Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition Read Free Page B

said, but it was too late: he was already sauntering out again.
    Kit smiled as the screen door slammed once more, but the smile was sardonic. “Is he for real?” Kit said under his breath.
    “Real enough to fix a busted star,” Dairine said, giving Kit an annoyed look.
    Kit raised his eyebrows. “Finish explaining this to me,” he said to Dairine as she got up, “because you didn’t get into detail yesterday. He’s a prince?”
    “A king, ” Dairine and Sker’ret said in chorus, sounding like they’d heard the correction much too often lately.
    “The upgrade from ‘prince’ happened the other day,” Dairine said.
    “And he won’t let us forget it,” Sker’ret said. “I think I liked him better as a prince. He was so much less self-assured…”
    Dairine rolled her eyes. She made her way around the table and out, heading through the kitchen after Roshaun. Squeak, bang! went the screen door.
    “Sker’ret, my boy,” said Nita’s dad as he came in from the living room, now dressed in jeans and a polo shirt for work, “your mastery of the art of irony becomes more comprehensive every day.”
    It was hard to be sure how she could tell that an alien with no face was smiling, but Nita could tell. “You going now, Daddy?” she said.
    “I want to get some bookkeeping done before I open the shop. See you, sweetie.” Once again, the screen door banged shut.
    “Something going on with Dairine and Roshaun?” Kit said after a moment.
    Nita shook her head. “At first I thought it might just be a crush,” she said. “But now I’m starting to wonder.” Nita speared the last pieces of waffle, and a thought hit her. “Hey, did Filif hear that he needs to be here?”
    The wizards around the table looked at one another. “He went out as you were coming in, didn’t he?”
    Nita nodded. “He’s probably out back,” she said. “I’ll check.”
    She got up and put her plate in the kitchen sink; and with Kit in tow, and Ponch following him, she went out through the side door, down the brick steps to the driveway. The morning was a little hazy, but the sun was warm on their faces. The view up and down the driveway would have seemed clear enough to any non-wizardly person who happened to pass by, but Nita’s vision, well trained in perceiving active spelling by now, could see a tremor of power all around the edges of their property, a selective-visibility field that would hide the presence or actions of anything nonhuman. Inside the screening field, the leaves on the big lilac bushes across the driveway were out at last, and the flower-spikes were growing fast. Nita was glad to see them, though they also made her sad. The winter and the earliest part of the spring seemed to have lasted forever, some ways: any sign of things being made new was welcome. But her mom had loved those lilacs, and wouldn’t be seeing them again. Nita sighed.
    “Yeah, I’m tired, too,” Kit said, glancing up and down the driveway as Ponch wandered off down it. “You wouldn’t think a vacation’d leave you so wiped out.”
    “And there won’t be much time to get rested up now,” Nita said. She looked down their street, where the branches of the maples beside the sidewalk, bare for so long, were now well clothed in that particular new spring yellow-green. The leaves that had been small when they first went off on their spring break were now almost full-sized. “At least there’s stuff to do…”
    “And five whole days left before we have to go back to school.” Kit looked at her meaningfully.
    Nita rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I know, the Mars thing. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. When did you get the idea it would be cute to carve my dad’s cellphone number on a rock in the middle of Syrtis Major? He hates it when people call me on his phone.”
    Kit gave Nita a resigned look. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist.”
    “Well, resist next time!” Nita said. “Anyway, we can’t just run off and start digging up