Hidden Charm

by Kristine Grayson

  Outside the door, several of the magical hovered. Selda was standing in front of them, actually barring them from entering.

  Zel glanced at the floor. Sonny’s sword seemed to have sunken deep into the polished wood, almost like the sword had become embedded in it. Almost like the sword was a design feature.

  Tank squirmed, but didn’t really move. Only her mouth, continuing to form a word—help?

  Zel couldn’t figure that out, not exactly.

  “Henry?” she said, but he didn’t seem to hear her. “Selda?”

  No one looked at her. Everyone seemed to have a job to do except her.

  And no one else saw Tank.

  Zel couldn’t walk across the floor, not without stepping on already injured faeries or that black and gray dust. Something told her to stay away from that dust as much as she could.

  She ran a hand through her short-cropped hair, and then froze.

  Tank was still struggling, but the struggles looked tired, as if Tank couldn’t keep them up. If she couldn’t get the word help out, did that mean she wasn’t getting air?

  Could she breathe?

  Zel didn’t have time to ask for more help.

  She winced, remembering that Selda had said only those with minimal magic should enter the house.

  But Zel was already inside—and besides, her magic was small.

  She tugged on a lock of hair growing around her right ear. That hair was trained. She was used to activating it, and it didn’t take much thought or power.

  The hair grew, and she sent the strand forward, guiding it as if it were a rope.

  She guided it over the lingering black dust in the air, past the drips on the side, as close to the ceiling as she could get. The strand reached Tank, who saw it, and looked startled.

  The lock probed and seemed to hit another barrier. Something clear had formed around Tank, pinning her to that skylight.

  Zel darted her eyes from side to side, trying to see if anyone was close enough to hear her. She couldn’t see Selda, but heard her voice from the doorway, giving instructions. And Henry was crouched near the pile of faeries, talking softly.

  None of the blue-garbed faeries were anywhere near Zel. If they were, she would tell them to go outside and break through the skylight.

  But they couldn’t hear her, and Tank—Tank’s tiny fists clenched and unclenched. Or rather, they were partially clenching. Whatever held her against that skylight seemed to originate in the palms of her hands.

  Zel probed the top of that barrier—where it hit the ceiling—and couldn’t get the hair through. She started to move the lock of hair, only to feel a tug against her skull, and a tiny pinprick. A single strand of hair pulled out of her skin.

  The long strand swept across the room, cutting through the still lingering black dust, and then swaying against the floor.

  She let out a tiny breath. Large things couldn’t get through that barrier, but the barrier wasn’t completely sealed. It was open the way so many things were open—thinly, so that only something as tiny as a hair—less than one-tenth of a millimeter—could fit inside. Her hair was thicker than most—she’d learned that doing hair for the movies—but it was still so tiny that it could get through.

  All of those thoughts went through her mind so rapidly that she barely acknowledged them. They were simply speaking to one side of her brain, the part that hated using magic, even when it was tied to her hair. Part of her was still afraid that her hair was littered with Aite’s magic, even though Zel had proven to herself over and over again, that her hair wasn’t spelled any longer.

  It could do whatever she wanted it to do.

  And what she wanted it to do at the moment was for that lock of hair to separate into individual strands.

  It did. Fifty of them, each fanning out in their own direction. They probed the top edge of that barrier, and each of them got in.

  She frowned, strengthening the strands, changing them from simple hair into something as powerful as steel. Then she forced them downward.

  They didn’t move at first, and Zel felt a half-second of panic. If she couldn’t get rid of the barrier this way, how could she? Would she have to sharpen the edges of the strands and try to break the skylight herself? And would all of that broken glass hurt Tank even worse?

  Then a loud cracking noise echoed through the living room. The blue-clad faeries floated upward, as if they expected something to fall on them. Henry bent over the faeries on the floor, protecting them with his body.

  Zel wasn’t really watching them. Instead, she noted that the barrier had appeared—sickly yellow, like plastic too long in the sun. Cracks zigzagged through it, starting where each strand of hair was.

  Then the strands sliced through the barrier, shredding it. Pieces of it rained onto the floor where—thanks to Tank—no one else was.

  A lot of those pieces landed on Sonny’s sword.

  But Zel only looked at that for a half a second. Then another sound made her focus.

  It was a loud and relieved gasp.

  Tank, trying to get air. She was breathing hard, the way that someone did when they’d held their breath too long. But she was gasping, too, as if the air around her was no good.

  “Oh, crap,” Zel whispered. The black stuff looked like smoke and ash particles. Those probably weren’t deadly to her lungs, but her lungs were gigantic in comparison to Tank’s.

  Zel sent her strands of hair upwards, so that they probed whatever it was that was holding Tank in place. Little teeny strands appeared, glistening grayly, like spiderwebs in the sunlight.

  Those silky strands imprisoned Tank. The spiderweb analogy probably wasn’t far off—whatever that magic was, it had stuck Tank in place as smoothly as a spider stuck a butterfly in a web.

  Zel’s strands of hair tangled in the other spidery strands. Her hair got stuck, one on one, and all the tugging she did wouldn’t fix it.

  She needed to break through the spidery strands, and single steel strands couldn’t do it.

  So she tugged another lock of her hair, this time her forelock, because she could manipulate that part of her hair faster than any other part. (Due to its location, she always thought.)

  She sent out that lock, zooming it toward Tank, but carefully making sure that lock followed the trajectory of the other lock, going up and around, rather than through.

  As the lock reached Tank, Zel reshaped the lock into a thin blade—one of those perfect knives she had held briefly when she was doing a movie about chefs. Thinner than the blades that decorated her home. Thin and lightweight and so sharp that it could slice a finger with a single touch.

  “Don’t move,” she said to Tank.

  Tank was still gasping for air, but she tried to stop, which was the only acknowledgement that Zel was going to get.

  Zel sent that hairy knife edge into the spidery strands, severing them as if they were made of paper.

  The right half of Tank’s body fell free, revealing her right wing. It rested listlessly against her back and for another half-second, Zel wondered if Tank’s wing was broken.

  But she had told Tank not to move, and Tank was following that order, although Zel couldn’t tell if Tank could actually move at all or, if when she was freed, she would tumble onto the shards below.

  Zel tugged another lock of hair and sent it forward, this time moving it straight through the dust and the goo to a level below Tank. Then Zel spread the lock out, until the strands formed a net. Zel reinforced it, making it as strong as she could, but soft too.

  Then she finished cutting the spider strands holding Tank in place.

  Tank’s left wing fluttered a little but her right wing didn’t move. She hung in the air for a moment—and Zel worried that another strand kept her in place—and then Tank fell, hard, her left wing fluttering uselessly, her arms and legs not moving at all.

  She landed on the net that Zel had formed from her own hair, then bounced upward slightly, and settled into the net.

  Z
el could still hear her gasping.

  So Zel wrapped the net around Tank and pulled her back, out of the center of the living room, and then she whirled as the cocooned Tank whizzed by, and she shoved Tank past Selda and the magical, all of them watching with their mouths open.

  Zel took a step toward them, so that she could see where her hair-net-cocoon was going. She shoved it out to the middle of the yard, away from the concrete blocks, and gently set Tank on the ground.

  “Someone help her!” Zel shouted, opening the cocoon. Then she made scissor fingers and severed the lock of hair from her own head, so that the magical outside could move Tank wherever they needed to.

  Zel turned around. Everyone in the room was still watching her, as if they couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

  Henry was still crouched over the faeries he had saved.

  “They can’t breathe in here,” she said. “We have to get them out.”

  Then she tugged locks of her own hair, starting on the right side of her head and moving backwards. She set out cocoon nets, since only those could envelope whoever they touched. She was going to get as many of these faeries out of her house as possible—as quickly as she possibly could.

  Chapter 11

  Zel had realized something that Henry hadn’t: the transformation of the faerie magic into something black was actually hurting them as much as the explosion had. That dripping goo hadn’t just destroyed the images the faerie dust had created; it was destroying the faeries themselves.

  That was a powerful magic spell. Not many of the magical could turn someone’s magic back on themselves and make that magic toxic to the magic user. A lot of the magical could do a smaller version of the spell, one that made another magic user’s spell bounce back on them. But to turn the magic toxic? Henry couldn’t do that, and he didn’t know many others who could.

  Zel’s hair was moving all over the house, growing out of her head like ropes, only to become little hammocks around the downed faeries. Somehow she was multi-tasking this as well. Each rope was a separate bit of magic, and each thing that it did required her concentration. She was getting the ropes to the downed faeries, collecting the faeries and then moving them out of the house rapidly, without the hair ropes tangling into each other.

  Henry had no idea how she was managing it. The amount of magic to do that was astonishing. The amount of concentration even more astonishing.

  He had finally received his answer about why he had seen so much magic sparking off her aura. She knew how to use the hair magic (which made sense: Rapunzel. Duh), but she didn’t seem to realize that she had other magic as well.

  But she would tire. She couldn’t do this alone. She was dividing her hair into smaller and smaller segments, but Henry wasn’t sure if she had enough hair to rescue everyone.

  He grabbed the faeries he had placed on the floor and clutched them to his chest. They felt like pliable dolls. He wasn’t sure if they were breathing or not.

  The blue-clad faeries were looking a little blue around the face, but they kept working.

  “Go outside,” he said to the nearest one. “Get your colleagues to go too. Whatever is in here is targeting faerie magic. It will kill you all.”

  It probably wasn’t affecting the blue faeries as badly right at the moment, simply because they hadn’t created the spells used inside the house. But once that horrid dark magic ran out of the originators of the faerie magic, the dark magic would attack other faeries.

  The little blue faerie nodded, then cupped her tiny hands around her face, and made high pitched eeps. Henry had only encountered that once before: the faeries had their own language, but rarely used it around non-faeries. Their language combined sound waves and magic particles to create something that his ears couldn’t recognize.

  But, a faerie once told him, the language could travel faster, farther, and louder than any normally made sound.

  But using it was a risk, especially in this toxic magic stew. The little faerie must have figured that it was better to risk engaging the dark magic than it was to let her people remain in the room a moment longer.

  Each blue-clad faerie looked up, and looked startled. Then they wrapped their tiny arms around whoever they were working on, and rose in the air. It was harder to see them than it had been before. The dark magic particles had become thick, a gray ashfall of dying magic.

  Each faerie was trying to fly out with their burden, and he hoped they made it, because he couldn’t watch any more. He had to get the faeries he clutched to his chest out of this house.

  He almost magicked them out, but thought the better of it. Using magic seemed to fuel that ashfall. Or maybe it was only faerie magic. But he didn’t have time to analyze.

  He had to act.

  He ran the faeries to the front door and out onto the lawn. The bright sunlight stabbed his eyes, giving him an instant headache.

  He hadn’t realized that the dark magic was having an effect on him as well. He stumbled down the uneven grass to the plants growing near the fence.

  Zel’s hair had been placing faeries all over the lawn. Some were underneath the canopy over the bricks, but most were on the grass. An entirely different group of faeries, wearing green and yellow pantsuits, their hair shorn close to their tiny faces, were tending the injured. From far away, those faeries shimmered like hummingbirds.

  Henry fell to his knees—not entirely on purpose—feeling the jolt rattle through his body. Carefully, he set the faeries down, then said, “I need help here,” because none of them looked like they were breathing.

  Even more yellow-and-green clad faeries flew over the fence. Apparently a call went out to faeries everywhere. Ten of them hovered around him, then headed downward to tend to the faeries he had brought outside.

  The hot sun wasn’t going to do them any good. He was about to put a canopy over them, when one of the faeries stopped in front of him. Her face had a yellow-and-green tattoo. He couldn’t make out what the lines were, only that they glowed on her face like paint.

  “No magic,” she said. “We don’t want to attract that stuff.”

  “But you’ll use magic,” he said.

  “We are prepared,” she said. “Let us do our work.”

  He nodded, feeling suddenly useless and turned back to the house.

  It looked like it had been possessed by a giant octopus. Zel’s hair was coming out of windows and doors, waving like tentacles, each one depositing injured faeries onto the grass. It looked like she was doing the same thing on the side of the house, which probably meant she was doing so in the back yard as well.

  More yellow-and-green faeries hovered around the house. Groups of them swooped down every time Zel set down a faerie, and set to work, although Henry couldn’t tell what that work was.

  Selda had assigned the magical jobs away from the house itself. A griffin guarded the main gate. The minotaur had gone around back. The Very Serious Witches were standing on the bricks, twisting their hands together as if they didn’t know what to do since they weren’t allowed to perform any magic.

  Selda was talking to some of the crime scene folk, waving her arms as she discussed what they needed to do next. She looked both tired and terrified, yet somehow she was managing to push forward.

  No one stood near the main door any longer. But there still had to be faeries inside.

  Besides, Zel would run out of magical energy soon, particularly if she hadn’t used her magic in a long time.

  Henry picked his way across the concrete blocks toward the house. Exhaustion dripped off him, and he couldn’t take deep breaths. A tickle had started in his throat sometime in the last few minutes, and he hadn’t allowed himself to cough for fear that he would dislodge a faerie or two—or maybe bring some of that dark magic out here.

  Zel’s hair whipped around him, never near him, either moving out of the house or back in. He was amazed at the magic, amazed at the rescue, amazed at her.

  “Don’t go in.” Somehow Selda had reached his
side without him realizing it.

  “She needs help,” he said. “It’ll take her magic too.”

  Selda put a hand on his arm and it felt like she had done more, that she had bound him to the outside. He wasn’t sure if he was feeling real magic from her or if he was just that tired.

  “You can’t help her,” Selda said. “We can’t go back in the house.”

  “Have you tried?” The question was a bit sharper than he had intended. He hated it when no one tried, but simply assumed.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s feeding off all the magic in there.”

  “Zel is using her magic,” he said. “It’s feeding off her?”

  “I don’t know,” Selda said. “But of all of us, she’s the only one who has a chance to get the faeries out.”

  That caught his attention. He frowned at Selda. “Are you just saying that to keep me out here?”

  “I’m saying that because the Very Serious Witches tell me that the homeowners have a different kind of magic inside their dwellings. Zel might be using that magic.”

  “And she might not,” Henry said. He had the sense that Zel had no idea how to protect her magic. If she hadn’t realized how strong she was, then she hadn’t had formal training, and that meant she didn’t know how to set up her defenses.

  Selda must have seen something on Henry’s face because she put her hand on his arm.

  “We are not going to interrupt her,” Selda said. “She’s our only hope to get them all out.”

  Henry looked at the house, at the tentacles of hair waving out of the windows and doors. He had no idea how Zel had opened them, but she had, somehow. And then she continued to rescue faeries. The tentacles coming out of the house looked like they had little fists on the ends. As she lowered them to the ground, the fists loosened, and for a brief moment, the tentacles separated into individual strands of hair, before reuniting into a tentacle again.

  “It’ll destroy her,” he said. The dark magic, the overuse, the stress—most of the magical had trouble with high magic usage. He had the sense that Zel had never done this before.