Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) by Adam Rex Page A

and shelves lined with matching spines of the sort of classics of Western literature that you could buy by the yard. He reread the poem:
The new year has a week to wait till waking.
The water’s almost frozen in the well.
The hours of the day
pass swiftly by, then drift away ,
and yet there’s nothing, less than nothing left to tell.
Soon the final days are numbered, then forgotten ,
and the new year’s hardly worth the time it’s taken.
By degrees the hourglass reckons
all the minutes, all the seconds ,
and the next year still has weeks to wait to waken.
    The unicat brushed up against his shins, stabbing him lightly in the leg.
    “The new year has a week to wait,” he told it. “Christmas Eve is a week before the end of the year. I wonder if that’s important.” In the margins he wrote Christmas, Xmas, eve, 12/24 . “I guess it’s about winter? Or time? Half the words are about either time or temperature.”
    He puzzled over the poem as the house slept around him.

CHAPTER 12
    “Tired,” said Merle, hunched over the wheel of the poppadum truck.
    “I’d drive if I could,” said Mick.
    “You could teach me,” Scott offered. He felt wired. “It’s left brake, right accelerator, right?”
    “Maybe you should just concentrate on keeping me awake.”
    “Tell us more about the good ol’ days,” said Mick. “The good ol’ days that haven’t happened yet, in your case. If yeh stop talkin’ we’ll give yeh a shove.”
    “Well …,” Merle began, hesitant, feeling his way back into the story. “I kept working on the time-travel question. I knew I could send things like Archimedes to the future, maybe even people to the future, but travel to the past seemed really impossible.”
    “You weren’t sure you could send people to the future?” asked Scott.
    “I hadn’t tried it yet.”
    Scott huffed. “I would have tried it right away.”
    “Would you?” Merle asked, turning. “Are you sure? You’d really be in a hurry to be the first human in all creation to try that, to have all your atoms taken apart and put back together again?”
    Scott saw his point.
    “Besides, I wasn’t prepared to explain to everyone why I’d disappeared for a whole year. But word must have gotten out about my little trick with Archie, and soon the Fay showed up to ruin everything, like they always do. No offense, Mick.”
    “None taken, ugly.”
    “I’d just gone outside for some fresh air,” Merle began, “when I got the feeling I was being watched.”
    He’d just gone outside for a smoke break, actually—arguably the exact opposite of fresh air—but like all former smokers he was ashamed to admit this in the presence of children. He was pacing the strip of sidewalk between the physics building and the tennis courts when a chill raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
    Maybe it was because he was an invasion baby—a human born in the year the elves came, when magic swept like hurricanes over the earth—that he could sense something was wrong. Maybe, he’d think later, it was because one of the Fay wanted him to know. Whatever. He tossed his cigarette under his heel and walked swiftly back into the building.
    Merle worked in a secure wing—the college had put locks on all the doors after some laptops and a bike had been stolen, years ago—but he cursed these locks now, even as he heard them click behind him. Put a keyed lock on a door, and one of the Fay might still get through it if you’re careless, if you neglect to make certain you’ve shut it tight behind you. But these doors had combination locks. And a fairy’s guesses were nothing if not lucky. Merle still had his hand on the knob when the door’s small window filled with the face of Captain Conor of the Trooping Fairies of Oberon. There were more elves behind him, and Conor looked at Merle, then at the keypad below.
    Merle turned, stumbled, raced down the hall shouting, “Archimedes! Octagon!” The mechanical owl met him at the door of his lab