"How did the queen react when she learned her heir was a failure?"

"The usual way. First, she punished the heir. Painfully. Then she let out the remainder of her frustration on the earthly realm. You've probably noticed over the years all the field blighting, freak snowstorms in July, and the sudden (but thankfully brief) onset of jeggings? But the tantrums grew to a steady stream of superstorms, earthquakes, tornados (an old favorite as long as you stay away from falling houses), chocolate shortages, and other disasters humans liked to call "natural" because they were blithely unaware of the mystical forces bearing down on them from the evil queen's realm."

"Sounds like kind of an overreaction. Why do so much harm?"

"This is what a life without love does to a soul."

We continued not teleporting through the forest.

Dead leaves crunched under our feet like the snapping of bones. Moonlight trickled through the many barren trees, creating skeletal shadows on the thick underbrush, and a few weak stars twinkled in and out of view as dark clouds drifted past. This was the kind of forest where things LURKED. I never liked things that lurked. Lurkers rarely had good intentions; and the moment they un-lurked, there was bound to be blood or pain. Or blood AND pain.

Or even pain.

And given that this place had more than its fair share of cannibals, I stuck close to Frekvic and his sack of monster chow. Even though he was half as tall as me, he knew his way around. Still, it was hard to keep up with him as he led me down the narrow dirt trail.

A chill breeze carried with it the stench of mud and mold. The tips of my ears ached with the cold, and with each exhale, curls of vapor formed in front of my face, obscuring my vision. There was something disconcerting about seeing the air that had just been inside of me, keeping me alive. Breath should be invisible unless you're a fire-breathing dragon.

Oooh! A dragon could be an excellent familiar with its ability to fly and incinerate my enemies. A spark of excitement lit in my belly, and for a moment, I wasn't cold.

"Rowen, Rowen," squeaked a tiny voice. My heart started thumping, and I spun, looking for the source.

"Did you hear that?" I said.

"Hear what?" Frekvic said.

"Someone was calling my name."

"Probably just the wind."

I rolled my eyes. "Does the wind here speak English?"

"What else would it speak? We're nowhere near Zandorkia. Keep up. We have a long way to go, and I don't want to miss lunch at the castle. It's pizza day!"

Pizza? Well, it beat frogs' legs. I was too wound up to care about food. There was so much on my mind with finding a familiar, focusing my powers, saving Blade and my dads, and carrying through my (hopefully) brilliant escape plan. Everything hinged on making it to the zoo and finding my familiar.

I wanted to fantasize about my new pet unicorn or pet griffin or dragon or maybe even a post-carrying pet owl like Hedwig, but instead, I had to worry about whether we'd even make it to the Familiar Zoo through this dark, creepy forest.

"What's with it being dark all the time?" I said, to take my mind off the subject of monsters and being eaten by them.

Frekvic looked up at the moon, which hovered in the sky like a blood orange. "It's been a full moon here for ages. Since Petronella turned full evil."

"But how does anything grow without sunlight?"

"Moonlight," he said simply. As if it were obvious.

"But moonlight is 1/200,000th as bright as the sun," I said, recalling a long-ago biology lesson. "Not nearly enough for photosynthesis."

Frekvic laughed. "We use magic. But you seem to know much about growing plants in your realm."

"My dad liked to garden and loved to make me help. It's something we call 'chores.' Parents tell you that chores are 'for your own good. To help you learn responsibility,' but I think they just don't want to do their own weeding because it's really boring, there are lots of bugs, and dirt gets under your fingernails."

"He'll be back to trimming his topiary soon enough once you're the queen." Something about what he said bothered me, but before I could figure it out, Frekvic came to such an abrupt stop, I almost tripped over him I'd been following so close.

"Sorry," I said. He flipped open his satchel and pulled out a long knife. A machete! "I said I was sorry!" I held my hands up as if that was going to protect me when something brushed against my ankles. "Hey!" I shook my leg. I glimpsed a small animal scuttling into the underbrush.

Frekvic lifted the machete over his head and swiped the glittering blade. Not at me (thank goodness), but at a patch of what looked like glow-in-the-dark ivy creeping toward the path. That must've been what attacked my ankle. Frekvic hacked away until the glowy vines were no longer glowy. Or even vines. More like chopped salad. "Moonvine," he snarled. "Nasty stuff. Causes Werewolf Derangement Syndrome."

"What's Werewolf Derangement Syndrome?"

"Something I hope you never see," putting the machete back in the bag. "Come."

Something far off to the side of the trail howled. "Is that a ..." I gulped. "... deranged werewolf?"

Frekvic cupped his ear.

"Arooooooo."

"Definitely a werewolf. Trouble with the never-ending full moon is that every night, the lot of them are in wolf mode. It makes them cranky, and then the moonvine turns them into lunatics."

"So, are we going to be gobbled down by werewolves?" My teeth chattered.

"There are worse things than that."

"Like what?"

"Like being slowly eaten by werewolves."

I laughed despite the gut-wrenching fear.

Then I stopped laughing.

Because an eight-foot-tall wolf, with mangy black fur, foam dripping from its mouth, had leaped onto the path just ahead of us, snarling. Its eyes were bloodshot. And those bloodshot eyes looked right at me. I suppose I was more of a full meal than Frekvic. Drip, drip, drip went the saliva.

My palms and feet sweat despite the cold. My heart galloped. I wanted to run, but wouldn't that make me look more like prey? "Maybe you should get out that machete again?" I suggested through clenched teeth.

"Hallo, Jerome," Frekvic said. "I've brought your favorite."

Please don't let his favorite be a scrawny redheaded potential queen!

"Rawr!"

I sincerely hoped 'rawr' didn't mean 'thanks for the human flesh.'

Frekvic withdrew a haunch of stinky, bloody meat from his satchel and tossed it far off into the forest. It landed with a loud splat about a quarter mile away. What an arm! Jerome, the feral werewolf, took off after his favorite snack, while we scurried away down the path.

Phew!

One thing I knew for sure, I didn't want a werewolf familiar. I mean, if that was an option. I'd take anything else.

We'd walked far enough for a blister to form on the back of my heel when we came to a fork in the path with a weather-beaten wooden sign. The left arrow said "Zoo—3 miles" and the right arrow read "Rowen Grove—.25 miles (Entry by permission of the Queen only. All others will be punished in a painful manner.)"

"Rowen grove? Perhaps we should check that out." How weird. Why would I have a grove named after me?

Frekvic raised a scruffy gray eyebrow.

"Right. I guess we don't want to be punished in a painful manner by disobeying some old sign. It's just my name is Rowen, so I thought ... Never mind. To the zoo." We trudged ahead, the same voice as before, intermittently calling my name. The wind. That was all it was. Not the angel of death, or a lunatic werewolf, or other as yet unknown, unspecified, sharp-toothed predator hunting me down.

Finally, after about a thousand more miles and seven hundred "are we there yets?" from me, we came to a clearing and paused in the knee-high grass. My sides ached, my ears ached, and my breaths came in short bursts. I leaned over with my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.

"Almost there!" Frekvic said, pointing to the top of a grassy knoll.

I stood. "Whoa. That's amazing.

"Sure is," Frekvic said, his tiny chest puffed out. "The Familiar Zoo. She's a beauty."

And she was! The zoo was surrounded by a train of magnificent hedges carved into massive animal shapes. It was lit by the eternal full moon, of course, but also by millions of fireflies zipping above the horticultural structure.

My heart fluttered, not only because I was about to have a heart attack from the excessive exercise, but also with anticipation. A cool familiar was about to be mine. Imagine my 'friends' at school when I showed up on a unicorn or a dragon! I took off ... at a limp, trekking through the dewy grass. Still, that was enough to leave Frekvic behind. Amazing what one can do with a little inspiration!

"Slow down, queenling. I must make sure you know how this works before we arrive. If anything should go wrong, the queen will threaten us with a punishment from her boxful of horrors. Too bad for her I like it! But you might not."

Ew? No comment here.

I turned to face him. "Don't worry, Frekvic! I understand how it works. I find a cool animal and ask it to be my familiar, and it says 'of course,' and then my magic is focused, and I can be an evil queen or whatever."

"That's not quite correct. The familiar chooses you," he said.

"And how do I know I've been chosen?"

"You'll know," he said, winking.

"Does it hurt?"

"Depends," he replied, enigmatically, the most annoying type of response.

"But then how does it work? How does a familiar know who his witch should be?"

"It's kind of a mystery." He grinned.

I clenched my fists. "I don't really like mysteries."

Do we though!? I did not say. 

"Still, we must persevere. The theory is that the familiar feels a kinship with its witch. Their personalities link on a deep level. One might say that the familiar is a reflection of the witch and vice versa."

"Does Petronella have a familiar?"

"She did. For the first couple hundred years."

"It was a snake, right? Had to be."

"No. Some kind of chimera if I recall correctly."

"What happened to it?"

Frekvic shook his head. "It's a mystery."

"Gah!" By the time we arrived at the zoo with its towering hedges, my skirts were wet and so were my legs. I wiped them with my sleeve as best I could. The scent of honeysuckle and roses pungent in the air. I could make out hooting, clucking, howling, roaring, chomping, and snoring from inside.

We followed the outer curve of the hedges, each one carved from holly, laurel, and boxwood, bursting with giant tropical-looking flowers used to create spots, eyes, and ears. The carvings were so intricate; it seemed that with a dusting of fairy magic, they could come alive and walk, fly, crawl, slither, or swim away.

Of course, in Brittlebane, this was entirely possible.

"How do we get in?"

"This way."

We came to a thatched roof stone building opposite the zoo, with a row of wooden dumpsters beside it. Weird to see trash in a magical realm. One would think trash would just poof into thin air in a place like this.

"I'll only be a moment," Frekvic said. "I must go inside and replenish the snack bag."

"Um, aren't the animals in cages?"

Frekvic drew back. "That would be inhumane. No."

"They're kept in cages where I come from."

"Your realm sounds dreadful."

"We have fewer cannibals," I shot back. He raised his wayward eyebrows. "Fewer cannibals are good!" I insisted.

As I stood there waiting, marveling at the topiary, Frekvic's words came back to me. "He'll be back to trimming his topiary soon enough ..." How did Frekvic know my dad trimmed topiary? I didn't tell him. But did I want to know the answer? Because if my dad worked here, then there was another whole other part of his life he'd kept secret from me.

A few moments later, Fedrick returned with the satchel so full it was the same size as he was, and he bent over sideways like a bough heavy with fruit. "Do you want me to carry that?" I said.

"No, I'm stronger than I look," he said, face red, sweat dripping down his forehead and into his beard. "Ready?"

"Yes."

Frekvic extracted his machete and chopped the leg off a topiary giraffe.

"Ouch!" it cried.

"Then stop growing over my entrance, Bob." Frekvic turned to me. "Don't worry about Bob. He'll grow a new leg soon enough."

We proceeded through the newly formed opening into a maze of wonder.

"This is brilliant!" I said.

"Thank you! Been working on it for eons. The maze design keeps natural enemies in their own sectors without being able to see one another."

"Can't they just walk into another part?"

"No, there are wards to prevent that."

"Cool. Do the wards prevent them from eating us?"

"You are obsessed with being eaten. Have you spoken to a professional about that?"

"No."

"You might want to. And yes, the wards protect us too."

"Then why do you need snacks?"

"Because the residents are my friends, and I like to give them treats."

We walked between the hedges, along a black graveled path, the stones crunching beneath our feet until we came to the first enclosure where a herd of unicorns grazed on a field of grass. Their tails flicked at the fireflies that kept trying to land on their backs.

"They're beautiful," I breathed. "Maybe it would be way more efficient if I could just choose one of them. We could make it back in time for lunch!"

"Alas, it doesn't work that way."

"Right," I sighed. "Here boy, here," I said to the nearest specimen—a sleek white model with pink stripes. Like a zebra or a candy cane! He didn't even look up. "Frekvic, do you have a carrot or something in your bag?"

"Let me see," he said, rifling through his satchel. "Ah, yes. Here you go."

I held up the carrot, but the unicorn simply whinnied and turned its butt toward me. "Rude!" I said.

"They can be," Frekvic said. "Let's keep going."

"But I really wanted a unicorn," I whined.

"Let me guess, you had a unicorn stuffed animal as a child."

"Harumph," I said, not dignifying his assumption with further response, especially since I did have a unicorn stuffed animal when I was a kid named Toby. I followed Frekvic down the path, back straight as a queen's.

The next stop was a lagoon with mermaids lounging in the moonlight on large polished flat rocks, flicking their tails. They were so beautiful I almost cried. I guess if I couldn't have a unicorn, a mermaid would be okay, although I'd probably have to give up my bathtub. Also, how would I carry around a mermaid everywhere? Well, there must be some way that it worked if they were an option.

I waved at the mermaids. A few rolled off their rocks into the water and swam to the shore nearest us. My heart thumped. This was it. I was about to come into my full magical powers. "Hello, ladies," Frekvic said. "Do you have my oysters?"

"That depends," said a mermaid with iridescent skin and a tangle of shimmery green hair. "Do you have our trout?"

"Of course!" Frekvic opened his bag and removed three whole trouts and tossed them to the mermaids, who caught them and dove beneath the surface to enjoy their treats. A bag made out of grasses arced out of the water, and he caught it, stuffing it into his bag. I waited for them to come back, but they didn't. "Not a mermaid then," Frekvic said. "Come along."

"Maybe they need more time," I said, swatting away fireflies that began swarming around my head.

"Come."

Frekvic, the fireflies, and I continued, stopping along the way to see who might want to be my familiar—griffins, dragons (all asleep), hellhounds (which honestly would've been really cool), house cats of enormous size, and an aviary filled with ravens, owls, crows, and phoenixes.

At the aviary, I resorted to bribery with a handsome white owl. "Wanna be my familiar? There are lots of rats in the castle!" I could kill two birds with one stone! The rat infestation would be reduced, and I'd have a pretty cool familiar. I mean, it wasn't a dragon or a unicorn, but it was super portable and could deliver correspondence.

The owl hooted at me, then flew up to a faraway branch.

As we continued, none of the animals paid me any attention except for a magical white lion who only seemed interested in me as a possible snack and not as a familiar. Frekvic threw him a steak.

Before I knew it, we were back at the three-legged giraffe. We'd done the entire maze, and no one chose me. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. Not only because my mission was falling apart, but because no one wanted me.

"Now what?" I said, wiping away the tears and trying not to hide the disappointment from my voice.

"Very odd, indeed," Frekvic said. "Quite unusual."

"Maybe I don't have a familiar," I said.

"Impossible."

"Why?"

"Because all witches do. We just haven't found yours yet."

"But wouldn't it be in your zoo?"

"It should be. Perhaps your familiar has already found you, but you weren't ready to accept it."

"You didn't mention that part. So not all the familiars are at the zoo?"

"Forgot. What? I'm a thousand years old. I'm allowed to have a little dementia! And yes, familiars can be anywhere, but the zoo is the best chance of finding one since there are so many in one place. Don't fret, little queenling. It's time for lunch. Shall we head back?"

"But will the queen be angry with you?" I said.

"Don't you worry about all Frekvic. I'm sure with a little ingenuity, I can calm her down. I'm an expert with savage beasts." Frekvic led me back to the stone building. "I'm going to load up my pack for the walk back. Wait here."

I heard a rustling from inside a dumpster. The lid creaked open and two eyes peered at me. Out crawled a rat with a moldy bit of cheese. I covered my mouth to stop an unqueenly scream and backed away.

"Did someone mention lunch?" the rat said.

"Do all the rats in this realm talk?" I said.

"To you, we can," the rat said. "I've been talking to you all day, but you didn't hear me, I guess."

"It was you in the forest?" I gasped.

"Allow me to introduce myself," the rat said, climbing out of the dumpster and dropping the gross cheese at my feet. "I am Vermeil Huntington MCIII, at your service." He bowed.

I recoiled and curled my lips at the stinky cheese. "Uh, thanks, but I'm not that hungry."

"Oh, you misunderstand. The cheese is mine. But you are my witch. And I am your familiar."

"What?" I said.

"I'm your familiar. That's why I can talk to you and so can my relatives. Shall I ride in your pocket, or would you rather carry me?"

I shook my head so hard I could feel my brain swishing around against my skull. It couldn't be. Not a rat! I'd even take a werewolf over a rat! "Neither," I said. "There must be a mistake."

"Why are you talking to that rat," Frekvic said, making me jump in surprise.

"I was only talking to myself." No way did I want Frekvic to know this was my familiar. Because what did that say about me? Rats! But part of me knew this would be putting Frekvic in danger. If I returned without a familiar, the queen might blame him. And what if he couldn't tame her? But he seemed pretty sure it would be okay. I shouldn't worry.

"Pizza waits for no man, woman, or gnome! Shall we?"

"Yes," I said, leaving Vermeil the vermin standing there with his cheese, even as he called after me, begging me to pick him up. A huge lump grew in my throat in response to his plaintive cries. For a while I heard him rustling in the grass, trying to catch up, but I kept walking until finally, I could no longer hear him.

Thanks for reading chapter 20!!! I've been thinking about the Familiar Zoo for years and was so excited to bring it to life for you here, in both words and in the illustration I created on Midjourney of Rowen inside.

There is a lot of foreshadowing and hinting in this chapter about what is to come. Can anyone guess what might happen? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Hugs!

THANKS FOR YOUR VOTES AND COMMENTS AND STUFF!

My attempt at the outside of the zoo, made in MidJourney:

Obviously, I need more practice!

This chapter is dedicated to BarleyLucy, a dear dear friend and my biggest cheerleader. She is so kind, positive, upbeat, and enthusiastic about my writing. She is a hugely successful Caldecott-winning children's author, and I'm absolutely gobsmacked by her belief in me. Love you to pieces, my friend! xoxoxo