A Wizard Alone

hadn’t eaten anything for days. But as the afternoon passed, Ponch started to look unhappy. And just after dinner, when Kit was helping his mama clear the table, they were both startled by a sound coming from outside. Ponch was howling.

Kit’s mama gave him a peculiar look. “What’s the matter with him?” she said. “Did the fire siren go off or something? I didn’t hear it.”

Kit shook his head. “I’ll go find out,” he said.

By the gate to the backyard, near the garage, Ponch was sitting in the grass of the yard, howling as if rehearsing for a part in The Call of the Wild. Kit opened the gate. “Ponch! What is it? You want to come in?”

No

Ponch kept on howling.

Kit was mystified. He went to sit down by his dog, who ignored him and howled on. “What’s the matter?” Kit said in the Speech, after a few moments more.

Ponch finished that howl and sat looking at the ground for a moment. How could It do that to him

? Ponch said then. He couldn ‘t even do anything! And he was good.

Kit blinked at that. “It’s the Lone Power,” he said. “Unfortunately, It seems to like to hurt people… and to like to see them hurting. Which is why we keep running into It, since it’s our job to stop It from doing that whenever we can.”

It’s not fair

, Ponch said. And he put his head up and howled again.

Down the street, Kit could hear one of the neighbors’ dogs start howling, too, in a little falsetto voice that would have made him laugh if he wasn’t rather concerned about Ponch. Soon every dog in the street was howling, and shortly there were some human shouts to go along with the noise: cries of “Shut up!” “Would you please shut your dog up?” and “Oh yeah, well, you shut yours up!”

Kit had no idea what to make of it all, and couldn’t think of anything to do but sit with Ponch.

Eventually the dog stopped howling, and one after another, slowly, the other dogs in the neighborhood got quiet. Ponch got up, shook himself, and walked out the still-open gate into the driveway. He made his way to the back door, waited for Kit to open it, and then went in and trotted up the stairs to Kit’s bedroom.

Kit’s mother had looked at him curiously as he came back in and closed the door. “What was that about?”

“Ponch was upset about what we were doing this morning,” Kit had said. “I’d try to explain it to you, but I’m not sure I understand it myself.”

Now, the next morning, as he went looking for his cereal bowl, he wasn’t any closer to an answer. Ponch had been asleep when Kit had gotten up to his room, and he was sleeping still. I‘ll talk to him about it later

, he thought, opening the cupboard over the counter.

There were no cornflakes. There was one box of his pop’s shredded wheat, which Kit detestedwhenever circumstances forced him to eat it, it always made him think he was eating a scrubbing pad. The only other box contained one of the cereals his sister liked, some kind of frosted, fruitflavored, multicolored, marshmallow-infested, hyperpuffed, vitamin-reinforced starch construct, which was utterly inedible due to its being ninety-eight percent sugar — even though the word appeared on the box only once, in letters small enough for anyone without a magnifying glass to miss. “Mama,” Kit said, aggrieved, “we’re out of cereal!”

“Your kind, anyway. I know,” his mother said, coming into the kitchen for another cup of coffee, with the TV remote in her hand. “Take it up with your pop: He had a fit of wanting cornflakes late last night, and he finished the box. He said he’d get some more on his way home from work. Have some toast.”

“It’s not the same,” Kit muttered, but all the same he closed the cupboard and went to get the bread out of the fridge.

“Is Ponch all right now?” his mother said as she poured more coffee and reached past Kit into the fridge for the milk.

“I think so. Still sleeping, anyway.”

His mama shook her head, and then smiled slightly. “All that noise last night… it reminded me.

Is it just me, or has down-the-street’s dog been louder than usual the past week or so?”

“You mean Tinkerbell?” That was not the dog’s real name in the dogs’ own language, Cyene, and possibly reason enough for the down-the-street dog’s incessant barking. “I dunno, Mama. I’m so used to hearing him bark all the time, I don’t notice anymore.”

“Do you think you could talk to him, sweetie? You know.” She wiggled her fingers in what she imagined was a vaguely wizardly gesture.

Kit raised his eyebrows while he put the bread in the toaster. “I can try. But, Mama, just because I talk to him doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to listen. The dog’s a head case. He thinks I’m a crook. But then he thinks everybody who doesn’t live in his house is a crook.”

“Dogs get like their owners, they say…”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, sweetie,” his mother said, looking suddenly guilty.

Kit kept the smile off his face while he waited for the toast to come up. It was going to be fun to be middle- aged, someday, and be told the things his mother was really thinking, with no more need for the kid-filter that parents routinely seemed to self-install.

“What about the youngster whose head you were going to get into?” his mother said. “Were you able to talk to him?”

Kit shook his head. “He was real busy,” Kit said. “Ponch and I are going to have to try again, when things are quieter.” If they get any quieter, he thought. And what if they don’t?

Then something else occurred to him. “Mom, you have any more trouble with the TV?”

“What?” She looked at Kit as if she couldn’t understand what he was talking about, and then blinked. “Oh. No, it’s been all right.”

“Good,” Kit said, and started buttering the toast.

“Except now that you mention it…”

Kit braced himself.

“Your dad told me you weren’t joking. About the cooking shows…”

Kit sat down with his toast and tried desperately not to look as if he was about to have a panic attack. “Yeah.”

His mother sat down across from Kit, looking thoughtfully at her coffee cup. “Honey, none of these people have ever tried to eat you, have they?”

“Aliens? No.” That, at least, was the truth. “They might have thought about it, though. But so far it’s not a crime to think about it. At least, not most places.”

His mother’s expression relaxed a little. “No, I guess I can see where it might not be. I just worry about you, that’s all.“

Kit finished one piece of toast. “Mama, in one way it’s like crossing the street. You know you have to watch out for traffic. So you look both ways before you cross. In some parts of the universe, you know that the locals think of you as a potential snack food, and you’re just careful when you visit them not to act like a snack. But mostly”— Kit grinned—“wizards are nobody’s snack. Dealing with those species mostly isn’t any more dangerous than crossing the street. Also, some of them owe us.”

His mama looked surprised. “What, humans?” “No, wizards.” Kit took a bite of the next piece of toast. “One of those species, the—” He paused; he wasn’t used to saying their name except in the Speech, since their own word for themselves was hard to say. “Let’s call them the Spinies, because they’ve got a lot of spines. They had a problem a while back: Their sun was going to go nova. One of us went in there and kept that from happening. It’s not like they don’t have their own wizardsthey do. But a wizard from another species was passing through, caught the problem before any of them did, and fixed it.” He shook his head. The story ranked as a hero-tale even among wizards, who, because of their line of work, were more or less used to saving the world, or worlds. “It was real