“I will die,” Regent Maximus said. “Splinter. Nail. Abscess. Tetanus. That garbage truck.”
The truck was six houses away. There was no possible way it could kill him. I tried to explain this to Regent Maximus, but it turned out that talking to a Unicorn was a very different thing from convincing a Unicorn. I couldn’t help but think about what a bad job of convincing I’d done during the Unicorn Incident.
The grown-ups were still talking. Mr. Henshaw, in a quite different voice from before, suddenly said, “Emma, I was thinking—would you like to go to dinner sometime? There’s this fabulous new Italian—”
“Oh, Bill, I’m flattered,” Aunt Emma said, her cheeks turning red. “Really, I am. But I’m still married to Grady.” She held up her left hand and flashed her wedding ring.
“I understand,” Mr. Henshaw said, but as if he did not understand. “Remember that it’s been seven years …”
“I know,” Aunt Emma said. “Believe me, I know.”
It was strange to hear someone talk about Uncle Grady. Most of the time we didn’t talk about my uncle.
And because we didn’t talk about my uncle, we also didn’t talk about dragons.
There are no dragons in Jeffrey Higgleston’s Guide to Magical Creatures … because they don’t exist. I mean, I’d love it if they did—there are all sorts of old stories about them, and every once in a while, a crazy story appears in the paper about how some old lady out in the desert spotted one. But the truth is that no one reputable has seen one in living memory, and no one ever finds skeletons. And most importantly, no one ever finds dragon poop.
Everything poops.
So there are no dragons. And yet, seven years ago, Aunt Emma’s husband, my uncle Grady, set off into the deserts of Texas and Mexico, looking for them. For a long time, he kept in touch—he called, or sometimes wrote Aunt Emma romantic letters. But then one day, the calls and letters stopped. Really stopped, just like that.
Was he dead? Was he alive? Did he need help? Did he ever find any dragon poop?
These questions had gone unanswered for seven years.
“Thanks for the, uh, invitation though,” Aunt Emma said, trying so hard to make her voice sound casual and airy that it sounded the opposite. “Give me a call when the stable is all ready for Regent Maximus!”
I saw Callie standing suspiciously in the doorway to the clinic. Her eyes were laser-death on Mr. Henshaw.
Mr. Henshaw smiled warmly despite this. “And, Pip! Don’t get too discouraged with Regent Maximus. I appreciate that you’re even trying.”
In the background, Regent Maximus suddenly shouted in terror. It sounded like a frightened whinny to everyone else, but I, of course, could understand him perfectly as he screamed, “Why! Why is the sky so blue today? What does it mean?”
I said, with considerably more confidence than I felt, “Just you wait. He’ll be a new Unicorn the next time you see him.”
“It’s. A. Piece. Of. Wood. Literally. It’s a piece of wood. You’re surrounded by them all day, every day, when you’re in the stable,” I said, dropping my forehead into my hand.
I was trying to be patient with Regent Maximus, but we’d been out here since lunchtime. It was hot and sticky, and gnats kept flying into my eyes. My entire arm was already covered with Fuzzle doodles I’d done while waiting out Regent Maximus’s many meltdowns. This board business hadn’t seemed like such an impossible task when I’d made the deal, but apparently Mr. Henshaw knew his Unicorn better than I’d thought.
Tomas, who was standing over on the clinic’s back step to avoid allergy bubbles, pointed out, “In fact, the wood used to build the stable is bigger. This is just a little piece of wood.”
“Bigger pieces?” Regent Maximus said, flicking a fearful ear toward the stable. His eyes widened. He started to tremble.
Great. Now he was afraid of the stable too.
Regent Maximus wasn’t the only thing on my mind. I was starting to feel a little more nervous about the Fuzzle situation. A lot more nervous, actually. We were one day closer to the exterminators’ arrival and we were no closer to a Fuzzle solution. We hadn’t seen Mrs. Dreadbatch again, but Aunt Emma had showed me a Cloverton newspaper article over breakfast. The tiny Cloverton museum had caught fire the night before, and all of the historical Civil War uniforms had been destroyed—I guessed Fuzzles would settle for wool uniforms when they couldn’t find any underwear. S.M.A.C.K.E.D. had called for a community meeting over the Fuzzle situation. Apparently they needed a majority vote in order for the extermination to go forward.
Extermination! Even the word sounded terrible.
Aunt Emma had said she’d go to the community meeting and talk about how well the habitat on the island was working for the moment. But she’d looked worried. She knew it wasn’t a permanent solution.
“No,” Regent Maximus was saying to Tomas. “No-no-no-no-no.”
“Why is he making noises at me?” Tomas asked. “I didn’t say anything!”
“His face!” the Unicorn said. “That boy was about to ask me to get closer and I won’t! I—no-no-no!”
I grimaced at him. It was hard to believe that he was the same species as the Barreras’ Unicorns. Regent Maximus slouched as much as a four-legged animal could slouch, and his rainbow forelock dribbled uncertainly over one eye. Also, Tomas had put one of his brothers’ white tube socks over the Unicorn’s horn, which made him look even less noble. Tomas told me the sock was to make training Regent Maximus safer. I didn’t think a tube sock would stop what Jeffrey Higgleston had called “the purest weapon in the natural world,” but Tomas was insistent.
Tomas switched to our previous topic of conversation: Fuzzles. “Maybe the you-know-whats are flying—well, rolling—south for the season? Like how birds do?” Earlier, we discovered the word Fuzzle sent Regent Maximus into a blind panic. Literally blind. He’d squeezed his eyes shut, then started running. Luckily, he hit the hay bale rather than the tractor right beside it.
“Nobody has mentioned anything online about a migration. And somebody would’ve noticed if they did it every year,” I replied. “Things don’t just suddenly decide to migrate.”
Tomas pulled a little motorized fan out of his pocket and waved it back and forth in front of his face. He looked at me. “What? Heatstroke can send you into cardiac arrest in minutes.”
I wished Tomas could have a conversation with Regent Maximus. I thought they’d have a lot to talk about.
The clinic’s back door cracked open. Bubbles trudged through, looking indignant, and Callie’s voice followed him: “Go on! If I find out who gave you pineapple, they’re dead. Now the whole office smells—” The door slammed shut.
Bubbles rolled his eyes, then laid down on the back step right beside Tomas. Under his breath, the Miniature Griffin muttered, “Smells better than her nail polish.” Then a small noise erupted from his rear end.
Tomas frowned. Regent Maximus shuddered.
Bubbles asked me, “What’s going on out here?”
I said, “We’re trying to teach Regent Maximus to go over that board over there.”
Bubbles chewed on a claw with his beak as he studied the board. “You mean, jump over it?”
“No. Walk over it.”
“And he … can’t?”
“He’s nervous,” I explained politely, since now Regent Maximus was listening. “About splinters. And tripping. And there were some ants near it earlier—”
“Unicorns,” Bubbles interrupted, looking thoroughly disgusted. He closed his eyes, though I could tell he was not sleeping.
I turned back to Regent Maximus. “Think about it, Regent Maximus. Mr. Randall’s going to be here soon, and we’ll have to leave to take today’s Fuzzles to Two Duck Lake. This could be your last chance to go over the board today!”
Regent Maximus’s nostrils flared. “Why? What’s going to happen later today? Earthquake? Killer bees? Shipwreck? What do you know?”
“All right,” Bubbles broke in gr
ouchily. “Let’s do this.” Rising, he stretched, extending his claws and bristling his feathers. “Hey, Unicorn! What’s his name? Regent Maximus? Regent—that’s a long name. How about instead of Regent What-evers-mus, I call you …” He hunched forward, ready to pounce, and said, “Dinner.”
“What?” I asked, confused.
“Dinner,” Regent Maximus echoed, with a note of hysteria in his voice. “Dinner.” He eyeballed Bubbles, trying to decide if this twenty-pound creature was really a threat.
Flexing his small claws, Bubbles twitched his tail from side to side.
“Pip! Pip, hide me!” Regent Maximus screamed, prancing behind me. He stuck his head under my arm to keep an eye on Bubbles. I felt him quivering. His tube-socked horn was right in front of me. It was quivering too.
“I haven’t had a good Unicorn in ages,” Bubbles said, low and menacing. “I can’t wait. Do we have any steak sauce, Pip?”
“Bubbles,” I said. “I don’t think—”
Regent Maximus was no longer forming coherent sentences—he was just shouting words: “Pip! Dinner! Eat! Hide! STEAK SAUCE!”
Bubbles sprang forward—sort of. He was too old to actually spring, so he just heaved himself off the back stoop.
It was enough.
Regent Maximus reared, rainbow mane waving like a flag behind him. He took off like a shot. Right at the board in the grass.
He leaped over it like it was nothing.
Tomas let out a loud “Whoop!” and jumped to his feet. Regent Maximus didn’t even notice what he’d just done—he continued on, wailing “Steak sauce!” at the top his lungs. When he reached the fence on the edge of the property, he shot a furtive look back at Bubbles, then dove behind a trough.
“You’re welcome,” Bubbles said to me. He pulled himself back onto the stoop with a yawn. “Unicorns. I’d rather have HobGrackles.”
“Don’t look so smug,” I shot back, even crankier than before. “That Unicorn didn’t learn anything.”
Tomas joined me, and together we walked over to retrieve Regent Maximus. He was still wedged behind the trough, which would have been a pretty good hiding spot, if it weren’t for the clearly visible tube sock sticking up above it.
“Why did Bubbles attack?” Tomas asked, because of course he hadn’t understood a word of Bubbles’s plan.
I explained it as Tomas removed a handful of fruit-flavored cough drops from his pocket, then placed a tantalizing trail of them from Regent Maximus’s hiding spot out into the yard. I heard the Unicorn make snuffling smelling noises behind the trough, but I guess he wasn’t tempted enough to come out just yet.
Tomas shrugged and stuck the last cough drop in his mouth. He said, “Well, you have to admit, the idea of getting eaten is pretty scary. I’d probably run too if something said it wanted to eat me with steak sauce. Especially since I’m allergic to steak sau—”
My bad mood suddenly melted away, replaced by excitement. “Tomas! That’s it!”
“My steak sauce allergy? It’s really an allergy to the caramel coloring—”
“No! The Fuzzles!” I clapped my hands together. “I think I know why they’re here!”
The Fuzzles were afraid.
Not of everything, like Regent Maximus was, but rather, they were afraid of being eaten. I was sure they had fled to Cloverton … from a predator. Trouble was, I didn’t have the tiniest clue what ate Fuzzles.
Still, it was a start. I decided the next step was to talk it out with Aunt Emma, and I got my opportunity that evening.
After the clinic was closed, Aunt Emma took me and Callie out to Two Duck Lake. She needed to check on the Fuzzles, so we decided to have a picnic dinner on the island too. She wasn’t the best at cooking though, so dinner was foil-wrapped baked potatoes with everything from the refrigerator drawers chopped up and put on them.
As we landed on the shore—thankfully, the Emerald Dunking Ducks seemed to have bedded down elsewhere, taking their judge-y comments with them—the Fuzzles crowded close, just out of reach. It was hard to tell what they were thinking, but they seemed curious. Aunt Emma lifted a few up, holding her stethoscope to each one, then shining a mini-flashlight in their eyes.
“They’re doing so well here!” she said. “It’s too bad we’ll run out of room soon.”
She didn’t say Too bad they’ll be exterminated soon. But I could tell she was thinking it.
Callie flopped down on the shore and opened her potato, then sighed. “Great. This thing’s cold as a dead polar bear.” Annoyed, she wrapped her potato back up and tossed it onto a pile of nearby Fuzzles, who lit up instantly.
“Callie!” admonished Aunt Emma.
Callie blinked. “What? If they can roast marshmallows, they can heat potatoes.”
There seemed to be an important difference between roasting a marshmallow over a Fuzzle and chucking a potato on its head, but the Fuzzles didn’t seem to mind. Still, Aunt Emma and I placed our foil packages more carefully among the Fuzzles instead of tossing them like Callie. When the potatoes had warmed and we were tucking into our food, I asked, “Aunt Emma, do Fuzzles have any natural predators?”
She picked a piece of apple off her potato and chewed it thoughtfully. “Well, lots of creatures find them delicious, actually. That’s why Fuzzles catch fire. They need some dramatic defense mechanisms to protect them since they aren’t very fast and don’t have teeth or claws to fend off large predators.”
“What sort of large predators?”
She thought about it. “Wild Morks, I suppose. They have special lining in their mouths to allow them to eat animals with spines, and it works to keep the flames from burning them so badly. And plain old crocodiles will eat them if they can get ahold of them, because they pull them underwater. Grims, if Fuzzles are in the path of the pack’s migration. Sometimes Wild Hobs …”
As Aunt Emma went on musing about Wild Hobs for a moment (and Callie went on sighing heavily about all the magical-creatures talk happening), I heard what sounded like a splash close by.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
Aunt Emma and Callie didn’t bother saying “What?” They both shut up in a hurry and listened. Sure enough, another splash sounded above the hushed buzzing of dusk insects.
“Glassfish?” Aunt Emma suggested. “There aren’t many mosquitoes out, but maybe they’re catching dragonflies.”
There was another splash.
Aunt Emma whipped out two flashlights. I took one; Callie reached for the other, but Aunt Emma grabbed her hand instead. Together, the three of us forged to the shore, sweeping the flashlights back and forth. My heart was galloping too loudly to hear if there were any more splashes. I could think of all kinds of things that might be hanging out around a lake at night. What if Tomas was right? What if there really were Georgia Swamp Cretins around here? Sure, they weren’t really deadly, but the bite of one could leave you limping for weeks!
(That wasn’t in the Guide. Tomas had told me. Three times.)
Aunt Emma cast her flashlight to and fro on the sand. The beam illuminated the flock of Emerald Dunking Ducks. They bobbed in the shallows, eyes shut, fast asleep, looking like a fleet of ships at harbor. One of them was muttering in his sleep: “… so much better … than those smaller ducks … practically chickens … barely even poultry …”
“I don’t see anything,” Aunt Emma whispered to me.
But I did. And I didn’t need a flashlight to see it.
“There!” I hissed. Halfway between the shore of the island and the shore of the mainland, a tiny, impossible fire burned on top of the water.
It was a Fuzzle, of course. I pointed my flashlight at it. It swayed gently in the water, wiggling and twitching and scooting its butt (maybe … it was hard to tell which end of a Fuzzle was which) to force itself closer to shore.
“How is it doing that?” Aunt Emma asked. “Fuzzles don’t swim!”
Callie’s voice came from behind us, quite sour. “You’d better find out, because there
go the rest of them.”
We jerked to follow her gaze. Sure enough, a small fleet of Fuzzles sailed into the middle of the lake, half of them on fire.
My normally practical and unshakable aunt said, “Oh, no. How?”
I squinted at them and shined my flashlight at the closest one. It seemed even more magical than Fuzzles were supposed to be. Like they were hovering on top of the water.
But then, as another batch of Fuzzles floated by, my flashlight caught a glint of light. It didn’t seem to be coming from the Fuzzle. It seemed to be coming from under the Fuzzle.
“It’s the Glassfish!” I gasped. “They’re riding on the Glassfish!”
Sure enough, when we trotted farther around the island, we saw that when the Glassfish came to the surface for insects, the Fuzzles leaped onto them. The Glassfish didn’t seem to mind. Instead, they bobbed along like fireproof little boats.
All of the Fuzzles seemed to know instinctively how to wiggle and shimmy and vibrate in just the right way to keep their Glassfish headed toward shore. As they grew closer to freedom, they began to hum, and as they began to hum, more and more of them caught fire.
“This is a disaster,” Aunt Emma said. “If they get loose on shore, they could set the vacation cabins on fire. And we can’t bring them back here, because obviously they can escape!”
Callie said, “This is just great. Nature! I love it! Just wait until Mrs. Dreadbatch hears about this.”
Just the sound of her name made my blood run cold.
I asked, “Can you call Mr. Randall? Maybe he can bring down some fire extinguishers before anyone sees.”
“Yes, yes,” Aunt Emma said, sounding relieved. “That’s a start. Can you try to scare away the rest of the Glassfish to keep any more from escaping while I try to get ahold of him?”
“How are we supposed to do that?” Callie demanded.
I pulled off my shoes and grimly began to roll up my pant legs.
“Oh, no way!” Callie said. “These are character shoes! For the stage! I was just breaking them in!”
Pip Bartlett's Guide to Magical Creatures Page 8