How (Not) to Play with Magic (A Cindy Eller Short Story Prequel) Read online

Alex Sanders, my stepfather, really made a great dog, I decided.

  He sat patiently on the doorstep of the house my roommates and I rented together. When I opened the door he thumped his tail on the ground in a friendly way.

  I would have scratched his ears if it hadn’t been so weird. He was my stepfather, after all.

  Alex made a pretty border collie, with a bright expression in his dark brown eyes with a framing black and white coat.

  As a man, Alex wasn’t much of anything. He was, for lack of a better word, dull.

  “Are you sure we can’t keep him?” Starrie pleaded.

  “Mom won’t let us have a dog,” Rainey added, “but maybe she’d let us keep this one.”

  I sighed. “Girls,” I reminded them. “Alex isn’t a real dog! He’s a person! You can’t just go around turning people into animals because you like animals more than you like people!”

  I saw Starrie mutter something about me always changing men into toads, but my glare quelled even her… temporarily.

  Starrie and Rainey had been born with some pretty powerful magic—and it all seemed to relate to animals in some way. We had despaired of Starrie ever learning to talk like a human, because she’d been born knowing how to talk to any animal in the world.

  “Alex,” I told my furry stepfather. “I’m sorry that this happened. I promise that the twins,” I shot my sisters a dirty look, “and I will work as hard as we can to bring you back to normal.”

  The dog let out a whine. I glanced towards Rainey and Starrie. I didn’t speak dog.

  “He needs to go to the bathroom,” Starrie sniggered.

  That gave me a pause. I couldn’t exactly tell my stepfather to go mark a tree, could I? That didn’t seem right. It was bad enough that he was in dog form without degrading him further.

  “Um,” I thought quickly. “He can… use my bathroom?”

  I really hoped he could manage it, hilarious as the idea of a dog sitting on the toilet might be.

  The dog thumped his tail again in what I thought had to be agreement.

  Starrie and Rainey giggled in unison, but showed the dog—er, Alex—the way to my bathroom where I assumed he would be taking care of business.

  I really just didn’t want to know.

  We headed back to the kitchen to wait for him.

  I couldn’t help wondering how he was going to wash his paws… er… hands.

  I didn’t have long to ponder about that because a loud shriek rang out through the house from that direction.

  “Crap!” I shouted. “Jessi!”

  My roommate and I shared a bathroom. I could only imagine what sight she had been treated to, stumbling into the bathroom in the middle of the night.

  “What the heck?” she screamed. “Why is there a dog sitting on the toilet?”

  I heard the twins sniggering behind me as I raced to reassure my roommate.

  What was I going to tell her? Jessi had no idea that I was a ‘witch’—a word my mother had forbidden me to use all my life. We were ‘magical practitioners’. I had to come up with some sensible reason for a dog to be using our bathroom in the middle of the night.

  The problem was I couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t completely ridiculous.

  “He knocked on the door and needed to go potty?” That was ludicrous.

  On top of that I was going to have to explain how my fifteen year old sisters had just appeared out of nowhere.

  Jessi stood in the hallway outside of the bathroom. Her pajamas were wrinkled and her eyes puffy, with a sleeping mask pushed up high on her forehead. Her exuberant hair, the legacy of an Irish father and an Kenyan mother, was pulled back in a riotous cloud of curls.

  She pointed a shaking hand towards the bathroom door. “Please tell me that I’m still dreaming,” she told me, “I thought I saw a dog—a dog!—sitting on the toilet.”

  I cleared my throat. “Um,” I said, “you’re not crazy, if that makes you feel any better.”

  She just stared at me, with her hands on her hips. “Seriously?” she demanded. “That’s the only explanation you have for me? Since when do we even have a dog?”

  “We don’t,” I said. “He’s… um… he’s my mom’s.”

  Jessi gave me a doubtful look. “Your mother has a dog?”

  I had to admit that wasn’t likely.

  “He’s…” I searched for the right thing to say, “he’s my sisters’ responsibility.”

  “That still doesn’t explain what he’s doing on the toilet!” Jessi said, throwing her hands in the air in aggravation.

  I thought quickly. “Well,” I hedged, “you know how some people teach their cats how to use the toilet instead of a litter box?”

  Jessi nodded suspiciously.

  “My sisters are trying an experiment to see if dogs can do the same thing,” I finished in a rush.

  “Oh.” Jessi thought about that for a moment. “That almost makes sense.” She shook her head. “Cindy, I’m sorry, but your family is really weird.”

  I laughed in relief. “You have no idea.”

  A flushing sound came from inside the bathroom and my stepdog appeared, wagging his tail at us briefly before disappearing in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Super weird,” Jessi said again, shaking her head. She disappeared into the bathroom and let out a little shriek. “Cindy! Your freaking dog used all the toilet paper!”

  I caught my sisters giggling when I went back into the kitchen.

  “Maybe CROW isn’t a bad idea,” I told them. “Why did you have to drag me into this mess of yours?”

  “Please,” Starrie turned on the waterworks, “you’re the only one we can turn to.” Her huge silver eyes shimmered beneath her tears.

  Rainey followed suit and soon matched her name perfectly.

  I groaned. “Fine,” I snapped. “I’ll see how I can help you. Just stop crying!”

  The tears stopped flowing as if by magic.

  I wondered just how magical they had been. My little sisters were powerful witches already—far more powerful than I was with my rather useless powers. “What have you tried to do to fix this?”

  An hour later we were no closer to the solution than they had been on their own. They had tried reversing the spell—nothing. They had tried a transformation spell to just change him back into a man—while my nails bit into my palms, that kind of magic was dangerous and terrified me. That didn’t work either.

  Meanwhile Alex sat calmly on the floor and wagged his tail from time to time, his eyes firmly on the chocolate cookies we were snacking on.

  “No chocolate for dogs,” Rainey told him, digging into her miniature purse to pull out a huge dog cookie.

  Somehow my sisters had ended up with the brand new designer top-of-the-line magical purses that everyone was dying to get their hands on—well, except for those beings that were already ostensibly dead. These purses were truly magical—containing cornucopia spells.

  I really needed one, but I probably didn’t have enough magic to activate the spell that granted the bearer what they needed.

  My magic was only good for one thing—baking—and that thought reminded me that I was going to have to rush to get ready or I was going to be late to work.

  I worked at Sugar High bakery—a neat little shop owned by the Davies, an older couple who had given me my first shot while I had still been in my pre-law program and all the way through my brief but useful stint in pastry school. They ran a tight ship, but let me experiment with flavors sometimes, as long as I kept up with their more traditional offerings like breads and cheese Danishes.

  “I have to go to work,” I told my sisters. “I’ll see if I figure anything out while I’m gone. Just… stay out of Mom’s radar range, OK?”

  They nodded in unison. They knew how Mom could be. There was no risk that they’d be flaunting our step-pooch under her nose anytime soon.

  “Save us some cookies,” they called to me as they caught ahold of the scruff of Alex’s n
eck, swung their hands in the air in unison, and vanished.

  I shook my head in envy.

  Chapter Three