Read Online A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane - Free Book Online

since Kit had become involved. Eleven wasn’t incredibly young for a wizard—Dairine had been offered the Wizard’s Oath at eleven—but it was still a little on the early side: a suggestion that the Powers That Be needed Darryl for something slightly more urgent than usual. All we need to do is try to figure out what it is … try to help him find his way around whatever’s blocking him. Without getting in the way of whatever his Ordeal’s supposed to do for him.
    That’s likely to be a tall order …
    Ponch had stopped dreaming and was breathing quietly again. Kit hated to wake him, but free days like this weren’t something he got often. He nudged his dog’s tummy gently with one sneaker.
    “Ponch,” he said. “C’mon, big guy.”
    Ponch opened one eye and looked at Kit.
    Breakfast!
    His dog might be getting a little strange, as wizards’ pets sometimes do, but in other regards Ponch was absolutely normal. Ponch got up, stretched fore and aft, shook himself all over, and then headed for the hallway. Kit grinned, picked up the manual, stuck it into the “pocket” of otherspace that he kept things in for his wizardly work, and went after him.
    In the kitchen, Kit opened a can of dog food and emptied it into the bowl. Ponch went through it in about five minutes of single-minded chowing down, then looked up. More?
    “You’re only supposed to get one in the morning. You know that.”
    But today’s a workday. Today we go hunting.
    “So?”
    I have to keep up my strength.
    Kit rolled his eyes. “I’m being had here,” he said.
    Boss! Ponch looked pained.
    “Oh, all right,” Kit said after a moment. “But if all this food makes you want to lie down and have a big long sleep all of a sudden…”
    It won’t.
    Kit sighed and opened the cupboard to get out another can of dog food. Not that one. The chicken this time, Ponch said.
    Kit looked at his dog, then at the label on the can. “When did you learn to read?”
    I don’t have to read. I can hear you doing it, Ponch said. Anyway, the color’s different on the food with chicken in it.
    Kit grabbed a different can and popped the top, shaking his head, and emptied it into Ponch’s bowl. “The color? ” he said after a moment. “I thought dogs saw only in gray.”
    Ponch paused in his eating. Maybe we do, he said. But important things look different.
    Kit shook his head. Whatever color his dog saw his food in, it didn’t matter much, as it all swiftly went inside him, where theoretically everything was the same color, especially after it was digested.
    When he was finished eating, Ponch circled around a couple of times and lay down to start washing his paws.
    “You’re not going to go to sleep, are you?” Kit said.
    Ponch looked at him with some mild annoyance. If you’re going to hunt, he said, your feet have to be clean. He went back to nibbling his paws again.
    Kit sighed and sat down to wait. When Ponch was finished, he got up, shook himself again, and said, I have to go out.
    “You’ll be ready then?”
    Yes.
    Kit opened the door and let the dog out. He put on his jacket, picked up his house keys from the hook inside the back door, and got one more thing from the place where the coats hung—the wizardry “leash” that he’d made for Ponch when they were working together in other worlds. For those who could see it, it looked like a slender, smooth cord of blue light, a tight braid of words in the Speech that had to do with finding things, remembering where you found them, and not losing what had helped you find them in the first place—namely Ponch. Kit coiled up the leash and stuffed it in his parka pocket, then locked up the house and went up the driveway to the gate in the chain-link fence. There Ponch was dancing with impatience. Kit opened the gate, and Ponch shot through and into the yard, straight to the back where the trees and bushes grew thickest.
    Kit paused for a moment in the frosty morning air. It was one of those cold gray