“I will let you send two people through a Great Gate,” said the note. “Go home and wait for my messenger. After today, anybody from any Family who comes to this town will be sent to the Moon. Leave now.”

Danny opened the front door, so they wouldn’t have to break it down. No reason for the landlord to lose money.

Then Danny gated to Washington, DC, then on to Staunton, to Lexington, and then to Naples, Florida, gathering in his gates behind him so they couldn’t trace him if they happened to have a Gatesniffer that Hermia didn’t know about.

Veevee knew at once that he had come through a gate into her condo. She came up from the beach through the gate he had left there for her. “Just in time for the season finale of The Good Wife,” she said.

“Is that a TV show?” asked Danny.

“It’s pure fantasy,” she said. “There are no good wives.”

“What about good husbands?” asked Danny.

“We’ll see—when you grow up. Want a sandwich?”

“I’ll make my own,” he said. “We told all my friends about what I can do.”

“Well, that was selfish and stupid of you.”

“They insisted,” said Danny.

“That was stupid of them, but they didn’t know what they were asking. You have no excuse.”

“I know,” said Danny. “But other people are going to be involved whether we like it or not. Might as well have some of them on our team, on purpose, by their own choice.”

Veevee shrugged, then laughed. “It’s going to be so entertaining, to see how this all comes out. Right up to the moment when everything goes up in smoke.”

“We’re gods,” said Danny. “What could go wrong?”

Captive

4

CAPTIVE

Wad was so very old that even his own grief and rage could not hold him deeply, not for long. The being who had dwelt inside a tree for fourteen centuries, watching for only one thing, a gate between worlds, was not fully engaged in being a human being, not yet, perhaps not ever.

Wad was a watcher above all. Yes, he had been taken as the lover of a queen. Yes, he had loved his son, had tried to protect him, and then had been outwitted by his lover, his enemy, Queen Bexoi, and his son was dead. Yes, he had imprisoned an innocent woman and her sons, then set them free. Surely this qualified as having been truly alive.

But Wad was still watching. Not only seeing what lay outside himself, as he had done creeping through the castle at Kamesham, but also what was happening inside himself, where his gatesense lay.