The Evil Wizard Smallbone (22 page)

Nick milked the goats, cleaned the pens, and cast the egg-gathering spell. When he got back to the kitchen, Ollie was kneeling by the fire, toasting bread on a long fork with Mutt, Tom, and Jeff gathered around him, watching eagerly. Hell Cat sat at the table, eating bacon with her bare ankles primly crossed.

Ollie pulled the toast off the fork, pushing Jeff’s muzzle out of the way. “Eggs!” he exclaimed when he saw Nick’s basket. “Toss ’em here and I’ll scramble ’em up. Mutt and Jeff ate the old ones. They was tough anyways.”

All his life, Nick had considered any eggs that weren’t rotten or burned good eggs. Ollie’s scrambled eggs were more than not burned. They were tender and buttery, like fluffy yellow clouds. He took another helping and wondered why Smallbone had turned anybody who could cook like that into a pig.

While he was eating, Mutt, who had consented to sit at the table, yelped suddenly.

Nick stared at him. He’d gone as pale as a fish’s belly and was gazing at the kitchen calendar as if he’d seen a ghost. “What?” Nick said. “It’s the first day of spring.”

“The year,” Mutt quavered. “Is that the right year?”

Ollie was staring, too, his mouth opening and shutting noiselessly, his wooden spoon dripping egg on the floor.

“Golly,” said Hell Cat. “It’s the twenty-first century!”

Nick looked from one strained face to the next. “What do you mean, it’s the twenty-first century? When else should it be?”

There was an uncomfortable silence, and then Mutt said, “I ain’t got much schooling, but my ma learned me how to cipher. If that there calendar is right, I reckon it’s about two hundred and forty years since the old man turned me into a dog.”

Nick stared at him. He looked scared but not crazy. “You don’t look it.”

Sensing that something was wrong, Jeff came and put his chin on his former packmate’s leg. “I still feel like I’m fourteen,” Mutt said, rubbing Jeff’s ears. “But what if them two hundred and forty years creep up and jump on me all at once? Dogs don’t think about things like that.”

Nick didn’t want to think about it, either. “You’ll get used to it,” he said uncomfortably.

“Not sure I want to.” Mutt sighed heavily. “I wish you hadn’t turned me back.”

“I don’t,” Hell Cat announced.

“I don’t, either,” Ollie said. “Being a pig isn’t all that interesting. Slop is slop.”

“Meow,” Tom said, and tried to jump up into Nick’s lap. He bumped his head on the chair. As he started to wail, Nick knew what he had to do. He didn’t know how. But if he could pull it off, it would solve half his apprentice problem. All it would take was lots of Will and Confidence. Plus the right book.

He stood. “You guys clean up. I got something I need to do.”

“What’s that?” Hell Cat asked suspiciously.

“You’ll find out,” Nick said, and left.

The bookshop looked bleak and gloomy. Nick took up his favorite position and folded his arms. “I did what you wanted,” he said. “Okay, I wanted to do it, too, and I admit I didn’t think it all the way through. Now they’re in the way and everything’s kind of a mess. Smallbone needs me to get rid of them, and Mutt wants to be a dog again, and Tom doesn’t even know he’s not a cat. So maybe you could help me turn them back?”

There was a long silence. Nick folded his arms tighter and bit his lip. If the books were testing his patience, he’d be patient. If they were testing his Control, he’d be controlled. If they were testing his persistence, then he’d go back in the shelves and examine every title until he found what he needed. He was a wizard, and that, apparently, was what wizards did.

A palm-size shadow flew down the aisle and slid onto the table. Nick picked it up and took it over to the counter so he could see it in the light. It wasn’t really a book at all — just pages folded between thin wooden covers tied shut with black tape. It was handwritten, not printed, and the first page read:

Nick stared. Using Smallbone’s own spells from Smallbone’s own book felt like reading his diary or using his toothbrush or — well, he didn’t know exactly what it felt like, except wrong. Still, the book had come to him and the spells would certainly work. Besides, he was curious.

He sat at the counter and started to read.

Some time later, he heard a noise and looked up to find a tray on the counter beside him. It held a plate with a sandwich and a cup of strong tea. Nick ate and drank and went back to reading. When the light began to fade, he lit a lamp, almost without thinking about it, and read until Hell Cat appeared and told him that if he wanted supper, he was going to have to come and get it.

To his surprise, Smallbone was there, eating spaghetti with homemade sauce and looking as harmless as an evil wizard in an ancient black coat and a bashed-in top hat could look. Mutt had retreated to the fire with Jeff and Tom, but Hell Cat and Ollie sat across from their former master, looking wary but determined.

Nick sat down. Ollie’s sauce was delicious.

The grandfather clock struck midnight as Nick finally finished reading Smallbone’s book. His head was spinning with words and ideas and magic he didn’t really understand. But he knew enough to do and say what he must to give Tom and Mutt what they wanted.

Now he just had to do it.

Only Hell Cat and Ollie were in the kitchen when Nick came down next morning, a lot later than usual.

“Mutt said he’d do the chores,” Hell Cat informed him. “He took Jeff and Tom with him.”

Nick stared at her blankly. Between nerves and strange dreams, he wasn’t at his best.

“You need breakfast,” Ollie said. It was flapjacks with wild-blueberry syrup, and when Nick had eaten and drunk a cup of coffee, he pulled on his Christmas sweater and a pair of duck boots. Smallbone’s book was back on its shelf. He knew the spell now. He could either cast it or he couldn’t. At this point, the book wouldn’t help.

Ollie wished him good luck.

It had rained overnight, and the barn was veiled in a damp gray mist. Mud sucked at Nick’s boots as he walked across the meadow. He knew how to clear the mist and dry the path, but he didn’t. He needed all the magic he had in him for what he was about to do.

Out in the barn, Nick found Mutt and Jeff and Tom curled against the goat pen in a heap. Tom and Jeff were asleep, and Mutt was pretending.

Nick swept the floor, took out his pentagram-drawing kit, and carefully inscribed a pentagram. Then he sat down inside.

“Okay, Mutt,” he said. “I’m ready.”

Mutt got up, lifted Tom in his arms, and put him in the pentagram, careful not to step on the lines. The little boy woke and crawled into Nick’s lap, making a soft growling noise like he was trying to purr.

Nick lifted his hand and concentrated.

He’d never done a spell this complicated before. Elemental Magic was basically suggesting to fire that it burn, to water that it flow, to earth that it support, to air that it move in exactly the way the elemental wizard wanted it to. Every transformation spell he’d cast had been meant to return something to its natural state. This spell went against nature, bending bone and dispersing mass, going against the natural course of biology and evolution to turn an actual human boy into an actual cat.

I’m Nick Reynaud
, he thought.
I’m an evil wizard. I can do anything I want to do. And I want to do this
.

The words of the transformation spell hurt his mouth as if he’d been eating rocks and thorns. They tried to stifle him, leaving Tom a boy with a cat’s head or maybe a shapeless bag of fur and guts. But Nick spoke on, determined. And when he finished, sweating and dizzy, a little orange cat was draped across his leg, purring like a motorboat.

Nick picked Tom up and set him outside the pentagram, careful not to smudge the lines. The little cat sneezed, bounded over to Groucho’s stall, and jumped through the rails.

Nick took a deep breath. “Your turn, Mutt.”

The former dog was backed up against the goat pen with his arms around Jeff’s neck, white as a sheet. “I changed my mind.”

Relief swept through Nick even as he said, “It’s a one-time offer, Mutt. What about those two hundred and forty years?”

“Don’t matter. That was the scariest thing I ever did see. I’d sooner get used to thinking than go through that. Besides, Jeff don’t care, do you, boy?”

Jeff lifted his muzzle and licked Mutt’s neck and ear.

With the energy of a boy who suddenly discovers he’s not going to have to walk over hot coals a second time, Nick rubbed out the pentagram, extracted Tom from Groucho’s manger, and went back to the house with Mutt and Jeff.

Mutt still looked spooked, but he perked right up when Ollie handed him a bowl that smelled richly of butter and the sea. “There was salt fish,” Ollie said to Nick. “So I made chowder. I hope you don’t mind.”

The chowder was the best Nick had ever eaten — even better than Eb’s. By the time Nick had finished it, he knew what to do with Ollie, and maybe Mutt and Hell Cat as well.

The apprentices, when he told them, were not enthusiastic.

“Take us to Smallbone Cove?” Hell Cat sneered. “Are you crazy? Those fellers hate us.”

“No, they don’t,” Nick argued, hoping this was true. “Why should they?”

“I dunno,” Mutt said. “Smallbone never had much good to say about the Cove Smallbones. Said they’re a bunch of lazy cusses.”

“He said the same about you,” Nick said, disgusted.

He went upstairs, went to bed, and slept the rest of the day and all night. When he woke up, a little orange cat was curled on his chest and the delicious smell of sausages was perfuming the air.

Downstairs, Mutt was sucking his fingers and Hell Cat was licking her plate. She stopped when she saw Nick. Mutt didn’t.

“We’ve decided,” she announced. “We’ll go to Smallbone Cove. If we hate it, we can always run away.”

They couldn’t leave immediately, though Nick wanted them to. Hell Cat said, rather snottily, that nobody was going to hire anybody who looked and smelled as bad as Ollie and Mutt, so there was a fight over that, and then Ollie and Mutt had to wash.

While they were getting ready, Smallbone took Jeff up to the tower with him.

“He should be with me,” Mutt said almost tearfully when he came out of the bathroom and found Jeff gone. “We belong together. Mutt and Jeff.”

“I’ll bring him to visit,” Nick promised. “Tom, too.”

The apprentices exchanged a look. Mutt knelt down and scratched Tom behind the ears, then marched out the back door and toward the path to Smallbone Cove without looking back. The rest of them had to run to catch up.

Nick was surprised that the apprentices knew the way as well as he did, and said so.

“It ain’t changed all that much,” Mutt said.

“Where’re we going?” Ollie wanted to know. “Nate’s?”

“Nate’s?”

“Clam shack down by the wharf. Best fried clams I ever ate.”

“Well, it’s Eb’s now,” Nick said. “The chowder’s good, but not as good as yours. I’m taking you to Smallbone Cove Mercantile, so you can meet Lily.”

“Who’s Lily?” Hell Cat asked.

“You’ll see.”

When they reached the porch of the Mercantile, Hell Cat made a small unhappy noise, almost like a mew. To Nick’s astonishment, Mutt and Ollie took her hands. She let them.

Nick opened the door and they all went in.

It was warm inside and smelled of sugar and chocolate. Lily looked up from laying out a batch of chocolate-chip cookies in the bakery case. “Well, hello, Foxkin. Who are your friends?”

This was it. Nick put on his brightest smile. “They’re old apprentices of Smallbone’s. They were under a spell, but I released them. I thought you — not you personally, but Smallbone Cove generally — could take them in.”

Lily turned a deep, angry red. “You’ve got a nerve, Foxkin, waltzing in here with things in the state they’re in! If Smallbone wants his spare apprentices housed and fed, he’ll have to come and ask himself.”

Nick thought quickly. “It’s not a favor for Smallbone. He just wants to get rid of them. Come on, Lily. They hate him even more than you do. That’s got to count for something. Besides, they don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Mutt took a shy step forward. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am. I’m Mutt. I used to be a dog.”

Lily’s lips twitched. “Lily Smallbone,” she said.

Ollie stuck out a large pale hand. “My name’s Ollie. I was a pig.”

Lily shook the hand. “Hello, Ollie.” She turned to Hell Cat, who was hanging back, scowling. “And what were you, honey?”

Hell Cat folded her arms across her skinny chest. “My name’s not Honey. It’s Hell Cat.”

“Hell Cat. I see.” Lily examined them with a business-
like air. “So, what can you fellers do?”

“I can cook,” Ollie offered.

“Ollie’s real good,” Nick put in helpfully. “Best fish chowder I ever ate. Magical, really. And Mutt here can get along with anybody.”

Mutt gave Lily a brilliant and slightly goofy smile. She blinked. “That’s nice. What’s your work experience?”

In the next ten minutes, Nick learned a great deal about the apprentices. Ollie and Mutt were orphans and had run away and ended up somehow at Smallbone’s, just like Nick. Mutt had worked for a greengrocer and Ollie had worked in his uncle’s tavern. Mutt was the oldest, having worked for Smallbone in 1781. Ollie had worked for him in 1916. Hell Cat had been separated from her family when they hit the road after the bank took her father’s Massachusetts farm in 1931.