Hidden Charm

by Kristine Grayson

  His hair was a mess, and his skin was pale beneath its normal caramel color. He didn’t look ill, but he didn’t look well either. He was too thin, something he had never realized before.

  But then, he hadn’t looked at himself through another’s eyes for a generation or more. (Probably more. Maybe even since Tiana had died.)

  Zel stood just off to one side. Her hair had grown out a bit, giving her the look of fringe all the way around, even in the areas she had messed with to create that spell.

  He pulled open the edge of the mirror, revealing the contents of the medicine cabinet: two first aid kits, both sealed; some band-aids and gauze; a handful of herbs, mostly of a kind used in healing spells; scent-free aftershave; scent-free shaving cream; brushes, combs, Q-tips; and yes, five different bottles of hair dye, all labeled in a beautiful cursive that seemed to have come from another century.

  Maybe it had. Another century, another world. After all, Zel specialized in hair and hair products for the movies. It would only make sense that she would label some dyes.

  “Good,” she said from behind him. “He has what we need. Grab the bottle labeled Wheat Gold.”

  That bottle was behind two others, both variations on black. He pulled out the Wheat Gold bottle and held it.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer directly. Instead, she put the bag of hair into the sink in front of her. Then she turned on the faucet full blast, coating the hair with steaming hot water. She grabbed the lever that sealed the drain and the sink immediately filled with water.

  Then she took the bottle from Henry, and somehow opened it with just her forefinger and thumb. She shut off the water, and then poured the entire contents of the dye into the sink.

  The stench of hydrogen peroxide mixed with lye made Henry’s eyes water. If his skin wasn’t already so dry from the fire and the explosion, then this smell would have dried him out.

  Or maybe that was just the leftover frog part of him that believed such things.

  “Can I turn on the fan?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, rather grimly. She was staring at the sink. The bag had turned a gold that Henry had only seen on sunny afternoons as wind rippled through a field of wheat ready for harvest.

  He hadn’t seen anything like that, in fact, since he had left the Kingdoms. The suggestion of magic in the color made him both homesick and a bit worried.

  Water dripped from his eyes, and he resisted the urge to sniffle. He wasn’t shedding tears, so much as dealing with the chemical stink. And, he wondered, why anything that Zel would have made would have been filled with chemicals.

  Of course, he was assuming that Zel made the dye. He didn’t know, and he hadn’t asked.

  “Fill the other sink, would you?” she asked, jerking her head in its direction. “Hot, hot water.”

  “Okay.” He did as he was told. The water steamed out of that sink, and he braced himself for the mess Zel would create when she moved the bag of hair into the second sink.

  But she didn’t move it. Instead, she plunged her free hand into the hot water, tilted her head back, and sighed just a little.

  “You all right?” Henry asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What do we do with that bag?” he asked.

  “We leave it for hours. Maybe even overnight,” she said. “Nothing living can survive that stew of chemicals.”

  So that was why it smelled of hydrogen peroxide. And she was right. Nothing that breathed should have been immersed in that goo.

  Magic sometimes had to breathe. Apparently, the magic she had captured was actually alive.

  She pulled her right hand out of the sink, and shook it off.

  “Want a towel?” he asked.

  “Not from here,” she said, wiping her hand on the side of her jeans. Then she grabbed the sword with her left hand, and headed out the door.

  Once she reached the hall, she stopped.

  “Coming?” she asked.

  He gave that stew in the sink one last glance. The golden glow had faded. The bag looked greenish and sickly, but that might have been a trick of the light.

  Or he might have been watching some magic he didn’t understand die.

  He shut off the light, and slipped out the door. Then Zel reached around him, and closed it.

  “I wish it locked,” she said.

  He opened the door, glanced at the knob, and saw one of those little push locks. He didn’t have a key to open the door once it was locked, but those little locks were so flimsy that it didn’t matter. He could open it no matter what.

  He pushed the lock, tested the front of the knob (it didn’t turn), and then pulled the door closed.

  Zel smiled at him. “Well done,” she said.

  He nodded, not sure what had just happened. He didn’t feel like smiling at all. He felt like they were running behind, dealing with traps left for the unwary, rather than moving ahead with their plans.

  “What was that, anyway?” he asked.

  Her smile faded. “Dark magic. Not the bad stuff, not really, not like at the house.”

  Her voice broke a little when she mentioned her house. He placed a hand on her arm, rubbing it just a bit in lieu of a hug. She looked like a woman who needed comfort, but not one who would accept a hug.

  “But not good stuff either,” she said. “I always think of magic like that as pre-bad.”

  “Like what, exactly?” he asked. “I’ve never seen it before.”

  Or rather, without using his magic, he hadn’t been able to see that spell at all. He had felt handicapped by the inability to use his best skill.

  “It’s observational magic,” she said. “Someone powerful had been watching Sonny—and, by extension, us.”

  Observational magic. Henry was familiar with that. He had been surrounded by it back when he was a frog—a real frog—trapped inside that body and unable to tap his own magic.

  He had hated observational magic from that moment on, thinking it as Aite’s particularly cruel way of keeping an eye on those she had captured. She seemed to enjoy the imprisonment as much as she enjoyed the capture—maybe more.

  “Aite used observational magic on you,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.

  Zel’s lips turned upward in a humorless smile. Her eyes had gone far away, as if, for a moment, she was trapped in a memory.

  “In the beginning,” Zel said. “That’s how I learned the spell. Partly because every time I disrupted it, she would replace it. She kept the tower I was in really clean, because she thought the spell was being disrupted by dust. She didn’t realize that I had caused the magic to disperse.”

  His admiration for Zel was growing with each thing she told him.

  “When did she stop replacing it?” he asked.

  “Oh, she didn’t,” Zel said. “I just figured out a way to manipulate it. That made her less angry than having to replace the magic all the time.”

  She spoke so matter of factly, as if the things she had endured in that tower were normal.

  They were no more normal than Henry’s time as a frog.

  “But you’ve done this since,” he said.

  “Oh, all over Los Angeles,” she said. “And most of the magic wasn’t Aite’s. Much of it was old. It had roosted, undisturbed, in a lot of those locations forever. I’m not even sure anyone was on the other end of that observational magic. It was that old. It might have been neglected for a very, very long time.”

  He had encountered old magic in L.A. as well. People had lived in this basin for centuries. There had been a lot of magic users from all different cultures, and they left bits of themselves even as their cultures disappeared, moved on, got assimilated, or got destroyed.

  “But this wasn’t old,” Zel said, waving her free hand at that door. “I went through this house when we bought it and made sure that no old magic lingered here.”

  Which meant that Sonny knew about Zel’s skill at trapping and destroying observational mag
ic. So, if Sonny had had any suspicions that such magic lurked here, then he would have asked Zel to get rid of it.

  “Would Sonny have tried to take care of observational magic on his own?” Henry asked.

  Zel looked at him in surprise. She hadn’t followed his thought processes, obviously, so the mention of Sonny might have seemed out of the blue to her.

  “No, probably not,” she said. “It’s one of the few things I’m better at. Most mages don’t expect my way of getting rid of the magic. Most have traps for traditional spells, but not my spells.”

  Which made her even more powerful. But clearly, no one had explained that to her. Sonny hadn’t explained that to her.

  Henry felt a surge of irritation, then realized that he (again) was trying to minimize her relationship with Sonny. Weird to be mildly jealous of a man Henry was trying to rescue. Weird how protective he felt toward Zel.

  Maybe there was a touch of magic in his emotion toward her. Maybe Sonny had spelled the air around her so that she would draw in protective magic from someone who could help her, if Sonny were unavailable.

  Henry knew such magic existed. If Sonny was powerful enough, he could have targeted a group of magic users to provide that protection—a broad and wide group, but one with certain skills.

  If Henry were casting that spell, knowing what he knew right now (as opposed to what he knew when he was a young prince expecting a family), he would target Charmings. They all had a powerful magic, one that could be used for protection as well as for other things. Very few Charmings had gone off the rails, too.

  He would have said not too long ago that Charmings weren’t entirely trustworthy, and then it had turned out that Blue—who had once been known as Bluebeard—had suffered under a curse or something, and he hadn’t been as bad as legend (and his own way of coping) had made him out to be.

  “What?” Zel asked.

  Clearly, Henry’s mental digression had shown on his face. He felt a flicker of irritation at himself. He had lived alone too long—been alone too long. He didn’t know how to sustain a conversation without going down some silent mental rabbit hole.

  “In other words,” Henry said, hoping she hadn’t spoken since he went off on his mental tangent, “that observational magic was new.”

  “New-ish,” she said. “I haven’t been here in…years.”

  She ended at a near whisper, as if she were appalled at herself.

  She looked up at Henry apologetically.

  “This was Sonny’s place,” she said. “Sonny’s work, Sonny’s neighborhood, Sonny’s thing. I hadn’t realized how separate our lives had become until just today.”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t blame yourself,” Henry said, trying to pull his own feelings (or the magicked feelings?) out of his response. “Married couples—”

  “We weren’t traditional in any way,” Zel said. “And, really, technically, by American standards, hell, by all standards, we weren’t really married. Just a piece of paper. Best friends, you know. And in the old old old awful days, a cover for Sonny.”

  The relief that filled Henry was greater than he wanted it to be (if he was trying to be fair to Sonny, that is).

  Zel wrapped her free hand on Henry’s arm, so that they were now holding each other’s arms, like young teenage kids who had no idea how to touch each other.

  “I don’t know why I told you that, except…” Zel shook her head. Then she squeezed her eyes closed. “I like you.” Her eyes popped open. “I’m probably projecting because you’ve been so kind. It’s probably—”

  “I like you too,” Henry said. “There’s something here, between us. A spark, maybe?”

  Zel let out a small laugh. “Like they say in the movies, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, unable to tell if she was minimizing what he had just said or simply agreeing with him. (You’re too much in your head, Henry, he mentally admonished himself, emblazoning the words on the inside of his brain. Stop overthinking!) “Like they say in the movies.”

  And he wanted to add, I’m not kind, but really, if he stepped outside of himself and looked at it from her perspective, he had been kind. Ridiculously kind. Un-Froggy-like kind.

  She leaned close to him, stood on her toes, and bussed his cheek.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “I haven’t done anything yet,” he said.

  “Except rescue me from whatever got me at the house, and helped me get here, and been there for me to lean on right from the start,” she said. “I have no idea what I would have done without you.”

  “I’m just a sounding board,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure if that was true.

  She frowned at him, but there was a fondness in that frown (or so he wanted to believe).

  “We’ll discuss this more after we find Sonny,” she said.

  Henry nodded. Because, once Sonny was back in the picture—best friend or no, everything would change.

  “Once we find Sonny,” Henry said, nodding, knowing that what they might find might be awful.

  And if it was awful, then any hope he had of spending more time with Zel would vanish. She would have to take care of an injured Sonny.

  And if Sonny was dead…

  Oh, Henry didn’t want to think about what might happen if Sonny was dead.

  Because Sonny was threaded throughout Zel’s life—her current one and her past one—no matter how much she said the two of them led separate existences.

  If she lost Sonny, she might very well think she had lost everything. And Henry wouldn’t be able to fight a ghost. He knew that from personal experience.

  No one had taken the place of Tiana—no matter how many people tried.

  No one until Zel.

  And that might not be him. That might be magic.

  Or a very real spark.

  Chapter 28

  Zel did a quick walk-through of the house to make sure there was no more observational magic lurking anywhere. She didn’t think there was because the strands of hair hadn’t floated to other parts of the house.

  But she wanted to double-check anyway, just in case. And she needed to move away from Henry. Because she had spontaneously kissed him.

  Yes, it was just a brush on the cheek, but that was more than she had ever done with anyone before. At least since she had come here. She felt so comfortable with him, and she also felt so close to him.

  He was the one who mentioned a spark, and he was right about that too. He made her heart flutter in a way she had never experienced before.

  But she wasn’t sure she could trust the emotion. Not today. Not with Sonny missing. Not with the panic she had felt, and then the magical attack.

  For all she knew, she was just feeling grateful. Or maybe she just needed to feel close to Henry, so she could ask for his help.

  Her cheeks warmed. She was one screwed-up woman, and on this day—this eventful day—she was beginning to realize just how screwed up she was. How she had let life coast by her while she refused to deal with everything that had happened to her in the past.

  Well, she was having to deal with it now. And on top of that, the universe had sent her the very first man who interested her in a very, very, very long time.

  The house was silent, which she had expected, and different than she remembered. Sonny had asked her to come and approve of the remodel, but she had been busy with a film. She had waved her hand and said, Whatever you need, hon. It’s your office after all.

  He had given her a disappointed look—he had given her a lot of disappointed looks these last few years—but after that comment, he hadn’t pushed her to come to the office. He had asked her to approve the bills for the remodel though, and come to think of it, that had been one of Sonny’s ways to try to convince her to see the changes for herself.

  Most of the changes were cosmetic. Unlike their house (their old, no-longer-existing house), this one still had the basic ranch format—three bedrooms down the hall, the long narrow bath,
and not quite enough room. Sonny being Sonny had to add a nice bathroom in what would have been the master, but that bath was nothing like his (had been) at home. The one here was just good enough, so that if Sonny wanted to sell the house, whoever bought it would feel like they had a master bath.

  The master bedroom wasn’t set up as a master bedroom either. It was his main office, with a sleek black desk that looked like it was rarely used, a dust-covered computer on a desk in the corner, some matching sleek black chairs, and another long black couch with splotches of white.

  The flooring in here was gray, which set off the black, and matched the wall. She had no idea when Sonny had decided that decorating in gray and black was a good idea. Maybe he just thought that made the entire place look professional.

  Most offices would have had photographs on the wall, along with awards, but Sonny didn’t truck with those things. Not that he liked having his photograph taken. He had received a lot of awards, though, and Zel would have bet that those awards were stuffed in a closet somewhere or maybe in the official-looking black cabinet near the dusty computer.

  Nothing in the room gave a hint about what Sonny did or who he was, and he probably liked it like that.

  She glanced around, made sure she saw no undulating ceilings or bits of dust gathered near a corner. There was nothing. She glanced at the sword to see if it was having any kind of reaction here, but she didn’t see anything.

  She hovered near the door, afraid to go inside, even though she knew she needed to. She and Henry were supposed to find something of Sonny’s that would lead them to him. But she didn’t see much.

  Of course, she wasn’t going inside to look, either.

  Henry hadn’t followed her, for which she was grateful. She needed to see what Sonny had done, who he had become even while he was living with her. Maybe something here would give her a clue as to what had happened to him—not a magical clue, but a real-life clue.

  She was better at real life than she was with magic anyway.

  She peeked into the next room. It was set up for children, which surprised her. It had two twin beds against one long wall, and a bunkbed against the other. Toys were placed haphazardly on top of some long storage chests. Blankets were folded on the bottom of each bed, and they all had extra pillows. The foot of each bed and the short sides of the bunk beds were made of bookshelves as well, and those shelves were filled with books.