Be Careful What You Wish For Read online

  It wasn’t bad if she said so herself, Cass thought with satisfaction. It was amazing what having a live subject did for her art. “Sure I will,” she said, handing Amanda back her brush and turning to the next little girl.

  “Me too! Me too!” Soon the other kids were crowding around, all wanting personalized stick figure portraits.

  “Okay, okay. One at a time!” Cass got into it, going from easel to easel, finally enjoying herself for the first time that day. Maybe there was something to this teaching thing after all, she thought. She just wished that Albert at the I.C.U. gallery was as easy to please as Amanda and her classmates.

  It didn’t take long and after a matter of minutes there was only one child left Cass hadn’t helped. He was a soft-spoken little boy named Derek who was working quietly at the corner of the table, his small face a mask of concentration.

  “Derek?” Cass came up behind him, expecting to see the standard house/sun/tree combo along with a few crudely painted smiling figures. What she saw instead surprised her.

  At first glance, Derek’s sheet of paper was a smear of black and purple—just a disorganized mess. But looking closer, Cass thought she could see a pair of yellow eyes glaring out at her. For some reason the picture gave her the shivers.

  “What is this?” she asked, keeping her voice light. “Is it some kind of monster? I thought you were going to paint a picture of your family, Derek.”

  “This is my family.” The little boy continued to paint, his brow furrowed in concentration. “This is my big brother.”

  “Oh.” Cass was at a loss. “Well, he’s not a very, uh, good looking guy, is he?”

  “No.” Derek put down his paintbrush and looked at her seriously. “He’s a doody-head. Can you help me make his mouth right, Miss Swann? He needs big sharp teeth.”

  “Okay, sure.” Cass picked up the paintbrush, thinking that this was taking sibling rivalry to a whole new level. She and Phil and Rory had had plenty of disagreements growing up but they always stuck together in the end. Maybe it was simply the difference between brothers and sisters.

  She had just finished dabbing on some bright, sharp teeth under the big brother monster’s glowing yellow eyes when a shriek from the other end of the classroom made her drop the brush.

  “Magic! It’s magic!” Amanda Simms was dancing around like a crazy thing pointing at her easel.

  “What? What’s going on?” Cass demanded but she had a sinking feeling in her gut that she already knew.

  “Me too, mine too!” the girl beside Amanda started yelling. “Look, it’s the picture Miss Swann made and it’s moving!”

  Oh, God, Cass mentally groaned but there was nothing she could do. As she watched, the little stick figures she’d painted for each child began to scramble off the paint splattered papers. None of them was bigger than a Barbie doll and most of them were smaller than that. Some scaled the easels like sailors crawling through the rigging of a ship and some jumped down to the center of the long rectangular table and began to play and fight just like real children. The students stared in fascination and Cass in horror as the brightly colored 3-D stick figures cavorted like kids on a playground.

  Cass felt frozen to the spot. Why oh why had she just assumed that her fairy godmother’s awful wish only extended to the portrait of Brandon? She’d wished to be able to get some life in her paintings and apparently the FG’s magic took her literally in every way. Now how was she going to clean up this mess before another adult came in and saw it?

  Take it easy, she told herself. They’re kids and kids are always making up wild stories. Nobody is actually going to believe that their pictures came to life and started playing tag on the art table.

  She was just beginning to think of the best way to catch the tiny paint figures and wondering if all of them would fit in her purse when she heard a low, choked cry of terror. Looking down she saw that Derek’s eyes had gone as round as baseballs.

  “What is it, Derek?” she asked, wondering if the sight of the stick figures come to life was too much for him. He seemed like a sensitive little boy and she hoped her stupid fairy godmother’s magic hadn’t scarred him for life. “Derek?” she said again but Derek only shook his head and pointed to his own easel. With a sinking feeling, Cass remembered the last thing she had painted—the big brother monster with evil yellow eyes and sharp white teeth.

  Oh please, she thought wildly. Not that! This isn’t fair—I didn’t even paint all of it, I just added the teeth. Oh my God—I gave it teeth!

  She was almost afraid to look but before her eyes the yawning maw of the monster Derek had started and she had finished gaped open, revealing the sharp white fangs Cass had painted.

  The monster was much bigger than the other stick figures—it filled the entire page Derek had been painting on and now it began to overflow the edges of the easel like spilled ink.

  “No!” Cass yelled and slapped her hand down on the still wet paint, trying to keep the awful thing in place. It was about the size of a small dog and thanks to her it had choppers that put Jaws to shame—no way was she letting it loose in a classroom full of first graders.

  The next thing she knew a blinding pain shot through her hand and she looked down to see that the bright white fangs she had painted for the monster were buried in her palm.

  “Son of a bitch!” Cass shouted, forgetting she was supposed to watch her language around the kids. Instinctively she yanked her hand away from Derek’s paper and before she could stop it, the painted monster had flowed off the page and onto the art table.

  “No! He ate her! He ate my little paint girl!” It was Amanda, now crying every bit as hard as she had been laughing a moment earlier. Cass looked up from her hand which was dripping blood and watched in horror as the monster gobbled up another stick figure and another and another. The tiny 3-D paint figurines scattered in every direction but the black and purple monster was frighteningly fast. The students watched the carnage in horror as the white teeth Cass had painted gnashed and tore. Bright primary colored paint ran down the monster’s chin as it consumed its victims.

  Guess that takes care of the problem of what I’m going to do with the stick figures, Cass thought numbly, still nursing her bleeding hand. But it still left her with the very real problem of what to do with a monster the size of a medium sized dog that had extremely sharp teeth and a big appetite.

  Wait a minute—a medium-sized dog? Hadn’t the painted monster been the size of a Chihuahua when it escaped from Derek’s page? Cass did a double take. Sure enough, the monster was more the size of a Pit Bull now and it was rapidly moving into Great Dane territory. With every stick figure it ate, it grew larger. And then all the stick figures were gone.

  Derek shrieked as the monster lunged forward, and Cass barely yanked him out of the way in time. Suddenly her problem had gone from having her students tell their parents they’d seen their paintings come to life to having them all gobbled up like Children McNuggets.

  Crap! Cass looked around wildly. Her first instinct was to send the students out into the hall to safety but the monster was between them and the door. What could she do?

  “Everybody to the corner of the room,” she shouted as the black and purple paint monster began to eye the other children hungrily. “Now—I mean it!”

  She didn’t have to tell them twice. Every single first grader ran to the corner of the room and huddled there while Cass looked for some kind of weapon.

  Her hurt hand throbbed as she grasped one of the wooden easels and yanked on it, heedless of the way the brightly colored paint pots spilled everywhere. She knew that if the monster got a chance at her now it wouldn’t bother with gnawing on her palm—it would probably bite her hand off. Hell, it would bite her head off.

  Got to keep it on the table, away from the kids! she thought grimly, standing back and taking aim with the wooden easel.

  The easel had been made to withstand generations of kids and it was so heavy just lifting it nearly broke her wr