Free The Warlock's Curse by M.K. Hobson Page B

too?” Will said. Jenny took another snort, then capped the bottle and settled back comfortably, looking around. “Hasn’t changed much,” was her conclusion. “You’ve still got my books!”
    “Yep, it’s like I’m still twelve years old,” Will said bitterly.
    “Boy, I sure liked the Dreadnought Stantons.” Jenny looked over the titles, smiling. If she noticed the absence of Volume 32, she didn’t mention it. “You remember the fight we had over those? I wanted to be Admiral Dewey and you gave me a bloody nose.”
    Will rolled his eyes. It had been a ridiculous fight. Jenny had been reading him an especially patriotic Stantonade in which the great Sophos was called upon by Congress to investigate the magical theft of a jeweled sword presented to Admiral Dewey by President McKinley. They’d both been so excited by the action in the book that they’d quickly dispensed with Jenny just reading it and went on to playing it out. It had been great fun—until Jenny demanded to play the role of Admiral Dewey. She said it was only fair, because Will had gotten most of the other good parts. But he found the idea so preposterous he’d been forced to object to it just on principle. She called him a nincompoop. He told her to both “go soak her head” and “dry up.”
    Perhaps it was the contradictory nature of these two statements that had made Jenny shove him. Will had shoved her back. And then there had been hair-pulling and fists started to fly, and finally Jenny ran to his mother, crying, her nose bleeding. Ma’am, who tended to be quite democratic about such things, did not scold Will for hitting a girl, or even for hitting someone younger than him. Instead, she had given Jenny a clean rag to staunch the bleeding and then told her if she wanted to be Admiral Dewey she had to keep her guard up. Additionally, she confided that, like the Spanish Pacific fleet, Will had a tendency to leave himself open on the right. Jenny was an apt pupil; the next time she and Will got into a scuffle, she walloped him handily.
    “Yeah, I remember,” Will said, watching as Jenny smoothed her serge skirt over her thighs. Her button-top shoes peeked out under the ruffled hem of her silk petticoat, and his eyes wanted to linger on her slim ankle. He looked away, clearing his throat. “Now, I’ve bought you a drink. So why don’t you go ahead and get lost? I’m sure Ma’am will wonder where you’ve gotten to. Sorry I can’t offer you any Sen-Sen, but there’s peppermint growing just outside the barn door if you want to chew some ...”
    She frowned at him. “What do you have against me, anyway? We used to have lots of fun together. You got a girl or something, afraid she’ll get mad at you for sitting with me up in the hayloft?”
    “No, I don’t have a girl,” Will said. “I’m twelve years old, remember?”
    “Oh, cut it out. You’re being mulish, and it doesn’t pay,” Jenny snapped. “You and I have more in common than you think. Probably more now than we ever had when we were kids.”
    Will smirked indulgently. “What do you figure we have in common?”
    “Everyone expects too little of us,” she said quickly. “You always hear people complaining about how horrible it is when others expect too much of them. But it’s worse the other way around. Isn’t it?”
    Will pondered this, then nodded in slow agreement. “But you’re an heiress. Why should anyone expect anything of you? You don’t have anything to prove. You don’t have to make a living. You just have to sit back and let everyone treat you like a queen.”
    “Treat me like a set of silver being polished up for a shop window, you mean,” Jenny grumbled. She reached for the bottle of whiskey again, but Will quickly tucked it away, mindful of her father sitting at the dinner table just a few hundred yards away.
    “Miss Murison’s is pretty good ... as girls’ schools go ...” Jenny parroted derisively. “I’ve only learned one thing in