afraid.’
The Goddess of Luck was not at all happy with Jezra over the whiskerfish incident. She was furious at the attack on her player and furious that Jezra had managed to bewitch the crown behind her back. Jezra was pleased to have caused her Ladyship inconvenience, but of course the plan had not worked as well as he’d hoped, for the whiskerfish poison he’d used was not lethal and Lex had still won the round. So really there wasn’t anyone who was all that happy about what had happened. Except, perhaps, for Zachary. When Schmidt had asked the fairy godmother if she had anything with which they could transport Lex back to the ship, she had grudgingly given them a small plastic bag and Schmidt had scooped Lex up in this and given the bag to Lucius to carry. Unfortunately, they had only gone a few steps from the cottage before Zachary leapt up and punctured the bag with his sharp carnivorous teeth so that water started pouring out and Lex had to be rushed back to the fairy godmother’s sink again, much to her tight-lipped irritation.
Then Schmidt and Lucius had an argument over whether Zachary had been truly trying to eat Lex or not.
‘He only has a ferret brain,’ Lucius whined. ‘He can’t understand. He probably thought Lex was lunch, or something. ’
‘Well, just keep an eye on him, would you?’ Schmidt snapped. ‘He’s been a ferret for so long he probably can’t remember being human. If he got hold of Lex he could kill him instantly.’
When they got back to the ship, Schmidt found a large transparent plastic container in the larder that had been used to store spider snacks. He tipped these out, filled the makeshift tank with water and poured the water from the plastic bag into it so that Lex fell into the tank where he could swim about agitatedly.
‘What’s going to happen to him?’ Lucius asked anxiously, pressing his nose against the side of the tank to stare in at his brother.
‘For the next week or so he’ll alternate daily between his usual charming self and this… little fish.’
‘But what are we going to do?’ Lucius cried, wringing his hands again.
‘Oh, stop flapping, Lucius! There isn’t anything we can do,’ Schmidt said impatiently. ‘We’ll just have to wait for it to wear off. In the meantime, do you know anything about caring for whiskerfish?’
It was an aggravating thing to have to spend one day as a fish and one as a human, but the real problem of it was that whiskerfish needed to eat at least once every couple of hours and — as they had no teeth whatsoever — they needed soft, mushy food. But although Schmidt turned the larder inside out looking for seaweed, flotsam or sea cucumbers, he was unable to find anything of the sort. It was all starting to look rather serious because whiskerfish absolutely had to eat once every two hours or they’d starve to death. Lucius volunteered to mash up some bananas he’d found and put them in the tank, but whiskerfish-Lex wouldn’t touch them and it looked, for a worrying few moments, as if he was not going to survive…
But then Schmidt found a box of muggets. Now muggets, as any fisherman knows, are made from a mixture of leech brains, jellyfish legs, maggot eggs and octopus tentacles, and are the best fishing bait ever created. They were seafood — of a type — and they were soft. It was also their only chance. So Schmidt dropped one into the tank, praying to the Gods that Lex would eat it. As it turned out, muggets were apparently divinely delicious to whiskerfish and Lex gobbled the thing up in no time. Based on Schmidt’s calculations, they had enough to last two weeks as long as they were careful. The problem, though, was that whilst this mixture was perfectly delicious and sustaining to the whiskerfish, to humans it was a mildly poisonous combination that the human body was incapable of digesting — not that any sensible person would ever try, for the muggets tasted as disgusting as they looked and smelt.
Because Lex needed to be fed every two hours as a fish, Schmidt and Lucius took alternate night shifts. Then, on the days when Lex was human again, they caught up on some sleep whilst Lex spent most of the day throwing up over the side of the ship. He was always worse in the mornings, when the remnants of muggets he’d eaten the day before were still undigested in his body. Within twenty-four torturous hours he would just be starting to feel like he was merely ill as opposed to dying when he would turn back into a fish that gobbled muggets all day.
There had initially been some worry over the Binding Bracelets. When Lex had turned into a fish, his bracelet had obviously fallen off and been taken back to the ship along with Lex’s other clothes. During his days as a whiskerfish he was unable to wear the bracelet and he and Schmidt were able to eat their meals separately without swapping bodies. But as soon as Lex turned back into a human the bracelet always shot straight back onto his wrist and it was these days that had really worried Schmidt for continuous puking had not put Lex in an eating mood and if Schmidt tried to eat anything without Lex, he would simply have found himself in Lex’s body, meaning he’d have been the one to turn into a whiskerfish when the time came. It even occurred to the lawyer that Lex might refuse food on purpose, just for that reason.
It was therefore with a distinct sense of unease that Schmidt suggested to Lex on his first human day that he put a crumb of bread or something in his mouth at meal-times so that Schmidt could eat his own food without body-swapping. To his surprise, Lex had agreed with a disinterested shrug and said, ‘If I’m going to be throwing up all day anyway I might as well throw up bread as well as muggets.’
It therefore appeared that, if swapping bodies on purpose had occurred to Lex, he wasn’t going to act on it and, to Schmidt’s relief, this remained the case even as the days went by and Lex became more ill.
‘How are you feeling?’ Lucius asked one afternoon as Lex staggered onto the bridge and dropped down onto his blankets.
Lex ignored the question. He felt like he would never be able to eat anything ever again. Being constantly sick drained away all his energy so that he couldn’t believe he would ever want to do anything active ever again either. And the really disheartening thing of it was that he knew he would not even begin to start getting better until he stopped turning into a fish all the time. The idea of this going on for weeks was unbearable.
‘Lex? I said, how are you feeling? Did you hear me, Lex?’ Lucius persisted.
Lex would have shot him if he’d only had a gun in his hand.
‘It’s quite clear that he feels like drowning himself in his own tank,’ Schmidt said from across the other side of the bridge. ‘Why don’t you just leave it at that?’
Lex felt a burst of gratitude towards his employer in that moment and made a silent vow to be nicer to him once he was recovered. At last he drifted off to sleep, but it seemed like mere moments later that Lucius was shaking him awake. ‘Come on, Lex, it’s time to get back down to your tank and have some more of those nice juicy muggets,’ he said, trying to lend a supportive hand. Lex shook him off irritably, suppressing the urge to heave just at the very mention of the word mugget.
‘Don’t fuss me!’ he snapped. ‘Don’t touch me! I can manage!’
‘All right,’ Lucius said, holding up his hands and backing away. ‘Fine. Do it yourself. Here’s your blanket.’
Lex snatched the blanket from his brother’s hand and wrapped it around his shivering shoulders, glaring at Lucius from red-rimmed eyes as he did so. Then he turned and stalked from the bridge towards the kitchen where his tank was, with Lucius trailing along behind him. Lex actually preferred it when Schmidt was the one babysitting him. Schmidt didn’t ask stupid questions or try to help him get dressed when he became human again — he just let him do it on his own.
Lex tried to stop himself from gnashing his teeth in annoyance when he walked into the kitchen and saw his tank sitting on the kitchen table with a slimy-looking mugget all ready for him. There was also a miniature castle in the tank, which Lucius had found on the ship somewhere and had insisted on putting there to make it seem more ‘homely’. Lex picked the thing out with distaste and threw it down on the table. ‘How many times do I have to tell you not to put that in my tank?’ he snapped. ‘It’s demeaning. I’m not really a fish — you do realise that, don’t you?’
‘You like it when you’re a fish,’ Lucius sighed, picking up the tiny castle and replacing it in the tank. ‘I think it makes you feel safe. You like hiding underneath that little drawbridge thing.’
Lex scowled and said nothing. The truth was that he found it hard to remember much of what he did as a whiskerfish. The only thing that mattered to his tiny fish brain was muggets. When he was human he would always promise himself that he was never going to eat another one of those awful things even if that meant he starved to death as a whiskerfish and Lucius had to flush his little fish corpse down the toilet the next morning. But when he was a fish again, it was like he was addicted to the bloody things and all he could think about was how much longer until he’d be given his next mugget. It was exhausting and Lex was thoroughly fed up with it. He was also less than comfortable about his tank being in the kitchen in case someone, in some fit of madness, decided to cook him for a midnight snack or something. But they couldn’t move his tank to the bridge because it was too heavy with all the
