A Wizard Alone

She gave him a slightly approving look. “Okay.”

“Thanks, Mama. You’re the best.” He got up and kissed her, and took her coffee cup. “You want some more?”

“Yes.” His mother leaned back on the sofa. “Two sugars. And then I want you to explain to me why I can hear the DVD player and the remote yelling at each other in Japanese in the middle of the night.”

Kit shut his eyes briefly in horror, and went to get the coffee.

Pursuits

Quite early the next morning, Kit came downstairs to find his sister sitting in front of the TV with a plate of half-finished toast, and a most peculiar expression on her face. “Brother dear…”

Carmela said.

This tone of voice usually meant that something bad was going to happen. And I haven’t even had my cornflakes yet

, Kit thought. “What?”

“I need to talk to you about the TV.”

“Uh… what about it?” He went into the kitchen to make a start at least on the cornflakes, before she really got rolling.

“Why did Pop tell me not to watch it?”

“Uh,” Kit said, “maybe I should ask you first — if Pop told you not to watch it, then what’re you doing?”

If he hoped that taking the offensive with his sister would help him even a little, the hope was misplaced. “Why do what they say until you can figure out why?”

Carmela said from the living room. “And with Pop at work and Mama asleep, there’s no way I’m going to find out the whys from them for hours. So I ask you, instead… while having a look myself.”

Kit said nothing, just rummaged enthusiastically in the fridge for the milk.

“Most of the shows don’t make much sense,” Carmela said. “And a lot of others are in weird languages. This has to do with all the yelling in Japanese the other day, am I right?”

“To a certain extent,” Kit said, getting a bowl out of the cupboard and then opening a drawer for a spoon.

His sister sighed. “You know,” she said, “you’re bad at covering your tracks when you’ve busted something. Hey, that’s a local phone number!”

Kit’s eyes widened with shock. He hurried in to find his sister goggling at a screen full of billowing white smoke and a number with a 516 area code…both of which, to his vast relief, then dissolved into whangy guitar music and an offer for cut-rate Elvis CDs.

Carmela looked up at Kit, registering his reaction, and shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re into this retro stuff,” she said, changing channels to her more usual morning fare, the channel with all the cartoons. “It’s a good thing you’ve got Nita, because it’s gonna be a long time before anybody else wants to date you, the taste you’ve got.”

“I have not ‘got’ Nita,” Kit said through gritted teeth. “And as for taste, you shouldn’t be talking.

Tom and Jerry cartoons? Give me a break.”

“I’m waiting for the Road Runner,” Carmela said, managing to sound both pitying and incredibly stuck-up. “A symbol of innocence endlessly pursued by the banality of evil.”

Kit went back to his cornflakes. “I wish the evil I keep running into was a little more banal,” he muttered as he picked up his bowl and started eating. The Lone Power’s favorite tool, entropy, had already struck locally: His cornflakes had gone soggy.

Resigned, he sat down and ate them anyway. Shortly Carmela came wandering into the kitchen and stuck her head in the refrigerator. “You got today off, huh?”

“Yeah. ‘Business’ stuff.” He ate the last spoonful of cornflakes and went to rinse the bowl. “And I didn’t ’bust‘ the TV, either.”

“Well, it has a gigabillion new channels, looks like,” his sister said. “The one before this one looked pretty neat. They were selling some kind of eternal-youth potion.” She paused to primp herself unnecessarily in the dark glass of the microwave. “Might come in handy.”

“You have to grow up first before the fountain of youth’s going to do you any good,” Kit said, putting the bowl and spoon in the dishwasher, “and anyway, what you need is the fountain of brains.”

Kit spent the next few minutes running around the house while his sister, in pursuit, whacked him as often as possible with a rolled-up boy-band fan magazine. He could have teleported straight out of there, but it was more fun to let her chase him, and it would keep her in a good mood. Finally eight-thirty rolled around, the latest time when she could leave and still get to homeroom on time, and Carmela got her book bag and headed out. “Bye-bye,” she said as she went out the back door.

“Don’t get eaten by monsters or anything.”

“HI try to avoid it.”

The door closed. Kit went off to get his manual, reflecting that things could be a lot worse for him. A resident sister who found wizardry freaky or annoying could cause endless trouble, forcing him to live like a fugitive in his own house, hiding what he was. But so many human wizards have to do that, anyway

, he thought, going into his room to get the manual off his desk, and carefully walking around Ponch, who lay on the braided oval rag rug beside his bed, still asleep. They have families they can’t trust, or who can’t cope

… The thought of telling someone you loved that you were a wizard, and then discovering that he or she couldn’t handle it and would have to have the memory removed, made Kit shudder. I was lucky. Not that it wasn’t a little traumatic at first, with Mama and Pop. But they got past it. And so did Helena, sort of.

His older sister had been the cause of some worries for Kit when he’d told her he was a wizard.

Helena had at first been dismissive, in an amused way: She hadn’t believed him. But when Kit had started casually using wizardry around the house, Helena had actually gone through a short period when she’d thought he’d done some kind of deal with the devil. Finally she calmed down when she saw that Kit had no trouble participating at church along with the rest of the family, and when Kit got Helena to understand that the Lone Power, no matter which costume It was wearing, was never going to be any friend of his. But Helena’s moral concerns had died down into a kind of strange embarrassment about Kit, which was as hard to bear, in its way, as the accusations of being a dupe of ultimate evil. When she went away to college and didn’t have to see what Kit was doing from day to day, their relationship got back to normal, if a rather long-distance kind of normal. What would it have been like if she’d stayed around, though

? Kit had found himself thinking, more than once. How would I have coped? It was a question he was glad not to have had to answer. And if that makes me chicken, fine. I’m chicken.

He glanced down at Ponch. He was still asleep, his muzzle and feet twitching gently as he dreamed. Kit sat down to wait until the dog finished the dream. The wizard’s manual lay on his desk; he flipped it open to Darryl’s page again and considered that for a few moments.

He’s only eleven

, Kit thought, looking over the slightly more detailed personal information that had added itself to Darryl’s listing since Kit had become involved. Eleven wasn’t incredibly young for a wizard— Dairine had been offered the Wizard’s Oath at eleven— but it was still a little on the early side: a suggestion that the Powers That Be needed Darryl for something slightly more urgent than usual. All we need to do is try to figure out what it is… try to help him find his way around whatever’s blocking him. Without getting in the way of whatever his Ordeal’s supposed to do for him.