Page 72 - Nuts to You - The Nutcracker Retold

Instead, he squeaked out why he was back.
The Mouse Queen tossed him a taffy and laughed, “Is my sonny-bunny, mousey-wousey lost without his mummy?” Using her staff to help her up off the throne, for it seemed to Reggie that his mum had put on a few pounds since he’d left, and from the half-eaten platters of candy surrounding the throne, he could see why she was having difficulty standing. Finally up, the Mouse Queen stuffed an assortment of fudges, caramels and peppermint sticks into the folds of her robe, before waddling over to the clock.
Reggie held his breath – would she whack him now? Nope. The Mouse Queen simply stepped into the clock and beamed, showing all her purple-y pink teeth again. “After you, Sonny, Mummy’s at your beck and call.”
To Reggie there was nothing more nerve-racking than that walk back to the clock door, with his mother – strung out on candy – behind him.
But he made it. There they were, standing in front of the locked door, with the Mouse Queen looking through the clock face, munching on a peppermint stick, while Reggie peeked past the swinging pendulum through the gold-leaf decorated door. When Reggie felt a curious warm and wet sensation growing on the back of his neck, he rubbed his neck, and his paw came away sticky and red. I’m bleeding! he thought, glancing up at the Mouse Queen to see if she had bit him when he wasn’t looking.
And at that moment, another glob of peppermint and saliva dropped from the slack jaws of his mother. She was positively drooling as she looked outside the clock. “It is the Stahlbaum’s! How lucky for us. First the Nutcracker, then Drosselmeir. And now, finally, that old biddy who had
58