Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue (8 page)

Nearby, Clank was struggling to climb a wall-like pile of rocks.

“Can you reach it, Clanky?” Bobble asked.

“Almost,” Clank grunted. “Just a little more …”

Bobble walked over to him so Clank could stand on his shoulders. Clank’s head rose over the top of the rocks.

“Now can you see anything?” Bobble groaned.

“No,” Clank said. “There’s a big building in the way.”

“Building?” Bobble repeated, trying to think what Clank meant. Then he understood. “It’s a house!” he shouted happily. “That’s it, Clanky. We got it!”

“What’ve we got?” Clank asked.

“House … House … Get off,” Bobble groaned, his knees beginning to buckle under Clank’s weight.

“Oh, sorry,” Clank said.

“I can’t feel my legs,” Bobble wailed.

But Vidia’s legs wanted to dance, because she knew they had done it. Against all odds, they had found their way back to the human house—and to Tinker Bell.

Inside her room, Lizzy lay on her bed with her head buried under a pillow. Tink fluttered beside her. “I’m so sorry, Lizzy,” she jingled.

Tinker Bell couldn’t tell if Lizzy understood or not, but at least she began to speak. “I’m so glad you’re here. You’re my best friend.”

That made Tinker Bell feel worse. Lizzy’s father should be her best friend, not a visiting fairy. Lizzy pulled her head out from under the pillow and opened the fairy field journal. “You want to hear a secret?”

Tinker Bell leaned closer, indicating that she did.

“It’s something I’ve never told anyone before.”

Tinker Bell flew near Lizzy’s lips so she could hear her whisper.

“I wish I were a fairy,” Lizzy confided. “Just like you. Then I could help the flowers bloom, and talk to the animals, and fly around with the other fairies all the time. That would be fun.”

Lizzy’s secret gave Tinker Bell an idea. She grabbed Lizzy’s finger and led her to the middle of the room.

“Where are we going?” Lizzy asked.

Tinker Bell pantomimed for Lizzy to open her arms and close her eyes. As soon as Lizzy’s lashes fluttered down, Tinker Bell flew above her head and shook a big handful of pixie dust all over her.

Tinker Bell laughed as she watched the pixie dust take effect. Lizzy’s pigtails floated upward first. Then Lizzy herself. Her eyes flew open and she let out a shriek as she floated higher, grabbing wildly for the bedpost. She clutched it with both hands.

Lizzy grinned from ear to ear.
Wheeee!
She opened her arms like Tink and took an exploratory flight across the room.

Lizzy did fine—at first. But she soon lost control and flipped over several times before crashing into a bookshelf.
“Whoaaa! Ouch!”

For the next attempt, Tinker Bell gave Lizzy a little tug. Lizzy went bouncing from one wall to the next, with a short sprint across the ceiling. “Oh, my! I’m flying.” Lizzy giggled gleefully. “Look at me! I’m a fairy!”

The rescue party had finally arrived.

Once they had sneaked into the kitchen, Vidia filled them in on the layout of the house. “Tinker Bell is upstairs,” she told them. “The little girl has her in a cage.”

“In a cage!” Rosetta cried.

“There’s also a large human man in the house who doesn’t like creatures with wings. He pins them up in a display case.”

“Great,” Fawn said dryly. “Anything else?”

Vidia tried for an airy tone. “Oh, yes. The cat.”

“The cat!”
Iridessa yelped. “What cat?”

Before Vidia could answer, she saw Clank and Bobble pointing nervously toward the doorway and backing away.

“That cat!”
the two of them wailed together.

Mr. Twitches came stalking in, huge, hairy, wet, and mad. A flash of lightning behind him made him look even more evil than usual.

“Fawn?” Bobble prompted.

“You’re an animal fairy,” Rosetta reminded her.

Fawn shook her head. “I can reason with bunnies and squirrels, but not Mr. Soggy-Bottom.”

Mr. Twitches bared his teeth and prepared to pounce.

“Run!”
Fawn yelled.

Mr. Twitches leapt, and the fairies ran toward a nearby broomstick. They raced up the broomstick and jumped from the top of the broom to the bottom of a coat hanging on a nearby peg. They quickly climbed up the coat and hopped to the safety of a high shelf full of dishes—
all except Clank!

Heavy Clank panted and gasped as he struggled to haul his bulk up the coat.

“Clank!” Silvermist warned as Mr. Twitches circled underneath the coat with his eyes on the vulnerable tinker.

Bobble leaned down and stuck his hand out for Clank to grab.

Too late!

Mr. Twitches sprang, flinging himself at the coat. His claws sank into the cloth. The cat’s weight began to pull him downward.

Clank was launched into the air and landed inside a teacup on a shelf. His bag of pixie dust broke, and sparkling dust fell everywhere. “I’m okay,” he assured them.

Vidia pointed to the stairway in the hall outside the kitchen. “We still need to get to that stairway,” she said.

They would have to cross the kitchen. Mr. Twitches paced back and forth on the floor, looking up at them and plotting his next move.

“If we could just build a bridge or something,” Silvermist said.

“That’s it!” Bobble said. “A bridge!” Then he paused, thinking hard. “But a bridge made out of … what?”

“Uh, guys!” Clank said in a worried voice.

Vidia and the others were still pondering their tactics.

“Guys,”
Clank repeated.

Vidia glanced up and gasped. All of the cups, plates, and silverware in the kitchen, which had been sprinkled with Clank’s pixie dust, were now hovering slightly above the shelves. Vidia’s eyes widened. “Clank! You’re a genius!”

Clank blinked, wondering what he could possibly have done to win Vidia’s approval. “Huh?” Then he saw what she had in mind. “Oh,” he began. A floating plate smacked him in the head. “It was nothing,” he groaned.

“All right!” Vidia said enthusiastically. “Let’s do this.”

The fairies made a floating bridge out of plates and saucers. They began crossing the room. But then Mr. Twitches took his own flying leap and landed on a plate in the middle of the bridge, sending cups and saucers spinning in every direction.

The fairies hung on for dear life, clinging to the cups and saucers as they spun around the kitchen like an amusement park ride.

Vidia was thrown off her plate but managed to grab on to a floating fork. The fork spun across the kitchen, carried Vidia into the hall, and came to a stop against a light fixture near the stairs.

Fawn, still hanging on to her own plate, flew past a plant on the windowsill. “Rosetta!” she called out to the garden fairy. “Is this what I think it is?”

Rosetta looked over and began to beam. “Darling, that’s
exactly
what you think it is. Catnip!” She shouted to Vidia, still watching from the hallway. “You get to Tink and we’ll take care of the cat.”

“Got it!” Vidia shouted back. She pushed off from the wall, riding her floating fork, and surfed to the bottom of the stairs just as Dr. Griffiths came out of his office.

Vidia veered to miss him and dropped into the shadows.

Dr. Griffiths began to climb the stairs. As soon as his back was safely to her, Vidia began climbing them herself … one step at a time.

Upstairs, Tinker Bell was still giving Lizzy a flying lesson. There was a knock on the door, and they both froze.

“Lizzy!” Lizzy struggled to land. “Coming, Father.”

“Lizzy!” he repeated.

Lizzy held on to the furniture to pull herself down and hurried to open the door. “Why, hello, Father. May I help you?” Her voice sounded too innocent, the voice of a child who was hiding something.

“What’s going on in here?” Dr. Griffiths asked.

“Nothing,” Lizzy answered in the same too-innocent tone.

Dr. Griffiths walked into the room. “Nothing? It sounds like a herd of elephants have been marching up here.”

Tinker Bell darted into the fairy house, where she could hide and watch.

Dr. Griffiths looked around the room, his eyes taking in the piles of fallen books, the tumbled boxes on the floor, and the crooked lampshades. “Look at this room! It looks like a cyclone hit it.”

“It’s not that bad,” Lizzy argued.

“Not that bad?
Your books are all over the floor. Your toys are everywhere. You tore your curtains.” He pointed upward. “How did you get footprints on the
ceiling
?”

Lizzy looked up, and so did Tink. Sure enough, there they were. Footprints on the ceiling. Lizzy couldn’t help grinning.

Big mistake.

Dr. Griffiths glowered. “This is simply too much. A temper tantrum of this magnitude is unacceptable.”

“But I wasn’t having a tantrum,” Lizzy protested.

“Then how did this happen? The truth this time.”

“Well, I … I …” Lizzy swallowed a big gulp of air. “I was flying!” she blurted out.

“You were what?”

“Flying. My fairy showed me how.”

“Really? You have a real fairy living in your room?”

“Yes. And I can prove it. Just look at the research we did.” Lizzy grabbed the fairy field journal and thrust it into his hands.

Dr. Griffiths flipped through it with poorly disguised contempt. “Oh, Elizabeth! This is what you’ve been doing? Field journals are supposed to be filled with facts. Not fairy tales.”

“These
are
facts!” Lizzy argued.

Dr. Griffiths angrily shut the journal. “I don’t understand this foolishness, Lizzy. You have such talent. Why would you waste it this way?”

He marched over to the wall and began tearing down Lizzy’s fairy art gallery. He crumpled one picture after the other.

“Father, wait!”

“I know this is difficult for you to understand. But this is all make-believe.”

“No!” Lizzy cried. “They’re real.”

“Elizabeth, this discussion is over.” He picked up the fairy field journal and dropped it into the trash.

Tink saw Lizzy’s sad face turn to despair. “But, Father …” Lizzy’s voice broke with a sob.

That did it. Lizzy needed to stand up to this big human bully of a father. Safe or not, it was time to help her out.

Tinker Bell zoomed out of the fairy house and hovered right in front of Dr. Griffiths’s nose. She glowered and shook her fist. She didn’t care that he couldn’t understand what she was saying—Tinker Bell wasn’t about to let anything stop her!

Dr. Griffiths froze. He stumbled backward and fell onto Lizzy’s bed. “It … it … can’t be!” he whispered.

He stared, as if in shock. Tinker Bell hoped he was suitably intimidated and impressed. She did a couple of figure eights so he could really see her in action. After making a neat landing on the table, she struck a “ta-da” pose.

“It’s okay, Father. She won’t hurt you.” Lizzy took Dr. Griffiths by the hand and led him to the table where Tinker Bell stood.

Dr. Griffiths knelt down beside the table, his expression changing from shock to wonder. “It’s … it’s … extraordinary.”

“Aren’t her wings beautiful?” Lizzy sighed.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Very similar to
Apoidea
. Or, no, no,
Odonata
. Look at the limb proportionality to the cranial radius. Fascinating.”