Black & White Croakies

by Sam Cheever

  Sebille stood behind the sales counter at Croakies, the fringed tip of her fire-engine red braid in her hand, and her eyes nearly crossed from looking at it.

  “What?” I asked, irritation spiking. The sprite had refused to dress in the manner required to enter the world of Andrew of Mayberry at a moment’s notice. And she hadn’t hidden her smile when she’d looked at me. Instead, as I sat with the store’s financial records spread out in front of me, she’d done nothing but stare at her split ends. It was especially annoying knowing that sprites didn’t get split ends. I knew I was being cranky because of my worry over Wicked and gang. I was also feeling guilty that I’d had to call Mrs. Foxladle and cancel book club again. But the sprite was getting on my last nerve.

  “Stop staring at your hair and come help me with these books.”

  She rolled her eyes. “What are you doing with them, anyway? We don’t have to get them to the accountant for another three weeks.”

  “I want to make sure everything’s in order now, just in case the worst happens.” The thought filled my eyes with tears. If the worst did happen, I’d have lost everything and everyone I loved. And aside from the idea of losing Sebille, Wicked, Slimy, and Hobs, the second worst part was that I had nobody to leave Croakies to. I had no living family that I knew of. The closest I had to an advisor was a man I barely knew. Still, I planned to pen a letter to Archibald Pudsnecker with instructions on how I wanted Croakies dispersed.

  I scanned a look toward the dividing door, knowing I should finish reading the letter that Archie had sent me. Maybe there was more information on what had happened to my mother.

  I also wanted to talk to Archie about why he’d had the letter in the first place. He hadn’t admitted to being a relative or even a friend of my parents. Yet he’d been mentioned in the letter. What was he to me?

  It was interesting that he was a sorcerer. That would imply some connection to me since the world of sorcery was relatively small compared to some of the other magical designations.

  “I wasn’t staring at my hair,” Sebille groused as she flopped into the chair across from me. “Well, technically I was, but I was just wondering what it would look like black. I’ve always had red hair. I can’t imagine it black, can you? I mean your hair is just brown. It won’t be much of a change. But mine…”

  I knew Sebille’s seemingly unimportant worry was just her way of trying to accept what we were about to do. As long as I’d known her, she’d seemed totally unconcerned with how she looked. In fact, with her outrageous outfits, she’d seemed to actively defy anyone to judge her appearance.

  “It could turn white, you know,” I told her, feeling only a little guilty for teasing her since she’d had no compunction against teasing me. “Or gray.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Gray?”

  My lips twitched, giving me away. “It will only be temporary,” I told her. “As soon as we come home, it will turn red again.” I hoped.

  Besides, I told myself, I had no intention of letting her come with me. It was just too dangerous. When Adolfo told me, and only me, according to my instructions to him before he left, that it was time, I planned to insert myself into the artifact alone.

  Then why, you’re probably wondering, am I insisting that Sebille go retro with me? That’s simple. I’d pay money to see Sebille clad in the mid-calf-length flowered dress and boring black pumps that I was reluctantly wearing.

  Especially with a tidy white apron.

  I’d give six inches of my long, curly and apparently boring brown hair to see that.

  Yes, I would.

  “Rustin called,” the sprite told me. “He said he found a great retro clothing store. He’s bringing us stuff.” She grimaced.

  “That’s good,” I told her, trying to focus on the books. I was having trouble reconciling the birdseed expenditures with the total expenses figure. I was sure I’d spent more than the figure in the books. But something had been erased in the column for the final amounts. “Did you change this number here?” I pointed to the erasure.

  Sebille shook her head. “No. What is it?”

  The bell on the exterior door jangled softly, announcing the arrival of a customer. Only it wasn’t a customer. It was Grym.

  Sebille and I stared at him a long moment, our eyes slowly growing to the size of golf balls.

  He glared back at us, all but daring us to comment on the way he looked.

  “Um,” I said.

  Sebille giggled, drawing an even darker glower from the cop.

  “It was all I could find that would fit,” he said, glancing down at the pants that were no less than three inches too short.

  “Those fit, huh?” I asked, clearing my throat to hide the giggle dancing on my tonsils.

  “Better than the other clothes I’ve tried,” he said, grimacing. He ran thick fingers beneath the ugly suspenders that were ostensibly keeping his too-tight, too-short pants on his hips. “These things pinch.”

  I rolled my lips together, pressing them tight against the smile burning to be released. “I, um, like the hair.”

  He reached up and ran a hand over the ruthlessly slicked mahogany strands. I wondered if his fingers came away coated in grease. “It’s not bad, huh?”

  “Are those bowling shoes?” Sebille asked, finally giving up and snorting out a laugh.

  His caramel gaze scoured her in acid. “They’re the closest thing I could find to saddle shoes.”

  Against my best intentions, the laugh I’d been trying to hold back erupted. “They’re very, saddle-ee.”

  Grym sighed. “I’ll feel better when we get this trip behind us.”

  I hadn’t intended for the cop to join me in world hopping. I hadn’t intended for anyone to join me. But it seemed he had other ideas. “Look, Grym…”

  He held up a blocky hand. “Don’t waste your breath, Naida. I’m coming. If we don’t fix this, McDonald’s house is going to continue to lose color, the poison spreading until it starts leaching out onto the lawn and onward from there. It’s my job to find the man and to stop the spread of this toxic magic. I want to protect Enchanted.”

  I could understand his feelings because I shared them. Rather than argue with him, I simply nodded. I’d just have to sneak away from him too.

  I bit back a sigh. The whole thing was getting too complex. Thinking about that, along with my lost friends and the letter waiting for me in the library, was too depressing. So I changed the subject. “Still no sign of McDonald, huh?”

  Grym shook his head. “He’s got to be inside that thing.”

  I had a thought that was worrying. “We don’t know what show he was watching when he was pulled inside. What if he was watching something other than Andrew of Mayberry?” As I asked the question, my stomach twisted with alarm. I had no idea how to find my friends and stop the artifact in one world. There was no way I’d be able to navigate two worlds and stop the artifact all by myself. I chewed my bottom lip.

  A chime sounded from inside the artifact library. Sebille and I shared a look. It was the communicating mirror.

  “Adolfo?” I asked,

  She shrugged. “I’ll go see what he wants.”

  Grym tugged out his cell. “I’ll call Rustin and tell him he needs to get back here.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him not to bother, knowing I was going on a solo mission. But I couldn’t think of a way to say it without cluing Grym in on what I planned.

  Bristly bear buttocks! Why was nothing ever simple?

  Sebille slammed the dividing door and stomped over to us. I’d have thought she was angry about something, except that was pretty much how she always walked in her ill-fitting Wicked Witch of the West shoes. “He said something’s changing and we’re to be ready. It’s close.”

  My chest tightened. I glanced toward the door, knowing I needed to find a way to get to the artifact without their knowing. Maybe I could throw a magical lock on the dividing door so they couldn’t follow me inside.

  “I�
�m just going to go to the back…”

  I never got a chance to finish that sentence. The front door opened again, and a familiar yet totally unfamiliar face and form came through.

  All of our mouths dropped open as Lea bounced into the store, a bright smile on her face.

  Hex trotted in behind her, tail snapping with emotion.

  “Erg…” Sebille burbled nonsensically.

  Lea laughed gaily, clapping her hands. “Isn’t it blustery?”

  The slang term was icy, but Lea regularly butchered it.

  She stood before us in a button-up white blouse that fit her more tightly than her usual garb, covered by a thin pink cardigan that came to the middle of her forearms and just below her waist. Her bottom half was covered in a pink…poodle…skirt that flared away from her rounded hips to an alarming width. I call it a poodle skirt because there was an honest-to-goddess poodle on the front. The decorative dog was formed from fabric and beading, a curving line of beads leading from the fabric dog collar like a leash. The end of the leash wrapped around the skirt and disappeared somewhere behind Lea.

  White socks were folded at her ankles, and her feet were covered in flat shoes with rounded toes and straps across the top. Her long, light-brown hair was twisted up into a high ponytail, the thick pony glossy and softly curled on the ends. Her buoyant ’do bounced around her head when she moved, looking manically happy like she appeared to be.

  “Isn’t it great?” Lea asked.

  It was definitely something. I wasn’t sure great was the word I was reaching for. I settled for a non-committal sound. “Hmm.”

  My friend seemed satisfied with that.

  I fixed a scolding look on her. “You’re not coming.”

  Her smile died. “Yes, I am.”

  “Lea…” I whined.

  She shook her head, sending the ponytail into spasms of delight. “I want to help. Hex can find Wicked, simplifying the search, and I can help you figure out how to stop that thing from whatever it’s doing.”

  I stared at her for a long moment, putting all of my unhappiness into my gaze. Her well-shaped lips tightened into a hard, determined line and I knew I was lost. I’d never talk her out of coming along. There was possibly only one person who was more stubborn than Sebille or me, and that was Lea.

  I expelled a frustrated breath, giving in less than gracefully. “Fine!”

  Lea’s grin immediately returned. I envied her that emotional resiliency. I’d suffer under a cloud of residual crankiness for at least an hour.

  “We just got the word,” Sebille told my friend the witch. “We’re to get prepared. Something’s changing in the magic.”

  Lea nodded. “Good. The sooner we get this over with, the better.”

  I didn’t respond. Instead, I turned on my heel and stalked toward the dividing door. I wasn’t sure where I was going or what I would do once I got there. I only knew I needed to put some space between me and all my “helpful” friends, who were probably going to die right along with me.

  That was not what I’d planned at all.

  Not even close.

  5

  Disappearing into Mist

  Unfortunately, I didn’t make it to the back. The front door opened again, and Rustin walked into Croakies. I perused the ghost witch with a critical and twitching eye. I tried rubbing the eye, but it just kept twitching. “Um.”

  Lea reached over and tugged on his red and white polka-dotted bow tie. “I think he looks very handsome,” she said.

  Her statement put me immediately on the defensive as Rustin lifted a dark eyebrow in silent accusation. “I’m not saying he doesn’t look handsome…”

  Rustin’s second brow arched up to join the first and I realized I’d stepped out of the sucking mud into quicksand. I sighed. “I’m just not sure you’re in the right decade.” Or century. The pants he was wearing had a waistline somewhere up around his nipples and flared into twin mermaid fins down by his ankles. “What are those pants, anyway?”

  He grinned. “Bellbottoms. Cool, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I coughed as my throat caught on the word. “Downright blizzardy.”

  Lea’s grin widened. I was pretty sure she was filing the non-word into her cool slang file to be misused later.

  I shook off my concern. I mean, it wasn’t like I could do anything about the ruffly shirt that looked as if he could wear it to sail the seven seas with Sewer Beak the parrot on his shoulder, the weird tie, or the even weirder pants. But the shoes…

  I narrowed my gaze on the brown and white monstrosities. “Are those giant baby shoes?”

  Sebille snorted, covering her mouth with a hand as Rustin glared over at her. “I’ll have you know these were the height of fashion.”

  “When?” Sebille asked, quite reasonably I thought.

  Rustin’s mouth opened and then closed. He shrugged. “I’m pretty sure I’m in the right century. Andrew of Mayberry will just have to deal with it.”

  “He’s going to think the circus is in town,” I mumbled, looking around at my hapless group of merry weirdos.

  Sebille, who still hadn’t changed out of her signature sprite costume, shook her head. “We’re doomed.”

  “We’ll be in and out before they even have time to notice our clothes,” Grym said.

  “Where’s Sadie?” Lea asked the ghost witch.

  He frowned. “I sent her to Maude. She can’t go into the artifact. If it strips her colors, she’ll lose all of her energy. We aren’t sure what that would do to her. Maude believed it might kill her.”

  Maude Quilleran was Rustin’s cousin and a young but very powerful witch. She was the one who’d given the little dragon to the ghost witch, and I knew she’d take good care of her.

  “Speaking of Maude,” I said, narrowing my gaze on the ghost witch, “You can’t come with us. You haven’t mastered your dual nature yet. What if you burst into…whatever you are in your second form…in the middle of this adventure? That would just about blow the lid off of anything we were trying to do.”

  When Rustin had been cursed into Slimy by his Uncle Jacob Quilleran, his aunt Madeline and his cousin Maude had used their prodigious magical abilities to find a way for him to regain his body. They’d come up with giving him a dual form, one of which was him and one was a supernormal form which nobody had yet seen.

  Rustin narrowed his gaze right back at me. “I’ve been working on my control. I’ll be fine.”

  “What’s the longest you’ve kept your current form,” I asked, “I mean, minus the baby shoes?”

  Sebille tittered gleefully.

  “Two days,” he responded, his expression cocky. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine, Naida. We aren’t going to be gone longer than that.”

  I clamped my lips shut, a wave of new worry hitting me as I added concern about Rustin to the rest of the mess. The ever-growing morass of worries only served to remind me just how dangerous our journey was going to be.

  The communicating mirror dinged a warning. I hurried into the library as the smoky-gray of the empty glass was replaced in the center by a quickly enlarging dot of vibrant green. When the connection had opened completely, the vivid hues of Lea’s greenhouse filled the background. Adolfo hovered in the foreground, his black and gray wings buzzing softly as he held himself aloft. His gaze slid immediately to Lea and her cheeks went pink.

  “Hello, Lea?”

  A giggle burst from my best friend’s lips.

  A giggle!

  I narrowed my gaze on them. Had they been up to some hanky type panky behind my back? Or in front of my front…since I was generally clueless about what was going on around me most of the time? “Do you have news?” I asked the overly friendly elf.

  His smile turned upside down before he yanked his gaze from Lea. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the elf didn’t want the witch to come with.

  On that, at least, we could agree.

  “Yes. The magic is coalescing. You will soon see a series of events
occur.” He buzzed closer, his tiny form taking up more of the mirrored surface. “Pay careful attention. You must do exactly what I say, exactly when I say to do it.”

  We all nodded as if our heads were connected by a single string.

  “First, the artifact will turn itself on.”

  We all looked toward the ancient TV, whose screen had gone dark sometime after the color leeching had begun.

  “At first, it will be only static. Like electric snow.”

  “Okay,” I said, my tone impatient.

  Adolfo sent me a reproachful glance. “The artifact will stay in that state for a short time and then an entertainment artifact will come on. I believe you refer to it as a television show. That is when you can enter the colorless sphere.” He frowned. “It’s important for you to understand, that sphere represents the live zone. The artifact can affect your actions anywhere inside that sphere.”

  He waited for us to nod before going on.

  “It will stay live almost indefinitely once it’s activated. But after you’ve entered the sphere, you will have precisely two minutes before you are drawn inexorably inside. There’s no turning back once it begins to pull you in.”

  I wiped my suddenly sweating palms over my ugly flowered dress. “There’s nothing we can do once we’re in the live zone?”

  He turned a worried glance on me. “At the two-minute mark you will lose the ability to affect anything.”

  “Do you know anything about how we will find our friends once inside?” Sebille asked.

  Adolfo gave a start and performed a quick bow on the air. “My apologies, Princess. I failed to greet you properly.”

  Sebille rolled her eyes. “Answer my question, please.”

  “Unfortunately, I do not. Nor can I or the queen assist you in stopping the artifact. All I can do is read the action segmentation in the magical signature.”

  “You can’t give us anything?” Lea asked, her voice soft, almost pleading.

  Adolfo went very still, brows lowering over his dark eyes. “I cannot give you specifics for this particular artifact. But I do know this. In each time and reality affecting artifact, there is a heart that beats to protect the artifact. If you extinguish that beating heart, you will be able to defeat the artifact. Though the means of defeating it are unknown.”