Milk & Croakies

by Sam Cheever

  I felt my eyes go wide. “Dispose of her?”

  The little creature in Maude’s hand warbled softly, her slanted eyes turning turquoise for a moment and then going black again. Whatever she was, she was adorable. I couldn’t let her be…disposed of…could I?

  The door between the store and the library flew open and crashed against the wall. I jumped and whipped around, glaring at the Sprite.

  She didn’t even notice.

  Sebille’s gaze locked onto Maude’s hand, and she strode forward faster than I’d ever seen her move unless she was being threatened…or heading for a plate of egg rolls. She stopped in front of the young witch, her pale, freckled face filled with awe, and wordlessly extended her hands.

  Maude carefully placed the creature across Sebille’s outstretched palms.

  Sadie warbled again. Her eyes glowed with pretty aqua light, and the light sifted along her body, fading to white as it slid off the tip of her tail.

  “Amazing,” Sebille whispered.

  Maude and I shared a look.

  “Do you know what she is?” I asked.

  Sebille nodded. “Yes. She’s incredible.” Sebille turned and headed back toward the library, her gaze never leaving the creature on her palms. Sadie stared back, seemingly just as transfixed by Sebille as the Sprite was by her.

  “Thanks for bringing her to me,” Sebille said at the door. Then she disappeared into the artifact library without another word.

  As the door snicked shut, Maude and I shared a look.

  “Crab’s crutches.” I shook my head. “I guess Sadie’s staying. What did you want to tell me about Rustin?”

  “He wanted me to let you know that he’s all right.”

  I nodded, filled with relief. I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks, and I’d been starting to worry that his work with his aunt wasn’t going well. “Any progress in helping him find a body?”

  “Some. At least we have a general direction now. A plan.” She frowned. “There have been some hiccups.”

  I could imagine. “What kind of hiccups?”

  She shook her head. “Aunt Maddie told me I couldn’t talk about it.”

  I held my thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “Just a little?” I wheedled.

  She grimaced. “We’ve given up on Rustin finding a permanent body.”

  My smile slid away, and my stomach twisted with despair. “Oh no.”

  Maude saw my reaction and shook her head, reaching out to touch my arm. “No, it’s not bad news. Not really. We’ve come up with a good compromise. Rustin’s fully on board with it.” Despite her upbeat reporting, I could see the doubt and worry in her yellow eyes.

  “What’s the compromise?”

  “I really shouldn’t…”

  “Please,” I asked, my heart in the single, desperate plea. “He’s my friend. I feel responsible for his predicament. Tell me?”

  “Well, first of all, you are not responsible, Naida.”

  I shrugged, feeling the old guilt flooding back at the news that their experiments had failed.

  “We’re going to twist Rustin’s essence to give him dual physicality.”

  She looked so proud I felt stupid having to ask the eighteen-year-old what she meant. “Huh?”

  “Like a shape-shifter. We got the idea from Margot.”

  Margot Quilleran was one of the black witches in the Quilleran coven. She was evil and deadly, her ginormous owl form the most terrifying monster I’d ever encountered. I felt my eyes go wide. “Margot’s helping?”

  “No. Are you kidding? She mostly paces her cage all day, spitting nails at us through her eyes. But she has shifter DNA, and we’re using it to help Rustin find a form he can shift into.”

  I was starting to warm to the idea. Then I realized what she was saying. “Wait. He’ll have to be some kind of animal? How is that better than being stuck inside Slimy?”

  “He’ll have a dual nature, Naida. He’ll be both.”

  “He can be himself?”

  “Part of the time. We’re not sure yet how much time he’ll need to spend in his second form. But we do know that, with time, he can extend the time for each or both.”

  “That’s wonderful!” For the first time in weeks, I felt hope for Rustin.

  Maude bounced happily on her toes. “I know, right?”

  On an impulse, I hugged her. “Thanks for coming to tell me. Do you want to stay for tea? I’m pretty sure I have some cookies left if Hobs didn’t find them.”

  My resident Hobgoblin was death to sweets of any kind. Especially if they had chocolate in them. I’d baked a batch of chocolate chips the night before and hidden them all around Croakies. If they were spread out all over the place, I figured it would at least take him longer to find them all.

  “I’d love some!”

  As I fixed tea, Maude looked around the shop. Wicked was sitting in a beam of sun on the windowsill, licking his paws. Maude walked over and peered down into Mr. Slimy’s terrarium. “Where is he? Is he hiding under his rock?” The young witch reached into the glass box and lifted the flat-topped rock I’d situated under a heating lamp.

  “Not exactly.” I handed her a cup of tea and, glancing around first to make sure Hobs was nowhere to be seen, I walked over to the first set of shelves and extracted a thick cookbook, reaching behind it to retrieve a small plastic container of cookies.

  I settled the container on the round reading table and sat down with Maude after grabbing my own cup of tea.

  I let her enjoy her snack for a minute before I gave her the bad news. “Slimy’s disappeared.”

  Maude stopped chewing, her eyes going wide. “He what?”

  I quickly filled her in on my Farmer Blue problem. She listened carefully and then finished her cookie with a thoughtful expression on her face.

  “Have you heard of anything like that before,” I asked the young witch.

  She surprised me by nodding. “It wasn’t a spell, though. I’m not even sure it was an artifact.” Her gaze when it lifted to mine was worried. “It sounds to me like a split in the dimensional fabric.”

  Well, that sounded bad. And I was pretty sure I couldn’t just buy dimension-repairing thread and needle and sew it back up. “How do we fix that?” I asked Maude.

  “I have no idea. But Aunt Maddie might. You’d better come back to the house with me.”

  Well, blithering bat boogers.

  4

  And Not a Moment More!

  “It can’t be this easy,” I lamented in a voice that was more than a little bit whiny.

  Maude laughed as she shoved the car door closed. She looked up and waved at the long line of red-eyed vultures sitting atop her aunt’s castle-like home. “I don’t know what to tell you, Naida.”

  “It took you like ten minutes to get here. Normally it takes me hours. And there were no narrow, winding roads with plunging cliffs on both sides. No deadly forests. No switchbacks, turnarounds, or stomach twisting hills. You took like three turns and we were here.”

  “The Universe is protective of PTB, you know that.”

  And Maude’s aunt was one of them. The Powers That Be were like the politicians of the magical Universe. They were its eyes and ears in each dimension.

  I did know that, which was why I was surprised the Universe had let Maude just drive right up to the house. In ten frog flipping minutes!

  The teen looked at my face and giggled. “I live here, Naida.”

  The line of vultures lifted their wings in that wave thing they did, the movement sifting along the roofline like they were fans at a witchy baseball game. I didn’t know if the wave was a warning, a magical key to open the door, or just a “Hey, how are ya?” to guests.

  I kind of doubted it was that last thing, though.

  The front door opened as Maude and I approached. I tensed, expecting Madeline to appear from the darkness on the other side like she had the last two times, her angular face looking like something out of a scary scene from a Grimm’s Fairy Tal
e.

  The space on the other side of the door was empty. There was nobody there. As soon as I cleared the door, Maude flicked a finger and it closed behind us. “Auntie, I’m home!”

  I nearly laughed. I’d spent so many hours in complete and utter terror of the uber-powerful Madeline Quilleran, that I had trouble envisioning her as Auntie, I’m home material.

  “In the kitchen,” a familiar voice said, the tone lighter than I usually heard from Madeline Quilleran.

  Maude jerked her head toward the hallway leading to the kitchen.

  I started after her, feeling the glossy brown gaze of the stag over the fireplace following my movements. My shoulder blades prickled at the feeling. But I could never catch the thing in the act of spying on me.

  I jerked to a stop, my head whipping around, hoping to catch the dead deer head watching me. The eyes were blank, focused toward the center of the big room. Not on me. I narrowed my gaze on it for a moment and then headed toward the kitchen, hearing the soft chuff of something on the air behind me. The stag was laughing.

  Dang magical wall deco.

  Maude was sitting at the long granite table, a cup of tea steaming on the glossy surface before her. She was taking a bite from a biscuit when I entered the room and her eyes rose to mine, a question filling her gaze.

  I felt compelled to explain. “I got lost.”

  She chuckled. “You were trying to catch Felonius again, weren’t you?”

  “Felonius?”

  “The stag,” a deeper, more mature female voice said.

  I turned to look at Madeline, finding her standing before the sink with a steaming cup in her hand. She gave me a slightly scary smile. “He is watching you. But you won’t catch him at it. He’s much too quick and smart for that.”

  “We’ll just see about that,” I murmured under my breath.

  “Yes,” Madeline said, her expression pleasant enough to melt butter. “We will.”

  My cheeks heated. I hadn’t intended for her to hear me. “Did Maude tell you why I’m here?”

  Madeline moved toward me, her steps so graceful and light she appeared to be floating above the tiles. The floor-length dress she wore didn’t do anything to remove that perception. I watched her carefully, my pulse spiking as she drew quickly near. “Sit,” she instructed, placing the tea on the table next to where Maude sat. “Would you like a sweet biscuit?”

  I swallowed, my throat and mouth suddenly dry, and nodded. “Please.” I really didn’t want the biscuit. But it would give me something to do with my hands when I got really nervous. So I didn’t make a complete fool of myself.

  I choked on the first bite of the biscuit, my coughing fit nearly making me gag.

  So much for not making a fool of myself.

  “I understand you’ve found a dimensional wrinkle.”

  I frowned. “I’m not sure. Maude said that’s what it sounded like. I was leaning toward a rogue artifact.”

  She lifted a dark brow. “Have you found an artifact?”

  “Well, no, but…”

  Madeline nodded as if she’d proven her point. “I’ve heard of this one other time, a hundred years ago. That wrinkle grew until it consumed an entire town.” She frowned. “Messy business.”

  I really didn’t like the sound of that. “When you say consumed, what do you mean, exactly?”

  Madeline shrugged, clearly not interested in the fate of that unlucky town. “Gone. Kaput.”

  “Did they ever come back?”

  “Not that I know of. We managed to stop the wrinkle from growing, but, unfortunately, it necessitated cutting the wrinkle at its base and removing it.” She sighed. “Doing dimensional surgery is such tedious work. I’ll have to cancel my appointments for the week.”

  “Wait a minute!” I shoved the deadly biscuit away and rested my arms on the table, leaning closer to Madeline as if the smaller distance would make her words less terrifying. “You can’t just slice this thing off. Slimy’s in there.” And Bessy, I needed to keep reminding myself.

  Madeline’s yellow gaze widened. “The frog? What in the world is he doing there?”

  I wished I knew. “He came with me to the barn. We were looking for Bessy the cow…”

  Madeline held up a slender hand. “You brought the frog to a client site?”

  “Yes, I…”

  “Why?” Her question didn’t appear to be a frivolous one. She seemed genuinely interested in a clinical sense.

  I tensed, not wanting Madeline to get too interested in Slimy. Having a witch interested in any of your friends was dangerous. And Slimy had already been through enough magical malfeasance for one small, green life.

  For all I knew, that could be the reason for his froggy incontinence issues.

  I’m just sayin’.

  “I don’t know. Wicked came along and he wanted me to bring Slimy.”

  Rather than put Madeline off Slimy’s scent, my explanation seemed to make her even more interested. “The Familiar is bonded to the frog?”

  I couldn’t help noticing that she’d said “The” instead of “Your” Familiar. I tried not to take it personally. I mean, I wasn’t a witch, I was a Sorceress. We generally didn’t have Familiars. “No…I mean…they like each other,” I stuttered lamely.

  Finally, Maude saved me. “The cat formed a bond when Rustin was in residence,” the young witch said with careful nonchalance. “He probably doesn’t realize Rustin’s gone.”

  Madeline seemed to lose interest in the subject. “Well, that doesn’t matter now. We have to close the wrinkle, Naida. If we don’t it will grow and keep consuming more and more land. It could conceivably suck the entirety of Enchanted into another dimension.”

  “How much time do I have?”

  “For what?”

  “To get Slimy back?”

  “It’s not possible to get someone back, Sorceress. Have you not been listening to me?”

  I stood up. “How long?”

  Madeline sighed. “It will take me two days to prepare the spell. Once I begin, nothing can interfere. Any disturbance of the spell at that point would cause a cataclysmic explosion and create a massive black hole. Enchanted and a good part of the surrounding countryside would get sucked into the abyss and lost forever.”

  “So you wouldn’t be open to say…stretching it to three days?”

  “Naida, keeper!” Madeline said, her voice booming around the kitchen and rattling the glass in the pretty picture windows.

  I raised my hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. I’ve got it. Forty-eight hours.” I turned on my heel and headed toward the front door. “Give or take a few hours,” I murmured so softly I barely heard it myself.

  “Forty-eight hours and not a moment more!” Madeline boomed.

  I stuck my tongue out at the stag as I hurried past. Childish, yes. But it made me feel better. I was standing on the porch, my gaze drawn to the giant, hostile birds circling above my head before I remembered I needed Maude to take me home.

  The young witch came outside a few minutes later, grinning when she saw me sitting on the steps waiting. “You didn’t want to come back inside and face Aunt Maddie again, did you?” She handed me another sweet biscuit as she walked past.

  “I was just enjoying the pleasant temperatures. If the sun could find a way past the thousands of massive, red-eyed guard birds in the sky, it might be really nice out.”

  Maude giggled, sliding behind the steering wheel. “You’re funny, Naida.”

  I bit into my biscuit, the sweet, buttery taste bathing my taste buds in nirvana. “Your aunt hates me.”

  Maude backed her little car out of the parking space at breakneck speed, barely even glancing behind to make sure she wasn’t going to hit a tree or something. She drove with the reckless abandon of a teenager who believed she was bulletproof and immortal. “Maybe if you didn’t tweak her all the time…” She rolled her eyes in my direction, a smile still riding her pretty face.

  I shrugged. “I’ve been hanging
around Sebille too long.”

  We drove in silence for a few moments while I thought about my wrinkle problem. When my head started hurting, I turned to Maude. “Do you know anything about fixing a wrinkle?”

  Maude turned off the highway, heading toward downtown and Croakies. “A giant glob of anti-aging cream?”

  “Har,” I responded, sighing. After what I’d recently experienced with an anti-aging cream that had worked too well…wayyyyy too well…I didn’t find that funny.

  Much.

  “Don’t worry, Naida. I have a feeling you’re going to be getting some help soon.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She shrugged, a secret little smile on her face. “Here we are.”

  I fixed a narrowed gaze on her for a long moment. She simply stared back, a tiny dimple decorating her flushed cheek. Shaking my head, I climbed out of the car. “Thanks for taking me to your aunt’s place.” I leaned down and looked across the car. “If you think of anything that will help…”

  “I’ll let you know. In the meantime, don’t you have a Hobgoblin at the store now?”

  “I do, but I don’t see how…”

  “Bye, Naida.” She drove away, nearly jerking the door out of my hand as I hurried to close it before she left.

  I stood on the sidewalk watching the little car fly down the street and whip around the corner as if it were being chased by the hounds of Hades.

  “Hobs? What had she asked about him?” At a loss, I headed into Croakies and was nearly mown down to the well-worn carpet the moment I stepped through the door.

  “Naida!”

  I yelped in surprise, my hand going to my chest as Sebille flew toward me. She was holding the rainbow lizard carefully in front of her. “You won’t believe…”

  “What’s wrong? What did Hobs and Wicked do now?”

  Sebille shook her head. “They didn’t…”

  I trudged past her and shoved my purse behind the sales counter. “We have a big problem. Slimy’s in danger. We only have two days, and I have no idea how to save him. Or Bessy.” I frowned. “How am I going to get inside a dimensional wrinkle, fetch Slimy and the cow, and get back out?” I looked up at Sebille, who was standing in front of me with a grin still on her face.