The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) Read Free Page B

step aside.”
    “This is my home,” whispered Lieder.
    “And that was my shoulder you were gripping,” said Danny. “Boundaries, Coach Lieder.”
    Danny walked into Lieder’s house.
    Lieder stayed outside for a while. No doubt trying to figure out what it was, exactly, that Danny had done. What had it felt like to him? Agony, yes—but had he understood that for a moment, his fingerbones had become tiny shards inside limp sacks of skin? Had he felt Danny move by an inch, instantaneously, or had he registered it only as Danny pulling away with incredible strength?
    Danny walked into the house and quickly found the kitchen, where apparently the cocoa was already made, for Nicki was pouring it into three cups. She moved slowly. She held the pitcher with two hands. It trembled in her grip—if it could be called a grip. Danny half-expected it to slip out of her fingers at any moment. No wonder Lieder didn’t want his wife trying to show him hospitality.
    It was not deliberate, not planned. More of a reflex, as if Danny had seen the pitcher slipping from her grasp and lunged out to catch it. Only the pitcher was not slipping, and he didn’t lunge with his hands. Instead, he sent out a gate, passed it over her, around her, and brought her out of it without having moved her more than a hairsbreadth from where she stood.
    She seemed to register it as a shudder. “Oh, someone stepped on my grave,” she said, with a tiny laugh, and then flinched as if she expected to cough, only she didn’t cough.
    Because passing a gate over her had healed her. It always did. Whatever was wrong with a person, passing through a gate always healed it, as long as their body parts were still attached and they weren’t fully dead.
    Not that she immediately became strong and hale—she looked completely unchanged. Except that her hand didn’t tremble holding the pitcher, and there was color in her cheeks and she didn’t seem so fragile as she continued pouring. “Isn’t that odd,” she said. “I felt a chill, and yet now I’m suddenly warm. I’m never warm anymore, but I am right now.”
    “Furnaces are like that,” said Danny. “One minute you’re cold, the next you’re hot. But remember, you’re holding a pot of hot cocoa.”
    “Of course,” she said. “No wonder I’m warm! I should feel downright hot .”
    “It’s nice of you to give this to me,” said Danny. “I don’t usually eat breakfast, but it’s cold enough today that even a good run didn’t warm me up the way it usually does.”
    She laughed as she set down the pitcher. The cups were full. Then covered her mouth. “I don’t know why I laughed,” she said. “Nothing you said was funny.”
    “But I said it in a funny way,” said Danny.
    “You say everything in a funny way,” she said.
    “I lived in Ohio for a while, but I didn’t think I picked up an accent.”
    “No, not an accent,” she said. “You talk as if you got the joke, but didn’t really expect me to get it. Only just now I think I did get it. Isn’t that funny?”
    Danny smiled. And as he looked at her, he realized that the hand to the mouth, the way she was looking at the cups instead of at him—this woman was shy.
    Not really shy. Just sort of generally embarrassed. He saw this all the time, but not with adults. No, he saw it at high school. He saw it with girls when some guy talked to them. A guy she kind of liked, or maybe liked a lot, and she couldn’t believe he was paying attention to her.
    This isn’t Coach Lieder’s wife, thought Danny. This is his daughter.
    She called him daddy, not by the habit of a husband and wife, but because he really was her father.
    “Do you mind if I ask how old you are?” asked Danny.
    “How old do you think?” she asked. But her face showed that she hated the question.
    “I’m deciding between sixteen and eighteen,” said Danny.
    “What’s wrong with seventeen?” she asked. But there was relief in her voice. Nobody had guessed so young