Police Detective Kenneth Hunt crossed his arms and looked Sigfried Smith up and down. “Valerie, you can’t be dating this guy! Look at him!” He gestured at where Siggy stood in his brand-new robe with his still damp golden curls sticking out under his square mortar board cap with its tassel. “Hair that’s neither too long nor too short? Decent clothing that aren’t ripped? No visible tattoos? Why, this guy’s not even a bad boy!”
“Am so a bad boy!” Sigfried cried, offended. “I even wear a knife. Wanna see?”
“He’s not a member of the criminal element,” continued Detective Hunt.
“I nick food and murder dragons! That’s vermicide!”
“He probably doesn’t even have a record!”
“Only because I’m too clever to get caught!”
Valerie watched the two of them, her expression walzing between mortification and amusement. “Dad, please. You are embarrassing me. What will these people think?”
“That my daughter is attracted to all the wrong kind of boys?” Detective Hunt smirked at her. “You should have seen the characters she used to hang out with. All current perps or future perps in the making. And now this dashing young man. I don’t know if I should be annoyed or pleased. Annoyed my only daughter is dating at fourteen? Or pleased that, for once, she’s picked a boy I might not be ashamed to be seen talking to.”
“I’m sure if you knew me better, you’d find a reason to be ashamed,” promised Siggy.
“Really? You wanna date my daughter?” Kenneth Hunt turned suddenly and jabbed a finger against the young man’s chest. “See that I never do!”
“Okay. Okay. Nothing to see here.” Valerie’s face was bright red.
She dropped to one knee and hid her face in Payback’s sil-very fur.
“Anyway, as you can imagine, I am rather disoriented, and I can’t wait to get home and see your mother,” Detective Hunt turned back to Valerie. “But first, I have an appointment to talk to the dean and some Agents. They have some questions for me about the case I was working on when I…got transformed. When I come back—”
“You remember the details of a case you were working on before you got turned into a duck?” asked Sigfried, impressed.
Kenneth Hunt tapped his balding head. “I keep it all right up here. In the old noggin.”
“The case involving Sakura Suzuki and Misty Lark,” Rachel asked earnestly, “and the murder of whole families?”
Detective Hunt’s expression became calm. “Who are you, again?”
“Agent Griffin’s daughter,” giggled Joy.
“Ah. Yes. That makes sense. Sorry, I can’t talk about a case in progress.”
Valerie gawked. “You know who Agent Griffin is? And Sigfried the Dragonslayer? How much about the World of the Wise did you know? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s okay,” Rachel replied solemnly, “fathers never can.”
Detective Hunt gave Rachel a curious look and then turned back to his daughter. “Like I was saying, when I come back, I am going to take you home with me for a few days. I think your mother would appreciate some time with both of us.”
Valerie looked up, her dark eyes shiny with tears. “I…can’t believe you’re back! You’ve been gone so long! Months and months! Were you a goose all that time? And how did you find out about the World of the Wise?”
“I guess so. I really don’t know. I don’t remember much…I was leaving for the airport to check out a lead on the case…then I was in the Halls of Healing, listening to some tiny red-haired broad play the bagpipes.”
The students all laughed, except for the princess, who frowned slightly. Apparently, she did not appreciate their diminutive Math tutor being called a broad—which Rachel knew from her extensive reading was considered on the derogative side nowadays, but was originally a stage term, meaning a beauty so astonishing that she was worthy of the broadest spotlight.
“As to how I know about magic? I found out a while back from Kyle Iscariot. He had to fill me in to get my help on a couple of cases,” said Kenneth Hunt. “What is mind-blowing to me is that now—not only does my daughter know, but she’s a student at Hogwarts.”
“It’s called Roanoke Academy, Daddy,” Valerie smirked. “Much as I wish it were not, the other one is imaginary.”
“Are you sure? Lots of stuff I thought was pretend turned out to be true. Like people being transformed into animals.” Detective Hunt raised his right hand like a man before the bar. “A year ago, I would have sworn in front of a court of law that was imaginary.”
“He has a point,” muttered Sigfried.
“Yeah…You. Kid. Come here.” Kenneth Hunt gestured with his head, indicating that Sigfried should follow him. He did. Lucky slunk along as well—which was too bad, because otherwise, Rachel could have asked the dragon what the other two were saying.
“Awk-ward,” Valerie murmured in a sing song voice.
Joy’s voice squeaked with excitement. “How many bad boys have you previously dated?”
“He wasn’t talking about ex-boyfriends!” Valerie snorted. She took a sip of her pink goo, made a face, and then shrugged, as if it did not taste too bad. “He was talking about some boys I interviewed for the school paper. We did a piece on ‘Outside the Box.’ You know, kids who don’t go with the flow? The artistic weirdoes, the animal activists? My assignment was to interview the kids who snuck outside to smoke. He and Mom later took advantage of this to have me do some undercover work for them among this same criminal element. So, it’s hardly my fault I was hanging out with them. Oh…and I have a few friends with less-than-parent-friendly fashion sense.”
Detective Hunt stopped near the fountain and spoke seriously to Sigfried. For once, Siggy did not look either wild-eyed or casual. He stood attentively and answered Valerie’s father very seriously. Rachel could not hear their conversation, but she was impressed by her friend’s demeanor. The two spoke for about a minute. Then, Detective Hunt came back and gave his daughter a last hug and Payback a last pat.
“So,” Valerie asked Sigfried sweetly, the moment the door sung closed behind her father, “how did it go?”
Sigfried shrugged. “Well enough.”
“What did he say?”
“Man stuff. Nothing for you to worry about.”
“I’m worried,” muttered Valerie. “Believe me, I’m worried.”
Siggy paused. “What does capeesh mean?”
“It’s short for tu capisci, which means: you understand? My grandmother was Italian.”
“I capeesh,” was all Sigfried would say on the subject.
Valerie turned and glared at where Joy lay on her cot, her face flushed, her eyes feverish.
“What?” Joy cried. “How was I to know you hadn’t told your father about a boy you had been dating for a whole month!”
Valerie narrowed her eyes. “I did mention that Siggy was my boyfriend to the goose.”
“Oh…” Joy looked mortified. “Right. Sorry.”
“How long was he missing?” Nastasia asked. She had drawn back the flame-orange curtains and was resting comfortably on a pile of pillows.
“Over nine months.”
“How propitious that he was found!” said the princess sincerely.
“Do you think that’s why the Voices sent Xandra along?” mused Rachel.
“Could the Voices have known we were going to fall into Transylvania?” asked Joy.
“Who knows?” Rachel shrugged.
The door jangled again, and Zoë Forrest returned with a tray upon which rested breakfast food. Behind her, carrying a second tray, swayed Valerie’s best friend, Salome Iscariot.
“Val! I just saw your dad! They found him!” Salome’s cheeks were pink with delight. Her huge luminous eyes shone with joy.
Salome placed the tray on Valerie’s bed and sat down, crossing one fishnet-stockinged leg over the other, so that her shorter-than-regulation skirt revealed more thigh than school uniforms were meant to allow. Siggy studiously looked away. Salome smirked.
Valerie dove into her breakfast. Rachel happily picked a scrambled egg wrap from the tray Zoë offered. Nastasia also accepted an egg wrap, but Joy, who felt queasy, settled for toast.
“Yep,” Valerie spoke despite a mouth full of hash browns. She swallowed, wiped her mouth with a napkin, and continued. “We found him last night, on this huge adventure. I’ll tell you about it later. These guys already know.”
“How exciting!” Salome leaned forward, straining the buttons of her too-tight blouse. “Though really, you should have taken me with you.”
Sigfried’s eyes gravitated toward her chest as if magnetized. Then he made an outrageous face, coughed, and averted his eyes, placing his hand beside his face like blinders.
Salome leaned close to Valerie. “Your father…does he know?”
“About…Strega?” Valerie’s cheeks lost what color they had. She shook her head mutely.
Meanwhile, Siggy was addressing Nastasia. “Princess? What next?”
Joy bounced on her bed, and then winced as this caused an ache in her head. “Yes, our fearless leader! What do we do next?”
Everyone turned toward the Princess of Magical Australia, whose brow was furrowed with a thoughtful frown that only bordered the slightest bit on poutiness. Maybe the others thought she was pondering, deciding their next course of action, but Rachel knew better. Nastasia had no idea what to say.
How could anyone consider the princess a leader?
Didn’t they notice that Nastasia not only had no plans, but that she had not the slightest idea what was going on? She looked so lost, floundering before their hopeful gazes.
Rachel sighed.
Taking a deep breath, she sprang to Nastasia’s aid.
“We should do more dream tests,” She said. “Quickly, in case the authorities decide we must stop.”
“What would we test?” The princess continued to frown.
Rachel struggled not to grind her teeth. “We just discovered two important things. One, the Spell of Bedazzlement makes a person dream. Two, a lucid dreamer can deliberately dream places Zoë can go. This is fantastic news for us!”
“Because now we can have a dreamer any time we like, can’t we?” Zoë grinned with delight. She sat on the floor, leaning against the bed next to Valerie’s, running her hands over her hair. The top part was an electric teal blue. The rest was still the yellow pattern from the walls of Beaumont. “That could make such a difference! Now we can go exploring during the middle of the day, instead of having to wait for people to sleep. Though it still would not have helped us get out of Transylvania.”
Rachel nodded. “We should zap one of us with Bedazzle-ment. Then, Zoë steps into that person’s dream and sees if she can wake that person up in dreamland.”
“Sweet as!” Zoë grinned. “Absolutely sure I can.”
Valerie sat cross-legged on her bed, with Payback on one side and Lucky on the other. Siggy pulled up a chair and sat beside her.
Valerie said, “Right! And we should test to see if you can put the dreaming person in a bag, like the princess’s purse, and take them with us. That would make traveling much easier. We’d never again be stuck, like we were at the castle!”
“Great idea!” Siggy said. “I volunteer to be knocked out and bedazzled, so long as Valerie is there to make sure that no girls take advantage of me in any way she objects to.”
“What if she doesn’t object?” purred Salome, looking at her long nails, which were currently painted like strawberries, green at the base and then red with white spots.
Siggy shrugged. “Then, why would I?”
Valerie and Salome both giggled. Joy looked on, her expression torn between jealousy and eagerness. Perhaps she was hoping she would be invited to join in on the Siggy defiling.
“There are so many destinations I want to visit!” Wanderlust made Rachel’s voice thick. “We could go to Zoë’s world, or Valerie’s, or…”
She thought but did not say, Gaius’s.
She let her imagination free, picturing the distant places, the marvelous vistas, that might now be open to them. The desire to see these places burned in her and shone through her eyes.
“That would be wicked cool!” Siggy’s face had taken on a similarly rapt expression. “We could go to the Moon! To Mars! We could visit other solar systems! Maybe even other galaxies! We could meet Metaplutons in their native environment! We could go beyond Pluto and become Metaplutons ourselves! Loot their technology! Steal their warp drives! Drive their steel warps! Warp their drive steels! Where are all these worlds the princess keeps visiting? Are they circling Alpha Century? In the Andromeda Galaxy! Lucky, we could visit your world!”
“I am from here,” Lucky frowned. “You hatched me from an egg.”
“But…before that!” Siggy insisted. “That Japanese place the princess saw with the river and the cherry blossoms and the floating masks.”
“I don’t care about the before-you.” Lucky shrugged.
“Who’re we inviting?” Valerie leaned toward her friend. “Can Salome come?”
“She is welcome.” The princess inclined her head toward the other girl. “Anyone who wishes can join us.”
“Can I bring Gaius?” Rachel blurted before she could stop herself.
“Certainly not,” replied the Princess sternly. “We cannot trust him. Or, at the very least, we know Dread is untrustworthy. Remember, the prince forced me to disobey my father, after I had explicitly instructed him not to.” She paused and then added with a thoughtful frown. “Does your family approve of you dating a commoner?”
Rachel pressed her lips together and did not reply. Her family did not approve of her dating, though commoner was possibly lower on their list than such issues as older or thaumaturge. Father had married a commoner, so it was unlikely that he would make a fuss about Gaius’s lack of nobility.
Ironically, it irked her slightly that her family was not more concerned about her boyfriend being a commoner. Not because she wanted them to give her more grief over dating Gaius, but because she knew how disappointed her grandparents would be by their lack of concern for propriety. Rachel sighed.
Life. Never as simple as one might like.
“Who is coming aside, these experiments sound like they might be interesting,” Zoë mumbled around her bite of egg burrito. “I wouldn’t mind knowing more about what I can do with my sandals.”
“I can’t wait!” Joy’s feverish cheeks glowed with a rosy hue. “This will be so much fun!”
“These are some good ideas,” the princess acknowledged. “I would like to find out about other worlds, too. I think we should tell people about them. I would like to open trade.”
“We can’t do that,” Rachel said wistfully. “It would damage the Wall.”
“I hardly think a Wall that keeps us from other worlds could be a good thing,” said Nastasia. “We should endeavor to take it down.”
“But…” Rachel was so alarmed, she jumped forward. “The Raven told us…”
She thought of the great shadow dragons who would have done just that the previous night—had she not stopped Azrael.
“I do not trust that creature.” The princess drew herself up and settled her blanket over her shoulders. “I believe it may be evil. Remember, the Raven let the Lightbringer come into our world and pester me. And we know he is wicked. We cannot trust anything it says.”
Thanks to her mother’s dissembling techniques, Rachel was somehow able to nod calmly. Inside, anguish wracked her heart. She could not tell the others that merely hinting to Sakura Suzuki had been enough to cause her to remember her past and instantly grow into an adult. Or that this alone might have been enough to spark other people’s memories and upset the delicate balance that kept the Wall in place. Or that the Raven had been forced to take from Sakura the power that had allowed her to disrupt the appearance of her being a teen. Or that the Raven had wished to remove Rachel’s memory of the incident, as he removed Sakura’s, Joy’s, and Zoë’s, but that this would have damaged Rachel, turning her into someone else—basically kill-ing the person she was now, so he had spared her.
She felt strongly, as well, that she should not let on that Enoch had actually been dead.
So how to convince Nastasia of how horribly wrong she was about the Raven? Because what she had just said was so unfair.
Rachel blinked.
When had the Raven become so tremendously dear to her?
“That is what we will do,” Nastasia stated quietly. “As soon as we are well, we will do some experiments with Zoë regarding dreamland.”
“Great ideas, Princess!” Joy’s eyelids were starting to flutter close, but she gazed at Nastasia’s face fondly. “I knew you would know what to do. You’re the best leader ever.”
“Three cheers for the princess!” shouted Sigfried.
Rachel rubbed her temples and sighed.
The nurse returned with a music stand. On it, she placed sheet music that read: A Curative for Those Who Have Inhaled the Kelpie’s Miasma. Rachel, who had been up in the air on her broom—and thus away from the foul fog—took leave of her friends. As she turned to go, Sigfried fell in step beside her.
“Not going to hang with your girlfriend?” she asked, as they walked toward the door.
“Nah, she’s got Salome to pal around with,” Siggy splashed his hand through the fountain, disturbing its rushing beat. Cold water splattered across Rachel’s face. She licked some of it off. It tasted cool against her tongue with the slightest touch of sweetness.
He said, “Besides, I need to be about my secret mission.”
“A secret mission?” Rachel asked, curious.
Siggy looked right and left. He leaned toward her and whispered, “The Lf-ea…Elf-lay? How do you say elf in Pig-Latin? Anyway, the…you know who I’m talking about…came into my dream last night and asked me to do a task for her.”
“Truly?” Rachel’s jaw gaped, envious that Sigfried had received secret communications from their elf friend. “What did she want?”
“She wants me to make an elixir for Zoë’s friend, Misty Lark—the one who saw her family get killed? She says it will help her with her grief.”
“What a lovely idea,” marveled Rachel.
“If you trust her,” said Sigfried, holding the door. Rachel ran down the stairs and waited for him at the bottom. “Otherwise, I could be about to poison the poor girl. Do you trust her?”
“Who, the Elf?” Rachel thought about this. “Yes. I do. She had ample opportunity to hurt us, if she wished to. Instead, she risked a great deal on our behalf.”
“She said I need a couple of herbs I don’t have yet: yarrow and goatweed, which she first called St. John’s wort. I remember yarrow from detention. How do I get a wart off St. John?”
Rachel giggled. “It’s a plant. Well, goatweed is. It’s also called rosin rose—which I’ve always found rather hard to say. Not sure about St. John’s wort. Saint is one of those orphan words. I think they might have something to do with Outside.”
“The wort or the word has something to do with Outside?” asked Siggy. “Never mind. Do you know where I can find some?”
“Certainly.” Rachel gestured to the east. “The alchemy herb gardens are along the path that leads from the infirmary to Staff Village.”
“Staff Village?”
“It’s a little community down by the creek,” explained Rachel. “The tutors and proctors live there. There’s a dorm for the single folk and thatched-roof cottages for the married couples. I see it when I fly down that way.”
They walked along the wood-chip covered path through the feathery hemlocks. The gymnasium and the track stretched to their right. The eastern dorms—Dee, Raleigh, Drake, and De Vere—were to their left. Fog lay low over the campus, its touch damp against their cheeks and clammy down the back of their necks. Tree trunks more than ten feet away loomed ominously, blurry and indistinct.
To either side, herbs grew: mint, basil, and anise, rosemary, and thyme. In the autumn drizzle, the freshly-washed plants smelled heavenly. Rachel spotted the herb Siggy wanted, with its long slender leaves with translucent white dots, growing beneath a cinnamon tree. As they squatted down to pick some, a familiar voice rang out through the trees.
“Rachel!”
She glanced up, startled. An older boy ran through the fog toward her—a very cute older boy, his face a mix of concern and delight. His robes were old and worn and bore several patches. His wand, which hung from a lanyard, clattered against his hip. His short chestnut ponytail flew out behind him.
“Gaius!” Rachel leapt to her feet.
He reached her and pulled her to him. His arms closed around her. As she wrapped her arms back around him, a slow, joyous smile crept across her face.
After over a month of dating, her boyfriend had finally hugged her.