Magic Street Page 0,83

out his name. Because he told me his name, you see."

"What is it?" Mack quickly asked.

"Don't even ask that," said Yolanda. "That's his desire, talking through you. If you say his true name, then he can come out. You're his key, don't you see? All the power of these hundreds of humans is stored up in you, except whatever got bled off to grant their foolish wishes. You've been strong for him, I can see it. You've been keeping it in, not letting any of it out for a long time. But now he wants it out, and he'll have it. If he could get you to say his name, then it would be easier. He could rise up out of the earth himself and no one could stop him then. He'd be like in the ancient days when our kind first came to earth and we all had the shape he's never given up. The first thing he'd do, Mack Street, is swallow you whole, so all that stored-up power was inside him."

"And you're here to stop him?" asked Ceese.

"I'm not here," she said. "That's what Mack understands and you don't. I'm trapped in a jar in a clearing, guarded by a panther, and so is Puck. When we bound Oberon, when he was writhing on the ground in the middle of the henge, when he was sinking down into the earth and it was swallowing him up to hold him captive so he couldn't destroy the human race, he still had his power over Puck.

Once a slave to the king of the fairies, then you're never really free. He can't be trusted, poor Puck, because he's bound by my husband's will. So at the last moment, the old worm tore the light out of us and put it in two jars and hung them like lanterns in a faraway place where he thought we'd never find it."

She sighed. "It took us all these years. Nearly four hundred years. And yet we couldn't get to where he held us captive. Because we could only control bodies in this world. Until you were born, Mack, if you want to call it that, all we could do was petty magicks. Bending humans to our will. Puck didn't mind - it amused him - but I was tired of using castoff bodies and it didn't amuse me to torment the others who still had a firm grip on theirs. We hung around here, but we went our separate ways.

Until we felt it. The surge of power. The darkness like a sudden blast of licorice. Of anise. We knew he had found a passageway that let him push something of himself out into the world. Puck found the way to you first - of course he would, he's still bound to Oberon and such binding works both ways, Oberon can't stir without Puck feeling it. I'm bound, too, but only as a wife. So you were already born when I arrived. Born and put in that shopping bag and taken back to the spout through which the old worm reaches into this world."

"There's no way that Mack is something evil," said Ceese, finally making some sense of what she was saying.

"Is a hammer a good carpenter or a bad one?" asked Yolanda. "The answer is, it's no carpenter at all, and the good or bad of the hammer depends on how the carpenter uses it."

"He's a tool when Oberon says he is. He'll have the use of him when he wants."

"He's the worm in your dream," Mack said. "The slug with wings. The one I fight."

"I don't know how twisted up that dream gets, but Mack, when you go to the worm, it's not to fight him. It's to be swallowed. It's to bring the power of these people into him. Nourish him. Make him mighty again."

"No way," said Mack. "I won't do it."

"You're not like Ceese here. I think maybe Ceese could tell him no. But you could no more deny him than your finger could refuse to pick your nose. May not like the work, but it can't say no."

"You saying Mack's not really human?" Ceese asked.

"Mack is what he is. Once you turn magic loose in the world, it becomes what it becomes. I don't know how reliable a tool he'll be. And you can count on this - Oberon hasn't been waiting all this time just to have everything depend on a changeling who's been under the daily influence