A Wizard Alone

And that single-mindedness strikes me as really likely to affect Kit. I think we need to be ready for that.”

“‘We’?” Dairine said.

“Dairine, he’s sure not listening to me right now—”

“I guess you know what he felt like with you over the past month, then,” Dairine said.

Nita grimaced at that, taking the point. “So we’ve got to arrange some kind of connection, ideally with an integrated power feed, from you to me — for when he goes in again. Think of it as a lifeline. I need to make sure that there’s somebody on the outside who can yank us both out of there if we get stuck too deep.”

Dairine, sitting there with her hands in her lap, looked up at Nita. It was an unusual position for Dairine; usually, even when she was talking her hands were doing something. But now she sat quite still, looking at Nita steadily, but a little bleakly. “Are you sure you want my help?” Dairine said.

Nita looked at her strangely. “Are you crazy?” she said. “Of course I do.”

“I just wasn’t sure,” Dairine said, and looked at the floor. There was nothing overtly guilty or upset about her face, but all the same, Nita saw there was trouble underneath the expression. “I warned you, Neets. Right now I’m paying the price for a big showy start, just as Tom said I would not so long ago. I can do basic wizardries well enough, but as for anything really high-powered—”

She shook her head. “I don’t know if you want to be depending on me right now.”

“I will depend on you any time,” Nita said.

The look Dairine gave Nita had a certain amount of good-natured scorn about it. She opened her mouth. “Do I have to say it in the Speech?” Nita said.

“Nita,” Dairine said then, very softly, “Mom couldn’t depend on me.”

Nita shook her head. “If you mean you couldn’t just make a wish and save her life,” Nita said, “then you’re right. If you really thought that it was going to be that way, then, yeah, you made a mistake. But that hardly means that she couldn’t depend on you. Or that I won’t.”

“You may be the one making the mistake, depending on my power right now,” Dairine said.

Nita rolled her eyes. “I don’t know if I’m exactly a model of stability right now myself,” she said, “but I can’t afford to just stand around wondering. Will you help, or am I going to have to do this without a net? Because more depends on this than just me or Kit. Darryl is apparently…”

Nita trailed off. She was uncertain exactly how much she wanted to tell Dairine about why Darryl was special.

“Something unusual,” Dairine said. “A lot of power… or something else. He would have to be unusual, to have attracted so much attention from Tom and Carl.“

Dairine sat quietly for a few seconds, then nodded. “I’ll work something out for you,” she said.

Nita nodded. “Thanks,” she said. She turned away.

“It kills you, doesn’t it?” Dairine said. “Asking me for help.”

Nita gave her sister a very slight smile. “Better it should kill me than Kit,” she said.

Then she went back into her room to start yet another futile search for the ace of hearts.

We have to go.

Kit sat up suddenly on the bed, looking around him. His glance wandered past the clock on his wall; it was around four-thirty in the afternoon. Where did the day go? part of him wondered, but that part seemed very remote. Much more important was the need to go looking for Darryl. Darryl was in trouble, he was stuck, and Kit had to get him out of there. In a world where nothing much seemed to matter, that suddenly mattered a great deal.

He could almost see that other world, here in the room with him, as if he were in two places at once. The world had changed again, or rather, he had changed it, Darryl had changed it, to put the One who was pursuing him off the scent. It always realized what had happened eventually — that Darryl had It trapped — and then Darryl had to change everything again, making a new world, a new self, in which the Pursuer would once again be confused. Each new world was better than the last, with new rules to impede the Lone One’s power and to keep him occupied longer. He wished, sometimes, that Darryl didn’t have to do it again and again. It gave him no time to find out what else wizardry might be for. If it was for anything else…

We have to go

, Kit thought, and got out of bed—

— and tripped over Ponch, who was lying on the rug, watching him. Boss! Ponch yelped. Where are you going?

“We have to go,” Kit said. The bedroom was already beginning to fade a little, like something that didn’t matter. What mattered was elsewhere. The Pursuer was coming again; all his attention now had to be given to the creation of the new illusion, at the expense of the old one.

You promised you wouldn’t

! Ponch whimpered, jumping up and down. You told Carl you’d stay here!

But it seemed now as if a different person entirely had made that promise. In fact, someone different had made it: another person, in another place… different from this, the only reality that really mattered, now reforming itself around him. The last time, he’d gotten a little careless, and the dark Other had found Its way in, and out again, too easily. This time, the place to which he found his way had to be a little more challenging. The idea had come to him that morning in the bathroom, as once again he faced what he couldn’t face in the mirror on the wall, in which he had to see, every day, human eyes with the dark Other looking out of them. This is Its weapon against you, the thought had come to him. Turn the weapon against It…

That other reality, glassy, gleaming, was becoming more and more real around Kit as he stood there. It was only a matter of moments before he would be able to step wholly into it, such was the other’s power and his need for help. Distressed, Ponch said, The leash! Boss, let me get the leash!

Wait for me—

The voice in his head seemed to Kit to come from almost too far away to matter.

Stay there, boss! Kit — stay! Stay!

The urgency of that voice was just enough to keep Kit where he was, to prevent him from taking the single step forward that would bring him into the gleaming maze now being constructed for the Other’s confusion. That was all that could be hoped for — to befuddle It, wear It down until eventually It would stop coming and just leave him alone. There was no telling whether the hope would ever be realized. But it was the only hope in the world, and hence it was worth clinging to.

The sound of paws scrabbling up the steps was as distant as everything else. Kit watched the shining unreality forming around him, watched his bedroom fade away, a backdrop without meaning. Into that backdrop burst something that shone, a line of blue light around a dark creature’s collar. The creature looked up at him, the only gaze he could stand, the only eyes that didn’t hurt him. Boss, take the leash! Take it, put it around your wrist.

Kit couldn’t see the point, but the creature’s eyes were so beseeching that he did as he was told.

As he looped the other end of the line of light around his wrist, the world in which he was standing finally became totally irrelevant. Kit took the step forward into the real world, or into the one that had become real, and the black creature beside him stepped through, too—

“Kit,” his mama’s voice said from down the hall, “I’m going out now. You call me if anything comes up here. Can I bring you anything back on my meal break?”

No reply.

“Kit? Sweetie, are you asleep?”

No reply.

Kit’s mama came down the hall. “You know, I brought that cold medicine home, the one with the zinc in it,” she said. “I wonder if maybe you should just take some, so you can head this thing off—”

She stood in the doorway of his bedroom, looking in at the empty bed.

“Oh, no,” she whispered.

At Nita’s house, the phone rang. Her dad, sitting at the dining room table and working his way through the