Castle Hangnail

Dragons have been known to have staring contests with mountains. They usually win.

For the goldfish loved Pins as dearly as he loved her, and the two of them had been friends for a very long time, since he had carried her across a great desert in a plastic bag and had fought Djinn and Ifrits and Ghouls for her. She would have gone anywhere with him, but since he had chosen to settle at Castle Hangnail, she had been more than happy to swim in her bowl and look out over the countryside from the window. (Which only goes to show that even minions have their own stories that may be long and heroic and have no bearing on the story at hand.)

Molly dove into the pastries. It had been a very long walk from the village and she’d been living on sandwiches and a thermos of cold tea. “These are delicious!” she said, around a mouthful of pastry. “Is learning to cook from first husband,” said Cook. “Then is cooking him. Lousy husband. Second husband is chef, much better.

There is something about a bathroom that feels like a fortress. A closed bathroom door may only be about two inches of plywood, but it feels like an iron bar.

Let's take a minute to talk about spellbooks, since, in this day and age when magic is no longer taught in schools (or is, at best, an elective like Home Economics), very few people have the experience with spellbooks that they used to.

They were very Wicked boots, but were they Wicked enough? “Could you do something . . . I don’t know, unpleasant?” Molly shifted her backpack from one shoulder to the other. “If you don’t let me in and show me to the bathroom, I’ll do something very unpleasant right here on the doorstep.

I’ll give you . . .” He paused and made a flourishing gesture with both hands. “. . . a thousand dollars!” It was bad enough, thought Molly, that he thought she would sell Castle Hangnail. But for such an insultingly low price? “How about I give you a thousand legs?” she asked. “It’ll require turning you into a millipede, but I think I can manage it.

It was black (of course), but it was different shades of black. The fabric was charcoal black and the trim was metallic black and the lining was obsidian black and the buttons were tiny silver raven skulls with even tinier twinkling black eyes. The sleeves were swooping and edged with black lace, but because Pins knew how Witches were, the lace could be tied back out of the way and there were very practical tight black sleeves underneath.

Her eyes traveled over the row of Encyclopedia Thaumaturgica, and paused at the gap, one book wide, for volume Q. If Cook threw away volume Q, why is there a gap at all? Shouldn’t P and R just be jammed up against each other?

The guardian flipped it over. “It’s one of ours, yes . . . hmm. Says it’s addressed to Eudaimonia—