Night of Cake & Puppets by Laini Taylor Read Free Book Online

you, scuppies. Two down. One for the tapping, one to lift the butterfly into the air. Poof! Poof! They go fast. I wish I had Karou’s whole necklace. Karou. I text her: Phase One a success. The Puppet That Bites would be proud.
    Because, yeah, using scuppies to animate a puppet, where on earth did I come up with that idea?
    It’s not copying, though. It’s an homage. Of course, that’s what artists always say when they steal from other artists. In this case, though, it really is an homage, to my own magical awakening two years ago. It seems right that Mik should be awakened in the same way. That we should lose our magic virginity the same way. To creepy puppets, during snowstorms.
    (Okay. That sounds so wrong. But you know what I mean.)
    The butterfly was my idea, though, and I think it was really the cherry on the cake, the thing that said, Oh, you think this is a trick? So how am I doing this , smart guy? I try to imagine what I’d think if it happened to me, but I can’t. Once you know magic is real, it’s really hard to remember what it was like not to know. It’s kind of like trying to see how you look with your eyes closed.
    (I did that once. I was a kid. It occurred to me out of nowhere to wonder what I looked like with my eyes closed, so I…um, went to the mirror and…closed my eyes.)
    (Yeah. I looked exactly like the inside of a pair of eyelids.)
    (I’ve never claimed to be a genius.)
    I wait, giving the black cat a good scratch and letting Mik put some distance between us before I emerge from hiding. It’s cold. I’m exhilarated. My heartbeat feels like a jaunty tune and my lips might as well be a parade float, and the rest of me just the little people on the ground holding the tethers.
    Also, I’m starving, and I crazy have to pee.
    I kind of wish I was just meeting Mik at Poison Kitchen. I mean, I could . I could just walk in behind him and say, ‘Well played, handsome man. Now let us eat strudel and then kiss. Just as soon as I get back from the bathroom.’
    But I’m not done dazzling him yet. I have more scuppies to spend before we reach the talking portion of the evening. I’m hoping the talking portion is just a thin layer between the dazzling portion and the kissing portion, like the frosting between layers of a cake.
    (Mmm. Cake.)
    Not that I’m not keen to talk to him. I am – in the fantasy version of tonight, anyway, in which I actually manage to string words into sentences, and not just random magnetic-poetry sentences, but sentences that don’t lead to the logical conclusion that I have brain damage. It’s just…I can’t begin to account for the intensity of my urgency to get kissing. The most likely explanation, after long thought, is that I’m a clone preprogrammed to perform this activity now or self-destruct.
    Or else it’s just Mik’s velvety sweetness. Like a cupcake, in boy form.
    I start walking, pausing to peer around the corner and make sure he’s gone. I proceed toward the Malá Strana, stopping in a cafe on the way to alleviate the more pressing of my physical urges (neither lips nor stomach, no; nothing trumps the bladder), and then continue on, hurrying, but careful to scan the way ahead and make sure I don’t overtake my stalkee. I don’t see any sign of him, though, and amuse myself by wondering which set of footprints through the snow on the Charles Bridge might be his.
    Those? Maybe.
    When I feel a surge of fondness for Mik’s maybe-footprints, I know I’m in serious trouble. The fact that I can’t even muster any true self-disgust tells me how deep this goes. I’m doomed.
    It’s about the time I’m creeping into the courtyard of Poison Kitchen – under the archway draped in black, frozen ivy, into the garden of medieval tombstones where the murdered monks lie buried – that I start to wonder if I’m being creepy. I mean, I am creeping. Does creep- ing automatically make one creep- y ? Or are there dispensations for…romance?
    I bet all stalkers