Wizards (8 page)

"It might be dangerous." I didn't mention that wandering around in her dressing gown in the middle of the night might get us noticed. See how quickly I'm learning and maturing?

"How would you get there if I don't drive you?" Jenny asked. She had a point, the address was in an area of the town I didn't know well enough to skip to.

"You'll have to get dressed first though."

I think that was the first time Jenny realized she was still wearing her dressing gown. She had the grace to blush before running upstairs to get changed. I was a bit worried her parents might wake with all the noise she was making, but it seems her parents sleep much more soundly than my Mum does.

Jenny was down the stairs again in less than five minutes. I think that might be a record for womankind. I must check in the Guinness Book of Records when I get the chance, though I've noticed they never record the really useful stuff.

The drive over to the Hamble estate was uneventful. The estate was a new development along the river and even the smallest flats were expensive. I wondered how anyone on a reporter's salary could afford to buy one. They were priced well beyond my wildest dreams.

"Number 127B," I reminded Jenny as we drove down the road. She pulled into one of the residents parking spots without even looking at the house numbers.

"That's his car," she told me as she pointed to a black SUV with tinted windows. "It's burned into my mind."

We got out of Jenny's car and walked to the nearest block of flats. Brass plates with call buttons covered the wall. There was a video and intercom system so people in the flats could see their callers before deciding to let them in.

The flats were protected from intruders by a locked door from which corridors and stairs led off to individual flats. Jenny located Peter Williams' flat on the brass plate and was about to press the button when I grabbed her arm.

"Let’s try it my way first," I suggested.

I'd never tried to break into a house before, so this would be a novel use of my powers. Still, if I could make an ordinary ring shoot fire I should be able to spring a Yale lock.

"Open," I told it, with my hand against it. The lock buzzed as the electric circuit closed and I pushed the door open. "Coming?" I asked.

"I didn't know you could do that," Jenny whispered excitedly as we followed the arrows on the wall for flat numbers 125B to 130B. The B flats were on the first floor so we had to go up a couple of flights of stairs.

"You never know until you try," I pointed out.

"What do we do now?" Jenny asked when we stood outside the door to 127B.

"Shush, I'm thinking." I said. The truth was I didn't know. My initial idea had been to steal the pictures off Williams, but how to accomplish that was beyond me. Go to his flat and see what comes up had been my strategy to date.

I went through my repertoire of talents. Hopscotch wasn't going to prove useful. I no longer had the ring to shoot fire at the door, though that didn't seem a very sensible thing to do, even if I could. I could make anything in the vicinity lucky, but I was damned if I could see the value in that. I could also open doors and I could put people to sleep.

Jenny folded her arms in front of her and tapped a foot dangerously. I'd better come up with a plan soon or she would do something foolish like bang on the door.

"Got it!" I said triumphantly and waved my hand in front of the door. "Follow me," I told Jenny, "Try and be quiet."

I put my hand on the door handle and turned it while willing it to open. It clicked open reassuringly and we stepped into the flat.

The lights in the hall were on and the two of us crept deeper into the flat. We found Peter Williams pretty much exactly where I expected to find him. Fast asleep in front of a computer console. It looked as though he keeled over in front of it, which was also what I expected.

"I cast a sleep spell over him from the door," I explained to Jenny.

Jenny was looking at the computer screen, completely ignoring the snoring reporter.

"The bastard is writing it all up. He's put my name and address in the article," she said angrily.

"That's not important, Jenny girl. Do you know how to find the photographs on his computer?"

"Can a fish swim?" Jenny said. "But we'll have to move sleeping beauty out of the way."

Williams was not heavy. We managed to move him onto the floor without dropping or waking him.

I found Williams' camera on a shelf to the right of the computer desk.

"The memory card's been removed," I told Jenny as I flipped open a cover.

"It's in the reader," she said pointing at a gizmo next to the monitor. Monitor, keyboard and mouse are the only things I can recognize on a computer with certainty. They are much more mysterious than magic as far as I'm concerned.

"These are the files he's downloaded from the card," Jenny told me, pointing at a list on the screen.

"Open up the first one," I ordered.

I have to admit, it was a great picture of Fluffy and Jenny. The two of them looked so happy to be in each other's arms.

"What do we do now?" Jenny asked, "Delete them?"

"I want to try something else first," I told her. I put my hand on the computer screen and willed the picture to change. Jenny giggled in appreciation when she saw the results of my efforts.

"Can you save it looking like that?"

Jenny played with the computer for about a minute. She looked up at me from the computer chair with something like awe on her face.

"We need to put up the pictures one by one," I said, before I realized Jenny was way ahead of me.

It took quite a long time to change all the pictures. We searched the computer and his desk for any other soft or hard copies. When we were sure we had finished the job, the two of us lifted the unconscious Williams back onto his computer chair and Jenny returned the computer to how she found it.

"I admit this is a good joke," Jenny said with a twinkle in her eye, "But he's bound to check the photos before he shows them to his editor."

I put my hand on Williams' head and concentrated for a few moments.

"I've tried to put a spell on him so he'll see the originals whenever he looks at the photos."

Jenny pulled me over by grabbing the top of my tee shirt and she kissed me full on the lips.

"You are a mean, mean boy, Jake Morrissey, and I'm going to take you to my bed for this."

I thought about this comment for a few moments and then I kissed her back. It took real concentration on both our parts to remember to get out of the room.

"Oh look, here's a surprise," Jenny said cheerfully to me a couple of days later. I got up from the kitchen table to look over her shoulder at the latest issue of the Evening Chronicle.

In a small column at the bottom of the page, there was a notice to the papers readers.

Peter Williams has left the Chronicle due to problems with his health. We wish him well with his treatment and hope that he makes a full recovery in the very near future.

"You didn't make him ill, did you Jake?" Jenny asked me with a smirk on her face.

"I suspect that when he went to his editor with a story about real dragons in Wales and showed him those photos, he was sent straight to the nearest psychiatrist," I said grinning. "My spell on him must have worked."

I had changed all the photographs so Fluffy became a large cuddly toy dragon. I don't know how I did it, but the pictures looked better to me than anything I've ever seen Photoshopped. Every shadow and nuance in the photos was perfect. Of course, Williams would still be seeing the originals but everyone else would see Jenny cuddling a toy. The editor must have been convinced Williams had cracked up.

"You are a mean, mean boy, Jake Morrissey," Jenny said with a twinkle in her eye. "And I'm going to have to take you to my bed again for making this work."

"But it's been less than half an hour since the last time," I protested.

Chapter Seven
: Dragon's Home

S
ometimes things that you think of first as a disaster turn out to be the best thing that could ever happen to you. I have a beautiful girlfriend called Jenny and a pet dragon called Fluffy. Fluffy is not at all fluffy and he's more my friend than my pet. That fact is very important in all that happened to us.

It was a couple of weeks after Jenny and I saw off the reporter who discovered Fluffy. Now, if wizards are as rare as hen's teeth across the multiverse, they are still plentiful when compared with the number of dragons you can spot flying over the valleys of Wales. Since it happened I'd been keeping my head down and Fluffy well hidden in the cave he calls home.

I noticed one corner of the carpet in my bedroom was flipped over. The remarkable thing about it was that it shouldn't have been possible. I fastened down all four corners of the carpet some years ago using special hooks I screwed into the floorboards.

Below the carpet was my hopscotch court painted onto the floorboards. The court was the mechanism I used to transport myself to anywhere in the multiverse. I must have a limited imagination because that was less than a dozen worlds, though I've been hopping to them since I was six years old.

When I investigated further, I discovered the carpet corner had been torn away from the hook. A quick check at another corner showed that it had also been disconnected. I rolled back the carpet with my tummy tingling as if a nest of butterflies had taken residence in there. The painted court was gone, not even the faintest outline remained. I felt my blood run cold. My secret had been discovered and I was trapped on Earth.

"Mum!" I shouted in my most petulant teenage voice. I have little choice but to live at home as the job opportunities for wizards in Wales are exactly zero and I have never been any good at schoolwork of any kind. I was therefore, as usual, stone cold broke.

"What is it now, Jake?" Mum called irritably up the stairs. "I'm just off to the supermarket to get something for your dad's dinner."

"Did you lift the carpet in my room?" I called down from the landing.

There was a long pause before I got my answer.

"I haven't got the time for any of your foolishness. I was giving your room a clean out while you were off gallivanting God only knows where, and having left Jenny in tears I might add, when I found your carpet was nailed down.

Fancy trying to cover up some childish graffiti like that, Jake. I'm ashamed of you. A bit of turpentine soon got rid of the drawing underneath. You must have done it when you were very young, it looked so old. Now what did you want to ask me?"

"Nothing, Mum!" I went back to my room and sat on my bed, wallowing in unhappiness. It made a real difference to my life, being able to hop to and from my room to anywhere I wanted. Now I'd have to find somewhere to draw a similar court outside. I would never be able to be sure it would be there when I wanted it, as a rain shower could wash it away. It rains a lot in Wales.

I felt miserable and out of sorts for the rest of the day. The only solution I could think of was to move into a flat of my own somewhere. However, that meant finding a job paying more than minimum wage and that wasn't easy when you have no qualifications.

I considered the possibility of hopping to Salice and asking Princess Esmeralda if there were any wizard jobs going that might earn me enough money to put the deposit on a flat back here. Despite my screw-ups, she had asked me to come and visit them again.

I realized even that plan wouldn't work. Even if she paid me in gold I would get unstuck the minute I tried to convert it into cash. These days, Homeland Security would be on me like a ton of bricks if I suddenly acquired money from nowhere. Not to mention the interest the tax man would show. I wondered how drug pushers laundered their money, but I'd never dealt with the local drug pushers and I wasn't going to start now.

I was going to meet Jenny at a coffee shop after she finished her classes. Jenny and I have recently taken our relationship to a whole new physical level. I lost my virginity with her after we sorted out the reporter. I suspected she didn't lose her virginity to me because she knew how to do a lot of things I didn't and she was a whole lot more confident.

Our new closer relationship had some unexpected side effects. One of which was to make it harder for me to visit Jenny. Both parents were getting suspicious we were doing the deed and so we took to meeting in coffee shops to put them off the scent.

"You look like something the cat has dragged in," Jenny told me after we kissed outside the shop. "Cheer up will you. The world hasn't ended."

I told her I'd explain the problem after we sat down. I queued for two lattes with blueberry muffins while Jenny found us a small table where we could sit in relative privacy.

"I don't understand?" Jenny asked when I explained about the hopscotch court. "Why do you need it?"

"To hop out to everywhere and then to help me get back," I said in exasperation.