access to your own potential, your own powers. You’ve been cut from the grounding forces of your own family bloodline. A nameless wizard can still be a powerful wizard, but almost never a well-rounded one.
I stared down at my gloved arm, thinking of my dead mother. Whether we like to admit it or not, our parents give us everything we have to start out with, good and bad. Sometimes their mistakes hang around your neck like loops of heavy, unbreakable chain.
Blue and I reached the nursery. I couldn’t hear any babies crying, but Mother Karen had probably put a sound-dampening enchantment on the room so her other kids wouldn’t be disturbed. She’d surely have some kind of baby monitor working at the same time. I opened the door.
The room was in utter chaos. Mother Karen was floating in the air, surrounded by a swirling storm of stuffed animals and colorful teething toys. She was holding onto the edge of the changing table for dear life, her free hand clutching a folded dirty diaper. Her graying brown hair was blown out in a wild corona around her face. Below her, the naked baby boy on the changing pad giggled and kicked in delight.
“Karen—” I began, ducking to dodge a flying teddy bear.
“All under control! Shut the door!” she cheerfully yelled back.
“But—”
“TakeBluebacktobedandshutthedoor!”
I quickly did as she told me, feeling rejected and useless. And, frankly, a bit scared. Most Talented kids don’t start developing their magical skills until they’ve reached an age of rational thought. And that’s exactly as it should be. A happy baby with full-blown magical powers is far more dangerous than an angry baby with a bag full of live grenades.
And we apparently had a house full of ’em. Christ in a chum bucket.
“Okay, I’m supposed to take you back to bed,” I said to Blue as I led him down the hall to his room.
“But I’m not tired,” he replied.
“When adults tell you to go to bed, that mostly means they want you to stay in your room and play quietly.”
“Oh.”
I pulled open the door to his room. It was one of the smallest bedrooms, maybe eight by eight, with a child-size low bed in the corner, a green beanbag seat, a toy chest, and a play table and little red chair. The dissected remains of an old Batman clock radio lay in neat piles on the beige carpet. Blue had even carefully pried the transistors off the circuit board and had put them in color-coordinated piles.
“Why did you do that?” I asked, pointing at the radio dissection.
“I wanted to know how it works,” he replied.
“Until you’ve read the manual, that’s not going to help you understand it,” I said. “It’s just going to leave you with a broken radio.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Because you can’t put it back together again the way it was, and so it won’t work anymore.”
Blue stared down at the radio parts, a slightly rebellious look of determination creeping across his face. “I bet I remember exactly how it goes together.”
I picked up one of the transistors. “Remember how this was stuck on with metal blobs?”
“Yes.”
“The blobs were stuff called solder. Regular glue won’t work. And since solder is poisonous and soldering irons are dangerous, I’m not going to give you any to play with.”
Any other kid genius would have gotten mad at this point; I was partly testing Blue to see if he had indeed shuffled all his capacity for “bad” emotions off into the demon he’d created. But Blue didn’t even seem the least bit frustrated. Of course, his mind was older than mine, almost as old as Cooper’s.
“Why won’t glue work?” he asked.
“It doesn’t conduct electricity.”
Blue reached down to the carpet and picked up a twisted paper clip, which he’d apparently used as a tool in his radio dissection. “Does this conduct electricity?”
“Yes. So do you. So don’t go sticking that in an electrical socket, or you’ll hurt yourself.”
“I don’t hurt,” Blue replied, turning the paper clip over in his hands. I realized for the first time that his little nails were chipped, and he had cuts and blisters on his fingers, presumably from prying the radio apart. “What if I melted this and used it to attach the transistor back on the green board thing?”
“How do you plan to melt it?”
He looked up at me. “With my mind.”
Uh-oh. “It would take a lot of heat to melt that.”
He shrugged. “That’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. You’d melt the circuit board and the transistor. You also