One Good Wand

by Grace McGuiness

  “Odmenticus!” Mallora Zent sounded far more irritated than the blonde had. “Oh, Shinewell. What in the name of the Dragon Queen are you doing here?”

  “Mallora,” Sabine greeted, not exactly cordially but without reproach, either. “Finally got your hands on Fairytale Endings, I see. Couldn’t even wait until Maysie’s retirement ink was dry, hm?”

  The black-haired woman didn’t smile, but the arch to her brows suggested amusement. “A deal waits for no fairy.”

  I squinted at her. Did she just say she was a fairy?

  “To what do we owe the honor of your official presence? I assume it’s official, yes?”

  “It is.” Sabine glanced sideways at me. “There seems to be confusion regarding the location of Maysie’s wand, post-retirement.”

  “No confusion,” I muttered, unable to stop myself. “I don’t have it.”

  Ms. Zent looked from me to Sabine with imperious slowness. “Why would my file clerk have a godmother’s wand?”

  Sabine’s lips pressed together, and I got the distinct impression she was glaring at me even though she was looking at Ms. Zent. “It appears to have gone missing. I was simply inquiring after it, if she had seen it around the office.”

  “And has she? I don’t like the idea of such things floating around my place of business.”

  “Or the fines it would cause, no doubt.” Sabine turned to me and magicked a business card out of thin air. “Here’s my number. If you find the object in question, please call me immediately. If it’s not found within three days, the Agency will have to mobilize a task force, and we don’t like to do that.” She stared at me so hard, I thought she might leave an imprint on my face.

  I nodded enthusiastically. “I don’t know why I’d want a silly wand, anyway,” I mumbled. “Just perpetuate my insanity…”

  “I would appreciate it if you would direct any future inquiries to me first,” my new boss said, her chin lifting. “Instead of to my employees.”

  “In future, of course I will. Fair day, Mallora.”

  “Speedy parting, Shinewell.” She didn’t budge.

  Sabine turned to me. “I’m sorry we couldn’t be of more help to each other. Good luck with your work. Fair day.”

  I raised my hand to say goodbye, but the blonde woman vanished in a puff of golden-pink smoke.

  As if the room wasn’t filled with two kinds of glittering smoke, Mallora pinned me with a subtly menacing stare. “What help are you in need of, Miss Hargitay?”

  I cast around for an answer she might accept and hit upon one pretty quickly. I wanted to kick myself for it, but I said it anyway. “Makeup tips. She said I was too far gone to help, though.”

  The tall woman stared at me for a long moment, and I thought my goose was most certainly cooked. Finally, she hemmed and said, “Yes. We can’t all be blessed with such pristine features as the Shinewell Clan, can we? Besides, your complexion is much closer to mine. If you are serious about assistance, I would be delighted to help.”

  That was not at all the response I’d expected. “Really?”

  “As I said, we have an image to maintain.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, if that’s all, let’s get back to work, shall we? Odmenticus, my office.”

  The little man bobbed his head, looking vaguely birdlike. Like a vulture, maybe. “Yes, Mistress.”

  No mention of the smoking floor. No comment on the explosion. No worry about someone being hurt. I had the distinct impression I was supposed to ignore it, too, so I turned woodenly and strode through the blast zone as if it weren’t a smoldering, black horseshoe waiting to zap me. Once inside with the door closed, a quick glance proved I wasn’t on magical green fire, so I let myself sink to the floor.

  A fairy godmother.

  How the hell was I a fairy godmother? And, more to the point, what the hell was I supposed to do now?

  I laid down on my newly swept floor, pressing my cheek to the cool wood until I could breathe without dry sobbing. One of these days, my grief over life up to this point would fade, leaving me with peaceful acceptance and emotional balance.

  Today was not that day.

  I slammed my fist into the floor, trying to keep the tears from flowing. Gentle plumes of dust unfurled into the bright nooning beam of sunlight, swirling and dancing like happy little ballerinas. It was hypnotic and soothing, helping me calm down. I hit the floor again to watch the effect. And again when the dust settled. Over and over again until, on the sixth or seventh punch, the floorboard I hit cracked, split, and flew up to smack me in the face.

  “Why you little…” I resisted the urge to fling it across the room. Destroying the file room would probably get me fired, even if looking like I was going to have sex in the boss’s office hadn’t.

  With a great deal more control than I felt like existed in the whole of my life, I scooted forward to replace the board. Except something in the space beneath glowed up at me. At first, I thought it was a unicorn’s horn, the way it spiraled and gleamed with a soft golden light. But the second I set a fingertip to the pale wood, I knew what it was.

  Maysie’s wand pulsed as if alive in my hand. I could feel her power coursing down my arm, wave after wave of cookies and pumpkin pie and fresh gingerbread filling me up with hope and possibilities.

  Beneath it lay a note.

  Dear Tessa,

  I’m leaving this in your keeping because there is no one else I trust. We haven’t known each other long, but ever since your interview I’ve known you were the one. The apprentice I’ve been looking for. I am a fairy godmother, and now you are, too.

  If you are reading this, something has happened to keep me from my normal life. WHIRA will undoubtedly come to collect my wand soon. This is very important: DO NOT LET ANYONE TAKE THIS WAND. So long as it’s in your possession, no one will be able to find it.

  I’m sorry I wasn’t able to induct you properly. Until the day that I am free to do so, you must assume you are alone in a world you know nothing about. Be the height of caution and protect yourself at all costs. The world appearing before you is more dangerous than you can know, and so different from the one into which you were born.

  A godmother’s job is often difficult, but it is also infinitely rewarding. Choose your girls well and do your best for them. I may not be able to train you yet, but I have faith in your natural talents. You have a special power, Tessa; I have only ever met one other person who saw with eyes like yours, but that gift will leave you vulnerable. Find allies you can trust; they will be worth more than Rumpelstiltskin’s gold. Mundanes are easier to trust than the Folk, if only because their motives are straight-forward. They can be your greatest shield but also your greatest weakness. Remember that, too.

  Fly well, Tessa, and take heart—your destiny is greater than any fairytale ending you may create.

  Yours in Magic,

  Maysie Browning Fife

  All I could think, even after rereading the letter twice, was, “Dammit, Destiny!”

  Chapter 15

  There had never been a longer day in my life. Not the last day of school before break every year as a kid. Not my wedding day. Not even the day I came home from a photo shoot to find my apartment half-empty without even a note to say goodbye.

  I did my best to keep working, just in case my new boss had a way of tracking my progress. Just because her assistant couldn’t blow up the door didn’t mean she couldn’t use fairy magic to see through it. And just in case she could, I kept the wand in the floor all day. Even from beneath the floorboard, I could feel its pulse as if it were tethered to my soul. As if it stared at me like Destiny - fluffy canine Destiny - begging for a treat off my dinner plate. I felt like I spent half my day looking at it without seeing it. Not with my physical eyes, at least. The more I looked, the more I could make out its glow like a chalk outline on the floor. Maybe that was just my imagination, but it still made me shiver.

  Mueller tried to get me to come out for lunch, wooing me w
ith promises of a new chocolate cookie the bakers wanted us to test. Knowing our boss was a fairy made me never want to touch anything in the factory, let alone eat it. The rational part of my brain stepped in and stomped all over those silly ideas. That is, it tried, putting up a bigger fight than was usually necessary. For all that I grew up believing in fairies and elves that fixed shoes in the middle of the night, I knew better as an adult. At least, that’s what Rational Me kept saying, over and over until it became a mantra. I know better than this. I know better than this. I know better than this!

  When the factory whistle blew at the end of the day signaling that Mueller had hit the master shut-down, I almost collapsed in a puddle of relief. Nothing else out of the ordinary had happened. My boss hadn’t demanded the wand, nor had Sabine popped back in to collect it. When I pulled the faintly glowing stick out of the floor, a spare thought wished she had. Maybe if I gave it to the official like I was apparently supposed to do, life would go back to normal. I would have no wand, no complication. Just a file clerk, filing files until the day I finally finished and flittered forward with my easy existence.

  Did godmothers think in such serious alliteration? Damn it…

  I could break the wand, snap it in half and put it back in the floor and forget about it. No danger to me—and Maysie’s note led me to believe danger now existed around every corner, whether I could see it or not. No responsibility. No insane new vocation I hadn’t chosen.

  Fairy godmother. Bah!

  Still, I shoved the wand deep down inside my purse before I left.

  Despite my best efforts to sneak out, Mueller was waiting for me at my mom’s car. He leaned against it with his arms folded heavily across a peach-colored t-shirt I couldn’t read. Despite that soft, sweet color, he looked neither soft nor sweet. Leaning there, he looked like a storm cloud preparing to drop a tornado on an unsuspecting farming town. His dark eyes glared at me without blinking as I crossed the parking lot. For a split second, I considered turning around and going back into the factory like I’d forgotten something. Like I hadn’t seen him. But Mueller didn’t strike me as the type of guy who’d give up that easily.

  I scuttled across the lot, kicking stray pebbles and dirt around me as I went. I left a wide berth between us when I got to the car, not looking at him as I pulled out my key to unlock the door.

  “What did I tell you, first thing?” he demanded, his usually deep voice so low I felt it in my bones. My body tried to respond to it in a way I had no interest in entertaining, so I spat words at it. “Don’t start.”

  If Mueller thought I was talking to him, he ignored me. “If you don’t keep your walkie on and with you, I can’t help you if something happens in the file room. I won’t know.” The thunder that rumbled in those last three words made me glance across the hood at him. There was more going on here than his concern that I’d get crushed by a file avalanche. Whatever it was, I had no room to address it. Realizing that made me angry. Not just a little angry; angry enough to shout and rage and rip my shirt in half with my bare hands and bulging green muscles.

  “This is such bullshit!” My voice bounced across the otherwise empty parking lot, echoing back to me in various strengths of Hulk. And then it was a waterfall, all the crap that my life had become spilling out of my mouth in a torrent of rage and despair and futility. It didn’t go deep, but oh, it went wide, the kind of river that causes flash floods in a storm. And this storm was a big one. By the time it wound down, I had covered everything from Bob and my mom’s extracurricular activities to Maysie’s letter without hearing or thinking about any of it. I heard the catch in my words as I asked, “What am I supposed to do with any of this? I barely know how to get out of bed every morning. How the hell am I supposed to, what? Make dreams come true?” I glanced at the side of the towering, red brick factory where faded yellow paint declared, Where dreams are born. A week ago, I’d loved that sign. Today, I wanted to scratch it off with my fingers, until my nails were nubs and my fingerprints had been scraped off and left a bloody, unidentifiable mess.

  Without saying a word, his eyes still a dark, menacing cloud bank threatening me from the horizon, he stalked around the car and hooked a hard hand around my upper arm. With that firm grip, he practically dragged me to his beat-up old Blazer where he unlocked the passenger side and shoved me in without ceremony.

  “And now you’re kidnapping me. Awesome,” I griped as he got in, but I didn’t try to leave. My outburst seemed to have taken all of my strength as it flowed out of me. Besides, I trusted Mueller. Maybe I shouldn’t; I had only known him for a week, after all. But this was Mueller. Mueller, who had saved my life and whose life I had saved the first day we met. Even if he didn’t remember. Despite the short amount of time we had known each other, I suddenly realized how much it hurt that he didn’t remember it right.

  “No crying in the Muellermobile.” Other than that, he appeared to ignore me as he backed out of the space and headed us toward God knew where. I believe in sweeping a woman off her feet, the peach shirt said. That seemed oddly un-Mueller-like, but it made me smile. Inside, way down deep where he couldn’t see it. Outwardly, I worked up a solid, silent fume.

  We drove through empty Colorado plains for what felt like ages, until I actually started to worry he might be kidnapping me. Well, maybe not kidnapping. Running away with me. For about two minutes, I hoped that’s what we were doing. Giving the finger to life and absconding across the country. We could be like Bonnie and Clyde without the criminal activity, adventuring around the country and leaving rumor and tall tales in our wake wherever we went. I was just getting invested in the idea when we pulled up to a tiny dive bar off the dirt road. There were cows grazing behind it and a solitary llama glaring at me as it chewed cud from behind a barbed fence.

  “You brought me to a strip club?” I asked incredulously as I noticed a blinking neon sign that advertised live entertainment. “I’m having a life crisis, and your first instinct is to show me another woman’s boobs?”

  He didn’t answer me, instead leaning around his seat to dig around in all the junk in the back seat. For the first time, I noticed that a cardboard cutout had been staring at me the whole ride.

  “Why do you have Harry Potter in your back seat?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

  “Carpool lane,” he said, with no hint of emotion.

  “That doesn’t really work, does it?”

  He didn’t answer me again. He did grumble a lot, cursing the mess until it yielded what he was looking for. “My first instinct was to show you that,” he said, dropping a box in my lap. Long and slender, it barely felt like it contained anything. I’d seen enough packaging at the factory to recognize it as a Fairytale Endings product, but there was no label to tell me what it was. “Open it,” he ordered.

  Widening my eyes sarcastically at the bossiness in his tone, I did as he said, upending the contents into my lap. I picked up the toy wand and held it in front of me in shock.

  It was the same wand I found in the floor with Maysie’s note. Same swirl pattern that made it look like a unicorn horn. Same warm color. Even the texture felt the same.

  I was staring at it with my mouth slightly open when Mueller asked, “That it?” As if he needed to ask.

  Without thinking, I slipped the other wand out of my purse and held it up to the toy. Identical. Identical, except…

  “See? Can’t tell ‘em apart. It’s a toy, Tessa. A joke. Don’t know who did it—kinda wish I’d thought of it. But it’s just a joke.”

  I hesitated before I answered, peering at his face for any hint of a tell. “I can tell the difference,” I whispered.

  He took them from me, turning them around in his hands. “This one has a button to turn it on and that one doesn’t. But if you don’t see…” He covered the button with his fist and matched the grip on the real wand. “They’re the same.”

  Just one little, tiny hint that he was joking, that he saw what I saw. That’s all I wanted. I wanted him to
tell me I wasn’t crazy. That what I felt was real. Or maybe all a figment of my imagination. A definitive answer one way or the other… “I can tell the difference,” I said again.

  Mueller mixed them up behind his back and held them out to me again, one in each fist, the button portion covered. Maysie’s wand wasn’t glowing anymore, but I didn’t need the light to show the way. I pointed to the real wand. He glared at me and mixed them up again. Nine times he made me choose the right one before he gave up and handed them back.

  “How?” he demanded.

  I shrugged. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” I put both wands in the box, figuring it would be safer if Sabine or anyone else showed up to take Maysie’s wand. They could probably tell the difference, too, but it was all I could do to keep it safe. I slid the box into the deep pocket of my cargo pants so I didn’t have to take my purse inside.

  “You should leave that here. Might give the girls the wrong idea about what’s behind the zipper.” That teasing, gutter-brained sparkle returned to his expression.

  “Please. Men may be convinced they can be that long, but women live in reality.” I tapped the box in my pocket and added, “At least when it comes to male genitalia.”

  Mueller gave me a look of pity as he opened his door. “We need to redefine your idea of reality.”

  I didn’t budge. He made it to the front door before he noticed.

  “I’m not going in there,” I said, rolling down the window just a crack.

  “Get out of the damn car, Tessa.” No room for argument. Whether I got out of the car or not, he was going inside. I could sit in the car for however long he decided to get his perv on, or I could go with him and be uncomfortable for however long he found amusing. Somehow, I figured the former would be a lot longer than the latter.