Bite-Sized Magic

by Kathryn Littlewood

  “Tactical advantage?” Rose repeated with a gulp.

  “I have in my captivity,” said Mr. Butter, “the one thing that Rosemary Bliss cares most about in the world: her family. Now, if you fail to perfect the remaining recipes, I have the power to take that family away.”

  “But they can help me!” said Rose. “We’re all magical bakers!”

  “I don’t think so,” said Mr. Butter sourly. “I want enough brainpower in that kitchen to fix the recipes—not enough to outsmart me and sabotage the company.”

  “I knew it,” said Rose. “What happened to all that junk you told me about trying to brighten people’s lives with baked goods? I believed you. I would have helped you! I would have helped you make better snack cakes!”

  “I want more than better snack cakes,” said Mr. Butter with a snarl. The lines of his face seemed to deepen, and the corners of his barely visible lips turned down. “It’s not enough to have a better snack cake. I have bigger plans, a grander vision.” He spread his arms wide. “Mostess Snack Cakes need to be so good people will kill for them.”

  Something dark flashed in his eyes, and Mr. Butter pointed a crooked finger directly at Rose. “And you’re going to make them that way—or else.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The Bunny and the Hag

  After Mr. Kerr and Mr. Butter took Rose back to the Development Kitchen, she silently climbed the stairs to her room, ignoring the questions from Marge and the other bakers, even ignoring Gus, and slept until three that afternoon. She generally disapproved of people sleeping during the day (and by people she really meant Sage and Ty on the weekend) but what with preparing the antidote for the Moony Pyes and saving Marge from tearing out her own hair, she hadn’t slept at all the night before.

  And she was upset at seeing her parents held captive.

  It was bad enough that Rose was being forced to help the evil Mostess Corporation take over the country—but the fact that her family was now in danger because of her was too much to bear. If Rose didn’t do exactly what Mr. Butter wanted, exactly how he wanted her to do it, who knew what he would do to her parents and to Balthazar?

  She was groggy and confused when she finally woke up, and her pillow was wet with drool. As she rubbed her face and sat up, she remembered everything. She had to rescue her parents and stop the Mostess Corporation and somehow fix Calamity Falls.

  Rose shook her head. It was too much to think about.

  Just then, the sound of Marge’s voice from the test kitchen reached Rose’s ears.

  “Rose!” Marge was calling out in a sharp, loud voice. “Please come down and get started! These Glo-Balls won’t fix themselves!”

  Through the glass window of her bedroom, Rose could see Marge holding up a tray of Glo-Balls, which were tiny puffs of chocolate cake covered in coconut that glowed in different colors: neon blue, neon green, neon orange, and neon pink. Rose thought they looked more like signs in the window of a seedy diner than things people should eat.

  “I don’t want to,” said Rose, looking around at the glass walls of her room, which felt more like a prison every second.

  Just then, Gus jumped down from the windowsill. “Well, well, well,” said the cat, swishing his tail. “Look who’s awake.”

  Rose folded her arm across her eyes to block out the world. “I don’t want to fix the recipes, Gus. I don’t want to help Mr. Butter and his Rolling Pin people. I want them to let Mom and Dad and Balthazar out, and I want to go home.”

  “Ugh.” Gus sighed. “You’re just like Moses.”

  “Moses?” Rose asked. “Like, Bible Moses? From the Old Testament? How?”

  Gus sat on Rose’s chest, and his heavy, furry warmth felt like a balm on Rose’s worried heart. “Moses was a Hebrew slave born in Egypt,” the cat explained. “But his mother sent him down a river in a basket, and he was found by the pharaoh’s wife and raised as a son of the pharaoh instead.”

  “How is that like me?” Rose asked. She loved the cat—honest she did—but sometimes she tired of how long it took him to say anything.

  “Hold on, Rose,” said the cat, pressing a paw to her lips. “Moses was next in line to become the pharaoh, and he was thrilled, I tell you, thrilled—until he learned that he was in actuality a Hebrew slave.”

  “Again,” said Rose, “feel free to wind your way back to how this relates to me.”

  “Patience!” Gus protested, holding out one of his paws. “Now, of course, being a Hebrew slave himself, Moses wanted to free the rest of the slaves. So he wandered into the desert. And he came back to Pharaoh’s court a long while later, begging Pharaoh to free the slaves, and he had to go to all sorts of trouble to do it. There were frogs and locusts and boils and the Red Sea split in two and a forty-year journey, and frankly the whole thing was a big mess.” Gus twitched his nose and scratched behind his ear. “Do you see my point?”

  Rose furrowed her brow. “Slavery is the greatest evil of civilization, justice is hard-won, and cats are long-winded?”

  “Yes,” Gus said, baring his sharp teeth. “All that is true. But my point is this: Don’t you think it would have been easier for Moses if instead he had just worked within the system? Isn’t it easier to free the slaves after you yourself have become the pharaoh?”

  Rose sighed and curled into a ball, dislodging the cat, who scrambled atop her hip. “I am not a pharaoh, and this is not Egypt, and I don’t see what this has to do with me.”

  Gus stalked forward and sat on Rose’s head, which he did when he wanted to truly make a point. “If you want to take down the Mostess Corporation, you have two options. You can try to rescue your family and leave, like Moses, risking your own life and the lives of everyone in your family. Or, you can pretend to cooperate while planning your attack, making the recipes Mr. Butter wants and their antidotes, then sneak up from behind and ruin their entire operation.” He paused. “Which sounds like the better plan to you?”

  “The second,” said Rose, removing the cat from her head and placing him at her side. She sat up. “I’ve got to do it.”

  Gus put a paw on Rose’s forehead. “You must, it’s true. You don’t have a choice. Not if you want to keep your family safe.”

  “Rose, please!” Marge shouted up. Her voice sounded worried and thin. “The Glo-Balls!”

  Rose looked to Gus and grumbled. “Okay, let’s go make some evil Glo-Balls.”

  “And?” said Gus.

  Rose turned up a corner of her mouth. “And the antidote.”

  Rose and the bakers stood over the prep table and stared down at the tray of chocolate Glo-Balls, which were the exact same colors of the highlighters Rose used at school.

  “Man, do I want one of these,” said Gene, salivating. “They look way better than those Moony Pyes.”

  “Moony Pyes are gross,” said Felanie with a shudder.

  “Grosser than gross,” said Melanie. “They’re . . . grewse.”

  Rose looked to Marge, confused, and rolled up the white sleeves of her baker’s uniform. “They’re not still under the Moony Pye spell?”

  Marge pointed proudly toward the stove. “I made them some Dragomiresti’s Apricot Jam! We all had scones with apricot jam for breakfast, and now we’re feeling a lot less Moony, if you know what I mean.”

  “Though I am craving apricots,” said Ning, patting his round stomach. “Sweet, delicious apricots!”

  “It’s a trade-off, Ning,” said Marge. “Go with it.”

  “But even more than that, I’m wanting some of these here Glo-Balls,” Ning said.

  “Me too,” said Jasmine. She blinked, and her eyes seemed to grow. “Something about the way they glow . . . I really want them.”

  Rose noticed that she, too, felt a strong urge to eat a Glo-Ball, even though she knew they were just dressed-up pieces of brown junk. Still, up close, the coconut-covered pastries seemed irresistible. The colors were so bright—the blues so blue, the greens so green—that each Glo-Ball looked like an enormous neon jewel.r />
  “Pretty,” Felanie said underneath her breath.

  “As the, erm, Directrice,” Rose said, “I will sample the Glo-Ball.”

  “Lucky,” Melanie whispered.

  Rose reached toward the neon-colored balls and popped a piece of an orange one in her mouth. The frosting tasted like shredded tissue paper, the chocolate cake tasted like gluey ash, and the creamy filling tasted like frothy, warmed-over saliva. And it was all sickeningly sweet.

  “Ugh!” said Rose, spitting it into the sink. “I hate it,” she said, perplexed. “I really hate it.” She rinsed her mouth, then rinsed it again. “But I want to eat another one right now. Maybe.”

  “That’s why the recipe needs work,” said Marge. “It’s not perfectly addictive.”

  Rose shuddered at the thought of what might happen if they were. “Okay,” she said. “Show me how you guys make these.”

  Gus sat on Rose’s shoulder as she watched the bakers re-create Lily’s Glo-Ball recipe.

  Marge held out another of Lily’s creamy-colored, beautifully copied-out recipe cards and hollered out orders. Jasmine made the fluffy balls of chocolate cake, while Gene, the Vice President of Fillings, pulled a fire hose from the wall and attached a long metal wand to the end. It looked like an enormous hypodermic needle.

  “What are you doing with that fire hose, Gene?” asked Rose.

  “Fire hose?” Puzzled, Gene looked at the object in his hand. “Oh man,” he said. “You thought this was a fire hose? No, this is a Preservation Nozzle.”

  Rose saw that the hose was connected to a churning tank of a thick clearish substance that looked a lot like mucus, which she hadn’t noticed before. Yech.

  As if he’d done this a couple of thousand times before—which he probably had, Rose thought—Gene brought the hose to the tray of hot chocolate cake balls and injected each one with a small dose of the churning white goop.

  “That’s the filling that goes into the Glo-Balls?” Rose’s stomach did a gentle flip. “That weird snot?”

  “No no, those are the preservatives,” Gene explained. “It’s an FLCP must. A dollop of this ensures that those Glo-Balls won’t go bad until after the earth has been inherited by zombies and cockroaches. Keeps them tasting as good as the day they were made—even a thousand years from now.” He smiled proudly.

  Rose thought of the Prohibition-era Dinky Cake sitting under the display jar in the main production facility.

  “Some things just shouldn’t be possible,” she said to Gus, who sat next to her on the spotless stainless-steel prep table. He nodded in agreement.

  After Gene had filled all of the Glo-Balls with their preservative snot, Ning and Felanie prepared four separate bowls of plain white vanilla frosting. Then they produced a red mason jar that contained a large black beetle. The beetle was turning circles inside the jar, as if looking for the exit. It looked more gross than magical; but then again, so did the Moon’s Cheese.

  “What is that?” Rose asked.

  “The Blinding Beetle,” said Marge, handing out black welding helmets to Rose and the rest of the bakers. “You’ll want to put these on.”

  Rose had seen helmets like these on the faces of construction workers joining steel beams with white-hot sparks outside the Calamity Falls Library. They looked a little heavy-duty and out of place for a bakery.

  She pulled hers over her head. It was like someone had turned out the lights. “I can’t see anything,” Rose said, “and I can barely breathe. Is this really necessary?”

  “Yes,” said Ning, opening the jar and dumping the Blinding Beetle into the mixing bowl.

  Rose stood in the pitch dark, listening to her own breath, until suddenly the beetle began to glow like a firecracker, running around the sides of the bowl and spraying a trail of crackling orange sparks from its wings. It sounded like the sparklers that she, Sage, and Ty would light in the backyard on July fourth—all hisses and crackles and pops.

  Ning spooned it over to the next bowl, where it began to glow neon green, shooting streams of green sparks. And then another bowl where it was an electric pink smudge in the dark. And then a final bowl, where it burned orbits of metallic blue. Even through the welder’s mask, the glow was almost too bright to look at. Trails of light snaked across Rose’s vision, so that she had to blink and look away.

  When the beetle had gone dark again, Ning trapped it and dropped it back into the red jar, then snapped on the lid.

  Rose took off her mask, wiping beads of sweat from her forehead, and saw that the four bowls of frosting were now neon orange, green, pink, and blue. Inside the mason jar, the unassuming black beetle crawled about looking exhausted.

  “My my,” said Marge, who was blinking rapidly. “My my.”

  “Interesting,” Rose said, flipping through the Apocrypha. She searched for any mention of the Blinding Beetle, and at last landed on this page:

  It was in 1832 in the Thai village of Songkram that the visiting British trader Deveril Shank, a descendent of Albatross Bliss, did discover the Blinding Beetle in the wild jungles of Southeast Asia. He did use the magical sparks produced by the Blinding Beetle to color the frosting of a poisoned cake that he fed to the royal family of Songkram, who had threatened to expel him. The royal family ate the cake, even though it was poisoned, because they were so entranced by the icing.

  “That’s awful!” said Marge, who had been leaning over Rose’s shoulder and reading the Apocrypha, too.

  “I know,” Rose said.

  Marge glanced back down at the recipe card that had been left to her by Lily. “I never saw the original recipe, only the version that our former Directrice gave to us.” She sucked in a large, dramatic breath and shook her head. “Albatross Bliss poisoned people! What is wrong with your family?”

  “They aren’t my family,” said Rose, feeling slightly defensive—only there wasn’t enough time to explain the Bliss family tree, and how a never-settled feud between two brothers—good-hearted Filbert and dark-hearted Albatross—led to two kinds of kitchen magic. There was helpful magic worked by Rose’s mother (and by Rose, too, she reminded herself). And there was the dark magic Albatross and his descendants performed.

  “But never mind that. Even though these are awful”—Rose pointed at the various bowls in front of her—“they’re nowhere near awful enough.”

  “What do you mean?” said Gus, hopping up onto the table. He shivered and all his hair stood on end. “I really hate bugs.”

  “This recipe only makes the Glo-Balls irresistible from the outside,” Rose explained. “They need to be irresistible from the inside.”

  Just then, Gene waddled over to the group. Rose ran her finger across her mouth, as though she was zipping up a zipper, and motioned for Gus to be quiet.

  “She really knows her stuff!” said Gene, patting Rose on the back.

  “Indeed!” Melanie and Felanie said simultaneously, staring into one of the frosting bowls.

  Rose beamed as she flipped through the pages of the Apocrypha and found this recipe, which seemed perfectly awful.

  FAMINE CAKE: For the terror of the towns

  It was in 1742 in the Irish Town of Ballybay that the nefarious Albatross descendant Callum O’Frame did bake tiny cakes that, when eaten, did cause the folk of Ballybay to feel a great emptiness in their bellies. They did eat as much food as they could, but nothing did cure the hunger. They ate up all of their own food, then did rove about the land in search of food, murdering their neighbors for boiled potatoes and shepherd’s pie. The Ballybayans did transform into ravenous beasts.

  Sir Callum O’Frame did mix two fists of flour with one fist of chocolate powder and one fist of white sugar. He did add one staff of cow’s butter with two chicken’s eggs and one fist of milk, one acorn of vanilla, and the howl of a Hag o’ the Mist, which surpassed even the howling stomachs of the villagers.

  “So, if we make this recipe, then we’ll become beasts?” Marge asked. She pulled off her chef’s toque, which was no lon
ger white, exactly—it was dirtied with bits of food coloring and brown sugar. “I don’t want to become a howling hag.”

  “This’ll cure you,” said Rose, pointing to the fine print on the back of the page.

  BUNNY BUNS: To cease the effects of the FAMINE CAKE

  The traveling baker Seamus Bliss did witness the murderous starvation of the perfectly well-fed Ballybay villagers and did fix for them sweet buns that did cause them to feel perfectly satiated whenever they touched the fur of a pure and sweet rabbit.

  Sir Bliss did mix three fists of flour with one acorn of the yeast, one fist cow’s milk, one chicken’s egg, and one fist of sugar. He did add the blessing of the Benedictine Bunny.

  Thereafter, the townsfolk did wear preserved rabbit’s feet around their necks—garnered from rabbits who had died of natural causes, of course—so that they would always be touching the fur of a pure and sweet rabbit.

  “Wow!” Gene exclaimed, his eyebrows spiking nearly to the top of his head. “Maybe that’s the origin of rabbit’s-foot key chains! I love those! I have a whole box of ’em under my bed!”

  “But where are we going to get the Benedictine Bunny?” Rose wondered aloud. “Let alone a Hag o’ the Mist?”

  While the bakers stood around and thought, Gus hopped into Rose’s arms and whispered into her ear. “It looked like they have every possible ingredient in that cake-shaped warehouse,” he said softly. “The one with the robots. I’m sure they’d give you the Hag o’ the Mist. The Benedictine Bunny, on the other hand, might cause some suspicion. You’d probably have to steal that one.”

  “Good idea,” Rose whispered into the cat’s ear. She let Gus hop down onto the floor, and then repeated his idea word for word.

  “I’ll go,” said Gene after Rose had finished speaking. He puffed out his chest. “I used to do some heavy-duty shoplifting when I was a teenager, before I straightened myself out and found baking. I’m sure I could make that Benedictine Bunny disappear like a rabbit in a top hat.”