Love Croakies

by Sam Cheever

  The inherent justice in using the cupid’s bows against them was almost too much. I dissolved into laughter again. And was happy when Grym’s deep chuckles joined with mine.

  We were all sitting around the table at Croakies. Grym, me, Sebille, and Archie, trying to come up with a plan for finding the serum and stopping the cherubs.

  Archie sipped the tea Sebille had given him. “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and I keep coming back to the missing serum.”

  I nodded because I agreed. “Whoever was behind the theft has to be the same one sending the evil cherubs around.”

  “Did the ogres admit to selling a ward-busting tool like the one they gave you to anyone else?”

  “They denied it. But I couldn’t help feeling like they weren’t telling the whole truth.” I glanced at Sebille.

  She nodded. “I agree. They’re a slippery bunch.”

  I barked out a laugh. “That’s certainly one way to put it.”

  “Feel like giving them another visit?” Grym asked, a sparkle in his eye.

  “Do I have to?” The fact that I sounded like a pouty seven-year-old trying to get out of eating her spinach did not escape me.

  “We need to find Lovelace,” Sebille said. “I think we should talk to this sister of his. Maybe she knows where the missing brother is. We’d probably have more luck talking to her than those big, naked guys.”

  Grym and Archie’s eyes went wide. “Naked?” Archie asked.

  Sebille’s gaze slid away from his. I fidgeted for a moment before I glanced up at the big clock on the wall. “Will you look at the time. I need to…um…go…see somebody about something.”

  Grym grabbed my arm before I could escape. “You get a temporary pass on that story, but I’ll expect a full accounting when this is over.”

  I flushed. “Yeah, we’ll see.”

  Archie had a thoughtful look on his face. “What are you thinking about?” Sebille asked him.

  The void sorcerer blinked. “Huh? Oh.” He shook his head. “Something’s niggling. I’ll remember it, given enough time.” He turned to me. “What type of artifact did the ogres give you?”

  “It looks like a bottle opener. They insist it can pierce any ward.”

  One of Archie’s shaggy brown brows lifted. “Have you tested it?” he asked.

  “I haven’t had time.” I frowned. “I just don’t know what good it will do us. It won’t find the serum or the person who took it.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Archie said. “As luck would have it, I’m familiar with that device. It’s called a Toll Token, one of a family of single-use artifacts that can be rented for a limited time. After the token is used for the pre-specified task, it automatically returns to the person who rented it out so it can be loaned again.”

  My eyes went wide. “Really? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  Grym looked, well grim. “They’re not exactly legal. I’d like to see the device,” he told me.

  Archie held up a hand. “You didn’t pay the ogres anything for it, did you?”

  Sebille and I shared a look.

  “What?” Grym asked.

  “We didn’t pay them,” Sebille said. “But we did sign a contract.”

  Archie paled. “What kind of contract?”

  Sebille looked at me. I grimaced. “Something about guaranteeing the item’s safety and…a bunch of other junk. It’ll be fine.” The airy quality I tried to insert into my voice sounded more panicked than lighthearted.

  “I can’t believe you signed a contract with the ogres you didn’t read.”

  “Of course we didn’t read it all,” Sebille exclaimed. “The tricky parts ended on his backside.”

  Grym and Archie stared at her.

  Finally, Grym said, “Please explain.”

  Sebille rolled her eyes, which was less than helpful, so I jumped in.

  “The contract was written on the big naked guy’s hairy back. Unfortunately, it was really wordy, so it kind of trailed down into other areas. I wasn’t looking at that any more than I had to. They were lucky I put my signature at the bottom.” My body convulsed in a violent shiver. “It was beyond disgusting.”

  “How did you affix your signature?” Archie asked.

  The sprite and I gave him a look.

  He waved it away. “Ink? Energy transfer? What? It’s important.”

  “Energy transfer,” Sebille said. “He gave us a choice, but that one didn’t require any touching.”

  “Dastardly buggers,” Archie exclaimed. He scrubbed a hand over his face and glanced at Grym. “It’ll take the two of us to handle this, I’m afraid. You as the law of Enchanted and me as a representative of the Société.”

  Uncle Pudsy was a Void Sorcerer with the Société of Dire Magic, the ruling magical body for the Earthly dimension.

  “So Sebille and I don’t need to go?”

  Archie glowered at us. “No. You’ve done quite enough damage.”

  My assistant and I bumped knuckles.

  “Don’t be so happy,” Grym said, narrowing his dark-caramel gaze on us. “You’ll have to decipher the log on the artifact. And believe me, as bad as our task is, yours is going to be ten times worse.”

  Despite his words, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face at getting out of another visit to the ogres. I nodded. “Just tell me how to do it.”

  Archie sighed. “You must find a spot that is completely free of conflicting magical energy. There must be no interference of any kind, or the log won’t open.”

  “Okay. Where would that be?”

  Sebille shrugged. “No idea. As far as I know, magic exists everywhere.”

  “Not quite true,” Archie said, standing up and brushing his hands over his robes. “There is one place that provides the neutrality you require.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  In answer to my question, Uncle Pudsy smiled.

  It wasn’t a nice smile.

  13

  To Grandmother’s House We Go

  I’d never seen so many glowy numbers, words, and icons. My eyes were slowly going crossed as I tried to make sense of them.

  The infernal crunching sound behind me wasn’t helping.

  “Will you please stop eating those cheesy crunchies and help me here?” I barked at the sprite.

  “I’m not done yet.”

  I made a grab for the bag, but she ducked out of the way, spilling cheesy crunchies onto the black, rubbery floor of our cozy little void. I shrugged. I was pretty sure the five-second rule didn’t apply in a magical void. I grabbed the fallen soldiers and crammed them into my mouth.

  Sebille leaned over my shoulder, her cheese breath wafting over me. “Maybe the columns are horizontal instead of vertical.”

  I peered at the wall-sized mess of indecipherable symbols and stuff and slowly tilted my head.

  Nothing.

  I squinted. The symbols wavered and then settled right back into their unintelligible order again.

  Sighing, I flung myself backward, startling Sebille into jerking away from me. “Watchit!” she yelled as two cheesy crunchies fell from her bag and onto the blackness beneath us. I plucked them up and shoved them into my mouth. “We’re never going to figure this out,” I mumbled around the savory treat.

  Sebille dropped down next to me with a sigh. “That hairy naked guy’s starting to look better and better.”

  I thought about it for a beat and then shook my head. “Nah. I’d still rather be in here trying to decipher the log.”

  We lay there, staring at the iridescent green figures hanging on the air in front of us. At first glance, they seemed to be a bunch of nonsense. Like somebody sneezed out a random mix of numbers, letters and symbols and they stuck to the wall.

  I frowned at the thought. “Do you think this was a trick?”

  Sebille crunched. “What do you mean?” she asked, a bright orange crumb shooting from her mouth and sticking to the wall of symbols.

  I stretched my sock
-covered toe toward the crumb and flicked it off, so it didn’t confuse us even more than we already were. “I mean, maybe this isn’t supposed to be legible. Maybe Grym and Archie just put us in here to punish us because they had to go read a hairy naked guy’s backside to find out what you and I promised in return for that artifact.”

  She shrugged. “It’s what I’d do.”

  “Yeah,” I said on a breath. “Me too.”

  We lay there a long time, only the sound of mutual crunching breaking the silence. Then Sebille said. “What if they forget to get us out of here?”

  “Grym wouldn’t forget us.”

  “Not on purpose. But the ogres might capture them or something. What if they can’t come back for days? Or weeks?”

  I frowned into the darkness. “How many bags of cheesy crunchies did you bring in here?”

  “Just one. But I have one of Lea’s apples and a dozen cookies too.”

  I sat up, leaning on my elbows. “You have cookies and you didn’t tell me?”

  “You’d have eaten them all by now.”

  I collapsed back onto the nothingness that formed the floor of the void. What could I say? She was right. “I’m thirsty.”

  Silence met my statement, and horror filled me. “You didn’t bring any drinks, did you?”

  “Why was it my job to think of everything?” she objected. “You could have brought drinks.”

  “You said you’d get us snacks. I just assumed.”

  “You know what they say about assuming, don’t you?”

  I flapped a hand at her, annoyed.

  We lay there a few more minutes, and another problem asserted itself. “I have to pee.”

  Sebille’s only response was to scoot further away from me.

  I sighed, squiggling uncomfortably. My bladder became more insistent by the moment. My foot bumped the artifact that was lying on the ground beneath the wall of figures.

  The columns of nonsense words and numbers shimmied and changed as the artifact moved.

  I blinked as one column of figures came into focus, and I was actually able to understand what it said. I sat up, using my finger as a pointer while I read. “Pascal Ormond, December 3rd, 2014, Warg spell. One use. Returned December 5th, 2014.”

  An indecipherable jumble of numbers and words followed that information. I figured it was an address because it ended with the name of an alternate dimension. “They rent inter-dimensionally too?”

  Sebille dropped her bag of crunchies as she sat up. “Makes sense. That portal they took us through probably feeds a bunch of pathways.” She glanced at me. “How’d you make that change?”

  “I bumped the artifact with my toe.”

  Sebille lay down on her belly and shimmied to the artifact, taking care to stay beneath the wall of shimmering symbols. She changed the orientation of the artifact slightly. “What did that do?”

  I squinted but saw no change. “Nothing.”

  She tried again and again, but nothing changed. All we had was Pascal the Warg.

  Sebille flopped back down beside me. “Another dead end.”

  “I really have to pee,” I whined. Sebille probably rolled her eyes, but I couldn’t see them rolling in the dark.

  We lay there another few minutes. Then an idea occurred, and I slapped my head. “Of course!” I sat up and threw myself to my belly.

  “What are you doing?” Sebille asked, sounding bored.

  “I’m an artifact Keeper,” I declared, reaching for the artifact.

  “Well, duh,” she responded in a dull voice.

  “No. I mean, it won’t respond to you because you don’t have Keeper energy. I do.” I moved the artifact slightly and Sebille surged upright, her green eyes glowing in the cast-off light from the log. “Yes! Keep moving it. Slowly. It’s changing.”

  Ten minutes of subtle turns and shifts of the artifact finally landed us on the information we needed.

  I held the pointy end of the opener off the ground an inch and shifted it sideways a centimeter, stopping as Sebille gave a whoop of joy! “That’s it! There she is!”

  I couldn’t let go of the artifact to read it. “Memorize it and read it to me, so I can memorize it too. We don’t want to go through this again to find it.”

  Silence met my instruction. “Sebille?” Nothing. Dread started to dance along my spine in spiked heels. “Um, Sebille, my finger’s getting tired here.”

  The sprite sighed. “We don’t need to memorize it. We’ve been there before.”

  I hesitated another minute. “You’re sure?”

  To my surprise, the sprite flopped onto her back again. “Unfortunately.”

  Still, I was reluctant to let the artifact go. “Where is she? Where’s the princess?”

  Sebille scrubbed a hand over her long, freckled face. Dread’s stilettos dug more deeply into my spine. “You’re freaking me out here, sprite.”

  “Good. You should be freaked out. Princess Desiree listed her address in The Enchanted Forest.”

  I swallowed. I hated that place. The last time we’d been there, I’d almost been eaten by a two-headed snake, killed by wraiths, burned alive in the clutches of a mad and powerful sorceress, and watched everyone I cared about nearly die.

  Fun times.

  “Okay. Well, that’s bad. But it can’t be as bad as last time, right?”

  Sebille made a losing buzzer noise. “Wrong again for a thousand. It’s exactly as bad as last time. The Princess’s address is the black castle. We need to go back to Dacara’s castle again.”

  Sizzling slug snot!

  14

  Shortcut to the Sorceress’s Lair

  “But we didn’t see her the last time we were there,” I argued. Aside from a quick pee break, we’d been arguing about the sprite’s bad news since Archie sprang us from the void. “This has to be a mistake.”

  Sebille stuffed the depleted bag of cheesie crunchies into the cabinet and gave me a look. “You saw the address on the log. It’s no mistake. If you want to talk to Princess Desiree, you need to do this.”

  I sighed. I knew I was being difficult about the whole “visit the evil sorceress in The Enchanted Forest” thing. But who could blame me? Dacara was about as evil as they came. She and her wraiths had nearly killed all of us the last time we’d gone there.

  Dacara was called the dual sorceress because she was one of a rare few sorcerers who wielded more than one kind of magic energy. In her case, death magic, represented by her ability to call and direct wraiths, as well as a deadly fire energy. She’d been banished to her ugly black castle in The Enchanted Forest by the Magical Universe, whose bidding had been done by the Société of Dire Magic.

  Dacara wasn’t supposed to be able to leave the forest. But she’d recently found a loophole in the form of a sweet time-and-space-traveling tortoise named Tildy.

  My friends and I had nearly died keeping her from tortoise-napping the sweet magical dinosaur to escape her prison.

  The demonic Desiree deciding to pay the dual sorceress a visit was a bad thing. A really bad thing. If the two of them escaped into the world and combined their magics…well…the word apocalypse came to mind.

  I blinked. “Wait a minute. Dacara’s castle is spelled so she can’t leave it. Are you telling me Desiree just popped into that castle to see her?”

  “We did,” Grym reminded me. I glanced his way. He and Archie had been bent over some star-chart type maps they’d spread over the table─the table that had been in three broken pieces when Sebille and I went into the void. Either Hobs had gotten good with tools, or I had a fairy godmother in the store.

  I was guessing the former.

  When Grym wasn’t correcting me, he and Archie had their heads down and were murmuring softly in between pointing at several black circle things dotting the map.

  “We did get in,” I agreed. “After fighting our way through an army of wraiths,” I complained.

  Archie’s head came up. His eyes, the same shade of blue as mine, were u
nderscored by purple arcs of weariness. “We might be able to skip the wraiths this time,” he said, his brows lowering into an expression filled with concern.

  I perked up. “How?”

  Archie poked a long finger at one of the black circles on the map. “Altas Magnanimus. Alt-Mag for short.”

  “Altas Whatsus?” I asked.

  “It’s a rare kind of void,” Grym told us, looking excited. “Archie says it comes around once in a millennium.”

  Archie nodded. “Yes. Rare indeed. And as unpredictably dangerous as a female bear with young ones.” The twin lines between his brows deepened. “But, if I can control it, we can bypass the trek to the castle, the deadlier aspects of the forest, and the wraiths.”

  “If?” Sebille asked, arcing a red brow.

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Alt-Mag is a scientific oddity. There are no other voids like it in the Universe. In fact, some in the void scientific community have argued that it’s not really a void.”

  “There’s a void scientific community?” I asked, totally missing the larger point as I had a tendency to do.

  Archie ignored my question, proving it wasn’t important.

  I did a mental shrug. “What is it then?”

  “If you buy into the train of thought that it’s not genus voidis, then the logical conclusion is that it’s an anomaly.” When he saw the dual blank looks Sebille and I were sending him, he shook his head. “The Universe is constantly shifting and twisting. The action pinches some things and expands others, creating an area that’s prone to gathering magical detritus, if you will.”

  Our blank expressions deepened.

  He sighed. “Think of it as a magical gas bubble.”

  I blinked. “The Universe has gas?”

  “Once in a millennia, yes,” Archie agreed.

  “But does that mean it’s in danger of popping?” Sebille asked.

  Archie sighed. “Ay, there’s the rub.”