Be Careful What You Wish For
The Swann Sisters Chronicles, Book 2
Evangeline Anderson
www.evangelineanderson.com
Be Careful What You Wish For, 1st Edition,
The Swann Sisters Chronicles, Book 2
Copyright © 2018 by Evangeline Anderson
All rights reserved.
Cover Art Design © 2018 by Croco Designs
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writers’ imagination or have been used factiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
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Cover content is for illustrative purposes only.
Any person depicted on the cover is a model.
Contents
Be Careful What You Wish For
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Epilogue
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Be Careful What You Wish For
The Swann Sisters Chronicles, Book 2
How do you sue your Fairy Godmother?
Cassandra Swann is about to find out. Because she and her sisters are 1/8th fairy—not enough to do any magic—just enough to get them a Fairy Godmother from hell whose reckless spells makes their lives miserable. When her older sister decides to take the FG to court, Cass gets caught in the crossfire. Hit by their godmother with a disastrous birthday wish, she is in danger of losing what she loves most—her ability to paint.
Because the court is in the realm of the Fae, Cass and her sisters have a Court Appointed Elf who acts as their attorney slash bodyguard. But who ever heard of a 6 foot 4 muscular elf with coal-black hair and intense green eyes? Sparks fly the first minute Cass meets Jacobin O'Shea. She resents his high-handed ways and Jake thinks Cass is a spoiled human brat. But after he saves her from a soul-sucker and sees her art, things begin to change between them.
But Cass's ability to paint is still screwed up. Every painting she attempts climbs off the canvas and makes trouble in the real world. When the Fae court assigns her a new Fairy Godmother, things get exponentially worse when her new wish multiplies her living art. To make matters even more difficult, Jake's ex-fiancée—a gorgeous, anorexically-thin fairy—has Cass in her crosshairs and is determined to ruin anything that might grow between them. And did we mention Cass's grandmother is going on disastrous dates that fill the house with Star Trek conventioneers, bikers, and nudists?
It's a mess only magic could make...or fix.
Will Cass and Jake ever get past their differences? Will Cass regain her ability to paint without every painting stepping off the canvas? (Really, Fairy Godmother?) And will Cass's grandmother find a man without burning down the house?
You'll have to read Be Careful What You Wish For, the second book in the Swann Sisters Chronicles to find out.
Prologue
On my twenty-third birthday, my fairy godmother ruined my life, but I wasn’t surprised. After all, it certainly wasn’t the first time.
My name is Cassandra Esmeralda Swann (Cass for short) and the first thing you have to know about me is that I’m one eighth fairy. One eighth. Not much, but enough to qualify as someone with fairy blood as opposed to a non-fairy or someone who’s purely human.
Now, if I was a marginal member of almost any other minority, I could get scholarships and maybe a sense of my ethnic heritage. If I was Native American I could go to the reservation and learn the ways of my people. If I was Asian American I could take a trip to China or Japan or maybe just Chinatown. Hell, if I was Norwegian I could go to freaking Minnesota.
But fairies don’t hand out scholarships and they don’t want anything to do with ‘half-breeds’ like my sisters and me. In fact, we’re not even allowed in fairy land, otherwise known as the Realm of the Fae where most magical creatures make their home, for fear that we’ll try to find full-blooded fairy husbands and contaminate somebody else’s bloodline. Not that we’d want to—being married to a man with a great big…uh, pair of wings isn’t exactly my dream come true. But try telling that to the full-blooded fairies, the rich, famous, and ultra-snobby of the fae world. It’s like saying you wouldn’t want to marry a movie star—who in Hollywood would believe you?
So being one eighth fairy isn’t enough to net me any real magical powers or a big pretty pair of glittery wings, which all the full-blooded fairies have. And it’s not enough to let me disappear in a puff of magical pink smoke or live thousands of years.
Being one eighth fairy just means that my sisters and I got assigned a fairy godmother to grant yearly birthday wishes. That doesn’t sound so bad so let me explain—we have the fairy godmother from hell. Seriously, the woman is a cold hearted…well let’s just say it rhymes with witch and leave it at that.
Most people would think it’s wonderful to get a yearly wish but let me spell it out for you— the wish can’t permanently affect anyone but the wisher, you can’t wish for more wishes or no wish at all, and the magic keeps you from telling anyone without fairy blood outside the family (my family, I mean) about it directly, no matter what the result. And it’s surprisingly hard to make wishes that don’t make your life a living hell.
The FG, as my sisters and I call her, resents having been assigned to grant wishes for girls with barely a drop of real fairy blood in their veins. As a result, she’s not very careful with how her magic turns out. Which means our yearly wishes are often brushes with disaster. We even have planning sessions before any one of us turns another year older to think up the smallest, most harmless wish possible. The idea is to wish for something too insignificant to ruin your life but even the smallest wishes can backfire.
There was the time my older sister, Phil, wished that all her B
arbie’s clothes would fit her. (She was ten at the time.) But instead of growing the clothes up to her size, the FG’s magic shrank Phil down to twelve inches high. Imagine living the rest of your life in the big pink Barbie dream house. It might sound nice when you’re ten, but when you get a little bit older you realize that Ken is lacking something as a conversationalist and also, he’s not exactly anatomically correct. It was a mess until I got our Fairy Godmother to take it back—something she hates to do, mainly because she doesn’t want to be bothered.
Then there was the time my younger sister, Rory, wished she could talk to animals. (She’s wanted to be a veterinarian ever since she was six and found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest.) Anyway, the FG’s magic turned her into a schnauzer so she could talk to her four legged friends first hand. Not at all what she had in mind. I spent my allowance on Kibbles ‘n Bits for a whole week before our fairy godmother finally took that one back.
And I’ve had my own run-ins with the FG too. For instance, the time when I turned fifteen and wished to have breasts as big as this girl at my school—Christy Seatons. I’m well endowed now, actually more than I’d like in both the boobs and the hips department, but at fifteen, I was so flat the walls were jealous. So it seemed like a good wish except that my fairy godmother screwed it up in typical fashion and I ended up with breasts as big as the porn star Trixie Teatons instead. I had to live with what my little sister Rory calls ‘porno titties’ for over a week until the FG finally showed up and fixed her mistake. I thought it was bad being teased for stuffing my training bra but it was nothing compared to the ribbing I took when my bust grew from a triple A cup to a double G overnight. Talk about a nightmare!
Even the smallest wishes can backfire. The year after my disastrous ‘porno titties’ wish, I went for something small and wished that my toenail polish would never chip. I’m an artist so I always have either clay or oil paint and sometimes both under my fingernails, but I like to keep my pedicure nice to compensate. In hindsight, it would have been better to make the wish when I was wearing a more normal colored polish. But I was sixteen and as it happened, I had just done my toes in ‘blizzard blue.’ Owing to the literal nature of the FG’s magic, that’s the color they still were at the time of my birthday.
That’s right, my toenails haven’t changed since I was sixteen. They’re still a bright icy blue and no amount of polish remover can change that. I’ve even tried painting new colors over the old polish but they don’t last. No matter how many coats I use, the blue starts showing through before the other polish is even dry.
So, I’m stuck with blue toenails, the same way I’m stuck with ‘eyes like dewy violets, skin like fresh fallen snow, and coal black hair’ which were my birth gifts from the FG—the ones she slapped me with before I was old enough to wish for myself.
It could be worse, I guess. My younger sister Rory has beautiful red hair (hair like spun rubies) and emerald eyes, but when she tries to sing, it comes out sounding like a bird twittering because of the FG’s gift of, ‘a voice like the birds in Spring.’
I was especially anxious about my twenty-third birthday because of what happened a month before with my older sister, Phil. See, in addition to hair of sunshine gold, eyes that mirror the sky, and lips that shame the reddest rose, the FG had also saddled Phil with a personality as ‘mild as a lamb’s’ which meant she was basically spineless. I’m sorry to say that because I love her, but it’s true. She was trapped in a dead-end job with a slob of a boss who was always trying to play grab-ass with her and living with a fiancé that gave jerks a bad name. Could it get any worse?
It could and did when Phil accidentally shouted out a wish to speak her mind. She suddenly grew a spine and a mouth to match but the wish screwed her up at work like you couldn’t believe. Suddenly she was telling her co-workers where to get off and her boss where to stick it.
Phil eventually got the FG to reverse the wish, but being the witch with a capital B that she is, our fairy godmother did just that—she literally reversed the wish. So that instead of telling everyone exactly what she was thinking, Phil had to listen to everyone else say what they were thinking and believe me, it wasn’t a pleasant experience.
She found out a lot of nasty things, including the fact that her jerk of a fiancé was cheating on her. (Well, that was actually good because she finally saw the light and broke up with him.) But she didn’t want to hear everybody’s dirty little secrets all the time (who could blame her?) so she asked the FG to fix it again. Only this time, with a little help from Rory who tends to say the first thing that comes out of her mouth (no magic wish needed there—it’s just the way Rory is), Phil ended up saying the opposite of what she was thinking.
That was a very confusing time for all of us, especially Josh, Phil’s best friend who was madly in love with her (another interesting little fact she found out about the same time her fiancé admitted he was cheating.) Anyway, Josh nearly moved back to California because Phil had to tell him she didn’t love him which was exactly the opposite of how she felt. Talk about a mess!
A wish that goes bad three times like that turns into a curse. Don’t ask me how—it’s in the fairy magic by-laws or something. Anyway, Phil had to break the curse which she did, with a little help from Josh. She wouldn’t give me the dirty details, but I suspect that it took more than just a kiss to overcome the FG’s nasty magic.
Whatever it was, it broke our fairy godmother’s hold over her forever, which was sure to piss Her Sparklieness off in a big way. I mean, Phil got rid of her birthday wishes once and for all and never has to worry about our fairy godmother screwing up her life again. Which is great, don’t get me wrong. But fairies don’t take kindly to having their magic broken and guess who was next in the line of fire—me.
My twenty-third birthday was coming up in a day or so and as anyone with any fairy or fae blood will tell you, odd-numbered birthdays are the worst. I can’t explain it but the magic gets stronger somehow and there’s a lot more potential for things to go wrong.
I could only hope to think up a wish small enough and harmless enough that the FG couldn’t screw it up. But looking down at my bright blue toenails, I was beginning to wonder if that was possible.
Somehow, I doubted it.
One
“Sorry, babydoll, I just can’t come over tonight. Me and the boys have to practice—Battle of the Bands is like, only three months away.” Brandon’s voice was almost as lush and pouty as his mouth. A mouth Cass loved to kiss. But right now, she just wanted to paint it. Not with lipstick or make-up. No, she literally wanted to capture those full, pretty lips on a canvas.
She blew out a breath in frustration and stared at the mostly finished portrait on the easel in front of her. A man with thick sable hair that fell to his shoulders—what her sister Rory called ‘rock star hair’—and a red, kissable mouth, stared back at her woodenly.
The portrait showed the impressive muscles of her boyfriend’s chest although not of his lower body. After one fifteen minute long nude session, which had been unfortunately interrupted by her sisters, Brandon had refused to take off his clothes for any endeavor more artistic than sex, so he was wearing jeans in the portrait. It showed the rock-star hair and the pouty mouth but it was missing something—some indefinable quality to make it come alive and turn it into more than just a pretty picture.
Cass had often thought the same thing of her boyfriend and reluctant model, but she squashed the disloyal thought almost as soon as it entered her brain.
“I understand that you and the rest of uh, Satan’s Stud Muffins, have to practice, honey,” she said, trying to be patient, “But my show at the I.C.U. gallery is coming up at the end of the week and if I don’t have your picture done, the gallery owner will cancel it. Remember, you’re my piece de resistance.”
“I don’t care what I’m a piece of, baby, I just can’t make it tonight.” Brandon’s voice sounded more like petulant than pouty this time and Cass could tell he was dan
gerously close to a full scale snit. “Tommy got a new amp we have to try out and the second verse to Jezebel’s Handcuffs still doesn’t rhyme.”
Cass suppressed a sigh. She knew if either one of her sisters was dating someone like Brandon, she would advise them to drop the jerk in a hot minute. But she couldn’t help herself—she had an artistic eye and a weakness for masculine beauty. He’d been the model for some of her best works—her muse in a way.
Plus, when he was in the mood, Brandon gave a hell of a back massage. Not that he’d been in the mood lately. He was focusing all of his time and energy on his music, hoping to win a local radio station’s battle of the bands in order to get more air time and maybe a recording contract. While Cass could understand pouring everything you had into your art, it was still irritating that he couldn’t take an hour out of his busy schedule to come sit for her so she could finish his portrait.
“Well, can you at least promise to drop by later in the week?” she asked, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. “The gallery owner is breathing down my neck and this show means a lot to me.”
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