The Evil Wizard Smallbone (16 page)

“Thank you!” Nick shouted, and took it out to the barn to read without even putting on his snow boots.

Nick opened his mouth to say yes, remembered that wizards shouldn’t lie, and said, “Not really.”

The Elements of Elemental Magic
was different from
Animal You
. It never lectured him, and it never scolded. It gave him diagrams that it said were pictures of energy and told him stories about river gods and molten rocks and birds that rode the paths of the winds. And it gave him exercises, lots of exercises, that turned out to be spells.

The first one Nick tried sent a wind roaring through the barn, much to the consternation of the animals, who panicked as their bedding swirled and danced around them. It took Nick forever to calm them, particularly the goats. But they got used to it after a while. They’d stand in the corner and watch the soiled bedding sail out of their pen and the fresh straw sail in and scatter itself across the boards with weary patience.

He still had to do Ollie’s pen with a manure fork. Pigs don’t like change.

Next he built a snowman using only water magic. It took him a lot longer than it would have just to pile up the snow and shape it, and the final result looked less like a snowman than an icy cone with strange lumps sticking out of it, one of which was decorated with stones and looked sort of like a face if you squinted hard. He melted it down with a fire spell, after which he felt sick and a little weak at the knees.

The next snowman was a lot better.

After about a week of this, Nick woke one morning to the dazzle of sun on new snow. He’d stayed up late, as usual, puzzling over the chart, and he must have overslept. Smallbone would be furious.

Heart pounding, he ran downstairs. Smallbone was hunched over the stove like an angry raven, his white hair bristling and the skirts of his coat flapping in no wind Nick could feel. Hell Cat, perched above the stove on her favorite shelf, turned sapphire eyes on Nick and hissed.

“If it’s staying up all night you like,” Smallbone said nastily, “I can turn you into something nocturnal. An opossum, maybe. Put you over the Wall for Fidelou’s coyotes to play with.”

The familiar red rage coursed through Nick’s veins. “I’d like to —” he began, and stopped.
Take a deep breath
, his
Animal You
–trained brain told him.
Do you want to test that shape-shifting spell right now?

“What?” Smallbone snarled. “You’d like to what?”

“Say I’m sorry,” Nick finished. “I won’t do it again.”

There was a tense pause, then Smallbone’s coat settled like a hen’s feathers. “You better not.” He left the stove and sat down with his pipe. “Now you’re here, you can make the coffee. I got work to do.”

When Nick got out to the barn, the animals were watered and fed, with fresh hay in their stalls. He brushed the loose hair from Groucho’s hide and played fetch with Ollie, then climbed up into the hayloft and got out
Elements of Elemental Magic
. He had a feeling it would have something to say, and it did.

But Nick didn’t want to be patient. The chart was beginning to make sense. It no longer looked to him like spilled spaghetti, sprinkled with numbers instead of meatballs. It looked like a complicated pattern. He couldn’t tell what it meant, yet, but he felt like he was getting close.

Warily, in case Smallbone was still around, Nick returned to the bookshop, hoping to beg for or find a more advanced book on Elemental Magic. The shop was willing. The books on the shelves were magic books. But the
NATURE
section, where the books on Elemental Magic were to be found, was bare of even dust and cobwebs. There wasn’t a book to be found.

Smallbone had taken them all.

Even in Maine, winter doesn’t last forever, although in March it can feel that way. “The March Hill,” they call it. Bitter windstorms are followed by thaws; snow squalls are followed by rain that turns everything into muddy, icy slush. People come down with colds and cabin fever. Anybody who can get through March without breaking a glass, a friendship, a secret, a promise, or somebody’s nose is either a saint or on vacation in Florida.

Nick wasn’t anybody’s idea of a saint.

One morning, Smallbone put on his muffler. “Should be home by suppertime,” he said. “Don’t get up to no shenanigans.”

Nick’s heart rose, but he kept his eyes firmly on the sink, full of greasy dishes and soap bubbles. “No shenanigans,” he said. “Check.”

“Hmph,” said Smallbone, and went out the door.

Nick counted to ten, then ran for the stairs, accompanied by the dogs, who leaped up ahead of him, almost as if they were leading him.

He’d given a lot of thought, in the past weeks, to what the inside of Smallbone’s tower looked like. From watching old movies like
The Sword in the Stone
and
Harry Potter
and
The Time Bandits
with his mom, he imagined Smallbone’s workshop as a dark room full of bones, mouse nests, and stuffed alligators, with maybe a caged demon in one corner. Long tables would hold glass alembics full of fluorescent green liquid bubbling over magic flames and iron crucibles for brewing potions. There would be a wand, black and knobby, with a claw at the end, several magic talismans, and at least one black-bladed knife for ritual purposes. The air would be thick and smoky and would smell of magic and, probably, blood.

He couldn’t wait to see it.

It had been some time since Nick had been in the stone corridor that led to Smallbone’s tower. He wasn’t at all sure he could get in now. But he had found a lock-picking spell in
E-Z Spelz
, of all places, and he knew a way of turning lightning away that might get him past Smallbone’s protection spell.

In any case, he intended to try.

The door to the workshop was just as intimidating as he remembered. He took a deep breath, concentrated, and muttered the lock-picking spell under his breath.

There was a small
click
.

His hand hovered over the latch. He could sense the lightning spell in it, waiting to sting him again. The latch was iron. Maybe if he called up magnetic energy out of the earth . . .

He concentrated. The thumb lever sank. He gave the door a kick, and it creaked open.

The dogs rushed past him and disappeared into the blackness. From the sound of it, they were climbing stairs, wooden ones. Nick squared his shoulders and went after them.

The steps were steep and high, almost ladder-like; the walls nearly brushed his shoulders. Heart racing, Nick groped his way upward, half expecting the door to slam shut behind him or the steps to disappear. At the top, he stumbled on a step that wasn’t there and fell into a choking, smothering mass of fabric. As he flailed at it, it parted on a blaze of sun and the smell of turpentine and dust. He stepped forward, blinking.

He’d been right about the books.

There were books stuffed into rickety brick-and-board shelves and books stacked within reaching distance of an old leather recliner. Books spilled across the floor and teetered in piles on the long trestle table under the far window, along with an old lantern, a pile of fur, a plate with half a sandwich on it, and a Bunsen burner. The books were bound in leather and metal, and they looked very old, but they were just books. The room, though admittedly cluttered, was just a room. There were no bones, no disgusting things in jars, not even a stuffed alligator hanging from a rafter. No rafters. The only real sign of magical activity was the silver pentagram inlaid in the floor, half obscured by Jeff’s furry butt and tail.

Nick turned around. Under one of the four round windows, Mutt was stretched beside a low bench laid out with planes and chisels and a half-finished carving of a duck just like the one that had come floating down the steps in the bookshop flood. Behind it, more carvings crowded a long, curving shelf.

Nick moved closer. Smallbone’s carvings were actually pretty good. They were all animals: cats, dogs, ravens, a bear, a family of gray harbor seals, an osprey, and, of course, ducks.

The cats looked like Smallbone’s cats, down to Tom’s fluffy tail and Hell Cat’s suspicious expression.

Nick put down the little wooden Tom and turned back toward the books. “I’m Nick,” he said. “You know, Smallbone’s apprentice. I need some books on Elemental Magic.”

Nothing moved except Jeff’s tail, sweeping the silver pentagram free of dust.

“Please?” Nick added experimentally.

Nothing.

Nick swore softly, then picked up the nearest book. It was
Water and Earth: Elements of Growth
. Bingo!

Mutt trotted over to the curtain, whuffed softly, then barked.

Nick knew that bark. It was Mutt’s happy-to-see-you-glad-you’re-home bark. Smallbone must be back.

He looked around for somewhere to hide. Under the table was too open; behind the chair was too far away. And it was too late now anyway, because Smallbone was standing in the door, glasses blazing, beard bristling, coat skirts quivering with fury.

“What in Sam Hill do you think you’re doing in my tower, boy?”

There was no good answer to this question. Nick clutched
Water and Earth
to his chest, feeling oddly calm. “Looking around,” he said. “You left the door unlocked.”

“Unlocked!” Smallbone growled. “I’ll show you unlocked!” And he raised his hand in an all-too-familiar gesture.

Nick gritted his teeth. This was it. He couldn’t stop Smallbone’s spell, but he should be able to turn himself back — if he could just hold on to his human mind. Know who you are,
Animal You
had told him. All right. Who was he?

I’m Nick
, he told himself.
I’m an elemental wizard, even though I don’t know much about it yet. I like science fiction and I can milk goats and cook. I’m smart enough to make an evil wizard think I’m dumb. I’m Nick Reynaud of Beaton, Maine, and some old geezer in an ugly old coat can’t make me be any different
.

The other times Smallbone had transformed Nick, everything had gone fuzzy or black, and next thing he knew, he was waking up with a set of strange new memories to sort out. This time, he felt the change as it happened. It was a little like having the measles and a little like riding a roller coaster and a lot like something he’d rather not go through again.

Then it was over, and Nick was still Nick, with all his human memories intact.

In a rat’s body. With a rat’s senses and instincts. It was like seeing double, only inside your head.

The smell of dog hit Nick like a sledgehammer, sending him scuttling to the safety of the wall. He scurried farther into the darkness, looking for a place to hide, his sensitive whiskers guiding him around and over piles of books, until he was stopped by something big and solid.

He sniffed carefully. Meat and wood and salt and age, and something dark and jumpy and sharp, like old blood and lightning.

Box full of magic
, his boy-self said.
Danger
, his rat-self added.
Run away!

He darted through a crack that led to the narrow space behind the wall.

As soon as he was safe, Nick peed and pooped on the floor. Then he sniffed what he’d done, because that’s what rats do. One part of him confirmed that he was a healthy young male rat and that he was afraid. The human part thought,
Ew, gross
, and backed away.

I am Nick Reynaud
, he thought.
My best friend is a bookshop. I know magic. I can turn myself back into my right shape any time I want
.

He could feel the words of the spell in his mind, ready to do their job, but his heart was beating too fast for him to concentrate. Which was probably a good thing, since the space between the walls would be a tight fit for a twelve-year-old boy, even a skinny one.

There was nobody to fight, nobody to yell at. He was alone and lost and, yes, he had to admit it, scared out of his mind. Half of him wanted to stay very still and hope it would all go away. The other half, the stubborn half, was telling him to get his furry butt in gear and search out a good place for his transformation.

He squeaked experimentally and listened to the echoes. The walls were there and there. All he had to do was go straight, and he’d be, well, somewhere else. The crack he’d escaped through couldn’t be the only rat hole in the place. He scuttled into the darkness, squeaking at intervals, investigating with his whiskers anything that sounded promising. The first opening he came to was stuffed with steel wool. He tried to chew through it and only cut his mouth. The next crack was also blocked, and the next and the next. The next was stuffed with paper folded into a fat packet. When Nick gave it a hopeful shove with his nose, his whiskers tingled.

Magic
, he thought, and left it alone.

Beyond that was a solid stone wall and a hole in the floor that smelled of dust and damp plaster, magic, and — was that bacon grease?

Rat-Nick was suddenly ravenous, but boy-Nick knew that getting lost in the walls was not going to help him. He retraced his route to Smallbone’s workshop, stuck his nose cautiously through the crack, and sniffed. Smallbone and the dogs were gone, so he emerged.