The Evil Wizard Smallbone (25 page)

Smallbone was delighted with the chart Hell Cat and Dinah had found in the library. He even smiled a reasonably non-evil smile when he unfolded it. “Looks like you’re worth your keep after all,” he said. “Two, three days to make sure we got this nailed down, and them coyotes’ll be shaking water out of their ears. Fetch me
Mysteria Acquam
, Foxkin. We got us some figuring to do.”

Nick researched tides and currents and underwater springs until Smallbone sent him down to make sandwiches, then made charts of numbers until Smallbone sent him to bed. He should have been too tired to dream, but even Bow-Wowzer Meowzer couldn’t keep him from waking up in a lather, sure he was back in the cellar in Beaton, sure he’d heard Jerry’s — or worse, Uncle Gabe’s — step on the stairs. After a particularly vivid dream that featured Uncle Gabe sniffing around Evil Wizard Books like a hunting dog, Nick went out to the barn with
The Hobbit
. He hung his lantern on a hook, made himself comfortable on a bale of hay, and read, wondering if Gandalf’s pipe smelled as bad as Smallbone’s.

It was still dark when Nick woke with a start to a chorus of yelling goats. Startled, he tumbled off his hay bale.

“Glad to see you’re up bright and early, Foxkin,” Smallbone said. “We got a big day ahead of us. There’s a visitor coming.”

Nick went over to the cranky old hand pump and started priming. “Visitor?” he said, as if he didn’t care.

Smallbone opened a bin, scooped out a bucket of goat feed, and dumped it into the trough. “Did a little scrying this morning, looking for Fidelou, found this feller instead. Big fat cuss, face like a walrus. He ain’t magic, and he sure ain’t with the State, so he’s got to be a relation. A father, I think you said. Or maybe an uncle?”

Nick pumped furiously. Water gushed out of the pump, flooding the buckets, slopping on the floor, and soaking his jeans to the knee. He jumped back, swearing, and fell onto a hay bale, where he lay, blank with terror.

“You better tell me,” Smallbone said.

“I saw my cousin Jerry in town yesterday,” Nick told the beams above him. “He’s with the Howling Coyotes. He must have called Uncle Gabe and told him where I was.”

“Would that be the famous Jerry Reynaud whose name you stole when we first met?”

“I thought if you started throwing curses around, maybe they’d land on him instead of me.”

“I see.” Smallbone picked up the hay fork. “This Uncle Gabe, he with Fidelou, too?”

His tone was mild, but Nick could hear the edge under it. “He lives way out in Beaton and works in a garage and watches races and wrestling on TV. And drinks. He doesn’t get out much.”

“Well, he’s out now.” Smallbone pulled his pipe from his pocket and stuck it in his mouth, unlit. “And he’s coming here.”

Nick’s mind raced. He could hide in the woods, or he could swim out to one of those little islands in the Reach. What he really wanted to do, though, was turn his uncle into an ant and step on him, or even stop the spell halfway and see if any of the horrible things
Animal You
had threatened would happen.

He must have said some of this out loud, because Smallbone cackled. “Bloodthirsty, ain’t you? Not that I blame you, mind — far as I can tell, it wouldn’t be more than he deserves. But that ain’t how this story goes. The Rule is your nearest kin gets three free shots at rescuing you.”

Nick sat up so suddenly his head spun. “I don’t want to be rescued. I want to learn magic.”

Smallbone gave him a thoughtful look. “So you can be an evil wizard?”

“Maybe I can be a good wizard, like Gandalf.”

The bristly beard twitched briefly. “Maybe pigs can fly.”

Silence fell, punctuated by goaty munching and slurping and the occasional impatient cluck from the chickens. Nick got up to feed them. He even cast his egg-gathering spell.

“There’s a way out of this,” Smallbone remarked as eggs floated from their hidey-holes to the straw-lined basket.

Nick shot him a suspicious look. “Really? What?”

“There’s more than one way to spin a story. Think, Foxkin.”

Thinking wasn’t easy with one part of Nick’s brain shouting
RUN
and another shouting
FIGHT
, but he came up with the answer at last. “It’s like ‘The Wizard Outwitted,’ ” he said. “Except what I have to do is
not
give Uncle Gabe a hint so he won’t know which animal is me.”

“Light dawns over Marblehead,” Smallbone said.

“Then will he go away and leave me alone?”

“He’ll have to. One chance to a customer.” The old wizard smiled toothily. “After that, you belong to me.”

Nick thought about this. “That’s too easy.”

“Maybe it is and maybe it ain’t,” Smallbone said. “Animal bodies got minds of their own, you know.”

Nick did know. Remembering some of the things he’d done as a rat still made him squirm. “I guess that means it’s on me now, huh?”

“It always is, Foxkin. It always is.”

Some time later, Nick was on the hearth rug in the kitchen, waiting for Uncle Gabe to show up. Jeff, who’d been out in the woods all morning, slept beside him, whuffing and jerking in a doggy dream. Tom was investigating something under the stove. The clock was ticking loudly and, Nick thought, much more slowly than usual.

He didn’t know where Smallbone was.

The shop bell jangled hoarsely. Jeff jumped up, ears pricked, growling; Tom galloped across the floor and tried to hide under Nick’s leg. Nick put his arms around Jeff’s neck and told himself there was nothing to worry about. Smallbone was doing all the magic. All Nick had to do was keep his head.

Out in the front room, the door opened with a long nerve-wrenching screech. Nick jumped nervously.

“I’m here for my nephew, old man,” a familiar voice shouted. “You going to hand him over, or do I stuff your scraggly whiskers down your throat?”

“Neither one,” Smallbone said calmly. “There’s Rules that govern these things, Rules even a cross-grained cuss like you has to follow.”

“You think?” Uncle Gabe snarled. There was a grunt, followed by a flood of very bad words. Apparently the Rules didn’t prevent Smallbone from showing Uncle Gabe who was boss.

“Here are the terms,” Smallbone went on as though nothing had happened. “You recognize your nephew three times in a row, you can have him. You get it wrong once, he stays with me.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Uncle Gabe said. “You think you can’t lose, don’t you? Seeing as you’re holding all the cards?”

“Anybody can lose,” Smallbone said. “That’s why it’s a test. And it’s starting
right now
!”

It was like movie magic —
Alakazam!
You’re a frog! Poof! You’re a fish! As Smallbone spoke, Nick, Jeff, and Tom turned into three black Lab puppies, identical in every detail except for one being a boy in a body he didn’t really know how to use.

A puppy knocked him over and bit his ear playfully. Nick growled and snapped at it.

Somewhere in the air above him, Smallbone’s voice said, “Your nephew is one of these dogs.”

“I know the drill,” Uncle Gabe sneered. “And I know you got to let me get a good look at ’em. So move your skinny butt before I move it for you.”

A shadow fell across Nick, and the stink of beer and stale sweat filled his nose. The other puppies bounced up and started to bark, their tails windmilling wildly. Nick bounced up, too, only his tail had tucked itself between his hind legs and he couldn’t figure out how to wag it. He whined in frustration.

A giant hand reached out of nowhere and grabbed him by the scruff.

The world spun around. Nick found himself kneeling in front of the fireplace, half choked, with Uncle Gabe’s grip tightening on his neck.

“Once,” Smallbone said.

Nick was squatting in the middle of a web. He was spitting mad — at himself, mostly, though Uncle Gabe was mixed up in there, too — and determined not to give himself away again. It should be easy. He’d been a spider before. He knew how it felt.

Two shadows fell over his web.
Flies
, Nick thought.
Yum
.

“One of these spiders —” Smallbone began.

“I got it,” Uncle Gabe growled.

Silence fell, thick as flannel. Nick thought he could feel his heart beating along his back. If spiders had sweat glands, he would have been sweating.

“Give up?” Smallbone said.

“Nope. I already know which one he is. I’m just thinking how I’m going to make him pay for putting me through this malarkey.”

Nick flinched. It wasn’t much of a flinch, but it shook the delicate threads of the web, which moved as if in an invisible breeze.

Uncle Gabe crowed. “That one!”

Nick found himself squatting on the barn floor with Uncle Gabe and Smallbone standing over him. Uncle Gabe was grinning like a jack-o’-lantern. Smallbone’s face was still as stone.

“Twice,” he said.

Nick was among a herd of goats he knew very well, staring at the two men standing outside the pen. Beside him, the billy goat Harpo stamped his foot and baaed uneasily. The herd separated into a line.

“Can’t see ’em clear, way back there,” Uncle Gabe said. “It ain’t a fair trial if I can’t see ’em clear.”

Smallbone climbed into the pen and tried to shoo them all forward. Nick kept an eye on Harpo and Thalia and bounced to one side. There were three billy goats, besides him — Tom and Jeff, probably, making things harder for Uncle Gabe. Maybe this would work after all.

“You give up?” Smallbone asked.

“I ain’t even got started.”

Uncle Gabe grabbed a hayfork and hit the rails of the pen with it. Thalia reared up on her hind legs and yelled like an angry toddler. Nick found himself rushing to the front of the pen with the intention of giving Uncle Gabe the head-butting of his life. When he hit the rails, he stretched his neck between the slats and spat straight into Uncle Gabe’s face.

“That one,” Uncle Gabe said triumphantly.

Then Nick was standing in the goat pen with Jeff trying to hide behind his legs and Tom crouched by his feet, mewing.

“Hey, there, Nick,” Uncle Gabe said. “How’s tricks?”

Smallbone’s gaze moved from Nick to Gabe and back again. His mouth was a thin line in his beard.

“Thrice,” he said, dry as a rainless month. “Seems like he’s yours after all.”

“You heard the old-timer,” Uncle Gabe said. “Come on. We’re going home.”

U
ncle Gabe dragged Nick to the pickup, shoved him inside, and slammed the door. Nick sat up and moved his butt off the spring sticking out of the seat. He didn’t fasten his seat belt, because there wasn’t one. Like everything his uncle owned, his truck was beat up and worn out and sad.

Like Nick.

He’d always been proud of being the kind of kid who never knew when he was beat. When a kid hit him, he hit back with interest. Every time Uncle Gabe had belted him, every time Jerry had gone at him or ripped up one of his books or thrown his shirt in the toilet, he’d spat and struggled and fought. Well, he was beat now.

Through the smeared windshield, he saw Smallbone on the porch of Evil Wizard Books with Tom in his arms and Jeff beside him, stiff legged and alert. With his black dog and his ginger cat and his coat and beard and hat he didn’t take off even when he ate, the old man looked more than ever like something out of a horror movie.

The Evil Wizard Smallbone. He used to be a nasty customer, but now he carves souvenir wooden figures and he’s nice to animals. He even lets his apprentice help him with his spells.

I hope Fidelou gets him
, Nick thought.
I hope Fidelou gets them all
. Well, not the animals. It wasn’t their fault Uncle Gabe could pick him out three times out of three. It wasn’t even Smallbone’s fault, though Nick would have liked it to be. Thanks to
Animal You
, Nick knew himself well enough to know that he’d given himself away.

Uncle Gabe got into the truck, slammed it into gear, and peeled out of the parking lot. His eyes were slits under his cap, his mouth set like iron. Nick knew that expression. It promised pain, maybe a trip to the hospital. It promised that Nick was going to be sorry he’d ever been born.

They drove through Smallbone Cove, going far too fast. A few startled Covers looked up as the pickup rattled by, then looked away again. No help there, Nick thought, even if they knew he needed helping. He was Smallbone’s apprentice and Smallbone’s problem. The only person Nick had left to count on now was himself. He slumped hopelessly in the seat.

“Well, aren’t you a useless lump of misery,” Uncle Gabe said. “Almost makes me glad your ma’s dead and gone.”

The habit of poking somebody until they cracked was obviously a family trick. Well, Nick wasn’t going to fall for it this time. Uncle Gabe might be bigger than Nick, and a whole lot meaner, but he wasn’t very smart.

“If it wasn’t that I promised your ma I’d keep you in the family,” Uncle Gabe went on, “I’d have put you in care soon as she was in the ground. Still, what goes around comes around. Just because I got no use for you don’t mean nobody does. The Boss wants you, devil knows why.”

Nick sat up. “The boss? Do you mean Fidelou?”

Uncle Gabe shifted gears. “Mean son of a so-and-so, ain’t he? He’ll make mincemeat of that old coot, when he catches him.”