How (Not) to Play with Magic (A Cindy Eller Short Story Prequel) (Cindy Eller Snack) by Elizabeth A Reeves Page A

bakery in one hour, and I really didn’t want to have to pry this out of the mutual grasps of my littlest sisters.
    “Um,” Starrie repeated.
    They glanced at each other and mumbled something.
    “What?” I demanded.
    “We accidentally turned Alex into a dog,” they repeated in unison.
    I dug into the freezer to keep myself from blowing up at my sisters. My roommate, Jessi, had come home with a new brand of ice cream. It was labeled ‘SweetDreams’. I really hoped it lived up to its name, because what I was facing right now was a total nightmare.
    I yanked the top off of the pint and grabbed a spoon, still avoiding the panicked expressions of my sisters.
    “Let me get this straight,” I said around my first mouthful of ice cream. It was really good—some kind of chocolate mango concoction that really hit the spot. I swallowed my mouthful and focused my glare at the twins. “You were messing around with magic that you have no business performing at your age, and ‘accidentally’ turned our stepfather—latest stepfather—into a dog?”
    “He’s a border collie,” Starrie said helpfully.
    “He makes a really awesome dog,” Rainey added. “Better than he was as a stepfather.”
    I rubbed my head as I felt the beginnings of a headache that had nothing to do with brain freeze.
    “You are not going to keep Mom’s latest husband,” I muttered, “as a pet!”
    The twins looked crestfallen.
    “How could this happen?” I demanded. “What were you trying to do?”
    “Well,” Starrie said reluctantly, “you know how Alex is always barking at us.”
    “Giving orders as if he was our real dad,” Rainey added sullenly.
    I dove into another bite of ice cream to keep myself from reminding them that their real dad was in magical lockdown for ‘Loki level’ infractions. My mother had bitten off more than even she could handle with that husband.
    Not that anyone would ever suggest to my mother that there was anything she couldn’t handle.
    “All we wanted to do,” Starrie whined, “is make him really bark—like a dog—whenever he started ordering us around.”
    I pinned her with a look. I was pretty sure that this had all been Starrie’s idea. Rainey, as usual, had just gotten dragged along in the carnage.
    Not that the idea wasn’t completely hilarious and spot on. I had to eat more ice cream to keep my lips from twitching.
    I also had a hunch that the orders my latest stepfather had been given were probably along the lines of, ‘go clean your rooms!’ and didn’t really deserve the kind of punishment the twins had dished out.
    “Where is he now?” I demanded.
    “Outside,” the girls chorused.

 

     

    Chapter Two
     
     
    Alex Sanders, my stepfather, really made a great dog, I decided.
    He sat patiently on the doorstep of the house my roommates and I rented together. When I opened the door, he thumped his tail on the ground in a friendly way.
    I would have scratched his ears if it hadn’t been so weird. He was my stepfather, after all.
    Alex made a pretty border collie, with a bright expression in his dark brown eyes with a framing black and white coat.
    As a man, Alex wasn’t much of anything. He was, for lack of a better word, dull.
    “Are you sure we can’t keep him?” Starrie pleaded.
    “Mom won’t let us have a dog,” Rainey added, “but maybe she’d let us keep this one.”
    I sighed. “Girls,” I reminded them. “Alex isn’t a real dog! He’s a person! You can’t just go around turning people into animals because you like animals more than you like people!”
    I saw Starrie mutter something about me always changing men into toads, but my glare quelled even her… temporarily.
    Starrie and Rainey had been born with some pretty powerful magic—and it all seemed to relate to animals in some way. We had despaired of Starrie ever learning to talk like a human, because she’d been born knowing how to talk to any animal in the world.
    “Alex,” I told my furry stepfather.