The Copper Gauntlet

He’d always been a little creeped out by the basement, which was full of old auto parts, broken furniture, dollhouses, dolls that needed repairing, and antique tin toys that sometimes whirred to life.

A bar of yellow light peeked out from under the doorway that led through to another of Alastair’s storage rooms, full of even more junk he hadn’t gotten around to fixing yet. Call gathered his courage and limped across the room, pushing the door open.

It didn’t budge. His father had locked it.

Call’s heart sped.

There was no reason for his dad to lock away a bunch of old, half-repaired stuff. No reason at all.

“Dad?” Call called through the door, wondering if Alastair was in there for some reason.

But he heard something very different stir on the other side. Fury rose up in him, terrible and choking. He took his little knife and tried to press it into the gap on the door, tried to push back the bolt.

After a tense moment, the tip of Miri pressed the right place and the lock sprung. The door opened.

The back of the cellar was no longer the way Call remembered it. The clutter had been removed, leaving space for what looked like a very spare mage’s office. A desk stood in one corner, piles of old and new books surrounding it. There was a cot in the other. And in the center of the floor, bound by shackles and gagged with a horrible-looking leather muzzle, was Havoc.

The wolf lunged toward Call, whining, only to be snapped back by his chains. Call sank to his knees, fingers ruffling Havoc’s fur as he felt for the release on the collar. He was so happy to see Havoc and so overwhelmed with rage at what his father had done that for a moment he missed the most important detail.

But as he scanned the room for where Alastair kept the key, he finally saw what he should have noticed first.

The cot against the far wall had shackles attached to it as well.

Shackles just the right size for a boy who was about to turn thirteen.

CALL COULDN’T STOP staring at the shackles. His heart felt like it was too small in his chest, desperately pumping away without making the blood move in his veins. The shackles were forged out of iron, inscribed with alchemical symbols, obvious mage-work, sunk deep into the wall behind them. Once they were clapped on, it would be impossible to get free….

Behind Call, Havoc made a whimpering sound. Call forced himself to look away, to concentrate on freeing his wolf. The muzzle was easy to get off, but the moment he did so, Havoc started barking wildly, as though trying to tell Call the story of how he’d wound up chained in the basement.

“Shhhhhh,” Call said, grabbing Havoc’s nose in panic, trying to keep him quiet. “Don’t wake up Dad.”

Havoc whimpered as Call tried to pull himself together. The floor of the storage room was concrete, and Call reached down into it for a jolt of earth magic to break the wolf’s chains. The earth magic, when it came, felt weak: Call’s concentration was all over the place and he knew it. He just couldn’t believe his father would pretend to be sorry about Havoc being missing and drive him around, letting him call for Havoc when he knew the whole time where he was, after he had chained him in the basement.

Except he couldn’t have chained Havoc in the basement himself. He’d been with Call the whole time. So someone else must have done it. A friend of his father’s? Call’s mind whirled. Alastair didn’t have any friends.

His heart sped up at the thought, and the intense combination of fear and magic split Havoc’s chains — the wolf was free. Call darted across the room to Alastair’s desk and grabbed at the papers there. They were all covered in his dad’s fine spidery handwriting: pages of notes and drawings. There was a sketch of the gates of the Magisterium, and of a pillared building Call didn’t know, and of the airplane hangar where the Iron Trial had been held. But most of the drawings were of a weird mechanical thing that looked like an old-fashioned armored metal gauntlet, covered with strange symbols. It would have been cool if something about it hadn’t sent a chill of creepiness up Call’s spine.