Wizard for Hire

  © 2018 Obert Skye

  Interior illustrations by Brandon Dorman

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, ­Shadow ­Mountain®, at ­[email protected]. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of ­Shadow ­Mountain.

  Visit us at ShadowMountain.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Skye, Obert, author.

  Title: Wizard for hire / Obert Skye.

  Description: Salt Lake City, Utah : Shadow Mountain, [2018] | Summary: After fourteen-year-old Ozzy’s scientist parents have been kidnapped, Ozzy’s only help may be a classified ad that says, “Wizard for hire.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017040909 | ISBN 9781629724126 (hardbound : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Friendship—Fiction. | Wizards—Fiction | Parents—Fiction. | Missing persons—Fiction. | Brainwashing—Fiction. | LCGFT: Action and adventure fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.S62877 Wk 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040909

  Printed in the United States of America

  LSC Communications, Crawfordsville, IN

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Krista

  the girl who works magic at every turn

  and makes this world a place worth being.

  Such a Shame to Ruin This Bright, Lazy Sunny Day

  You’ve Just Never Been Out in the Woods Alone

  Evidence of What He Was Like

  Wondering Who I Am

  A Small First Glimpse

  Being Awake Never Felt Like This Before

  Get the Job Done

  Now What a Perfect World This Would Be

  Stop the Bus

  I’ll Get Off Here

  Fortunate Like You

  Well, I Hate That It’s Come to This

  Officer Friendly

  Everybody’s Talkin’ about You Now

  WFH

  In a Minute This Will All Be Coming Down

  Destiny Is Calling

  The End of an Era

  The Strangest Things Have Happened Lately

  Tell You Everything

  The Forest for the Trees

  All-Day Breakfast

  Who’s Got the Brains?

  A Plan Is Hatched

  Doyle, Doyle, Doyle, and Trouble

  A Question of Great Importance

  Breaking Curfew

  I Don’t Know What to Do

  Won’t You Look Up at the Skyline

  Relatively Sane

  A Square Window

  A Relative in the Ointment

  Bothered

  Took Everything I Have

  Shattered Magic

  The Difference in Dairy

  Try Not to Think About It

  Some Shirts Are Hard Not to Notice

  Cracking the Window

  Best Served Cold

  A Secret Rooted Out

  Asking for Favors

  Voices from Beyond

  Going Far Away

  Where Did You Go?

  I Could Take a Train

  Heavy Sleeper

  Maybe It’s Time to Believe

  Propelled Forward through Space

  Fake Personalities

  I See That There Is Evil

  Worry and Hope

  Burritos and Break-ins

  Cemetery Gates

  Trolls and Darkness

  Good from Bad

  You Are What You Read

  Struck with Wonder

  And If My Mind’s Somewhere Else

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  In the dense Oregon woods, there was a small cabin, a little wooden home with a crooked green roof and round windows. The cabin was surrounded by aspens and oaks and topped off with clouds that loved to huddle above it. Behind the home was a thin stream that ran parallel to a tall wall of black mossy stone.

  As the noon hour arrived, a small hole opened in the clouds, allowing a loose rope of sunlight to drop down. The light coiled up into a mound of warmth, flopping against the ground and lighting up the front steps of the cabin. A man with a dark mustache and thick brown hair sat on the steps. He lifted his right hand above his eyes to look up at the light. Next to the man was a woman with glowing skin and hair the color of milk chocolate. The man was Dr. Emmitt Toffy—the woman, his wife, was also a doctor, but her name was Mia.

  Two charming people sitting in front of an interesting cabin in the middle of a lush forest.

  Make that three.

  Because, next to Mia was Ozzy, their seven-year-old boy with wide, grey eyes. His complexion was dark and his hair was thick and black, like a night with no stars. At seven he was already tall for his age, but thin. He had a deep purple birthmark that covered the pointer finger on his left hand like a single-finger sheath.

  Despite the dark complexion, hair, and finger, Ozzy’s face was giving the sunlight some competition.

  The boy smiled at his parents as he played with a plastic dragon on the steps near his mother.

  “I never get tired of this sunshine,” Ozzy’s father said, still looking up. “I have an affection for light.”

  “It is wonderful,” his mother observed. “The forest is perfect, Emmitt. I’m afraid I don’t miss the East at all.”

  Two months before, they had moved with Ozzy into the isolated Oregon forest. Emmitt was a neuroscientist. He was also an inventor. Mia was a brilliant theoretical psychologist, studying how people thought and acted and dreamed. They had lived successfully back East for many years, but they had recently sold everything and, under the cloak of darkness, taken Ozzy across the country to Oregon.

  The cabin they had purchased was hidden from the world. There were no roads leading up to it or even trails. They received no mail, had no visitors, and since they had arrived, Ozzy had seen no one other than his parents. The inside of their wooden home was filled from floor to ceiling with boxes that had yet to be opened or organized. The only place that had any semblance of composure was Ozzy’s space. His room was in the attic, which was accessible by climbing twenty thin wooden stairs. Engraved on the front of each stair were dozens of small black stars that made it look like Ozzy was traveling the cosmos to reach his room. Other than that, the inside of the house looked like a convention of cardboard and chaos and it didn’t seem as if the doctors were in any hurry to remedy that. They had unpacked only the essentials for the moment.

  “The boxes can wait,” Dr. Emmitt always said. “Today is about what’s already unpacked.”

  The family had spent their first few weeks walking through the trees and planting a garden back by the stream. Ozzy’s parents taught him how to do things for himself and let the boy read to them to improve his mind. At night he would be tucked into bed in his small attic room, where a single round window let in moonbeams and lit the space in a magical light. While Ozzy slept, his father would work in the basement and his mother would put pen to paper in the ground-floor office, both laboring over things that Ozzy knew nothing about. But today there was no laboring, just sunshine and a bit of resting on the steps after a small hike.

  The image was idyllic—a mother and father and their small child on the porch steps of a quaint mou
ntain cabin. There were city families that would have paid good money to have their pictures taken in such a scene—a family portrait they could show their friends as proof of how close they were to nature and each other. For the Toffys, however, it wasn’t an act—it was their life. They were safe and hidden away from something of which Ozzy was completely unaware.

  The grey-eyed child moved his plastic dragon into the soil of a potted flower on the porch. He pillaged the bright azaleas.

  “Ozzy,” his mother said with a warm smile, “your dragon might enjoy running through the stream more than dirtying its talons here in the mud. And you’re old enough to play behind the house by yourself.”

  “Just don’t go beyond sight of the cabin,” his father said.

  Ozzy grinned. He collected his dragon and, like a small, independent adult, walked around the house and behind the cabin.

  The stream wasn’t more than a couple of feet wide and a few inches deep, but it ran all year and filled the air with the constant burble of tumbling water. It originated from a spring near a dark stone wall and wove through the nearby trees and down away from the cabin. The dark wall was covered in moss and the stain of a million years of wet skies. Animals of all kinds gathered often near the water to drink. A skinny brown fox who had been doing just that saw the boy and darted off.

  Ozzy knelt and set his dragon in the water.

  A cold trickle of liquid washed around his small fingers and he shivered. The toy stomped through the water and over the slick rocks.

  Ozzy missed his home in New York, but memories of it were already beginning to fade—the few friends he’d had, the store on the corner that sold cheese and bread, Jonathan the doorman who always gave him sweets.

  The dragon splashed through the water as Ozzy created new and mossier memories.

  “Attack, ambush . . .”

  Ozzy heard his mother scream from the front of the cabin.

  The young boy dropped his toy and kneeled tall.

  His mother screamed again.

  He could hear his father shouting and unknown voices shouting back.

  Ozzy stood up and ran. His steps were uneven as he bolted forward in what looked like a prolonged stumble. He reached the front of the house and saw several men in green clothing. Some were in the cabin. Two of them were pulling his parents into the trees and away from the scene.

  “Mom!” Ozzy screamed.

  “Ozzy!” she yelled.

  Ozzy froze; fear made it impossible for him to move. He was too scared to help his parents, but there was no way he could turn and run away. His feet felt like roots planted deep in the ground and hardened from age.

  “Ozzy!” his dad screamed. “Ozzy—”

  One of the men put a rag over Emmitt’s mouth. Another did the same to Mia. Ozzy’s parents thrashed and kicked, but their mouths were covered and they were no match for the hulking men who had them bound. Ozzy’s father was struck behind the head and collapsed. Mia saw the strike and lost consciousness from the horror of it all.

  The men picked up the two Toffys and threw them over their shoulders like rolled-up rugs. Then, as if they were subtle brushstrokes on the edge of a painted forest, they faded into the trees and were no longer discernible.

  Two of the green men stepped out onto the porch and spotted Ozzy.

  “Hey!” one of them yelled. “Stay right there!”

  The man yelling was thin, with a black beard and a hooked nose. Ozzy stared as the man slowly began to move closer. The look on Blackbeard Hooknose’s face was sinister. The other man was short, with red hair and an uneasy look.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” Hooknose said calmly. “Don’t move.”

  Ozzy shivered violently and his feet broke free from the soil. The two men lunged forward as Ozzy spun around and took off running. He ran back behind the cabin, across the stream, and scurried up over the black wall. Once there, Ozzy jumped down under a fallen tree and hid himself beneath the branches of a feathery bush.

  He could hear Hooknose stomping around nearby.

  “Come out, boy! We won’t hurt you.”

  Ozzy stayed perfectly still.

  The red-haired man moved closer.

  Through one of the cracks in the bush Ozzy watched the men searching for him. He closed his eyes and clamped his teeth, wishing he could disappear and reappear someplace safe.

  He opened his eyes to discover that his wish hadn’t come true.

  The men yelled a few more times before Blackbeard hollered out, “Forget it, Eric. Let’s search the home.”

  “What about the kid?” the short man asked.

  The hole in the clouds above cinched up and took every bit of sunlight and warmth with it.

  “Leave him. We’ve got the doctors.”

  Ozzy didn’t dare even quiver.

  Tears dropped from his eyes like wet coins. They plunked softly into the pool of water collecting in the dirt around him, creating a hopeless wishing well.

  The men climbed over the stone wall and returned to the cabin to do some pillaging of their own. Ozzy stayed where he was, too frightened to move. Eventually the sun went down and all sounds of anyone in or around the cabin ceased.

  The world was silent.

  The boy worked his way out of his hiding place and, slowly and cautiously, snuck back to the front of the cabin.

  What he found was sickening. There were boxes and papers tossed all over the front porch. The door was open and he could see that inside the home had been ransacked as well. His parents were nowhere to be seen.

  Ozzy stood like a small broken tree. He hung his head and cried.

  If anyone had been there to witness the scene, their hearts would have broken for him. But no one was there. In fact, Ozzy was very much alone, and he would remain that way for quite some time.

  It’s terrible to be lonely.

  It’s even worse to be lonely, seven, and on your own.

  Ozzy was left for dead. He was a seven-year-old child in a thick, lonely forest with no real knowledge of where he was or what he should do. His only desire was to see his parents again and that desire was not going to be fulfilled anytime soon. He would have buried his head in the rich brown soil and given up, but his will to survive kicked in just enough for him to drink a little water and eat a little food.

  The cabin had been properly torn apart by the men who had taken Ozzy’s parents. All the boxes on the main floor and the basement had been rifled through. And his small attic room at the top of the starry staircase had been turned inside out.

  It was a rustic home with no electricity and because of that the nights were cold and dark, and fear like Ozzy’s seven-year old brain couldn’t even imagine would take over until, exhausted, he would fall into a sleep that offered no comfort.

  Each day, however, the pain lessened in tiny, unfelt increments. As months slipped by, the relief became more measurable. The nights weren’t as frightening—in fact, they became somewhat familiar. And his slumber offered dreams that would replay memories of his parents’ faces and give him reason to smile in his sleep.

  In the light of day, Ozzy would sit on the porch steps waiting for his parents to return. When that grew too painful he would search through the boxes he was strong enough to move and open. In the basement, he found crate after crate of dried and canned food. His parents, it seemed, had been planning to stay hidden and fed for a very long time.

  On the main floor, he pushed and shoved the boxes to make a maze of sorts.

  Outside of the house, the bushes grew lush and wild. They began to consume and cloak the exterior. By the time Ozzy was ten, the small cabin resembled more a large leafy knoll than an abode. The trees and bushes around the home had begun to work their roots and branches through the walls and windows. The invading growth made the place look like a home that a wizard—or a talking ­beaver—mi
ght live in, and camouflaged it nicely. A stranger walking by wouldn’t notice there was even a home there. Of course, due to the remote location, no strangers ever walked by—or even near.

  By the time Ozzy turned twelve, the cloaked house was just that.

  Now, as night began to fall, Ozzy stood up on the porch stairs and looked into the sky. He was wearing a white T-shirt that had belonged to his father and shorts that he had made from a pair of his father’s pants. He wore no shoes. Because of that, his feet were tough. He could easily walk barefoot on the stones around his home. His black hair was long and his grey eyes had darkened a bit over time.

  Ozzy felt at home by himself and almost content. He had lived off of stockpiled food and what he had grown in the garden. He had no way of knowing how unusual it was for someone to have a basement full of canned food. He thought perhaps every boy had their parents taken from them, that it was par for the course to live alone in a vegetation-cloaked cabin without any influence from the outside world. He figured he would grow old, meet a girl, have a son, and then one day be taken away from that child.

  The circle of life.

  Ozzy turned and walked into the cloaked house. Like most nights, he planned to read by candlelight until he was tired. It was no small miracle that Ozzy was a voracious reader when his parents were taken. Because of that, he had gone through all the books that were on bookshelves and any he’d found in boxes. His vocabulary and understanding had grown in leaps and bounds. His parents had been obsessed with the mind; many of the books they owned were medical or philosophical in nature. Recently, however, Ozzy had discovered a few large boxes filled with titles he hadn’t seen before. Many of them dealt with science and invention and psychology, but in one of the heaviest boxes he found books of adventure and fantasy—Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The words were all more imaginative and fun than the books he had been reading. And the stories took him away from the cloaked house and into castles and caves and spaceships that were exciting, magical, and improbable.

  The books had also given Ozzy something to hope for. Reading them made it seem entirely possible that he, too, had a gift of some sort, a power or wondrous ability. He just needed to figure it out. He had begun writing a short list of gifts he could eliminate since he had already tried and failed. So far the list consisted of flight, super speed, and whistling.