The Silver Glove by Suzy McKee Charnas Page A

that awful man. How in the world could we get away from him? I ached with cold and hopelessness.
    The rowboat lake was below us now. We had been maneuvered over water so that we couldn’t land. The kite string curved away down a huge, impossible distance back to the Sheep Meadow.
    â€œGrab the rug fringe and hang on,” Gran said. She lay down beside me, her lumpy old hands twisted firmly into the thick fringe next to mine. The carpet shivered under us and we banked and headed west toward the river, traveling so fast that I could scarcely breathe.
    Nothing spectacular, mind you, no loops or rolls or zigzags, but flat-out velocity into the west wind. The kite chased us, but its line held it back. It got smaller, falling behind, and my heart rate started to slow to mere overdrive.
    Then the kite made a dive, looped back across its own string, and flew free, its cutting line trailing maybe twenty feet—cut by itself.
    As the tiger kite sped toward us, I saw something that made me shut my eyes: a metallic glitter of the sun’s sudden light along the wooden frame—the edges of razor blades, fixed to the wooden spars. Now I knew why the big samurai kite had gone down trailing raggedy flags. It had been sliced to death, not by a fighting kite but by a killer kite.
    â€œHold tight!” Gran screamed in my ear. Our carpet did a sudden sideslip and fast climb that almost made me whoops.
    Something brushed my right hand like a feather of fire, and we sped upward at a steep angle.
    I opened my eyes and saw a line of blood along my knuckles. Below us, the killer kite stalled, turned, and shot toward the carpet’s underside. We dropped hard toward the ground, as if to knock the killer out of the air with our sheer weight.
    The little kite turned belly-up and crossed underneath us, hitting us a light blow. A three-inch slice in the weave opened right next to my knee.
    The tiger kite spiraled off at an angle, righted itself, and sailed in a high, wide, mocking loop over us. Our carpet flew heavily now, losing altitude over the dull, rippled sheen of the Hudson River.
    My cut hand hurt. The pain sort of merged with the cold that ached in my clenched fingers.
    The tiger kite peeled out of the sky like a fighter plane in an old movie.
    â€œAagh!” I screamed. “Get away!”
    Then the gulls came: big, white, noisy birds in a riotous gang looping through the sky. They swarmed around the kite and pretended to ram it, sheering off at the last minute. They stalled and flipped and clowned, squawking and nipping at it with their ugly orange beaks, quarreling as if over a choice piece of edible garbage.
    The kite sliced through the mob of birds, leaving two of them streaked with blood. I saw one flutter down silently and disappear into the river.
    The gulls screamed and attacked. A wild melee filled the air with drifting feathers and scraps of paper. The sun glanced off white wings and darting eyes. Two more gulls tumbled down, crying.
    Then the kite plummeted, pinwheeling, the gulls after it all the way. They burst outward in all directions over the water, yelling and swooping to snatch bits of paper from each other’s beaks. The kite sank.
    One by one, the gulls settled on the river. The water lifted them in a peaceful, bobbing motion. They dug their beaks into their feathers, rooting around disgustingly for bugs to eat. I loved them.
    â€œI thought they’d never come,” Gran said. “Someone must have been feeding them over at the yacht basin.”
    I was shaking all over. “What was it? The kite, I mean.”
    â€œIt was what you called The Claw,” she said, “in one of its many manifestations. Basically, it’s a sort of evil impulse that Brightner can project out of himself and into objects like that little kite, to animate them and send them to do his will. Like the hangers at Kress’s that he organized into a monster, and now this kite—brilliantly done, too.