The Copper Gauntlet (15 page)

“What happened to you four?” she asked, eyebrows going up.

“Mudslide?” Aaron said, although he didn’t sound very certain.

She winced, as though either she didn’t believe him or she was generally disgusted with them in her store, tracking mud and touching things with sooty fingers. Maybe both.

It didn’t take too long for Call to find the perfect outfit, though. Jeans, like the kind he’d worn back home, and a navy blue T-shirt proclaiming
I DON’T BELIEVE IN MAGIC
with a squashed fairy in the lower right-hand corner.

Aaron started laughing when he saw it. “There is something seriously wrong with you,” he said.

“Well, you look like you’re on your way to yoga class,” Call said. Aaron had picked out gray sweatpants and a shirt with a yin-yang symbol on it. Tamara had found black jeans and wore a big silky tunic that might be a dress over it. Jasper had somehow discovered khakis, a blazer in his size, and mirrored sunglasses.

The total for the clothes came to about twenty dollars, which had Tamara frowning thoughtfully and counting out loud. Jasper leaned past her and gave the cat-eye-glasses lady his most charming smile.

“Can you tell us where we can get sandwiches?” he asked. “And Internet?”

“Bits and Bytes, two blocks down Main,” she said, and pointed at their heap of discarded, muddy green uniforms. “I’m guessing I can toss these? What kind of clothes are they, anyway?”

Call gave the clothes an almost regretful look. Their uniforms branded them as Magisterium school students. Without them, all they had were their wristbands.

“Karate uniforms,” he said. “That’s how we got dirty. Karate-chopping ninjas.”

“In a mudslide,” Aaron interjected, sticking to his story.

Tamara dragged them out of the store by the backs of their shirts. Main Street was mostly deserted. A few cars drove up and down, but nobody gave them a second look.

“Karate-chopping ninjas in a mudslide?” Tamara gave Aaron and Call a dark look. “Could you guys try to lay low?” She stopped in front of an ATM. “I’ve got to get some money out.”

“Speaking of lying low, I’ve heard they can trace your ATM card,” said Jasper. “You know, using the Internet.”

Call wondered if he’d thrown away his phone for nothing.

“The
police
can,” said Aaron. “Not the Magisterium.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, we have to risk it,” said Tamara. “That was all the rest of our cash, that twenty bucks, and we’re going to need more gas and food.”

Still, her hand shook a little as she took out the money and stuffed it in her wallet.

Bits and Bytes turned out to be a sandwich shop with a row of computers where you could rent Internet time, a dollar an hour.

Aaron went to buy sandwiches while Call logged in. He typed
latitude
and
longitude
into Google, which took him to a page that calculated both from an address. He pressed the reverse lookup button and entered the numbers he had.

Then he held his breath.

The map showed a location quickly enough, although there was no address associated with it, just the words
Monument Island, Harpswell, Maine
. According to the map, there were no roads on it and no houses. He doubted there was a ferry, either.

Even worse, when he typed in the directions, the computer said it would take fifteen hours to drive there. Fifteen hours! And Alastair had a head start. What if he was already there? What if he’d taken a plane?

For a moment, terrible panic overwhelmed Call. The screen in front of him flickered. The lights shuddered. Jasper looked in Call’s direction, sneering.

“Maybe someone went through the Gate of Control too soon,” he said under his breath.

“Easy.” Aaron put a hand on Call’s shoulder. Steadying him.

Call stood up abruptly, fighting for breath. “I’ve got to …”

“You’ve got to what?” Aaron looked at him strangely.

“Print,” Call said. “I’ve got to print. The directions.” He staggered over to the register. “Do you guys have a printer?”

The girl behind the counter nodded. “Three dollars a page, though.”

Call glanced at Tamara. “Can we?”

She sighed. “It’s a necessary expense. Go ahead.”

Call sent the directions to print. Now all three of them were looking at him strangely. “Is something wrong?” Aaron said.

“It’s in Maine,” Call said. “Fifteen hours away by car.”

Aaron looked up from his ham-and-provolone sandwich with a shocked expression. “Seriously?”

“Could have been worse,” Jasper said, surprising Call. “Could have been Alaska.”

Tamara glanced around and then back at Call. Her brown eyes were very serious. “You sure you want to do this?”

“I’m sure I have to,” he said.

She took a bite out of her sandwich. “Well, eat up, everyone,” she said. “I guess we’re going on a road trip to Maine.”

After lunch, they got back to the car, dumping their backpacks in the back. Call walked Havoc and fed him two roast beef sandwiches and then tipped a bottle of water so he could lap at it. The Chaos-ridden wolf ate and drank with surprising daintiness.

Call drove, with Tamara acting as copilot while Jasper and Aaron pillowed their heads on Havoc’s furry back and napped. Jasper must have been pretty exhausted to deign to sleep on a Chaos-ridden animal. Hours passed like this.

“You know you can get arrested for going
under
the speed limit, too,” said Tamara, her warm ginger ale in the cup holder beside her. She was unbraiding her hair, brushing it out as it blew around with the breeze of her open window. Tamara almost always kept her hair in braids, and Call was surprised by how long it was unbraided, black and shiny and hanging to her waist.

Call pressed his foot harder on the gas and the Morris lurched forward. As the speedometer needle started to edge up, the car began to shudder.

“Uh,” Tamara said. “Maybe we should take a chance on the cops.”

He gave her a quick smile. “Do you really think the Magisterium sent that monster after us?”

“I don’t think Master Rufus would,” Tamara said, hesitating. When she spoke again, the words came out in a rush. “But I’m not sure about anyone else. It just doesn’t make sense to me. Call, if there was something you knew — you’d tell us, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” she said, her fingers nimbly working her hair back into a single long braid.

Call focused on the road, on the blur of lines and keeping his distance from other cars.

“What’s the next exit?” he asked her. “We need gas.”

“Call,” Tamara said again. Now she was playing with her wristband. He wished she’d stop fidgeting. “You know if there was something you wanted to tell me that was a secret, I’d keep it. I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Like you didn’t tell anyone about my dad?” Call said, immediately regretting it. Tamara’s eyes went wide and then angry.

“You
know
why I did that,” she said. “He tried to steal the Alkahest! He was putting Aaron in danger! And things turned out even worse than we thought. He didn’t have good intentions.”

“Not everything is about Aaron,” Call said, which made him feel even more terrible. It wasn’t Aaron’s fault he was who he was. Call was just glad Aaron was asleep again, his blond head resting on Havoc’s fur.

“Then what is this about, Call?” Tamara said. “Because I have a feeling you know.”

Words felt like they were clawing their way up Call’s throat — he didn’t know if he wanted to yell at Tamara or spill everything just for the relief of not keeping it bottled up anymore — when suddenly the car started shaking hard.

“Call, slow down!” Tamara said.

“I
am
slowed down!” he protested. “Maybe I should pull over —”

Suddenly and without warning, Master Rufus appeared, popping into existence between Call and Tamara in the front seat of the car.

“Students,” he said, looking very displeased. “Would you like to explain yourselves?”

C
ALL AND TAMARA
screamed. The car swerved, Call’s hands heedless on the wheel. That made Tamara scream even harder. All the screams woke Jasper and Aaron, who added their voices to the screaming. Havoc started to bark. Throughout all the commotion, Master Rufus just floated in the center of the car, looking annoyed and — translucent.

That was the final shock. Call slammed on the brakes, and the car screeched to a stop in the middle of the road. Everyone suddenly stopped screaming. There was a dead silence. Master Rufus continued to be see-through.

“Are you dead?” Call asked in a shaking voice.

“He’s not
dead
,” Jasper said, managing to sound smug and annoyed even though he was clearly terrified. “He’s calling from an ether phone. This is how it looks on the other end.”

“Oh.” Call filed away the knowledge that the thing he’d always called a tornado phone was actually called something else. He pictured Master Rufus holding the glass jar on his lap, staring into it balefully. “So you’re somewhere else?” he said to Rufus. “Not … actually here?”

“It doesn’t matter where I am. What matters is that you children are all in a great deal of trouble,” Master Rufus said. “An enormous amount of trouble and also a great deal of danger. Callum Hunt, you are already on thin ice. Aaron Stewart, you are a Makar and you have responsibilities — responsibilities that include
behaving responsibly
. And you, Tamara Rajavi, of the three of you, I expected you to know better.”

“Master Rufus,” Jasper began, in his sweetest tattletale voice, “I’ll have you know that I never —”

“As for you, Jasper deWinter,” Master Rufus said, cutting him off. “Maybe I was wrong about you. Maybe you really are more interesting than I originally imagined. But the four of you must return to the Magisterium immediately.”

Jasper looked horrified, probably for several reasons.

“Are you back at the Magisterium?” Call asked.

Master Rufus appeared highly peeved by that question. “Indeed I am, Callum. After spending most of yesterday and all of today fruitlessly searching for you children, one of you must have lost your protection against scrying. I see that you’re in some kind of vehicle. Pull over, tell me where you are, and some mages will be along to get you shortly.”

“I don’t think we can do that,” Callum said, heart pounding.

“And why not?” Master Rufus’s eyebrows twitched with barely contained annoyance.

Call hesitated.

“Because we’re on a mission,” Tamara said quickly. “We’re going to recover the Alkahest.”

“I’m the Makar,” Aaron said. “I’m supposed to save people. They’re not supposed to save me — they resent having to save me. And I’ve been told plenty that I can’t succeed doing stuff alone, so Call is here to be my counterweight. Tamara is here because she’s clever and crafty. And Jasper is …”

“Comic relief?” Call ventured under his breath.

“I’m your friend, too, you idiot!” Jasper burst out. “I can be clever!”

“Anyway,” Aaron said, trying to recover the situation. “We’re a team and we’re getting the Alkahest back, so please don’t send any other elementals after us.”

“Send any other elementals after you?” Master Rufus sounded genuinely confused. “What on earth do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” Aaron said in that flat voice he used when he was angry and trying not to show it. “We all know. Automotones nearly killed us, and he came from the Magisterium. You released him to hunt us down.”

Now Master Rufus looked shocked. “There must be a mistake. Automotones is here, our prisoner; he has been for hundreds of years.”

“It’s not a mistake,” Tamara said. “Maybe the other mages didn’t tell you, because we’re your apprentices. But it absolutely happened. Automotones murdered a woman, too. Burned her house down.”

Tamara’s voice shook.

“These are lies,” Master Rufus said.

“We’re not lying,” Aaron told him. “But I guess that means you trust us about as much as we trust you.”

“Then you’re being lied to,” said Master Rufus. “I don’t know — I don’t understand yet — but you must come back to the Magisterium. It’s more important now than ever. This is the only place where I can protect you.”

“We’re not coming back.” Surprisingly, Jasper was speaking. He turned to Call. “Hang up the phone.”

Call stared at ghostly Rufus. “I, uh, don’t know how.”

“Earth!” Tamara yelped. “Earth is the opposite of air!”

“Right. I, uh —” Call reached down and grabbed Miri out of the sheath on his belt. Metal had earth magic properties. “Sorry,” he said, and plunged the knife into ghostly Rufus.

Rufus disappeared with a pop, like a burst bubble.

Tamara screamed.

“I didn’t kill him, did I?” Call said, looking around at everyone’s shocked faces. Only Havoc seemed unmoved. He’d gone back to sleep.

“No,” Jasper said. “It’s just, most people just use the earth power to shut down the connection. But I guess that’s a lot of restraint to expect from you, weirdo.”

“I am not a weirdo,” Call grumbled, sheathing his blade.

“You’re a little weird,” Aaron said.

“Oh, yeah, well, who lost their protective rock?” Call demanded. “Who forgot to transfer it to their new clothes?”

Tamara groaned in frustration. “That’s how the mages found us! Jasper, did you?”

Jasper held up his hands, flummoxed. “
That’s
what that rock was? No one told me!”

“Now isn’t the time to worry about this,” Aaron insisted. “We made some mistakes. The important thing is that we hide from the mages as best we can.”

Call went to pull the car back onto the main road, when he realized the engine had stalled out.

Aaron had to spark the wires all over again, while they held their collective breaths, since there were no more cars to take if the Morris conked out on them. A few moments later, though, Aaron had it running once more.

Tamara didn’t have any more stones, so they took turns passing around the ones they had, so the mages might not scry the right person at the right time.

Call drove for the rest of the day and through the night, with the other kids sleeping in shifts. Call didn’t sleep, though. At each rest stop, he acquired more and more coffee until he felt as though his head was going to spin around like a top and then pop right off.

The landscape had changed, becoming more mountainous. The air was cooler, and pine trees took the place of mulberry and dogwood.

“I could drive for a while,” Tamara offered, coming out of a Gas and Grub in Maine. Dawn was breaking by then and Call had been caught at least once driving with a single eye open.

Aaron had bought a Butterfinger and a Honey Bun and was mashing the candy bar into the pastry to make a bizarre sugar hot dog. Call approved. Jasper ate pretzels and stared.

“No,” Call said, taking a swig from his coffee. One of his eyes twitched a little, but he ignored it. “I’ve got this.”

Tamara shrugged and handed the directions to Jasper. It was his turn to navigate.

“I refuse,” Jasper said, taking a long look at Call. “You need to sleep. You’re going to drive into a ditch and we’re going to die, all because you won’t take a nap. So take a nap!”

“I’ll set an alarm,” Tamara offered.

“I could stretch my legs,” said Aaron. “Go ahead. Lie down in the backseat.”

Now that they mentioned it, Call was feeling kind of fuzzy-headed. “Okay,” he said, yawning. “But just for twenty minutes. Dad used to say that that was the ideal amount of time for a nap.”

“We’ll take Havoc for a real walk,” Tamara said. “See you in twenty.”

Call climbed into the backseat. But when he closed his eyes, what he saw was Master Rufus, his eyes going wide as Call drew Miri and stabbed the image of him. His expression had reminded Call of the way his father had looked, right before Call used magic to slam him against a wall.

Despite being exhausted, Call couldn’t stop his brain from showing him those images over and over again.

And as soon as he shoved those images away, new ones rose up to take their place. Images of things that hadn’t happened yet, but might. The look of betrayal on Aaron’s face when he discovered who Call really was, the look of fury on Tamara’s. Jasper’s smug certainty that he’d been right about Call all along.

Finally, he gave up and got out of the car. Early-morning sunlight dappled the grass, and the music of distant birdsong hung in the air. Aaron and Tamara and Havoc were gone, but Jasper was sitting at a worn old picnic table. Sparks flew from his fingers as he set fire to a pinecone and then watched it turn to embers.

“You’re supposed to be asleep,” Jasper said.

“I know,” Call told him. “But I wanted to talk to you about something, while the others aren’t here.”

Jasper narrowed his eyes. “Oh, going behind your friends’ backs? This should be interesting.”

Call sat down at the picnic table. The wind had picked up and it was blowing his hair into his eyes. “When we get to the destination on the map, hopefully, my father is going to be there and he’s still going to have the Alkahest. But I need to talk to him — alone.”

“About what?”

“He’ll listen to me, but not if he thinks a bunch of apprentices are going to attack him. And I don’t want Aaron getting too close, in case my dad
does
try to hurt him. I need you and Tamara and Aaron to keep back, at least until I finish my conversation.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Jasper still looked suspicious, but not unconvinced.

Call couldn’t tell him the truth — that it was easier to lie to Jasper than to his friends. “Because you care about protecting Aaron a lot more than you care about protecting me.”

“True,” said Jasper. “He’s the Makar. You’re just …” He looked curiously at Call. “I don’t know what you are.”

“Yeah, well,” Call said. “That makes two of us.”

Before Jasper could say anything else, Tamara and Aaron appeared from between the trees, Havoc bounding around excitedly beside them.

Call slid off the bench. “What’s he so happy about?”

“He ate a squirrel.” Tamara sounded disapproving.

As Call headed toward the car, he bent down to pet Havoc’s head and whispered, “Good dog. Excellent hunting instincts. We eat squirrels, not people, am I right?”

“Never too early to start molding his character,” Aaron said.

“That’s what I was thinking.” Together Call and Aaron helped heave a reluctant Havoc into the backseat. Jasper and Tamara clambered in after him, and Aaron took the passenger seat.

The moment they all sat down, the doors of the car slammed shut in unison.

“What’s going on?” Tamara demanded. She scrabbled at her door, but it wouldn’t open. None of their doors would budge. “Start the car, Aaron!”

Aaron reached across Call for the wires, trying to get a spark. Nothing happened. No sound of the engine turning over. He did it again, and again. Sweat started to prickle along Call’s back. What was going on?

From the backseat, Jasper shouted, “I tried to use metal magic and sparks hurt my hand instead.”

“It must be warded,” said Tamara.

Something swooped in front of the windshield. Call yelled and Aaron jerked back, wires dropping from his hands.

Two huge air elementals had appeared in front of the car. One of them looked like a six-legged horse, if horses were about twice the size they normally were. The other one resembled a brontosaurus with wings. Both were bridled and saddled: Master Rockmaple was riding one, and Master Milagros the second.

“We are in so much trouble,” said Jasper.

Master Milagros slid from the back of her six-legged horse and stalked over to the car. She lifted her hands, spread her fingers, and hurled from her palms long threads of glimmering metal wires. They wrapped around the front of the car and within seconds, it was tightly secured.

As she performed her metal magic, Milagros looked through the windshield at the kids. She shook her head disapprovingly, but Callum thought she looked a little bit as if she found the whole thing … funny.

She whirled around without a word to them and marched back to the elementals. She tossed a rope of metal to Rockmaple and climbed back up onto her own elemental, securing her rope to the pommel of the saddle.

“Oh, my God,” said Tamara. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

She threw herself against her door, but the car was already rising into the air like the basket below a balloon. Everyone in the car shrieked as maps and empty soda cans and candy bar wrappers flew off the dashboard and out of the cup holders and rattled around inside the car.

“What are they doing?” Call yelled over the sound of the wind.

“Taking us to the Magisterium — what do you think?” Jasper yelled back.

“They’re going to fly us to Virginia? Won’t someone normal, you know, notice?”

“They’re probably using air magic to block us from view,” Tamara said. Then she yelped as the car swung out over the forest below. All Call could see beneath them were miles of green trees.

“In movies, people pretend to be sick to get their jailers to let them out,” Aaron told them. “Maybe one of us could try throwing up — or frothing from the mouth.”