Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog (Magic Carpet Books) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Anima blow away. Why waste it when you could give it to me? Please, I’ll be your best friend, and it would taste so good.”
    Compassion is the vice of queens,
Mamma always says, and she thinks I should toughen up. She says that I let the dogs take advantage of me and hog the bed, when they should sleep on the floor, and that I give too much of my pocket money to beggars, and that if I am to get along in this world, I need to harden my heart.
    Well, I don’t want my heart to be hard, and even if I end up like Poppy, trying to drink my heart to death, or like Mamma, trying to work my heart to death, at least I will know that I have a heart and I used it honestly. And maybe I owed Valefor something for making him worse. I couldn’t really resist the poor Butler sitting there so forlorn and famished, too weak to even get up out of the heap that I had blown him into.
    He said eagerly, “It’s very easy—see, all you have to do is breathe out and I shall breathe in, thus I shall be fed. Easy as pie.”
    “All right.” I knelt down beside him, and he reached for me with thin shivery hands. We bent our heads together. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and felt the featherweight touch of his lips against mine. Slowly I breathed out, then felt his shoulders shake under my hands.
    “Ah, that is so happy,” Valefor whispered. “One more time?”
    I drew in another breath, and again exhaled. His lips grew warmer, and now I was shivering—not with cold, but with a skittery feeling deep inside, not entirely unpleasant. I opened my eyes. His pupils had dilated to enormous purple circles, bright as coldfire. Glittering. A faint tinge of color was creeping across his face.
    “Just once more. The last, I promise.”
    I sucked a deep breath into my lungs, which suddenly felt deflated and small. Valefor’s grip was much stronger this time. As I breathed out, a great darkness opened up before me, swirling with streaks of color. The skittery feeling inside turned warm, then hot, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe at all. I yanked back, gasping.
    Val said, distantly, “Thank you. You don’t know how much better I feel.”
    I leaned against the window seat, sputtering. The room spun about me in fragments of light and color. I closed my eyes again, and the spinning slowed. I felt as though something had punched me in the gut. Something delicious.
    “What a drama queen you are, Flora,” Valefor said. “I didn’t take that much.”
    I opened my eyes. The fragments slid back together with a click, and there was Valefor, looking an awful lot better. His face had rounded out, and his eyes were now iridescently purple. He shook out his gown and twirled it around. The fabric, now black and satiny, flared around his knees. “Isn’t it nice?” he said.
    It
was
rather nice, but I didn’t want to admit it. The tight feeling of anxiety and gloom that I usually carry around in the pit of my stomach seemed less tight, less gloomy.
    Still twirling, Val was giving off little sparks. He stopped suddenly, and his glittery eyes crinkled as he frowned. “You taste different, though. There’s some unfamiliar spark about you. What can it be?”
    “I don’t know and I can’t wait for you to figure it out,” I said, standing up. A whirl of dizziness made me almost slide back down.
    “Rebellion! That’s it, Flora Segunda. You are full of irresponsible thoughts. So you want to be a ranger, join the Ranger Corps?”
    “There is no more Ranger Corps. They were disbanded at the end of the War.”
    “Oh, that silly war, ayah, I remember. A ranger! Secret and sly, the rangers are. Other than Nini Mo, who knows a ranger? Who can tell where a ranger will be,
who
a ranger will be? I’m surprised at you, Flora, for harboring such deviant thoughts. Fyrdraacas go to the Barracks, you know.”
    I did not want to be reminded of this, particularly by a denizen who was making that remark with a superior little grin. “I gotta go. Ave,