Love Croakies Sam Cheever (red queen ebook txt) 📖

in the sun, partially melting. Doctor Whom wore a cloak of feathers that fluttered from his narrow shoulders to his much wider hips, dropping just past his knobby knees to brush the calves of his short, skinny legs. Just like the last time he’d been summoned, the Doctor’s bowed calves were covered in fitted, yellow socks that stopped at his ankles. They looked like support hose for birds. His feet were bare, the toes long and curved downward like claws.

The doc blinked slowly at me through enormous eyes, which were set close together on either side of a sharp, beaklike nose. “Whooo?”

I was briefly distracted as several tiny gray and white mice skittered past his long feet from the interior of the traveling birdhouse and disappeared beneath the bookshelves.

I sighed. Visits from the good doctor always required rodent poop cleanup on aisle five.

“Whooo?” the good doctor repeated, his lips pursed with pique.

“Um, my friend, Hobs.” I pointed toward the steps. “He’s upstairs.”

Whom didn’t turn his body to look at the second floor landing. He only turned his head, rotating it nearly a full three-hundred-sixty degrees without difficulty.

I grimaced, my hand going to my throat in sympathetic pain.

Without another word, Doctor Whom spun around and returned to his birdhouse, closing the door behind him.

“Um,” I said.

The golden lights began to flash again and I took a step toward the birdhouse. “Wait, don’t leave!” I threw myself toward the house, determined to hold him there by sheer will if I had to.

The house disappeared in a burst of eyeball-searing light and I stumbled forward, slamming up against the stair railing. Pain radiated through my shins, where they met the immovable edge of the steps.

Before I could straighten, light flared through the open door to the apartment upstairs.

Sebille and I shared a surprised glance and then hightailed it up the stairs.

Wicked hissed at the magical birdhouse, all the hair on his back standing on end. A constant yowl emerged from his throat, and the whipping of his tail could have turned eggs into meringue.

Still, there was a hungry glint in his eyes as he watched Doctor Whom waddle across the room. I caught Wicked licking his lips when the birdman came close.

Talk about punching above your weight class.

I hurried over to the bed so I could watch the doctor work. “We think he might have inadvertently gotten some love serum, and it made him love crazed,” I told Whom. “Then he went into some kind of fugue state and finally convulsions.”

Whom tugged his stethoscope from under his feathery cloak. He pressed it against the little hobgoblin’s chest and listened for a moment, frowning.

I threw Sebille a worried glance.

She shook her head in a quick jerk.

Whom replaced the stethoscope beneath the cloak and lifted a strange, gnarled hand that had feathers springing from the knuckles instead of hair. A curved claw emerged from the yellow flesh.

I’d seen his method of assessment before, so I was ready. Or I thought I was. But I still grimaced as he sliced the claw along the inside of Hobs’ skinny arm. Blood rose from the gouge and beaded there. It was a sickly pink rather than the vibrant red I’d expected. “Does that blood look right to you?”

Doctor Whom grunted in response.

Sebille shrugged.

The birdman sniffed his bloody claw and jerked away, making a birdlike sound of alarm.

Wicked spit at Whom, crouching lower on the bed as if preparing to attack.

Doctor Whom turned his enormous eyes on me. “What did you say he was poisoned with?”

“We think love serum,” I told him.

He shook his head. “I’m not familiar with the pathology of this poison.” He turned his head and coughed, bringing up a lumpy dark gray ball that was slashed through with the stark white of tiny bones.

I gagged, covering my mouth with my hand to keep my last meal…or cookies…from making an uncomfortable return.

Doctor Whom pressed the slimy ball of bird barf onto the bloody scratch. He rested back on his bent legs, squatting rather than actually sitting, and closed his eyes. He began to whistle.

We watched him in what appeared to be a meditative state for fifteen minutes before I lost patience and spoke up. “Doctor?”

He opened one eye, narrowing it at me. “Have patience, young lady. The process must complete itself.”

“Yes. But…is anything happening?” The last time I’d seen him do the puke poultice method, the poison rose up from the cut and into the poultice. I didn’t see anything coming out of Hobs’ arm.

He glanced down at the poultice, his thick black brows dipping toward his beaky nose. “We’ll give it more time.” And then he closed his eyes and started whistling again.

I sighed. “How about some tea?” I suggested to Sebille. She and I both knew I was asking her to make it since she was tea-talented and I was…not.

She threw Hobs a last, worried glance and nodded, heading toward my little kitchen. I spun on my heel. “I think I have some pie…” I jerked to a halt, my gaze caught on the scene playing out on the floor in front of me.

Unnoticed by me, my cat had jumped down from the bed and gone exploring. Clearly, the giant birdhouse invading our home was the logical place to start his exploration.

Wicked was crouched, tail barely moving, and eyes fixed on the tiny white creature squatting near Whom’s door. The mouse’s cute little pink nose twitched with alarm, its long whiskers quivering.

I watched in horror as Wicked licked his chops.

He’d apparently realized a giant bird was beyond even his formidable hunting skills. Not so a tiny mouse.

“Wicked,” I warned in a soft voice. At that moment, I really wished my cat was a dog, so I’d have a snowball’s chance in Hades of getting him to listen.

But he wasn’t a dog.

And he’d caught the scent.

And if I didn’t do something fast, that cute little rodent was going down.

Wicked’s backend tensed. The mouse twitched in alarm. And I started to leap, knowing I’d