The first thing I did when I got back home that evening was help Aunt Emma set up Regent Maximus in the large animal stable—he’d be staying with us until Mr. Henshaw got his burned-up one fixed. It took ages, because Regent Maximus was sure he would fall and drown in the water trough, or get bitten by lavender mites, or stab himself with his own horn.

“Couldn’t you have stabbed yourself just as easily back home, though?” I said to him, whispering so Aunt Emma wouldn’t catch me talking to a Unicorn.

“You’re right! Oh, oh! I’ve been living so recklessly!” Regent Maximus wailed into the stable rafters.

The second thing I did when I got back home was gallop upstairs for Jeffrey Higgleston’s Guide to Magical Creatures.

Fuzzles. Fuzzles. Fuzzles.

Why couldn’t I remember what the Guide had said about them?

When I flipped open the Guide to their page, I understood why. It barely said anything at all.

You’d think an animal that turns into a fireball would deserve more description.

I charged back downstairs. Callie was sitting on the arm of the sofa, painting her toenails the color of unripe tomatoes and making vowel sounds. She did this in the mornings sometimes too. She’d told me this was to “exercise her voice” for “clarity onstage.”

In the cluttered kitchen area, Aunt Emma held her phone to her ear and paced. “Only one at the moment,” she told the phone in a serious voice. “Yes, yes, we have it contained.” We all looked to the round kitchen table. A metal box containing the Fuzzle sat in the middle. A small curl of smoke trailed from one of the breathing holes.

Aunt Emma hung up, sighed, and ran her hand through her hair. “Callie, I’m sorry, but I can’t take you to the movie tonight.”

Callie started to leap up before remembering her wet toenails. Instead, she merely pushed herself up on her elbows with as much anger as possible. “What?! I’ve hardly gone out all summer.”

“That’s not true!” Aunt Emma said, sounding a little offended. “I took you to the fabric store last week to get sequins for that … that mermaid costume thing.”

“That was three weeks ago, Mom. And it was a siren costume. Mermaids are for, like, kids. Delynn and I are trying to convince the school to do a musical version of The Odyssey. It would be incredible.”

Aunt Emma made a face that told me she realized Callie was right about the timing.

“I’ll make it up to you, Callie. Anything you want. But right now I need to look under the crawl space to make sure there aren’t any Fuzzles down there. This house is very old and I don’t trust the smoke detectors.”

“This is ridiculous,” Callie muttered. “I am persecuted.”

“We’re all persecuted,” Aunt Emma replied. “I’m hoping this is a one-off incident and we won’t find any more in Cloverton. Come on, you can hold the flashlight for me. Maybe that Doxel still lives down there!”

Callie’s eyes widened with obvious distaste. Her left eye widened more than the other. Like this: O.o.

I guess she didn’t care for Doxels.

“I’ll help!” I said eagerly.

“She speaks!” Callie snorted.

“Callie!” Aunt Emma chastised. “Say sorry. Now.”

“Sorry, now,” Callie said. “I guess I’ll order pizza. Again.” With a meaningful look at her mother, she turned to me. “What would you like on it, Pip?”

I was so glad to be asked, even if it was just to show Aunt Emma she was being nice to me. I said happily, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. I only eat the crust anyway.”

“Get me some with pineapple,” grumbled Bubbles. I hadn’t even noticed him lying on top of the living room bookshelf. He had wedged himself in between one of Aunt Emma’s wedding photographs and a trophy in the shape of four horned birds. He did so hate it when Callie sang.

“I mean, I like pineapple on mine,” I said quickly. I wanted to get on Bubbles’s good side. “They have that, right?”

“Weirdo,” Callie muttered. But she jotted it down on a notepad.

Ten minutes later, Aunt Emma and I were crouched in the dirty space beneath the house. It was nothing but brick rubble and dirt for the floor and concrete blocks for the too-close walls. Oh, and some spiders (zero Doxels). It was a very not-Callie kind of place. Aunt Emma poked the nozzle of the fire extinguisher in a corner while I played the flashlight beam over the top of it.

“Aunt Emma?” I asked. “Can I ask you a question?”

My aunt spun around to face me, eyes wide with concern. “Of course, Pip! Is everything all right?”

“It’s just that I looked in the Guide for Fuzzles, and it barely says anything at all. Can you believe that? Why wouldn’t there be more about them in there?”

Aunt Emma smiled at me and spoke with obvious relief in her voice. “Well, the Guide really focuses on animals rather than pests. Fuzzles are more like insects than creatures, really. And they’re not all that common. Thankfully.”

“Thankfully, because they burn down stables?”

“Exactly,” Aunt Emma said. “When they get surprised or scared, Fuzzles catch fire. It doesn’t hurt them, but it hurts pretty much everything else.”

She paused.

“Also, um, they have litters of three hundred FuzzleKits every three weeks during the summer.”

I did the math in my head.

“Oh my gosh,” I said. “That’s why you hope the Fuzzle from the barn is the only one!”

“Exactly.”

Now I too was hoping the Fuzzle in the box was the only one. I was also kind of hoping to get a better look at it. Because I didn’t think it mattered if Fuzzles were pests. They still deserved a better entry in the Guide. They were fascinating!

Overhead, we heard the pizza delivery person come and go. Callie shouted, “MOM! PIZZA! OH, YEAH, PIP TOO! PIZZA!”

We poked around for a few more minutes before Aunt Emma said, “It looks pretty clear down here. I don’t see any signs of nests or warrens. Fingers crossed it really was just one Fuzzle who lost its way.”

But it wasn’t.

*  *  *

“So then he said that she didn’t have the stage presence to pull off the role, and she said that he wouldn’t know—what? Yes, I’m talking about him! No, not the guy who originated the part, the second one—yes—” Callie was on the phone. I wondered if whoever was on the other end of the line understood Callie. I sure didn’t.

I sat at a table just over Callie’s shoulder, studying the Fuzzle. It was still contained in the little metal box, and had rolled itself over to a tiny water dish I put inside.

Even though it was a pest, I didn’t think it should go thirsty.

I’d gone through all Aunt Emma’s old magical veterinary school textbooks looking for information on Fuzzles, and hadn’t found a single sentence. I peered into the box and doodled some flames on the back of my hand.

“Hey, Fuzzle?” I whispered. “Come on. Talk to me! Why are you here?”

The Fuzzle didn’t answer. It just blinked at me, grumbled a bit, and then hummed. It sounded like this: grrrrrrrrrrrrr mmmmmmmmmmm. Except the “m” went on forever and ever and ever, until I gave up. I couldn’t tell if the Fuzzles didn’t want to talk to me or simply couldn’t. They didn’t really seem to have mouths, after all.

“Did I just hear you talk to that thing? Because you know you’re not supposed to pretend you can talk to animals anymore,” Callie said, crossing her arms. She’d hung up and was now standing over me. She narrowed her eyes at both me and the Fuzzle, who was rolling itself back and forth happily. It was pretty cute for something that turned into a miniature inferno.

“I was talking to myself,” I said, which wasn’t entirely untrue, seeing as how the Fuzzle hadn’t answered. Catching a glimpse of the old, sticker-covered computer at the front desk, I suddenly had an idea. “Do you think I could use the computer?”

“Ha!” Callie said. “Mom has that thing so locked down with parental controls that it’s cruel and unusual punishment. She says—”

“That the computer is just for work,” Aunt Emma finished the sentence, suddenly rounding the corner. She was holding a Jillymander by the tail. I didn’t think I’d like to be hung upside down, but the Jillymander was purring, so I guessed it was fine. She added, “Don’t roll your eyes at me, Callie. You’re on the computer plenty enough during the school year. It’s summer! Get out! Explore!”

“By explore, do you mean the vast, uncharted terrain of the front desk?” Callie asked, crossing her arms.

“Well … explore after hours, then,” Aunt Emma said, but I could tell she felt a little bad. She and the Jillymander vanished into an exam room just as the phone rang. Callie lunged for it.

“Delynn? Did you watch the audition video? What? This isn’t Delynn? Yes, this is Cloverton Clinic for Magical Creatures. What? How is that our problem? No, we don’t treat them. Because they’re … they’re Fuzzles! We treat pets, not pests!”

It was the first Fuzzle call. The first of many.

By the time I’d fed Regent Maximus his lunch and taken Bubbles for a walk with Tomas, Callie had received fifty-seven Fuzzle-related phone calls.

“It hasn’t stopped ringing!” she said shrilly when Tomas, Bubbles, and I walked back in the front door. Callie pointed at the phone like it had bitten her. It rang again in response.

Fifty-eight Fuzzle-related phone calls.

“Aunt Emma said they can produce three hundred FuzzleKits a week,” I told Tomas. “I guess that means the one in Regent Maximus’s stable wasn’t a stray.”

“Three hundred Fuzzles?” Tomas rubbed his nose, as if already imagining an allergic reaction. “That’s a lot of fur.”

We turned to look as a fire truck whizzed past the clinic, lights flashing and sirens loud.

“That’s a lot of fire,” I added. “I wonder why the Fuzzles showed up all of a sudden? Aunt Emma said they’re usually very rare.”

But by closing time, Fuzzles were no longer very rare—or, at least, they were no longer very rare at Cloverton Clinic for Magical Creatures.

It turned out that no one in Cloverton knew what to do with the Fuzzles. The police suggested quarantining them in fireproof boxes, but no one had enough lying around. The fire department suggested dousing the Fuzzles in water so they’d burn slower, but that just created a lot of steam before the inevitable fire. Cloverton Animal Control didn’t know what to do with them, so they kept sending calls to us.

At three o’clock, Aunt Emma suggested Callie simply take the phone off the hook. And it worked!

For about thirty minutes, anyway. When people didn’t get an answer, they stopped calling and started showing up at the door with Fuzzles. Fuzzles in metal lock boxes. Fuzzles in empty coffee tins. Fuzzles in jelly jars. Fuzzles on glass cake platters, and even a few Fuzzles wrapped in tin foil like fuzzy baked potatoes.

Aunt Emma and Callie ran to the store to buy more fire extinguishers. Tomas and I were charged with keeping the waiting room from burning down.

“This is ridiculous!” Tomas said, throwing his hands in the air. I wasn’t sure what Tomas meant was ridiculous—the hundreds of Fuzzles or the big puffs of periwinkle-colored smoke that were coming out of his ears. I was beginning to think Tomas really was allergic to all magical creatures.

I stood on the desk, holding a fire extinguisher. Every now and then, a Fuzzle would smoke, and I’d spray it down. It was working for now, but what were we supposed to do overnight? Take shifts?

“Incoming,” Tomas warned as a car rolled up outside. The driver hopped out, ran to the front door, dropped a metal trash can full of Fuzzles on the doorstep, then squealed off.

Not very noble.

“Pip! Quick!” Tomas said. He pointed to a Fuzzle off to his left that was smoking. I aimed the fire extinguisher at it and blasted, but the spray didn’t quite reach. The smoke deepened in color.

“Hurry!” Tomas said as I jumped off the counter and tiptoed through the sea of Fuzzles on the floor. I wasn’t going to make it in time! Tomas flung himself forward. He grabbed for the smoking Fuzzle, but he couldn’t quite reach. Fingers stretched, he grasped, his fingertips scratching across the Fuzzle’s blond fur—

The Fuzzle stopped smoking.

Tomas and I exchanged a puzzled look.

I wound my way over. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Tomas said. “I just—I guess I just sort of …” Reaching forward again, he scratched the Fuzzle on its head.

The Fuzzle opened its eyes and looked up at Tomas happily. It began to trill. Like when you roll your tongue and sort of sing. That’s what the Fuzzle sounded like. It trilled faster and faster until the sound just became a hum.

And then the humming was everywhere. All the other Fuzzles in the waiting room were harmonizing with the first.

And better yet? They’d all stopped smoking. Well, except for Tomas. Puffs of allergic smoke still trailed from his ears.

With a sigh of relief, I set the fire extinguisher down. “Well. That’s definitely something about Fuzzles that belongs in the Guide.”

“But what about all the others?” Tomas said. “I mean, the ones out there?” He waved toward the front door and beyond. “People can’t go around petting Fuzzles all day.”

“No,” I agreed. “But at least we won’t be stuck in another burning building.”

Tomas nodded and scratched the Fuzzle’s head a little harder.

*  *  *

That night, after we’d sorted the Fuzzles into fireproof containers and double-checked the smoke detectors, I fell happily into my bed. I was almost asleep when someone opened my bedroom door. The silhouette looked like a gangly monster topped with a mushroom of fur. I sat up, confused, and realized it was Callie. She wore pink pajamas and her hair was all piled on top of her head.

I didn’t say anything. I just stared at her and thought about her looking like a monster with mushroom hair.

“Look,” Callie said. “Stop staring at me like that. I don’t really get this whole magical-creature-guide-knowledge-memorizing thing you do, but fine, whatever, because I want these Fuzzles g-o-n-e, gone.”

I knew she’d told me to stop staring, but I couldn’t think of any other response.

Callie reached down and turned my head to the side, so my eyes were pointed at the wall. “Just tell me—what do you need to know about them to make them go away?”

To the wall, I said, “I’ve already gone through the Guide—”

“I mean, what can I find for you on the …” Callie dropped her voice. “Computer?”

I turned back to face her. “What about the parental controls?”

“Please,” Callie said, looking smug. “I’m good for more than just a flawless line-by-line recitation of Romeo and Juliet. You really think I’d sit up there all day without the Internet?”

The world suddenly opened up. Surely someone else had to know something more about Fuzzles, and surely that someone else had put it on a website.

“Oh. Well … anything. Anything you can find out would help. Like, habitat. That means where they live.”

“I know what habitat means,” Callie said scornfully. “Right. I’ll see what I can do.”

The next day, I discovered there was a lot more to Fuzzles than I’d thought.