Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (2 page)

“You’re too late,” Dairine said. “The French toast is history.”

“Knew I could count on you,” Nita said.

At the table, the centipede pointed a couple of spare eyes at the Christmas tree. “You done with that?” the centipede said.

“Yes,” the tree said, and pushed the pink magazine over to the centipede.

“Thanks,” said the centipede. It tore the cover off the magazine, examined it with a connoisseur’s eye, and started to eat it.

“Morning, everybody,” Nita said as she headed through the dining room and around the corner into the kitchen, where her father was. “You all sleep well?”

“Yes, thank you,” said the Christmas tree and the centipede.

“Adequately,” said the slim blond guy, nodding graciously to Nita as she passed.

In the kitchen, Nita’s tall, blocky, silver-haired dad was standing in front of the open fridge in sweatpants and a T-shirt, considering the contents. Nita went to him and hugged him. “Morning, Daddy.”

“Morning, sweetie.” He hugged her back, one-armed. “Didn’t think I’d see you so early.”

“I’m surprised too,” Nita said. “Didn’t think I’d get over the lag so fast. Tom and Carl are coming over in a while. Oh, and Kit.”

“That’s fine.”

Nita rummaged in the cupboard over the counter by the stove to find herself a mug, then put the kettle on the burner for tea. She put one hand on the kettle and said to the water inside it, in the Speech, “You wouldn’t mind boiling for me, would you?”

There was a soft rush of response as the water inside the kettle heated up very abruptly. Nita took her hand off in a hurry. It took only about five seconds for the kettle to start whistling with steam.

Nita stood there and breathed hard for a moment, feeling as if she’d just run a couple of flights of stairs. No wizardry was without its price, even one so small as making water boil: one way or another, you paid for the energy.

“You’re getting impatient in your old age,” her father said, reaching into one of the canisters on the other side of the refrigerator and handing Nita a tea bag.

“Yup,” Nita said as she dropped the tea bag into the mug and poured boiling water on it.

She smiled. Her father seemed to have become surprisingly blasé in a very short time about wizardry in general—but Nita and Dairine had between them put their parents through a fair amount of wizardly business in the past couple of years, and the adults’ coping skills had improved in a hurry once they’d come to grips with the idea that the magic in the house wasn’t going to go away.
We were lucky, I guess,
Nita thought.
So many wizards don’t dare come out to their families at all. Or they try it, and it doesn’t work, and then they have to make them forget…
She got down some sugar from the cupboard.
But look at him now. You’d think everybody had alien wizards living in their basement.

“It’s almost nine,” her dad said. “I should get ready to go, honey.”

“Okay,” Nita said as her dad headed through the dining room and toward the back of the house.

She wandered back into the dining room with her tea and pulled one of the spare chairs over from the wall, pushing it down to the far end of the table between Sker’ret and where Dairine had been sitting. The centipede—Nita smiled at herself.
I should lay off that,
she thought,
it’s so Earth-centric…
The Rirhait was carefully tearing out another page from the teen magazine. He then examined both sides of the page with great care before shredding it up with several pairs of small knife-sharp mandibles and stuffing it into his facial orifice.

“Where’d these come from?” Nita said to Dairine as she came back in.

“Carmela brought them,” Dairine said. “They’re sure not
mine.
I mean, look at the covers! You could find them in the dark. The publishers must think human females are nearly blind until they’re eighteen. And completely fixated on one segment of the visual spectrum.”

The Christmas tree—
The Demisiv, I mean,
Nita thought—reached out a frond-branch to pull another magazine off the pile. “I think the colors are delightful,” he said.

“That’s just because you’re a sucker for Day-Glo, Filif,” Dairine said. “You’ll get over it.”

Nita somehow wasn’t so sure about that. “And as for you, Sker’ret,” she said to the Rirhait, “you’re a one-being recycling center.”

“There’s a pile of Dad’s old
Time
magazines by the chair in the living room,” Dairine said. “For when you want something a little more substantial.”

“Oh, substance isn’t everything,” Sker’ret said. “Sometimes a little junk food’s just what you need.”

He munched away. Nita drank her tea, watching Roshaun read while he maneuvered the lollipop stick from one side of his mouth to the other. It was like catching some coolly elegant anime character relaxing between shots, because the bulge it produced in the Wellakhit’s face looked very out of place against that otherwise flawless facial structure, the emerald green eyes and the too-perfect blond hair.

Roshaun felt Nita’s gaze resting on him, and looked up. “What?”

It was exactly what Dairine would have said. Nita controlled her smile. “The lollipop…”

“What about it?”

“Hate to say this, but you’re kind of spoiling your grandeur.”

“What grandeur he
has,”
Dairine remarked.

“Kings are made no less noble by eating,” Roshaun said. “Rather, they ennoble what they eat.”

“Wow, who sold you
that
one?” Nita said. She grinned. At the same moment, her stomach growled, and she made up her mind about breakfast. “Think I’ll go ennoble a couple of waffles.”

Roshaun ignored her and continued to work on the lollipop, while Nita went back into the kitchen and headed for the freezer. “And you’re going to get cavities,” Dairine said.

As Nita turned around with the frozen-waffle box, she saw Roshaun deliberately arch one eyebrow. “How can a biped come down with a geological feature?”

“It’s
hwatha-t,
” Dairine said, turning a page in the weekend section. “Not
emiwai.
”

“Oh,” Roshaun said. “Well, it’s all right: people from my planet don’t get those.”

“I don’t care if you come from Dental Hygiene World,” Nita said as she put the waffles in the toaster and started it up, “you’ll get cavities all right if you start stuffing that much sugar in your face every day.”

Roshaun merely chewed briefly, and then reached out to the canister in the middle of the table for another lollipop. Nita winced. “Oh, Roshaun, don’t chew them up like that. It hurts just listening to you!”

“You sound like Sker’ret,” Dairine said, turning another page.

“Sker’ret is if nothing else enthusiastic and robust in his approach to the things he enjoys,” Roshaun said, “so I’ll take that as a compliment.” He got up and wandered out the back door.

As the screen door slammed behind him, Nita glanced over at Dairine. “You’ve got a live one there,” she said.

Dairine glanced up and shrugged. “Listen, at least he’s not complaining about our food anymore. You should have heard him last week.”

“I didn’t understand it, either. All your food’s lovely,” Sker’ret said, and munched another page of the teen magazine.

Nita’s waffles popped up. She went to the cupboard for a plate and pulled the waffles one by one out of the toaster, hissing a little as their heat stung her fingers. Dropping the waffles on the plate, she turned to root around on the shelf next to the stove for a bottle of maple syrup. “Got my hands full here,” she said in the Speech to the silverware drawer by the sink. “Would you mind?”

The drawer, well used to the request by now, slid open. Nita tucked the maple syrup bottle into the crook of her elbow while holding the plate in that hand, and went fishing in it for a knife and fork. “Thanks,” she said to the drawer.

It courteously closed itself as Nita headed into the dining room. Filif drifted past her in the opposite direction, brushing Nita with the fronds on one side as he passed. “You need anything?” Nita said.

“No, I’m just going out to root for a little,” Filif said, levitating gracefully past her and toward the back door. “I’ll be back shortly.”

Nita headed into the dining room; the screen door creaked open and banged shut behind her. She sat down and poured syrup on her waffles, then started to eat. “So what’re your plans for the day?” Dairine said.

“To stay right here until Tom and Carl turn up,” Nita said between bites.

“They’re coming
here
?” Dairine said, looking alarmed.

Sker’ret looked surprised, too. “They’re your Seniors, aren’t they? Wouldn’t you normally go to
them?
”

“Yeah, but what’s been normal lately?” Nita said.

The screen door creaked open again. A moment later, a black four-legged shape burst into the room and began jumping up on the people at the table, one after another, putting his front paws on them and licking them until they protested they’d had enough. When the large Labrador-ish creature got to Nita, he started the same procedure with her, and then paused, looking with sudden interest at her waffle.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” Nita said.

But it smells so nice,
Ponch said silently.

“And it’s going to keep smelling nice until it’s all gone,” Nita said. “Oh, come on, don’t give me those big sad puppy-dog eyes. Kit gave you breakfast.”

He might not have. You haven’t asked.

There was no lessening of the puppy-dog–eyes effect. Nita went back to eating. “I don’t have to ask,” she said. “I know he did. You’re really pitiful, you know that?”

Not pitiful enough, it seems,
Ponch said, in a tone of mild regret. He dropped to the floor again and went to sit by Sker’ret instead.

Sker’ret looked at Ponch with several eyes, then offered him a strip of torn-off magazine page. Ponch sniffed it, mouthed it briefly, and then let Sker’ret have it back, somewhat damp.
Tastes like my dry dog food,
Ponch said.

Kit came in from the kitchen in Ponch’s wake. “Did I hear you bad-mouthing breakfast?”

Not
hers, Ponch said.

Kit flopped down in Roshaun’s vacant seat. Ponch got up and went to rest his head on Kit’s knee.
I don’t mind the dry food so much when there’s some wet food. But when you have to eat it by itself—

“It tastes like cardboard, is that what you’re trying to tell me? Okay, we’ll try another brand.” Kit ruffled Ponch’s ears. “Boy, when you got smart, you sure got picky…”

I was always picky,
Ponch said, with an air of wounded dignity.
But now that I’m smart, I can tell you
why.

Kit looked over at Nita, amused. As he did, it struck her that he looked a little different somehow. “Is it just me,” she said, “or are you having another growth spurt? You look taller today.”

“I am taller,” Kit said, looking toward the kitchen as the screen door creaked open again. “Probably so are you. Looks like ten days in eight-tenths Earth gravity makes your spine stretch. My mom picked up on it last night. She measured me and I’d gained half an inch.”

“Huh,” Nita said, turning her attention back to what was left of her waffle.

“I, too, am taller,” Roshaun said, coming back into the dining room. “Your gravity is somewhat lighter than ours at home.”

“You’re the last one around here who needs to be any taller,” Dairine said as Roshaun reached for the lollipop canister again. “I have to stand on a step stool to get your attention as it is.”

“You finished that last one
already?
” Nita said, taking a bite of waffle as Roshaun sorted through the canister, pulling out a couple of the root-beer–flavored pops. “Roshaun, you’re not going to have any teeth left by the time you get home.”

“We shall see. And what is this delicacy?” He reached down into Nita’s plate and snitched a chunk of waffle off it just as Nita was about to spear it with her fork. As it was, she nearly speared him instead, and wasn’t terribly sorry about it. “Hey!” Nita said. “Cut it out!”

Roshaun ignored her, chewing. “A naive but pleasing contrast,” he said. “And I wouldn’t be so concerned about
my
sugar intake, if I were you.” He smiled at Nita.

“I don’t eat these every five minutes, Roshaun!” Nita said, but it was too late: he was already sauntering out again.

Kit smiled as the screen door slammed once more, but the smile was sardonic. “Is he for real?” Kit said under his breath.

“Real enough to fix a busted star,” Dairine said, giving Kit an annoyed look.

Kit raised his eyebrows. “Finish explaining this to me,” he said to Dairine as she got up, “because you didn’t get into detail yesterday. He’s a prince?”

“A
king,
” Dairine and Sker’ret said in chorus, sounding like they’d heard the correction much too often lately.

“The upgrade from ‘prince’ happened the other day,” Dairine said.

“And he won’t let us forget it,” Sker’ret said. “I think I liked him better as a prince. He was so much less self-assured…”

Dairine rolled her eyes. She made her way around the table and out, heading through the kitchen after Roshaun.
Squeak, bang!
went the screen door.

“Sker’ret, my boy,” said Nita’s dad as he came in from the living room, now dressed in jeans and a polo shirt for work, “your mastery of the art of irony becomes more comprehensive every day.”

It was hard to be sure how she could tell that an alien with no face was smiling, but Nita could tell. “You going now, Daddy?” she said.

“I want to get some bookkeeping done before I open the shop. See you, sweetie.” Once again, the screen door banged shut.

“Something going on with Dairine and Roshaun?” Kit said after a moment.

Nita shook her head. “At first I thought it might just be a crush,” she said. “But now I’m starting to wonder.” Nita speared the last pieces of waffle, and a thought hit her. “Hey, did Filif hear that he needs to be here?”

The wizards around the table looked at one another. “He went out as you were coming in, didn’t he?”

Nita nodded. “He’s probably out back,” she said. “I’ll check.”

She got up and put her plate in the kitchen sink; and with Kit in tow, and Ponch following him, she went out through the side door, down the brick steps to the driveway. The morning was a little hazy, but the sun was warm on their faces. The view up and down the driveway would have seemed clear enough to any non-wizardly person who happened to pass by, but Nita’s vision, well trained in perceiving active spelling by now, could see a tremor of power all around the edges of their property, a selective-visibility field that would hide the presence or actions of anything nonhuman. Inside the screening field, the leaves on the big lilac bushes across the driveway were out at last, and the flower-spikes were growing fast. Nita was glad to see them, though they also made her sad. The winter and the earliest part of the spring seemed to have lasted forever, some ways: any sign of things being made new was welcome. But her mom had loved those lilacs, and wouldn’t be seeing them again. Nita sighed.