on sidewalks and rooftops and completely coated any car that had been sitting still too long. It coated the square, gray house that waited where they pulled up, and the unkempt lantanas by the door. It was a ridiculously ugly house, and Kim was pretty sure that opinion had nothing to do with her desire to live somewhere else. It was legitimately awful. Other than small, regular windows, its face was completely featureless. It looked like a prison. Maybe that opinion wasn't entirely unbiased.

Two big men and a bent-over old one slid out of the cab of the truck and began to unload, with the two muscly ones lifting and carrying and the old one directing. Kim found the room that was meant to be hers and stayed out of the way by sitting on the floor of the closet with her music and a book. It wasn't even a good book, but it was the only one that had escaped the packing boxes. It was also a library book, and the odds were that Kim was never going to have a chance to return it, now. She had never not returned a library book, before. One more small misery to add to the growing list.

When the men were gone, Kim and her mother unpacked a few boxes, just until they found a pot and two bowls with which to serve their improvised dinner of macaroni and lunch meat.

Two towels and a rolled-up sweatshirt served for blankets and pillows until the bedding could be found.

Some neighbors arrived the next day. One elderly couple brought a blueberry cobbler as a welcome-to-the-neighborhood present. They exchanged phone numbers with Kim's mom and obtained a detailed description of the family car, including license plate number, so that they could be on guard against trespassers. A young couple brought a bowl of black-eyed peas and a green bean casserole. They repeated the ritual. Lasagna arrived later in the day, borne by a middle-aged couple that seemed to fall almost exactly between the old and the young. Kim was bright and cheerful until everyone was gone, because she didn't want anyone to think her a morose teenager, even if she actually was one.

When the unpacking was finished, Kim's mom went to work, and Kim stayed behind with piles and piles of books. She saw to her own homeschooling, which wasn't exactly legal, but what the authorities didn't know wouldn't hurt them. It was only for the end of the school year, anyway. She'd be back in high school come fall.

Besides, a young wizard's education is a uniquely personal affair.

Math and science and history had their places on her shelves, but memorizing facts and formulas was easy for Kim. Magic was a lot more time consuming. The conventional wisdom was that only so much of it could be taught, and the rest had to be discovered in order to stick, and so Kim huddled in her room with a bag of chips and discovered.

The conventional wisdom, in Kim's opinion, was crap. Her mom would have absolutely turned inside out if anyone had suggested teaching a teenager to drive by sticking her behind the wheel of a car and telling her to have at it, and if there was one thing that had been drilled into her head since birth, it was that there was absolutely nothing more dangerous than magic. It was like teaching a teenager to drive by sticking her in the cockpit of the Space Shuttle. Her cousins all got more guidance than she did, she was certain. But then, none of her cousins had mothers all set and lined up to take over North America's most powerful Circle as soon as the patriarch decided he'd had enough.

Her cousins all had dads, too.

They had been in San Antonio about two weeks when the next-door neighbor got back to town. Kim was helping unload groceries from the trunk when a dark green Lincoln Continental coasted up into the next driveway. Its driver climbed out and ducked into the back seat to retrieve a battered brown suitcase. Then he straightened, shooting upward like a stalk of bamboo, tall and thin and wiry.

Kim gaped. He had to be six and a half feet tall, with his brown fedora pushing him toward seven. The afternoon light fragmented against the sharp angles of his narrow face, almost startlingly white beneath dark hair majestically winged with gray. Piercing, frost-pale eyes regarded her and her scrutiny with mild affront from behind wire-rimmed spectacles. A muscle twitched in his jaw, like a failed attempt at a smile.

He was spectacular. Spectacularly frightening. Sort of like her grandfather, Kim reflected.

“Good afternoon,” he said crisply, raising incredibly long, white fingertips to the brim of his hat. “Ma'am, Miss.”

English, Kim thought, or something like it. The 'r' was missing from 'afternoon', and 'ma'am' lengthened into 'maahm'.

“Afternoon,” said Kim's mom. Her fingers dug painfully into Kim's upper arm and squeezed, pushing her toward the house.

Kim stumbled a step away and stopped. Her mother nudged her again, and she pushed back in irritation.

“Hi,” Kim said brightly. “I'm Kim, and this is my mom, Cindy. We just moved in while you were away.”

“Cynthia Reed,” her mom clarified. She gave Kim another discreet prod.

The man nodded, staring hard at Cynthia. “Daniel Leland,” he replied. “It's a pleasure.” His sharp gaze traveled to Kim. “I think your mother wants you to go inside, Miss. It is usually best to do as your mother wants.”

Kim felt Cynthia stiffen beside her.

Daniel Leland's thin lips twitched into an expression a little too sardonic to be called a smile. He locked his car and strode up the sidewalk to his front door, disappearing inside.

Cynthia seized the last remaining grocery bags, shut the trunk, herded her daughter inside, and locked the door.

“Holy beans, Mom,” Kim griped. “What the heck was that? I'm supposed to be polite, but you get to be a complete jerk to that man?”

Cynthia pressed her flat palm to the door and whispered a single word. Kim could feel the power that surged through the house's walls, its windows, its roof, down into the foundation and the surrounding soil. It felt like caulk, something that was meant to stop up holes.

“That's not a man,” Cynthia muttered. “Our neighbor is a vampire.”

The vampire, Kim found out by listening to her mother's furious phone calls. He had a reputation. There was one vampire in San Antonio, Texas, and his name was Daniel Leland. Skeeters were almost universally territorial, but this one took the cake. Other bloodsuckers dumb enough to pass through his turf rarely made it out the other side. Whereas most vampires belonged to bureaucratic organizations known as Houses, this one submitted to no authority. The descriptors that came up were things like 'wild card' and 'loose cannon'. They had sent agents to kill him, before. Tony and Edith, the undead overlords of North America, had come in person to destroy him, but he disappeared into thin air and reappeared when the coast was clear, and it had only taken them a few tries before they decided that one city wasn't worth so much trouble, and they let him have it.

Kim was not allowed to go outside by herself anymore. She was provided with books that cautioned her strongly not to give anyone a spoken invitation into her house, not to look anyone directly in the eye, and to avoid listening to anyone speak, if at all possible. Daylight was no guarantee of safety, and that stupid movie myth was responsible for any number of deaths. Stranger danger acquired a whole new meaning when the stranger in question could hypnotize you with a glance and a soft word.

She stayed in her room with her books and her fat gray cat, Bud, but she wasn't really sure that the panic was warranted. Just because the guy was a bogeyman to other skeeters didn't mean he had anything against wizards. In fact, a vampire that kept other vampires away sounded like a good thing to have around. Sort of like a watchdog. And he had to know that chewing on wizards was illegal. If he hurt her or her mother, a hundred of their sorcerous family members would descend from every corner of the continent and set him on fire. Her books told her that a vampire's highest priority was self-preservation, so it made sense that he wouldn't do anything that was sure to get him executed.

Not that she wanted to invite him over for a movie night, or anything. But the ability to go outside again would have been nice.

As for Daniel Leland, Kim was pretty sure he had no idea what kind of chaos he had caused in the house next door. With nothing more interesting to do than spy on him, she saw him leave his house every morning around seven o'clock and get home every evening around six. He rarely looked in her direction, but on the few occasions his gaze did pass across her bedroom window, she didn't see any interest there at all. He looked vaguely annoyed whenever he saw Cynthia, but he didn't ever show the demonic, malice-filled eyes one might expect from a creature of death. He didn't seem afraid of the wizards next door. He didn't seem to loathe them. He didn't seem to be plotting their gory demise. He was going about his business completely unaware that the fact of his existence had trapped a fifteen-year-old girl in a prison of boredom. In fact, she realized, it was entirely possible that he didn't even know he had wizards next door. If that was the case, her mom's behavior probably looked pretty darn weird, not to mention pretty darn rude.

She brought up her observations over dinner one evening, and her mother's lips thinned dangerously.

“He may not be looking for an opportunity,” Cynthia said, “but that doesn't mean he wouldn't take one if it presented itself.”

Kim poked her cauliflower with one tine of her fork. “Why don't we just move again?”

Cynthia scowled. “No Reed will be driven out of her home by some blighted leech,” she spat.

“What about stuck miserably inside her home?” Kim tried.

Cynthia brandished her fork. “Don't you give me that lip, young lady. You do not get to complain that I won't let you put yourself in danger.”

“What if the house catches fire?”

“Eat your dinner, Kimberly Michelle.”

It was specieism, pure and simple, Kim decided. If Cynthia had actually been afraid for their lives, they would have moved, or at the very least, she would have stopped leaving Kim at home alone. The fact that a vampire couldn't cross a threshold uninvited didn't prevent him from blocking the doors and setting fire to the house, or from shooting them through the living room window. If he wanted to hurt them, there were any number of non-vampirey things he could try. And he continued to go about his business, pretty much just ignoring them and certainly not making any attempts on their lives.

Creeping from room to room, peering out windows and comparing her observations to her books, Kim felt like she should be delivering some kind of running commentary in a British accent.

“The mature North American nosferatu patrols the borders of his territory, ever wary of rivals.”

He paused beside his mailbox and looked up with a frown, and Kim ducked down out of fear that, somehow, he had heard her. Their hearing couldn't possibly be that sharp, could it? But he turned away and raised a hand in greeting to the very, very old woman across the street. Mrs. Meers, Kim thought. Or maybe Meyers. Anyway, the woman smiled right back and pushed her walker down the sidewalk to strike up a conversation. The vampire met her halfway so she wouldn’t have to negotiate the street and bent low to speak into her ear. Kim could see the exaggerated movement of his mouth as he over-enunciated to cut through senile deafness. Mrs. Meers dug through the basket on the front of her walker and handed him a plastic bag full of leathery, dark orange strips of something Kim couldn’t identify. Dried fruit, maybe, though Kim wasn’t sure what kind of fruit dried to that color. Papaya, she decided. The old lady gave the vampire a plastic baggie full of dried papaya. Okay, then.

They kept talking a few minutes longer before saying their goodbyes and turning back to their own homes. Kim lost sight of him and moved away from the window, finally bored enough to start thinking about picking up a school book. She didn’t have to worry about pop quizzes, or anything, but it would mightily suck to start school next year and, somehow, find that she had fallen behind. Extremely unlikely, but mightily sucky, all the same.

She had just stuck a pan of Jiffy Pop onto the stove and scrounged up a can of ginger ale when the doorbell rang. She froze. The walls around her shivered… But no, that was just her spine. But it was definitely the bricks that broke out in goosebumps… or was it her skin? She shook herself and backed up against the counter, taking a moment to get a grip. She felt tight, like she was being squeezed, or like she was doing the squeezing, constricting so the infection couldn’t get in…

“Ugh!” she groaned, pressing the heels of her hands hard against her temples. All of her was cold and clammy, like the beginnings of a fever. “Holy beans!”

She knew what it had to be, of course, but that didn’t make it any less strange. Her mother had done something to the house, laid some kind of protection over it, a warning system, and in Cynthia’s absence, the spell did the next best thing and warned Kim, instead. There was danger outside.

She was pretty sure she knew what kind of danger, too, and it occurred to her that having a warning system that made you feel the need to puke was sort of counterproductive. Maybe that sort of thing worked better for the person who had actually created it.

She took a few deep breaths until it no longer felt like her stomach was trying to climb up her throat and crept to the front door to peek out the peephole.

But all she could see was a shoulder.

Said shoulder was very high up, and despite the peephole’s distortion, she might have said it was thin, so she was reasonably certain that, if she opened the door, it would be Daniel Leland on the other side. She wasn’t certain, though.

If it was, she wasn’t too worried. A vampire couldn’t come in unless invited, and as long as she stayed on one side of the threshold and he stayed on the other, he couldn’t touch her. She didn’t think he would, anyway, not in broad daylight when any one of the neighbors might look out a window at an inopportune time. It wouldn’t have been logical.

If it wasn’t, though, opening the door might be a mistake. Vampires were monsters, and monsters followed certain rules. Creepers of the human variety typically did not.

But the shoulder wasn’t going away, and she had already stood there waffling long enough that most people would have given up and left. The shoulder’s owner wasn’t giving up. Possibly because he knew she was there, because he was someone who could hear almost-silent footsteps and almost-silent breaths through a closed door.

She slid back the chain, unlocked the door, and opened it a fraction of an inch, pressing her eye to the crack. It was the neighbor, all right, staring her with suppressed distaste. She opened the door a little further.

In one hand, he held a rolled-up newspaper. In the other, he grasped a fistful of Bud the Cat. Bud dangled morosely by his scruff, tail flicking back and forth. There was some kind of foul, viscous, black fluid on his paws and around his muzzle, and more of the same in dark streaks across the backs of Daniel Leland’s hands and along the left side of his jaw. There were also loose loops of thread all up the left sleeve of his blazer, and Kim had a sinking feeling that she could piece together the chain of events perfectly.

“Your animal,” he said in a slow, deliberately calm voice, “was in the process of leaving a present on my porch.” He dropped the newspaper. A few cat turds rolled out. “When I attempted to remove it, it attacked me.”

“I am so sorry,” Kim hurried to assure him. “Are you okay?”

But he cut her off. “If I find that thing on my property again, I’ll kill it.”

He dropped Bud, as well, and the cat rocketed past Kim’s ankles and disappeared into the house. Lost and gone forever, Kim suspected. At least until dinner. But Bud wasn’t an attack cat. He was too lazy to catch a snail and too cowardly to go after anything even as big as a bird, and the thought that he might have attacked a six-and-a-half foot man was ridiculous.

The popcorn started popping on the stove, making her jump.

Daniel Leland stared at her coldly. Waiting for something.

“Understood,” she said finally, and he nodded and turned to go. Not the shortest way, across the grass, she noted, but down the sidewalk.

“Rat bastard,” she muttered under her breath. There was no way he could have failed to hear, but he didn’t respond. What kind of jerk couldn’t accept the fact that animals poop, and not always where you want them to?

And then she did something very, very, very stupid. It only took an instant, the briefest moment of not-thinking, for her to lose control of her temper, squeeze her eyes shut, and do her damnedest to hex the rotten leech’s hair off. A charge of magic built up in her chest, wriggling around without form or order, not like the fine, precise work her mother could do, and she sent it shooting invisibly off across the yard to splash against the man’s back. She knew it was a bad idea the moment it happened, but it would have taken a much more experienced wizard than Kim Reed to call magic back once it was let go, even though she tried.

But to her surprise, it just beaded up and rolled off him, like water off plastic. No incipient baldness.

It didn’t affect him, but the man stopped dead all the same and turned slowly to face her with ice in his stare. “What did you just do?”