The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page B

of a sticky-note still stuck to the table. “Uh-oh—”
    “What?”
    “Mom forgot her list—”
    “You mean her ‘lint’?” Her dad chuckled.
    “Yeah. It’s still stuck here.”
    “She’ll call and get me to read it to her, probably. Or I’ll phonecam it to her.”
    There was a soft bang! from the backyard—a sound that could have been mistaken for a car backfiring, except that there weren’t likely to be cars back there. “That Dairine?” Nita’s dad said.
    “Probably,” said Nita. It hadn’t taken her parents long to learn the sound of suddenly displaced air—a sign of a wizard in a hurry or being a little less than slick about appearing out of nothing. At first it seemed to Nita as if her folks, after they’d found out she was a wizard, spent nearly all their time listening for that sound in varying states of nervousness. Now they were starting to get casual about it, which struck her as a healthy development.
    But wait a minute. Maybe it’s Kit, coming back to apologize —Nita started to get up.
    The screen door opened and Dairine came in.
    Nita sat down again. “Hey, Dair,” she said.
    “Hey,” said Dairine, and went on past.
    Nita glanced after her, for Dairine wasn’t usually so terse after a day out. Her little sister paused by the table just long enough to drop her own book bag onto a chair, then went into the living room, pushing that startling red hair out of her eyes. It was getting longer, and, as a result, her resemblance to their mother was stronger than ever. Has she started noticing boys? Nita wondered. Or is something else going on?
    Something scrabbled at the back door. Dairine sighed, came back through the dining room and the kitchen, went to the screen door, and pushed it open. A delicate clatter of many little feet followed, as what appeared to be a slim black-skinned laptop computer came spidering into the kitchen on multiple spindly legs. On the lid of the laptop glowed a white apple with no bite out of it.
    Nita peered at the laptop as it followed Dairine back into the living room. “Am I confused,” she said, “or is he shiny all of a sudden?”
    “You’re always confused,” said Dairine as she headed for her room, “but yeah. Just molted. Probably he’ll go matte later.”
    Nita shook her head and went back to looking at her mom’s list. Dairine’s version of the wizard’s manual had arrived as software for the household’s first computer, and had been through some changes during the course of her Ordeal. Finally she’d wound up with this machine… if machine was the right word for something that was clearly alive in its own right. In the meantime the household’s main computer continued to go through periodic changes, which made some of the neighbors suspect that Nita’s father was making more money as a florist than he really was. For his own part, Nita’s dad shrugged and said, “Your mom says it does the spreadsheets just fine. I don’t want to know what else it might do … and as long as I don’t have to pay extra for it…”
    The phone on the counter rang. Her dad went over and picked it up. “Aha, here she is. Hey, guess what you forgot? Yeah. You want me to read it to you? Or I’ll take a pic and SMS it— Oh. Well, okay, sure. No, she just came in. No, both of them. Sure, I’ll ask.”
    Nita’s dad put his head around the corner. “Honey, your mom forgot a couple other things, too, so she’s coming back. She says, do you want to go clothes shopping? They’re having sales at a couple of the stores in the mall.”
    Nita couldn’t think of anything else to do at the moment. “Sure.”
    Her dad turned his attention back to the phone. Nita went back to her room to change into a top that was easier to get in and out of in a hurry. From upstairs she could hear faint thumping and bumping noises. What’s she doing up there? she thought, and when she finished changing, Nita went up the stairs to Dairine’s room.
    It was never the