Potions and Pageants Read online

  “What is that supposed to mean?” she said hotly.

  “You know exactly what it means.”

  “Okay fine, but you know I don’t like doing boring things. Why does it even matter?”

  “Your mother told Nanny Nora to build me my aviary at the bottom of my garden, but you fired Nanny Nora before she built it!”

  “Why do you need an aviary?” she said astonished. “Your birds love you anyway. It’s not like they’re going to fly away.”

  “I need it because I need it,” he said. “You’re going to make it for me, and then I’ll help you.”

  “You want me to build your aviary?” she said in disbelief. “But if you wanted it so badly, why didn’t you just make it yourself?”

  He glared at her.

  She stared at him. And then she said, “Oh!”

  Mr Bramble only stood at around three feet tall, and he was stout. He was not lazy, but he was also not very agile. Clearly he had not built the aviary because this was a task he was unable to do by himself.

  “Okay,” she said. “It’s a deal. Please can you tell your friend the hegwitch about the green juice as soon as possible?”

  “After the aviary is finished.”

  “But I need to know before the pageant final on Friday. Which means your friend only has two days to get me the results. I promise I’ll build the aviary this weekend.”

  “No,” he said. “Now.”

  He walked off, taking the bottle of green juice with him.

  “But where are you going?” she said in astonishment. “Aren’t you going to help me?”

  He turned around. “That Councilor Strickt said you have to prove you have a sense of responsibility.”

  “Jeeves and his big mouth,” she muttered. “I’m gonna kill him.”

  “The councilor was right. You never finish anything by yourself. Sometimes I despair that you’ll never finish anything in the whole of your life!”

  “I do finish stuff!”

  “Like what?”

  “Like… like… I took driving lessons and learned how to drive a car!”

  He glowered at her.

  “Okay, fine,” she huffed. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Think what you could do if only you would try,” he said. “So you had better finish my aviary, or I won’t give this juice to my friend. Build it around that tree.”

  He pointed to the tree that the robins’ nests were in, and then he disappeared off down the path towards his home.

  Percy groaned. She knew what aviary he was talking about now. Shortly before she had fired Nanny Nora there had been a delivery of a very large set of boxes to the house.

  Nanny Nora had floated them all out with her wand towards the storage shed, and Percy found the boxes still in there, gathering dust.

  Percy ripped the heavy cardboard open with a utility knife, and found the instructions. It did look like something designed for one person to be able to build by themselves, even though it recommended two people.

  Percy sulked as she read all the steps. She hated building furniture. This was the worst thing she could imagine having to do. And she only had a few hours of daylight left.

  She debated leaving it until tomorrow. But tomorrow was Wednesday. If she didn’t do it tonight then a whole day would be wasted at school tomorrow, and she would have to finish it late tomorrow.

  That left just Thursday for Mr Bramble to take the bottle to his friend to get it examined, and for her to send results back the same evening. It was not enough time.

  She didn’t even know how far away Mr Bramble’s friend lived. That meant tonight. She had to build this whole darn thing tonight.

  Percy dragged all the planks of wood down to the robins’ tree and began arranging them.

  A couple of hours later, as Percy hammered what seemed like the thousandth nail into a long beam of wood, she let out a furious yelp as the hammer hit her thumb.

  With a curse, she dashed the hammer to the ground. The robins up in the tree had been watching her and chirping inquisitively for the whole time. Now their little chirps sounded almost like a mocking laughter.

  Percy was hot and sweaty and sick and tired, and she was nowhere near completing the aviary.

  She was hungry too. But she knew there would be nothing in the cooler to eat. Jeeves made his food fresh every day for her, and since she had upset him yesterday, she doubted he would have cooked anything today.

  Percy collapsed with a groan onto the ground.

  What she really needed was a nice hot meal and one of Luca’s delicious cappuccinos. Or two. Two cappuccinos was exactly what she needed to finish this job.

  Abandoning her tools, she fought her way through the brambles, and left her house.

  Humming to herself, she marched as quickly as possible to Luca’s, where she sat at her favorite booth in the back and ate a delicious steaming hot spaghetti marinara and drank two tiny delicious perfect cups of cappuccino.

  She had been very relieved on her arrival to see Luca behind the counter as usual, and when he had taken her order she’d quietly asked him about his werewolf waiter.

  Luca himself was a werewolf. He had grumpily told her that he’d had no idea the guy was taking drugs and had turned feral, and had said he was glad to be rid of him.

  But when she had told him that the Sentinel Alliance had sentenced the guy to death, he had looked alarmed and gone somewhat pale.

  He had shaken his head. “The Sentinel Alliance,” he had said darkly. “That’s bad news. Bad for my business too. You won’t tell anyone, ey?”

  She had reassured him that she would not.

  Pushing aside her empty plates, and feeling pleasantly full, she got to her feet. After settling up the bill and leaving a large tip, she trudged out of the café.

  Now that she was full, she felt almost sleepy. And yet she had at least a couple of hours work ahead of her. And a couple of hours was an optimistic estimation. She suspected that she was going to have to get up very early tomorrow morning to finish the job before school.

  This knowledge weighed heavily on her shoulders and made her drag her feet as she walked home.

  She probably had an hour or so of daylight left. She couldn’t work in the dark. She wondered if she had any candles in the house that she could set up in the garden. Her mother used to have a stash of them enchanted so the wind would not blow them out, but that had been a long time ago.

  If she had been a witch, she thought very grumpily, she could have enchanted up some lights to help her with her work.

  Heck, she could have waved her wand and got the aviary to assemble itself. This thought made her feel very sour indeed.

  She had turned into her street, when a thought came to her that brought her to a standstill.

  She didn’t have to do her work herself! She could pay somebody to do it. Like that guy who had given her the driving lessons.

  He was a student at a London University, and a Humble to boot. He had known she was underage, but had given her the driving lessons anyway because he needed the money. He would most definitely build her aviary for her if she paid him.

  Then her shoulders sagged again. The trouble was that Mr Bramble would see him doing the work. And Mr Bramble had said that he wanted Percy to do it herself.

  As she debated the possibility of persuading Mr Bramble that a completed aviary was a completed job, no matter who had done it, Percy felt a whisper of wind behind her. As if someone was there.

  Before she could turn, something crashed into the back of Percy’s head.

  She fell face forward onto the ground, stunned by the impact. It hurt so much and was such a shock that Percy had not even made a squeak. To her horror, someone grabbed her by the shoulders and dragged her along the pavement into an alley.

  Percy tried to scream, but her brain would not obey her. Neither would her hands and legs. She couldn’t stop the person from dragging her. She couldn’t get to her feet and run away.

&nb
sp; The person rolled her over onto her back, forcing her hood down over her eyes at the same time. She could not see them. Sitting on her chest, they pinned her to the ground.

  A hand was pressed over her mouth so that she couldn’t scream, not that she had even been able to try, so dazed was she.

  But then the hand moved, and the person squeezed her nostrils shut.

  Percy’s mouth flew open and she heaved a giant lungful of air. Before she could scream, something was shoved hard into her open mouth.

  Something cold and hard. Glass. A bottle. Liquid sloshed out of it and splashed the back of her throat.

  And now Percy did scream. She screamed so hard that the burst of air escaping from her lungs made the liquid bubble and foam out of her mouth.

  She bucked, trying to get her arms free from between the person’s tightly clamped thighs.

  A few drops of the liquid went down into her lungs, making her heave and splutter and choke.

  Poison, was all she could think. The poison potion.

  The force of her spluttering and choking and thrashing sent the bottle flying away from her mouth. Wrenching her head sideways, she spat as much of the liquid out as possible.

  The bottle had landed with a chink on the ground. Percy could not see it. But all the liquid must’ve flowed out because the person shrieked in fury.

  Percy thrashed her head, trying to get her hood off from over her eyes.

  And then a fist slammed into Percy’s nose, and all she could see was the red of blood on her eyelids as she squeezed them shut in pain.

  The person got off her. She heard them run.

  She rolled over and spat and spat, trying to get the liquid out of her mouth. It tasted of nothing at all. If only it tasted of something, then she would know if it was still on her tongue. Then she would know if she had swallowed any of it. All she could do was wretch and try to spit it all out.

  By the time Percy had crawled onto her hands and knees, the person was long gone.

  Percy staggered out of the alleyway that they had dragged her into. And then she half ran, half stumbled all the way home, and into the kitchen, where she furiously rinsed out her mouth and washed her face, scrubbing it until she hoped every trace of the potion was gone.

  16. Nan’s Discovery

  When Percy walked into school the next morning, the first thing she heard was not pleasant.

  “Look, it’s moaning mosshead. The sore loser.”

  “Ooh, look at her face! What happened to you, mosshead?”

  Percy did not bother to reply. She had fixed her broken nose last night by seizing it and pulling it into place, despite the horrible wrench of pain that it had caused.

  This morning she had woken with two black eyes, and a gash across the bridge of her nose that she had covered with a fresh plaster.

  She did not know what hurt worse — her face, or the back of her skull from whatever had crashed into it. There was a huge tender bump there under her hair.

  She still did not know whether it was potion that had been used on her or something else.

  Following the attack, by the time her eyes had stopped running and she could see again properly, she had washed away every trace of the liquid. There had been no ominous traces of the cloud of doom left for her to see, if it had ever been there.

  Worse, she had felt so unwell that she’d had to go straight to bed, and been unable to work on the aviary. When she had knocked on Mr Bramble’s door early that morning to explain things, he had not answered it.

  He had probably woken up early himself, since he was usually up at the crack of dawn, and seen the terrible job she had left half-finished, and was so miffed with her that he didn’t want to talk to her.

  In desperation she had gone up to the attic to find Jeeves. But his door had been firmly locked from the inside, and there had been no response or sounds from inside when she had called for him.

  So that was the possibility of Jeeves helping her gone out of the window.

  Percy felt miserable. She had been half convinced that a dribble of potion might have gone down her throat and that she might have perished last night or on her way to school. She had taken it as a good omen that she hadn’t stumbled down the stairs to her death in the morning.

  And so she didn’t particularly care about the jeers of “Moaning mosshead” that followed her throughout the school day.

  In fact, she wouldn’t have even bothered to have come to school today if it wasn’t for the fact that Councilor Strickt had made it very clear that he was monitoring her school attendance too.

  Or that Headmistress Glory would turn up at her house to find her if she went astray.

  The morning’s lessons were Eldritch Community Studies and then Magical History.

  Percy walked into the Eldritch Communities Studies classroom and the first thing she saw was Felix and Octavia sitting near the front. The next thing she saw was Nan sitting at the middle of the classroom with Shara.

  Not in the mood to talk to Nan, who would probably say Percy had brought the attack on herself, Percy quickly ducked her head to let her loose hair fall over her face. It was too late though, because Shara had already seen it.

  Percy saw Shara nudging Nan, so she hurried to an empty seat at the back of the class and refused to look at Nan during the entire lesson, even though she saw Nan glance back at her several times in an attempt to catch her eye.

  At the end of the lesson, both Nan and Felix waited by the door and cornered Percy as she left the classroom. There was no avoiding them.

  “What happened to you?” Nan demanded.

  Percy, who had no intention of saying anything with Felix in earshot, said, “Had an accident,” as she edged past them.

  “You should go and see the school nurse,” said Felix.

  “I don’t need your advice thanks, Fiori,” she snapped at him and stalked off.

  When Nan tried to sit with her in Magical History, Percy put her bag onto the seat so that Nan couldn’t take it. Nan gave her a hurt look and went to sit next to Shara instead.

  Percy spent morning break locked in a cubicle in the girl’s toilets. She had a thumping headache. The last thing she wanted was to play twenty questions with Nan or worse, with the headmistress.

  She wondered if Lucifer was missing her. He had liked it when she had joined him in the library for tea the past two days.

  Right now she didn’t particularly want to see him either, not after he had expressed his desire to eat someone’s soul.

  He’d probably demand to know what progress she had made. Heck, he might even want to show her what other demon qualities had emerged since his delicious encounter with death yesterday.

  When the bell rang, Percy trudged to her free study period. Percy had feared getting questions from teachers about what happened to her face. But they had not asked. However, the study period supervisor took one look at her face and tutted.

  “Getting into fights now, Prince?” he said. “Whatever will you do next?”

  Her headache had been growing steadily all day, and by lunchtime it was thumping.

  Not feeling up to facing the inevitable chorus of jeers from a dining hall full of students, she grabbed a sandwich and made her way out to the school fields.

  There, she lay back against a tree trunk, and closed her eyes, and lifted her face towards the warmth of the sun. Finally her headache eased a little.

  She had slept badly the previous night, unable to breathe through her swollen nose, and found herself drifting off.

  An annoyed cry of, “There you are!” made her open her eyes.

  Nan was standing over her.

  “You’re blocking my sunshine,” said Percy rather hoarsely.

  “Well?” said Nan stroppily, her arms on her hips in angry expectation of an explanation.

  “Broken nose,” said Percy thickly.

  Nan sat down on the grass next to her. After looking around to make sure no other students were nearby, Nan pulled her wand out of h
er pocket.

  “Do you want me to try and fix it?” she said.

  “Don’t even think about it,” said Percy, eyeing up the wand suspiciously.

  Nan had certainly not had a wand back when she and Percy had stopped being friends. It was another sign of how much Nan had changed in the intervening years. Now she could heal a broken nose with her magic. Percy couldn’t even build a darn aviary.

  Never having seen Nan use a wand, Percy did not want to trust her nose to it.

  “I’m not bad at it,” said Nan defensively. “Mum says I’m quite good actually.”

  “I believe you,” said Percy, not bothering to argue.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened or not?” demanded Nan. “Did you get into a fight with someone?”

  “Why do you think it’s my fault?” said Percy.

  “What then? Did… did someone attack you?” Nan looked very upset at this possibility. “Who was it? I swear I’ll jinx them!”

  Percy laughed, and then winced because it hurt her nose. “You would never.”

  Nan looked guilty. “Okay, maybe not.”

  “And anyway, I’m Demonling remember?” said Percy. “Nobody would dare fight me.”

  Percy had a vague and not entirely believable memory of once having had a body that was nowhere near as puny as the one she had now. The thing was, she could not remember at all what that body had been like.

  Nan was looking like she was thinking the same thing.

  “So you were the last man standing, where you?” said Nan dryly.

  “No,” said Percy, irritable again. “They conked me over the head and I went down like a sack of potatoes. You happy now?”

  “Oh heavens,” said Nan. “How did it happen? Where did it happen?”

  “Last night. Outside my house. Or as good as.”

  “Did they… Did they…?”

  “Try to snuff out my daylights? Probably. They forced something liquid down my throat, or tried to. Probably that murderous potion.”

  Nan’s hands flew over her mouth in shock. Her eyes went suspiciously shiny.

  “Don’t you start bawling like a baby,” said Percy sharply.