The Only Thing Worse Than Witches by Lauren Magaziner Page B

Rupert’s arm. “We don’t have time for this,” she whispered.
    â€œThey’re talking about us,” Rupert mouthed back.
    She shrugged and walked toward the archway, beckoning for Rupert to follow her. They walked into an archway and found themselves in a tunnel made entirely of dirt. The cold air made Rupert shiver. For a while, he kept up behind Witchling Two, but he soon found himself slowing down until finally he stopped.
    His nostrils twitched, and he sniffed. He smelled the most beautiful smell that anyone in the world had ever smelled.
    â€œWhat is that?” he said. “What is that wonderful — ”
    He looked to the left and spotted a bed of flowers. He walked over to them and leaned closer. They were the most delicate shades of red, violet, pink, and indigo, and Rupert reached out to touch one . . .
    Footsteps came closer from around the corner.
“What are you doing?”
shouted Witchling Two.
    Rupert sniffed. “Come smell these!” he said. “They are splendid!”
    â€œI told you
not
to smell the flowers!”
    Rupert inhaled. “Oh, how glorious!” he said. “How wonderful! How magnificent! How astonishing!”
    Witchling Two hoisted him up into a piggyback and began to run down the hallway with him. “I
told
you not to smell the flowers. Never trust a pretty flower. They are terribly sneaky things . . . as sneaky as bunnies.”
    Rupert twisted and turned, trying desperately to get out of her piggyback grip, but she held on to him tightly.
    When she rounded the corner, she put him down. She dragged him down a torch-lit hallway, and with the flickering firelight, it was starting to look like a real witch’s lair. Finally, they stopped at a wooden door.
    Witchling Two whisked him into a small room with many stacks of crumpled up papers, and Rupert finally began to realize that the smell was gone — and he had a thundering headache.
    â€œWhat
was
that?” he groaned. He felt groggy, like he couldn’t tell whether he was sleeping or awake, or what was up and what was down.
    â€œFlowers,” she said, shaking her head. “They’re our security traps. We witches can’t smell them, but they’re meant to catch human intruders. They put you under a spell, and the moment you touch the flowers, you’re caught in a net.”
    Rupert put his hand to his temple. “Thanks for rescuing me.”
    â€œI couldn’t very well leave my apprentice at the mercy of a flower bed, could I?”
    Rupert licked his lips, looking around the room. “So this is the Filing Room?”
    â€œSure is!”
    â€œYou call this filing?” Rupert said, staring at the stack of crumpled up papers on the floor. He looked around the room. There wasn’t a filing cabinet in sight — just a whole bunch of papers on the ground and a small, wooden table by the door.
    Witchling Two pulled a soggy piece of parchment out of a stack. She read it over with a
hmm,
then she crumpled it and tossed it over her shoulder before picking up a new piece of paper. Rupert walked over and began to read papers. They hardly made sense to him, and a lot of them had names of Gliverstoll townspeople and punishments on them.
    â€œWhat are these?” Rupert asked, holding up a paper that read:
Viola Frobbleman punished under article 31. Caught vandalizing the bell tower. Punishment: Toecorn
. He shuddered at the thought of Toecorn.
    â€œWe keep everything all filed together, so we’ve got record on all the punishments we’ve ever given, the WHATs questions, witch evaluation reports, research notes, and witchling report cards all mixed together.
    Rupert shook his head. At this rate, they’d
never
find what they were looking for. He dug through more papers, some soggy, some crusty, all smelling like sour eggs. There were more papers than Rupert thought — they were endless, circling the ground and