The power washed up over and around them, blotting out the backyard. A moment later, Kit andPonch were standing in a parking lot two towns away, looking at another school building.

It was considerably smaller than Kit s junior high, though this place shared the same kind of late-seventies institutional architecture: a lot of plate glass, a lot of brick. Kit looked around them through the slight heat-haze shimmer of the invisibility spell, keepingPonch with him for the moment simply by holding on to his collar. The school was surrounded by suburban housing and, off to one side, what looked like the back of a strip mall; maybe about fifty cars were parked around the school. It had a small playing field, but nobody was out there.

Kit wasn t overly concerned even if anyone had been out there, they wouldn t have been able to seePonch and him. Now the point was to find Darryl. The structure of the locator spell mandated that Darryl was somewhere within a two-hundred-meter radius: All Kit had to do was look around.

Two hundred meters, Kit thought,could definitely include at least part of the school building . He walked toward it, looking for any sign of the characteristic aura that would surround the object of his search once he got within visual range. Beside him,Ponch paced along, looking at everything, his nose working.

From around the side of the school, a white van drove toward the front entrance and pulled up. Kit gave the van a wide berth, having no desire to be run over by something that couldn t see him. A moment later, the driver got out and went in through the front doors. Kit looked through the front windows of the school, foundhimself looking at office space, not classrooms.  Okay,  he said,  so we ll go in. Don t start barking at anything, whatever you do!

Please,Ponch said in a somewhat offended tone. Kit smiled in slight amusement as they headed for the doors. Once upon a time, his dog wouldn t have been quite so focused duringa wizardry , but lately, sincePonch had started actively finding things like other universes this had changed.