Pip Bartlett's Guide to Magical Creatures

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Fortnight, who I guess had had enough of being teased, unseated Marisol and galloped toward Raindancer, leaping into the air and arcing his back gracefully on the way. It was impressive, until he crashed through the grill and sent burgers skidding across the pavement. The blond Unicorn dodged the burgers but wound up stamping on the pancake tables, and batter slung through the sky and splattered across the moms with stringed instruments. All the running around upset my dad’s table, and his geodes smashed to the ground. The ones that didn’t break rolled under the hooves of the green-maned Unicorn, who stumbled. To avoid falling forward, the Unicorn sat down—on Mr. Dyatlov.

  “Get off him!” I yelled. The Unicorn pranced away, but only because he’d noticed all the attention the sunflower-wielding Unicorn was getting. Mr. Dyatlov looked okay, though he’d been squished into the fallen hamburgers, which were now stuck to his pants.

  “Raindancer, stop,” I pleaded.

  “Isn’t this what you wanted? For everyone to look at you?” Raindancer whinnied.

  “No!” I shouted back. “I wanted them to listen to me!”

  But even Raindancer wasn’t listening to me now. As a Unicorn with a mane that was sherbet-orange charged beside us, Raindancer charged directly through our school sign. Wood slivers sprayed everywhere. I saw the bit of wood with our mascot on it—a smiling gopher—go flying past my face. Raindancer sang gleefully.

  Her hooves touched the ground with a massive jolt. I snatched for a better grip, but somehow my hands and her slippery mane seemed nowhere near each other.

  I made another eep sound—Raindancer didn’t so much as flick an ear—and landed in a decorative bush beside the smiling gopher. Through the broken branches, I could see the blue sky overhead. It was blocked out briefly by the bellies of three Unicorns as they jumped over both the broken sign and the bush I was now lying in.

  All of my breath and happiness had been knocked out of me.

  Just a minute later, my father appeared, panting for his own breath. “Pip! Pip! Are you alive?”

  “I’m okay,” I said from inside the bush.

  “In that case,” he said, “you’re in so much trouble.”

  Silently, I decided to add another note to the Guide to Magical Creatures:

  Unicorns are bad listeners.

  Okay, so maybe I wrecked Career Day and ruined Fortnight’s show season and destroyed three cellos, forty perfectly good turkey burgers, most of Dad’s geodes, and Mr. Dyatlov’s glasses. It’s not something I’m proud of, and getting grounded for the rest of the school year wasn’t much fun. After the Unicorn Incident (which was what my mom called it when she went all narrow-eyed and frown-y), my parents decided that I should spend the summer in Cloverton, a little town in south Georgia, where my aunt Emma was a veterinarian for magical creatures.

  “This way you can see lots of magical creatures in a … erm … safer environment,” Mom said as she packed my purple suitcase. I think by “safer” she meant “place with fewer cellos.”

  Since Mom had to go on a very important geological dig and Dad had just left to give a presentation, one of Mom’s interns, Shantel, drove me to Cloverton. Aunt Emma’s house was attached to the clinic, but it didn’t seem right to just stroll into her living room without saying hello to her first, so Shantel and I went to the clinic instead.

  “Hmm, she must be with a patient,” Shantel said—there was no one at the reception desk and no sign of Aunt Emma in the waiting room. “Do you want me to stay until she comes out?” Shantel asked. She didn’t look like she wanted to.

  “No, I can wait by myself,” I said. How much trouble could I get into in a waiting room?

  Shantel gave me a thumbs-up. “Great.” Then she hurried outside and peeled out of the parking lot at the speed of a runaway Unicorn. In the waiting room, I shoved my backpack under a chair and sat on my hands to keep myself still. The only other person in the waiting room was a friendly looking young man with a shirt (plaid) and a beard (not plaid). He had a Lilac-Horned Pomeranian on a leash. I could tell it was elderly because the lilac fur around its nose was now bluish silver.

  “Can I pet her?” I asked.

  He nodded. “If she’ll let you. Missy gets a little nervous at the vet.”

  The Lilac-Horned Pomeranian’s tongue darted out to lick my hand as I patted the tuft of fur between her horns.

  “It’s okay, Missy. There’s nothing to be nervous about. My aunt Emma is very nice.” While her owner didn’t realize it, Missy understood me perfectly, and looked a little happier as she retreated back under her owner’s chair.

  It was good to know that talking to animals didn’t always end up with a stampede.

  To be honest, though, I was a little nervous too. My aunt Emma was indeed very nice, but I really wasn’t sure what she thought of me since the Unicorn Incident.

  I picked up a brochure from the table beside me. It was called “Easy Nutrition for Newborn Pegasi.” The front featured a picture of a winged horse flying over an empty dinner plate. Even before I opened it, I knew that the plate should have been piled with peanut butter. Peanut butter, especially the chunky kind, is a baby Pegasus’s favorite food, according to Jeffrey Higgleston’s Guide to Magical Creatures. Chapter three, page four.

  My copy of the Guide was in my backpack, as always—I insisted on carrying it there, with my sandwich cookies and spare pens. I liked having it close by.

  The old bell above the door dinged. I looked up as two women struggled in with a large plastic animal crate.

  Oh.

  Oh!

  It was a HobGrackle! I’d never seen one in real life before. Inside the crate, a shiny beak tapped anxiously on the metal cage bars. The beak was black, but black like a pool of oil—swirled with other colors too. Rainbow-y. But the beak wasn’t how I could tell it was a HobGrackle. It was the—

  “What is that smell?” said Callie from behind the check-in desk.

  Callie was my thirteen-year-old cousin. We’d hung out together on family vacations, but weren’t exactly friends, because Callie liked musicals with lots of costumes and dancing and I liked Lilac-Horned Pomeranians and biting my nails. Those things weren’t opposites, but they kind of felt like it when you were trying to strike up a friendly conversation.

  “Oh, sorry,” said the lady at the front of the crate. “That’s Goggy.”

  According to the Guide to Magical Creatures, HobGrackles release an odor “similar to that of a rotting ostrich egg on a sidewalk” when they are stressed.

  This HobGrackle smelled pretty stressed.

  The Guide said the smell came from a slippery, oily sweat that was released from the HobGrackle’s armpits. And leg pits. And chin. And tail pit. I wasn’t sure what a tail pit was, but any oily substance that came from it seemed like a bad idea.

  “Goggy’s been limping,” one of the women said to Callie. “I don’t know what’s going on with him. Maybe you could just—”

  Callie interrupted the woman by popping her gum and slapping the sign-up sheet with a pencil. “Sign in.”

  The woman looked a little stressed herself. “Goggy isn’t great at waiting. Are there many patients ahead of us?”

  Callie gave her a bored look through her bright pink glasses. “Let me break it down for you, lady. There’s a feverish Miniature Silky Griffin in exam room one. I’ve got an Invisible Salamander vomiting up socks in exam room two. There’s a litter of levitating Garden Trolls in room three that need their shots. Goggy doesn’t have an appointment. Goggy will have to sign in. Goggy will have to wait.”

  “Okay,” the woman said meekly.

  I pretend-drew on my hand, avoiding Callie’s eyes. It was nice to see that grown women found Callie as scary as I did.

  The door dinged again, and I looked up excitedly—first a HobGrackle, now what?

  But the lady who walked in didn’t seem to have a magical creature with her. Instead, she had pointy shoes, angry eyebrows, and a clipboard tucked under her arm. She marched up to Cal
lie, and when she passed I got a whiff of some sort of perfume that smelled like a field of wilting gardenias. It was a lot worse than the way Goggy smelled, if you ask me. I tried to cover my nose without being too impolite. The Lilac-Horned Pomeranian whistled sadly.

  The lady smacked her clipboard on the counter in front of Callie. “I’m here to do an inspection on … some sort of Invisible Salamander thing?”

  “Hello, Mrs. Dreadbatch,” Callie said, her voice suddenly very calm and very proper and very unlike the voice she’d just used with Goggy’s owners. “I’ll get my mom for you in just a moment. She’s busy right now with—”

  “Busy!” Dreadbatch snorted and put a hand on her hip. “She’d better not be too busy for an official visit from the Supernatural/Magical Animal Care, Keeping, and Education Department!”

  My heart stopped. Well, paused. I knew all about the Supernatural/Magical Animal Care, Keeping, and Education Department—S.M.A.C.K.E.D. They were the government department in charge of making sure that mag­ical creatures didn’t get in the way of regular, non-magical life. They had visited our school the day after the Unicorn Incident, and they’d nearly had Raindancer taken away from the Barreras. They would have taken her away, actually, if I hadn’t said that it was all my fault.

  Remembering that horrible afternoon made my heart stay paused for a little longer.

  Callie’s voice rose. “You have to understand that—”

  “I’m a very busy woman, young lady,” Dreadbatch interrupted, waving her off, “and if I can’t complete the S.M.A.C.K.E.D. paperwork showing that steps are being taken to prevent the Invisible Salamander from eating the laundry off everyone’s lines again, it’ll have to be labeled a public nuisance. And you know what that means.”

  “Yes, his owner will have to get rid of him,” Callie snapped, sounding more like her normal self. “I know. I know. I know. Hold on, I’ll see if Mom can get away from the Griffin.”

  After Callie had gone into the back, the waiting room went very quiet, except for the rap-rap-rap of Dreadbatch’s long, coral-colored nails drumming on the reception desk. Either the noise or her perfume didn’t seem to be having a good effect on the animals in the waiting room. Both the Lilac-Horned Pomeranian and the HobGrackle were looking at Dreadbatch and quivering. Something thin and purple oozed onto the tile floor from the bottom of the HobGrackle’s crate: HobGrackle sweat. It coated the metal bars and smelled even more like rotten eggs than before.

  I frowned.

  The Guide observed that HobGrackles really made terrible pets—what with the oozing and the claws and the beak and the diet of rats and all that—but that didn’t stop people from trying. Jeffrey Higgleston insisted they had great personalities. But he’d said something else about them, something I couldn’t quite remember …

  The oily door of the crate burst into the air. Goggy shot out. The clinic was suddenly full of miscellaneous screams.

  Then I remembered: The sweat of a stressed HobGrackle could melt metal.

  Goggy scampered across three empty chairs, knocking them all over. He looked just like the illustration in the Guide: He had a bird’s beak, but a pit bull’s head. His furry wings were brindle, as were his legs, which were an equal mixture of fur and tiny feathers. His tail was much, much longer than the rest of him—yards and yards of rope-like tail that uncoiled from the crate, finally ending in a tuft of fur and feathers. It whipped his owners in the face, then knocked over three more office chairs.

  My frown deepened.

  Jeffrey Higgleston hadn’t mentioned the tail.

  Goggy leaped for the closed glass door of the clinic. He smacked into it with the sort of crash you’d expect when a winged animal runs straight into a glass door. He left a big smear of egg-smelling HobGrackle spit on the glass. Then he climbed up the wall, tearing paintings off their hooks.

  Dreadbatch looked horrified. “Control your monster!” she screeched, holding up her clipboard like a shield.

  “Goggy!” wailed his owner. “HEEL!”

  Goggy did not heel. He ran around the walls with no apparent regard for gravity, leaving purple footprints.

  “Goggy!” I shouted. “You have to stop!”

  “No, I have to flee!” Goggy cried. “Flee! The mean lady will take you away from your owners! She’ll lock you up! She’ll send you away! Flee!”

  “I’m reporting this to S.M.A.C.K.E.D.!” Dreadbatch yelled, which made Goggy’s owners panic, which made Goggy panic even more. Plus, now the Lilac-Horned Pomeranian was freaking out—

  “Missy!” I pleaded. “Not you too! Everyone just calm down!”

  “What’s happening here?” Callie exclaimed as she reappeared behind the desk. She looked at Goggy, then Dreadbatch, then, finally, me. I was worried that she would blame me, but she looked like she hated us all equally in that moment.

  “A very illuminating event!” Dreadbatch said, her voice loud enough to be heard over the howls of animals and the weeping of Goggy’s owners. “That’s what is happening!”

  Her voice sent Goggy into a fresh wave of panic. He clawed at the window and yelled, “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  “Save yourself!” Missy cried, using her center horn to ram the door of the clinic. The bearded man tried to haul her back in by her leash, but she hunkered her weight down and rammed it again. Shards of glass went flying.

  “A menace,” Dreadbatch continued. “A danger to society—”

  Goggy bounded off the window. One of his owners grabbed for his foot but missed; it was enough to knock him off-balance mid-leap. He twisted in the air, tail spiraling, purple sweat raining down—

  And landed right in Dreadbatch’s arms.

  Everyone froze. Goggy dripped.

  Dreadbatch screamed.

  “We’re all right, everyone!” a new voice called. It was calm, cheery, and totally wrong because (a) nothing about this was all right, (b) Goggy’s sweat was now eating its way through the watch on Dreadbatch’s wrist, and (c) Missy had a pretty sizable piece of the front door stuck on her center horn.

  “We’re all right!” the voice repeated.

  It was Aunt Emma. Since I had last seen her, she had cut her brown hair very short and dyed a single, choppy lock of it bright pink. She wore pink scrubs that were not quite as pink as her hair. Sweeping through the room, she gathered Goggy with one hand and offered Dreadbatch a towel with the other. Dreadbatch’s eyebrows descended low over her eyes, but she accepted the towel.

  Aunt Emma slipped Missy’s leash out of the bearded man’s hand, then said, “Callie, please get Mrs. Dreadbatch some hand sanitizer and order her a new watch. Ms. Webster, see if you can use the zip ties in the top right drawer of the work desk to put the door back on Goggy’s crate for now. Mr. Rose, you look nervous, so why don’t you go have a walk around the parking lot? Mrs. Dreadbatch, let me get these two critters sorted and I’ll be back so we can go over that important paperwork. Everyone else, be patient, please!”

  Aunt Emma was pretty good at fixing things, even though she couldn’t talk with animals. Because her arms were full, she nudged at the door to the back room with her foot.

  I jumped up to get the door for her. She blinked at me, like she was just now realizing I was there.

  “Hi, Aunt Emma,” I said meekly.

  Aunt Emma smiled, and even though she looked a little harassed, it was a nice smile. “Hey there, Pip. Welcome to Cloverton.”

  “They really think I’m limping?” Goggy the HobGrackle asked. “That’s why they brought me here?”

  Goggy and I sat in exam room three (formerly occupied by the Troll babies), waiting for Aunt Emma, who was still chipping the glass off Missy’s horn. Goggy was considerably calmer, in part because Dreadbatch wasn’t in here, but mostly because he was exhausted from the chase around the clinic.

  “That’s what it says here on your chart,” I said, nodding toward the clipboard. “You aren’t limping?”

  Goggy looked miffed. “I am learning ballet.”
>
  “You aren’t hurt at all?”

  “I’m hurt they didn’t appreciate my interpretation of Swan Lake,” Goggy sighed. He put his head down on his coiled-up tail. I took the opportunity to study him and finish the addition I’d made to the HobGrackle entry in Jeffrey Higgleston’s Guide to Magical Creatures.

  It wasn’t the first sketch or note that I’d added to the Guide. The foreword of the Guide said, “a good researcher will continue to study and discover magical creatures across the globe.”

  I very much wanted to be a good researcher.

  The exam room door swung open and Aunt Emma walked in.

  “Pip, your hair’s gotten longer! I’m sorry about all that nonsense in the waiting room. Mrs. Dreadbatch … well … she doesn’t have a very good energy with animals.”

  I thought that was a very nice way for Aunt Emma to put it.

  Aunt Emma caught sight of my Guide. “I like your addition. I guess the HobGrackle chapter doesn’t mention that tail, does it?”

  She rubbed her head as she said this. Her hand had purple Goggy sweat on it and now her head did too, but she didn’t appear too upset.

  “I’ve never seen a HobGrackle before,” I said quickly. “No one keeps them as pets in Atlanta, since they need so much space. I can’t wait to see other magical creatures face-to-face.”

  “Oh, yes, your mom told me that you still really love them,” Aunt Emma said. In a wistful voice, she added, “I wish Callie would take more of an interest—too bad there isn’t a musical about magical animals, huh? Oh, well. I’m sure you’ll learn a lot here.”

  “I really want to be helpful,” I said. “Like Goggy, for instance. He’s not actually limping! He was doing ballet! He told me.”

  Aunt Emma didn’t respond right away. She didn’t give me the look that meant, This child is crazy. But she did tilt her head a bit. Probably she was thinking about the Unicorn Incident.

  Finally, she put a hand on my shoulder, leaving a small purple mark of HobGrackle sweat. “Pip. Kiddo. I know you love animals—especially magical ones. So do I! And I know sometimes it really does feel like they’re talking to us. But do try to remember that it’s only in your imagination. Animals need people like us precisely because they can’t talk!”