The Polar Bear Explorers' Club Alex Bell (learn to read books .txt) 📖

chicken and Ethan had oysters, which the others all thought smelled terrible and looked like snot. The magician pointedly ignored their remarks and picked them neatly, and rather elegantly, from the egg using the silver oyster fork. Once they’d finished their savoury course, they all thought of a dessert, which magically appeared in the egg. Stella had jam roly-poly, Shay had some kind of fried banana pancake, Ethan had chocolate cake and Beanie had jellybeans which, of course, he separated into various coloured piles before he ate them.

Stella was feeling satisfyingly full, and was just thinking that it was a really good thing that they had trusted the frosties, and not listened to Ethan when he’d been all suspicious before – when one of the frosties said, ‘We’ve made up your beds in the guesthouse.’

‘Beds?’ Stella repeated. ‘Oh, well, thank you but we can’t stay. We’re explorers, you see – we need to get going.’

‘But didn’t you say that you’d lost all your supplies?’ the frosty persisted. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to spend the night here in a warm bed, and leave in the morning?’

‘Exploring isn’t really about spending the night in a warm bed,’ Shay said. ‘Besides, it’s far too early to go to sleep just yet. Thank you very much for your hospitality, but I’m afraid we really must be on our way. We have a lot of adventuring still to do.’

Shay stood up. Despite his relaxed tone, he had a wary expression on his face. The frosties seemed too still, too silent. All of a sudden, Koa was on her feet, her lips pulled back in a snarl. Stella could hear a low growl rumbling in the back of the shadow wolf’s throat. She and Ethan both stood up quickly, and Stella nudged Beanie, who was tidying his last pile of jellybeans.

‘Come on, Beanie,’ she whispered. ‘We’re going.’

‘We can’t,’ he replied. ‘I haven’t finished organising my jellybeans.’

‘We’ve already made the beds,’ the female frosty said again, suddenly sounding far less friendly. ‘It would be very rude of you to go without sleeping in them.’

Stella was suddenly very aware of the rows of silent frosties standing on the branches of the trees above them, staring down with a look that seemed almost … hungry.

‘Sorry to disappoint you, but we really can’t stay,’ Shay said. ‘Places to go, things to see, and all that.’

‘That is a pity,’ the female frosty said slowly. ‘Because it would have been far less painful if you’d been asleep.’

‘What would have?’ Beanie asked, suddenly looking up from his jellybean pile.

The frosty smiled – smiled properly for the first time since they’d arrived – and Stella was horrified to see that her mouth was full of row upon row of glittering, needle-sharp teeth. ‘Frostbite,’ she said.

Stella had, of course, heard of frostbite. It was hard to live with a polar explorer for ten years and not do so. She knew that sometimes explorers came back from expeditions to the Icelands having lost entire fingers and toes to frostbite, and that it could be very dangerous. If it was left untreated and led to hypothermia, it could even kill you.

‘But frostbite isn’t an actual bite,’ she protested. ‘It’s caused by exposure to extreme cold.’

The frosty grinned even wider, exposing another set of teeth. ‘Is it?’ she said.

And then, quick as a flash, the frosty flew at Ethan, who happened to be the nearest explorer – or perhaps the frosty simply found him the most irritating of the four children. The magician threw up his hands and a blast of magic flashed blue. Stella wasn’t sure what Ethan had intended to do, but she was fairly sure it hadn’t been to create another polar bean.

The bean’s shrill giggle turned into a shriek as the frosty’s fangs impaled it, and Stella watched as lines of ice spread out from the bite. The bean froze solid in seconds. The frosty withdrew its teeth and threw the bean on the floor in disgust, whereupon it promptly shattered into hundreds of frozen, broken pieces.

Stella saw Shay’s eyes widen in shock. Beside him, Koa was snarling ferociously, but having no substance, she was no threat to the frosties. The whisperer’s wolf at Shay’s throat opened its gleaming red eyes, and Stella really hoped that meant he was calling the wolves. They had to get out of there. Right now.

Then everything happened at once. The frosties from the tree all came swooping down at them, claws curled, teeth bared. The geese ran about, honking and flapping in panic and generally getting in everyone’s way. Shay whipped the boomerang out of his cloak and threw it through the cloud of frosties, knocking them from the air like stones. Ethan threw more magic at them; a mixture of tiny arrows – which were quite effective at stopping the frosties – and more polar beans, which were less so. Beanie snatched up the red jellybeans before they could get mixed up with the blue ones, and began hurling them at the frosties, which didn’t work much better than Ethan’s polar beans.

Meanwhile, Stella snatched up the only weapon within her reach, which happened to be the moustache spoon. It was actually quite an effective object for smacking any frosty that came near, and the thud they made when they hit the spoon was extremely satisfying. There must have been a hundred frosties, though, and it was a difficult thing for four young explorers armed only with a moustache spoon, a boomerang, some jellybeans and unreliable bean-and-arrow magic to fend them off forever.

As Shay reached up to catch the returning boomerang, Stella noticed, to her horror, that there was a frosty heading directly for him, mouth open and teeth gleaming, moments away from biting.

Fortunately, Ethan saw it too. ‘Watch out!’ he cried, shoving Shay out of the way. The frosty missed him, but it got Ethan instead, clamping its fangs firmly into his finger. The magician yelled, and dragged the frosty from his hand, flinging it away from