“Maybe I should fill you in on what’s happening,” Emma said.
His little round ears perked up.
“Lily ran away. Crystal and I went to get her, but Lily’s magic went haywire, and she triggered a blizzard so large, all the dragons wintering in Africa began their northern migration early. They caused a plane crash, which Crystal and I stumbled across, and I ended up flying a baby dragon out to find Lily while Crystal stayed with the crash survivors. But I couldn’t get close to Lily because of the temperature, so I brought the baby dragon and her mother back to Crystal, she took off on the mother dragon, and then the dragon came back alone. I assume Crystal stayed with Lily.”
Emma frowned. She tapped a finger to her lips; her eyes grew distant.
“If only I could remember that dream…”
George knew exactly which dream she was talking about. Wendy had played a part in it. Emma, Crystal, and Gemma had all forgotten it when they woke up, but they had also woken up knowing they had to help Lily. Because this was important enough to warrant Wendy breaking a cardinal rule: no mass dreams.
Messing with an individual dream here or there was an accepted and applauded practice.
At least, it was in George’s neighborhood.
How much trouble was Wendy in now?
He fidgeted with his whiskers. If saving Wendy’s career meant he had to spend the rest of his life in this form, then so be it. Even if he had to live in a cage in little Sue’s bedroom.
He loved that fairy godmother so much.
Her smile. The clouds in her gray eyes. The way she handled Lily’s magical incidents with such calm ingenuity. She was so proud of her problem charge, so willing to wipe a few memories and keep her goddaughter safe. Why, she positively bragged about Lily’s creations. The snowman septet performing BTS music was a particular favorite of hers.
He sighed again. If he managed to turn this around for himself, he was taking her to the next BTS concert they put on. The pair could sneak in, but getting the full experience in physical form would be fun for a change. They could be a human couple on a date. Nobody would know the difference.
He heard a crackling sound from the PA system.
“We are now arriving in Newfoundland. Please fasten your seatbelt for landing.”
As if the pilot couldn’t have just hollered over his shoulder.
Emma held her pocket open, and George hopped inside as she strapped herself into her seat. The popping in his ears felt awful. He rubbed them furiously, but the plane was still descending rapidly, and his ears were still popping.
If he could only cast a little spell to stop that…
With a roar and a rush, the plane’s wheels hit the landing strip. There was the usual hectic moment where the pilot applied the brakes and the plane seemed to be racing out of control, and then the plane stopped, and George heard another roar. A distinctly dragon roar.
“Oh, no, she doesn’t like the plane,” Emma mumbled.
She unstrapped herself with a click of the seatbelt and hopped to her feet. “Thank you! I’ll let you know if I need you to pick me up again.”
“Hopefully not later today,” the pilot said, determined to utilize his PA system to the fullest.
George poked his head out of Emma’s pocket as she descended from the plane onto the asphalt. One emerald green dragon awaited them, wings spread to make itself look larger, teeth bared, a claw lifted with talons at the ready.
No, two dragons. He could see the legs and claws of a smaller, black dragon behind the green one.
Mama dragon wasn’t happy about the plane potentially attacking her daughter.
Stella. It popped into his head suddenly. That was the mother dragon’s name.
Stella, can you hear me?
The dragon’s lips covered her sharp white teeth again. She relaxed and lifted her long neck, tilting her head to the side as she set her claw back on the ground. Her wings folded somewhat.
Yes.
George could have cried. He resisted the urge, however, knowing mouse tears were red and easily mistaken for blood. Emma probably knew that, too, but if she didn’t, he didn’t want to worry her.
My name is George, and I have a problem.
The dragon’s golden eyes focused on him and Emma’s pocket, vertical pupils narrowing to slits as the elf approached.
You’re telling me. Everything you say is coming through fuzzy. It’s kind of hard to understand.
That’s… well, could you get a message to a fairy godmother? After you take us to Crystal and Lily?
The baby dragon’s head peeked around her mother.
“Hello!” Emma called, waving at the pair of dragons. “Ready to take us back to Crystal and Lily?”
Stella extended one wing and touched it to the ground, creating a ramp. Yes. You have a passenger this time.
“Oh, this little guy?” Emma looked down at her pocket. “His name is George. He and I met once before when he was a raccoon.”
You sure get around, Stella commented to George.
There have been… incidents, he replied. He considered asking if Stella could patch him through to Emma, but for what purpose? Telling the little elf too much would only get him into worse trouble.
He twitched his whiskers, thinking, as Emma carried on what to him sounded like a one-sided conversation with Stella. Yes, he could destroy the book. But what next? What was the next step in clearing his name and regaining his job?
A puff of hot air blew his ears back.
You don’t smell like a mouse.
He looked up at the curious baby dragon. Her name wasn’t coming to him.
That’s because I’m not a mouse. I’m an imp. And you are…?
Vega. What’s an imp?
He stared at the dragon. She didn’t know what an imp was? What was her mother teaching her?
Hold on tight. Here we go! Stella warned him.
He ducked into Emma’s pocket and dug his tiny claws into the inner nylon lining. The dragon leaped into the air with a jolt of his stomach, and he suddenly realized he was hungry. Very hungry. Mice had fast metabolisms, so it made sense. But he couldn’t magically remove the sensation this time.
It hit him like a truck. He needed to eat. For the first time in his existence, he needed to eat.
He didn’t like being mortal.
Stella?
Yes?
Do you think you could connect me to Emma?
I’m not a radio, the dragon grumbled. But I guess I can try…
“Oh? What’s that fuzzy sound, Stella?” Emma wondered aloud. “It almost sounds like static.”
Can you hear me? George asked her.
She didn’t answer.
The dragon’s wingbeats had stabilized with their altitude, and he chanced a peek out of Emma’s pocket. The wind blew his ears back and whipped her curly brown hair around her face as she looked down at him, wide-eyed.
That was a ‘yes,’ then.
Do you have anything I could eat?
She sighed. If not for his superior murine hearing, the sound would have disappeared into the sky without him noticing it.
“You didn’t think about that on the plane?”
He wanted to snap back with something about never having to eat before, but he bit his tongue and fired off a sharp, No.
She sighed again and reached around to the pack on her back, hugging Stella tighter with her knees as she did so. An experienced dragon rider, George noted. And here he’d thought she was a simple homemaker and mother, with her most colorful credentials being her marriage to a mad scientist.
That was probably still her most colorful credential, actually.
“I have a granola bar,” she said, pulling it out of the pack and handing it to him. “You can chew through the wrapper, can’t you? I’d rather not lose my grip and fall to my death because I was opening a snack.”
I can manage, thank you.
He sniffed the foil-wrapped bar she shoved into her pocket beside him. It smelled good. Honey and oats. That sounded delicious right about now. He set to work gnawing through the wrapper, which didn’t take long at all, and then he was nibbling happily at the bar, satisfying his urge to eat and his urge to chew in a single moment.
Was this it, then? The rest of his life? Searching for food and something to wear his incisors down?
He thought again of Wendy and felt a pang in his tiny heart. She would think he was adorable if she saw him this way, and she would be happy to take care of him, but he didn’t want to be her pet. He wanted to be her boyfriend. A tricky thing to pull off for an imp and a fairy godmother, but impossible for a mouse and a fairy godmother.
And if he managed to get back to the immortal plane… if she saw him as he really was…
He shuddered to think about it.
What was next? After he destroyed the book—what then?
He wouldn’t be much help to Lily while the storm raged. Oh, sure, he could stay in Emma’s pocket, sheltered from the elements, and he would have to do that until Lily’s magic settled, but what could he do for Lily after that? She had to solve the riddle and break the curse herself, or it wouldn’t count. The fine print was very specific about these things.
He wished he had more time to think. And he wished he didn’t have so much time, either.
He thought of that picture again, the one on Emma’s nightstand. She and Pipaluk were so lucky. In all the twenty-two years he’d known Wendy, they’d never once kissed. They couldn’t. That was what got them into the search for a way to break Lily’s curse, because as usual, the ramifications extended beyond the cursed individual.
Twenty-two years.
And he’d fallen in love with Wendy the moment he’d first seen her.
She liked to laugh when they talked about it and say he was such a romantic. Love at first sight, then carrying his torch alone for ten years before she’d finally asked him why he was following her around.
Not that he had been stalking her, exactly. It was normal for imps to keep tabs on the accursed for their employers. The demons who unspoke the curses knew the moment something occurred to affect them, like speaking the unspoken, but they wanted to know before it happened. They wanted a little warning. Hence, frequent routine checks by the imps in their employ.
So, nobody had questioned George jetting off to the mortal plane whenever Lily’s magic went haywire. It was easy enough to catch such incidents early, too, because while all use of magic had some effect on the immortal plane, Lily’s magic was like a massive earthquake that registered high on the Richter scale. And whenever she used that much magic, there was always a mess for her fairy godmother to clean up.
Which meant George had a guaranteed few minutes to spend with Wendy before he could defy the pull of the immortal plane no longer.
Ten years of showing up in the magical aftermath before Wendy finally asked him why he was following her around. And then another five years of her coming around to him and returning his affection. But they couldn’t even touch until five years ago, when George had finally risked speaking the unspoken and set this whole horrible chain of events in motion.
Lily’s mother had died.
Lily had spiralled into a deep depression
Her magic had become even more chaotic and unbalanced.
She had isolated herself even more than she had before.
And yet, George had been happy, because he could touch Wendy.
It was like walking through a fog and feeling the moisture in the air mist on his skin, like brushing his fingers across dew-dampened grass first thing in the morning. She looked smokey, but she didn’t feel gritty like smoke, didn’t smell charred like smoke. He still hadn’t kissed her—couldn’t—but he imagined her lips would feel like a cool springtime breeze in the early morning sunshine.
He sighed.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡGDEDaK6wWO
