Misspelled Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Trippingly Off the Tongue

  8 rms, full bsmt

  Eye of the Beholder

  Cybermancer

  Eye of Newt

  Chafing the Bogey Man

  A Perfect Circle

  Reading, Writing, Plagues

  Totally Devoted 2 U

  The Mysterious Case of Spell Zero

  Crosscut

  Bitch Bewitched

  The Witch of Westmoreland Avenue

  A Spell of Quality

  Demon in the Cupboard

  Untrained Melody

  Yours for Only $19.99

  ‘‘Bogey man, bogey man, hide if you will. The creature of shadows I will catch with skill!’’

  This was definitely wrong. Just as it occurred to Bob to speak to the officials about postponing play, a little, little man with a long beard and red, pointed cap bounded up onto the tee. Bob almost dropped his club.

  ‘‘Whaaa?’’

  ‘‘You’ve got to play,’’ the little man told him. ‘‘It’s sudden death.’’

  ‘‘Jim, it looks like a garden gnome,’’ the commentator said.

  ‘‘Play?’’ Bob asked.

  ‘‘If you don’t continue, well, the consequences . . .’’

  ‘‘Consequences? What consequences?’’

  ‘‘Why, sudden death!’’

  An official strode up to the green with determined strides. ‘‘This is not acceptable,’’ he said.

  "It appears the official is conferring with MacDuff and the garden gnome, Jim,’’ the commentator said.

  The gnome whirled and pointed at the commentator. ‘‘I am not a garden gnome. My name is Robertson and I’m a golf gnome.’’

  ‘‘I don’t care what kind of gnome you are,’’ the official told him. ‘‘You are interfering—’’

  Robertson waved his hand at the official. The man vanished, his empty clothing—smart yellow blazer, plaid slacks, golf hat, and all—collapsing to the ground. Within moments, a toad hopped out from beneath the hat.

  ‘‘Interference!’’ it croaked.

  —from ‘‘Chafing the Bogey Man’’ by Kristen Britain

  Also Available from DAW Books:

  Places to Be, People to Kill, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Brittiany A. Koren

  Assassins—are they born or made? And what does an assassin do when he or she isn’t out killing people? These are just some of the questions you’ll find answered in this all-original collection of tales. From Vree, the well-known assassin from Tanya Huff’s Quarters novels . . . to a woman whose father’s vengeful spirit forced her down dark magic’s bloody path . . . to an assassin seeking to escape his Master’s death spell . . . to the origins of the legendary nin-sha and the ritual of the hundredth kill . . . here are spellbinding stories of murder and mayhem of shadowy figures who strike from night’s concealment or find their way past all safeguards to reach their unsuspecting victims. With stories by Jim C. Hines, S. Andrew Swann, Sarah A. Hoyt, Ed Gorman, and John Marco.

  Pandora’s Closet,edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jean Rabe

  When Pandora’s Box was opened, so the ancient tale goes, all the evils that would beset humanity were released into the world, and when the box was all but empty, the only thing that remained was hope. Now some of fantasy’s finest, such as Timothy Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Louise Marley, and Sarah Zettel have taken on the task of opening Pandora’s closet, which, naturally, is filled with a whole assortment of items that can be claimed by people, but only at their own peril. From a ring that could bring its wearer infinite wealth but at a terrible cost . . . to a special helmet found in the most unlikely of places . . . to a tale which reveals what happened to the ruby slippers . . . to a mysterious box that held an ancient, legendary piece of cloth . . . to a red hoodie that could transform one young woman’s entire world, here are unforgettable stories that will have you looking at the things you find in the back of your own closet in a whole new light. . . .

  Army of the Fantastic,edited by John Marco and John Helfers

  How might the course of WWII have changed if sentient dragons ran bombing missions for the Germans? This is just one of the stories gathered in this all-original volume that will take you to magical place in our own world and to fantasy realms where the armies of the fantastic are on the march, waging wars both vast and personal. With stories by Rick Hautala, Alan Dean Foster, Tanya Huff, Tim Waggoner, Bill Fawcett, and Fiona Patton.

  Copyright © 2008 by Tekno Books and Julie E. Czerneda.

  All Rights Reserved

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1438.

  DAW Books is distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  First Printing, April 2008

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED I NTHE U.S.A.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  ISBN: 9781440633508

  Version_2

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction © 2008 by Julie E. Czerneda

  Trippingly Off the Tongue © 2008 by Lesley D. Livingston

  8 rms, full bsmt © 2008 by Kristine Smith

  Eye of the Beholder © 2008 by Kevin G. Maclean

  Cybermancer © 2008 by Janet Elizabeth Chase

  Eye of Newt © 2008 by Marc Mackay

  Chafing the Bogey Man © 2008 by Kristen Britain

  A Perfect Circle © 2008 by Kent Pollard

  Reading, Writing, Plagues © 2008 by Kell Brown

  Totally Devoted 2 U © 2008 by John Zakour

  The Mysterious Case of Spell Zero © 2008 by Rob St. Martin

  Crosscut © 2008 by S. W. Mayse

  Bitch Bewitched © 2008 by Doranna Durgin

  The Witch of Westmoreland Avenue © 2008 by Morgan S. Brilliant

  A Spell of Quality © 2008 by Kate Paulk

  Demon in the Cupboard © 2008 by Nathan Azinger

  Untrained Melody © 2008 by Jim C. Hines

  Yours for Only $19.99 © 2008 by Shannan Palma

  Introduction

  What’s the difference between a good cook and a great one? Between a capable chemist and a famous inventor? I think it’s a willingness to experiment with ingredients and procedures. The best make intelligent, reasonable substitutions and observe what happens. If something unexpected occurs, they recognize when they’ve struck gold. Key Lime Pie and Post-it Notes™ come to mind.

  The worst? Because others are willing to experiment too. The results can be memorable. Poor cooks and sloppy chemists. You know who I mean. People in a rush, who never finish (or start) reading the directions or bother to understand why this and not that is listed in a recipe. They leave out steps, toss in whatever’s handy, omit what they don’t have, and hope for the best. Occasionally, this works. Just as often, family and friends go home feeling ill—or there’s a crater where the lab used to be.

  That’s real life. In fantasy, much relies on the uncanny skill of wizards, the long memories of witches, and the years of learning required to properly cast spells.

  Come on. Not everyone is going to le
arn it all before they try some magic. Not everyone will read the manual first or be careful. It’s simply not in our nature. Which means someone will goof a spell—at least once. When magic’s involved, what might be the consequences?

  Welcome to Misspelled.

  Julie E. Czerneda

  Trippingly Off the Tongue

  Lesley D. Livingston

  Narrator: The final exam. The ultimate test. That moment in time when success or failure is measured by what you accomplish under pressure. Or, in the case of Michaela duLey, what she can accomplish with the help of her lab partner and a single, dangerous spell. There’s only one problem . . . Michaela hasn’t been quite herself lately. She’d better be very careful indeed.

  "Careful with that!" Michaela duLey froze, her eyes panic-wide in the dusky air.

  Vinx, her lab partner, stiffened at the squawk of admonition and cocked his head, eyeing the beaker of bilious green liquid he held—rather carelessly—in one hand. ‘‘You don’t trust me,’’ he mused, raising a tangled eyebrow at Mickey and gently sloshing the beaker’s contents about.

  ‘‘I really don’t!’’ Mickey was agog at the notion.

  The stuff was becoming vaporous the more Vinx agitated it. Mickey knew how much he enjoyed goading her to elevated flights of nervous tension, but she was in no mood for shenanigans. Besides, they had work to do. She turned the scorch-factor way up on her glower and Vinx relented, stifling whatever nefarious impulses he might have. Contenting himself with a smug chuckle, he deposited the catastrophically explosive substance near the back of the workbench and out of harm’s reach with a delicate flourish.

  Mickey watched as faint vaporous swirls of mist settled in the glass, and she wiped a sleeve across her sweating brow. Then she shrugged the tension from her shoulders and turned back to the work at hand, a heavy sigh escaping her lips. They’d been toiling over various final exam projects for the past week and a half, and tonight’s was the last. Mickey was tense to the point of snapping. ‘‘What I wouldn’t give for a nice cold bier just now,’’ the sorceress-in-training pined.

  Vinx cocked an ear in her direction, feigning innocence. ‘‘Oh, I don’t think it’s as bad as all that, Mick!’’ He tut-tutted. ‘‘You’re not quite dead yet . . .’’

  ‘‘Pardon?’’ She raised an eyebrow at the apparent non sequitur.

  ‘‘Nothing . . . nothing . . .’’

  It’s wayyy late for this, Mickey groaned inwardly, not prepared to deal with Vinx’s bizarre sense of humor. Not that she wasn’t well acquainted with it—they’d been paired up as study buddies for two semesters in a row—and usually she could handle him just fine. But tonight he was getting on her nerves. She glanced at her watch, but it was a useless gesture. The hands just spun in a slow backward circle, as they always did when she was in the middle of a spell-casting. Something to do with arcane energies or magnetic field generation or dimensional flux yadda yadda. Mickey didn’t quite grasp the specifics, but that didn’t stop her from finding the phenomenon truly irksome. Struggling to keep her cool, she turned back to her lab partner and asked politely, ‘‘Vinx, what’s the thyme?’’

  ‘‘It’s that greenish-gray aromatic stuff over there— very nice on pork roast.’’

  Mickey snarled in frustration and turned back to the work muttering, ‘‘Demented demon spawn . . .’’

  ‘‘Why, thank you.’’ Vinx bowed very slightly from the waist, an amused grin stretching the scaly, eggplanthued skin across the craggy landscape of his features. In the flaring light of a dozen torches, the red glint of his eyes sparkled with an alien mirth and he picked up the beaker of liquid again, swirling it in the glass. ‘‘You were saying about this?’’

  Mickey glared violently. ‘‘Just bee careful. That’s awl.’’

  ‘‘I’m always careful around bees—allergies, you know. And awls for that matter—got a nasty poke in the thumb once.’’ Rumbles of barely contained demon-giggles bubbled up from deep within his barrel chest, and the membranous wings sprouting from his massive shoulders ruffled slightly with amusement.

  Mickey gritted her teeth as the lightbulb finally went on above her head and Vinx’s cryptic banter suddenly made sense after a fashion. She must be doing it again. ‘‘Eye’m doing it again,’’ she sighed, ‘‘aren’t eye?’’

  ‘‘Yup.’’ Rumble rumble. Ruffle.

  ‘‘Dammit!’’ The young apprentice threw a delicate pair of sterling silver calipers down on the workbench, seething with frustration. ‘‘This is yore fault.’’

  ‘‘Umm . . .’’ Vinx held up a single, yellowed talon. ‘‘You were the one doing the incantation, Mick . . .’’

  ‘‘That’s only because somebody was so apocalyptically hungover after yet another pan-dimensional village pillage that he was incapable!’’ Mickey threw her hands in the air. ‘‘Even though ewe gnu perfectly well that eye wood knot bee able too handle that stupid Karnalaquiann dialect myself!’’

  ‘‘Well, granted, it is somewhat impossible if you only have a single tongue . . .’’

  ‘‘Rite!’’ Mickey barked. ‘‘Besides—how was eye two no that unduuruu and unndurru were pronounced that differently, anyway?’’

  ‘‘They’re not.’’ Vinx shrugged a massive, leathery shoulder. ‘‘They’re pronounced exactly the same.’’

  ‘‘Ewe sea my difficulty.’’

  ‘‘Clearly . . .’’ Giggle giggle rumble. The demon’s amusement sounded like the beginnings of a rockslide. ‘‘Although I’m not sure sheep are all that fond of the water!’’ Vinx turned away before he lost it completely.

  ‘‘Bloody mystical homonyms . . .’’ Mickey fumed.

  ‘‘Homophones, actually.’’ Unable to contain his glee any longer, Vinx collapsed in a large, quivering mess of burbling, boiling guffaws.

  ‘‘Vinx, it’s bean a weak . . .’’

  In Mickey’s defense it had, indeed, ‘‘bean a weak.’’ Off and on, at least. But she was truly sick of the weird looks she kept getting at the bank and in coffee shops whenever the awkward side effects of her botched Karnalaq soothe-spell took hold. Every now and then she would just erupt into bouts of saying one thing and—utterly unintentionally—meaning something else entirely to whomever she was speaking. And, of course, she couldn’t tell when she was doing it. Not, at least, by the sounds she was making. Only by way of blank or puzzled stares. ‘‘Seven daze! When’s it gonna stop?’’

  After a long moment of squeezing every ounce of enjoyment out of Mickey’s sound-alike plight had passed, Vinx relented. The demon wiped a tear from his rumpled cheek and reached into the pouch hanging from his belt. ‘‘Here. I’ve been working on this. A pinch of powder up the left nostril ought to do,’’ he said as he poured from a thin, blown-glass vial into the palm of Mickey’s hand.

  Mickey sighed and, pinching her right nostril shut, snorted the sparkly purple crystals, trying hard not to sneeze as she felt the tingly snap of synapses rearranging themselves ever so slightly deep within the vault of her skull. ‘‘Huzzah,’’ she cheered blandly, eyeing the demon with mixed scepticism and gratitude. ‘‘I’m cured.’’

  ‘‘Oops.’’

  ‘‘ ‘Oops’?’’ Mickey asked warily. ‘‘What ‘oops’?’’

  Vinx looked like he was trying really hard not to bust out laughing again. ‘‘When you said ‘cured,’ just now, you meant ‘like bacon.’ ’’

  ‘‘I did not.’’

  ‘‘Did. And that is, in fact, a homonym.’’ He popped the cork on the vial again. ‘‘Did I say left nostril or right?’’

  ‘‘You said ‘left.’ ’’

  ‘‘As in ‘I left a package at the door.’ ’’ The demon pointed at the novice spell-slinger with moderate triumph. ‘‘See? You’re speaking in homonyms. I should have said ‘right.’ ’’

  Mickey ground her teeth and snorted purple crystals again. ‘‘As in—I’m gonna tear your head right off if this doesn’t work?’’

  ‘‘Ah—see!’’ Vinx sl
apped his massive palms together, beaming benevolently at his fellow student. ‘‘All better!’’

  ‘‘Lucky for you.’’

  ‘‘Now. Where were we?’’

  ‘‘Still stuck in a cave . . .’’ Mick grumbled, now thoroughly mired in ill-humor. ‘‘Why does anything to do with dark magick always have to be performed in a cave?’’

  ‘‘Something to do with the dark?’’ Vinx asked dryly as he reached for a small clay pot.

  ‘‘That is so lame.’’ Mickey rolled an eye at him. ‘‘It’s such a stereotype. Like—evil has to be ugly.’’

  ‘‘I’m not exactly evil . . .’’ the demon sounded hurt.

  ‘‘Not you, Vinx. Well, actually, yes—you.’’ Mickey plucked the jar from his taloned grasp. ‘‘Also the entire cheerleading squad at my old high school. All very pretty girls and—here’s the thing—PURE EVIL.’’

  Vinx nodded appreciatively.

  ‘‘Yah. You would’ve like them.’’ Mickey peered at the pot, looking for a label of some kind. That would, of course, be way too easy. ‘‘Seriously, man. Uh— demon. I was under the impression that warding-amulet spells were pretty straightforward. Why was the Conclave being all dire and cryptic with this assignment?’’

  ‘‘Perhaps they’re just encouraging us to stretch a bit. This is your final project, after all. And, contrary to your middle-of-the-road approach, I happen to think that even the simplest spells can be interesting if you use a little imagination, Mick.’’

  ‘‘Like last week’s transmogrification?’’ She pegged him with a sharp gaze.

  ‘‘What was wrong with that?’’ Vinx shrugged innocently.

  ‘‘Dragon was not on the approved list of morph targets, you maniac.’’

  ‘‘Oh, fine. Go ahead,’’ he huffed. ‘‘Be boring. Turn yourself into a hedgehog again, my little kitchen witch. And then I’ll barbeque you with my mighty dragon’s breath!’’

  ‘‘You are such a drama queen.’’ Mickey turned the pot around and around.