Sticks and Stones by Sarah Mlynowski

Author:Sarah Mlynowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic UK
Published: 2016-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

“Get them!” the Sparkies cried. They swarmed down from the tree house.

Nory and Willa fled from the yard. Andres bobbed behind, trailing leaves and bits of vine. They got to the street where the rest of the UDM kids were.

“Go, go, go!” Nory cried.

They charged up the block. Andres kicked wildly through the air.

Nory looked over her shoulder. Lacey was a grim bulldozer, running in front of the Sparkies pack.

Nory felt heat on her neck. The sound of pounding feet rose and roared behind her. Lacey grabbed the collar of her shirt and jerked.

“You are so going down, Nory Horace,” Lacey panted.

Nory tugged free and ran, but a flaming tennis ball whizzed past her ear. Then another. Then another.

Unsupervised flaring! Horrible!

Marigold reached out a hand and tapped one of the flaming balls as it zipped by. It shrank to almost nothing! She did the same to the next one.

Unsupervised shrinking! Awesome!

Elliott iced a tennis ball and kept running. But more tennis balls came, orange streaks of flame behind them.

One scorched Nory’s ear. Another burned Sebastian’s elbow.

The UDM kids needed to do something before someone got hurt worse.

Willa couldn’t make it rain. Her rain only worked indoors. Sebastian couldn’t help, and neither could Bax or Andres.

Should Nory flux into a dritten and defend her friends?

She could if she wanted to! She could breathe fire at those Sparkies and really show them unsupervised flaring, if that’s how they were going to act. Nory was this close to fluxing when she heard a loud chorus of barks. Yappy barks, menacing barks, deep barks, feverish barks.

She looked down the street. An army of dogs was running toward them. Marigold and Sebastian hopped over a fence into a nearby yard. Elliott threw himself into a bush to avoid being trampled. Nory pressed her spine to a maple tree and soaked in the scene with amazement.

Dogs, everywhere! A chocolate Lab, a Yorkshire terrier, half a dozen mutts. But not just dogs! There was also a crew of yowling cats … ​a chittering rush of squirrels and chipmunks … ​ then a jackrabbit and a couple of goats. Finally, a swirl of butterflies, bluebirds, and pigeons, a rush of flapping wings.

The Sparkies screamed. They dropped their tennis balls and pivoted on their heels. Then they ran back the way they’d come. The dogs and cats and squirrels and birds, the cardinals and chipmunks and butterflies—they chased the Sparkies down the street and out of sight.

One lone tennis ball rolled into the gutter, smoking now that its flame was out.

Nory stepped away from the tree. Marigold and Sebastian joined her.

“Where did those animals come from?” Willa asked, dropping down from the tree branch she’d been clinging to. She untangled Andres’s leash and pulled him behind her.

“Were they chasing the Sparkies?” Elliott said, brushing bits of leaves off his jeans. “It looked like they were chasing the Sparkies—but that’s not possible. Is it?”

Just then, Pepper ran up and stopped in the middle of the street. She flung out her arms and twirled.

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