Read A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition for Free Online

lately.”
    “Huh? Oh, Nita.” They went into the classroom together and took seats near the back wall. There was no assigned seating in Mack’s class, which meant there was always a rush for the rearmost seats, everybody’s desperate attempt to be somewhere that would make Machiavelli less likely to call on them… not that sitting in the back ever seemed to work. “She’s okay, pretty much.” Kit paused, watching the room fill up hurriedly—no surprise, since Mack made the lives of latecomers a question-filled hell. “I mean, as okay as she can be under the circumstances.”
    Raoul looked at Kit with interest. “So if you weren’t going all vague about her just now, then what’s on your mind?”
    “Oh, just home stuff…”
    The bell rang. Saved! Kit thought. With the bell came Machiavelli, moving fast, as always, five feet tall and balding, in a blue suit and wearing a red tie ornamented with the images of many tiny yellow rubber duckies. The suit never changed, but the tie changed every day, and in the few seconds of fascination it produced, Mr. Mack would always pick the unfortunate student who looked most off guard and start peppering him or her with questions. “Rodriguez,” he said, and Kit’s heart sank. “You ready for our little quiz today?”
    Wizards do not lie; too much depends on the words they use seriously for them to play fast and loose with the less serious ones. “I don’t know, Mr. M., but I think I’m about to find out.”
    Machiavelli grinned at him. Kit restrained the urge to groan out loud, and once again wished it wasn’t unethical for a wizard to use his powers to read the closed textbook in his backpack. All he could do now was pray for the bloodshed to be over with quickly.
    Forty-five minutes later, Kit and the rest of the class walked out, mostly looking like they had been run over repeatedly by the same steamroller. “Remind me never to go to sub-Saharan Africa in the eighteen hundreds,” Raoul muttered. “After today, just seeing it would make me come down with post-traumatic stress disorder.”
    Kit theoretically could have gone to that time and place if he wanted to and was willing to pay the price, but right now he felt about the same as Raoul did. “Still, it could have been worse. At least we passed.”
    “Yeah. Not sure I have any appetite left for lunch … I guess we can go look, though.”
    Kit grinned, privately thinking that it would take a nuclear war to ruin Raoul’s appetite. “Let me know how it was. I have to go home for lunch.”
    “God, I wish I lived as close to school as you do,” Raoul said. “When I think of all the cafeteria food I wouldn’t have to eat…!”
    “Go on, Pirate,” Kit said. “Suffer a little. I’ll see you later.”
    He made his way back to his locker, chucked his backpack into it, locked it up again, and headed out the school’s back door, jogging across the parking lot, through the gate, and around the corner onto Conlon Road.
    Ponch was bouncing around in the backyard, jumping almost to the top of the chain-link fence, as Kit came down the driveway. “Okay, okay, give me a minute,” Kit said. He pulled the screen door open and poked the lock with one finger. “Hey, Chubbo…”
    The lock obligingly threw its bolt back for him. Kit patted the lock, opened the door, loped into the kitchen, very hastily threw together a ham sandwich on rye with some mustard, and ate it. For his mother, who was still asleep because she had been working night shifts at the hospital over the past week, he left a note scribbled on the pad on the refrigerator: “I had lunch. See you later.” He thought of adding the code phrase “Out on business now” to let his mama know that there was wizardry work afoot, but then he changed his mind. He’d have no more than his lunch period minus the time to eat the sandwich before he would have to be back at school again, anyway.
    Kit cleaned up the crumbs from his sandwich and went out, pulling