by Geof Johnson
“Dr. Tindall handled it okay,” Jamie said. “So did those two CIA agents.”
“Nancy Tindall from the Biology department?” Coach asked.
“She’s been here. She’s going to help us out with some stuff.”
“So the story about the CIA is true?”
Jamie’s grandmother nodded gently. “I’m sure everything he told you is true.” Then she turned to Jamie and said, “So why did you bring him here today. Anything special?”
“I’m having a hard time making it to track practice ’cause I’m so busy with the assassin problem and classes and stuff. Bryce thinks if I offer to let the team run here once in a while, Coach will let me train on my own some. Otherwise, I might have to quit.”
“Don’t quit, Jamie. You’ve never been a quitter.”
“I know, but…I just can’t do everything. I’m getting pulled in ten directions at once.”
“I’m sure you will work something out.” She smiled at Coach Harrison and said, “Would you like to get a quick tour of the school while you’re here?”
“Uh, maybe next time.”
“Well, then enjoy the rest of your visit here. I think you’ll find that this is a very nice little town.” She waved goodbye and started back toward the building.
Coach Harrison watched her go, then glanced at the clear sky again before turning back to Jamie. “You said you guys run here sometimes?”
“A lot. We’ve got a great six-mile course mapped out. I’ll show you.”
He led them out to the dirt road that ran in front of the school and said, “We start at my house, which is a little less than a mile from here, and—”
“Your house?” Coach said. “Your parents live here?”
“No, it’s my house. It’s on the river, east of here. I inherited it from the wizard that I killed.”
Coach took a quick step back. “You killed somebody?”
“It’s a long story, but just take my word for it that he had it coming.”
“He did, Coach,” Bryce said. “Really. He was a psycho serial killer and he tried to kill Jamie’s parents.”
Coach sucked in his cheeks and squeezed his eyes closed for a moment. “Okay, whatever. So your course starts there, then what?”
Jamie pointed down the road to the farms beyond. “Then we go to a spot about two miles that way and turn around and take a side road back. It’s really scenic.”
“You should see it during the spring and summer,” Bryce said. “It’s beautiful out here. I mean, really beautiful. No cars at all, just horses and wagons, and nothing but fields full of crops and wildflowers on both sides of the road.”
“It’s beautiful now.” Coach inhaled deeply through his nose. “The air smells clean, too.” Then he toed the dirt road and studied it for a moment. “This is a good surface to run on. Better on the knees than asphalt.”
“Speaking of knees,” Jamie said, “I’ve got something that’ll fix up Alberto’s. Frankie’s shin splints, too.”
“It’s a healing jelly,” Bryce said. “It’s awesome.”
“You make that?” Coach asked Jamie.
“No, my girlfriend does. She’s a witch.”
“That pretty redheaded girl? You’re kidding me.”
“No, and she makes some great potions.”
“Why am I not surprised by that?” He rattled his head as if shaking off mental cobwebs. “Okay, so this healing jelly. What does it do?”
“Heals magically.”
“Yeah.” He gave a short laugh. “How long does it take to work?”
“Right away. Both Alberto and Max could probably train today, pain free.”
“Really?”
“It’s true, Coach,” Bryce said. “I had hairline fractures in my shins, same as Max, and Jamie managed to fix ’em up by himself, and he’s not even a witch. You should see Fred’s healing jelly. It’s way more awesome, because witch’s magic is better for that kind of stuff than a wizard’s.”
“This I gotta see.” Coach glanced skyward one last time, then checked his watch before turning to Jamie. “It’s not too cold here. Is it always like this?”
“The climate’s about the same as North Carolina’s. It doesn’t always rain at the same time, though.”
“Can the team run here today?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“We need to go back. I want to send a message to everybody and tell them we’re training this afternoon instead of tonight. Can you run with us?”
“I’m free until tonight. But you can’t tell the guys where we’re training until I get them to do the oath.”
“But you don’t mind doing that, do you?”
Jamie hesitated and thought, Here I go again. I was trying to be more secretive about the magic, and instead I’m telling even more people about it. He sighed and shook his head. “No, it’s fine.”
“Coach?” Bryce said. “Does this mean you’re gonna cut Jamie some slack about when he trains?”
“We’ll see.”
Before the team crowded into their coach’s office to do the magic oath, Jamie and Bryce tweaked the wording of it to make sure that electronic communication was explicitly covered by it, too. Jamie didn’t want anyone’s seemingly harmless text or tweet to arouse the suspicions of the NSA or the CIA or anyone else.
At first, Jamie worried about how effective the oath would be with their mixed-faith group. They had at least one atheist, a Muslim, and two Jews among them, and all Jamie had for them to pledge on was a Bible that Rollie brought. But after they all said the vow, everyone’s hands and arms glowed as brightly as suns. Their initial excitement was dulled, however, when Jamie made them drink the foul-tasting inoculation potion.
They quickly recovered.
Now the young men spilled out of the magic portal in front of Jamie’s stone house in Rivershire like excited young sailors on their first shore leave, only they were in the most exotic port imaginable — another planet.
“Whoa!” Cody said, gazing about, wide-eyed as the rest. “Is this for real? Somebody pinch me.”
Amir reached for Cody’s shoulder, but he jumped back and held out both hands. “Hey! It’s just an expression.”
“This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” DeSean said, a crooked grin on his dark face. “I mean…freakin’ cool. Can you show us some more magic, Jamie? Can you change Cody into a frog?”
“No,” Tony said. “A pig. You know how he eats.”
Cody frowned. “That’s not funny.”
“I’ll do some more magic later,” Jamie said, “but I can’t change him into anything.”
Logan pointed at the stone house and raised his eyebrows. “Jamie, is this really yours? Looks pretty nice, like a cottage from a postcard or something.”
“We want to see it,” William said. “Give us a tour.”
“I don’t want us to bother Mrs. Tully, the lady who takes care of the house, and we’d probably track in a bunch of dirt on her clean floor.”
Coach Harrison tapped his watch. “We don’t have time right now.”
Rollie had come with them, too, after he’d helped with the oath. He grunted as he leaned over and stretched his hamstrings. “Can we hurry up and get this over with? I got a class pretty soon.”
“Yeah,” William said drily, “world’s fastest man.”
Bryce thrust out his jaw. “He is. He’s gonna prove it right now. Who wants to race him?”
“Can we make it short?” Rollie said, “like a sprint, right here in front of the house?”
DeSean stepped forward. “I’ll take you on, man. I’m the only sprinter here today.”
“I want to apologize in advance for beating you. I’m not here to embarrass anybody, I just want to prove that I can do it so Bryce will quit buggin’ me about it.”
DeSean tightened his eyes and mouth. “Embarrass? I got third place in the conference finals last year, and you’re not even a runner.”
“The last time we clocked him,�
� Jamie said, “Rollie ran a mile in just over seventeen seconds.”
“That’s a bunch of crap.”
“It’s true. It was on a highway, though. He can really open up when he has the room.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it. Where do you want us to go?”
Their new assistant coach, Dave Grant, pointed down the dirt road that stretched away from the house. “Go to that spot where the curve starts and run toward us and finish here. That’s about a hundred yards, I’d say.”
Rollie agreed and he and Desean jogged off. Coach Harrison clapped his hands twice and said, “How about the rest of you guys quit standing around and start warming up? We need to get going as soon as they’re done.”
When Rollie and DeSean reached the designated spot, they turned and faced the coach and bent into a runner’s crouch.
Coach Harrison held his hand up high and yelled to them. “On my signal.” Then he dropped his arm and both boys took off sprinting. Rollie ran about three strides and blurred, reappearing much closer a fraction of a second later, then he blurred again and again in rapid succession, streaking toward them like a missile, and within the span of a few heartbeats, zipped past them with a rush of wind that rippled their clothes and hair.
The boys erupted in exultant shouts, but DeSean, who was still seventy yards way, slowed to a jog and scowled.
“Dude!” Ivan said to Rollie. “You gotta run for the team. You’d win every race and we’d win every meet.”
“It’s not fair. I’d love to, but…you know. Gotta do what’s right.”
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with it,” Noah said. “You’ve got unbelievable speed, that’s all.”
“It’s supernatural, and no matter how much I’d like to, I can’t. Wrong is wrong.”
Coach Harrison, who’d been quietly watching Rollie, said, “You just ran a hundred yards in less than five seconds. That’s impossible.”
“I think he’s folding space,” Jamie said. “His feet aren’t moving faster than any other sprinter, but he’s making shortcuts in front of him as he goes. When he runs longer distances, he makes bigger folds and covers more ground.”
“Folding space,” Amir said. “We talked about that in my physics class. It’s the only way we’ll ever be able to explore other solar systems, if we can figure out how to do it.”
“We’re in another solar system now.”
One side of Amir’s mouth pulled up. “That’s really cool.”
DeSean had made it back to their group, and he said, “Shortcuts. I knew it had to be something. He’s not really faster than me.”
Rollie rolled his eyes and waved one hand. “Whatever. I couldn’t beat you without magic, so don’t lose any sleep over it, all right?” He turned to Jamie. “Can you make a doorway back to my dorm now? I gotta go.”
Jamie outlined the glowing portal and his teammates gawked again. After Jamie closed it, Tony said, “Man…that is incredible! Can you make one of those to anywhere?”
“Pretty much. Wanna go to Waikiki? We can run on the beach.”
Coach Harrison shook his head. “We can run here just fine.”
“Besides,” Coach Dave said, “how often do you get to run on another world?” Then he wrinkled his brow and turned to Jamie. “Are we really on another world? Everything looks exactly the same…the trees, the grass…everything.”
“Everybody asks that at first. I can prove it if we come at night and the moon’s out. Otherwise, this place is almost exactly like Earth.”
“Do the people here speak English?” William said.
“Yes, but they have an accent.” Then his teammates began besieging him with questions, so Jamie held up both hands defensively. “Bryce and I will tell you everything while we run.”
Coach Harrison looked at Alberto and said, “How are your knees? You gonna be able to go?”
Alberto squatted and slowly rose, then nodded. “They’re great coach. I think I can go full speed.”
Coach turned to Max and pointed at his shins, which were still glistening from Fred’s healing jelly. “How about you?”
“They don’t hurt at all. Not a bit. That stuff did the trick.”
“Jamie,” Frankie said, “you’ve been holding out on us. You’ve had that stuff all along and you didn’t tell us? Alberto and Max could’ve been running in all of our meets.”
“What was I supposed to say? That my girlfriend is a witch and she makes really awesome healing potions?”
“There’s no way that hot-lookin’ girl is a witch.”
“Rollie’s girlfriend is a witch, too. So is Fred’s little sister. Not Bryce’s girlfriend, though.”
“Oh, man,” Coach Dave said. “Anything else you’ve been hiding from us?”
“Let’s talk about it while we run,” Coach Harrison said and set his watch. “Let’s go.”
They set off from the house at a moderate pace, and Jamie took turns with Bryce explaining some of the amazing things that had happened — killing Renn, Fred’s kidnap ordeal, the demon, and their spring break in Rivershire.
They passed the stone pillars of the town’s east gate and ran along the paved streets, all of the boys turning their heads as they took in the sights.
“Pretty little town,” Max said as they neared the first shops that lined both sides of the road. They slowed to a jog as they dodged a carriage, glossy black with a pair of matching horses, their hooves clopping out a rhythm on the paving stones. Pedestrians stared at the boys as they went by, and a couple of them waved and called out to Jamie.
“Ooohh, Master Jamie,” Frankie said in a feminine, falsetto voice. Some of the boys snickered
“That’s what some people call him here,” Bryce said.
“That’s your new nickname.” Ivan bobbed his head.
Jamie frowned. “Next guy who calls me that will get translocated to the top of the nearest tree.”
Alberto nudged Bryce. “Can he do that?”
“Yep. Wanna see?”
“No thanks.”
They ran on, and Jamie and Bryce explained how the people of Rivershire had originally come from Ireland and Scotland and hadn’t been aware that they were on a different world. “Most of them still don’t believe it,” Jamie said as they turned left on a busy street. “The kids at the school are starting to get it, though. Some of them have been to Earth already.”
“Don’t they kinda stand out?” Max said. “They dress funny here. They look like Amish people or something, with all those long dresses and the guys wearing suspenders and stuff.”
“We were careful about it when we took then there,” Jamie said. “They only went to my house, pretty much.”
They trotted through the south gates and the road changed over from paving stones to hard-packed dirt again. Jamie pointed out his grandfather’s headquarters when it came into view on their right, and then the school on their left. He proudly identified the new library and cafeteria, and the maintenance facility behind it.
They passed the main building, and out on the playground were a dozen kids, students who lived too far away to walk home after school, and their parents hadn’t picked them up yet. “Can we hold up a sec?” Jamie motioned for them to stop and their group slowed to a halt. The kids noticed them and called out to Jamie, then ran across the field to him and his teammates.
“Hey, Jamie!” Leora said when she neared. Milly and Daisy ran with her. “What are you doing?”
“This is my track team.” He gestured at the boys clustered around him. “I told you about them, remember? We’re running here because it’s raining where we live.”
“May we run with you?” Milly said, her face bright and eager.
“I don’t think you can keep up.”
“Oh, but we can! We are quite fast, we are.”
“I’m sure you are, but you need to stay here because your mom’s coming to pick you up soon, and she might worry if you’re gone.”
“Maybe next time, Milly,” Bryce said.
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“Bryce,” Frankie said, “you know these kids, too?”
“Most of ’em.”
“I love the way they talk. Sounds Irish.”
Miss Duffy, who had been sitting at the picnic table under the big oak tree, rose and walked toward them. Jamie waved to her and she waved back, but then her eyes settled on someone else. Jamie turned to see Coach Dave, staring at her with his lips slightly parted.
“Who’s that, Jamie?” the young coach asked quietly.
“Miss Duffy. She’s our music and art teacher.”
The young coach didn’t respond, but continued to stare at Miss Duffy, their gazes fixed as if they were held by an invisible bond.
Oh, no. Jamie thought as he recognized the look that passed between them. Not again.
Coach Harrison cleared his throat and said, “Come on, guys, we need to get moving. We’ve stopped long enough.”
They began to run again, away from the school, Coach Dave stealing a couple of glances over his shoulder as they went. Bryce maneuvered next to Jamie, leaned close to him and said in a low voice, “Did you see that?”
“Yes,” Jamie said tersely.
“Remind you of anyone we know? Like maybe John Paul and—”
“Don’t even think about it. Just don’t.”
“Why? It worked out okay for them, didn’t it?”
“It was just a look Bryce. That’s all. Don’t read too much into it.”
“Riiiigght,” Bryce said slowly and smirked. “Just a look.”
Coach Harrison clapped his hands again and said, “We need to pick up the pace over the next five miles. We’re runnin’ like a bunch of old ladies.”
They kicked into high gear and the talking ceased the rest of the way.
They finished in front of the stone house, some of the boys stretching, some walking around with their hands on tops of their heads, all of them breathing heavily. Jamie noticed that they were looking at him differently since they’d come to Rivershire. Before, he had been just a lowly freshman to them, who had to work his way up the ladder of esteem one hard-earned rung at a time. Now it was if they viewed him with more respect, maybe even a little awe, with furtive sideways glances or unexpected widening of their eyes.
Jamie worried that they might be afraid of him, but they seemed to be trying to follow Bryce’s example as to how to handle these stunning, newfound facts — Jamie was a powerful sorcerer and they were on another world. Bryce was as casual and nonchalant as before, as if to say, So what? It’s just Jamie and it’s just magic. No big deal.
