Yvette settled into the other chair. She looked almost like a little kid, sitting upright with her little pink feet propped up on a throw pillow.

"When I was human, I wasn't exactly the most trustworthy person," she said. “I hope you won’t hold it against me."

"Of course not." After some of the things I'd done to survive when my parents were too strung out on drugs to care for me, I was in no position to judge.

"Okay," she said. "I used to live at a house for kids who broke the law. My parents dumped me there after I got caught selling eoesu flower at school. It was strict; we all had to go to bed at a certain time and everybody had to do chores, even if you were sick puking your guts out. I hated it there so I'd run away."

"But I kept getting caught and dragged back. The city guard knew who all the runaways were and they'd break up the parties we'd have in the city park at night. They'd even beat some of the kids if they didn't go quietly.”

“Then Mrs. Morris, the house matron who was in charge, would lock me in my room. But there was a kid I knew named Azriel who lived in an abandoned warehouse, who showed me how to pick the lock with a hairpin."

"By the way," I said. "Where exactly are we?"

"We're in Kitlo, in the country of Thomdel."

I gasped. "I came all that way?"

"Where are you from?" she asked.

"Dorien is my native country. I live in a city called Jenelle. That's all the way across the Sea of Caldrie."

Yvette's button eyes widened. "That's practically on the other side of the world."

"Addison is definitely going to have another heart attack," I said.

"Maybe Rufus will sort out this pendant nonsense and send you home before Addison even finds out," she said.

"Maybe," I said, but wasn't counting on it. I'd never be able to live with myself if I caused Addison to get sick again, or worse. "Tell me the rest of your story," I said, eager to change the subject.

Yvette grinned. "One night, a few of my friends from the city park had a plan to break into this place where some chemists were making raskia. Do you know what that is?"

Of course I knew. It was what killed my father.

In large amounts, raskia is a poison that causes paralysis. You stop being able to speak. Soon after that the rest of your organs shut down and you die. There's no antidote. At least it happens fairly quick.

If taken in tiny doses, it gives you a euphoric high. People usually put a drop or two on their tongue. Licensed chemists make raskia to sell to infirmaries for medical procedures, to professional executioners for death sentences, and a few others. But unscrupulous chemists will sell it or even mix it with other poisons to whoever is willing to pay.

Addison once told me that victims of raskia poisoning are completely aware of what is happening to them until the very end. And our world had plenty of overdoses. My late father was one of them.

I nodded. "Yeah. Go on."

"My friends and I hid behind in some trash bins behind the place. The chemists had put the raskia in tiny glass vials to sell them. We were going to get a lot of money to steal them; three-hundred direts a vial. Then we waited for them to lock up for the night."

"We waited in the bins for almost two hours. Finally, we saw them leave. One of the older boys we were with had a lock picking kit, so it was going to be his job to get us inside. Azriel was there too. I was supposed to be the lookout while the others moved the crates of vials outside to the trash bins."

"Just as we were moving the first crate out, a bunch of city guards surrounded us, pointing their rifles at us. I saw this other guy standing near a streetlamp, who wasn't dressed in a guard uniform. He had this weird, glowing baton-type thing. Like a billy club."

"We all took off running. I booked it down an alley and then I heard someone yell. Stupidly I looked behind me and saw it was the guy with the baton. Suddenly my legs went out from under me because he tripped me with it.”

Yvette sighed, remembering. “He pinned me to the pavement and I thought it was the end of me. I kicked and screamed but he was too strong. There was this intense heat coming from the baton. It felt like it was alive even though it only looked like it was made of this dark colored metal.”

“He pointed the baton at me and I saw it had this gemstone or crystal or something set inside the end of it. That’s what was making it glow.”

“Immediately I knew he was a magic user. And then he got this look on his face, like he knew I just figured it out. And then he said, ‘Enjoy your new life.’”

“This beam of light blasted out from the crystal in the baton and slammed into my stomach. I couldn’t move. There was this buzzing all over my body and then absolutely the worst pain of my life, waves of it, until I lost consciousness.”

"I woke up. It was hours later because it had gotten lighter out. For a second I thought I might be dead and now I was a ghost. The alley was empty except for a dog barking at me from behind a gate.”

“I scrambled to my feet and ran. I didn’t know what to do or where Azriel or anybody else was from the night before. I don’t even know where I was running to.”

“Then I realized I was really low to the ground and running on four feet instead of two. I didn't know what the guy with the baton had done to me until I caught glimpse of myself in a basement window."

"Wow," I said. "That must have been shocking."

Shocking? I could have punched myself for making the understatement of the century.

She gave a rueful smile. "To say the least. You know, I never heard them coming, and now I think I know why. The guy who chased me must have kept the guards hidden with a spell, too."

"That makes sense," I said. "Addison does sound-cloaking spells to hide stuff from me sometimes."

"I still don't know how we got caught. I haven’t seen any of them since, but I bet it was one of them who tipped off the city guard and got paid. I doubt I'll ever find out."

"That sounds likely," I said. "But how has it been, being an opossum?"

Yvette shrugged. "It's been okay, mostly. In the beginning it was tough, finding places to sleep and such. Every time I thought I found a safe place I'd get chased off by a dog or a cat or someone throwing something at me."

"Finding food was another ordeal, but only at first. I can eat just about anything, but the weirdest part was when I found myself craving bugs. I'd never eaten a bug in my life except for the time a gnat flew into my mouth once and I accidentally swallowed it."

"How did you get to be here at Rufus's, though?" I asked, trying not to be queasy at the thought of eating insects.

"Well," she said, "mainly because I came in through the chimney and he's been too busy to exterminate me. We usually just leave each other alone. Plus, I'm clean, I don't smell, and I eat the ticks in his garden of deadly flowers. I think he appreciates it even though he doesn't say it out loud."

"Don't give yourself too much credit, ratty," Rufus said, as he materialized in front of us, freshly showered and clean-shaven. He was carrying a tray with chicken pie and rolls for dinner. "Here, you two brats need to eat, I suppose. I’d better not find any of your hair on my new chairs, rat."

My stomach growled. It had been hours since I'd eaten the doughnuts.

Yvette smacked herself in the forehead with her paw. "How many times do I have to tell you that I'm a marsupial, not a rat."

I was surprised at the tone she took with Rufus, but he ignored her.

"Did you make this, Rufus?" I asked, ladling a giant scoopful of pie onto a black dish etched with strange, winged demon creatures. Rufus had a thing for that type of design. It was all over his house, at least what I'd seen. I wondered what the bathroom looked like.

"Of course. My skills extend beyond magic," he said.

"Yeah," said Yvette, licking pie gravy from her whiskers, "now that he's single, he has to fend for himself. No wifey to do the cooking anymore."

I coughed and choked down a forkful and waited for Rufus to explode.

"She rarely cooked for me and I'm better off without her," he said. "You should know that."

He said it with decisive calmness, but I saw the white-knuckled grip on his fork.

"It's really good.” I wasn't lying. Rufus was a great cook if the pie was any measure of his talent in the kitchen.

Crumbs fell from Yvette’s mouth as she chewed and mumbled in agreement. Rufus gave a short nod. We ate in silence while I tried not to think about Addison in the hospital, hoping to be on my way before he realized I wasn't even on the same continent anymore.

After we finished eating the pie, Rufus put me in a spare bedroom upstairs. Yvette had sneaked away through the grate in the sitting room.

Black curtains embossed with a sinister floral design hung in the arched, thick-paned windows. The canopy bed and dresser were hulking and equally dark, with ornately carved patterns of wailing faces. A demon print loveseat stood off to the side.

Everywhere looked like an ideal hiding place for zombies or ghouls. I was relieved one hadn't popped out anywhere yet, although Yvette said that Rufus managed to successfully banish them to their undead planes of existence.

"No way. I'm not spending the night with the creepy screaming people on the furniture."

"I need you out of the way," he explained with a grin, "until I can set the spell to send you back. Don't worry, those aren't real people I trapped in the furniture or anything like that."

Great, give me something else to worry about. "But what about the portal you used to grab the pendant?" I asked.

The grin vanished. "What about it?"

"Can't you just do that again? Except opposite?" I knew that it was probably a long shot, but it didn't hurt to ask.

Rufus gave an exaggerated sigh that rivaled even the ones I gave Addison on my moodiest days. "For someone who lives with a magic-user, you are a bonehead when it comes to levels of sorcery."

"I'm just asking!"

He rubbed his forehead as if rubbing away his annoyance. "They are two completely distinct types of spells. The one that you interfered with was designed to transport objects, not people."

"Then why did I get dragged along?"

"Because the pendant was re-set to return to me," he said. "The magic was amplified. I also never imagined you'd try to stop me from getting my own pendant back."

I shrugged. "I was only doing what Addison told me to do."

Rufus glowered. "Why would he have told you to stop me from getting it?"

"I don't know. I think he just wanted it to stay at our house until he could come home and do it himself."

He stared. For a moment, I wondered if he was trying to read my mind or if there was something on my face.

"Come home from where?"

Oops. I blinked. "Huh?"

"You told me Addison was sick."

"He is," I said.

"Then where is he? Be honest with me. I'll know if you aren't."

He probably would, now that I was right here in front of him instead of through the Chimbrelis.

"He's at the hospital," I sighed. "He had a heart attack this morning."

Rufus's mouth hung open for a moment. He had the same look of flustered surprise as when I'd answered the Chimbrelis.

"Gods," he said. "Isn't that an unpleasant turn of events."

I crossed my arms. "Yeah, it is. I need to get home, before he discovers I'm missing. Don't you care about that?"

His face turned stormy. "Do not presume that I don't care about your predicament. I'm sorry about Addison. But you fail to understand the type of magic involved to send you back. It takes lots of preparation, and I need to conserve my energy for the situation in the laboratory."

"When do you think the laboratory thing is going to be fixed?"

"Are you serious?" he asked. "It's not the type of thing I can put a time frame on."

"What's going on down there, anyway?"

"I'm not explaining it to the likes of you," he said.

Sudden anger welled up inside my stomach. Average people who thought they were better than everybody else were barely tolerable. It was even worse when magic-users were like that, and all because they were born with some stupid genetic thing that gave them special powers.

"Why, because I'm not a magic-user, I don't deserve to know? Or I wouldn't understand?" I said, growing bolder by the second. Maybe if I drove him crazy enough, he'd send me back sooner. Eating dinner had given me a second wind. "Being here with you is really inconvenient."

Rufus's eyes did the scary blue glowy thing. I cringed, expecting lightning bolts to fly from his fingertips and fry me from the inside out.

"Go to bed!" he shouted, and slammed the door shut.

"I'm not just some dumb kid, you know!" I shouted back.

"Perhaps not," he said through the door, “but until you prove yourself otherwise, you will stay put.”

I heard a click. I twisted the door knob but it was stuck.

"Hey, unlock the door!" I screamed, kicking it so hard the wood shivered.

"No," he said. "If you break my door, you will pay for a new one, and then I will make you stand barefoot in a bucket of stinging ants."

"You wouldn't do that," I gasped. "Addison would kill you."

"Addison isn't here to bail you out of this," Rufus said. "And he wouldn't be very happy if he knew you were trying to vandalize my property."

"He wouldn't like that you're keeping me hostage inside your house."

"It's for your own safety," Rufus said. "Settle down and go to sleep, or I will make you."

I cursed and paced the room, wondering what to do next.

What if he meant to keep me in here until he got the laboratory thing settled? What was happening down there? There was more going on than what Yvette had explained, and it seemed dangerous.

What if he got killed in the process? That purple lightning leveled him once already that I'd seen. Gods forbid Rufus ended up dead while I was shut up inside a spare bedroom an entire continent and ocean away from Addison.

I pulled back the curtains, pressed my forehead on the window glass, and peered outside. It was too dark to see anything, so I had no idea what was down there or how far of a drop it would be to the ground.

There was no point in jumping out a window if I was just going to break a leg or end up impaled on a spiky wrought iron fence. Devising an escape would have to wait until morning.

After I checked under the bed, behind the shower curtain inside the attached bathroom (more dark florals), and inside the closet for Rufus's undead minions (which were empty except for dust bunnies under the bed frame, and some dark robes in the closet), I crawled under the covers to worry some more.

At least the bed linens were beautiful; sumptuous crimson silk, embroidered with deadly black-ash flowers and matching overstuffed pillows.

A loud clang startled me. I scurried to the side of the bed where the noise had come from and came face to face with Yvette. Around her neck was a black satin cord with a key.

"I've solved your 'locked-inside' problem," she said.