# Deal's Worth

Part 17 of 22 (1,657 words)

"You'll get used to it," Alicia said.

"I don't want to get used to it, I liked it." Then his face changed, and Jeff saw the worry arrive all at once. Biscuit turned his head, closed his eyes, and breathed in through his nose. Long and slow.

His eyes snapped open.

"Yogi had eggs," he said. "Over easy."

Yogi was quiet for a moment. "That was three days ago."

A grin split Biscuit's face so wide it looked like it hurt. "Still got it." He turned toward the kitchen. "And there's a bag of chips open in the pantry that somebody said they didn't open."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," said Alicia, who had opened the chips.

"You could've wished me switchable." He looked down at his hands, then back at Jeff, and the grin didn't leave, but something rueful sat down next to it. "Human and dog. Whenever I wanted."

Jeff opened his mouth, closed it, and pointed at him.

"Yeah," he admitted. "That would've been the smarter wish."

"Okay," Alicia said, and clapped once, and the whole house seemed to change gears. "Weapons. Stuff. Now."

"Attic," Jeff said, already moving.

"Attic!"

"Do I need clothes?" Biscuit called, following them down the hall with the quilt dragging behind him like a royal train.

"YES," Jeff said. "Obviously. Stay away from me until you have pants."

"Whose pants?"

Jeff yanked down the attic ladder. Alicia was up it in four quick steps, her head and shoulders vanishing into the dusty dark, and then her voice drifted down, flat with realization.

"It's not up here."

"What do you mean it's not up here?"

"We moved it all after the raccoon thing."

"What raccoon thing?"

"The raccoon thing, Jeff."

Jeff closed his eyes briefly as the memory of the raccoon thing arrived. "Bedroom."

"Bedroom!"

Alicia came down the ladder fast and cracked the top of her head on the frame of the hatch on the way. It made a real sound, a solid wooden thunk.

"Huh," she said, mildly, and kept going.

Jeff's own scalp prickled in sympathy, a reflex for a kind of hurt she'd never have to collect on. He'd been married to her for years, and he still flinched every single time.

In the bedroom, Alicia dove into the closet and came out with an armful of red-and-white fabric, which she lobbed past Jeff into the hallway. "Biscuit! Those are Jeff's pajamas I shrunk in the dryer."

"That's where those went," Jeff said.

"They went to a better place."

"They were my good pajamas."

"And now they're his good pajamas."

From the hallway came the sounds of a boy fighting pajama pants for the first time in his life and losing several early rounds. Jeff pulled a hoodie out of his dresser and tossed it out the door without looking. "And that."

"This smells like you," Biscuit called.

"It's my hoodie."

"It's nice. It's just a lot."

Biscuit reappeared in the doorway wearing pajama pants that stopped a few inches above his ankles, a hoodie that went down to the middle of his thighs, and the fiercely dignified expression of someone who knows exactly how he looks and has decided to be above it. The drawstring hung loose. The waistband was already sliding.

Alicia crossed the room, knelt, and tied the drawstring in a firm double knot. "There. Now they'll stay up."

"Thanks." He peered down at the knot. "How'd you do that so fast? Fingers are hard."

"Practice."

Biscuit wiggled all ten of his and looked at them with deep suspicion.

The bag wasn't under the bed, so it was in the basement, and the basement was dark, because the bulb at the bottom of the stairs had been dead for a month and a half and both of them had decided, independently and without discussion, that it was the other one's job.

Halfway down the stairs, the tattoo on the back of Jeff's neck woke up.

It always did in the dark. A faint gold halo, glowing soft through the collar of his hoodie, and lower, behind the fabric over the right side of his stomach, the dim outline of a smiley face with a single red tear. Not bright. Just enough to see by if you didn't mind a little atmosphere.

"Your neck's on," Alicia said.

"I know my neck's on."

"I'm just saying, you're very easy to find down here."

"Find the bag."

She found the bag.

It was nothing to look at. A cloth sack the size of a pillowcase, with thin shoulder straps that had been repaired twice with thread that didn't match. Alicia shrugged it on, slid her whole arm into it up to the shoulder, and started naming things.

"Healing shards." Her hand came out holding a velvet pouch that clinked, and she tucked it into her hoodie pocket. Arm back in. "Coins. Rope." A coil of rope came out. She looked at it and put it back. "Rope." Another coil came out. "Why do we have so much rope?"

"You said rope is always useful."

"I did say that." She put the rope back. "Why did you listen to me."

Jeff dragged a heavy wooden box off the bottom shelf and flipped the lid. Crystal shards lay inside on old towels, broken pieces of a dozen different formations, each one and each of their auras faintly glowing its own color in the dark: amber, frost-blue, a sullen red, a green so bright it looked fake. He started filling his pockets, but he did it the way he'd learned to, holding each piece up against his own finger first. Anything shorter than that was just a very pretty paperweight. He knew because he had a drawer full of very pretty paperweights.

"Red," he muttered. "Blue. Blue. Too short. Too short. Why did I keep this one, it's a pebble."

"Sentimental value," Alicia said from inside the bag.

"It doesn't do anything."

"That's what makes it sentimental."

The sword and the staff lived in the shed, because Alicia had decided a long time ago that blades and ice didn't belong in the same house where people slept. They went out the back door at a dead sprint, across the yard, through the long grass, and Jeff wrenched the shed door open so hard it bounced off the wall and nearly closed on him again.

Alicia's staff hung on two pegs on the left wall: pale, smooth with a knot of blue-white crystal that breathed cold into the air around it. She took it down and spun it once, a quick, familiar flourish, and frost bloomed across the shed window in a thin fern pattern.

Jeff's sword hung on the right, in a plain black sheath.

He wrapped his hand around the grip, and the blade drank from him. It always did, first thing. A thread of warmth pulled out of his palm and up into the steel, patient and hungry, like something waking up and reaching for breakfast.

"Easy," Jeff told it, and buckled it on. "You'll eat later."

"You talk to your sword," Alicia said.

"You talk to your bag."

"My bag listens."

When they turned around, Biscuit was standing in the shed doorway in his too-short pajamas and his too-long hoodie, and he'd found shoes somewhere, and they were Alicia's.

"I'm coming," he said. "Right?"

"No," Jeff said.

"I have magic. And I have a nose. I can smell a dragon from—"

"Everyone can smell that dragon, bud. It's the size of a church."

"I'm fast."

"You were fast on four legs. Your two legs are about twelve minutes old." Jeff put a hand on top of the kid's head. He had to reach up to do it now, a little, and that was going to take some getting used to. "Stay here."

Biscuit stared at him.

"Did you just tell me to stay?"

Jeff heard it the same instant everyone else did.

"...In the human way," he said.

"Guard the house," Jeff said, recovering what little dignity he had left. "Watch the TV. If anything weird happens, remember it."

"Everything on that TV is weird."

"Then remember the weirdest stuff."

Biscuit looked like he wanted to keep arguing. Then his eyes went to Alicia, fully armed and practically vibrating, and to Jeff, whose irises were still blazing neon yellow, and something grown-up passed over his face for just a moment, and he let it go.

"I gotta show my friends," he said instead, a little wistfully. "They're not gonna believe this."

"IS IT STILL GOING?" Jeff yelled toward the house, forgetting for a second where Biscuit was standing.

Biscuit, directly in front of him, winced and put his hands over his ears. "Yes. And ow. It's still going."

They found Yogi in the backyard, standing in the sun beside the shed with his hands folded behind his back, exactly where nobody had left him.

Alicia hurried across the grass. "Can't Jeff just wish us over there?"

"Can't wish you anywhere," Jeff said. "Only me. It's a teleport."

"He's right," Biscuit said from the back steps. He had the book from the side table open in both hands, and he was turning the pages with his thumbs with an expression of pure, private joy. "'Any wish to teleport a conscious thinking existence is not able to be granted, except regarding teleporting oneself.' Page—" he turned another page just to do it again, "—dude. Pages are so easy with thumbs."

"So we do a portal," Alicia said.

"We do a portal."

Jeff turned to Yogi, and all at once the rush went out of him and something quieter came in behind it.

"This is the last one," he said.

"I know."

"You were a good genie."

"I was a great genie. I stood in the woods, flew upside down, and didn't hit anybody who didn't have it coming." Yogi tipped his head toward the house.