Lucky Rabbit

When Thaniel and Isidor went to their room to get ready for dinner, Pandy took the opportunity to speak to them. Switching to Ms. Wellington, she told them that Augustus was sick, and the reason she’d been so late was because she was helping him. She could tell she’d actually surprised Isidor, and when it became obvious that Things Had Happened that she couldn’t talk about in front of Thaniel, the older boy grabbed his coat and headed off, probably to get some answers from Professor Beeswick, or whoever else was lurking around the school.

“You won’t get sick, will you?” Thaniel asked, pressing little hands to Pandy’s cheeks and forehead.

She shook her head, heart melting at the worried expression on his face. “I don’t think I can get sick.” She’d been paying almost as much attention to her own internal processes as she had to her Mana, and had never noticed even the slightest change, in spite of how much time she’d spent among the infected. She still had no idea what was going on inside her furry outer shell, but she could add ‘no more colds’ to the list of reasons why it wasn’t so bad being mildly undead.

“That’s good,” Thaniel said, a smile breaking through. “Mama said that being sick is just our body’s way of saying to rest and drink lots of water. You must get lots of sleep.”

“Your Mama was really smart,” Pandy said, pressing a kiss to his head. For the thousandth time, she wished that she could have been sent just a few years further back in time. It sounded like preventing Thaniel’s and Lian’s mother’s death would have been fairly simple, even for a rabbit – just keep her from getting into that carriage. Then neither boy would have had to suffer that loss. Depending on what Thaniel’s parents had argued about, that might also have prevented The Father from experimenting with summoning Demons, leaving the whole family intact and happy.

Thaniel nodded eagerly, but his fingers gripped Pandy’s sleeve. “Do you haveta leave again?”

Pandy sighed. He was as smart as his mother, and she should have known he’d see right through her. “I think I might be able to find some medicine that will help Mr. Blackwood.” A white lie, since what she was really looking for was clues about the poison and the people who were using it. Knowing exactly what they’d done to the spider venom might help Mistress Rose formulate a specific antidote, though.

They’d been sitting on Thaniel’s bed, snuggling, but now Pandy stood. Crossing to Thaniel’s little desk, she opened his bag and took out a pencil and a piece of paper. “I’ve been thinking about it, and it’s really hard for me to hold a pencil when I’m Bunny, but if we make these ahead of time,” Pandy tore the paper into several squares, and began drawing numbers on them, “then I can leave the right ones out to let you know when I think I’ll be back.”

Thaniel’s eyes lit up, and he hopped down off the bed, crossing to dig in the bag. Coming up with a cloth pouch, he tipped it out, spilling a mound of the little domino-like game pieces Pandy had seen the children play with. “Ellie gave us each a set,” he explained. “She said there’s games where you can keep adding in more Element Tiles to make it bigger an’ bigger.”

Carefully, he sorted a few of them out, pointing to the little pips painted on their surface. Like dominos, they had two ends, each with their own pips, but rather than counting up to six, the most they could have was five. The pips were also painted in different colors, though some colors never seemed to go together. She saw black pips and yellow pips, but the black and yellow were never together on the same tile, and there were other combinations that just didn’t happen.

“You could put out a tile for when you think you’ll be back,” Thaniel said, pushing out a tile with five green pips on one end and three yellow pips on the other.

Pandy nodded. “Sometimes I may not be sure, though.” She moved the tiles around, thinking, then held up a tile that only had green pips. “If I’m sure I’ll be back by a certain time, I’ll use green. If I’m pretty sure, but not completely, I can use green and yellow.” She moved the tile Thaniel had picked next to her double-green.

“All yellow means don’t worry if I’m late, but I’ll try to be back by that time,” she said, pushing over a third tile. Then, hesitantly, she added a double-red, but kept shuffling through the pile, turning over tiles that had landed face down until she found a yellow and red, which she slid between the all red and all yellow tiles. “Red and yellow means I don’t really know when I’ll be back, and all red means I’ll just come back when I can,” she finished.

Thaniel nodded, then tilted his head to the side. “Why’d you use Nature, Light, and Fire?”

Pandy started to open her mouth, then closed it again. Of course they didn’t have street lights or even stop signs here. Green didn’t mean go, red didn’t mean stop or danger, and yellow definitely didn’t mean ‘go faster’. She shrugged. “I like those colors?”

“Okay,” he said, apparently entirely satisfied with this response. Carefully, he lined up all the tiles using green, yellow, and red pips, or any combination of those. Though actually, there didn’t seem to be any green and red together, so Pandy asked why not. Thaniel gave her the ‘How do you not know this?’ look and said, “Nature and Fire don’t like each other.”

Of course they didn’t. Though reality was more complex than that, with plants needing heat to sprout and grow, it made sense for a children’s game to keep things simple. Actually, Pandy wouldn’t mind learning to play some of these games sometime. They weren’t videogames, but she had no doubt the children would keep them entertaining anyway.

Shifting around the tiles, Pandy picked out a green and yellow one with pips that added up to eight. She put it on the top left corner of the desk. “I hope I’ll be back by eight in the morning,” she tapped the desk next to the tiles, “not eight at night.” This time she placed a finger on the top right corner.

Thaniel looked crestfallen, but nodded. “But if you’re not, I shouldn’t worry,” he said, touching the yellow end of the tile.

“Exactly right,” she told him.

He hesitated, then almost whispered, “I wish you could stay ‘til I go to sleep.”

A fist tightened in Pandy’s chest, and she crouched down beside him. “I do, too. But I think if I wait until then, it may be too late.” Too late to find a carriage willing to take her into that part of town, that is. She had an idea how she could reach the general area, but when it came down to it, she wouldn’t be able to pick out a single building from among dozens of similar buildings.

Thaniel was staring at his toes, and he swallowed hard, his chin bobbing, then said, “Would you sing to me before you go?”

Sing? Pandy didn’t sing. Well, she did, but not where anyone else could hear her. It wasn’t that her voice was bad, exactly, but she certainly hadn’t ever had any training, and with her luck, her voice would crack, reach the perfect frequency for shattering glass, and bring down a highrise.

“When the sun lies down to sleep,” Thaniel said softly, “The moon will rise to watch the sheep. Little boys drowse, safe in their house-”

“And Mama keeps watch while they sleep,” Pandy said with him. It was a song Thaniel used to sing to himself, alone in his bed, after Cassie put out the lamp. He hadn’t sung it since his father died, and definitely not since he discovered that Bunny wasn’t just his pet rabbit, but she’d heard it often enough before then that she could remember the simple tune.

Clearing her throat, Pandy sang, “So rest your head, here in your bed, upon your pillow deep. Dream of fun, and wind and sun, where summer lasts forever.”

“Kisses here,” Thaniel said, pointing to his eyes, and Pandy dutifully pressed a soft kiss to each lid. Blinking his eyes open, he smiled up at her. “We’ll always be under the same stars,” he said in the tone of someone quoting someone else, and she nodded. Then, as if he hadn’t just torn open her chest and stolen her heart – or whatever served as her heart – he grinned and said, “Now I’m gonna go. I’m starving!”

The door closed behind him before Pandy even realized that the ringing in her ears was the bell calling the students to eat. Closing her eyes, she listened to the boys moving through the hall just beyond the door, and wished she could have met her own mother. It wasn’t something she thought of often, that stranger who had abandoned her so long ago, but for the barest instant, the longing was a spiked knot in her gut, twin to the pain in her chest.

Voices and footsteps faded as Pandy struggled to pull herself together, to shove down those dark, inconvenient feelings behind the pragmatic part of her, the Pandy who just did what she had to do to get through every day. When she finally felt like she could move again, she crossed the room and quietly opened the door, peering out into an empty hall.

Pandy thought, and for once the System didn’t have anything to say. Soon, she was hopping off down the corridor, then down the stairs, across the foyer, and into the dim classroom wing. Really, this would be so much easier if Thaniel’s room had a window, or even if Pandy could use the window in Ms. Wellington’s office. Unfortunately, since her alter ego was AWOL, the odds were good that someone was either watching her rooms, or had assigned an elemental to do so. She couldn’t even retrieve a change of clothes – not that it would matter for another six days.

Fortunately, when she reached the second floor and shifted back to Ms. Wellington, the first doorknob she tried opened easily beneath her hand. She still wasn’t sure if the rooms were just left unlocked or if she had ‘permission’ to open them, thanks to her status as a teacher – however short-lived that had turned out to be – but either way, she was in, and the window opened as easily as the door.

Pandy almost wished she had enough time to try this as a human, but she just didn’t. A quick glance at her Status showed that she had little more than an hour of Shifting Faces remaining. She’d spent far too much time with Thaniel, and yet not nearly enough.

Shaking off this thought, Pandy again released her spell and hopped up onto the windowsill. Thanks to the gentle but persistent rain, the sky was cloudy and dark, but the few flickers of lightning were too distant to be concerning. Surprisingly, Pandy had only been struck by lightning once, but that was enough to ensure that she never again stepped out into a thunderstorm.

Before she could think better of it, Pandy threw herself into the darkness, thinking,

Wings of Glory successful.

One more use to Level 3.

-18 LF

And it’s not like Mana was an option.

But using your spells more often is!

Maybe you should try jumping out of a tree.

I could calculate which one is tallest based on some simple measurements.

Should I do that?

Wings ripped free from Pandy’s back, the pain causing her to roll and dip as she struggled to regain her equilibrium. When she came up with this plan, she hadn’t accounted for the fact that between the clouds and the rain, even she could barely see. The cheerful light shining from the windows of the school was behind her, but that didn’t tell her if she was pointed up or down.

A flicker of something caught her eye, and instinctively she veered toward it, sending water spraying from her wings as she corrected her course. And yes, there were a few faint stars, off to her left now, where the rain had already passed. Turning toward them, she rose up and up, barely missing one tree, then another, having to yank up her paws so she didn’t accidentally touch something that would count as ‘landing’ and force her to waste another twenty-five Corruption Points. She’d gotten more than that just by spending time in Suzanne’s comforting Dark Aura today, but she had no idea how many she would need, and it just wasn’t in Pandy’s nature to assume things would work out in her favor.

She circled above the school a few times, struggling to orient herself. If Falconet was here, and the blurry expanse of trees that was the Nature Preserve was there, then she needed to head straight toward those particularly bright stars. No satellites or airplanes here, so she didn’t need to worry that her celestial body was going to move on her, so Pandy pointed her nose toward the second star on the right and headed straight on.