Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) by Ysabeau S. Wilce

Author:Ysabeau S. Wilce
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2010-04-12T06:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Eight

Soggy. Swamped. The Mirror.

I CHOKED AND WHEEZED and choked again. Someone rolled me over on my face and thumped my back. Still choking. Another thump—this time really, really hard. I gagged, gurgled, upchucked a hot rush of water. I convulsed and spit, and coughed and spit, and convulsed and coughed again. But I was breathing.

A voice said, “Where the hell did you come from?”

Still gasping, I opened my eyes, saw a swampy marble floor and two bare feet. The feet were small and white and the toenails were chipped with red.

“You ruined my Working!” the voice said accusingly.

The white feet were attached to white ankles; the white ankles were attached to white calves, which disappeared into a giant shocking-pink skirt that was square and wide. Above the flat top of the skirt: a low-cut bodice, rounded cleavage, white shoulders, and a white neck surrounded by a stiff spiky lace ruff. And above—I would have shouted if I’d had the breath. My rescuer had the curvy body of a girl but the shaggy head of a black bear.

The Bear Girl’s muzzle yawned, displaying very white sharp teeth. “Can you understand me?”

“Ayah. Where am I?” I sat up, ignoring the swimmingly dizzy feeling in my head, and saw in the flaring candlelight the pool from which I had been dragged. No, not a pool, but a perfectly round bathtub. Water had overflowed its rim and swamped the floor. Also swamped was the remnant of what clearly had been some sort of magickal Working: the pillar candles that ringed the bathtub were still burning, but the cornmeal sigils drawn on the floor had dissolved into a soggy mess. A pink plushy pig almost identical to my pink plushy pig sat upon the potty, which was as toweringly tall as a throne, gilded and carved.

“You ruined my fiking Working,” the Bear Girl said. “I spent two whole weeks getting ready, fasting and gorging and purging. Then I had to wait until the Current was high enough and Paimon was busy elsewhere—and him, too—and you fiking ruined it all.”

I clambered to my feet. My legs and knees felt wobbly and a spike of pain was beginning to throb over my left eye, but I had to shake the weakness off and focus. My shoulders felt oddly light and I realized that I had lost my dispatch case. And my boots, too. And my redingote. And my stays had sprung open. I pulled them the rest of the way off—good riddance—and hastily tucked the ranger badge back into my chemise before the bear-headed girl noticed it.

Was I in Bilskinir? Who was this bear-headed girl with the foul mouth? In my muddled state, I couldn’t remember seeing bear-human hybrids at Bilskinir before. A Vortex can go anywhere. I could be anywhere. All I knew for sure was that this bear-headed girl wasn’t friendly.

“Well?” she demanded. “What the fike do you have to say?”

Play it close until you know the situation, said Nini Mo.

“That was one mighty big Vortex.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.