Free Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) by Ysabeau S. Wilce Page B

There would be editorials published, and questions asked in the Warlord’s Grand Council. That’s what happened after the rat-bite incident—the whole City talked of nothing else. After a lot of hullabaloo, Lord Axacaya promised to take care of the problem, and he did, with an Anti-Rat Sigil or something, and since then the City has been remarkably rat-free.
    I peered over the rim of the tub at the potty. It sits up on a little wooden platform, thronelike. The lid was down, and surely it was only my imagination that, for an instant, it looked as though it was quivering—as though something inside wanted to get out.
Was
it my imagination? The longer I stared at it, the more the porcelain lid seemed to wiggle.
    I stood up with a splash and grabbed my towel. The potty lid was firmly down—the quivering had been all due to my anxiety and the only ripples in the tub were those made by my hasty exit. Still, I toweled off hastily, and as I left the bathroom, I pulled the door firmly shut, just in case.
    “You’ve gotten rid of the smell of liver and smoke,” Valefor allowed, still lounging on my bed, “but the failure is still strong. I can’t stand that smell. Maybe you should sleep on the settee?”
    “It’s my bed.
You
can sleep somewhere else.”
    “Don’t be mean, Flora,” Val said, not moving.
    I hung my towel on the fire-fender and, after fishing
The Eschata
and the apple pies out of my bag, climbed into bed and slid the door shut, so that Valefor and I were snug and hidden away. Even if a tentacle
did
come out of the drains, and
did
find its way down the hallway and through my bedroom door, it wouldn’t find me, for my cupboard bed vanishes behind a paneled wall when the door is closed.
    “Do you know anything about tentacles, Valefor?” I asked. Valefor’s glow was thin and wavering but it was enough to read by. I opened
The Eschata
to the Entity Spotter Appendix, and began to page through to the Ts. The pies were delicious; Poppy really knows how to make a proper piecrust—flaky and crisp. My piecrusts always turn out soggy.
    “Tentacles?” Valefor said, yawning. He had taken all the pillows and piled them up behind him, and I noticed he was clutching the pink plushy pig that someone, apparently under the impression that I was turning four instead of fourteen, had given me for my Catorcena. “Wiggly things. Sometimes they have suckers. Sometimes they glow. Don’t bogart all the pies, Flora. I’m hungry”
    “After all that toffee?” I said, but I passed him a pie.
The Eschata’s
entry for
tentacle
said:
A longflexible fleshy appendage used as a sensory organ or appendage. Can be tipped with suckers, barbs, hooks, or luminescent pads. Can be found singularly, or in multiples. In small doses, a delicious snack. Larger—very bad news.
    “What entities have tentacles, Val?”
    Valefor said, spraying crumbs, “Well, that last time I saw him, Virguex, Sucker of Souls, had tentacles.”
    I flipped to
Virguex,
who turned out to be a tenth-level apoplectic entity, who, as his name suggested, liked to suck people’s souls away via a long hollow tongue with a barb on the end. First he pierced your neck with this tongue, and then he slurped. Yuck. Virguex did not sound like the kind of entity you would want to meet in a dark alley at deepest midnight unless you were armed with the Semiote Verb
To Smite.
    Fortunately, Virguex was not my guy, as the Entity Spotter soon made clear. When I finished reading Virguex’s entry, the black letters on the page began to jiggle and wiggle, unraveling to become one long black thread that reworked itself into an image: a mug shot of an ugly dude with jagged fangs, a domelike head covered with short wormy tentacles, and a lolling tongue that was so long he could have tied a knot in it and worn it as a cravat.
    “Not him,” I said.
    “Hmmm,” Valefor said. “If I were more myself—a little less hungry—my memory might be a little better, Flora Segunda. That pie