One Good Wand

by Grace McGuiness

  “What? Hargitay…” When I didn’t respond, he grabbed the folder away from me. “She was transferred. That’s not a big deal. Doesn’t explain why she didn’t say goodbye, but…” He shrugged and tossed the folder on the table with too much force to convince me he didn’t care. “Congratulations, you can have me now.”

  “Mueller, this isn’t funny.” I righted the pile his haphazard toss had almost knocked off the table and picked up Val’s folder again. Double-check, triple-check, and yep—still the same. “It’s not like she was transferred across the state. Or even across the country.”

  He hunkered back down onto the floor and slammed the back of his head against the file cabinet. The explosion of dust that issued forth made me sneeze. “Doesn’t change anything. She left. I’m free. We can get it on. End of story.”

  I sat down next to him again. “They transferred her to Verdant Beauty Boutique, here.” I held out the page, pointing at the name.

  “Seattle?”

  My laugh came out before I could catch it. “I’m sorry. It’s not funny. But…it’s the magic. It’s amazing how it works.”

  Through gritted teeth, he growled, “So where is she?”

  I took a deep breath. “The Emerald City.”

  “Like I said—Seattle.”

  Something - maybe my magic, or maybe it was just the moment - made me reach out and take his hand. “No, over the rainbow Emerald City. Mueller, your girlfriend is in Oz.”

  I watched it slowly sink in. He blinked repeatedly like he had something in his eyes. “Like, wizard and tinman and no place like home?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  He stared at the ceiling. “I guess that would explain why she’s not returning my calls…”

  I squeezed his hand. “At least she’s safe, right? She hasn’t been kidnapped by the Trapperstown Trapper, or anything.”

  He didn’t answer me. For the first time ever, Mueller looked almost small beside me. I wanted to scoot closer and enfold him in a big hug. Since I didn’t know how he would take that, I just kept on holding his hand.

  After a minute had passed, I said, “I don’t know where Oz actually is and I have no idea how we get there except via tornado, but I’ll help you find out. We’ll find her. I promise.”

  “Shouldn’t promise things you don’t know if you can do,” he grumbled.

  “Fine. I promise I will do everything I can to find her.”

  “I’m not a princess.”

  I wasn’t really sure what that had to do with anything. “That’s a relief, ‘cause I didn’t want to be the one to tell you that even a practiced godmother’s magic might not be enough to win you a prince.”

  He still didn’t look at me. “Even if you stay a godmother, I’m not a princess. You can’t help me.”

  “Says who?”

  “That pamphlet the cougar lady left you.”

  I blinked. Clearly, I needed to go back and read it again. For the hundredth time. I must have been more tired last night than I realized if I had missed such a blatant rule. “Even if that’s true, somebody out there has to help the prince find the girl who can’t save herself.”

  “Not a godmother.”

  I gave a quiet roar of frustration. “Fine! Don’t let me help you. See if I care.” I took my hand back and crossed my arms over my chest defensively.

  After my irritated silence had settled, he asked, “So you’re definitely staying a godmother, then?”

  Was I? With all the insanity? The wand squad on its way to do who knew what to me, the curses and the spells and the freaking Land of Oz? Was that what I wanted? “I guess so. I mean, it’s not like I have a lot going for me otherwise.”

  “And whoever replaces you might be worse.”

  I grimaced. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “If Maysie was the godmother before you, it might go to the new factory owner if you give it up.”

  “Nah, she’s a witch, not a godmother.”

  “Are you sure there’s a difference?”

  “One’s good and one’s…I don’t know.”

  “Evil?”

  “Ms. Zent’s not all bad. Scary, absolutely. And that Od guy creeps me out. But she saved me today.”

  Mueller’s dark eyes watched me. “Are you sure about that?”

  “I was, until you said it like that…Why do you ask?”

  He shrugged. “You were the one who said to meet at my car. You had a plan. Are you sure she didn’t just get in the way of you doing what you were going to do anyway, and then confuse you so she could take the credit?”

  My head whirled. Again. I was getting really tired of that. “You’re confusing me.”

  “Don’t worry about it. So, what are we doing when the squad shows up?”

  “Hide like two little babies with no hope of escape?”

  He snorted. “Forever?”

  “Ms. Zent said she would help.”

  Lumbering to his feet, Mueller surveyed the room around us as if it might hold unknown secret weapons. “I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.”

  I was about to demand to know what he knew about our employer that I didn’t when my phone dinged. It was a message from Amy. Your brother is not only hot, he’s funny and awesome and he gave me a job!

  For a split second, my stomach gremlin turned a shade of green befitting Val’s new home. Wasn’t I the one she had turned to? The godmother with the magic? Why did my jackass little brother get all the praise? But then I gave myself a mental shake, chained down the gremlin, and focused on the big picture.

  That’s great! I typed back. But he didn’t give you anything you didn’t earn. That’s not his style.

  This guy from school offered to take me out for a drink. He got a job, too. How crazy is it that we share classes and both got picked for the interviews?? You don’t mind, do you?

  The excitement that came through her text message made me smile. Don’t mind at all. Have fun!

  “What’s up?” Mueller asked as I closed my phone.

  “She did it,” I began, but I didn’t get a chance to elaborate. My phone rang just as I was sticking it in my pocket.

  “Look who’s suddenly the most popular girl in the file room,” he growled, back to his normal teasing self.

  I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered it anyway. Unusual for me. I must have been riding the wave of Amy’s excitement.

  “Tessa?” Danny’s ex-girlfriend’s voice said into my ear. “Are you sitting down?”

  A frog suddenly burrowed into my throat, making it very difficult to say, “Gigi, hey. And yeah. What’s wrong?”

  “You’re going to want to get here fast,” she said, sounding breathless.

  “Gigi, what—”

  “They’re awake, Tess. All of them. Your mom, your stepdad. All of them. And they’re fine.”

  I didn’t even manage to put the phone down before I collapsed into a sobbing heap of relief on the floor.

  Chapter 33

  It was over. All of it. The fear of my mom never waking up. The battle to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do about it. I got Amy to Comic Con, she landed the job and crafted her own fairytale ending, and the curse had broken. Was that how it always was for the godmother? Everything happening on a stage to which she wasn’t invited? That didn’t seem fair to all those kindly old women.

  Part of me refused to believe the last week had happened at all. For the whole drive from the factory to the hospital, all I could think about was how it couldn’t have been me. Not magic. It was just the natural course of the disease. Or the doctors had figured out a cure. Or someone else, someone not me in any way, had fixed it. As much as I had seen and done, I was still trying to explain away the magic.

  The second I stepped inside the hospital, that part of me was sorely disappointed. Everywhere we went, nurses, doctors, and other hospital personnel clustered in corners and around nursing stations, gossiping. How had it happened? Who had cured it? How was it possib
le everyone had awoken at the same time when they hadn’t contracted the disease at the same time? No one had any answers.

  Mueller kept elbowing me gently every time we passed one of the chattering groups, smiling knowingly. I wanted to shove him into a trash can, but I was shaking too hard. It was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other. When we arrived at my mom’s room, the door stood slightly ajar. I couldn’t seem to make myself go in. What if it was all a mistake? Or a dream? My dreams had been really weird and vivid and strangely truthful lately. What if this was just one more setup for a nightmare?

  “Go on in, sweetie,” one of the nurses said, pressing warm fingers to my chilly elbow.

  I smiled at her, but my feet wouldn’t budge. When she was out of earshot, I whispered to Mueller, “What if this isn’t real?”

  “You have a real gift for melodrama, you know that?”

  “I’m serious, Mueller. What if this is the wand squad’s escalation? What if I’m not really here and none of this is really happening? What if I only think it is? This could be my prison. I illegally retained someone else’s wand, and they caught me and threw me into a magical prison where I have to experience all the things I want, only to have them fall apart?” I swallowed hard. “What if I walk in there and she dies?”

  He shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal. “Well, I’m not kissing you. So you’re already not getting all the things you want.”

  That made me break the intense staring contest I was having with the door to give him a sarcastic look. “You’re not funny.”

  “Sure I am. You’re just choosing to ignore it. Just like you’re choosing to ignore that you did something right. Get in there before I shove you in.”

  “That’s what she said,” I said, automatically.

  He laughed. I couldn’t help but smile. “Go,” he ordered.

  “Mr. Bossy.” But I stepped through the door.

  I had never seen such a beautiful sight. My mom, sitting upright, her body a little thinner than it should have been, her dark hair stringy and limp around her shoulders. When she saw me, she smiled with all the love and delight that only a mother can show. Somehow, I made it to her bed without collapsing, but only just. With my arms around her waist, my head on the scratchy blanket covering her lap, her long, graceful fingers running through my hair—I didn’t care if it was real or not. I could live in this moment for the rest of my life and regret nothing.

  “Oh, my sweet Tessy. Everything is okay. It’s all okay.”

  It took me nearly an hour to stop crying. Even then, stray tears kept escaping without my knowledge. Danny showed up somewhere in the middle and even he cried. Eventually, Bob had him laughing and Mom had me smiling, and it was as if the whole world had righted itself again.

  When Mueller brought us all hot chocolate, I left mine in the room and ducked out to rinse my face. I may not have had heavy purple and black makeup to sob off thanks to my timely costume change earlier, but I still looked like a total mess. I considered using magic to make myself at least a little presentable, but I didn’t want to overuse it. Maybe it wasn’t possible to overuse my own magic, but somehow it seemed lazy. I had never been the kind of girl to overdo it with self-enhancements, anyway. No reason to start now.

  I left the bathroom feeling refreshed if not exactly pretty. Especially not next to Jolene Jepson, the same reporter who had joined me in the bathroom back when it all started. Her crew set up in the waiting room down the hall from my mom, drawing a crowd of patients, family members, and staff…including Danny. He waved me over as he watched Jolene give her report beside a bright-but-filtered light.

  “That kid you sent my way?” he murmured to me as I slipped into the edge of the crowd beside him.

  “Amy?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me the players love her?”

  I blinked at him. “Pretty sure I did.”

  He didn’t look at me. Briefly, I wondered if Jolene was magical, the way she held him spellbound. But then I figured her ratings would probably be a lot higher. Danny was a dude without a girlfriend and she was glamorous and locally famous. “I’m supposed to be building a game that makes people feel at home. The forums were blowing up with her name, apparently, demanding she be made community manager.” He sipped from his hot chocolate, still riveted on the sultry reporter. “Plus, she knows the game inside and out. That helped a lot, too.”

  I wanted to punch him. “I told you that last night! And about a dozen other things that—”

  “Shhh!” hissed no fewer than five strangers in the crowd.

  “Anyway, thanks for sending her my way. I would have brought her in just from the resume she emailed in last night, but it’s good to know I’ve got you keeping an eye out for talent.”

  “Sure,” I said through clenched teeth. I wasn’t really sure if I should take that nicely or hit him for being so…so…Danny. Not wanting to completely lose my good mood, I opted for the former. Before I said anything less nice, I left him to his ogling and headed back toward my mom’s room.

  As I rounded the corner, I caught sight of a familiar form in a nice, simple blue suit. The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I hadn’t seen Nicky since our date. Hadn’t even talked to him because he hadn’t wanted to talk to me. And here I was, totally without makeup, in dusty jeans and a t-shirt still damp with tears. Curse me and my anti-vanity high ground!

  Wait. I still had that makeup in my purse that Ms. Zent had instructed me to use before I came back to work on Tuesday. I hadn’t actually gone back to work that day…had I? Whatever. I dug it out of my purse, popping the compact open with something resembling discretion. With my purse under my arm and the compact held to eye level, I picked up the puff. It had been used once, probably back when my mom accidentally grabbed the wrong purse. A quick glance in the mirror proved my eyes were just as red and puffy as they had been in the bathroom. Only magic would fix that, and I couldn’t exactly do it in the middle of the hallway. I would have to settle for softening my blotchy complexion and smoothing the appearance of my pores by regular old human methods.

  “Tessa!” Nicky shouted at me. “Stop!” I heard his hard footfalls approaching without seeing him over the compact. He was a speedy man. Had he run track in high school? I couldn’t remember. Whether he had or not, he was in amazing shape now. I hadn’t even managed to powder the shine from my nose by the time his warm hands closed around my wrists and pulled my hands away from my face. “Stop,” he breathed, his eyes frantically searching my face.

  “Have something against makeup, Mr. Mikkelsen?”

  He dragged his thumbs across my cheeks as if ensuring there was no powder to be found there. My heart skipped.

  “Good. You didn’t get any on you.” He moved my hands away from both of us carefully. I hadn’t seen his partner in the hall with him, but she was there the next instant, using gloves to pluck the puff from my hand and place it into a plastic bag. She did the same with the compact, then used an antibacterial wipe to thoroughly clean Nicky’s hands, then mine. She dropped the wipe into the bag and followed it with both gloves before sealing the bag tightly. “I’ll get these to the lab, just to be sure.” And then she was gone as quickly as she had appeared.

  I looked up at him expectantly, my hands still held in midair, afraid to move. “Ummm…”

  “We had the virus narrowed down to a handful of products from the same manufacturer. That powder was one of them.”

  Ice replaced the blood in my veins. “Those were made at my factory. The one where I work…” The implications thundered through my head in wave after wave of glacial heartbeats. “Did my boss…did my boss do this? Put people in comas?”

  His brow furrowed. “I can’t discuss an open case. I can tell you that we investigated your place of employment and can say for certain that they weren’t made there.”

  “So it’s safe to go to work?” My voice sounded a million miles away.

  “I don’t know about ‘safe.’ Some of those machines looke
d pretty dangerous.” He smiled reassuringly. “But it’s clean. You don’t have to worry about falling asleep just going to work.”

  “I sort files all day. That’s always a danger.” I forced myself to smile, even though all I could think was, My boss poisoned my mom.

  Nicky chuckled, a delightfully masculine sound that managed to penetrate the ice coursing through me. Or maybe it was the heat of his hands as they took mine, intertwining our fingers. Probably both. “I’m really sorry I haven’t answered your calls. I couldn’t, because of the investigation. No personal contact with possible suspects.”

  I pulled back. “I was a suspect?”

  He moved with me, keeping the distance between us small enough I could still feel the warmth of his sexy frame. “Officially, it was possible. Unofficially, never.” He swallowed, causing his Adam’s apple to bob. It drew my gaze to the clean-shaven line of his jaw. “Thanks for rescuing Dave, by the way. I have no idea how he got out of the yard. Sometimes I think he’s too smart to be a dog.”

  I flicked my eyes up to meet his, a magical alarm going off in my head. “What else would he be?” I had kept Dave at my house. If he were some kind of magical beast…

  “Part wolf.”

  “Oh.” I laughed at myself, dropping my gaze. Somehow, I was standing closer to him than I had been a second ago. “You’re welcome. And…” I lifted my eyes again, this time catching his in that delicious way that locked two people together in a universe of their own, even with a whole room between them. And we definitely didn’t have a whole room between us. “I’m glad you’re okay. I was worried.”

  “Yeah?” His fingers tightened on mine.

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. No chill remained anywhere inside me now. It was all heat. Volcanic, even.

  “Lucky me.”

  And then his lips were on mine, hot and soft and perfect. Nothing else in the world existed. Just his lips, the taste of him, the feel of his body against mine, the smell of his cologne and the man underneath it. I released his hands and drew my arms around his neck as if I had been drowning and he saved me from certain death. His arms wrapped around my waist with the same intensity.