Not On My Patch: a Young Wizards Hallowe'en Story Read Free Page B

vegetable before.”
    “Life’s full of these little surprises,” Nita said. She fitted the pumpkin’s top back in place, saw to her satisfaction that it fitted snugly. Then on an afterthought she removed it again, shook her charm bracelet around on her wrist, and pinched one charm, a tiny lightbulb, that had a ready-to-activate spell attached to it. When she pulled her finger and thumb away from the charm again, they had a little spark of bright white light between them. Nita reached inside the pumpkin and snugged the little particle of wizard-light down into the place where she’d most deeply dug away the pumpkin’s flesh at the bottom, then put the stem-lid back on. The wizard-light shone very satisfactorily through the pumpkin’s new eyes and mouth, even in daylight. “Anybody sees that,” Nita said, “they’ll think it’s an LED. Give me a couple of minutes to deal with the handle and we can go.”
    It took less than that, as it turned out: some of the heavy braided raffia-twine that her dad used in his florist’s business proved to be perfect for this job. When it was done Nita tested the handle, found it entirely secure, and then equipped herself with one of several Halloween-themed paper shopping bags. She handed one each to the others. “You ready?”
    “All set,” Ronan said.
    “Daddy, we’re going…!” Nita said.
    “So I see,” he said, looking in again from the kitchen. “And you’ve got your phones with you if there are any problems…”
    “Don’t think there’s likely to be much in the way of problems,” Nita said.
    Her dad watched them head for the front door with a slightly thoughtful expression. Nita blushed one more time, for though her dad knew that there’d recently been some kind of status change in her relationship with Kit, she hadn’t yet been successful in explaining it to him, because she hadn’t yet finished figuring it out herself. “Don’t be too late,” her dad said: and Nita knew this was code for Don’t do anything I wouldn’t want you to.
    “I won’t,” she said: and very much hoped, as the front door shut behind them, that this was going to turn out to be true.
    *

The weather at least was cooperating with the local trick-or-treaters. After a few days of rain and wind earlier in the week, conditions had abruptly settled the day before into a lovely still crispness exactly right for the end of October. The trees were on the turn and glowing in the last rays of late-afternoon sun; and things had fortunately had time to dry out, so that the yellow and orange maple and oak leaves you scuffed through rustled satisfyingly instead of just lying there wet and sodden on the sidewalk.
    Nita sighed as the four of them walked down the street and stopped at the first few of their neighbors’ houses. She loved this time of year, both for the changeableness of it and the slight sense of sadness that seemed to hover over it, the world saying Oh well… as it reluctantly gave up the midyear warmth and paused for a few long cool breaths before turning inevitably toward the winter. The particular blue the sky went, the growing quiet even on windy days when the leaves came off the trees: they all mattered a lot to her.
    That changeableness seemed to have come over Hallowe’en itself, in a way. It was a little weird to see so many older kids dressed up and taking part in the last-day-of-October ritual. But over the last few years it seemed that a lot of junior high-age, even senior high-age kids, had been getting into it. Partly it was being pitched among the kids as a way to have fun after dark with the excuse of taking care of the littler participants… though pretty much everyone involved understood that this was actually a good way to get out from under the ever-watchful parental eyes for a while. Nita knew very well that a lot of kids from school, though they’d gotten themselves costumed and acquired all the rest of the necessary props, were actually up in town