The Misadventures of the Magician's Dog (18 page)

Peter opened his mouth to argue or beg, but no words could squeeze out of his suddenly dry throat. Next to Izzy, Henry, halfway between human and mouse, had dropped to the floor, his paw-hands clawing desperately at his now bewhiskered nose.

“It will be simple enough,” said the magician. “A mere matter of removing what's human about you. Your intelligence. Your soul. Your will and desire. Hold still for a minute. I've never done this before, but I'm pretty sure it's going to hurt.” The magician reached out his hand, palm upward, his narrow fingers grasping at something only he could see.

Anger
, Peter thought.
I have to get angry, and I'll be able to do magic
. But all he could feel was fear.

And then all he felt was pain. It was as if the magician had reached through Peter's rib cage and encircled Peter's heart with his fist. Squeezing, the magician tugged, and tugged again, more insistently;
one more tug
, Peter thought,
and my heart will slide out, and nothing will ever put it back again
.

“Stop!” cried Izzy, tears streaking down her face. “You have to stop!” But the magician didn't. As Peter watched, Celia launched herself toward him, but before she was halfway across the room, the magician waved his hand and she froze in her tracks.
Somebody help me!
Peter wanted to scream. But poor Henry was now more mouse than boy, a small brown blob writhing on the ground; and though The Dog's teeth were bared, Peter
knew he could do nothing against magic as powerful as the magician's. No one could save Peter: they needed Peter to save them.

The pressure from the tugging grew and grew and grew, until the pain of it was the only thing left in the world.

And then he heard something.

It was soft at first, and he could hardly make it out.
Music
, he thought as it got louder, and then:
Not just music, a woman singing a lullaby
. The voice was unfamiliar, and the song was one Peter had never heard. He couldn't tell where it was coming from.

“In a house on a street,”

the voice sang,

“In a city that's sleeping,
A baby woke up, and
A mother rocked her son.”

The song might have been unknown to Peter, but its effect was immediate: the tugging within him became less.

“And he cried, and she kissed him
And the city slept around them.
And she laughed, and he smiled,
And she sang him this song.”

The song ended, but the woman's gentle voice didn't stop. “Time to sleep now, Daniel,” she said. “I love you, sweetheart.”

The tugging, for a moment, ceased altogether.

In front of Peter, the magician's face was a mask of longing and confusion. His dark eyes were wet, and he looked almost unrecognizable to Peter, as if—for at least a moment—he had become someone else. “Now,” Peter heard The Dog say, even though he was across the room and his mouth wasn't moving.

Suddenly Peter understood where the music had come from and what he was supposed to do. But how could he do magic when he wasn't angry? And how could he be angry, looking at the sad face of the boy who suddenly was not the magician?
Daniel
, the woman's voice had said.
His mother
, Peter thought.

Trying to pull power into himself, Peter thought back once more to what The Dog had said about his father, the words that had made Peter so angry that he had made the magician human.
Magic could bring him back. But it couldn't change who he is
. . . . This time, though, when Peter imagined his father's face, it wasn't anger he felt. In his mind's eye, he could see his father smiling at him: from across a chessboard; in the kitchen as he made pancakes; with Izzy on his lap on the sofa. His father, who loved to fly planes. Who had been a part of the air force since before Peter was born. But who also loved Peter and his sisters. Who emailed every day, even when Peter didn't write back. Who had awakened Peter on that last morning because he wanted time alone with him before he left.

Peter could feel the magic building, could feel it on the surface of his skin. It was there, waiting: the magic he needed to save himself and his sisters. But how could he give power to his anger when he felt only love?

As he watched, the magician's shoulders started to straighten. “Now!” The Dog exclaimed from across the room. “Peter! Do it now!”

“Peter!” screamed Izzy. Even Celia's frozen eyes seemed to beg him to act.

The power was present; Peter's hands were trembling with it. But he wasn't angry.

The magician lifted his face.

Peter thought.

It didn't feel the same. The spot on his head was slightly farther up than before, and the taste in his mouth was different, sweeter somehow, more like fruit than chocolate. But still, Peter knew it was working; there was no mistaking the feeling of magic traveling through him.

Be rock
.

Peter could see the moment the magician realized what was happening. His face twisted into a snarl, and the pain in Peter's chest suddenly returned, more agonizing than before. That pain almost caused Peter's magic to slip. But the look of hope on The Dog's face helped Peter focus.
Rock. Be rock
.

The magic was like nothing Peter had done before: the magician had willpower, and from the moment he felt the first tremors of the spell, he fought against it. But Peter concentrated as he had never before concentrated in his life, all his will and determination channeled toward that one crucial act of magic.

And just like that, the magician disappeared, replaced by a rock the size of a chicken.

Peter sank to the ground with relief as the pain in his chest abruptly vanished. But he didn't even have time to figure out what had happened before The Dog was standing next to him. “Not yet,” barked The Dog. “You can't stop yet.”

“What do I have to do now?” said Peter, his voice shaking with exhaustion. He realized the answer even as he asked the question. Her face streaked with tears, Izzy held her hands out toward her brother; in them was the small, limp body. Was it too late? Peter wondered. He might be a magician, but he was pretty sure he couldn't bring back the dead. Even a mouse.

Izzy placed Henry in Peter's open fingers.

Izzy loved the mouse, and Peter loved Izzy. He had to try. Peter thought his way into that tiny body, the magic as strange and free of anger as it had been before. At first he was certain Henry was gone, but then he felt the flicker of a heartbeat.
Maybe
, he thought, and with his mind, he pushed air into Henry's minuscule lungs.
Again. Again
. And the heartbeat grew, and the mouse came to life in his hands.

“Henry!” cried Izzy. She took the mouse from Peter and cradled him against her cheek.

“Impressive,” said The Dog. “Can you unfreeze Celia?” He glanced at Peter, slumped on the floor. “Actually, let me try.” A moment later, Celia stretched her arms toward the ceiling.

She looked at Henry, now crouched on Izzy's shoulder, then down at the rock. “Wow. You did it, Peter. Everything's fixed!”

Peter didn't say anything. Neither did The Dog.

“What?” demanded Celia. “Why aren't we celebrating? Peter turned the evil magician back into a rock, Henry's okay, The Dog isn't shooting through the galaxy somewhere. Why isn't everyone happier?”

Celia's right, of course
, Peter thought. He glanced down at the rock. The magician would have eagerly destroyed them all. It was a good thing he was a rock again. Wasn't it? But it didn't feel like a good thing. Inside that rock was a boy whose mother had sung him lullabies, a boy who had lived in a white house with roses in the yard.

A boy whom The Dog loved. A boy whom The Dog had manipulated today with the sound of his mother's voice. The Dog knew Daniel perfectly, Peter thought—knew him so well that he had predicted how he would react to that song.

“Can I ask you something?” Peter said to The Dog.

“Yes.”

Peter chose his next words carefully. “When the magician heard that coyote howling and turned himself into a rock, that wasn't an accident, was it?”

The Dog abruptly turned toward Peter. Then his legs buckled and he sank to the floor. “How did you know?”

Peter didn't answer.

The Dog stared at the carpet as though he couldn't bear to look Peter in the eye. “I couldn't do anything to stop him,” he said. “He was becoming worse and worse. And one day I decided it had gone far enough. All I did was make that sound, a coyote howling, when he was deep asleep. Of course his spell couldn't work; there wasn't a real coyote there for it to work on.”

“Then why did you bring me into it? Why did you to try to convince me to make him human again?” Peter asked. “I'm probably going to end up evil, and then turn into a rock myself. And it's all for nothing. So that you could make the magician human after you made him turn himself into a rock!” For a moment, Peter felt anger building within him. But then tears suddenly stung his eyes, and the anger was gone. “I thought . . . I thought you were my friend.”

“It was the magic water bowl,” said The Dog slowly. “That's no excuse, of course. After the magician turned into the rock, I knew I'd done the right thing, but I still felt horrible. He was my best friend, after all. So one day I asked my magic water bowl what it would take to make him himself again—not himself the magician, but himself the boy. And the answer I got was you.”

“Because Peter's stronger than the magician,” said Izzy.

“You keep saying that,” said Peter, “but I'm really not. You just think that because you're my little sister.”

Izzy looked at Peter as if he were being particularly slow. “You turned the magician into a rock, didn't you?”

“Well, yes, but that was just luck.”

“How did you do that, Peter?” asked The Dog. “I've been wondering. I was sure we were all goners.”

Peter thought back to that moment. “I don't know, honestly. I was going to ask you. I couldn't make myself angry, but the magic worked anyway.”

“What?”

“I tried to make myself angry by thinking about my dad, but it didn't work.” Peter shifted his weight from
one foot to the other. It felt a little embarrassing to say it aloud, but he remembered clearly what he'd felt at that moment. “I was thinking about my dad. About how much . . . well, how much I love him.”

“You did magic through love?”

Had he? Peter thought back to the way the power had flowed through him. “I guess I did.”

The Dog's mouth hung open, exposing his incisors and long pink tongue. “Peter, don't you see what you're saying?” he asked. “How do you feel now? Are you angry?”

“I . . . I feel fine,” said Peter. How could he not have noticed before? “Not angry at all.”

The Dog dropped to his haunches, lifted his nose, and howled to the stars that twinkled through the ceiling.

“What are you howling about?” Peter asked. “Are you upset?”

The Dog looked at him, and there were tears in his eyes.
A dog crying
, Peter thought.
Not the strangest part of this day, but strange enough
.

“Not upset,” said The Dog. “I'm howling because I'm happy. You wouldn't understand. It's a dog thing.”

“Did you know people could do magic through love? Why didn't you tell me?”

“I didn't know,” said The Dog. “Or I would've told you. But I sometimes wondered if maybe you would be able to find a different way to do things than he had. That's why I didn't tell you that you had to be angry that night at the golf course. It's also why I made you hear Izzy's voice when you were flying, and why I brought your sisters to the magician's house. You care a lot about
your family, and I thought that might keep the anger from taking you over. But I didn't know it was the key to everything.”

“Does that mean Peter won't become evil like the magician?” Celia asked. She and Izzy were listening as intently as Peter.

“I don't think he will,” said The Dog. “He's not angry now, and he just did an enormous amount of magic.”

He wouldn't become evil. Peter looked down at his dusty hands; he had never before felt so grateful just to be himself. “Will I still turn into a rock? I mean, will a spell backfire on me eventually, like it did with your magician?”

“That I don't know,” said The Dog. “It seems possible. But then, in legends there are often good magicians, aren't there? Like Merlin, for instance—he lived to be an old man. Perhaps there's some basis of truth in those stories.”

“Are you trying to say you think I could become like Merlin?” The idea struck Peter as preposterous.

But The Dog seemed to take the question seriously. “It seems more likely to me that you'll end up like him than that you'll end up a rock.”