The stairs seemed to go on forever. The darkness grew more intense the farther down they went, and the damp smell got worse. Water dripped somewhere, and some of the stone steps were broken off.
Sonny stepped down with incredible focus, the sword trembling in his hands. Occasionally, he looked up at her, with a clear question on his face. What’s going on?
She had no idea. It frightened her, in hindsight, to think that she might have been completely alone in that tower night after night. What if something had gone seriously wrong? What if she had needed help?
She wouldn’t have received it. Even if she shouted for help, no one would have heard her this far out in the woods, away from anything, all alone in a building of thick river stone.
She pushed the thoughts from her mind. She wasn’t out of here yet, and if she were forced to stay, then she would be thinking about it from now on—she would know that she was alone, and somehow that very idea terrified her more than going down the stairs did.
Zel moved just a little closer to Sonny, despite her promise to give him room so that he could swing the blade. If someone else were in this tower stairwell, they should be able to hear that person, right?
She had no real idea. She was guessing, based on books. And she knew better than to ask Sonny any questions. Their whispers might echo down the stairs alerting—who?
They reached a landing where there were no stairs at all. Just another solid oak door.
With his free hand, Sonny reached into his pocket and pulled out another packet. He handed it to her. It felt like parchment, only crisper. She had never touched a substance like that before. She could even see through it, at the herbs inside.
“Pour that into my hand,” he said in a near whisper. Not that they needed to whisper. They really were alone.
He held his palm up and she did pour the herbs into it. He clenched his fingers around it, moved the sword slightly, and tossed the herbs at the door.
More purple webs. They were scattered all over the door.
“I’ll bet it’s not even locked,” he muttered.
“What?” she asked.
“The one upstairs wasn’t,” he said. “Your witch got lazy. She let the wards guard you.”
He made that sound like a good thing. But he didn’t know how it felt that day Aite had shown up, the terror in that attendant’s face, the way the attendant had run for the window.
“I’m not going to set my sword down,” he said. “You’ll have to hold it. And it will want to follow me, so hold tight.”
She frowned. He ran the tip of one finger along the flat of the sword and said quietly, “She’s safe. Trust her.”
Then he handed her the sword.
It vibrated in her hands. It felt both alive and terrified at the same time. If it were a person, she would think its skin was crawling at her touch.
The flaring light dimmed, and the sword tugged her toward Sonny. But she kept her feet firmly on the stone floor, not letting it pull her close.
He took a few steps toward the door, muttered those weird words again, and tossed something else at the purple webs.
Like the ones upstairs, these turned gray and dissolved. The scent of burning lavender filled the stairwell. She hadn’t smelled that upstairs, but then, she wouldn’t have noticed. Not with the fire going, the breeze from the window, and the candles that were always lit.
This time, the smell overpowered the stench of damp.
The sword started swirling at the top, as if it were fighting against the smell all on its own.
Sonny took the sword from her, and it flared golden, as if it recognized him.
Maybe it did.
Then he put his hand on the door’s handle, and pushed.
The door eased open.
Sounds, that she normally heard upstairs as she tried to sleep, filtered inside. Frogs croaking, cicadas buzzing, the occasional hoot of an owl. Sounds that she normally found comforting seemed almost overwhelming now.
“Behind me,” Sonny said, and then backed that up by pushing her behind him with his free hand. He walked through the door, and she followed, stepping outside for the first time in her memory.
The darkness here wasn’t absolute. Moonlight filtered down through the trees, illuminating a path on the ground, aided by the sword itself. The path wound around bushes that she couldn’t identify—green and leafy, next to some with pointed needles.
The scent of magnolias filled the air, something she hadn’t expected. She had been given magnolia flowers, but she had never seen them in person before. They grew along the side of the tower, on vines.
In fact, the entire tower was hidden by plants. It looked like a moss-covered, vine-covered growth in the middle of the woods.
It was amazing that Sonny had found her at all.
He turned around and around, looking for someone. But the two of them were alone.
His warhorse, not too far away, stomped its hooves and tossed its head.
“I could have gotten out all this time,” Zel said.
“No,” Sonny said. “You couldn’t have. Those wards were powerful.”
He took her hand. No one had ever done that before. It felt…reassuring.
“Let’s get out of here before someone figures out they’re gone,” he said.
She swallowed. “Will Aite be able to follow us?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But if we have a head start, it’ll be hard to find us.”
“In the Greater World,” Zel said, as if she actually knew what that was.
“Yeah,” he said. He pulled her forward, looking around the entire time at the area around them.
She tried not to gape. The air was colder here than she expected, but humid and thick. The breeze was strong. Things would warm up in the daytime, but it always got cold here at night.
Her shoes weren’t as thick as she thought and the ground was uneven. The grass tickled her legs—and the thought of grass tickling pleased her even as she ran toward the warhorse.
Sonny got to the horse, and untied it from the tree. The warhorse moved slightly as if it knew what he was about to do.
Then Sonny grabbed her waist and thrust her toward the horse. The horse smelled ripe, like a person who hadn’t bathed combined with something even more visceral.
She landed on her stomach. The horse’s back was flattish, and covered with a saddle—or at least, that’s what she assumed it was. It was some kind of seat, with wide curved edges and blankets beneath. And it was strapped to the horse.
She grabbed one of the sides, and somehow clambered upright.
Sonny said urgently, “Get on the saddle,” confirming that what she was looking at was, indeed, a saddle, and something she should sit on. Somehow, she gathered her skirts and herself, and managed to climb over that molded thing that made the saddle look more like a chair.
“Straddle the damn thing,” Sonny said, the urgency still in his voice. He looked over his shoulder at the tower, as if he expected someone.
She expected someone, and no one was coming. That was weird.
Sonny gripped the top upright thing (pommel? Cantle? She’d read the words, but never seen the item, and didn’t know which word applied) and pulled himself onto the saddle, somehow ending up upright without any real effort at all.
“Put your arms around me,” he said, gathering the reins (she at least knew what those were).
She frowned at his straight back. Touching. Wow. Something she had never thought of at all. Holding someone, even to keep herself upright. It felt odd.
“Zel,” he said, “now.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her body against his back. His back was solid, his waist thin, his legs muscular. His body felt so different from hers that it seemed almost as different as the horse’s body.
He made some kind of clicking noise, and the horse made its way around the tree. Then Sonny faced the tower one last time.
“I don’t see anything, do you?” he asked.
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“No,” she said.
“Complacency,” he said. “It’s so anticlimactic.”
Then he spun the horse around, made a different kind of clicking noise, and the horse ran (galloped?) down the path, making Zel bounce and her teeth rattle.
Anticlimactic? Maybe, since he had been expecting a battle. But this was exciting to her.
It was exciting and terrifying and different than she expected.
The trees brushed by her, the horse’s hooves pounded against the ground, and her entire body felt like it was being jolted apart.
With each step, she was getting farther and farther away from her prison.
And that wasn’t anticlimactic at all.
Part III
The Actual Beginning
Chapter 4
The GPS in her brand new silver Subaru Forester directed Zel, in a lovely British male voice, to a street in front of the Archetype Place. But like so many streets in the Greater Los Angeles area, this one was marked No Parking.
Zel clenched her fists against the leather steering wheel cover, and made herself take a deep breath.
Calm, calm, calm. You’ve been through a lot worse.
She had, but she had been oblivious to the worse. It had only become worse in hindsight. At the time, everything that happened to her had been just a part of her daily life.
She hadn’t known any better, and now she did.
She made herself take one of those deep breaths that the yoga instructor Sonny had hired recommended. The breathing in was hard, breathing out was harder, and she gave up.
Screw it. If there ever was a time to panic, it was now.
She tried the breathing thing again, then drove the Forester around the block, searching for parking. Sonny was the one who always came to the Archetype Place. He had tried to make her come—for camaraderie if nothing else, he would say—but she didn’t want camaraderie, particularly from the magical.
Magic hadn’t helped her in her life—or rather, magic hadn’t helped her much—and she preferred to ignore it. Besides, she had work, and it wasn’t clichéd work in the Disney studios or with the cartoon companies or anything like that, things the Archetype Place had been initially built to help with.
Sonny kept telling her that the Archetype Place provided other services, and she kept telling him that she didn’t need them, and they had found one of those stalemates that had defined their relationship—those quiet moments that reinforced just how different the two of them really were.
God, she missed him. God, she was scared for him. God, she had no idea what to do about any of this.
If he were around, he would understand that the very fact she was in Anaheim, across from Disneyland, trying to find a place to park around the Archetype Place, showed just how desperate she was.
She went around the corner, and realized that what she had thought were dozens of Disney-rip-off storefronts were actually part of the gigantic white warehouse that the GPS on the dash told her was the Archetype Place.
Okay, fine, she hadn’t paid as much attention to anything about the place as Sonny thought she should have. Okay, fine, Son, she thought, wishing she was actually psychic so she could find him and send those thoughts to him and listen to his dry laugh and watch his eyes twinkle like they did when he actually won an argument. I should have listened to you. I’m so sorry.
There only four cars in the sun-drenched parking lot. The sunlight had a white quality to it, a quality that reflected off the whitewashed back of the warehouse itself.
The day was warming up, and she wasn’t dressed for it. She was dressed for work, in flowing silk pants and a loose tunic. She didn’t even have extra shoes in her Subaru because the damn thing was so new. She usually carried flats or running shoes, just so she could get around quicker than she normally could with her heels.
But she hadn’t been prepared. She hadn’t been prepared for any of this.
Her eyes prickled with the threat of tears. She wasn’t going to cry. She never cried. Sonny would tell her sometimes that she needed to cry, crying was healthy, but she had never felt like crying at all before this morning, before seeing that sword, gleaming and abandoned on the floor of their living room.
She hit the stop button and the quiet engine powered off. Then she checked her purse (maybe for the umpteenth time) to make sure her phone and her keyless entry fob were inside. She was paranoid about everything today, more than usual. Usually, she could get away with being airheaded. But not today.
Not when Sonny depended on her.
She got out of the Subaru, and stepped onto the blond asphalt. This part of Anaheim still felt old, even though it had been upgraded dozens of times since she had come to the Greater World.
She had come to the Archetype Place early on, when it had been battling the real Walt Disney and his sexist and cartoonish interpretations of the lives of the magical. For some reason, the founders of the Archetype Place thought those images would hurt the magical over the years.
Zel had put that theory into the realm of politics and politics, she believed, had nothing to do with her. She just did her work, lived her life, and pretended she had never lived anywhere else.
Her magic was small and concentrated and she used it mostly in the jobs she did for the fantasy TV shows and movies. The regular mortals of the Greater World thought she had come from a long line of Hollywood employees, when, in fact, each person who had worked in the various lots and for the various studios had really been her.
She had changed identities a little bit, just like everyone else in her world, since they all were so long-lived. She would “retire” for a few years, and then emerge as a daughter or a granddaughter or a cousin, and everyone who had known her before would say just how much she looked like her mother or grandmother or aunt. And she would smile, and keep a rein on her mouth, because the last thing she wanted was for those people to know she had worked with them before, and she knew their tricks and secrets and family history.
It wasn’t quite a lonely existence, because she did have a few friends among the magical, but she had never been the most social person in Los Angeles, not even the most social person in the Greater World. Crowds made her uncomfortable, talking to strangers more so.
She had never really gotten over being raised alone, being unable to talk to anyone about anything substantive. Books and movies and stories were her best friends—along with Sonny, of course.
Sonny. Her heart constricted. She closed the car door, made sure the Subaru was locked, and then hurried across the parking lot. Even though Sonny had told her time and time again that most of the magical didn’t drive to the Archetype Place (they flew or appeared), she hadn’t really processed that.
Her magic wasn’t big. She had never flown in her life. She couldn’t appear or disappear at will, no matter how much people had tried to train her over the years.
Sonny had the magic in their family. Charm magic, which made him so very popular, and enough regular magic that he could actually employ spells, and then, the sword, of course.
That sword, lying on the floor, as if it had been dropped.
In all the years she’d known Sonny, he had never—not once—dropped his sword.
She hurried across the parking lot, glancing at the outline of a door behind the building, wondering if that was the actual entry. If it was, she would have no idea how to access it.
She had gone in the front sixty years ago, and she would try that again now.
She rounded the building and stepped onto the cracked sidewalk. It was clear, now that she was close, that what she had thought were actual Disney-rip-off shops, were simply well painted murals, that made it seem like a shop had (or would or did) exist here. There were no visible doors, though, although the murals all had shop windows painted on them—and she would wager, although she did not know, that those window displays would change once a week or so.
Because magic worked that way.
The actual door into the Ar
chetype Place was exactly where she remembered it had been, smack in the center of the building. The door was made of smoked glass that did not reveal anything inside, nor did it reflect the image of the person who was opening the door.
That was a bit disconcerting. Zel spent most of her time in the non-magical world, and there, glass doors reflected, even if they were made of smoked glass. She had become a lot less magical over the decades.
Or rather, she had never really become magical. The world she had learned after Sonny had rescued her from that tower had been this world, not the world she had been born in.
She hadn’t really ever contemplated what it was like to live in a world where magic was normal, and fairy tales were real.
The door opened into a wide reception area. It smelled faintly of magnolias, bringing tears to her eyes. She could almost feel Sonny’s solid back, the jostling of the warhorse beneath them, and that sense—that marvelous sense—that her life was finally beginning.
The door closed behind her with a slight click and that brought her out of the memory. This place was probably infused with comfort magic, and the spell had taken magnolias out of her subconscious.
Usually that would comfort her, but right now, it only made her feel worse.
She resisted the urge to wipe at her face, but didn’t because she didn’t know who was watching. She had taken several habits with her from those years in that tower, and one of those habits was to never let anyone see the depths of her emotions.
Besides, even though the reception area looked empty, it probably wasn’t. For all she knew, an invisible someone sat on the comfortable-looking brown couch, and an invisible someone else was sprawled in the matching brown chair, with feet on the nearby coffee table. It was slightly skewed to the left, so it probably had been moved by feet, but whether it was currently being moved by feet, she couldn’t tell.
Hidden Charm Page 3