Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Page A

said.
    His eyes on the can, Ponch sat down, very proper, with his front feet placed so that the white tips on his forepaws came right together, making him look extremely composed and serious. Never, Ponch said. At least, not at dinnertime.
    Kit opened the can and dumped it into Ponch’s dish, filled the dry food bowl, and checked to make sure that there was plenty of water in the bowl beside it. Ponch jumped up again, turned around in excited circles a few times more, and then went over to the dish and started to gobble his food.
    Kit shook his head and rinsed out the can at the sink before chucking it into the recycle bin. In the living room, things had gone quieter as Carmela got off the phone and went back to talking to the TV, or rather to someone the Powers That Be only knew how many light-years away. From the sound of it, she was translating a subtitled display rather than listening to live Speech, but at the moment, this didn’t seem to be helping her much. “What?” Kit heard her say. “Do I what? Do I grenfelz? Uh, I don’t think so. …No, I am not shy! Okay then, show me an image—”
    There was a moment’s silence, after which Carmela dissolved into uncontrollable laughter. Kit was incredibly tempted to go see what she was looking at. I am not going to do that, he thought. She’ll get the idea I’m trying to chaperone her, and she’ll give me all kinds of grief.
    And I would be trying to chaperone her —
    Kit went to look out the kitchen window again. He’d done this earlier, when he’d just come back from Nita’s and Ponch had still been asleep. Then, the sidewalk outside their house had been empty. Now, though, it was full of dogs.
    There were at least ten of them. Most were neighborhood dogs: various multicolored and multisized mutts, the big blue-merle collie from the Winchesters’ place down the block, a pair of bulldogs from two streets over, and even the dysfunctional little terrier from three houses down, Tinkerbell—the one who normally threatened, in unusually fluent dog-language, that if he ever got out of his yard, he’d rip Kit’s throat out. Yet there he was, sitting peacefully on the sidewalk and gazing at the Rodriguez house as intently as all the other dogs were. The big silvery Great Dane from down Nita’s street, sitting next to Tinkerbell and as intent on the house as he was, shifted position slightly and put one huge foot on Tinkerbell’s rear end, nearly squashing him flat. Tinkerbell just wriggled out from under, shook himself, sat down again, and resumed staring at the house.
    “Are they still out there?” Kit’s mama said from the dining room couch, turning a page of the paper.
    “Yeah,” Kit said.
    “Remember our little talk the other day?” Kit’s mama said, her voice just slightly edgy.
    “Yeah, Mama. I’m working on it.”
    “Well, work harder.”
    Kit turned away from the window, annoyed. He had spent some weeks in consultation with Tom Swale on the question of what was causing the increasing weirdness around his house. The best explanation Tom had been able to come up with was “hypermantic contagion syndrome,” an irritatingly vague suite of symptoms usually more casually described as “wizardry leakage.” Days of perusing his manual had left Kit completely in the dark as to exactly what kind of wizardry, or whose, was leaking, from where, into what… and until he figured those things out, there was no stopping the leak.
    Kit looked out at the dogs and sighed. At least they were quiet at the moment. But they tended not to stay that way. And when they started making noise and drawing the attention of the whole neighborhood, his folks got tense. It wasn’t that they’d started giving him trouble about his wizardry as such. But the Rodriguez house used to be a fairly quiet and peaceful place, before the past month or so. Before the dogs, that is. Before the TV began evolving. Before Carmela became a boy magnet. The noise wasn’t his fault, and Kit