by Emma Savant
But damn it, I’d felt good this morning. I’d felt good last night. I’d felt good every time I’d done something I wasn’t supposed to do, and didn’t that count for something? Maybe it only meant that I should do whatever felt worst, because that was always sure to be the right thing.
But that couldn’t be right. I couldn’t picture Queen Amani saying any such thing. She’d offered me her job and then said it was my choice. That must mean I was equipped to make choices. I’d known that this morning when I’d walked through the doors. I’d forgotten it when Lorinda had started shouting in my face, but I wasn’t about to do that twice in a row.
Reginald Feye wasn’t important enough to make me forget that.
I met his eyes and sat up straight. “I don’t propose to undo that damage,” I said. “I made a choice. I’ll accept responsibility for my actions, but I’m not taking it back.”
My voice was much clearer than I’d hoped, and it gave me courage. I knew I’d regret this later, but it was like Imogen had said last night: Sometimes, you just had to let yourself feel good.
Dad stared at me. His handsome face was totally blank. I hadn’t talked back to him like this in a long time. Maybe ever, I realized, scanning my memory. Aside from tantrums I’d thrown when I was little and didn’t know better, I couldn’t remember a time I’d said no to his face.
It felt amazing.
“Excuse me?” he said.
I sat up straighter. “Lorinda has already made it clear that I probably won’t keep this job. That sucks, but I deserve it. However, I told my client what I did because she has a right to know.”
“A right to know?” he repeated, again like I was the biggest idiot he’d ever met. “Your client, who was raised as a Humdrum, has a right to know about the work her father commissioned her faerie godmother to do on her behalf?”
“Looks like I’m not the only one who broke confidentiality,” I said. I folded my arms across my chest. “You’re not supposed to know that.”
I stared at him, just like he was staring at me. I felt the storm clouds gather around him. “I am a member of the Grand Council of Magical Beings,” he said, his voice gathering electricity and getting louder with every word. “Do not question my authority!”
I raised my eyebrows, realizing a second too late this was the exact expression my mom always had when she and my dad were fighting and she was ten kinds of fed up with him. I had nothing more to say, so I stared, waiting for whatever was next. He could bluster and storm all he wanted, but what was he going to do to me? Get me fired? Already done. The worst that could happen, I realized, was that he’d force me into another job like this one, and that would pay for college, too.
“You owe me an apology, young lady,” he said. “I did not raise you to behave like this.” When I still didn’t talk, he barked, “Well? Are you going to apologize?”
The pause drew out while I thought. Finally, I spoke. “No,” I said.
I had never spoken to him like this. No one ever spoke to him like this, as far as I knew, except for my mom, and sometimes they wouldn’t speak for weeks afterward. He drew himself up to his full height, and his faerie gifts took over.
The air crackled audibly around him, and his features darkened as though he’d stepped into a shadow. “I am ashamed of you,” he hissed. “You are disrespectful, a failure as a faerie godmother, and a disgrace to the Feye family name. I am embarrassed to call you my daughter!”
He’d said all he could possibly say. He glared down at me, while I stared back and felt my breath coming hot and sharp in and out of my nose. When the crackling around him had grown loud enough to be heard everywhere in the office, he snapped his fingers and disappeared with a furious clap of thunder.
The air where he had been standing swirled and whistled, blowing my hair hot and cold around my ears. When it subsided, I was alone in a cubicle full of scattered papers and heavy silence. My privacy glamour was gone.
A few minutes later, after I’d gathered the papers back up, I heard clicking footsteps outside. Lorinda’s voice interrupted me. “Olivia,” she said cautiously. I looked up, keeping my face perfectly calm. I raised an eyebrow, not trusting myself to speak. Her anger had subsided, and her face was drawn together in concern. “Are you okay?” she said.
I swallowed and gave her a curt nod. “I’m fine.”
She rolled her lips together as if she’d just put on lip balm, and then, very softly, she said, “I’m sorry I was rough on you. What you did wasn’t okay, but you know that. Let’s just try to make the best of it now, all right?”
I didn’t know what to do with her sympathy. But I forced a smile. “Thanks,” I said, and knew I’d probably mean it later after my heartbeat had slowed and I’d stopped hearing my dad’s voice repeating I’m embarrassed to call you my daughter over and over in my head. “I appreciate it. I’m sorry. It just didn’t feel right to keep something like that from her.”
She shrugged one padded shoulder and admitted, “I get the same feeling sometimes about things. We just have to remember, it’s—”
“Not our job to judge,” I finished with her. I sighed. “I know.” I didn’t add that it was wrong, that she and Tabitha both had it all backwards. How could I explain?
She tapped the door frame of my cubicle, obviously not sure where to go from here. I held up a stack of papers. “I’d better get back to this,” I said.
“Right, you do that,” she said. She gave me a little smile. “I guess there’s no way to ruin the case now. You just make sure it closes and we’ll be all right. I can’t give third chances.”
Ironic, I thought. I thought stuff in fairy tales always came in threes. But of course, my life wasn’t a fairy tale.
Chapter 19
It was the first really nice weekend of spring, and the Saturday Market was crowded with people eager to enjoy the sunshine. We passed a guy standing on a yoga ball, juggling brightly colored Easter eggs. A raven sat perched on his top hat, looking down at the eggs with contempt.
“What about him?” Elle asked. She wrapped her cardigan more tightly around her yellow sundress and squinted up at him.
I looked over my glasses. A pale gold haze floated around him. “Faerie,” I said in surprise. “Huh. Would have guessed wizard.”
“How can you be sure?” she said.
“It’s one of my gifts,” I said. “Sometimes they’re called whimsies, or talents. I can see magic.”
“Is that why you’re always looking over your glasses?” she said. “It makes you look like Mother Goose.”
Imogen skipped ahead, then whirled around and exclaimed, “The mirror stall is back!”
She raced on ahead to a booth with white wire grille walls hung with mirrors. Their frames were cobbled together out of everything from driftwood to seashell-studded clay to mosaics of stained glass and shards of reflective glass.
“Magic mirrors?” Elle said, looking sideways at me.
They looked more like something out of a kitschy gift shop on the coast than a fairy tale. But I nodded and led the way over to the booth.
I positioned her in front of one with a frame of crocheted red thread. “Who do you want to see?” I said.
“Um,” she said, pursing her lips while she thought. “Kyle.”
“Show her Kyle,” I ordered the mirror. The surface rippled like water in a pond, then cleared to reveal Kyle sitting on a carpeted floor playing cards with another older boy who had his same sandy hair. Kyle set his cards on the carpet, and the other guy threw down his cards and pumped his hands in the air.
Elle gaped at the mirror. “Whoa,” she breathed.
“That his brother?” I said, squinting at the older guy.
“Yeah,” she said. “They play poker to decide who gets the car and who has to weed the garden that weekend and stuff. They’re dorks. So I thought you said your world is hidden from the regular world.”
She looked around the stall, her eyes taking it all in.
“This is
hidden,” I said. “You never would have noticed it if Imogen hadn’t pointed it out.” I frowned at Elle and pulled my glasses down, trying not to look like Mother Goose. “Or maybe you would. You’ve got your mom’s Glim blood but you’ve never developed your magic, so—”
“Olivia, look!” Imogen interrupted, and grabbed my arm to show me a pretty mirror edged in silver wire worked with beads. “It changes your appearance!” she said. She positioned me in front of it. My reflection stared back at me from the mirror, but she had straight bottle-blond hair with hot pink tips. “What a great way to come up with glamour ideas.”
She pushed her face in against mine, a dark-skinned version of her pressing in against Blond Olivia.
“This is better than that makeover Barbie you had when we were kids,” she said.
It should be. One of Imogen’s older sisters—I couldn’t remember which one—had enchanted the life-size doll head to spit out angry frogs whenever we brushed her hair. I’d been scared of amphibians for years afterwards.
We moved along the rows of white tents. The Glimmering shops were tucked here and there between Humdrum ones, camouflaged so perfectly you’d never realize what they were. A booth selling sugared almonds was being run by two witches, who probably had potion-candied almonds under the table. Another booth selling essential oils had a tiny rack in the back that was loaded with magical blends laced with fairy dust. A faint glow of magic rose off some of the soaps in a goat’s-milk soap shop, and when I asked the woman sitting in the back with her chihuahua what they were for, she promised that one would remove pimples, another would give me a rosy glow, and a few more would make me more attractive to the opposite sex. Imogen eyed these last ones with interest, but we moved on without buying anything.
I paused at a tent where an older woman sold succulents in tiny multicolored pots. They practically oozed sweetness into the air. A cluster of plump purple-green Graptopetalum rosettes seemed to twirl where they sat. Beside them, the bubbly, juicy green leaves of a jade plant looked like someone had enchanted a cartoon tree into life.
“Liv,” Imogen said. She grabbed my shoulders and steered me back out of the tent. “No more succulents. You already have more succulents than will fit on your bedroom shelves.”
“But—” I protested.
“I know they’re cute,” she said. “The answer is no.”
I let myself be marched away. Imogen was only following orders: I’d begged her to stop me from buying plants until the end of the school year. I didn’t have the self-control to resist them alone.
In front of us, Elle stopped in front of a booth near the end of a row.
“This is where my mom’s stall used to be,” she said.
She stepped inside. The white tent was full of jewelry made of seashells and rough-cut crystals. I picked up a silver necklace hung with a piece of rose quartz and examined it. The necklace was beautifully made, with the faint warm residue of a charm emanating off it.
“I’ll bet your mom sold charms like these,” I said.
“My mom sold glass paperweights and ornaments and stuff,” Elle said.
“Same difference,” I said. “It’s all small stuff that’s been enchanted to help you or your space. Like this.” I held up the rose quartz necklace. “This has a love spell. It’ll help you attract new relationships and grow closer to family and friends.”
She turned back to the jewelry with renewed interest. “What about this one?” she said, holding up a piece of agate threaded through with green deposits that looked like moss.
I took it from her and held it in my palm, waiting for the impression to arrive. “This one helps with overcoming addictions, I think,” I said.
“And this one?”
She dropped a circle of blue tourmaline in my palm.
“I think for hope,” I said, weighing it carefully. “And protection. And serenity.”
“Geez, multi-task much?” Imogen said, taking the stone from me and giving it a critical look. She set it down and picked up a necklace with a large brownish stone dangling from the gold chain. “This is more my style.”
It was a complicated stone with a surface that looked like silt sand pressed deep with pretty spiraling seashells. The card in front of its pedestal said Turritella Agate in swirling script. Imogen turned it over in her hand, reading the energy off it. She was better at this than I was.
“It’s a protective stone. Lots of natural defenses against spells.” She flipped it over and examined its lacy gold setting. “I could have used something like this three years ago when Maia was trying to enchant me every other day. She wouldn’t have stood a chance against this thing.”
“Maia?” Elle said.
“My sister,” Imogen said. “She’s about to marry a bird.” She rolled her eyes and didn’t bother to explain. “But that’s just the stone’s energy. The actual charm on it is for success in business, and making change happen quickly. Hey, Elle, this might be right up your alley.” She held the necklace out to Elle.
I reached up to try to grab it. “I don’t think that’s a good—” I said, but Elle already had it in her hand and was examining it.
“You think this could help Pumpkin Spice?” she said.
“It’s really not a good idea to use charms until you know what you’re doing,” I said.
She looked around. Humdrums were milling around everywhere. “Can’t be that bad,” she said.
“Humdrums aren’t going to be interested in these,” I said. “You probably can’t tell because your mom was Glim, but all the charmed necklaces have a Humdrum repellent on them.”
“So the charm doesn’t work on Humdrums?”
“It’ll work,” I said. “They usually remove the repellent when a Glim buys one. But if you ever re-sell it, you have to put the repellent back on so a Hum doesn’t decide to buy it. It’s basic ethics.”
“And the law, if your dad has anything to do with it,” Imogen said, picking up a pair of teardrop opal earrings. She held the package up next to her ear in front of a little mirror the vendor had hung on the stall wall, entirely missing my Shut up look.
Elle forgot about the necklace for a moment and said, “What does your dad have to do with it?”
“He’s kind of a big deal,” I said.
I couldn’t think of much I’d rather not talk about than Reginald Feye. I tried to casually take the necklace from her, but she snatched it away and held it up to look at it some more.
“I like this,” she said.
She caught the vendor’s eye.
“I’ll take it,” Elle said, then added, smiling like she was in on a secret, “And could you do something about that repellent?”
The vendor, a leathery older man wearing a brown bowler hat with a speckled hen’s feather sticking up from the back, winked at her and nodded. She reached into her purse for cash while he packaged up the necklace, muttering to remove the spell as he went. He looked surprised when she handed him dollar bills instead of nickel or silver coins, but quickly covered the surprise with a smile and bowed us from the stall.
Elle immediately dug the necklace out of its pretty white box and put it on. I had to admit, it looked nice with her pale yellow sundress, but I wished she’d take it off. People who hadn’t grown up with magic were never ready to handle how strong these charms could be, and I just had a bad feeling about Elle wearing something that would make her business succeed at lightning speed.
I couldn’t tell why I felt nervous—wasn’t early success a good thing?—but the feeling didn’t go away.
We stopped at a food cart set up by the river. Imogen bought us all greasy packets of bite-sized fried dough covered in cinnamon sugar. We wandered through the next aisle of stalls while we nibbled on them, Elle occasionally reaching up to touch her heavy stone. I was busy examining a series of herb seedlings that seemed to be cowering a little in the chill spring air, when I heard her draw in her breath.
I looked up. Tyler Breckenridge was walking down the ai
sle between the booths.
“I didn’t see him as a Saturday Market kind of guy,” I said, mostly to Imogen, since Elle was looking a little too preoccupied to listen.
Imogen eyed him up and down. “Definitely getting more of an outlet mall vibe,” she said. She managed to make it sound dismissive, even though she herself had never passed by a mall of any kind without at least lingering a few seconds in front of the window displays.
“What is he doing here?” Elle hissed.
I tried to sound reassuring. “He probably hasn’t even seen us.”
I realized what an idiot I sounded like a second later. He clearly had seen us. He was headed straight for Elle, which was odd, since the same pretty blond girl as before was on his arm and simpering at him like he was some kind of celebrity.
He stopped in front of the plants booth. His gaze was right on Elle, a little too intense and unblinking to be anything but weird.
“Hey, Tyler!” I said brightly, trying to take the edge off the situation. It didn’t work.
He didn’t look at me. “Hi, Elle,” he said, lingering on her name. How are you?”
She looked at him like he’d just stepped in something smelly. “I’m good, I guess,” she said. She didn’t return the inquiry, but that didn’t stop him from leaning in toward her.
“It’s great to see you,” he said.
The girl on his arm pressed her lips together and tensed her forehead into fine lines as if to say it really wasn’t. She eyed Elle up and down, slowly enough that it was impossible to miss. Elle frowned at her and folded her arms tight across her chest. When she didn’t look like she was going to say anything, Tyler said, “I wish we could have talked the other day. That was great coffee, by the way.”
Elle stepped sideways, just enough to nudge me with her arm. “Did you do this?” she muttered in a dark undertone. “Is this the spell?”