"Diane Duane - Wizards 2 - Deep Wizardry" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

weeks, anyway. ...
It hadn't taken Nita much begging to get her folks to let her friend Kit Rodriguez go along
with them, or to get Kit's folks to say yes. Both families were delighted that their children
had each finally found a close friend. Nita, and Kit laughed about that sometimes. Their
families knew only the surface | of what was going onтАФwhich was probably for the best.
A black shape came scrabbling up the dune toward Nita, flinging sand in I all directions in
his hurry. "Whoa!" she shouted at Ponch, but it was no use; it never was. He hit her
about stomach level with both paws and knocked her down, panting with excitement;
then, when she managed to sit up, he started | enthusiastically washing her face. His
breath smelled like dead fish.
"Euuuuw, enough!" Nita said, making a face and pushing the dog more or| less off her.
"Ponch, where's Kit?"
"Yayayayayayayaya!" Ponch barked, jumping up and bouncing around Nita I in an
attempt to get her to play. He grabbed up a long string of dead seaweed | in his jaws and
began shaking it like a rope and growling.
"Cut it out, Ponch. Get serious." Nita got up and headed down the far| side of the dune,
brushing herself off as she went. "Where's the boss?"
"He played with me," Ponch said in another string of barks as he loped | down the dune
alongside her. "He threw the stick. I chased it."
"Great. Where is he now?"
They came to the bottom of the dune together. The sand was harder I there, but still dry;
the tide was low and just beginning to turn. "Don't| know," Ponch said, a bark with a
grumble on the end of it.
"Hey, you're a good boy, I'm not mad at you," Nita said. She stopped to I scratch the dog
behind the ears, in the good place. He stood still with his tongue hanging out and looked
up at her, his eyes shining oddly in the of the nearly full Moon that was climbing the sky. "I
just don't feel playing right now. I want to swim. Would you find Kit?"
The big brown eyes gazed soulfully up at her, and Ponch made a small | beseeching
whine. "A dog biscuit?"


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 Summer Night's Song

Nita grinned. "Blackmailer. Okay, you find the boss, I'll give you a biscuit-Two biscuits.
Go get 'im!"
Ponch bounded off westward down the beach, kicking up wet sand.

DEEP WIZARDRY 169

headed for the water line, where she shrugged off the windbreaker that had been
covering her bathing suit and dropped it on the sand. Two months ago, talking to a dog
and getting an answer back would have been something that happened only in Disney
movies. But then one day in the library, Nita had stumbled onto a book called So You
Want to Be a Wizard. She'd followed the instructions in the book, as Kit had in the copy
he'd found in a used-book storeтАФand afterward, dogs talked back. Or, more accurately,
she knew what language they spoke and how to hear it. There was nothing that didn 't
talk back, she'd foundтАФonly things she didn't yet know how to hear or how to talk to
properly.
Like parents, Nita thought with mild amusement. If her mother knew Nita was going