Ursula Vernon Read online

  This one’s for all the coffee shops in Pittsboro, North Carolina, where the great majority of the Dragonbreath books have been written. Without bottomless cups of coffee and extra cream, Danny would be much less zany.

  DIAL BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Published by The Penguin Group • Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa • Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2012 by Ursula Vernon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vernon, Ursula.

  When fairies go bad / by Ursula Vernon. p. cm. — (Dragonbreath ; 7)

  Summary: Danny’s mother has disappeared into a fairy ring growing in her backyard vegetable garden, and Danny and his friends Wendell and Christiana must go to Faerie to try to save her.

  ISBN 978-1-101-59137-6

  [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Fairies—Fiction. 3. Dragons—Fiction. 4. Iguanas—Fiction. 5. Humorous stories.] I. Title. PZ7.V5985Whe 2012

  [Fic]—dc23 2011048053

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright

  MUSHROOM INVASION

  THE MOM-NAPPING

  A REAL NIGHTMARE

  THE DRAGONBREATH WAY

  SECRET OF THE SPOONS

  BACK ON THE BUS

  STRANGE NEW WORLD

  THE CURSE

  OFF THE PATH

  STRANGE CREATURES

  TEARS OF A MAIDEN

  THE POWER OF THE SPOON

  OR ELSE!

  CAGED

  DANNY VS. FAIRY KING

  MEAN LITTLE CUSSES

  HALT!

  HOME, SPOONLESS HOME

  “Danny,” his mother said, and then somewhat louder, “Danny!”

  “Huh? What?” Danny looked up, startled.

  “I think you’ve watered it enough.” His mother studied the brown puddle that surrounded the tiny pumpkin seedling. “More than enough, really . . .”

  “Oh!” Danny hastily pulled the hose away. His plant looked like a tiny green island in a sea of soggy dirt. “Did I hurt it? Is it okay?”

  “It’ll be fine. Plants are tougher than they look.”

  Danny squelched happily through the damp garden soil to hang the hose back up. He liked gardening. Well, he liked some gardening. The exciting bits anyway, like when you got to use shovels and trowels and other implements of destruction to dig holes and trenches and make mounds of earth.

  Harvesting was okay, for the first ten minutes, since there was something at least semi-destructive about wrenching stuff off stems, except that then you had to eat it for dinner and it was all vegetables, sort of by definition. The raw peas were pretty good, when you could crack the pod with your thumb and eat them right there, but you were still dealing with vegetables, and a bad candy bar tended to beat a good vegetable any day of the week.

  He wasn’t fond of weeding either. It always seemed to involve putting his hand on a slug. Neither he nor the slug enjoyed this. It was gross, and not in a fun way, just in a squishy way.

  Ever since his mom had gotten into organic gardening and had turned the backyard into a vegetable garden, there was plenty of weeding to go around and more vegetables than any sane kid could be expected to eat. Some of them were weird vegetables too.

  Danny sighed. Still, he’d get to grow his own pumpkin. The seed packet had a photo of a pumpkin bigger than the farmer who grew it. How cool was that?

  He wished Wendell the iguana were here. Then if he got slug slime on his hands, he could at least chase Wendell around with it.

  Probably sensing that the natives were growing restless, Danny’s mother looked up from her tray of seedlings. “I don’t think I need any more help today, Danny,” she said, which was parent-speak for “Go find something else to do.”

  “Okay!” Danny sprinted for the patio.

  He got about halfway there, caught his foot on something, and sprawled face-first into the grass.

  “Danny!” His mother jumped up. “Are you okay?”

  Danny sat up, scrubbing at his scales with his sleeve. “Yeah, I’m fine . . . I think. Something tripped me!”

  “Tripped you?”

  The two dragons peered down at the culprit.

  “That’s a big mushroom,” said Danny. It was nearly as large as his head.

  “I’m surprised I didn’t notice it earlier,” said his mother. “And surprised you didn’t smash it when you fell—that must be one tough mushroom!”

  Danny reached out to poke it, and his mother grabbed his hand. “Don’t! Big spotted mushrooms like that are usually poisonous!” She frowned down at the mushroom.

  “There’s another one over there,” said Danny, pointing. “And I think I see one over there too . . .”

  “That’s what people used to call mushroom rings. They said the fairies would come and dance in them.”

  Danny wrinkled his snout. “Fairies? You mean the little thingies with the wings on girls’ lunch boxes?”

  His mom laughed. “Don’t make that face—I had fairies on my lunch box too, when I was a girl. But I don’t think they really look like that, if they even exist at all.”

  “You mean they aren’t real?” Danny considered this. “Like really not real, or like mythical-not-real?” Being a dragon himself, he was used to mythical creatures. Some of the people who showed up at family reunions were unusual, to say the least.

  “I don’t really know,” his mom admitted. “Nobody in the family has ever seen one, I don’t think, although your great-grandfather claims they get in at night and steal the spoons.”

  Danny had no problem believing this. Great-Grandfather Dragonbreath was notably eccentric, even in a family that included Danny, and that was saying something.

  “Anyway,” his mother said, “some mushrooms just grow in rings, no fairies required. I’d better go on the Internet and find out what kind it is. If it’s poisonous and one springs up in the vegetable beds . . .” She reached out with her gardening gloves and grabbed the malicious mushroom by the stalk. It cracked off at the base, revealing squishy white flesh.

  Wrinkling her nose, his mother headed toward the house. Danny cast a last look over his shoulder at the other m
ushrooms, then followed.

  Danny woke up in the night and knew that something strange was going on.

  He could hear music.

  His dad sometimes got insomnia and listened to the radio late at night—usually country, which was all about heartbreak and misery and women who done you wrong. (Danny hated country music.) But Danny’s father was out of town for the week on business, and anyway, this wasn’t country. This music was all swirly and skirling and full of pipes. There were no words . . . about women who done you wrong or otherwise.

  It was kind of interesting, actually.

  Without quite realizing it, Danny had gotten out of bed. He went to the window and looked down into the backyard. The music seemed louder, and he could hear drums now.

  If he opened the window, he might be able to climb down—he was getting too big for the rain gutter to really support his weight, and he’d decided not to do that anymore after the last time, when he’d nearly torn it off the side of the house—but there was something about that music. He wanted to see where it was coming from.

  The back door banged. Danny jumped.

  His mother walked into the backyard. She was wearing a bathrobe, and she was looking around, as if trying to locate the music herself.

  You should come down, the music said, without words. Come closer.

  Don’t be stupid, said Danny’s brain, your mom is standing right there, and if she sees you coming down the rain gutter, you are gonna get in so much trouble—!

  Come down, whispered the music. Come closer, foolish woman who pulled our mushrooms . . .

  His mom walked forward, into the grass. Danny realized two things, more or less simultaneously—first of all, the music wasn’t talking to him, and secondly, the mushroom ring was glowing.

  Danny might not be as smart as his friends Wendell and Christiana, but he’d read enough comic books to know that you didn’t mess around with strange stuff that glowed.

  This was a bad glow too. It was greenish gray and it flickered and throbbed. It looked unhealthy, like it would give you some horrible disease if you touched it.

  “Mom!” Danny yelled out the window.

  His mother stopped at the edge of the fairy ring and looked around vaguely. “Danny?” he heard her say. “Danny, do you hear—”

  It was too late. As she turned toward him, her arm passed over the line of mushrooms.

  The music rose to a screaming whine, and something reached out of the fairy ring, closed over Danny’s mother’s wrist, and yanked her into the ring.

  She vanished. The music halted as if it had been cut with a knife.

  The glow of the mushrooms began to fade. By the time Danny had catapulted across his bed, pounded down the hallway, hurtled the stairs, and skidded through the kitchen to reach the backyard, it was nearly gone. A few sickly green flashes clung to the mushroom gills, and then faded.

  Danny groped for the light switch and turned on the patio light. He could see the dark trail of footsteps that his mother had left in the wet grass, leading up to the fairy ring, but that was all.

  His mom was gone.

  Something in the fairy ring had taken her.

  Danny woke up feeling enormously relieved. He’d had an awful nightmare, a real brain-burner, but he was awake now. Although he was really cold, come to think of it, and his neck hurt, and was he wet?

  He had a brief, horrifying notion that he might have wet the bed. There were probably more humiliating things that could happen to a dragon, but he couldn’t think of any.

  He sat up in a hurry and realized that for some reason he had been asleep in one of the deck chairs on the patio.

  He was soaked because the dew had settled on him. But why would he be sleeping on the patio?

  Unless . . .

  Danny slowly turned, ignoring the pain in his neck, and saw the mushroom ring.

  The mushrooms weren’t glowing anymore, but the trail of footprints was still dimly visible through the silver grass.

  He bolted into the house, yelling, “MOM! Mom, where are you?”

  There was no answer. The kitchen was cold. The coffeepot had turned on automatically, but the pot was full and hadn’t been touched, which was conclusive proof that Danny’s mother was nowhere on this mortal plane. Mrs. Dragonbreath went nowhere without coffee.

  Danny gulped. There was only one explanation, then. His dream had been real, and that meant—

  “You’re telling me that fairies took your mother?” said Wendell.

  The iguana wasn’t entirely pleased at being on the phone—normally on Saturday mornings he was watching cartoons and trying to choke down his mother’s bran waffles. Danny was interrupting Skate Force, just as the villain was about to feed Landshark into a giant laser.

  “I’m serious!” said Danny. “She’s gone!”

  “Have you called the police?” asked Wendell, stabbing another bit of waffle. Low-calorie organic sodium-free agave nectar syrup-alternative was congealing around the edges. The bran waffles had the dubious distinction of weighing more than the waffle iron they were cooked on, and they sat in your stomach like a syrup-coated bowling ball.

  “What am I going to tell the police?” snapped Danny. “I saw my mom go into a mushroom ring last night and now she’s gone? They’ll never believe me! They didn’t believe me last month about the body snatchers!”

  Wendell rubbed his forehead. “What does your dad say?”

  “He’s out of town.” Danny leaned against the refrigerator. “He won’t be back until Monday night. And I tried to call him, but his phone’s not charged. He never remembers to charge his phone. Mom’s always yelling at him about it.”

  Wendell heaved a sigh. “Maybe she just went to the grocery store early or something.”

  Danny played his trump card. “The coffeepot hasn’t been touched.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. Then the tinny sounds of Skate Force switched off and a distant thud, as of a bran waffle being dropped into the trash.

  “Right,” said Wendell. “This is an emergency. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “I’ve called Christiana,” Wendell announced. “She’ll be here as soon as she can.”

  “You’ve got her phone number?” asked Danny. “What’s up with that?”

  “What?” Wendell shoved his glasses up his snout. “We’re lab partners. We talk on the phone every time we’ve got an assignment.”

  Danny wasn’t sure if he believed that, but then again, Wendell and Christiana were in the super-advanced science class, and Danny was in the class where the teacher watched him like a hawk and jumped on him if he so much as looked at the hydrochloric acid. Danny was pretty sure that Wendell could walk out of the school with a gallon of acid under each arm. Life was so unfair.

  Anyway, this was not the time to tease Wendell about maybe having a girlfriend.

  “I’m telling you, I saw my mom walk into the mushroom ring! Come look! And there was this weird music and everything!”

  Wendell plodded into the backyard after him to see the mushrooms. “Hmm. Well, they’re mushrooms, all right. They look kinda poisonous.”

  “That’s what Mom said.”

  “Yeah.”

  Wendell stepped back. “Is this the bit where you tell me that dragons know all about fairies and your great-grandmother was a fairy?”

  “Unfortunately, no.” Danny frowned down at the mushrooms. “Mom didn’t know if they were real or not. I’ve never met one. The only thing I’ve heard . . .”

  He stopped, because it was too dumb even to tell Wendell.

  “Yes?”

  Danny took a deep breath. “My great-grandfather thinks they get in at night and steal the
spoons.” It sounded even worse when he said it out loud.

  “Oh no,” said Wendell. “I am not going to see your great-grandfather again. He always calls me Wanda.”

  “I dunno, you kinda look like a Wanda . . .” said Christiana, opening the gate in the fence and letting herself into the backyard. The crested lizard tromped across the grass, exchanged a friendly elbow-in-the-ribs with Wendell, and turned to Danny. “Wendell said it was urgent. What’s up?”

  Danny sighed. It seemed unfair that he had to deal with Junior Skeptic Christiana on top of having his mom disappear. On the other hand, Christiana was the only person he knew who was as smart as Wendell, and he needed all the help he could get.

  Being a lizard, Christiana didn’t blink very much to begin with, but there was a quality to that unwinking stare that made Danny uncomfortable. You got the impression that she thought you were making the world a stupider place merely by talking into it.

  “So then I called Wendell,” he finished. “And . . . uh . . . yeah.”

  “Did you call the police?” asked Christiana. Wendell grinned, then tried to hide it behind a hand.

  “They won’t believe me,” said Danny tiredly. “You don’t believe me, and you saw the ghost last year, and the jackalope and everything.”

  “The possible existence of ghosts—which we have not been able to replicate—does not prove anything about the existence of fairies,” said Christiana. “And the jackalope was a straightforward example of applied cryptozoology. An exciting discovery, but it doesn’t prove that any other cryptid necessarily exists.”

  “Look,” said Danny, feeling discouraged, “whatever you just said is probably true in nerd-speak, but the fact is, my mom’s GONE, and I saw her walk into that—Wendell, no!”