The Golden Thread

  “Yes. I didn’t even know him then. It was because of Paavo that Joel and I met.”

  “Paavo,” Lennie said, nodding. “The street fiddler, only the fiddle was magical, and he was really a wizard from this Sorcery Hall, right? He needed you to help him with his magic because of your family talent, but what did Joel do?”

  “Poor Joel, he was dying for Paavo to take him as a violin student,” I said. “What Joel did was to get himself stuck in the subway as a prisoner of a monster we called the kraken.” I sighed. “No, that’s not fair. He tried to help when these three punks that were working with the kraken attacked us, up at Castle Lake. Joel kept the kraken from getting hold of the key that we needed. And then the kraken died, and Paavo died—”

  There was no way to go past that fast enough. My eyes got all hot and swimmy. I snuffled into my coat collar again until I got back in control, but it was very shaky control.

  Actually, I was feeling furious. What was the good of having beaten the kraken and then having outwitted Brightner the necromancer and his wife Ushah, only to end up being run ragged by some crazy teen-witch from another world?

  I added, “Then Joel went away to school, in up Boston. End of story.”

  “Not if Bosanka wants him in.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell Lennie that I had already tried to involve Joel, or at least let him know what was going on, and the jerk had hung up on me. The prognosis, as the doctors kept saying about Gran, was not good.

  Lennie reached under his jacket and scratched thoughtfully. One thing about him, he was always very casual about body things, which could be kind of embarrassing.

  “What is it?” I snapped. “Have you got fleas?”

  His eyebrows quirked in surprise. “Just an itch.”

  “Well, spare me, will you?” I said.

  “Sorry,” he said. He anchored both hands deep in his jacket pockets. “There’s more, right?” he said after a minute. “Without Joel. The part about that guy who pretended to be our school psychologist for a little while—”

  “Brightner, that pig!” God, how clearly all that came back to me now—the lush, juicy voice of the man, and his hound-dog smile!

  Lennie cleared his throat delicately. “He came on to your mother, you said.”

  I poked him in the knee with my foot. “Lennie, he was after her, and me, and my Gran. Control of the family talent was what he really wanted. I wouldn’t call that exactly flirting, you know?”

  He blushed. “Me, either. But you beat him, right?”

  “Me and my Gran,” I said. “We beat him.”

  “Well, we will beat this thing, too. Us. The Comet Committee.”

  “What?” I squawked.

  Some ducks in the puddles at the lake’s edge flapped their wings and moved further away, to a less explosive neighborhood. Also less dirty. Right around the wooden pavilion there was more litter and trash than anywhere else along the shoreline.

  I went on pretty hotly, “Lennie, were you there just now? Did you hear what Mimi said? Did you see what happened to Peter? And Joel thinks the Comet Committee is a load of crap anyway, so why should he help?”

  “He’s kind of snooty, isn’t he?” Lennie said, not meanly, but thoughtfully. “I mean, he’s not too good at fitting in with people he doesn’t know.”

  I frowned at the beat-up wooden floor of the gazebo. I didn’t like to hear Lennie criticizing Joel. What did Lennie really know about him or about magic, anyway? It was Joel who had been a prisoner of the kraken, not Lennie, and it was Joel who had this mysterious hand-malady that was driving him to drink, a little anyway, and cutting him off from me when I could really use his help.

  I said angrily, “I just said, I don’t even know if I can persuade Joel to have anything to do with this.”

  “Just don’t strain yourself,” Lennie said mildly, “that’s all I’m saying.”

  I sighed. “You’ve got a lot to learn about magic,” I said. “As you said yourself, Bosanka wants him in, and she’s calling the shots.”

  Lennie drew his eyebrows together into a dark bar over his eyes. He looked away from me, out at the gray ice of the lake. “I guess she is, isn’t she? It feels funny, taking orders from a girl.”

  I snorted. “I don’t like it any better than you do, but it has nothing to do with her being female. Bosanka the crazy alien just scares me to death.”

  “Want a Life Saver?” He held out a grubby roll of candies. I took the top one even though it was only grape flavor and had some pocket fuzz stuck to it. Lennie popped a green one into his mouth and put the roll away. “You know what scares me? That we did do something real that night on the roof, or Bosanka wouldn’t have noticed us.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “What I mean is, I guess you’re used to thinking of yourself as, you know, talented this way,” he said. “I’m not. It gives me the creeps. But I have to admit, I’d sort of been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Since New Year’s. I felt something connect up with us, hard, on the roof that night. I just couldn’t figure out what it might be. Now I know, and I wish I didn’t.”

  I thought back to the falling sensation, the brightness, the interruption like a fist smashing our sending—Bosanka, homing in on what she saw as “power.”

  “Hey,” I said, “do you think we all felt it—I mean, the comet or whatever it was we made, and then the shock when Bosanka glommed onto us like that? Mimi and Peter didn’t seem to believe that anything had really happened.”

  “Mimi’s naturally spaced most of the time,” he said. “And Peter—well, anything he can’t explain makes him angry, and we know where that got him. Yeah, I think we all felt it.” He paused. Then he said, “And I think Bosanka’s business is really with all of us, the whole committee, just like she says. So this isn’t only your family curse, Val. Other people are involved, with gifts of their own—the whole committee.”

  “Baloney,” I muttered. “Magic isn’t just another human gene, you know.”

  “I’m not saying we all have magic, Val. But what happened on New Year’s Eve—whatever energy we generated—happened because of what each of us felt, what each of us wished for. I’m sure of that.”

  I wasn’t, but I did want to believe that it hadn’t just been me, lobbing off a firework of my family talent all by myself, that had gotten all of us in the soup and Peter turned into a deer. So I didn’t say anything.

  “Listen,” Lennie said, stretching out his arms along the rail of the gazebo. “Why did you bring us together to talk to Bosanka today? You must have thought we had something to contribute to the situation, right? Or what did you think was going to happen?”

  “I thought,” I said, “that she’d take one look at the Comet Committee and realize that she had it all wrong, that we were just a bunch of high-school kids and there wasn’t a thing we could do for her. That’s what I thought would happen.”

  In other words, I had been hoping that the total unmagicalness of the rest of them would camouflage me and deflect Bosanka from my family talent. Now that I thought it through, I felt embarrassed: I’d been trying to use the rest of them. Not very admirable. Gran would not be impressed, that was for sure.

  “Come on. Val,” Lennie said, “come on! We’re all for real, just like Bosanka says. The Comet Committee works.” His eyes glowed with a wonder that would have been beautiful to see, except that what had caused it could also get us all killed, or worse (I didn’t know exactly what “worse” would be, but I knew it must be out there, lurking).

  “Lennie,” I said, “I hate to bring you down to grubby old reality, but what good is a committee that’s only half-together and a bunch of beginners at magic besides? And one of them’s in Boston, and another one’s a deer?”

  He considered this for a moment, scratching vaguely at his neck until he remembered not to and put his hand down again quickly.

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I’m just trying to point something out to you. I’m trying to point
out that you’re not alone in this. I think you’re used to being, like, the only kid on the block, the one and only sorcerer’s apprentice. This time it’s the sorcerer’s opponents. The sorcerer is Bosanka, and our side—our side is a team thing, or it’s nothing.”

  Reluctantly I thought about this while I wiggled my toes inside my shoes to keep my circulation going.

  Lennie knew me well enough to sense that it was time to ease off and leave me to think. He got up and leaned over the railing, looking down at the muddy margin of the lake. He bounced on the balls of his feet.

  “Wow,” he said, “no wonder no fish live in this lake. You know what’s down there?”

  And in his Lennie way he began reeling off a list of what he saw. “Paper, broken glass, peanut shells, two cigarette butts, some crunched tinfoil, two feathers, a white plastic fork with broken tines, a matchbook cover, some sticks, three mashed-up soda cans, and an evil-looking wad of black clothing.”

  I got up. “Thanks for the guided tour of the local dump. Come on, let’s go. I’m freezing.”

  “Look,” Lennie said as he swung around one of the corner posts, leaving the gazebo. He pointed at the outside wall.

  Someone had drawn an animal on it, standing up on its hind legs and holding a blob in its front paws. The outline was drawn in a kind of dark grease, and it had the bold simplicity of a prehistoric wall-painting.

  “Lipstick,” Lennie said, touching the outline and rubbing his fingers together under his nose. “Phew, cheap stuff, smells like Log Cabin Syrup. Funny kind of graffiti.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  The picture was of a leaf-taker, and seeing it there, I understood where Bosanka was spending her spare time—in the most familiar territory she could find, our “parkland.”

  Which I knew from personal experience to be a center of power in its own right. If she hooked up her native magic with that, we were all going to be in absolutely unimaginable trouble.

  Assuming she hadn’t done it already.

  9

  Now Here’s My Plan

  GRAN HAD BEEN MOVED to a private room. I had a few nightmare moments when I thought I wouldn’t be able to find her. But I did, of course. I told her everything, even though nothing seemed to get through.

  “Bosanka’s a witch, Gran,” I whispered, “and there’s a whole lot of people at risk here. One of them’s already under a bad spell. We can’t handle this alone. You have to help me. Please wake up and tell me what’s going on, tell me what to do!”

  For a minute there, looking at my magic Gran laid out like a little withered-up mummy, I could have killed myself for having used my silver wish to protect my mom. What I should have done, of course, was to wish my Gran well again!

  But could you make a silver wish for something like that? What if Gran was here for a reason I didn’t know? It must mean something that she was out of reach right now, of all times. In all my visists to her at the hospital, it had never occurred to me to think about this situation from her point of view.

  Suppose she wasn’t dying at all? Suppose she just had to have some rest time, uninterrupted by anything or anybody, so afterward she could live for a long time to come? Or suppose Sorcery Hall had called on her suddenly and she had left her body here while her powerful spirit went off to do something that nobody else could do?

  Well, then why didn’t she warn me? Why hadn’t she seen Bosanka coming and tipped me off, or left me with some kind of advice or special spell to deal with the girl-witch from her horrible planet of hunters?

  Or maybe Gran had simply made a mistake. Nobody’s foolproof. The machines at the head of Gran’s bed made sucking, sighing noises something like the noises I was making, crying, while my mind went on churning.

  If Gran did wake up, she’d probably say I was right to make a wish to safeguard my mom, who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, protect herself in any magical way. And Gran could protect herself, I had to believe, even she seemed to be almost completely gone.

  Which left me to protect myself, while I did my best to deal with some alien witch from Hell. I could manage that, couldn’t I, as long as I didn’t have to worry about Mom and Gran at the same time? I had the family talent, and I’d already used it, however clumsily, a lot more than I’d ever wanted to, and successfully.

  What I didn’t have was access to Gran’s wisdom, but I still knew a thing or two—more than anybody else in the Comet Committee did.

  In fact, they didn’t know a thing.

  It hit me like a breaker, big and cold: no matter how much talent each of those kids might have—Lennie, Tamsin (yuk), dippy Mimi (really, could she have any magic?), Peter, Joel, and let’s not forget the mystery girl I didn’t know—no matter how much, it was pretty clear that none of them had as much experience as I had.

  Compared to them, I had wisdom, the way Gran had wisdom compared to me.

  I kissed Gran on the forehead—her skin was very dry and cool—and went home.

  That same Wednesday evening we met at Lennie’s: Mimi, Tamsin, me, and Lennie, of course. His parents were at the theater, and his youngest sister was sleeping over at her friend’s house.

  I got there late, right from the hospital. Everybody gave me funny looks when I came in except Lennie. He was wiping down his favorite shoes, a pair of old, scuffed work boots, with an oily rag.

  “What?” I said to the group at large. “What are you all staring at?”

  Tamsin said, “Lennie says you’re a witch.”

  “Lennie!” I yelled.

  He said, “People have to know, Val. Us in the committee, I mean.”

  “Who decided that?” I shot back. “It’s my secret, remember? My family secret. You had no right—”

  He stopped working on the shoes. “You don’t go into a tough game with your team all shaky and wondering what they’ve got that’s strong enough to stop the other guys.”

  The whales and giant groupers and things stared from the posters on the walls of Lennie’s bedroom. He was taking Mrs. Moorehouse’s elective “Spaceship Earth,” an ecology course. He was deeply into marine life-systems, which was not so strange for a kid who had once loved to play at being Captain Nemo in his submarine headquarters, twenty thousand leagues under the sea, with me playing everybody else in the story.

  That had been a long time ago. We weren’t playing now.

  “Okay, okay, I guess I was going to have to say something about it anyway,” I grumbled. “But it’s not like waving some stupid magic wand, you know? I’m just improvising, here.”

  Mimi said, “Well, somebody has to. I mean, what are we going to do?”

  Tamsin snorted and looked down her nose at me. “Well, I, for one, don’t believe any of it. Why should your family have magic? You don’t look so special to me.”

  I don’t need this, I thought, I could just walk out of here. But I did need this. Or anyway, I needed the members of the Comet Committee. Maybe I was special, but Bosanka wanted them all.

  I said, “I don’t know how come, Tamsin. All I can tell you is that Gran’s from Scotland, where some people are ‘fey.’ You know, with psychic talents and stuff.”

  “That’s Ireland,” Tamsin said.

  Lennie said patiently, “They’re all Celts, Tam.”

  Mimi said, “What do your parents think about this?”

  “My dad went to live in Alaska years ago,” I said. “I don’t think he knows anything about it. My mom knows. She hates the whole idea.”

  “I bet,” Tamsin said shrewdly. “She’d deny it if we asked her, wouldn’t she? She’d tell us you’re just very imaginative.”

  “Probably,” I said. “So don’t bother asking her. Ask me. What would convince you, Tamsin?”

  “How about a demonstration?”

  Mimi yelled out, “NO! That’s what Peter said, and Bosanka turned him into a deer.”

  Tamsin said, “Oh, for crying out loud!”

  “Tammy, listen,” Lennie insisted. “I was there, I saw what
happened to Peter. I guess I should have let him gore me so I’d have evidence to show you.”

  “But he didn’t,” Tamsin said, flopping down in the old red sling-chair by Lennie’s window. “So there’s no evidence, is there?”

  I said, “There’s what happened.”

  “What you say happened,” Tamsin sneered.

  “What all three of us say happened.”

  She shrugged. She was wearing a big old shirt of Lennie’s over a leotard, and purple leg-warmers—very picturesque. Dressed to impress, not to be impressed.

  Lennie turned to me. “I think you’d better tell the whole story, Val, your way. About your family, too.”

  So I sat down on his bed and told about Paavo and the kraken and Joel and Dr. Brightner and Ushah the witch—and now, Bosanka.

  Mimi wailed, “This is crazy! I’m going to tell my mother!”

  “How would that help?” Lennie objected. “She could get hurt, Mimi.”

  “Well, we could, too,” she whined. “What about us?”

  “Look,” I said, “if you tell your parents they’ll just freak. As far as we know, there are no grown-ups around with a better handle on this situation than we have ourselves. At least I’ve had some, uh, experience with this kind of stuff.”

  “ ‘Experience,’ ” Tamsin jeered. “I bet this whole mess is all on account of you.”

  I snapped, “Who first suggested ‘making a star’ on the roof on New Year’s?”

  “Hey, come on,” Lennie said wearily. “Passing the blame around won’t get us anywhere. We’ve only got till Saturday to figure out what to do.”

  Tamsin tossed her long black hair. “You’ve got,” she said. “I never said I was getting mixed up with some loony tune from outer space.”

  “You have to help!” Mimi cried. “Otherwise she’ll turn us all into animals!”

  Lennie said, “Tammy, you’re in. Bosanka said so.”