The Power Potion Read Free

sniffed.

    Their top lips pursed and wagged and quivered.
    Goat tongues made their way toward Dave.
    “Aaaah!” Dave cried (because, really, what else was there to say?).
    Now, you may be wondering why Dave didn’t just push right through this brash blockade of bearded goats. After all, goats are not predators.
    Goats don’t circle and attack.
    Or stalk and assault.
    (They do, it’s true, assault stalks, but that’s an entirely different matter.)
    It was the eyes. The golden eyes with long, slitty, sideways pupils. They reminded Dave of tiger-eyes.
    Living, blinking, sideways tiger-eyes.
    And tiger-eyes (to make a long story short) reminded Dave of Damien Black, and thinking of Damien Black petrified him.
    However, the bleating and groaning andgrunting and baaing that the goats were doing also kept Dave from pushing through them.
    Plus, there were horns.
    Large, curled horns.
    You don’t just blithely push through a hard-horned herd of bleating, baaing, grunting, groaning goats.
    You just don’t.
    And
then
Dave noticed that one of the goats had not just two but
six
horns coming out of its head.
    Six horns?
    Dave was now way beyond discombobulated or panicked.
    He was freaking out.
    “AAAAH!” Dave cried again, but as he backed away, he rammed right into a second six-horned goat.
    “AAAAHHH!” he cried once more, because the goats were now upon him, nibbling at hisshoes, his handlebars, his tires, his bike seat, his sweatshirt.
    “HELP!” he yelped from inside the herd of side-eyed nibblers. “HELP!”
    “Hey!” came a voice from Dave’s right. “Hey, leave him alone, you two-toed turkeys!”
    It was a girl, no more than eight.
    A girl who reminded Dave of his little sister, Evie.
    A girl brash and pushy and loud.
    One who knew how to get her way.
    “Back off!” she said, whacking the goats with a stick. “He’s not edible. Go! Go!”
    “Thanks,” Dave choked out after the goats began retreating, but he felt terribly embarrassed to have been rescued by a little girl. (Especially one so much like Evie.)
    “Watch out for Hilda,” the girl said, nodding at the tree branch above. “She’s a prankster.”
    As if on cue, the goat in the tree let loose a sprayof pellets, raining little poopy nuggets all over Dave.
    “AAAAHH!” Dave cried (yet again) because (yet again) what else was there to say?
    He shook out his helmet, then pushed forward, asking the girl, “How do you get back to the main road?”
    “Jackaroo?” she asked.
    “Yes!” he called over his shoulder (as he was, once again, too impatient to wait for decent directions).
    “Second right, right, right!” she called after him.
    “
Second
right?”
    “Right!” she shouted.
    And so off Dave pedaled, escaping Moongaze Maze as fast as he could.

Chapter 4
A THREE-PRONGED FORK IN THE ROAD
    After Dave escaped Moongaze Maze, he still did not go directly to Raven Ridge.
    Instead, he went directly home.
    “Sticky!” he called after he’d made sure his parents and sister were not in the apartment. “Sticky, where are you?”
    Well. We’ve reached the point in the story when I worry about telling you more. Either you already know everything I’m about to tell you or you know none of it. If you know everything, you’ll say, Yeah, yeah, I know all that—now get on with the story! And if you know none of it, well, chances are you’ll roll your eyes and go, Oh,
right
, and I’ll have to jump through a bunchof fast and fiery hoops to convince you that this isn’t just some silly make-believe story—that it’s true, authenticated, documented, and (in fact) factual.
    You see, what I’m about to explain is so unbelievable that not believing it is (I admit) a realistic (and, actually, rational) reaction.
    However, I can’t go forward without first going back, and so here we are at a little three-pronged fork in our road.
    You do, however, have choices, and here they are:
    One:
If you already know what Dave’s tippity tip-top secret is