Pure Dead Magic Read Online Free Page A

absentfather’s vast computer, Titus moved the entire system out of Signor Strega-Borgia’s study and into his own bedroom.
    With these two seemingly unconnected actions, Titus and Pandora unwittingly set off a chain reaction of events that would prove to be catastrophic. This is how it began.
    Damp had done A Bad Thing. Damp knew it was A Bad Thing because Mrs. McLachlan’s mouth had shrunk to a flat tight line, and her eyes had grown cold and wee.
    Minutes before, Damp had been gazing in adoration at the open disk drawer on Titus’s CD-ROM. Above the disk drawer sat Titus’s modem with its two buttons decorated with stick-on eyeballs. Titus had applied these from a sheet of cutout face parts, and thus it was hardly surprising that Damp put two and two together and arrived at pi r squared.
    It’s a
face,
thought Damp delightedly, what a
big
mouth—all the better to eat breakfast with. She crawled closer to the CD-ROM.
    Hello, face, she thought, waving some bacon rinds that she’d found on the floor. Want some breakfast? She clambered onto Titus’s desk, using its open drawers as steps, waving the bacon rinds like a flag. The open CD drawer gaped hungrily. Nice face, decided Damp, have some breakfast. With small baby fingers, Damp stuffed her bacon rinds, one by one, into Titus’s CD-ROM.
    It was thus that Mrs. McLachlan found her. “Damp! NO! Stop right NOW!” she commanded.
    Uh-oh, thought Damp. She paused in her bacon-stuffing efforts and, at a loss for what to do next, popped her thumb into her mouth and simultaneously risked a quick glance at herbeloved nanny. What she saw was not cheering. Instead of radiating Highland warmth and pillowy comfort, Mrs. McLachlan’s whole being smacked of cold rain showers and grim mountain peaks.
    Mrs. McLachlan bristled, pursed, and tsked. “Right, girly,” she said, plucking Damp off Titus’s desk, “you’re coming where I can keep an eye on you, but first, a diaper change.”
    Sorry, face, thought Damp as she was hauled inelegantly bathroomward. Bye-bye, face.
    The enticing reek of bacon rinds slowly congealing inside the CD-ROM turned it into an olfactory beacon, sending out a clear signal to those creatures that relied on their noses for survival. Several such creatures, thirteen to be exact, were idly chewing paper under Titus’s bed when the first finger-like waft of bacon arrived. Thirteen noses twitched. The fourteenth nose snored, attached to Multitudina, rat mother to multitudes, who was catching up on some well-earned sleep while her brood amused themselves with an irreplaceable stack of prewar
National Geographic
magazines. Thirteen noses found bacon to be a far more exciting prospect, foodwise, than paper and ink. Fifty-two pink paws stampeded for the enticements of the CD-ROM, squeaking and snapping at each other in their haste to be first at the feast.
    Multitudina awoke to see the last of her children’s bald tails snaking to and fro, dangling twitchily from the open drawer of the CD-ROM.
    “RATS!” she squeaked, lunging after her offspring and gaining the desktop as the last millimeter of tail vanished into the gray gape of the drawer. Despite a rigorous postnatal exercise program, Multitudina had not managed to regain her skinnypre-pregnancy figure, and found herself unable to squeeze through the gap and rescue her children. Wild squeakings from within informed her that her children were quite happy, thank you very much, and didn’t intend ever coming back out to eat paper with Mum. Having scoured the CD-ROM for bacon rinds and congealed fat, they’d found a way into another gray slot and were checking it out for more of the same. The thirteen squeakings grew fainter as Multitudina’s brood investigated Titus’s adjoining modem.
    Multitudina squatted on the keyboard to have a think about what to do next, depressing several keys under her bottom as she considered the problem. Behind her, the screen sprang to life. A dialogue box appeared, saying