Nick sat up like he’d been spring-loaded.
Don’t believe your eyes, Smallbone had said. And Nick didn’t. He really didn’t.
Nick scooped up the little cat, and Tom mewed indignantly, giving Nick an excellent view of one human tooth, flat as a Chiclet among sharp white thorns.
Still in his nightshirt, Nick ran down to the kitchen.
Mutt and Jeff greeted him with bouncing, slobbering, tail-swishing joy. “Sit!” Nick commanded. Two furry bottoms hit the wooden floor; two sleek black heads cocked sideways; two mouths opened in goofy doggy grins. Nick grabbed Mutt’s muzzle, lifted the velvety upper lip, and unfocused his eyes. The tooth next to one long canine was square, crooked, and a little yellow — unmistakably human. Jeff, on the other hand, was all dog.
Nick hadn’t thought about Smallbone’s other apprentices for weeks. He’d figured they’d been turned into animals and never restored, but he’d assumed that the old man had then let them go to live out their animal lives in the woods or between the walls — or even given them to Hell Cat to play with, as he was always threatening to do to Nick.
He’d never thought Smallbone would keep them as pets.
Or else, he thought glumly, he just hadn’t wanted to think about it.
He didn’t really want to now, but he couldn’t help it. What about the farm animals? When he groomed Groucho, was he really combing a boy? When he gave Ollie his slops, was he feeding some poor kid potatoes, carrots, and bran mixed with sour milk?
And what about Hell Cat? Would Smallbone have a girl apprentice? Or the hens? It was bad enough that Nick had been shoveling transformed-apprentice dung all this time without worrying about maybe eating an egg laid by one.
He refused to think about milking the goats.
When he got to the barn, he examined every animal in turn with unfocused eyes, looking for nonstandard body parts. As far as he could tell, the barn animals were all just animals, except for Ollie, whose human ear lay small and flat against his massive head.
Nick gave the nearest hay bale a good solid kick. Now that he knew the truth, he couldn’t pretend he didn’t. He had to turn the apprentices back. It’s what he’d want them to do, if their positions were reversed. Tom and Mutt and Ollie were human beings, and nobody had asked them whether they wanted to be animals or not.
Besides, the bookshop seemed to want him to.
Breakfast was a tense meal. Nick was so agitated he turned the fire up too high and burned the fried eggs black. Smallbone threatened to turn him into a cabbage and boil him for dinner, and Nick asked if he was a cannibal, and Smallbone said he might be if Nick didn’t make him something fit to eat right soon. This time Nick broke the yolks, but Smallbone ate them anyway, then went upstairs, grumbling like a thunderstorm.
Nick left the dishes to the animals and went to the barn.
“I know about Smallbone’s apprentices,” he said, “and I’ll turn them back. I just want to know if it’s the same spell as the one in Animal You.”
It wasn’t. The new book was called Curses and How to Lift Them. The spell it gave him wasn’t particularly complicated and it didn’t call for a lot of energy.
Good for practicing your Control.
There’d been a lot of rain the past few days, and the snow had been fretted down to dirty lumps and tattered patches of white scattered across the muddy barnyard. Nick put on a sou’wester and whistled to the dogs, who exploded out the door as soon as he’d opened it, ears flapping wildly. He scooped Tom off the rocker and was stowing him in one oversize pocket when Hell Cat jumped down from her perch over the stove and gave Nick her blue-eyed glare. She’d turned into a spitting ball of claws and teeth when he tried to examine her earlier, and he didn’t think she was anything but a cat. But he didn’t want to make any more mistakes.
“I’m going to turn these guys back,” he said, feeling foolish. “You can come if you want to.”
Hell Cat’s tail shivered, and she trotted past Nick and toward the barn.
Nick closed the door and followed thoughtfully.
The barn was warm and shadowy and familiar. Nick brought out his chalk and string, drew a pentagram, and settled inside it.
According to Curses and How to Lift Them, animal-transformation spells were the easiest kind of curse to lift — for another wizard, anyway. A living thing wants to return to its natural shape. All you have to do is create the conditions for that to happen.
The spell was short and repetitive, easy to learn. Nick shut his eyes and started chanting, carefully feeding magic into the words bit by bit. Control didn’t give him the rush of full-out spell casting, but it was oddly satisfying, like executing a perfect layup. As Nick chanted the last phrase, he felt his magical basketball swish right through the hoop.
There was a moment of silence, and then the barn erupted in panic-stricken squawking, baaing, and screaming.
Screaming?
Nick opened his eyes and saw a little kid in short pants and a frilly shirt sitting on a hay bale. Ginger-red hair the color of Tom’s fur stuck out around his head, and he was howling like a strong wind.
While Nick was still taking this in, a hard body cannoned into him. “Grr!” the attacker said fiercely. “Bark! Bark!”
Nick squirmed, turned, and shoved him off. The boy who had been Mutt fell over sideways and floundered. Before Nick could get up, a second apprentice jumped on his back. This one knew how to fight. Teeth fastened themselves on Nick’s ear and something sharp burned a line of fire across his cheek and lip.
At Beaton Middle School, kids got into fights all the time. They windmilled at one another with their fists and rolled on the ground. When one got a bloody nose or started to cry, most of them accepted that the fight was over, except for the inevitable trip to the principal’s office.
Nick wasn’t most kids. Nick never cried. Nick went berserk.
Twisting like an eel, he grabbed the apprentice who had scratched him by a fistful of cloth, and cocked back his arm for a good, hard, satisfying punch.
A pair of furious blue eyes glared up at him. They belonged to a skinny girl in a shapeless cotton dress and an even more shapeless gray sweater.
She showed her teeth and hissed. “Evil wizard!”
“Hell Cat?”
Nick dropped his hand and backed up a step. His mom had always told him he should never, never, not for any reason, hit girls or little kids — not even if they started it. He had promised he wouldn’t, he never had, and he wasn’t going to begin now, even though he really wanted to.
He could, however, set the record straight. “I am not an evil wizard!”
Hell Cat smoothed her sweater, turned up her nose, and stalked off to sit by Tom. If she’d still had a tail, she would have wrapped it around her feet.
Mutt crawled up to Nick and bumped his head against Nick’s leg. “Arf!”
It was then that Nick realized that he hadn’t given any thought to what he would do with the apprentices once he’d freed them.
A rustle drew his attention to the pigpen, where a boy was leaning over the rails. He was older than Nick, maybe sixteen, with a body like a barrel and a face like a cheese thatched with yellow hair.
“You must be Ollie,” Nick said.
The boy who had been the finest Yorkshire on the coast of Maine scratched his belly and blushed like a sunset. “Dunno. Sounds familiar, anyways. Who the Sam Hill are you?”
At least, Nick thought, this one can talk like a human. “Smallbone calls me Foxkin.”
Hell Cat spat. “You must be evil. He’s teaching you magic. He wouldn’t teach you if you were good. I’m good, and he didn’t teach me.”
She was frowning at him as fiercely as Smallbone ever did. Nick looked from Tom, who was smearing tears and snot everywhere, trying to wash his face like a cat, to Mutt, who was curled up on the floor, whimpering, while Jeff sniffed him over curiously.
“What’s the matter with you guys?” Nick shouted. “I’m the good guy here. I rescued y
ou. Why can’t you just say thank you and go away?”
“Evil wizard!” Hell Cat snarled.
“Meow,” Tom said.
“I’m hungry,” Ollie grunted.
Nick stalked out of the barn.
Nick checked out the damage to his face in the bathroom mirror. He looked like he’d been in a cat fight.
Nothing like this had happened in “The Wizard Outwitted.”
It was, as Smallbone would say, a jeezly mess.
Smallbone! He’d forgotten all about him! What was the old man going to say when he found out one of his dogs and both his cats were now people, not to mention his prize pig? Maybe if Nick just left them in the barn for a while, they’d all go away.
In the meantime, he had to start lunch.
Nick cast a glamour on his face to hide the scratches and went back out to the kitchen.
He was chopping onions for bean soup when Smallbone appeared, ferreted around in the fridge, and emerged with a cold drumstick in one hand and a glowing purple vial in the other.
“I’m eating upstairs today,” he said.
Nick bent his head over the knife. “Okay.”
The old man stomped to the door, stopped, and turned around. “By the way. That’s a decent illusion you’ve cast on them scratches. For a beginner.”
“Thanks,” Nick said in a strangled voice.
“Your timing might have been better, what with Fidelou howling at the door and all,” Smallbone went on with suspicious calm. “Now you turned them apprentices back, you got the same problem I had, which is what to do with a set of gormy nincompoops not worth the fire to cook their soup.”
Nick looked up. “Then you’re not mad?”
“The hell I ain’t. I had ’em squared away all right and tight, with comfortable, easy, useful lives. If I wanted a passel of kids around the house, I wouldn’t have transformed ’em in the first place. The problem with you is, you got power, but you ain’t got sense. You made this jeezly foul-up, you fix it. Get ’em off the premises. I don’t care how. You got three days, starting now.”
Nick began to feel sick. “What happens if I can’t?”
Smallbone’s smile bared a tumbled graveyard of teeth. “I get rid of ’em for you.”
Nick felt sicker. “Promise me you won’t hurt them.”
Smallbone gave him a sharp look, then shrugged. “You broke the spell. The Rule is, I can’t touch ’em until and unless you fail to finish the rescue. So I guess you better get cracking.”
Nick didn’t have a plan or even the beginnings of one, but feeding the apprentices seemed like it would be a good place to start. So he heated up yesterday’s oatmeal, dumped it in a bucket, and took it and some tin bowls and spoons out to the barn.
The apprentices were gone. Nick felt a sinking in his stomach, followed by something oddly like relief when he saw Mutt and Ollie and Tom huddled up with Jeff by the pigpen. Hell Cat was sitting by Groucho’s manger, flexing and stretching her fingers with concentrated attention. When she saw Nick, she whisked her hands into the pockets of her baggy sweater.
“I brought you something to eat.” Nick took the lid off the bucket. “Oatmeal.”
Hell Cat scowled. “I want some milk.”
“This is what there is,” Nick said. “Take it or leave it.”
Hell Cat shot him an offended look and turned her back.
Tom, Ollie, and Mutt weren’t as picky. They came out of the pen and gathered around hopefully. Ollie and Mutt stuck their faces in the bowls and slurped. Tom tried to lap with his human tongue and got oatmeal all over his face.
Nick went to see if Thalia had a little milk left in her.
She did. Nick filled Hell Cat’s bowl and held it out to her. “Here’s your milk.”
Hell Cat ignored him.
Nick gritted his teeth. “You probably won’t believe this, but I know how you feel. I’ve woken up not knowing how many arms and legs I have or what I want for breakfast. I’d probably be a rat right now if I hadn’t turned myself back.”
Hell Cat growled. “That’s because you’re an evil wizard.”
“And you’re a snotty little brat!”
He had tried not to shout, but he’d failed. The boys lifted startled oatmeal-streaked faces. Tom started crying again.
Nick took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I yelled,” he said, trying to sound like he meant it. “I’m sorry about the whole thing. I just wanted to help.” That, at least, was true.
“You want to help us?” Ollie squealed.
“Smallbone was wrong to turn you into animals. I wanted to fix it.” Nick sighed. “Guess I’m a numb-brain, huh?”
Nobody disagreed.
“Smallbone’s going to kill us when he finds out,” Hell Cat remarked. “You, too, probably.”
“No, he won’t,” Nick said.
“How do you know?” Mutt asked.
“Because I’m still alive.”
Everybody went very still. Nick looked up. Their faces were frozen, wide-eyed, white with fear. “What’s up with you guys? I mean, it was totally evil of him to turn you into animals and keep you as pets — that’s why I turned you back. But it’s not like he beat you or starved you or fed you to the coyotes. You got to admit, the old man’s not so bad, for an evil wizard.”
Hell Cat spat. “Not so bad! Now I know you’re evil!”
“Quit saying that!”
“Why? It’s true.”
Mutt was sitting with Jeff, cross-legged. He’d found a few words. “Devil!” he barked. “Evil wizard! Mean!”
“Mutt’s right,” Ollie said. “Last thing I remember, he told me he was going to make me into sausages come fall.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Nick said. “He’s always threatening to turn me into a slug and salt me, but he never does.”
Ollie grunted skeptically. “How about this, then? He had this stick he kept by the fire, used to beat me all by itself. If I forgot to sweep under the stove or didn’t scrub the pots just right, or took a piece of cheese more than I was allowed, it’d fly up and larrup me until I was black-and-blue.”
Nick’s mouth fell open. “But —”
“He set a spell on me once,” Hell Cat said. “Made me scrub nonstop for nearly two days. When he took it off, I hit him with a frying pan. That’s when he turned me into a cat.”
Nick looked from face to frightened face. They were telling the truth. “Maybe he’s changed,” he said weakly. “I mean, he’s crabby and all that, but he’s never actually hurt me, if you don’t count the spider thing. I’ve got warm clothes and enough to eat. He carves little wooden animals, for the love of Mike.”
The apprentices exchanged looks. He’s lying, the looks said. He’s crazy. He’s an evil wizard.
“Listen,” Nick said earnestly. “He took real good care of you when you were animals. He liked you. Ollie, he played ball with you. Mutt, you were always following him around and wagging your tail and asking to be petted. You liked him. You all did.”
“I didn’t,” Hell Cat said smugly. “I remember. I scratched him every chance I got.”
Nick stood up and brushed straw from his jeans. “You can see for yourselves if you don’t believe me. Come down to the house and have supper with us. It’s fried mackerel and peas and mashed potatoes.”
“And if we don’t?” Hell Cat asked.
“I’ll bring you sandwiches,” Nick said. “If I remember.”
“What about Smallbone?” Ollie said anxiously.
“He won’t hurt you, I promise. Supper’s at six — that’s just after sunset. See you then.”
Nick was frying mackerel when Smallbone came down to the kitchen that evening. He took in the extra chairs, the steaming heap of golden-brown fish keeping warm at the back of the stove, the huge bowl of mashed potatoes, the economy-size package of frozen peas, and munched his jaws thoughtfully.
Tom scampered up to him, meowing in a little-boy voice. The old man’s beard twitched, and he reached down and strok
ed the ginger curls as if the boy were still a cat.
Nick let go his breath and started putting out the meal. It looked like Smallbone intended to keep his promise. There was some use to those Rules of his after all.
When the clock struck six, the back door opened. Hell Cat walked in.
“Evening, Hell Cat,” Smallbone said. “You joining us?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You got a problem with that, Evil Wizard?”
“Only if you lick your plate. Foxkin, young Hell Cat needs a glass of milk. And a napkin.”
It was a quiet meal. Hell Cat concentrated on drinking from a glass, eating with a knife and fork, and pretending Smallbone didn’t exist. She managed pretty well until he moved to the rocking chair and Tom crawled up in his lap. She nearly choked on her potatoes when the old man put an arm around the little boy, lit his pipe, blew a smoke ring over his head, and rocked.
Hell Cat took a hasty gulp of milk, licked her hand, flushed beet red, and stalked into the bathroom, where she turned on the taps full blast.
Smallbone set the sleeping Tom gently on the rug.
“This place is like a jeezly nursery school,” he grumbled. “I’ve half a mind to turn you into —”
The door opened and Jeff trotted in, tracking in lumps of sticky mud. Behind him was Mutt, a little unsteady on his pins, looking hangdog.
“Jeff’s hungry,” he muttered.
“I see you’re looking yourself again,” said Smallbone amiably. “Foxkin, you better heat up them taters. They’re gone gluey cold.”
Mutt wouldn’t sit at the table, so Nick put his plate down on the floor next to Jeff’s. He was a messy eater, but at least he was using his fingers now.
After a while, Hell Cat came out of the bathroom, pink faced and clean, her dark braid trailing water down the back of her baggy sweater. “I’m going to sleep,” she announced to the room. “In a bed. Like a person.”
“Take the first room to the left at the top of the stairs,” Smallbone said. “It’s got a bed and a mattress. There’s blankets in the bureau.”
When Nick got back from doing the evening chores, Smallbone was gone and Mutt, Jeff, and Tom were asleep on the hearth rug in a pile. Nick went upstairs, put on his nightshirt, and climbed into bed.
The Evil Wizard Smallbone Page 14