Free Switch! by Karen Prince Page A

mean, the leopard made you?”  
    “What a nice boy,” Gogo Maya chuckled, with a touch of approval.
    The boy, Ethan, pointed a finger at his temple. “It told me, right into my head,” he practically wailed. “It threatened me.” They both looked over at Gogo Maya and Salih. The leopard lounged beside her, preening and fluffing up the white tip of his tail, looking as harmless as a domestic cat.  
    The handsome one laughed. “Don’t be lame, Ethan, you are making this up. It was just protecting the woman. It must be her pet.”
    “Familiar,” corrected Salih mischievously, getting a smothered laugh from Gogo Maya.  
    The boy snapped his head around and glared at Salih with open animosity. “You see?”
    “What?” said the handsome one.
    A group of scruffy, barefoot boys picked their way past, careful to avoid going too close to Salih, and joined the two others. They were led by a scrawny youngster in a red shirt and a filthy hat pulled low over his eyes.  
    “Ah, you are feeling better, Ethan.” He placed a hand on the forehead of the drenched one and held it there, even when the boy recoiled. “I will send some of my men to fetch my dad.”
    “Will your dad fetch my uncle?”  
    Before she could stop herself, Gogo Maya leaped up, almost choking on a pip, and cried, “No! No! Don’t fetch him! He will not believe! Things will get too complicated! I will get trapped here!”  
    She clapped a hand over her mouth. Drat , she thought, she was going to have to help now. Past experience had led Gogo Maya to be wary of grown-ups. They usually came armed with the authorities and awkward questions, and she felt in no shape to take them on, weakened as she was.  
    “We have to fetch men to help us find Joe,” a boy explained to her. He spoke kindly enough, but Gogo Maya was not about to trust him just because he was smaller than her. He had a vicious-looking machete dangling from a rope around his waist. It had dried blood on it.
    “I will help you find the boy, Joe,” she said quickly. “I know where he is. Well, nearly.”
    The boy gave her a puzzled frown. “How do you know?”
    “I just know in my bones,” she said, as evasively as she dared.
    “You mean in your bones bones or throw bones?” The boy, Ethan,   was a bit too quick off the mark for Gogo Maya, and not the most polite. He shot his friend a self-satisfied look, then said, “See, I told you she was a witch.”
    Gogo Maya glowered at him. She did not hold with rudeness, even if he had blown some sort of life magic into her. Any point in pretending to be a kindly old woman had disappeared with the mention of grown-ups. “Well, you’re perfectly right, young man. I am in fact a witch,” she told him. “Now don’t get all huffy, we’ve had a sort of... accident. I have exchanged places with your friend.”
    Ethan’s eyes darted from the red-shirt boy to the boy with the wild hair to see if they had heard her, then fixed on Gogo Maya with an incredulous stare. “How?”  
    “I switched, using the amulet.”  
    “What do you mean, switched ?” Now he looked close to tears.
    Having expected him to be smug once she admitted she was a witch, Gogo Maya felt a vague stirring of guilt that he looked so unhappy. “Well, it is difficult to explain,” she said in a more conciliatory tone. “I hold the amulet and hope to be someplace else and the opal moves me. Of course, wherever I land, the thing occupying that space will be where I was before I switch places.” She still did not hold out much hope that he would believe her.
    Surprisingly, he did. He straightened his shoulders, narrowed his eyes and went straight for the weakness in her story. “And it didn’t occur to you that whoever you changed places with might not be happy with that?”
    “Usually when I switch, Ethan, I am replaced by a rock or an animal or something,” she offered by way of an excuse, “and I never move far, but this time I seem to have been drawn by