A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition Read Free Page B

of the yard, where they were out of sight of the houses on either side. “Come to any conclusions?”
    Just that your mama’s easy to shake down for dog biscuits.
    Kit grinned. “You didn’t need to start talking to her to find that out,” he said. He reached into his pocket, felt around for the “zipper” in it that facilitated access to the alternate space where he kept some of his spells ready, and pulled one out—a long chain of strung-together words in the Speech that glowed a very faint blue in the swiftly falling darkness. “I’d keep it in the family, though,” Kit said to Ponch. “Don’t start asking strangers complicated philosophical questions … It’ll confuse them.”
    It may be too late, Ponch said.
    Kit wondered what that was supposed to mean, then shrugged. He dropped the spell-chain to the ground around them in a circle. The transit wizardry knotted itself together at the ends in the figure-eight wizard’s knot, and from it a brief shimmering curtain of light went up and blanked the night away as displaced air went thump! and Kit’s ears popped. A moment later he and Ponch were standing together in Tom’s backyard, behind the high privet hedge blocking the view from Tom’s neighbors’ houses. Across the patio, lights were on in the house, and banging noises were coming from the kitchen.
    Kit and Ponch made their way past the stucco koi pond toward the sliding porch doors, Ponch shaking his head emphatically. “Are your ears bothering you?” Kit said, as the sound of barking came from further inside the house.
    Only lately, Ponch said.
    “Sorry. I’ll have a look at the spell later.” Kit pushed the patio door to one side and went into Tom’s dining room. That space flowed into the living room area, where Tom’s desk sat in a corner, past the sofas and the entertainment center. But at the moment all the action was in the kitchen, off to the left, where big, dark-haired Carl, Tom’s fellow Advisory wizard, was doing something to the strip lighting that ran below the upper kitchen cupboards. Tom was leaning against the refrigerator, holding a cup of coffee, with the expression of a man who wants nothing to do with whatever’s happening.
    “Hi, Kit,” he said, as Ponch ran through the kitchen and out the other side, heading toward the bedrooms, where the sheepdogs Annie and Monty were barking at something. “Something to drink? Just got some orange smoothies in…”
    “Yeah, thanks.” Kit sat down at the table and watched Carl, who was bent over sideways under the upper cupboards and making faces.
    “I told him to call an expert,” Tom said as he fished a carton of pre-mixed smoothie out of the fridge and a glass out of a cupboard by the sink, and having poured it full sat down with Kit at the dining room table, where a number of volumes of the Senior version of the wizard’s manual were piled up.
    “We’re expert enough to change the laws of physics temporarily,” Carl muttered. “How hard can wiring be?”
    With a clunk! all the lights in the house went out.
    Carl moaned. Kit could just see Tom make a flicking motion with one finger at the circuit-breaker box near the kitchen door, and the lights came back on again. “You should stick to physics,” Tom said.
    “Just one more time,” Carl said, and went down the stairs to the basement.
    “This will be the sixth ‘one more time’ in the past two hours,” Tom said. “I’m hoping he’ll see sense before he blows up the transformer at the end of the street. Or maybe the local power station.”
    “I heard that!” said the voice from the basement.
    Kit snickered, but not too loudly.
    “Anyway,” Tom said, “thanks for coming over. Briefly, one of our wizards is missing, and I’d like you to look into it.”
    This was a new one on Kit. “Missing? Anybody I know?”
    “Hard for me to tell. Here’s the listing.” Tom pulled down the topmost manual and opened it; the pages riffled themselves to a spot he had