The Evil Wizard Smallbone (23 page)

“And what do you do?” Lily asked her. “Besides raising hell?”

Hell Cat glowered. “Pa taught me to shoot a rifle. I used to get rabbits and woodchucks for the pot. And I can take care of myself, if that counts.”

“It does. Well,” Lily said, looking around at the three anxious faces, “there’s quite a collection of talents here. Ollie, Eb can always use a good cook at the Klam Shak, especially when tourist season starts. Hell Cat, there’s not much call around here for a sharpshooter, but Miss Rachel at the library could use some help.”

Hell Cat looked panicky. “I ain’t a big reader.”

“Miss Rachel doesn’t need you to read. She’s not as young as she used to be and she’s in a wheelchair. Truth is, she could use some help around the house, and she might even accept it if she knew she was doing you a favor.”

“Let Mutt do it,” Hell Cat said. “He’s good at taking care of folks.”

“You’ll learn,” Lily said firmly. “Mutt, you can work here. Room and board to start with, salary to be determined when I see what you can do. Everybody happy?”

Her tone suggested that they better be. The three apprentices nodded. “Good. Nick, take them to Eb’s and wait for me.”

Outside, apprentices past and present exchanged dazed looks. “What just happened?” Mutt asked.

“You got Lilied,” Nick said.

“I don’t like her,” Hell Cat announced, glowering. “She’s bossy.”

Nick shrugged. “Good thing you won’t be working for her, then. Come on. I want to get back to Evil Wizard Books before Smallbone comes looking for me.”

I
n the days following the Equinox, half the town went to look at the mended Wall and the glowing Lantern and agreed that there might be something in this ritual thing after all, and wasn’t it just like Smallbone to leave all the hard work to them while he hid in his tower. And what about those kids who’d showed up in town? Old apprentices of Smallbone’s, Lily said, but they seemed ordinary enough, even if they had been animals for all those years.

Dinah wasn’t so sure about that. She’d been a coyote for only a few weeks, and she sometimes still dreamed about it. As soon as she had the chance, she headed right over to the library to see how Miss Rachel was getting on with the girl from Evil Wizard Books.

What did a cat know about the Dewey decimal system, anyway?

Hell Cat had turned out to be strange but fascinating. She didn’t seem to think that having spent the last eighty-some years as a cat made her peculiar or weird. She had a mind of her own and she didn’t care who knew it. She hissed when she was mad and told stories about Smallbone that almost curled Dinah’s hair. And she was a demon for work. In the week she’d been with Miss Rachel, she’d done more to clean up the library than Dinah had managed in a year.

She couldn’t read a word, but Miss Rachel had taught her how to alphabetize.

When Dinah got to the library the next Saturday morning, Miss Rachel was by her window as usual, a steaming mug of tea on her desk, looking somewhat exercised. The floor had been cleared and its boards still glistened with water from the first scrubbing they’d had since Dinah could remember.

“As you can see,” Miss Rachel said in the tone of a woman who has been tried to the limit, “we’re in the middle of spring cleaning here. I only hope I can find my books again when it’s done.”

Hell Cat popped out of the kitchen like a jack-in-the-box. Her hair was tied up in a bandanna and her middle in a big flowered apron. “Miss Rachel’s mad because I want to move the sofa.”

They all looked at the sofa. Once, it had been the pride of some nineteenth-century Smallbone’s front room, carved with cavorting seals and upholstered in ocean-blue plush. The seals were cracked and the plush was faded and worn bald in patches, and the sofa itself was very much in the way, but Miss Rachel considered it a part of the library’s quaint charm. Tourists sometimes had their pictures taken sitting on it.

“That sofa can stay right where it is,” Miss Rachel said. “It’s been there since my grandma was a girl, and likely long before.”

Hell Cat looked sly. “Can’t we at least get that box out from under it so I can clean? There could be something really historical in it.” Her sapphire eyes gleamed. “Treasure, even.”

“She’s right,” Dinah said. “We might find something you could use for your book on Smallbone Cove.”

Miss Rachel looked thoughtful. “Go ahead, then. But be careful!”

The box was made of metal, welded by age and damp to the floor below. Hell Cat fetched a hammer and a screwdriver, and finally, with Dinah pulling and Hell Cat pushing, they worked the box free of the sofa, which promptly cracked and collapsed in the middle.

“My sofa!” Miss Rachel bleated.

Dinah pulled cautiously at the box’s old-fashioned iron latch. “Drat. It’s rusted shut.”

“I think there’s some WD-40 in the kitchen drawer,” Hell Cat said, and ran to get it, coming back a moment later with the oil.

It took some doing, but they got the latch open at last and lifted the lid, releasing a sour smell and a puff of what looked like soot.

Miss Rachel put her hand over her nose. “Mold! Get that thing out of here, right away, before it infects everything.”

Dinah helped Hell Cat wrestle the box into the kitchen. They were debating whether to leave it there or take it out back when Miss Rachel gave an amazingly seal-like bark of alarm.

The two girls raced into the reading room. The library door was open, and two Howling Coyotes were surveying the room with the air of tourists at a county fair. They both had brown Howling Coyote jackets zipped to their throats like armor. One of them, not much more than a kid, wore a red baseball cap over his sandy hair. They smelled of rot, gasoline, and wet dog.

Dinah knew that smell. It was the smell of the pelt she’d found in the Stream. It made her nose sting and filled her with terror and confusion. She shrank back against the bookshelves.

Red Baseball Cap Guy narrowed his eyes at Hell Cat, who was bristling like a porcupine. “You got a problem, little girl?”

“I sure do,” Hell Cat hissed. “I —”

“Wanted to tell you how easy it is to get a temporary library card,” Miss Rachel boomed. “We usually only issue them in the summer, but we’re willing to make an exception for dedicated readers.”

Red Baseball Cap sneered. “That right, little girl?”

Dinah glanced at Hell Cat, who looked like she was ready to explode.

Miss Rachel cleared her throat warningly.

“Yeah,” Hell Cat said finally. “I wanted to give you a library card.” Dinah allowed herself a small sigh of relief. “You know how to read?”

Red Baseball Cap’s face twisted.

Dinah looked around for something she could use for a weapon. The hammer was too far away, but Hell Cat’s broom was right over . . .

“Aw, leave it alone, Jerry,” Red Baseball Cap’s companion said. ‘There’s no fun in beating up old women and babies.”

“Baby?”
Hell Cat yowled. “I’ll show you baby!”

The next few minutes were crowded. Hell Cat jumped on the biker called Jerry, scratching and kicking. His friend plucked her off and threw her against the shelves. Miss Rachel roared, Dinah caught up the broom, and Jerry laughed and jerked it out of her hands. He used it to sweep out shelf after shelf of books, which thumped down on Hell Cat like papery bricks.

A chorus of yammering and yipping and roaring broke out in the street, accompanied by the sound of breaking glass.

“Let’s
go
, Jerry!” his companion said, and ran out the door. Jerry threw one last book at Dinah and followed, taking a moment to knock over Miss Rachel’s desk, tea and all, before dashing out the door and plunging into the hullabaloo in the street.

Dinah ran over to Hell Cat, who was sitting in a pile of books, rubbing her head and using the kind of language that would have earned Dinah a good old-fashioned talking-to if she’d ever been dumb enough to use it.

“You all right?” Dinah asked breathlessly.

Hell Cat glared. “Shut the door, you idiot!”

Dinah looked out at the running, struggling crowd of fishermen in yellow oilcloth and Howling Coyotes in brown leather and ran to close and lock the door. Then she turned to Miss Rachel, who was staring out the window, her eyes like polished black pebbles and her mouth in a straight, grim line.

“Coyotes,” she remarked, “are perfectly nice animals. And there are many respectable motorcyclists. These creatures are neither the one nor the other.” She paused, then added, “Poor things.”

“Poor things nothing,” Dinah said. “They’re horrible.”

“
Fidelou
is horrible,” Miss Rachel corrected her. “He gave them those wicked pelts. They can’t call their souls their own. Still, I hope Saul and his crew give them a larruping they won’t forget.”

Dinah looked out the window.

After Smallbone had freed her from the magic coyote pelt, Dinah read every book the library held on coyotes and seals. She’d learned that coyotes ate anything, including fish, and that they didn’t usually run in packs. She’d also read that seals, while usually peaceable animals that would rather flee than fight, had been known to attack killer whales — and beat them, too — by ganging up and tearing at them with their strong, sharp teeth.

The fishermen of Smallbone Cove had only ordinary human teeth, but their arms were strong from hauling nets and they outnumbered the bikers almost two to one. The Howling Coyotes, on the other hand, had knives and tire irons and chains, and they’d been in a lot more fights than the fishermen had.

Hell Cat got up and went to the other window. “Ham’s down!” she shrieked, dancing with excitement and fury. “No, he’s up again, but he’s bleeding! Doesn’t look too bad, though. Go, HAM!”

Dinah looked out over the crowd of bodies surging and tumbling along the street. Here Cain the animal doctor and a hulking biker pummeled each other on the porch of Three Bags Full Knitting. There a leather-covered arm brandished a crowbar. At the edge of the parking lot, a fisherman in yellow oilcloth was beating a biker’s head against a wooden bar. Even through the storm windows, she could hear cracks and shouts and groans.

“This is horrible!” she cried. “What’re we going to do?”

“There is nothing we can do,” Miss Rachel said. “The coyotes are Smallbone’s concern. This library is mine.”

“Well, Smallbone should know about it, then!”

Dinah turned and fled though the kitchen and out the back door. Then she took off behind the church toward the path that led to Evil Wizard Books, running as though all the coyotes in Fidelou’s pack were howling on her heels.

N
ick was sweeping the kitchen floor after lunch, thinking about how to make the Stream rise up in monster shapes if a coyote tried to cross it.

The shop bell jangled sharply. His bones turned to ice.

The bell rang a second time. Jeff raced out of the kitchen, barking. Nick dropped the broom, hurried to the shop, and peered through the window. It was Dinah, the girl who had been a coyote. She looked furious.

Nick grabbed Jeff by the scruff of his neck and opened the door.

Dinah was red faced from running, and her mottled hair stuck up around her head. “I want to talk to the evil wizard,” she said. “It’s real important.”

“He’s working on the Sentries,” Nick said. “Anything I can do?”

Dinah clenched her fists. “I have to talk to Smallbone. The coyotes are back and everybody’s fighting.” Her voice trembled a little. “They tore up the library.”

“The library?”

Dinah made a frustrated noise. “Are you going to get Smallbone or not?”

“I’ll get him,” Nick said. “You want to come in?”

The seal-dark eyes moved to Jeff, who was growling gently. “What about the dog?”

“Oh, Jeff doesn’t bite.” He couldn’t resist adding, “Not hard, anyway.”

Leaving her to work things out with Jeff, Nick took off up the stairs two at a time.

Over the past weeks, Nick had noticed that the tower door moved, depending on Smallbone’s mood — or maybe its mood — Nick wasn’t sure. Today it was at the end of the hall his bedroom was on, with the door wide open. He stood at the bottom of the steps and shouted, “Smallbone? The bikers are back, and they’re tearing up the Cove!”