Deep Wizardry-wiz 2 Read Online Free PDF Page A

trapeze swing of the rusty swing set, her short red hair ruffling in the breeze. Dairine was a tiny stick of a thing and an all right younger sister, though (in Nita’s estimation) much too smart for her own good. Right now entirely too much smart was showing in those sharp gray eyes. Nita tried not to react to it. “Gonna fall down and bust your head open,” she said. “Probably lose what few brains you have all over the ground.”
    Dairine shook her head, causing herself to swing a little. “Naaah,” she said, “but I’d sooner”—she started pumping, so as to swing harder—“fall off the swing—than fall out the window—in the middle of the night!”
    Nita went first cold, then hot. She glanced at the windows to see if anyone was looking out. They weren’t. “Did you tell?” she hissed.
    “I—don’t tell anybody—anything,” Dairine said, in time with her swinging. This was true enough. When Dairine had needed glasses, when she’d started getting beaten up at school, and when she was exposed to German measles, nobody had heard about it from her.
    “Y’like him, huh?” Dairine said.
    Nita glared at Dairine, opened her mouth to start shouting, then remembered the open windows.
    “Yeah, I like him,” Nita said, and turned red at having to make the admission. The problem was, there was no lying to Dairine. She always found out the truth sooner or later and made your life unbearable for having tried to hide it from her.
    “You messing around?” Dairine said.
    “Dairiiiiiiiine!” Nita said, quietly, but with murder in it. “No, we are not Kessing around!”
    “Okay. I just wondered. You going swimming?”
    “No,” Nita said, snapping the strap of her bathing suit very obviously at her sister, “I thought I’d go skiing. Wake up, lamebrain.”
    Dairine grinned at Nita upside down. “Kit went west,” she said.
    “Thanks,” Nita said, and headed out of the yard. “Tell Mom and Dad I’ll be back for supper.”
    “Be careful,” Dairine called after Nita, in a perfect imitation of their mother. Nita made a face.
    “And watch out for sharks!” Dairine added at the top of her lungs.
    “Oh, great,” Nita said to herself, wondering if her mom or dad had heard She took off at a dead run in case they had.
    She found Kit waiting about a mile down the beach, playing fetch with Ponch to tire him out, as he’d told her he was going to. “Otherwise he gets crazy if I go away. This way he’ll just lie down and sack out.” And sure enough, after some initial barking and dancing around Nita when she arrived, Ponch flopped panting on the sand beside them where they sat talking and finally rolled over on one side and began to snore.
    They grinned at each other and headed out into the water. It was unnerving at first, to swim straight out into the ocean, past the breakers and the rollers, past the place where the bottom fell away, and to just keep going as if they never intended to come back. Nita had uncomfortable thoughts about undertow and how it might feel to drown. But just when she was at her twitchiest, she saw a long floppy fin tip up out of the water. S’reee was lolling there in the wavewash, her long pale barnacled belly upward.
    The night before, when S’reee had been injured and immobile, it had been hard to tell much of anything about her. Now Nita was struck by the size of her—S’reee was at least forty feet from the tips of her flukes to her pointy nose. And last night she had been a wheezing hulk. Now she was all grace, floating and gliding and rolling like some absurd, fat, slim-winged bird—for her long swimming fins looked more like wings than anything else.
    “Did you sleep well?” she sang at them, a weird cheerful crescendo like something out of a happy synthesizer. “I slept wonderfully. And I ate well too. I think I may get back most of the weight I lost yesterday.”
    Kit looked at the healed place, treading water. “What do you eat?”
    “Krill, mostly. The