Glimmers of Scales

by Emma Savant

  “Hi!” she said, way too loudly.

  I yelped and shot backward, the wheels of my chair a little too willing to roll across the polished wood floor. My seat bounced against the scratchy cubicle wall, making it vibrate.

  Lily’s eyes were as round as two sand dollars.

  “I’m so sorry!” she said. “Oh my goodness, are you all right? I didn’t mean to scare you!”

  My heart slammed around inside my ribcage. I took a few deep breaths.

  “You’re fine,” I said. “I was kind of focused.” I frowned. “I thought I was picking you up. How did you get here?”

  “Bus,” she said.

  Her face practically glowed with pride, and I had to admit that riding a bus across town was probably a pretty big deal if you’d spent your life in a river.

  I waved at the ugly plastic yellow chair that had somehow found its home in the corner of my cubicle. A paper airplane fluttered past, high over our heads.

  “Good job,” I said. “Pull up a seat.”

  She dragged it over and sat, her toes grazing the ground. She pressed her knees together and bounced them up and down while her hands tried to hold them still. She waited all of two seconds before launching in.

  “I need you to perform a love spell,” she said.

  I caught my breath in a hurry.

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “Those are the worst.”

  I knew, because I’d done one in the spring for Elle. It had been a nightmare for everybody.

  “But I need you to!” she said. “Evan won’t leave his girlfriend!”

  I held up a hand.

  “Whoa,” I said. “How do you know? I thought we were going to go visit Evan again together once you had your legs under you a little more.”

  That had been the plan. Her face made it clear that the plan had not been followed. Again.

  I couldn’t even pretend to be surprised.

  “I couldn’t help myself,” she said.

  I felt like she should look a little more apologetic than she did. Whatever guilt she felt was overlaid by the kind of rapture I was coming to identify as Evan Face.

  “I love him so much and I just had to go see him,” she said. “We were talking on the internet together. Don’t look at me like you don’t approve, because I already know you don’t. We began sharing our fondness for one another and I couldn’t bear to be away from him for a moment longer. So I went to see him, and oh, faerie godmother, it was wonderful!”

  She sighed and closed her eyes, looking way too blissed-out to be talking about some dude.

  “I love him,” she repeated, which—shockingly enough—was not news to me. “We had such a lovely conversation, and I told him I have feelings for him, and he said he has feelings for me, too, but he also said that he’s committed to his girlfriend and can’t betray her trust.”

  “Good,” I said, but Lily was too far gone to listen.

  “And so I need you to perform a spell that will make him realize he loves me, not her.”

  Her eyes were bigger than a puppy’s. I folded my arms across my chest and tried to figure out how to explain to her that really, really wanting something wasn’t always a good enough reason to get it. Especially not when it involved dragging me into the middle of things.

  “I need this, faerie godmother!” she said. “I can’t tell you how much I need it!”

  “Olivia,” I corrected.

  She was too busy clasping her hands to her bosom to hear me.

  She hadn’t been this bad in a while. I couldn’t decide whether I liked her earnestness or just wanted to strangle her. The scales were tipped strongly in the strangling direction when she added, “Also, I need a new place to live. Your boss says I can’t be at Goose House anymore.”

  I’d been enjoying the day. I’d been holed up, feeling cozy, and so of course everything had to start imploding.

  And I wasn’t in the mood.

  I stood up and marched past Lily and out of my cubicle. One of my coworkers, Aster, stopped typing and watched me pass, but I ignored her.

  Lorinda’s blinds were pulled up. I could see her and Tabitha through the glass windows, sipping tea and talking about the papers on Lorinda’s desk. The dark purple walls loomed over them.

  Tabitha’s back was to me, so all I could see was the back of her severe black bob and her black shawl. She looked more like a stylish French witch than a faerie godmother, which, on days of less crisis, gave me a tiny bit of hope that I could manage this job for a bit without falling prey to the horrible pastel suits Lorinda seemed to love.

  Lorinda had barely called “Come in” before I entered.

  I kept one hand on the door frame for support. This had seemed like a better idea until I was actually standing here with their eyes on me.

  “Do you have a minute?” I said.

  Lorinda raised her eyebrows at me. “Looks like I’d better,” she said. “Tabitha, pardon me.”

  They both turned to me and waited.

  I took a deep breath.

  “My client is in my cubicle,” I said. “Apparently you told her she can’t stay at Goose House.”

  Lorinda frowned and sighed deeply. The shoulder pads under her sky-blue blazer rose and fell with the breath.

  “I certainly didn’t expect her to come here,” she said.

  “So what’s the problem?” I said. “Why can’t she stay at Goose House?”

  “I was trying to convince her to go back to the river where she belongs,” Lorinda said.

  She glanced at Tabitha, then back at me.

  “King Pacifica has been exerting a certain amount of pressure and I hoped that if she didn’t have a place to stay, she might be more willing to give this up and go home.”

  “I thought the Oracle had approved this,” Tabitha said.

  “The Oracle doesn’t have to deal with daily messages from Neptune threatening he’ll press kidnapping charges,” Lorinda said grimly. “If it’s the girl’s choice, the Oracle can’t say anything about it. Even the Oracle is required to accept our clients’ choices about their Stories.”

  “Being required to accept them doesn’t mean she does,” Tabitha said, but Lorinda shot her a quelling look.

  I drummed my fingers on the doorframe.

  “Next time, I would really appreciate if you would let me know,” I said, trying and—judging by the amusement on Tabitha’s face—failing to be polite.

  Lorinda sighed in a way that made me think I wasn’t the only one having a bad day.

  “I’m sorry, Olivia,” she said. “I should have mentioned it.”

  “What do I do now?” I said. “She can’t stay at my place.”

  My parents would never go for it. Or worse, they might really go for it and see making Lily welcome as a way to nurture my fledgling godmother career, and that wasn’t happening.

  “What about your friend?” Lorinda said. “Imogen?”

  “No,” I said.

  “The Danns might have room,” Tabitha said. “Didn’t her parents just have one of their daughters get married? I’m sure they’d have space for Lily for a week or two.”

  “No,” I repeated. “Lily cannot stay with Imogen.”

  “Imogen’s a nice girl,” Lorinda said. “Her supervisor speaks very highly of her.”

  “Her supervisor clearly doesn’t know Imogen cheated on her Proctor Exam,” I said.

  The blood rushed hot to my face the second the words left my lips.

  The silence congealed in the air, almost thick enough to reach out and touch. Lorinda pursed her lips, and Tabitha’s dark eyebrows tightened. They glanced at each other, and then Tabitha looked at me and cocked her head, waiting.

  “I didn’t say that,” I said.

  But then, why not?

  Imogen had cheated. And Aubrey was right: My former best friend was going to keep acting like she ran the world if no one ever called her on her crap.

  The Oracle said I could use Imogen’s secrets however I wanted, that te
lling the truth about her would mean “balance in my world.” I wasn’t dumb enough to think that balance meant we’d be friends again like nothing had ever happened. But we were never going to be friends again anyway. Imogen had made that clear.

  Maybe I’d feel better about it and be able to let this whole stupid thing go.

  “That’s a fairly serious accusation,” Tabitha said, her voice gentle as though she didn’t want to spook me. But I wasn’t in the mood to be spooked.

  “Ask the Oracle if you don’t believe me,” I said.

  They could take it from here. I turned back to Lorinda. “So what am I supposed to do?”

  She rubbed the place between her eyes. “Lily can stay the rest of the month,” she said. “I’ll call and arrange it. But you need to have this case wrapped up by the end of October.”

  “I can do that,” I said.

  I frowned, not sure where those words had come from. I had no idea if I could do that. But the look on Lorinda’s normally brisk face was so exhausted that I knew I’d have to make it work.

  I tapped the doorframe. “Thank you. Seriously.”

  She offered me a tired smile, and I left, closing the door quietly behind me.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The tiny rooftop garden a few buildings away from Wishes Fulfilled was overgrown with weeds and climbing flowers. It was supposed to be a community garden for local Glims, but no one kept up on it. A lone picnic table sat in a corner, its dark reddish-brown paint peeling with age. Lily and I sat on top of the table with our feet resting on the bench. Lily bounced her legs absently, making the table vibrate. Rain fell around us, but we were dry and warm under the protective bubble I’d created.

  “I can’t remember what it’s called,” Lily said. “It’s on the computer. There’s a place where you write questions, and then it gives you the answers. It’s how I found Evan that one time.”

  “A search engine?” I said.

  “Um, sure,” Lily said.

  She twirled a strand of green-threaded hair around her finger.

  “So I asked it how I could find Evan Costner, and then I clicked on some blue letters that had his name. And that took me to this different computer screen. And then all his pictures were there. And it was strange, because they were all images he’d taken, but none of them were of him.” She sighed. “It made me miss him, so I messaged him. I long for him.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said.

  I felt the waves of beautiful desperation pour off of her, an endless rush of wanting something she seriously shouldn’t have.

  “You still disapprove,” she said.

  I tapped my knees with my palms.

  “Honestly?” I said. “Who cares if I disapprove? You don’t care. Your dad doesn’t care. My boss doesn’t care. I’m not sure who I’m trying to impress.”

  She frowned. “You sound bitter.”

  “It’s not bitter,” I said, and let out a huge gust of air, trying to let some of my tension go with it. “It’s just, I’m tired. I’ve been dealing with a lot lately, and I don’t have a lot of energy to worry about whether you’re making the right decisions, especially since you don’t seem to be interested in my advice anyway. No offense, but let’s be honest, you’re not.”

  “Not when it comes to Evan,” Lily said.

  She had the good grace to look slightly ashamed. She studied the wet ground and wrapped her hands around her knees.

  “I respect you as a godmother, I really do. But I can’t let anyone else make decisions for me when it comes to Evan. He’s my everything.”

  I knew. I bit back another sigh.

  “You’re in luck,” I said. “I’ve already booked that photo shoot with him. We’re going to go there together and you’re going to get head shots taken.”

  Her eyebrows furrowed. “Head shots?”

  Nervousness tingled from her, and it took me a second to realize why.

  “Not like someone’s shooting you in the head,” I said. “Head shots are pictures of your face. People get them for their online portfolios and professional social media pages and stuff. And actors get them when they’re trying to get roles. We could always tell him you’re an actress.”

  Her hand flew to the back of her neck.

  “I’d love to be an actress!” she said. “Then we could both be in the arts. He could take pictures and I could be in the moving pictures. Wouldn’t that be romantic?”

  “Movies,” I said. “They’re called movies.”

  “When are we head shooting?” she said. “Please say soon.”

  “Soon-ish,” I said.

  I bit the inside of my cheek and debated on my next words, but decided to be honest. It wasn’t like Lily would care anyway.

  “He’s gone half of this week because he’s taking his girlfriend to a show in Seattle for her birthday.”

  No reaction, other than breathless anticipation. A little gray bird skittered to a stop on the ground a ways in front of us. Water beaded on its feathers. It froze for a second and then fluttered into the air again before diving into the tiny potting shed that held unused tools.

  “After he gets back from Seattle, he’s booked for a while,” I said. “So two Tuesdays from now, we’ll go see him.”

  She clasped her hands to her chest, like I’d thought people only did in silent films from the twenties.

  “Oh, faerie godmother!”

  “Olivia,” I said automatically, but she wasn’t listening.

  “When is he leaving for Seattle?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I only got that much information because I pried like a creeper.”

  “If we go right now, I imagine we could see him,” Lily said. “We could tell him that we wanted to come discuss the details of the head shoots before we actually do them, and then we could actually go do them at our appointment. Please. I’ll die if I don’t see him again soon!”

  I waited until the melodramatic torrent dried up and then blinked at her.

  “Seriously?” I said.

  “I’m ready,” Lily said. “We both are. We need to see each other. Our last conversation didn’t end well.”

  “By which you mean he wouldn’t abandon his probably long-term girlfriend for you,” I said.

  “What if he forgets about me? What if he spends all that time with her and then doesn’t want to come home to me?”

  “Then he’s probably a good person,” I said.

  She groaned. It was a desperate, raw sound, something I hadn’t heard come out of her before. The frustration that often seemed to fritz around her aura swelled into a tangible rush.

  “There’s so much we don’t know about each other,” she said. “How are we supposed to be married if you won’t even let us talk? He doesn’t even know I’m a mermaid!”

  That had to stop, right here, right now. I put a firm hand on hers.

  “He can’t know that,” I said.

  The nightmare of trying to explain that one not just to Lorinda but to magical law enforcement threatened to engulf me.

  “Lily?” I said. “Listen. There are laws about that.’

  “You land people don’t follow laws,” she said. “They’re just suggestions to you. I know all about ‘speed limits.’”

  I squeezed her hand, hard.

  “I’m not talking about speed limits,” I said. “You cannot tell him you’re a Glim.”

  A slight breeze rushed down between the buildings and into our courtyard. It was cool and made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end; I hoped it was doing the same thing to Lily to reinforce the gravity of her situation.

  “Hum-Glim relationships don’t always turn out well,” I said. “I know you love Evan. I get that. But magic is a big thing for a Humdrum to just come to terms with. I mean, can you imagine if you started dating someone and then they told you that an entire world existed under your nose that you knew nothing about?”

  Lily smiled at me like I was an idiot child.

  “Olivia,” she s
aid gently. “Evan did show me a new world. Evan is my new world!”

  I didn’t smack her.

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “It’s not like, ‘Yay, there’s an amazing new world full of magic, let’s get married!’ A lot of the time, the Hums aren’t happy. One partner having magic is a lot of inequality to throw into a relationship. I had this friend.”

  The word friend seemed wrong on my tongue. Ex-friend? Former bestie? What was Imogen, anyway?

  “Her aunt was dating this Hum guy,” I said. “They decided to get married. And so he gave her a ring, and then she told him she was a faerie. And he said he was fine with it. But whenever she’d use a spell, he’d make a snide comment about how it was a shame things weren’t that easy for everyone. Or whenever she tried to introduce him to her Glim friends, he’d make a big deal about how he didn’t have any special powers.”

  She looked at me. I couldn’t tell if she was listening.

  “It wore their relationship to pieces,” I said. “They broke up and they had to glamour his memories. He doesn’t remember our world now; he just remembers that their relationship went sour and that she gave the ring back.”

  “The ring,” Lily said. “That’s part of the law, right?”

  “You can’t tell someone you’re Glim until you’ve exchanged a serious token of your relationship, like an engagement ring or an apartment key or something,” I said. “You have to enchant the token with a spell so the Council can track down the Hum if they need to glamour their memory. People break up so often that glamouring memories is part of the law.”

  “That won’t be a problem for Evan and me,” Lily said. “Our love can withstand anything.”

  “Most mixed relationships fail,” I said.

  “Ours will last forever,” she said.

  I rubbed the spot between my eyes. Another bird cawed as it hopped along edge of the rooftop.

  “So you keep telling me,” I said. “You know what? Whatever. Maybe it will. Just, please, stop trying to force it until after your photo session with him, okay?”