The Evil Wizard Smallbone (30 page)

Hell Cat unfolded the bundle. It was Smallbone’s coat, all right, looking strangely sad and ragged without Smallbone in it. For the first time, Nick saw the lining, which was completely covered with tiny black writing. The collar was frayed.

“His hat’s in the pocket,” Hell Cat said helpfully. “We had to collapse it.”

“What do we do now?” Mutt asked.

Hell Cat punched his arm again. “He can’t talk, dummy. We’ll have to use my plan.”

“You mean the one that’s practically guaranteed to get us both killed?”

Their squabbling was interrupted by a tremendous roar from the meadow.

Three heads turned to the field.

A dragon and a giant confronted each other across a wasteland of uneven furrows and ridges punctuated with muddy puddles, uprooted bushes, and displaced boulders. The dragon was enormous, green, and scaly, with claws like steel scythes. The giant had four arms and two heads, each sporting a single pale-blue eye in its forehead, and looked extremely fearsome, although the pine tree he held like a club was probably not the best choice of weapon against a fire-breathing opponent.

Nick tried to unfocus his eyes. It was no good. He couldn’t tell which monster was Smallbone and which was Fidelou. They both looked real to him.

Up to now, the duel had been more like a game than a fight. The wizards had been testing each other’s abilities, seeing which shapes the other chose, thinking how to counter them. Now they were really getting serious.

The dragon opened its whiskered jaws and spouted an arc of bright flame at the giant, who vanished.

Nick stuck his muzzle under Smallbone’s coat and wiggled his way into it.

Power roared into him. His brain reeled. “Whoa!” he said. “Awesome!” and scrambled to his own two feet.

The dragon was stomping around, bellowing as it looked for its prey. Now that he was wearing the coat, Nick could see the white wolf inside the dragon, like the nucleus of a frog’s egg. Smallbone, cloudy and indistinct, surrounded a small brightly colored snake coiled up behind a rock.

It was time to do something. The question was, what? Even with the coat, Nick couldn’t fight Fidelou: it was against the Rules.

Nick’s cheek itched. He scratched it, or tried to, but his fingers met a springy, wiry barrier. A beard? How did a twelve-year-old grow a beard? He looked at his hands. They were liver spotted, bony, gnarled — Smallbone’s hands.

He stared at them a moment, then smiled. It felt like an evil smile.

Nick lifted both arms and waved. “Hey! Dingy dragon!” he yelled, putting magical force behind it. “You lose something?”

It wasn’t the cleverest taunt in the world, but it did the trick. Everybody was staring at him — were-coyotes (four- and two-footed), Hiram, the dragon that was suddenly not a dragon anymore but a big man wearing a white fur cloak, his eyes shooting yellow fire and his outstretched finger shaking with rage, screaming, “Cheat! Cheat! I win! You
cheated
!”

“Did not!” Nick yelled.

“But yes! A duel to the death, you said, and no person to take his true shape until the other lies dead!”

“Ha!” Nick gave his best Smallbone sneer. “But this ain’t my true shape!”

Fidelou raised his face to the cloudy sky and howled. It was a truly impressive howl, somewhere between a wolf pack serenading a full moon and a jet plane taking off. It was the howl of a wizard who had well and truly lost his temper. Which, as
E-Z Spelz for Little Wizardz
could have told him, was really bad for a wizard’s Concentration and Control.

Nick slapped his hands over his throbbing ears and counted.

One.

Two.

On three, a huge black grizzly flowed up from behind a rock and took the wolf wizard into its massive arms. The howl cut off, muffled in fur and muscle. In the sudden silence, Nick heard a growl and a sickening crunch.

The grizzly turned into a plump bald man in red suspenders. He looked down at the heap of torn flesh and fur at his feet, wiped blood from his mouth, and squinted shortsightedly in the direction of Fidelou’s pack.

“Get out of here right now and we’ll call it square,” he said. “Attack me, and I’ll turn you into rabbits. Up to you.”

A handful of four-legged coyotes bolted to the woods, their ears back and their tails between their legs. One of them, Nick noted, was black with white feet. It looked like Jerry was going to be a coyote for a very long time. But then, Nick thought, maybe the coyote was Jerry’s totem animal anyway.

Then a handful of two-legged pack members made a break for it — women with kids, plus some guys who looked more relieved than shocked. This left the real hard cases, coyote and currently human, the scarred and the one eared, with narrow eyes and mean, tight smiles. They produced knives and chains and tire irons and bared their teeth and moved toward the flannel-shirted man who had killed their leader.

The biggest coyote, a big tan brute with a scar Nick could see across the field, sprang. The wizard threw his arm out in a gesture that should have sent the animal flying into the woods but, to Nick’s dismay, only knocked him onto his back. The coyote lay there for a moment, picked himself up, shook his head angrily, and prepared to charge again.

Smallbone was running out of magic.

With a steam-engine scream, Nick took off across the field, stepped in a ditch, and pitched headfirst into a tangle of brambles.

If it hadn’t been for the coat, he might have gotten tangled and pricked like one of the unluckier princes who went to find Sleeping Beauty. As it was, his face and hands stung like he’d been cuddling a porcupine, and his leg felt like it had been hit by a red-hot poker. Smallbone was still a long way off, and the ring of coyotes was tighter than it had been.

Healing spell. Why didn’t he know a healing spell? Because he’d never thought to ask for one. He swore, then heaved himself out of the brambles and shucked off the coat. Holding it over his head, he closed his eyes and thought about wind. He imagined drafts and breezes and sudden, gusty blows strong enough to rip a sheet off a clothesline, pegs and all. Behind him, he heard the soft rustling sigh of pines bending in the wind. And then his hair was whipping at his cheeks and the coat was flapping and straining like a living thing. Nick released his grip and the coat glided away like a huge bat toward Smallbone and the furious coyotes.

The wizard — and he was a wizard, coat or not — had his hands full, holding a protection around himself that shrank moment by moment as his power drained. Teeth clenched with concentration, Nick directed his wind to float the coat above Smallbone and lay it gently on his shoulders.

The coat dropped on his head, then heaved and flapped as Smallbone struggled to find the sleeves. The coyotes fell on him in a yammering, shouting mass.

Nick closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears, his mind blank with shock. He couldn’t have failed. He was the hero of this tale. He’d done all the right things. He’d paid his debts and been kind to animals and learned his lessons. He’d put himself in danger, fooled the evil wizard, and called up a magic wind. It should have worked.

The pack fell silent.
It’s over
, Nick thought. He suspected he’d be next. He didn’t much care. He opened his eyes, feeling oddly calm.

A pack of little brown rabbits was scattering across the meadow. Some of them hopped past him, their long soft ears laid back, their round black eyes staring, stinking of fear and musk. And then they were gone, white scuts twinkling as they headed toward the safety of the woods.

“Well, that’s that.”

Nick looked up to see Smallbone standing beside him. The old wizard’s beard was bristling, his hat was waggling, his coat was flapping, and his graveyard teeth were prominently displayed.

“You’re not dead,” Nick said weakly.

“Takes more than a bunch of mangy coyotes to kill the Evil Wizard Smallbone.” The old man reached into a pocket, pulled out his glasses, and perched them on his beaky nose. “That’s a nasty mess you made of your leg, there, boy.”

Nick grinned helplessly. “I’m fine.”

“Ha!” Smallbone’s glasses glittered in the sun. “Better learn some healing magic, Foxkin. Boy like you’ll find plenty of use for it.”

Hell Cat and Mutt came puffing up, looking pale. “That was some wind you called,” Hell Cat said. “Nearly blew the hair off my head.”

“You all right?” asked Mutt.

Smallbone reached down and poked at Nick’s leg. Nick yelled.

“I ain’t no doctor, but I guess it ain’t broken. Some ripped up, though.” Smallbone directed a glare at Mutt. “I hope you got a car. It’s going to be a long haul home if you don’t.”

S
mallbone Cove in June was very different from Smallbone Cove in January. Shops were open all up and down Commercial Street, from Three Bags Full Knitting to Joshua’s Kites ’N Chimes. Artists set up their easels in the municipal parking lot and painted views of the harbor. Lovers of seafood from all over New England flocked to Eb’s Klam Shak, where Ollie’s fish chowder and corn bread special was getting a real reputation. The weather was hot and clear and bright. Smallbone Cove Mercantile did a brisk business in sunscreen, as well as postcards, coyote and seal plushies, and black T-shirts with
EVIL WIZARD BOOKSHOP
in Gothic letters below a white-line drawing of Smallbone at his horror-movie best.

It was Midsummer Day.

Just before dawn that morning, Lily, Zery, Dinah, and the ancient proprietor of Evil Wizard Books had led a festive procession through the woods. A convenient path, newly cleared and graded, ran just inside the inland boundary, but it was still a long walk — fifteen miles, just about, mostly through the woods along the banks of a bright, chattering stream. The procession made four stops along the way, and everybody — even the grown-ups — sang something that sounded like a children’s jump-rope rhyme. When they got back to the pretty white clapboard church, with its unusual weathervane shaped like a harbor seal, everybody danced.

When it was all over, the procession broke up to buy Moxie and iced tea and chowder from the stands in the parking lot in front of Eb’s, and jump ropes, reproduction Weathervanes and Lanterns, and other Midsummer Magic merchandise from the shops on Commercial Street.

Smallbone himself headed for the Smallbone Cove Public Library with Lily, Dinah, Mutt, and Miss Rachel. She had Walked the Bounds, too — or rolled them — in her new electric wheelchair.

The library had gone through a lot of changes since April. The boxes of books and papers had all been sorted and arranged in drawers and shelves, newly installed on the second floor. The downstairs had been scrubbed and freshly painted, its shelves lined with mysteries and biographies and guides to Maine wildlife. The circulation desk now boasted a computer. A little carved wooden cat perched on the monitor.

The seal sofa had been repaired and re-covered and placed in the new reading alcove.

Dinah had made herself responsible for the online catalog and the computerized checkout system. Hell Cat shelved returns, processed late fees, and ran a reading group for little kids on rainy weekend afternoons. Owing to all the sorting and alphabetizing, she was getting pretty good at reading, though her favorite book was
Millions of Cats
, which hardly had any words in it at all. Miss Rachel supervised, answered questions, and made progress on her history of Smallbone Cove.

Dinah ran up the wheelchair access ramp (also new) and opened the door. Hell Cat was peering intently at the computer screen. Judging from her expression, she was playing Angry Birds.

“Getting some work done?” Dinah asked innocently.

Hell Cat clicked the mouse and spun her chair around. “How’d it go? See any coyotes out there?”

“Ha, ha,” Mutt said. “Very funny.”

Miss Rachel backed into her workstation by the window. “The ritual worked fine and dandy. I’m just sorry young Foxkin couldn’t come. He’s worked so hard repairing the Weathervane and all.”

“Somebody had to mind the store,” Smallbone said. “Lily, them jeezly black undershirts you ordered’re selling like hotcakes.”

“Of course they are.” Lily’s voice was smug. “And after your performance this morning, you’ll have to reorder. I didn’t know you could dance like that.”

Smallbone tugged on his beard. “Magic makes you do strange things,” he said gruffly. “Ain’t it time we got on with what we come for? Hell Cat, did Foxkin remember to bring that chest over from Evil Wizard Books?”

“Last night,” Hell Cat said. “It’s in the back.”

“Well, haul it out, then. I ain’t got all day.”

After some discussion about the respective strength of boys and girls, Mutt and Hell Cat went to the kitchen table and came back lugging a wooden sea chest between them. It was very old, with rope handles and a big iron padlock. A painted harbor seal gazed mournfully from the lid.

Lily gave it a doubtful look.

“You sure this is right?” she asked. “It doesn’t look big enough.”

“They fold up smaller than you think,” Smallbone said, handing her an ornate key.

Dinah was surprised to see her mother’s eyes well with tears as she knelt by the chest, turned the key, removed the lock, and lifted the hasp.