Love Croakies

by Sam Cheever

  She held up a hand. “Okay, I was guilty about the puckery lips.” She giggled. “You have to admit the customers thought it was a hoot.”

  I narrowed my eyes to slits.

  “Okay, you don’t have to admit it. I can see it in your eyes. You loved it.”

  “Sebille.” My voice was a growled warning.

  “I put the bow tie and vest on the cat too. But this…” She waved a hand at Hobs. “This is all him. He’s in love.”

  “He doesn’t seem very happy about it. Are you sure?”

  “One hundred percent sure. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. Hobgoblins don’t respond to strong emotions like the rest of us. They live life in overdrive. They do everything at five hundred percent, going five thousand miles per hour. So, when they love, they love completely, to the point of making themselves sick.”

  I frowned. “Which means that, yes, he might be in love. But it doesn’t necessarily mean he took the serum, right?”

  “Wrong. The other thing about hobgoblins is that, because it affects them so deeply, they’re slow to embrace emotions. Think of it as a biological safety valve. If Hobs fell naturally into love, we’d have seen or heard it building for months. Maybe years. But there’ve been no signs. None.”

  She was right. I’d been caught totally off guard that morning when Hobs had declared he had a date. I winced. “You think he broke the ward and took the serum?” I didn’t want to believe it. I’d gone against all the advice of my friends to let him live at Croakies. Even though several people had warned me it would be dangerous. Hobgoblins were tricksters. And having a trickster living in a place with tens of thousands of magical artifacts was risky.

  I sighed, my own heart breaking. It might be hard for hobgoblins to embrace emotion, but it wasn’t hard for me. I loved the little guy. And he was in serious trouble.

  “I don’t think he stole it,” Sebille said, chewing her lip.

  I wanted to believe her, but Sebille loved the little guy too. We could both be fooling ourselves because we didn’t want to consider the alternative.

  “If he did, he’d have hidden it here at Croakies,” I said.

  She frowned but nodded. “Unfortunately, Hobs is a master at hiding stuff.”

  He was. He’d once hidden a stash of frosted chocolate brownies in a wrinkle to another dimension. The thought made my stomach twist in alarm. “He could have even opened up one of those doors to another plane and hidden it there.”

  We’d never find that serum.

  “I just don’t think he’d take it, Naida.”

  Sebille’s voice was firmer than before. She meant what she said.

  I expelled air. “Okay. Let’s go with that for now. If he didn’t take the serum, how did he get exposed?”

  “Someone deliberately gave it to him.”

  “Why would someone do that?”

  “Because he snuck up on them and caught them stealing it,” Sebille said, shrugging.

  Okay, that made sense. I nodded. “It’s definitely plausible.”

  Hobs’ little body convulsed suddenly, the shudders violent enough to have pitched him off my couch if I hadn’t been holding onto him.

  I wrapped myself around him and held on, tears rolling down my cheeks. “What can I do!” I yelled at Sebille, my heart breaking.

  She held up a finger and ran out of the room. A second later, I saw a burst of green energy on the landing and heard the buzz of her wings as she flew away.

  “Wicked!” I screamed, wondering where my wayward feline had gotten to.

  Sebille ran back into the room, holding a gooey square of chocolate pastry in her hand.

  A frosted chocolate brownie! Hobs was crazy for them. It was as close to an addiction for the little hobgoblin as anything we had.

  “Hold this under his nose.”

  I grabbed the delectable treat, the intoxicating scent of rich chocolate wafting to my nose as I took it, and shoved the brownie in front of Hobs’ little button nose.

  Nothing happened for several minutes. I’d just about given up on it working when his long-fingered hand snaked up and grabbed the brownie from me. He pressed it against his lips, not biting but just inhaling the treat. Ever so slowly, Hobs’ muscles slowly relaxed until he sagged against me, giving a long sigh as he fell into a restless sleep. His breathing was still much too fast, and his chest heaved as if he struggled to get enough air into his lungs.

  I sagged too, completely wrung out. “That was horrible.”

  Sebille slid her arms under Hobs and moved him to my bed, covering him with the blanket. She stood looking down on him for a beat, her brow furrowed with concern. I’d never seen her so pale. “We need to get Doctor Whom.”

  I nodded.

  “Meow!”

  I turned to find Mr. Wicked trotting into the apartment, tail high and whipping. He was naked again, having somehow ditched his little bow tie and vest.

  “Where have you been?” I scolded my cat, earning a hostile glare from his flashing orange eyes. The message couldn’t have been clearer if he’d spoken the words. “I’m a busy cat. Cut me some slack.”

  Though I had no idea exactly what kept my magical cat busy all day and night, having first-hand knowledge of his whereabouts pretty much only when he was asleep on my pillow or sitting on the windowsill in the sun with Mr. Slimy at his side, I sensed that he used his magical connection to me to keep Croakies running smoothly and limit magical explosions of the kind we’d been suffering since the toxic magic vault had been breached.

  Mostly he was successful. Occasionally, things got past him.

  I’d long ago admitted to myself that, of the two of us, Wicked was easily the most magically astute.

  Mr. Wicked jumped up onto the bed and draped himself alongside Hobs, placing a tiny gray paw in the center of the hobgoblin’s heaving chest. A faint charcoal glow appeared beneath Wicked’s paw, and I gasped as I felt the tug of his magic use in my belly.

  Hobs’ chest stopped heaving and his breathing slowed. Finally, he sighed and melted into a much more restful sleep.

  Wicked folded himself into a tidy coil next to his friend and proceeded to join him in a nap.

  “Okay,” Sebille said. “Let’s get the Doc here before Wicked’s magic wears off.”

  I eyed Hobs. “You think he’s going to get worse again?”

  She stood and nodded, her manner totally free of her usual judgmental disdain. “Yes. His problem isn’t gone. He’s just oblivious to it while he sleeps. But the cat’s spell won’t last forever. It’s just given us some time to get help.” Sebille fixed my cat with a rare look of respect.

  As if he could see her through his lids, Wicked’s eyes flashed open, the orange flaring with hostility. He hissed at the sprite, his claws flexing free before he sheathed them again.

  Sebille hissed back at him. Then she turned on her heel and strode determinedly from the room. “Come on, Naida. We don’t have much time.”

  I glanced at my cat, arching a brow in question. He softened his gaze, a soft rumble vibrating in his throat.

  I shook my head. “You two. I’ll never understand your relationship.”

  Wicked bathed a perfectly clean paw, ignoring me completely.

  16

  Whooo?

  I felt like an idiot.

  “Try again, Naida. We need him.”

  I glared at Sebille, certain she was playing games but unable to deny her for fear that Hobs really would die without help. I expelled a breath and tried again. “Paging Doctor Whooooo!”

  “More uplift on the Whooooo,” she said, her lips twitching. “Like an owl.”

  I stamped my foot, then jumped and yelped as a bright light flashed in the middle of the library, and an enormous birdhouse appeared.

  Light flared around the structure for a moment, blinking like silent, golden emergency lights on an ambulance. And then the lights cut off and the door in the center of the small structure opened on silent hinges.

  A creature st
raight out of the pages of a Grimms fairy tale stood blinking owlishly at us.

  He was approximately five feet tall. Several inches shorter than my own five-feet-nine-inch height. His form was pear-shaped, with a sloping aspect, as if he was made of wax and had spent too much time in the sun, partially melting. Doctor Whom wore a cloak of feathers that fluttered from his narrow shoulders to his much wider hips, dropping just past his knobby knees to brush the calves of his short, skinny legs. Just like the last time he’d been summoned, the Doctor’s bowed calves were covered in fitted, yellow socks that stopped at his ankles. They looked like support hose for birds. His feet were bare, the toes long and curved downward like claws.

  The doc blinked slowly at me through enormous eyes, which were set close together on either side of a sharp, beaklike nose. “Whooo?”

  I was briefly distracted as several tiny gray and white mice skittered past his long feet from the interior of the traveling birdhouse and disappeared beneath the bookshelves.

  I sighed. Visits from the good doctor always required rodent poop cleanup on aisle five.

  “Whooo?” the good doctor repeated, his lips pursed with pique.

  “Um, my friend, Hobs.” I pointed toward the steps. “He’s upstairs.”

  Whom didn’t turn his body to look at the second floor landing. He only turned his head, rotating it nearly a full three-hundred-sixty degrees without difficulty.

  I grimaced, my hand going to my throat in sympathetic pain.

  Without another word, Doctor Whom spun around and returned to his birdhouse, closing the door behind him.

  “Um,” I said.

  The golden lights began to flash again and I took a step toward the birdhouse. “Wait, don’t leave!” I threw myself toward the house, determined to hold him there by sheer will if I had to.

  The house disappeared in a burst of eyeball-searing light and I stumbled forward, slamming up against the stair railing. Pain radiated through my shins, where they met the immovable edge of the steps.

  Before I could straighten, light flared through the open door to the apartment upstairs.

  Sebille and I shared a surprised glance and then hightailed it up the stairs.

  Wicked hissed at the magical birdhouse, all the hair on his back standing on end. A constant yowl emerged from his throat, and the whipping of his tail could have turned eggs into meringue.

  Still, there was a hungry glint in his eyes as he watched Doctor Whom waddle across the room. I caught Wicked licking his lips when the birdman came close.

  Talk about punching above your weight class.

  I hurried over to the bed so I could watch the doctor work. “We think he might have inadvertently gotten some love serum, and it made him love crazed,” I told Whom. “Then he went into some kind of fugue state and finally convulsions.”

  Whom tugged his stethoscope from under his feathery cloak. He pressed it against the little hobgoblin’s chest and listened for a moment, frowning.

  I threw Sebille a worried glance.

  She shook her head in a quick jerk.

  Whom replaced the stethoscope beneath the cloak and lifted a strange, gnarled hand that had feathers springing from the knuckles instead of hair. A curved claw emerged from the yellow flesh.

  I’d seen his method of assessment before, so I was ready. Or I thought I was. But I still grimaced as he sliced the claw along the inside of Hobs’ skinny arm. Blood rose from the gouge and beaded there. It was a sickly pink rather than the vibrant red I’d expected. “Does that blood look right to you?”

  Doctor Whom grunted in response.

  Sebille shrugged.

  The birdman sniffed his bloody claw and jerked away, making a birdlike sound of alarm.

  Wicked spit at Whom, crouching lower on the bed as if preparing to attack.

  Doctor Whom turned his enormous eyes on me. “What did you say he was poisoned with?”

  “We think love serum,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “I’m not familiar with the pathology of this poison.” He turned his head and coughed, bringing up a lumpy dark gray ball that was slashed through with the stark white of tiny bones.

  I gagged, covering my mouth with my hand to keep my last meal…or cookies…from making an uncomfortable return.

  Doctor Whom pressed the slimy ball of bird barf onto the bloody scratch. He rested back on his bent legs, squatting rather than actually sitting, and closed his eyes. He began to whistle.

  We watched him in what appeared to be a meditative state for fifteen minutes before I lost patience and spoke up. “Doctor?”

  He opened one eye, narrowing it at me. “Have patience, young lady. The process must complete itself.”

  “Yes. But…is anything happening?” The last time I’d seen him do the puke poultice method, the poison rose up from the cut and into the poultice. I didn’t see anything coming out of Hobs’ arm.

  He glanced down at the poultice, his thick black brows dipping toward his beaky nose. “We’ll give it more time.” And then he closed his eyes and started whistling again.

  I sighed. “How about some tea?” I suggested to Sebille. She and I both knew I was asking her to make it since she was tea-talented and I was…not.

  She threw Hobs a last, worried glance and nodded, heading toward my little kitchen. I spun on my heel. “I think I have some pie…” I jerked to a halt, my gaze caught on the scene playing out on the floor in front of me.

  Unnoticed by me, my cat had jumped down from the bed and gone exploring. Clearly, the giant birdhouse invading our home was the logical place to start his exploration.

  Wicked was crouched, tail barely moving, and eyes fixed on the tiny white creature squatting near Whom’s door. The mouse’s cute little pink nose twitched with alarm, its long whiskers quivering.

  I watched in horror as Wicked licked his chops.

  He’d apparently realized a giant bird was beyond even his formidable hunting skills. Not so a tiny mouse.

  “Wicked,” I warned in a soft voice. At that moment, I really wished my cat was a dog, so I’d have a snowball’s chance in Hades of getting him to listen.

  But he wasn’t a dog.

  And he’d caught the scent.

  And if I didn’t do something fast, that cute little rodent was going down.

  Wicked’s backend tensed. The mouse twitched in alarm. And I started to leap, knowing I’d be too late.

  Wicked pounced. The mouse squeaked and flew into the air.

  I threw myself at Wicked and hit the carpet hard, skidding along the rough surface on my elbow. Fire burned along my arm, the pain exquisite. “Ayee!” I yelled in pain and frustration.

  The room exploded in a burst of yellow light. Sounds were muffled and everything turned weightless.

  I floated above the floor in a formless bubble, even the pain in my elbow dulling beneath the magic that held me in thrall.

  Wicked floated past, legs flailing in a useless attempt to control his movement. His mouth was open and he was giving the Universe a feline-shaped talking to. I’d have smiled at the sight, but I became distracted by the little mouse. It was floating past on its back looking completely relaxed. The rodent’s little button eyes fixed on me, and its nose twitched adorably.

  I grinned.

  An angry claw slashed toward the mouse, missing it by a mile.

  Somewhere Sebille was talking, but she sounded far away. The noise of my cat yowling with temper and frustration came to me through a thick layer of cotton wool. My ears felt like they had the time I’d followed a fainting goat up a mountain looking for a demon’s lair. I moved my jaw around, but they refused to pop.

  A gnarled, yellow hand with curved claws appeared and the tiny mouse floated into it, settling down with a twitch of its whiskers.

  And then suddenly, the weightlessness stopped and I slammed to the ground.

  Wicked managed to land on his feet, of course, but I landed on my back, the impact knocking the air out of my lungs.

 
Whom stood looking down at me, his beakish nose twitching like the mouse’s whiskers. “The poultice is not working, young lady,” he said. “You must collect the serum that has poisoned him. I will create an antidote from that. Be quick now. The lad is in dire straits. Call me when you have the serum.” He tucked the mouse into an invisible pocket in his feathery cloak and ambled toward his house.

  Wicked spat at him as he waddled by. “Mind your Ps and Qs, young man. It is not copacetic to take someone else’s medicine.” With that odd statement, he disappeared into his birdhouse with his mouse. Golden light exploded into the room and, a blink later, the birdhouse and the good doctor were gone.

  And I had one heck of a backache.

  17

  Into the Great Unknown Together

  We stood in a flat area at the bottom of a tall, spiky peak. Around us, the sweet smell of pine needles softened the cloying stink of dark magic permeating The Enchanted Forest. I looked around the place, my skin crawling as I remembered the last time I’d been there. The area where we stood, surrounded by oversized trees of both the evergreen and deciduous varieties, reminded me too much of the spot where the two-headed snake had tried to make me its dinner.

  I shuddered, drawing Sebille’s curious glance.

  “According to my calculations, we should be just about on top of it,” Archie said. He was carrying the book on magical anomalies he’d gotten from Shakespeare’s desk in the artifact library. The author of the reference book was none other than Doctor Mortimus Osvald.

  I glanced nervously at my phone. “Maybe I should check in with Lea again.”

  Sebille shook her head. “You checked in two minutes ago and three minutes before that. The little runt is fine. We’re going to get the serum back to him in time.”

  I frowned. “Who are you, and what have you done with Sebille?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Oh, there you are.” I sighed. “Don’t act like I’m the only one who’s worried about Hobs. I’ve seen you texting Lea like five times since we left.”