Read Online The Water and the Wild by Katie Elise Ormsbee - Free Book Online Page A

any?” she said dubiously.
    â€œDear girl! Magic may not be reasonable. It may not be tamable or even reliable. But it does provide plenty of proof.”
    Mr. Wilfer reached into his desk drawer and handed Lottie a vial, thin and fragile, filled to the top with a suspicious-looking gray liquid.
    â€œThat is a cure that took me a year to perfect. I had to capture ten laughs on a rainy day and all the ingredients of eggs Benedict. Then I had to quote a full book of sonnets at it. Go on, try it. It’s for the cut across your forehead.”
    Lottie raised a hand to her eyebrow and found that there was, in fact, a nastily scabbed cut there, which must have come from her bicycle accident. She looked suspiciously at the medicine, and it looked suspiciously gray back at her. She unstoppered the vial, and the prettiest smell of hot omelet drifted out. Lottie raised the vial toher lips, looking all the while at Mr. Wilfer, and took the tiniest of sips. A prickle fizzed across her forehead and a sound like a
snap!
smacked around the walls of the room. At first, Lottie thought her head had exploded and how stupid she had been to taste a strange potion from a strange man! But her head was still very much intact and in much better shape than it had been a second before. Her cut had healed. Lottie rubbed her finger along her smooth skin and set the vial back down.
    â€œIt worked,” she said.
    â€œIt worked,” said Mr. Wilfer.
    Lottie was still rubbing her forehead. Trees that were elevators, doctors that weren’t human, New Kembles that weren’t New Kembles, and now medicines made from eggs Benedict! It was all a bit much to take after a full day of school.
    â€œYou don’t believe me yet,” Mr. Wilfer said. “I understand. This is hardly the ideal way to tell you everything, all at once. I hadn’t even intended for you to root shoot until your sixteenth birthday.”
    â€œDid my letter change your mind?”
    â€œThat,” said Mr. Wilfer, “and something else. Something complicated.”
    Lottie wasn’t much in the mood for complications. Eliot was what mattered.
    â€œAll right,” she said. “Say I believe you, Mr. Wilfer, and all of this business about cooking up medicines. If it’s true, then I can’t go back to Thirsby Square. Not until I’ve got a cure for Eliot.”
    â€œThat is what I expected,” said Mr. Wilfer. “I’ve made all the arrangements to have you stay with us for however long it takes.”
    â€œIt can’t take long,” Lottie whispered. “There isn’t much time.”
    Mr. Wilfer looked Lottie straight in the eye. She had never seen a man—not even Mr. Walsch on his worst day in the calligraphy office—look so tired as Mr. Wilfer did at this moment. Still, Lottie could not help but ask the question.
    â€œWhat’s the final ingredient for the Otherwise Incurable?”
    â€œIt is late,” said Mr. Wilfer, “and both you and I are weary. Adelaide will show you to bed. In the morning, we will revisit this conversation.”
    â€œBut—” protested Lottie.
    â€œThis,” Mr. Wilfer assured her, “is better.”

    When Lottie emerged from the laboratory, Mr. Wilfer instructed a waiting Adelaide to take their guest to a bedroom on the second floor, at the tip-top of the foyer’s spiral staircase. Oliver was nowhere to be seen, which was disappointing. Even though his poetry quoting and eye color changing were more than a little strange, Lottie had decided that she liked the sly-faced boy. She also would have much preferred Oliver to Adelaide as her guide through the house called Iris Gate. The entire journey up the stairs, Adelaide spouted off boring facts and corrections as though she were preparing Lottie for a short-answer quiz at Kemble School.
    â€œThe banister is very old,” she said solemnly. “The wood was a gift from the Southerly Court to