Bite-Sized Magic (14 page)

“I'd like to ask you all a series of questions,” he said, using his fingers to comb nonexistent hair across his shiny scalp. “Just to make sure the King Things are perfect.”

“Anything for you, Master of the Mostess!” Ning declared with a bow.

Mr. Butter whispered to Rose, “We'll see whether the recipe has truly been perfected. Lily Le Fay was able to achieve similar results, but her King Things weren't quite strong enough.”

They're strong enough now,
Rose thought.
Thanks to Ty and Sage
.

Mr. Butter pointed to Marge. “What do Kathy Keegan Koko Kakes taste like?”

Marge made a face of disgust. “Rotten eggs and disappointment!”

He pointed to Melanie and Felanie. “What is your favorite thing about Kathy Keegan?”

“That she can be hit over the head with a rolling pin,” Melanie volunteered.

“And smacked in the face with a baking sheet,” said Felanie with a firm nod.

Mr. Butter continued around the kitchen until he was standing directly in front of Gene. “Where do you think Kathy Keegan lives?”

“A sewer,” he answered. “And that's where she does her baking.”

Finally, he gestured at Jasmine and Ning. “And what would you do if you ran into Kathy Keegan on the street?”

“Run!” cried Ning.

“As fast and as far in the opposite direction as I can go!” said Jasmine.

“Or build a prison out of Moony Pyes and Glo-Balls and lock her inside,” said Ning.

“You've outdone yourself, Miss Rosemary Bliss,” Mr. Butter said just as Jacques appeared at the corner of the table.

“Why thank you, sir!” Rose said, anxious to draw away his attention.
Now please give us your keys so I can go see my mother and turn these poor bakers back the way they were
.

“In a mere four
days
you have perfected our Moony Pyes, Glo-Balls, Dinky Doodle Donuts, and now our King Things! By the end of today, when you've perfected the original Dinky recipe, all five of our new and improved FLCPs will be ready to go into production!”

Jacques tightroped along the edge of the table, carefully putting one tiny pink foot in front of the other, almost within reach of the dangling batch of keys on Mr. Butter's belt.

“Kathy Keegan is, as you know, the devil incarnate,” said Mr. Butter.

The bakers hooted and applauded as Jacques, unseen by anyone but Rose, reached forward and tried to unhook the rolling-pin key. But Mr. Butter was standing just an inch too far from the table for Jacques to reach.

Rose moved to the edge of the prep table opposite Mr. Butter. “Could you lean forward, Mr. Butter?”

“Why?”

“I . . . I'm thinking of shaving my hair off, and I want to see what it would look like on top.” She shrugged and smiled. “It's a new fashion!”

Mr. Butter cooed and leaned forward, so that his key ring clunked onto the top of the table. “This isn't a traditional girl's haircut,” he said, “but kids these days!”

Rose reached forward and ran her fingers along the smooth, waxy surface of Mr. Butter's head, all the while staring down at Jacques, who had disappeared beneath the folds of Mr. Butter's button-down shirt.

“It's so . . . bumpy,” Rose said.

“That's my skull under the skin,” Mr. Butter said.

A moment later, the mouse emerged carrying the oddly shaped key, and Rose liberated her hand from Mr. Butter's greasy head. “Thank you,” she said. “That was very . . . informative.”

“You're welcome,” Mr. Butter said, smiling. “I aim to inform.”

Jacques scampered across the table on his hind legs, carrying the rolling pin key over his head like a javelin thrower.

He was nearly at the other end of the table, ready for Rose to scoop him up into the pocket of her apron, when he was spotted by Mr. Kerr.

“Mouse!” Mr. Kerr screeched, and he slammed a metal mixing bowl down onto the steel table, trapping Jacques inside.

Before Mr. Kerr could reach into the mixing bowl, Gus leaped from the top of the refrigerator and landed on the shoulder of his velour jumpsuit.

“Ahhh! I'm being attacked!” cried Mr. Kerr, who hurled a swift upper jab toward Gus in an attempt to knock the cat off of his shoulder, but Gus had already leaped through the air onto the back of Mr. Butter's blazer, latching on like a baby koala bear.

“Get it off!” Mr. Butter cried, and Mr. Kerr ran over to pry the cat off Mr. Butter's back. Gus immediately jumped onto Mr. Kerr's head and from there onto the top of the refrigerator. Meanwhile, making it look like an accident, Rose overturned a two-foot-tall stack of metal mixing bowls onto the surface of the prep table. Some landed right side up, some landed face down, and some clattered to the floor.

When Mr. Kerr turned back to the prep table, he saw no fewer than seven metal mixing bowls overturned on the table. “Which one was the mouse in?” he cried.

“I don't remember!” said Rose. And it was the truth—she'd forgotten which bowl Jacques was cowering under. “I guess we'll wait to see which bowl moves!” she shouted, hoping Jacques would get the hint and nudge against the wall of his metal prison, so she would know which bowl to protect.

Mr. Kerr impatiently began overturning the bowls. “I'm not waiting around for a filthy mouse.”

The bowl in front of Rose moved a half inch, and Rose lifted it just enough for Jacques to scamper from beneath it into the pocket of her apron. “Nothing here!” she said, overturning the bowl to show the others.

Mr. Kerr sent the last of the metal bowls careening to the ground, with no mouse in sight. He huffed over to the golf cart, sat in the driver's seat, folded his arms, and pouted. “I thought I had it,” he said.

Gus released himself from Mr. Butter's back and dashed away into the Bakers' Quarters.

“Were you not doing such good work, Rosemary Bliss,” Mr. Butter said dryly, “I would have that cat removed immediately.”

“No!” Rose cried. “He's my only link to home.”

“I understand wanting a link to the place you grew up,” said Mr. Butter, tucking into the passenger seat of the golf cart. “Just make sure I never ever see him again. Keep that beast caged up. And get started on those Dinkies now. We are so close to our dream! When you're done tonight, there will be a wonderful reward waiting for you.”

As the golf cart disappeared beneath the floor, Jacques poked his head out of Rose's pocket. “
Merci
, Rose,” he said gravely.

“The thanks are all owed you,” Rose said. “Did you manage to hold on to it?”

The mouse held up the tiny notched-and-grooved rolling pin. “I've got ze key!”

CHAPTER 14
Love Is in the Jars

W
ith one hand on the steering wheel, Ty sped the golf cart through the maze of warehouses, darting away from the occasional oncoming delivery trucks.

“This is no big deal for me,
hermana
!” he yelled to Rose over the rush of the wind. “I'm basically a stunt driver!”

Sage sat in the back, his arms wrapped around a crate of red mason jars, empty save for a bit of heavy cream at the bottom of each. The jars clinked and rattled as the golf cart hurtled along.

Rose sat in the passenger seat, clinging to the dashboard with one hand and clutching the rolling-pin key with the other. She thought of her mother's face, tender and heart-shaped, with her wild, curly dark hair that was always tied into a messy bun, like a swallow's nest in a willow tree.

Her mother always knew the best thing to do. Was there some way out of this whole Mostess mess that Purdy might be able to see, if only she weren't locked away like Rapunzel in a tower? After finishing the antidote for the King Things, Rose only had one more recipe to perfect—the Dinky—but the real work of bringing down the Mostess Corporation was just beginning. She didn't know how she would do everything without her parents' help.

But she knew that she had to try.

If she freed her parents and escaped now, who would stop Mr. Butter and the International Society of the Rolling Pin? No one. It was all up to Rose. First she had to undo the evil recipes she'd helped to perfect. Then she had to find a way to defeat Mr. Butter. And
then
she could free herself and her family, and maybe together they could reverse the new bakery law. . . .

“What are you thinking?” Sage asked, nudging her shoulder.

“That it will be good to see Mom,” Rose said.

“And to break her out!” Sage replied. But Rose didn't answer him.

By then, Ty had pulled up in front of the pastry-bag-shaped hotel, which seemed to rise up straight into the late-morning clouds. Rose, Ty, and Sage tiptoed through the empty lobby, which was so crisply air-conditioned that Rose instantly found her arms covered in goose bumps. The teenage concierge looked bewildered by the reappearance of Sage and Ty.

“Hello again, Miss Bliss,” he ventured. “I see your guests from the Children with Weird Voices Association are back?”

Rose cleared her throat. “Umm, yes. It's actually a two-day tour.”

“And you're giving away free mason jars?” the concierge asked, referring to the crate of twelve empty jars that Sage was clutching to his chest.

“My
souvenniiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrs
!” Sage roared in his weirdest voice, struggling to keep the jars from dropping. He sounded like a strange cross between an old lady and a newborn baby.

The concierge just nodded, as if glad his own voice was not so weird.

 

When they were all safely inside the elevator, Sage gratefully laid his red glass burden on the floor, and Rose found the small, rolling-pin-shaped indentation in the brass plate next to the button for floor 34.

She took a deep breath and inserted the key into the small hole and heard that wonderfully satisfying click that keys always make when they fit into a lock. Rose turned the key to the right while pressing the button, and the elevator rumbled and began its ascent.

“Once we break them out, are we going to go home?” Sage asked as the glass box rose higher and higher over the Mostess compound.

Ty tapped Rose on the shoulder. “
Hermana
, if we bust Mom and Dad and Balthazar out of that hotel room, won't that Butter dude find out? And won't he think you did it and come after you?”

“We are going home, and we are going to free them,” Rose answered, gazing out over the warehouses and the small house where Mr. Butter grew up, all of it looking very small in the golden wash of morning. “But only after we ruin this place.”

“Can't we just go home?” Sage whined. “Tomorrow night is the inaugural summer water balloon fight in Calamity Falls Square, and I'm going to miss it! I've been planning for it all year.”

“Sage, our
hermana
is right. Think about it,” Ty continued. “If we escape, they're gonna zombify that Kathy Keegan cartoon lady, and then they're gonna ruin the rest of the country. We're the only ones who can stop them! But we can't stop them if we let Mom and Dad and Balthazar go.”

Sage scowled. “But we
need
Mom and Dad and Balthazar to help us stop them,” he protested. “This is too big for us to do on our own.”

“No, it's not,” Rose said as the elevator shuddered to a stop on the thirty-fourth floor. “That's why we brought the jars.”

The doors parted, and Rose led Ty and Sage down the plush hallway, past the sleek wooden doors, to room 3405. To Rose's great relief, the keyhole was shaped like a rolling pin.

“You ready, Sage?” Rose asked as her younger brother opened the twelve red mason jars.

“I guess so,” Sage said grumpily, opening the last jar and gathering the crate up in his arms.

Rose turned the key, and the door to the suite swung open.

Purdy, Albert, and Balthazar were lounging on a plush velvet couch in the living room, staring at a flat-screen TV whose size rivaled those of the screens at the Calamity Falls Movie Theater. They were cackling at a stand-up comedy special and looked very relaxed.

At the sound of the door creaking open, the three adults whipped their heads around in surprise. Albert leaped over the couch like he was jumping hurdles at the Olympics and threw his arms around Ty and Sage. “My boys! How did you get in? What are you doing here?”

“I drove!” Ty said. Balthazar, who had sauntered over from the couch with outstretched arms, patted Ty on the back.

“Good boy,” he said, and Rose noticed a slight glassy wetness in her normally grizzled great-great-great-grandfather's eyes.

Purdy scooped Rose into her arms and kissed her cheeks over and over.

“You're okay!” Purdy cried. “I can't believe you're okay! We were so worried! But where is Leigh?”

“She's still with Mrs. Carlson,” Sage said. He broke free of Albert and began capping the twelve open mason jars.

As Purdy hugged Rose, then Ty, then Sage in turn, the bit of cream sitting at the bottom of each jar whipped and swelled into a pale-pink butter, filled with her love for her children. “What are you doing, Sage?” she asked.

“I love you, Mom,” he said, and she just squeezed him harder. He twisted the lid on another jar.

“What's with the jars, son?” Albert asked curiously.

“We needed a Mother's Love,” Sage answered, capping the last lid onto the last jar. “As an antidote to fix the bakers in the test kitchen. They ate the Object of Revulsion and now they want to burn Kathy Keegan.”

“The Object of Revulsion, eh?” said Balthazar. “That's a nasty one.”

“They want to burn someone?” Albert said, alarmed.

Rose explained everything that had happened that she'd been unable to tell her parents before—about what Mr. Butter had made her do, about Lily's involvement, about how the International Society of the Rolling Pin intended to enslave the country. “I've been making antidotes left and right,” she ended, “but I made all these awful recipes, too! None of this would have happened if I had just refused. But now I've helped them.”

“You couldn't have refused, darling,” said Purdy, clasping Rose's hands. “Mr. Butter gave you no choice. He kidnapped you, and he said he would hurt us if you didn't help him. You did what you had to do. And you did it
well
.”

Even though Rose was incredibly upset, hearing that her mother wasn't mad at her—and actually seemed proud—lifted her spirits.

“So they have the nasty recipes?” Balthazar asked in a guttural voice. “The Apocrypha?”

“Yes,” Rose said, “and no. They have some recipes on cards that Lily copied out, but they don't know the Apocrypha is here. And they're planning to feed some of the evil recipes to Kathy Keegan. She's their last competitor, and they're going to take her out.”

“I thought Kathy Keegan was just a cartoon!” Albert said, scratching his scruffy red beard.

“Apparently, she's real,” Ty replied. “And she's coming here, and then she'll be brainwashed into joining Mostess, and when she does, there'll be no stopping them.”

“Oh my goodness,” Purdy fretted, rubbing Rose's cheeks with her soft hands. Then, to Rose's surprise, her mother simply looked at Rose and said, “So what are you going to do about it?”

“Me?” Rose did a double take. “I don't know what to do about it! I thought you'd tell me what to do!”

Purdy and Albert and Balthazar looked at one another with furrowed brows. “Of course we'd love to tell you what to do, sweetheart,” said Purdy, smoothing her daughter's black bangs. “But we're trapped here. We can't help you with the baking.”

Her head down, Rose mumbled, “I know.”

“Mr. Butter's guards check on us a couple of times every day, and you're smart enough to know that if we disappear, Mr. Butter will find out.”

“I know that, too,” Rose said. Her chin began to tremble. Her mother knew Rose wasn't going to rescue her, and Purdy was okay with that. “But how can we just leave you here?”

“You don't have a choice, honey,” Purdy said.

“I don't know about these two,” said Balthazar, “but I'm enjoying having a little time off. This is the biggest TV I've ever seen. Though I have to say, the food leaves something to be desired.” Balthazar plopped back down on the couch and held up a plate filled with Dinkies, Moony Pyes, and King Things. “I don't know how much longer we can survive without eating. It's been two days, and we're pretty hungry. So hurry it up, kiddo.”

Rose wailed, “But I don't know how to stop Mr. Butter!”

“You will figure it out, my love,” Purdy said firmly. “I know you can do it. And you won't have to do it alone. You have your brothers. They would do anything for you.”

Rose pulled back and stared imploringly into her mother's heart-shaped face. Her emotions felt like cookie dough—all mixed up and swirled together. “But what if they win, Mom?”

“I have the distinct feeling that won't happen,” Purdy said. She stood and gathered Rose, Ty, and Sage in front of her. “I have very special children. You are good and clever, and you look out for one another. You will be fine.”

Rose wiped away tears with the sleeve of her white baking jacket. Her mother was right. They would be fine. “I'm sorry you're not coming with us.”

“Oh, I'll be with you the whole time,” said Purdy. “You have the best part of me in those red jars. Use it wisely.”

Suddenly, a red light over the door began to blink. “Hurry!” Albert cried. “That means one of the guards is on his way up to clear our dishes! You three gotta run!”

With that, Rose and her brothers gathered back up the jars, put them into the crate, and stumbled out into the hallway, closing the prison door behind them.

 

When Rose and her brothers returned to the test kitchen, they found the six bakers on the floor, tied up in a bundle with kitchen twine. Their wrists and ankles were bound, and their mouths were plugged up with cloth napkins. Gus and Jacques were splayed out beside them, panting.

“What happened?” Rose gasped.

“
C'est horrible!
They started saying we reminded them of Kathy Keegan,” Jacques panted. “How I am reminiscent of a cartoon woman,
je ne sais pas,
but this is what they were saying.”

“They came after us with knives!” said Gus. “We had no choice but to tie them up with kitchen twine.”

“How did you even do it?” Sage asked, setting the twelve full jars of Mother's Love down on the prep table.

“I don't want to talk about it,” Gus replied, swishing his tail. “Let's just say cats don't typically run, and I've done more running in the past half hour than I have in all my life until now.”

The bakers snarled and made gurgling sounds through their gags.

“Luckily, we got enough Mother's Love in these jars to cure a whole army,” said Rose with a sniffle.

“Where are Mistress Purdy and Master Albert?” Gus asked. “And where is Balthazar, that gnarly old coot? Were you not able to access their hotel room?”

“We were.” Rose sighed. “But they couldn't come with us.”

“Comme c'est bizarre!”
Jacques exclaimed. “Why not? Did they not want to be rescued?”

“They did,” said Ty, “but we all knew it would compromise the mission to take down Mostess. So they stayed. After we finally take care of Mr. Butter and these crazy Rolling Pin people, we're gonna spring them loose.”

“
If
we blow them out of the water,” Rose said under her breath.