Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane

look into becoming a wizard, too.”
    “It doesn’t work that way,” Kit said, feeling incredibly relieved that it didn’t. Yet the very idea still freaked him out somewhat. Just what I need. My very own version of Dairine… ! Oh, please, no. “You can’t be a wizard unless the Powers invite you,” Kit said. “And you’re too old.” Oh please let her be too old! “Besides, it’s a lot of hard work.”
    “I’m not sure I believe that,” Carmela said. “Nita makes it look easy. She just reads out of her book, or waves that little white wooden wand of hers, and things happen.”
    “It is not that easy,” Kit said, starting to get irritated, possibly by the insinuation that wizardry was easier for Nita than it was for him. “It’s like saying that someone just sits down at their computer and fiddles with the keys and things happen. Wands are just hardware. At the end of the day, it’s the software that does the job. And you have to write it yourself.”
    Carmela gave Kit a not-entirely-convinced look. “Well,” she said, getting up, “I’ll go get the thingy for you.”
    Downstairs, the phone rang. “In a while,” Carmela said as she ran out, pounding down the hall. “And when you’re playing around with it,” she added from halfway down the stairs, “make sure you don’t void the warranty!”
    Kit felt like banging his head against the wall. “The warranty,” he said to no one in particular. “Why should she care about the warranty?”
    He looked down at Ponch and heaved a sigh. Ponch opened one eye. “You weren’t asleep,” Kit said.
    Not the whole time, Ponch said silently.
    “What am I going to do with her?”
    Ponch looked after her. Ignore her. She’s just saying things like that to make you chase your tail; I can hear it in her voice. She thinks it’s fun.
    Kit shook his head. “The problem with sisters is that you can never tell what they’re going to pull next. And she’s been getting… unusual lately.”
    Then Kit wondered if he should have chosen another word. Ponch, too, had been getting unusual lately. This by itself wasn’t a surprise—wizards’ pets often start to acquire strange abilities or behaviors as their companions use their wizardry more, but in Ponch’s case, the level of unusual had become very high indeed. Here was a dog who recently had developed the ability to create a new universe and take Kit for a walk through it. And you have to wonder, Kit thought, is someone who can do that really a dog anymore?
    Ponch rolled to his feet, got up, stretched fore and aft, and then came over to Kit and put his nose on Kit’s knee. Dinner? Ponch said.
    Kit laughed. Whatever his own concerns, there were still some things about Ponch that were entirely doggy. “Yeah,” he said. “Come on.”
    The two of them went downstairs together. Kit’s mama was slumped on the dining room sofa reading a newspaper, dressed in one of her pink nurse’s uniforms; she was just back from the day shift at the local hospital and hadn’t yet bothered to change. In the living room, Carmela was on the phone, talking rapidly about some new music download to what Kit assumed was yet another of the crowd of guys who were chasing her around. “Mama,” Kit said, “when’s dinner ready?”
    “About an hour. Nita coming?”
    “She said so, yeah.”
    “Okay. You feed the monster there?”
    “I’m doing that now.”
    “You looked outside yet?”
    “Not yet,” Kit said, with dread. He was sure he knew what he was going to see.
    As they went into the kitchen together, Ponch started alternating between dancing around and spinning in circles on the same spot. Dinner!
    “Yeah,” Kit said, “and you know what it is?”
    What?
    “It’s dog food!”
    Oh, hurray! Dog food again! Ponch said, and jumped up and down some more.
    But Kit caught the amused glint in Ponch’s eye as he got a can of dog food out of the cupboard where the canned goods were kept. “You making fun of me?” Kit