Jumper Cable Read Online Free PDF Page A

mollified. “It is not my tree. I merely dislike being disturbed when I’m snoozing.”
    “We will move on,” Jumper said.
    “It talks!”
    “I was given the gift of tongues,” Jumper explained. “Come on Maeve; we don’t want to intrude on her nap.”
    “Oh, I’m awake anyway, now,” the harpy said with grudging grace.
    “Take your two fruits.”
    “You’re a harpy,” Wenda said. “Why are yew knot swearing?”
    “I am a high brow harpy,” she replied, raising her brows. “I don’t use fowl language.”
    “A high brow harpy,” Maeve said, shaking her head. “I never heard of that.”
    “Naturally not.”
    Maeve bridled. “Is that a cut, birdbrain?”
    The harpy eyed her scathingly. “That depends on whether you have the wit to appreciate it, floozy.”
    Maeve made a growling sound as she ripped out her false teeth to expose the gleaming pointed ones. But both Wenda and Jumper dived in to separate the two. “Let’s exchange introductions,” Wenda said, desperately changing the subject as she shoved a juicy pear at Maeve. “I am Wenda Woodwife.”
    “A woodwife! But you look rounded.”
    “My friend Jumper here helped fill me out with cloth and webbing. I really am hollow. And this is Maeve Maenad.”
    “A maenad! In clothing?”
    “What’s it to you, featherface?” Maeve demanded. The harpy inspected her more closely. “Those teeth. You are a maenad. In that case you’re no vapid nymph, but a savage creature to be respected. We harpies have long admired the viciousness of the maenads.”
    “Is that an apology?” Maeve demanded.
    “It resembles one. I am Haughty Harpy.”
    “We are glad to meet yew,” Wenda said quickly. The harpy inspected the three of them. “Pardon my curiosity, but why would a hollow woodwife, a bloodthirsty maenad, and a giant spider be traveling together peacefully? You should be trying to consume or squish each other.”
    “Oh, we woodn’t care to burden yew with our problems,” Wenda said.
    “Unfortunately for me, I am atypical of my species in that I am a curious bird. Suppose we exchange problems? That is, information on them.”
    Wenda looked at Jumper. “I suppose a harpy woodn’t be eager to bruit secrets about, wood she?”
    Jumper didn’t know anything about harpies, so he temporized.
    “Maybe not if she had a secret of her own she didn’t want shared.”
    “Exchange of hostages,” Maeve said, replacing her wax teeth now that she had finished demolishing her pear and wasn’t about to tear the harpy apart.
    “Fair enough,” Haughty said. “I will show you mine if you show me yours.”
    “Agreed,” Jumper said, now curious about her secret. The two girls nodded.
    “Harpies have half talents,” Haughty said. “We can’t use them well unless we find and cooperate with folk of other species who have the other halves. Since we hate to cooperate with anyone, even other harpies, this renders us effectively talentless. But sometimes our magic manifests anyway.”
    She paused, because her paragraph had ended. Then a new paragraph arrived, neatly enclosed in quote marks, and she resumed.
    “Mine is, of course, obnoxious. It is that I change at times to my alter ego, Hottie Harpie, who is all the things I’m not, but definitely not my better half. She seeks males of either the avian or mammalian persuasions, and shamelessly seduces them. I hate that, because of course if she catches the stork’s attention on her watch, that stork will in due course seek me on mine. I hate babies! They bawl endlessly and are chronic bundles of demand. ’Tis a fate devoutly to be abhorred.”
    “Yes!” Maeve said in the pause between paragraphs. Then another paragraph arrived, as neatly packaged as the first two, and Haughty had to continue. “So now I am trying to travel to the Good Magician’s Castle, to prevail on the old f**t for an Answer to my
    Question, which is how the bl**p do I stop my worser half from being so obnoxious?”
    “I didn’t