Flitterwig Read online

  Ella followed the stream of orange bugs to the washroom, where a flight attendant was battling with the door.

  ‘There’s something wrong with it,’ she explained apologetically to Ella. But Ella wasn’t watching her at all. She was watching Dixon. Every time the woman tried to shut the door, Dixon put himself in the way so it slammed against him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ella asked.

  ‘I’m trying to fix the door,’ the attendant replied, somewhat taken aback by the forwardness of the little girl’s enquiry.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ella. ‘Not you, I mean, um –’

  The attendant closed the door on Dixon again.

  ‘I just can’t figure it out,’ the woman said.

  ‘May I try?’ Ella asked. She squeezed past the attendant and into the washroom, grabbing Dixon in her fist on the way. Closing the door firmly behind her, she put the pixie down next to the sink. He began to smash his head against the tap.

  ‘What are you doing, Dixon?’ she asked, holding him down with her fingers on the stainless steel bench.

  ‘Oh, I’m a dumb pixie,’ Dixon wailed. ‘Dumb, bum, numb. Bad pixie. Bad pixie. Want to make you happy. But you’re so sad, bad, mad.’ He flung his legs up to his throat and tried to throttle himself with them.

  ‘Just calm down, Dixon,’ said Ella, fighting back her own feelings in the face of the demented pixie’s distress.

  ‘Can’t calm, balm,’ said Dixon. ‘Lost Granny, lost Grandpa.’ He wailed and thrashed about like a child in a tantrum. ‘Ella’s heart’s sore, more, pore, war.’

  ‘Stop it!’ Ella told him firmly.

  The little man went very still. His eyes opened wide. ‘Very good bossiness, Ella,’ he said, after a pause, standing to attention. He clicked his heels and grinned. ‘We just might make a leader of you yet, bet!’

  Ella let go of him. He brushed himself down and stood up straight. ‘Ella?’ he said. ‘Ella, do you trust me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ella. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Then you must believe me,’ he said, ‘when I tell you that your grandparents are not all right but they really are all right. I know because the robin redbreast brought this to me from Her Majesty to Manna’s this morning, warning.’

  Opening his backpack, Dixon pulled out a scribbled letter. Ella, accepting the fact that a rather large piece of paper had just come out of a terribly small backpack, opened it and read:

  Your Royal Majesty,

  The Grand Duke of Magus and I have the Clearhearted Flitterwig’s grandparents. They have been Shrinkified and frozen, and thus are entirely unaware of their predicament. They will not be harmed if you bring the child to us at once. To ignore this message is to risk their well-being entirely.

  Respectfully,

  Saul of the Flitterwigs

  Ella gasped. The air in the tiny washroom felt suddenly constrictive and suffocating. Dixon, jumping up as high as he could, swatted her about the face. ‘You have to keep it together, Ella, you have to.’

  ‘I must get back home and swap me for Granny and Grandpa!’ Ella said, her voice choking. It seemed she was to blame for just about everything these days.

  Dixon jumped onto her shoulder. ‘You have to find the Dewdrops so we can all get back to Magus, Ella,’ he instructed her, swinging off her neck. ‘That is the only chance we have. If you give yourself up to the bad Flitterwig and the Duke, they won’t let you go, oh, no. It’s a trap, Ella. A trap, flap, clap. You are the only one the Dewdrops will obey, remember, December? You have to find the Dewdrops.’ Dixon threw himself forward dramatically and would have fallen to the floor if she hadn’t caught his foot.

  Ella started to wheeze, and pulled out her inhaler. Dixon, seeing her distress, was about to slam himself against a cake of soap, but Ella grabbed him by the waist.

  As the soothing mist opened up her lungs, her survival instincts kicked in. Granny and Grandpa were the only people in the world she had ever trusted and felt safe with until now. She looked at the pixie and a tingling sensation warmed the tips of her ears and ran across her shoulders. Her hair began to flare as though a wind had whipped it up. She set Dixon gently on a cake of soap, closed her eyes tightly, and put her hands over her ears as Manna had shown her yesterday.

  ‘Listen to yourself,’ Manna had said, ‘and your magic will talk to you.’

  All Ella had sensed yesterday was the pumping of her heart and the birds singing in the trees and a desire to burst out laughing. But now she could feel the heat in her ears spreading through her body and she was buoyed by it.

  ‘I’ll give myself up to Saul and the Duke when I get back to England,’ she said. Then, remembering this morning’s riddle, she added, ‘I think there are messages for me wherever it is we’re going that we must find first. Messages from spotted elves and a wise man.’

  Dixon’s eyes poked right out of their sockets. He flipped himself up onto Ella’s shoulder and wrapped himself like a starfish around her face.

  ‘What a magical Ella you are, far, car, Zanzibar,’ he said.

  Trying to push thoughts of her grandparents to the back of her mind, Ella peeled the pixie off her face so she could see to open the washroom door. ‘What are those little orange things out there?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, of course, you wouldn’t know,’ said Dixon pulling himself together with a shake. ‘They are the Endangered Species Imps. They’re ever so naughty, don’t you know. They are travelling with an extraordinarily precious plant in the hold. Got bored, you see, knee, pee. ESIs are the naughtiest imps of all.’ He started to giggle. Then he covered his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘What it means, spleens, beans,’ he said, ‘is that this flight isn’t going to be very comfortabubble for any of the human bubbles. No no. Ho ho.’

  Ella went back to her seat and considered her options. If she was to have any chance of saving her grandparents, she needed to get better at magic. But how was she supposed to do that?

  There were imps everywhere, having particular fun using Dribbles’ dumpy nose as a slide. She took the specs off and twiddled her ear. Bits of the imps appeared, but not much of them. She rubbed harder. No good. She put the specs back on, and saw a handful of imps swinging off her hair.

  ‘Believe in yourself, believe in yourself,’ they chanted as they swung past her eyes and bounced off her nose. She took the specs off again. Slowly, slowly, the imps took fuller shape. ‘See!’ they cried. ‘You can do it! You can do it!’

  chapter 14

  traps & tiddlywinks

  ‘Gotcha!’

  The butterfly net in Charlie’s freckled hand flew out from under his arm and over the top of Ragwald and a handful of Troggles. A cold wind whipped through the grass, unsettling the morning fog to reveal the ancient bricks of Snoppit farmstead and the old farm buildings. Charlie stormed towards the barn.

  Through the murkiness a voice called out. ‘Look, I’m sorry about before. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Charlie! Come on, old chap.’

  It was the Duke, heading up the hill from last night’s clandestine activities at Willow Farm. His wings had stopped working altogether and he was struggling to catch up with Charlie by foot. Earth really was a filthy place for wings.

  ‘Oh, do put them down and let us talk,’ he called after the angry boy. Having to shout brought on a fit of coughing. A glob of something dark fell out of his mouth. ‘Magicforsaken Saul!’ he spluttered, slowing down to catch his breath. ‘I need more Antidote!’

  Looking about him, he spotted some flies hovering over a steaming cowpat in the grass. He tweaked his left ear and a vial of clear liquid appeared out of nowhere. Tipping a little of the liquid onto a claw, he pointed it at the flies. Elf dust shot from it at once.

  The flies began to stretch beyond recognition until they were ten times their original size. ‘Come,’ the Duke whispered, his words floating across the fog. ‘Gather,’ he ordered them. The flies gathered together, like automatons, in a tight formation above the cowpat.

  The D
uke scratched his head in frustration and pulled on his ear again. ‘I said, come! Not stay over there!’ he growled.

  The flies buzzed over to the left side of the cowpat. Rolling his eyes, the Duke dragged himself over to the fly-sheet and lifted himself up on it, squeezing his nose tightly with two Royal claws to avoid the smell of the poo.

  ‘Follow that boy,’ he commanded, although with his nose thus pinched the force of the order left a little to be desired.

  The flies obeyed. Across the hill they buzzed, in hot pursuit of the speedy child with the net in his hand, but the child slipped into the barn and slammed the door behind him before they could catch up.

  The Duke ordered the fly chariot to raise him up the side of the barn wall so he could look through a window. It was imperative that he see what Charlie was up to.

  ‘I’ll snap you to bits if you don’t tell me who that man was, why you were stealing the blood from under the scab on my knee, and why I feel so weak,’ Charlie was yelling at the Troggles. ‘I’ll rip your heads out of your necks, stomp on you, drown you, use you for frog bait!’ His mouth was set in a determined line and his moon-shaped forehead crumpled furiously.

  ‘I wake up,’ he ranted on, ‘and you smelly, rotting, red-eyed bunch have me splayed out on the ground like some kind of human sacrifice or something. I want to know what’s going on! We had an agreement, the Duke and I. I thought we were friends.’ Even spitting out his words and with his face twisted in anger, the boy appeared nothing but innocent and lost with his big glasses balanced on the tip of his button nose.

  From his perch outside, the Duke guffawed. An agreement!

  Magic above, humans were a contradictory race! There was the boy yelling empty threats at the Troggles and expecting honesty in return.

  He watched as Charlie pulled himself

  together, dumped the Troggle-filled net on the

  floor and moved swiftly over to the trunk to pull

  out his food processor.

  ‘I’m going to mince you one by one unless you start talking,’

  Charlie yelled. He plugged the processor into the wall outlet

  and turned it on. The blades sliced with a menace that thrilled

  the Duke, reminding him why he had come to Earth in the first

  place. Oh, the power of the machine. It was terribly exciting.

  The Troggles escaped from the net and ran in panicked circles, bumping into one another like a bunch of balloons on a windy day. Ragwald did his best to control them, but his own Trogglitis was so severe today that all that came out of his mouth was, ‘Bleurghy, bleurghy, bleu di bleurgh. Di blueeeeeurghy.’

  The Duke lowered his face into his hands. This army of his was completely incompetent without the balancing effect of a dose of Antidote. Saul was refusing to provide any more until the Duke told him where the Sacred Dewdrops were, and without it, his chances of rallying his troops were getting increasingly slim. He sighed. Then, summoning up all the strength he could muster, he flicked his ear and pointed at the window. Elf dust flew out of his claw, and the window pane shattered.

  Earth might be weakening him physically, but the Duke still had the essence of a most powerful magic beating inside him. He ducked, and his buzzing carpet passed through the broken glass and lowered him to the barn floor.

  The Duke pointed at the processor. Another white laser of elf dust flew from his digit, striking the machine with such force that it burst into flames.

  Charlie stepped back in shock.

  The Duke put a clawed hand up to his chest to contain the searing pain in his lungs.

  ‘Of course we have an agreement, Charlie,’ the Duke rasped, feeling a bit better now that he had suitably frightened the boy. ‘And I haven’t forgotten my promise to walk with you to school to teach those Fowler boys a thing or two. I will even teach you more tricks to do using the powers of your spectacles. That man you saw today is called Saul. He has an Antidote that I need to keep me strong, so I have to keep him on side, you see. I fear he wants to hurt you, though, because you are so special,’ he lied. ‘Remember, as the owner of those spectacles, you are an extremely powerful young boy. A threat to Saul. I was negotiating for your safe release, but I didn’t want him to think I was desperate. I was trying to underplay your importance.’ The Duke might be losing his knack for flight, but my, he was getting better at deception.

  Charlie didn’t know what to believe. He wanted to trust the Duke, because the Duke had got rid of his stutter, but something didn’t feel right. He scratched his nose and wondered what to do.

  Hoping the boy was as stupid as he looked, the Duke forged on. ‘We must work as a team if we both want to survive. We’re in this together.’

  Charlie snorted as dismissively as he could, but he really didn’t want to lose his new ally.

  ‘I’m not lying,’ said the Duke, lying magnificently and coming closer. He shook his drooping wings and the giant flies shrank to their normal size, dispersing across the room as though shooed from a sugar bowl. ‘And what is more, young man,’ he added as a subtle inducement, for time was of the essence, ‘that girl across the way, Ella Montgomery, is not to be trusted. She is Saul’s accomplice.’

  Charlie frowned. That bit just didn’t make sense. Charlie didn’t know why, but it didn’t.

  ‘Doubt me if you will,’ said the Duke, ‘but she has a pair of magical spectacles too, and lots of the little creatures and talking animals you despise are teaching her how to use them in order to make them more powerful. That makes her more of a nuisance than you could possibly imagine.’ He closed his eyes against the ache in his head.

  ‘But she looks so harmless,’ said Charlie, feeling that strange warmth well up in him again, as it had on the morning when Ella had crash-landed in the pond before him.

  The Duke rolled his eyes. ‘And so do the frogs,’ he said. ‘But all they do is harass you. Charlie, I need you to help me get to the girl so that I can get to the Sacred Dewdrops. And then I will teach you how to use your magical spectacles in a way that will protect you from all your nightmares forever.’

  Charlie crouched down on his haunches to think. ‘But she’s overseas right now,’ he said, suddenly remembering. ‘My dad works at her dad’s lollipop factory, and he said her dad took her abroad because her grandparents have disappeared and everyone’s in a right old muddle about it.’

  The Duke passed a claw across his chin.

  ‘But,’ continued Charlie, looking pleased with himself, ‘my dad also said her dad’s doing an inspection of the lollipop factory he works at, the day after tomorrow. The factory isn’t that far from the airport.’

  The Duke reflected that the boy wasn’t so stupid after all. ‘Come, Charlie,’ he said, ‘let us join together and devise a plan, based on your canny observations, to capture the girl.’ He willed his wings to perform. They refused. He walked the short distance that separated him from Charlie, and took the boy’s arm in his. Very carefully he tucked a Ponkalucka into Charlie’s pocket. He would use it later to Possess him should the opportunity arise.

  Behind the Duke sat a group of Troggles, exhausted from running around in panicked circles, playing tiddlywinks with a bag of chocolate drops.

  chapter 15

  malaga & mischief

  Ella woke up in a hotel bedroom in Malaga, Spain. The morning sun shone crisp and clear through the window, bathing the room in a warm glow. She twiddled her ear. Dixon sat cross-legged at the end of the bed, reading her Spanish for Beginners textbook. At least, half of him did, because he was split right down the middle. She still couldn’t do it perfectly, but she was definitely getting better at seeing him without the spectacles.

  Then she remembered what had happened to Granny and Grandpa, and Dixon disappeared altogether. She shook the thought from her head and swallowed a lump in her throat, willing herself not to panic. She slipped the spectacles on. There was Dixon again, all of him this time, talking to himself. She had to get her grandparents back. She just had to
. Or she had to try, at least. The smell of cinnamon in the air soothed her a little.

  She slid out of bed and stepped over to the mirror on the dressing-table.

  Looking back at her through the lenses of the spectacles were two overly large almond-shaped eyes, emerald green flecked with gold. She pulled her hair over her long, pointy ears, still finding it hard to believe that they were not a total embarrassment but part of what made her special.

  ‘Apparently you’re magic,’ she said aloud to her reflection. Her reflection gave her a ‘yeah, right’ look back. She took a deep breath and was about to try again when a key turned in the bedroom door.

  Dribbles’ head appeared in the mirror, followed by her big body in a tight dress covered in purple and orange flowers. A sausagey finger tapped on the face of a watch almost lost in the folds of her pudgy wrist.

  Feeling her governess’s accusing eyes on her back, Ella whipped the spectacles off her face and scooted to the bathroom.

  ‘Your grandparents,’ Dribbles bellowed after her, ‘are still missing.’ Ella shut the door of the bathroom and leaned against it, trying to control the wheeze rising in her throat. ‘Your poor father,’ Dribbles added, and Ella heard a sob and the nasty trumpeting sound of the woman blowing her nose.

  In the shower Ella forced back tears and concentrated on her breathing. She knew she had no choice but to swallow the sadness down, get dressed, and follow Dribbles wherever Dribbles chose to take her. So, like a bird in the shadow of a rhinoceros, that’s what she did.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting breakfast,’ Dribbles said, limping along the hotel corridor towards the elevator. She looked at Ella over her shoulder, narrowing her eyes. ‘Although now your dear grandmother has disappeared, I’m tempted not to feed you. That’d get rid of you soon enough.’