“Thank you,” Eli said simply.
Mud didn’t know what to say, so, she shrugged and looked at the winged lizard in her lap, embarrassed. “Anytime,” she finally managed.
Eli laughed. “Anytime? Hell. I hope we don’t have to do this again,ever.”
“Me neither,” Mud said. “My butt is wet.”
Eli laughed harder and leaned his back against the rock wall. His laughter filled the space, bouncing off the rock walls. “We need to put you on payroll.”
“I’m expensive,” Mud said instantly. “Speaking of which, do I get paid anything for saving the queen?”
“Oh yeah,” Eli said. “I’d guess you just earned your entire college education.”
“Okay. That’s seems about right.” She stuck out a hand to Eli. “Like I said. Anytime.”
THE END
Gotcha / Magic Camp
Faith’s Note: This story has never been seen. Never been read outside of a certain nosy, demanding PR person named Mud, and the editors. Angie is twelve, Mud is sixteen, and they are at summer magic camp, learning how to use their magic. And yeah, I know neither of them has magic like most witches do. Yeah, I know they don’t really belong there.
Interestingly enough, they know that too. Mwahahaha!
???
“My hair isnotsupposed to bepuke green.” Angie threw the hairbrush into the corner of the girl’s bathhouse, where it ricocheted and settled, with a wood-on-concrete-blockthunk.
“Could be worse,” Mud said, sounding too calm for Angie’s temper. “Could be actual puke. Or you could be growing leaves in your scalp at night, like me.”
Angie poked at her hair. It felt weird. It wasn’t curly anymore. “I know someone who would turn into a mountain lion and kill the person who did this to her.”
Mud snorted and lifted a strand of the mostly olive green, pepto-pink, snot gray, disgusting hair. “Thatsomeoneis the Dark Queen of the Vampires, and queens have minions. She’d send one of the big hunky ones to get back at them.”
“Hunky?”
“Like Koun.” Mud got a goofy look on her face and her leaves rustled. “Sorta Viking looking. With all those tattoos. And that hair.”
Angie turned from the mirror and said, “You have a crush onKoun? He frowns. And when he talks he mostly grunts and looks to the side.” And he was a Celt, not a Viking, but Angie didn’t share that because, well, rules. And privacy. Stuff she had learned at the queen’s court when she was little.
Mud didn’t respond to the “crush” comment except to blush a little. She said, “Koun acts like that around you because you’re the Dark Queen’s godchild and because you got your magic as a kid.”
“That’s stupid. Koun’s a vampire warrior. He could break me in half. I know. He taught me to fight, starting when I was, like, eight.”
Mud shrugged. “Same reasons why the administrators wouldn’t let you attend magic camp until you were twelve. Same reasons why the Cabin A girls pick on you like they pick on me. Because you’re unusual. Atypical.” Mud plucked a leaf off her head and placed it in Angie’s hand, as if to illustrate that distinction, to show what she meant by beingatypical. She took the leaf back and tucked it into her overalls’ pocket. “That means you probably have big magic, but you haven’t shown anyone at magic camp what you can really do. Which means you also have secrets.”
Angie controlled her expression and her breathing. No one was supposed to know about the secrets and Mud was saying that . . . everyone already knew.
“Also,” Mud continued, “you have connections. So they’re jealous of you.”
Angie had always been different, and different people were picked on. Always. Tears prickled under her lids and sheblinked them away. “I just wanted to have a real friend.” Even to her own ears it sounded pathetic.
“I’m your friend.”
Mud Nicholson wasn’t one of the cool kids at Magic Camp. Her real name wasn’t even Mud. She picked that one herself. A lot of Mud’s differentness was on purpose. Sometimes she let leaves grow from her hair and fingernail tips and she always had dirt under her nails from working in their garden plot and the greenhouse. She wore overalls and boots and carried a five foot tall, beaver-chewed, oak stick like a staff. She couldn’t fight with the staff like Angie could, and she didn’t have witch magic, a fact that made the mean girls giggle, but she had earth gifts that fell sorta into the witch category, which was why she had attended Magic Camp every summer since she was fourteen. She was verydifferent, which made her “less than” in the eyes of the cool girls in Cabin A.
Mud, however different she was, had what the queen would callpresence.
But she sounded as lonely as Angie felt.
