Snow can change anything. Even the harshest landscape seems somehow graceful when blanketed by snow. In those tiny ice crystals lies, it seems, a magic, a fairy dust, redolent with the power to transform.

I gazed out at the snow-covered valley; glinting in the summer sun and thought how beautiful it might be if it where real, but it was only an illusion brought on by leaking magic waste. My large black boots felt far to heavy but once I got out onto the snow they’d stop me floating off into the atmosphere. In magic dumps the rules are reversed and I had to be ready for anything.

My superior Johnston was giving me a weird look so I gave him a thumbs up sign, I wasn’t about to let him report to head office that I’d been slacking. Johnston would like any excuse to fire me.

* *

The snow disappeared almost immediate when my feet touched it and was replaced by sparkling purple glop, the leaked toxic magic.

“Blood magicians,” I muttered “Magical Energy is the future my arse”

Johnston was already spraying his patch with Concavian formula and smiling smugly me.

Concavian formula – the only thing that could render magic waste harmless, it was available but loads of Magi’s incorporated companies still dumped their waste rather than pay the fees. The formula its self was a heavily guarded secret known only to the scientist who made it, but rumour had it that it was made up of the most unmagical qualities known to man, some one in the higher achy had been leaking secrets to the press a month earlier and one of the ingredients had come to light: brillo pads.

It had got all the head wizards in a tizz but I couldn’t care less about them and their problems it was me who had to clean up their mess after all.

I started spraying the patch assigned to me but my heart wasn’t really in it and I found myself thinking about what I’d do when I got home.

I’d already set the video recorder in case I ran in to over time; I didn’t want to miss the ‘I’m a reduced car sales man get me out of here’ omnibus addition with Aria Flockheart interviewing the Volvo salesman who’d been kicked out for refusing to drink a pint of liquidised slugs.

There was a long thin piece of wood slowly wiggling its way towards me, it was a wand; some times they get buried at the bottom of barrels and when the barrels split they fight their way out. This one looked old and pretty harmless, if it had any real power left it would have been flying.

The only way to deal with it was to take it back to headquarters where they’d submerge it in a vat of Concavian formula till it dissolved.

I advanced upon it and picked it up, the thing started to squirm in my hand glowing red and puffing pink and white smoke out of its top; startled I dropped it and it skewered its self through my foot.

The least thing I remember before I blacked out was the feeling of something warm and tingly making its way up my leg.

* *

The light when I opened my eyes was blinding, I felt numb all over as if someone had stuck me in a freezer to keep me fresh and everything smelled like herbs.

Slowly the brightness of the light dimmed so I could make out hazy shapes and then they became clearer still till I could see details in full.

I screamed.

There was a woman by my bedside but she was quiet the ugliest woman I had ever seen with a hooked nose and hair lip, a snaggle toothed grin and a wart on her cheek. Her hair was black and greasy and tied in a bun and she wore a green nurses uniform.

“How are you feeling?” she asked me in a voice that conjured up pictures of gingerbread houses and ovens.

“Your…you’re a witch!” I crocked out; she nodded and smiled.

I shuddered and screamed again “I want to go to a normal hospital! What am I doing in this freak hospital! I want a transfer!”

“You’re sick, you’ve had magic contact with your blood stream; we had to pump your stomach” she said in a no-nonsense manner “My name is Suverge and I’ll be your nurse”

“I want a transfer,” I whispered again weekly as I was tucked up and fed medicine, which to my imagination tasted like liquidised slugs.

* *

When I awoke again I was confronted by a microphone being pushed up my nose; on the end of this microphone and dressed in a pastel pink power suit with matching shoes was Aria Flockheart. She smiled her dazzling bleached smile at me and tossed her perfectly quaffed blond hair.

I looked around and noticed a cameraman and a man in a suit who was nervously chewing his fingernails.

“What’s going on?” I crocked but they ignored me, the cameraman held up his fingers and began a count down.

“We’re on air in five..four..three..two…we’re on the air”

Aria flockheart perched on the edge of my bed and smiled into the camera.

“I’m here at West Moreland magic hospital where a patient has just been admitted having contracted magic through a faulty wand” again she thrust the microphone into my face “how do you feel?”

“Tired…what’s going on?” I looked down at my hands which felt dry and flaking and saw they where covered in scales like a snake, I raised a hand to my face and found the same scales covering me there as well.

I was changing.

“As you can see he’s disorientated” Aria continued unaware of my plight “and the staff here at the hospital have no clue how to treat the magic”

I looked helplessly for my nurse but couldn’t see her, I grabbed at Aria and she screamed.

“Where’s my nurse!” I wailed

“It touched me! It touched me! What if I’m infected!” Aria screamed, the man in the suit rushed into shot to pull her away from me but I clawed and scratched and hung on. Suverge appeared in the doorway carrying a broom, she strode over to the bed and hit me smartly on the head.

I let go of Aria and curled up sobbing angrily.

Suverge turned on the camera crew and waved the broom threateningly at them; her horrible appearance made even more frightening with a scowl.

“You get out!” she yelled “I don’t know who you are or how you got in but get out!”

The suited man stepped forward and cleared his throat, I think he might have been a lawyer because faced with this argument his whole appearance seemed to change to someone stronger and his face lit up with a malevolent happiness.

“We shall be suing this hospital, that thing” he pointed to me “attacked Miss Flockheart”

I sniffed loudly and Aria shuddered, Suverge saw this and growled.

“She shouldn’t have been in here and neither should that camera, now get out!” and with that she hit the suited man, he yelped and rushed to the door fallowed by Aria Flockheart and the camera man but not before Suverge had got a few more hits in for good measure.

She came to sit by my bedside and stroked my hair until I stopped crying; I had misjudged her by how she looked but she was compassionate and kind to me even though she made me drink the medicine again.

“We’re sending for some specialists” she told me as I drifted off to sleep again “they’ll figure out how to treat you”

* *

I raised my scaly hands up to fend off the doctor who was trying to take my temperature and saw suddenly the scales fade and my bones show through ice-like skin.

The Potion Maker fainted.

“He’s mutating again” he Rune-Reader screamed. I writhed around the bed, tearing sheets between long elongated claws that grow from my fingers and coughing till I thought my lungs would burst.

Finally the agony stopped and I looked up expectantly at the specialist crowded around my desk.

“Meow?” I asked.