A Dash of Magic: A Bliss Novel (14 page)

“Your dad and I are only halfway through our list of ingredients to collect,” Purdy said, “so we’re going to go out now and hunt. Balthazar is still back at the hotel, translating. You just sit tight, keep an eye on Leigh, and we’ll be back in an hour to watch you bake.” Purdy looked down and noticed the ball of brown fur huddled in Rose’s sweatshirt pocket. “Oh, Jacques! You came back! Even though the cat warned you not to! This is true bravery, right here.”

“I am a spy, after all,” Jacques replied.

“All right,” said Purdy. “I’m off.” She kissed Rose on the forehead and disappeared through the room’s big doors.

Sage, Leigh, and Ty watched Purdy go. Sage instantly began fidgeting, which Gus did not appreciate. “I’m bored,” said Sage. “What are we supposed to do for an hour before the bake-off starts?”

Across the black-and-white-checkered aisle, with TV and film cameras still documenting her every move, their aunt Lily was poring over a sheet of paper, probably the recipe for whatever AIRY dessert she’d planned. At her side was the Shrunken Man, a leather satchel in the shape of a water jug hanging from his shoulder. The bag looked full of something, but Rose couldn’t tell whether or not it was the Booke.

Rose thought that could mean that the Booke was alone and unguarded. She could picture it sitting there on Lily’s ottoman on the Fantasy Floor, ripe for the taking.

“Let’s sneak into Lily’s room again and take the Booke back,” she said, expecting her brothers to jump at the opportunity for mischief. Of course, Rose herself was never out for mischief. But she doubted her ability to produce the perfect slice of Angel’s Breath Food Cake. “What if I mess up? I can’t risk losing the Booke forever over a baking mistake. I think we should just go take it back.”

“I shan’t return to the Fantasy Floor!” cried Jacques.

Ty looked hesitant. “I don’t know,
mi hermana
. We only have an hour.”

“Besides,” Sage added, “you have the recipe for the Angel’s Breath Food Cake, and you already have the ghostly gust to go with it. This one’s kinda in the bag. Why risk everything right now? We don’t even know if the Booke is in the hotel room.”

“But what if I’m not qualified to do this!” Rose cried. “It’s too risky to put it all on me—I’m not that good a baker.”

“But you
are
, Rose. Besides, how would we even get in?” Sage asked. “Lily and the Shrunken Man aren’t going to make the same mistake twice. They know we were there. They know
why
we were there. This time, they’ll totally see us coming.”

“And how will you ensure that Lily and the tiny one stay put for the duration of the hour?” Gus asked.

Rose looked at her little sister, Leigh, and then at Miriam and Muriel, who were sitting in an opera box on the side of the room, looking bored. She looked over at Lily, who was consulting with the Shrunken Man, then noticed that Lily kept a tall stack of 8-x-11 glossy photos on her table. “I think I have a plan.”

“I don’t know about this, Rose,” Sage said. “Trying to steal the Booke back just seems
wrong
.”

“It’s my fault that she has the Booke at all,” Rose said through gritted teeth. She would have said more, but she was afraid she might cry. Everything that was wrong in her life, everything that was wrong in Calamity Falls—it all came back to Rose’s mistake. She’d trusted Lily. Rose would do anything to set things right. “I
have
to get it back.”

Ty stared at Rose for a minute. “There’s a little vein in your forehead that looks like it’s gonna blow, Rosita.” He turned to Sage and Jacques. “What the heck, right? Let’s give it a whirl. For Rose. So her head doesn’t explode.”

Rose watched as Miriam and Muriel Desjardins fought their way through the cameras around Lily’s kitchen and approached her as she worked at her baking table.

“Lily!” Miriam called. “After we were eliminated from the competition yesterday, we were approached by representatives of the Orphanage of Paris. The children have all requested the same thing for their birthdays: your autograph! We were hoping you could take some time out of your busy schedule to sign . . . oh, two hundred photographs or so!”

Lily glanced up, a look of irritation crossing her face. Then she remembered that she was surrounded by cameras. Almost magically, her frown turned into a gleaming smile. “Of course!” she lilted, right into the cameras. “
Anything
for orphans.”

Lily pulled a Sharpie marker from her apron and set to work autographing glossy photographs of her glossy face—two hundred of them, to be exact.

“I don’t think Lily and the Shrunken Man will be going anywhere for the next hour,” Ty said. “Good idea,
mi hermana.”

“Thanks,” Rose said. “Was it hard to get Miriam and Muriel to do it?”

Ty’s grin grew wider. He primped his spiky hair. “Nope. They were suspicious, of course. They wanted to know why I was asking them to do such a strange thing. I told them it was a top-secret mission, and they got even more suspicious. But then I used a one-two punch,” he said. “‘The Wounded Athlete’ look followed by ‘The Lost Woodsman.’ Never fails.”

“How’d you really do it?” Rose asked.

Ty looked sheepishly at the floor. “I gave them fifty bucks.”

While Gus and Sage stood vigil in the expo center kitchen, Ty, Rose, Leigh, and Jacques hurried back to the Hôtel de Notre Dame.

When they got to the lobby, it was time for Leigh to do her part.

“You ready, Leigh?” Rose asked, setting her down.

“If you’re assuring me that this is the only way I will ever get to enter the magnificent Lily Le Fay’s suite, then yes, I am ready.”

Rose and Ty took a seat on a couch by the elevators, with Jacques in Rose’s pocket, and watched as Leigh toddled up to the front desk.

“Hello!” Leigh called to the clerk. She banged a fist against the front of the counter. “I have misplaced my key, and I’d like another.”

The concierge glanced around in confusion, then leaned over his mahogany desk to see who could possibly be speaking. He was surprised to find a child in a dirty
101 Dalmatians
T-shirt. “Hello there, little one!” the concierge said. “Where’s your mother?”

Leigh huffed. “Speak to me with the proper respect, young man! I am a guest in your hotel and a personage of great renown!”

The concierge smiled. “Of course you are. And what room are you in?”

“What room am I in?” Leigh repeated, indignant. “Do not condescend to me, young man! I’m not in a
room
at all! I’m in one of your exclusive suites on the Fantasy Floor!”

“You . . . are?” the concierge asked.

“Oh, this is rich,” Leigh announced to the entire lobby. “Do you judge me simply because of my reduced stature? Can no one see past my diminutive form to the sterling mind contained within? No! You are all betrayed by your eyes! No one recognizes the Countess Juniper du Frost! The wife of the renowned Count Ashcroft du Frost, assistant to the great Lily Le Fay! I am staying on the Fantasy Floor with my mustachioed husband, in Miss Le Fay’s suite, and I have misplaced my key! Kindly please give me another!”

In the sudden silence of the lobby, everyone could hear the concierge swallow. “I am so sorry, Mrs. du Frost! It will not happen again.” Smiling to the assembled onlookers, he ceremoniously reached down and stuffed an enormous brass key into Leigh’s outstretched hand.

Leigh nodded curtly. “That is the level of sublime service I have come to expect in my hoteliers.” She bowed and swept her hand wide with a flourish. “I’ll see that you receive a commendation from your supervisor!”

Then she spun on her heel and marched back to where her sister and brother waited by the elevator.

She smiled sweetly. “There,” she said. “Now get me upstairs. I want to smell Lily’s perfume as it permeates the living room.”

Moments later, as Rose keyed
B O O K E
onto the keypad of the Fantasy Floor elevator bank, she was gripped by a terrible sense of foreboding.

Maybe this is a bad idea,
she thought.
Maybe I’ve gone off the deep end, asking my little sister to pretend to be a famous countess when I’m not even sure the Booke is going to be there. Maybe I’ve gone too far.

Ty flicked Rose in the shoulder. “Hey, you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” she snapped.

Rose held her breath all the way up to the seventeenth floor.

Soon the four of them—Rose, Ty, Leigh, and Jacques, in Rose’s pocket—stood before the locked door of Lily’s suite.

“Jacques,” said Rose, “would you mind taking a peek through your hole to make sure there’s no one in the room?”

“No problem,” said Jacques. He leaped from the pocket of Rose’s sweatshirt and scurried across the floor. “Oh no!” he cried once he’d reached the baseboard. “They have plugged up my private entrance!”

“That’s not a good sign,” Ty said. “How could they have known about Jacques?”

“I’m sure it was the Shrunken Man. A little spy can smell another little spy a mile away,” Leigh said sagely as Jacques scrambled up Rose’s leg and curled in her pocket once more.

Ty shrugged. “We’re here now.”

Rose nodded. She slid the key into the lock. “Here goes nothing.”

Rose turned the key and swung open the door. Before she could take a single step, however, Leigh ran inside and plopped onto a purple velvet couch sitting next to the ottoman. “That performance has left me utterly drained! Naptime for
moi
!” she announced, promptly falling asleep.

Rose and Ty looked at each other, then crossed to the ottoman where they had spotted the Shrunken Man and the Booke—but the ottoman was empty, save for a small, cream-colored envelope.

Rose reached down and picked up the envelope.

Immediately, a piercing buzzer rang out.

“What’s that, a fire drill?” Ty cried.

Rose pulled a slip of paper from the envelope and read it aloud. “‘Surprise, burglars! This is a trap. If you’re reading this, then you’re about to be on TV! Love, Lily.’”

“What does that mean?” Ty asked.

Even over the piercing wail of the alarm, Rose heard a rustling in the bedroom. “Quick, hide behind the couch!” she cried. She and Ty hurtled over the back of the purple velvet couch just as a camera crew darted into the living room.

Rose breathed a sigh of relief—until she remembered that Leigh was sleeping in plain view on the other side of the couch.

A
trap!

The sofa Leigh had fallen asleep on, and behind which Ty and Rose were hiding, wasn’t like a regular sofa at all. It was a long, wrought-iron bench with an intricate filigree pattern covering the back to which purple velvet cushions had been tied. By peering through the spaces between the purple velvet couch cushions, Rose and Ty could see what was going on.

Just after Rose and Ty had leaped behind the couch, three men had run into the living room. They had been lurking in the suite’s bedroom, waiting for someone to trip the alarm. The men were dressed in jeans and fleece jackets of various colors. They all had beards. One held a long pole with a fuzzy gray microphone dangling from the end, one carried a hefty camera on his shoulder like a bazooka, and the other—the scrawniest of the three—followed behind with loops of electrical cords dangling from his arms.

Rose crossed her fingers. Maybe the men would think Leigh was an extralarge baby doll and ignore her.

But the man with the hanging microphone lowered it toward Leigh, tickling her ear with its gray fuzz.

As fervently as Leigh loved to nap, she hated to be tickled even more fervently. She bolted up and swatted at the scratchy microphone like it was a swarm of locusts. “Stop, fiend!” she cried.

The fleeced man holding the microphone stumbled backward.

“We—we—we . . . caught you!” he stammered. “We caught you breaking into Lily Le Fay’s fantasy suite. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Rose glanced nervously at Ty. Lately Leigh had had a tendency to be too truthful, and in this case, too truthful might get them into serious trouble.

Lie, little sister!
Rose wanted to scream.
Lie your head off!

Leigh was shaking her head in disgust. “Breaking in?” she said incredulously. “Breaking in! That is rich, men. Extrarich. Nay, nay. Why should I break in when I’ve got the key?”

Leigh reached into the front pocket of her
101 Dalmatians
T-shirt and pulled out the brass key the concierge had so apologetically handed her just minutes before.

The jaws of the cameraman, microphone man, and wire-wrangler man dropped simultaneously.

“That’s right, gentlemen. I am the smallest woman in the world, and I am waiting here for a rendezvous with the smallest man in the world. I was hoping to ease some of the puffiness under my eyes by taking a nap, but since you’ve so rudely interrupted my regimen of facial restoration, I’ll have no choice but to meet my paramour looking like a droopy old sack!

“I see you’ve been recording the proceedings,” Leigh continued, addressing the man with the camera on his shoulder. “If you dare show any of your pitiful ‘footage’ on television, my lawyer will extract millions of dollars from your low-rent production company and put you out of business.”