“She’s El Tiablo,” Ty whispered.
“What?” Balthazar croaked.
“Nada.”
“Well then, we’ll just have to be better!” growled Albert. “We should build our own arsenal of super-exotic ingredients, more exotic even than the ones we brought with us, and tailor our recipes to offset and override whatever Lily does.”
“But how can we offset her recipe if we don’t know what she’s going to bake?” Rose asked.
“Duh. We need a spy,” said Sage, leaning casually over the back of the couch. “And clearly, I am the most qualified.”
“Based on what?” said Ty.
“Based on my powers of disguise.” He pulled the collar of his T-shirt up to the bridge of his nose so that just his eyes and red Brillo hair were showing.
All of a sudden, Leigh shrieked and scrambled onto a chair. “Vermin!” she cried. She pointed toward the baseboard by the door, where Rose saw a tiny gray mouse, no bigger than a Ping-Pong ball, scampering toward the corner of the room.
“Nobody move,” whispered Gus. “There will be absolute silence as I commence the hunt. Does anyone have a small rifle or crossbow?”
“Gus, you useless animal,” said Balthazar. “Do it yourself!”
Gus swished his tail. “I don’t want his disease-ridden coat in my mouth! He probably has mumps, or rubella. These creatures aren’t vaccinated, you know!”
“Gus,” whispered Purdy, who had perched atop the couch. “Please.”
“Fine,” said Gus. He lumbered down from the ottoman and slunk across the floor to the corner of the room, where the little mouse was shivering.
“Would someone please ready a breath mint for me?” Gus said. “I’ll need it when this is over.”
Then Gus leaped forward and seized the mouse in his jaws. Instead of gulping down the furry little morsel, Gus waddled across the floor and hopped onto the kitchen counter, where he grabbed a drinking glass between his paws. He spat out the mouse and, before the dazed creature could run, flipped the glass down over it, trapping it underneath.
“That’s noble of you, gato, to spare the mouse’s life,” said Ty.
“I’m not being kind, playboy. I am being practical. Mouse isn’t tasty enough for my refined palate.” Gus contemplated the furry creature languishing under the drinking glass. “Although I have an idea. If we need a spy, the mouse could do the job well enough. He’s small, and if he perishes in the line of duty, no one will miss him.”
“But a mouse can’t talk,” said Rose.
“Think outside the box, child,” said Gus. “I can talk, can’t I?”
Purdy turned to Balthazar, who was leaning back in a frilly brocade chair. “Could we make the mouse talk?”
Balthazar thought for a minute, pressing his back into the chair and clinging to the sides with his big, pockmarked hands. “Sure,” he said. “But if this mouse is going to be half as chatty as the cat, I’m not sure I want to.”
Everyone in her family seemed so optimistic about Rose winning the competition. Why couldn’t she feel optimistic about herself?
Six flames and five songs later, the Chattering Cheddar Biscuits—made with the only cheese on hand, the mac and cheese powdered “cheese”—were puffed and crusty and tinged a curious, unnatural shade of orange. Balthazar slipped a hot biscuit under the glass to the little mouse. The mouse looked around nervously, then dived into the biscuit and devoured the whole thing.
Balthazar lifted the glass as the mouse sat back, bloated. He crinkled his pink, bulbous nose in an expression that looked suspiciously similar to disgust. Suddenly the little mouse opened his mouth and spoke.
“You call that cheese?” he piped up in a thick French accent. His long front teeth got caught on his bottom lip as the words tumbled out. “Ah! I am talking! Why am I talking? Who are you people? Don’t you know better than to give fake cheese to a mouse from France?”
Rose held out her hand to the mouse, and he stepped on it, one paw at a time. “I have very sharp teeth!” he said. “If you try to crush me, I will bite you!”
“I’m not going to crush you,” Rose said gently. “You are a lucky mouse, Monsieur . . .”
“Jacques,” answered the mouse. “Je m’appelle Jacques. Why am I lucky?”
“Well,” answered Rose, “not only have you been given the power of speech, but you have also been hired as a spy.”
“A spy?” Jacques marveled. “But I couldn’t possibly be a spy! I am a musician, a flutist! I was going home to practice when that demon snatched me up in his jaws!”
“What if we were to pay you?” Rose replied. “In cheese. Real cheese.”
“And where is the room of this chef of the dark arts?” Jacques asked after they’d explained everything and gone out to buy Jacques’s required form of payment: a fine Roquefort cheese.
He was sitting on the knee of Rose’s jeans as she sat back on the couch. Albert, Purdy, and Balthazar sat next to Rose; and Ty, Sage, and Leigh leaned over the back of the couch and watched Jacques. Gus had slunk off to the bathroom to clean his paws. At that point it was four in the afternoon, after what had been a long morning, and everyone was yawning quietly.
“We don’t actually know,” Rose admitted. “She’s famous. When famous people come to the Hôtel de Notre Dame, where do they stay?”
Jacques shuddered. “The Fantasy Floor. It’s an armored compound at the top of the building. The regular elevator doesn’t go there; there’s a hidden elevator. I know where it is, but it is too dangerous. I am sorry; I cannot do it.”
Purdy went to the fridge, retrieved the hunk of Roquefort, and unwrapped it. She waved the white, creamy slab underneath Jacques’s pointed little nose. Rose wrinkled her own nose; the stuff smelled like armpits and was dotted with black mold. Jacques, however, was overcome with desire.
“Ah!” he cried. “I cannot resist! I will risk my life for this cheese. I have sunk so low!”
With a scrabbling of tiny claws, Jacques vaulted off Rose’s knee and disappeared into a hole in the wall.
The Blisses counted the minutes while their intrepid mouse spy was gone, fretfully pacing and saying very little. But three hours later Jacques scurried back into the center of the living room.
He lifted his little nose at Rose. His eyes were wide, and he was shaking and drenched in sweat. “Mademoiselle. Please.”
Rose bent down and laid her hand flat on the floor. Jacques climbed onto her palm, and Rose carefully lifted him to the kitchen counter. He sat back on his haunches and wiped the sweat from his fur as the family arranged themselves around him to hear his report.
“Alors, it was a harrowing journey,” he said, “but after many great exertions, I at last found myself crouching between two cans of beans in an open cabinet in the witch’s kitchen. The air was filled with the smell of—”
“Baking?” Sage asked.
“Non!” said Jacques. “Evil. While I waited, I was made fun of by a brutish cockroach. I ran him off. And then the witch came into the kitchen. She stood at the stove and looked through a thick book with a brown leather cover.”
“The Cookery Booke!” Purdy gasped.
“It’s here, in this hotel?” said Albert. “Storm the Fantastic Floor! Or whatever it’s called.”
“After a while the witch closed the book and left the kitchen. When she returned, she was pulling a large portable wardrobe.”
“A wardrobe?” Albert asked incredulously.
“Yes,” said Jacques. “A great wardrobe of dark wood. When she opened the double doors, I saw jars. Dozens of mason jars, tinted blue. I couldn’t see what was in the jars. Out loud to herself the witch said, ‘SOUR.’ And then she took down one of the jars. Into a bowl she poured flour and a bunch of other things, and then she poured the jar over the bowl. When she did, there rose from the bowl the sound of crying. And then she put in a jar of capers.”
“Capers?” said Ty, examining his cuticles. “Those little sour green things? In a cake?”
Purdy gave a quick nod. “She’s making Sourpatch Pie,” she said. “SOUR was one of the categories when I competed in ninety-two. She’s probably running through the recipe just in case that’s one of the categories. Did she do anything else?”
“Oui,” answered Jacques. “From a cardboard box she put a dash of the powder into the pie.”
Ty muttered, “Lily’s Secret Ingredient.”
“Then something happened that made my fur stand on end! From the bowl came a sinister whisper: Lilllyyyyy. . . .”
“Did you see her do anything else?” Purdy asked.
“Oui, madame,” he said. “Many, many things.”
Jacques recounted the sound of a powerful Scandinavian soprano—clearly a Soprano Wedding Cake, according to Purdy. “Probably for the SUGARLESS category.”
“Then there was purple smoke—”
“Could be a Jittering Jelly Roll,” said Albert. “For the ROLLED category.”
“There was a green explosion—”
“Springtime Soufflé. Definitely AIRY,” Purdy noted.
And then Jacques described an eerie silence accompanied by an iridescent swirl and the howling of a low, empty wind.
“A Hold-Your-Tongue Tart,” said Purdy. “Though I don’t know what category she’s intending that for. You know something about Hold-Your-Tongue Tarts, don’t you, kids?”
Rose, Ty, Sage, and Leigh exchanged looks. Rose remembered, after Lily had visited them in Calamity Falls, the way her tongue had gone numb and limp whenever she tried to talk about Lily.
“Now that we know some of what she’s preparing,” said Purdy, pacing around the ottoman in circles, “we need to gather our own stock of extra-special ingredients so we’ll have weapons to fight back with, no matter what the secret theme of the day happens to be.”
Balthazar disappeared into his room and returned lugging a suitcase of blue linoleum that looked like it had been made before World War II. He raised the lid, and Rose gasped at the rows of miniature blue mason jars tucked neatly inside, each topped with a handwritten label.
“Like any good kitchen magician, I don’t travel anywhere without a supply. I have some of what we might need here,” he said, “but this is just a limited sampling. We’ll need more.”
“We’ll need to think of all the possible surprise categories,” said Purdy, “then pick recipes that can beat Lily’s, even with the addition of her Magic Ingredient—recipes that are the most incredible, delicious recipes in the whole Booke, recipes she might not know about ’cause I doubt she’s tried all six hundred and twenty-three. Then Balthazar will translate the recipes—quickly—Rose will memorize, and we’ll have gathered the required ingredients ahead of time.”
“Thank you, Jacques,” said Purdy, looking to where Jacques had been sitting. “You’ve been very helpful. . . .”
But Jacques was no longer there. “Where did he go?”
Gus shrugged his shoulders. “I warned him to leave and never come back.”
“But why?” Rose cried. “He was so kind to us! He risked his life!”
“It is written in the Book of the Scottish Fold. When a Fold encounters a mouse, the Fold will warn the mouse never to return. If the mouse disobeys the warning, anything goes, as they say.”
“We can debate the politics of cat-and-mouse relations later,” said Purdy. “I do hope Jacques returns so we can thank him, but for now, we have to get to work.”
The family sat around on the living room couches for the rest of the evening, sorting out how to survive the competition against their formidable, cheating, high-heeled opponent.
Purdy turned to a fresh sheet of paper from Rose’s notebook. She wrote down the possible categories for the remaining days of the competition based on categories she’d competed in during her time at the Gala and stories from friends who had competed as well.
She wrote:
Puffed
Short
Phyllo
Cheesy
Chocolate
Airy
Sugarless
Flaky
Rolled
Sour
Rose sat next to Balthazar, who held his Sassanian version of the Cookery Booke open on the lap of his trousers. He described various recipes as he turned to them, and the family debated back and forth together about which would be the most exotic and special, until eventually they settled on a few good options.
“Better-Than-Anything Banana Bread will beat Lily’s Soprano Wedding Cake in the SUGARLESS category any day,” said Balthazar.
“And I bet an Angel’s Breath Food Cake would beat a Springtime Soufflé in the AIRY category,” said Purdy. “It’s much airier.”
Ty and Albert took turns writing out ideas on Rose’s note paper while Balthazar looked through the ancient copy of the Booke, telling Rose and Purdy about each recipe. Sage and Gus shouted out their opinions while Leigh napped in a corner.
The final list looked like this:
Puffed—Nectar-of-Joy Cream Puffs
Phyllo—Born Yesterday Baklava
Cheesy—Sublime Danish
Chocolate—Disappearing Devil’s Food Cake
Airy—Angel’s Breath Food Cake
Sugarless—Better-Than-Anything Banana Bread
Flaky—Crazed Croissants
Rolled—Ravishing Rugelach
Sour—Double Orange Whoopie Pie
When they had finally finished with the list, it was midnight, and Purdy declared that everyone should get some sleep, particularly Rose and Ty, who had to bake early in the morning.
“But we won’t be ready in the morning!” Rose protested. “Balthazar can’t possibly translate all these recipes by then! And we can’t have gathered all the necessary ingredients by then, either!”
“Calm down, Rosie, honey,” said Albert. “It’ll all work itself out. Balthazar can wake up early and start translating, and we’ll still have an hour before baking tomorrow to gather the ingredients we need.”
And so Rose reluctantly went to her room and lay down on her bed opposite a snoring Leigh.
She felt a little better having an idea of what categories might be coming up and what to do if they did, but she had no idea how she would get through tomorrow morning with no translated recipes and no ingredients.
She tried to fall asleep, but she kept hallucinating the sound of flute music. I must be having some sort of bizarre nightmare, she thought. The music seemed to be coming from the wall, from underneath a writing desk in the corner. After a moment, Rose hopped out of bed and followed the sound. She discovered a small hole in the baseboard through which she could hear the flute music more clearly.
“Hello?” she whispered into the hole.
The flute music stopped. After a moment Jacques poked his fuzzy nose through the hole.
“Jacques!” she whispered. “You’re back!”
“I am not back,” he replied. “I live in this hole, and I am doing my nightly practice. But I have not returned. I have not disobeyed the warning of the Scottish Fold. It is written in the Book of Mouse that I must stay away until the warning has been rescinded.”
“There’s a Book of Mouse, too?” asked Rose.
Jacques emerged from the hole, looking left and right, then sat back on his haunches. He was carrying a miniature silver flute the size of a toothpick. “Every mouse has a copy of the Book of Mouse,” he said. “It is a history of mice, their oppression by humans and cats, and their glorification by insects and small birds.”
Rose nodded. “We had a book like that. It’s a collection of our family’s magical recipes, sort of a magical family history. Some of the recipes are good; some are dangerous. We never used the dangerous ones. Except once, by accident.”
“You say you had the book? Where did it go?” Jacques asked.
“It’s the one you just saw in that suite on the Fantasy Floor,” said Rose. “That’s the whole reason we’re here. To beat my aunt Lily in a baking contest and get that book back. But I d
on’t think I can do it.”
“Your mind is heavy,” said Jacques, patting Rose’s knee with his tiny paw, which was the size of a lentil. “Which is why you are awake at such a late hour.”
“It’s true,” said Rose. “I just wish I could get the Booke back tonight. There’s no way I can win against Lily. I’m not a good enough baker.”
Rose pondered a minute, then trapped Jacques between her palms and ferried him into Sage and Ty’s room, where her brothers had already fallen asleep.
“Guys! Ty! Sage! Wake up! I have an idea!” Rose shouted, drowning out the sound of Jacques’s pleas. “Instead of waiting around to lose tomorrow morning, why don’t we sneak up to the Fantasy Floor tonight and steal the Booke back once and for all!”
“What?” Sage said groggily.
“Rose, go back to bed,” said Ty.
Rose ran to Ty’s bed and shook him awake by the shoulder, holding Jacques captive in her other palm. “We can sneak up to Lily’s room, steal the Booke back, and go home and fix Calamity Falls tomorrow. Wouldn’t that be easier?”
Ty sat up in bed, his eyes still closed. “Yeah, I guess . . .”
“Sage, don’t you want this whole thing over with?” said Rose.
“It’s kind of unlike you to want to break into someone’s room and steal something, Rose.”
“I don’t want to steal; I just want to make sure we get the Booke back, and I don’t think I can do it by winning the contest,” she replied.
Jacques shook his narrow little head. “Non, non. I cannot show you how to get up to the Fantasy Floor. It is too dangerous.”
Rose thought for a moment. “I suppose a slice of Brie wouldn’t change your mind?” she said.
Jacques sat in the front pocket of Rose’s hooded sweatshirt as she and her brothers walked through the hotel lobby. On one side of the room stretched the hotel’s ornate front desk. A flower arrangement dominated the room’s center, towering nearly to the massive chandelier hanging from the frescoed ceiling.
According to the huge clock above the front desk, it was a half hour past midnight. While the chandelier above them burned brightly, the rest of the lights in the room were dimmed, and the lobby was nearly empty.
A Dash of Magic: A Bliss Novel Page 6