Elliot and the Pixie Plot by Jennifer A. Nielsen Read Free Book Online Page B

wand.
    Elliot held up his hands, the way bad guys do when the cops say to freeze. Fidget sighed. “Don’t be so lame, human. If I wanted to kill you, I’d have just done it already.”
    “You’re letting me go home?”
    “Hello?” Fidget rapped Elliot’s head with her wand, then she pointed it at the Glimmering Forest. “Does it look like we’ve beaten the Fairies? You’re not going home yet.”
    “I know you’ve got a Fairy problem,” Elliot said, “but I’ve got a problem too, one named Cami Wortson. If you think Goblins are scary, you should see this girl when she gets a bad grade.”
    “Can Cami Wortson turn you inside out with a wave of her wand?”
    Elliot clutched his stomach. Maybe if she had a wand she could. She’d probably enjoy doing it too.
    Fidget folded her arms. “Let’s get this straight, human. Even if this Cami Wortson has snakes for hair and spikes for teeth, I’m still the scariest girl you know. And if you want to go home, then you’ll have to solve my problem first.”
    “You think I can get the Fairies out of Glimmering Forest? I can’t even get my sister out of the bathroom in the morning.”
    “I’ll take care of the Fairies. All I need from you is one little hair.”
    “My hair?” Elliot would shave himself bald if that’s all it took to go home. It’d be hard to explain the baldness to his family, but it would be worth it.
    Fidget sighed in a way that reminded Elliot of how stupid his question was. “Eww, gag me! I so totally don’t want human hair. To keep the Fairies out of Glimmering Forest, all I need is one hair from their worst enemy—the Demon Kovol.”

 

     
    Dear Reader, if you’ve recently traveled to Greenland, you probably noticed the musk ox grazing nearby. The musk ox has two layers of hair, so even when it loses the outside layer, it still has plenty of hair left. The hair can be two to three feet long and sometimes drags on the ground. So if Fidget had ordered Elliot to steal a hair from a musk ox, as long as Elliot was nice about it, the musk ox probably wouldn’t have cared.
    But that’s not what Fidget ordered.
    She wanted a hair from a very different creature.
    Elliot had about a hundred reasons why he wasn’t going to snatch a hair from the Demon Kovol. For one thing, Kovol was supposed to be asleep for another thousand years. If he woke up to someone pulling his hair out, that was sure to start his day off badly, not to mention that he would definitely end Elliot’s day in a very unpleasant way. And for another reason, everyone Elliot had ever asked about Kovol sounded like they’d rather face a dentist’s drill without being numb than face ten seconds with Kovol.
    Agatha the Hag had told Elliot that Kovol was the last of the Underworld Demons. He didn’t know why Kovol was the last, and he didn’t know why Kovol was sleeping. But Agatha had seemed certain that asleep was the way everyone in the Underworld wanted Kovol to remain.
    Elliot didn’t have time to tell Fidget why he wasn’t going to snatch a hair from Kovol. She apparently had bigger problems to deal with. Fidget stamped her foot and whined, “Oh, fruit rot. I’m late for my hair stylist. Now it’ll be wash and go. Not awesome!”
    Elliot tried to say something before she fluttered away, but she cut him off and said, “Oh, and that other human with you—Tubs—he’s staying here until you bring me the hair. Better hurry before I get bored and put him in time-out with a Troll.” With that, she poofed Elliot away. He decided that he didn’t like being poofed places. It made his stomach feel upside down. For all he knew, maybe it was.
    But the question for now was where Fidget had sent him. He was standing on some grass near a small town set on a hill, where it looked as if little homes had been made from caves in the hillside. A maze of dirt paths went from one house to another, so it would be nearly impossible to travel anywhere without stopping at a dozen homes