Harry vanished with a soft popping sound and a blip of green light, just at the moment Brick realized his ears had definite points.
"Okay, that explains a few things." He swallowed hard, wishing he hadn't braced himself with the lumberjack breakfast special at Hunky & Dory's. He sat down on the end of the bed where Will was a limp, pale lump. "Magic, right? Real magic. Or else I'm drugged." He swallowed hard again. "Hey, how did Lori tell him when there wasn't time for her to call..."
Will groaned, rolled over, and let out a long, rattling snore.
Brick decided to take that as a good sign.
* * * *
"Thank goodness this happened in Neighborlee, instead of somewhere else where we'd have the entire FBI, CIA, CTU, NCIS and real-life Mulders and Scullys come pouring down on us," Phill grumbled. She sat up in the bed, letting the damp cloth slide off her forehead. It hit the mattress and tumbled to the floor with a soft, sodden plop.
"Angela assured me that Neighborlee's resident mass amnesia field would smooth over memories and questions," Lori said. She held out her hand and a glass of fizzing magenta liquid popped into it. "Here. This will cure what ails you."
"What does ail me, exactly? And is Will okay?" Phill reached for the glass. Missed. Closed one eye and tried again.
"I haven't checked the Ether Lexicon, but I don't think I have to. Not with all the research I've done, bracing to fight against my relatives." Lori settled on the end of the bed and frowned, waiting until Phill tipped the glass back and drained it.
"Oh, that's awful."
"It is not. I made it your favorite flavor and twice as strong as necessary."
"Not the taste." Phill stuck her tongue out, then winced and pressed her hand against the back of her head while holding out her other hand with the glass. "The feeling of all those bubbles going to work inside my head." She sighed. "So, is Will okay?"
"The last I checked with Harry, he was pretty much progressing like you."
"So what's wrong with us?"
"My diagnosis is a massive case of Need denied."
"Huh?" She stuck her tongue out again when Lori giggled. "We don't have Need."
"Think about it, you dope. Need is there to draw two people together--you and Will have always been together. You want to be together. Right?"
"Absolutely."
"Need is to glue people together until they can make the soul bond, but you and Will are bound together already. My theory is that you never went into identifiable, physical Need because Will has always been there, and hasn't been resisting at all. So there was no Need to turn on the superconductor magnet, to use some Human terminology."
"And use it badly." Phill rubbed once more at the back of her head and sighed. "Considering what you did for my aching head, I'm willing to consider you a doctor and take the diagnosis. So, what about last night?"
"A long overdue linkage, to put it simply."
"To put it mildly, and understate it to the hundredth power. Wow. Did we really knock out all the lights?" A slow smile unfroze the aching muscles in her face.
Lori rolled her eyes and grimaced, and a moment later they both burst out laughing. Phill snuggled down in the blankets again, after plumping her pillow.
"Okay, then we get our happily ever after, despite all the dire predictions of both our relatives. Can you believe, that ninny was ready to walk away, because someone convinced him that since I hadn't gone into Need, he must be interfering, and that meant I might die?"
"True love?"
"I can accept that diagnosis, too." She stretched luxuriously. "I'm wiped, but feeling a thousand percent better already. So... Now that my problems are all solved, we need to concentrate on you."
"Hmm, maybe."
"Maybe?" She snatched at Lori's hand when her friend got up to walk away from the bed. "What's that smirk for?"
"Brick was here."
"You were making out with him while I was lying here, dying?"
"We did not make out, and there was no chance of you dying." Lori pouted, eyes sparkling with mischief, and sank down on the end of the bed again. "He came to apologize and beg me to forgive him and... I promised I'd tell him everything tomorrow."
"Everything? As in...everything?" Phill whistled softly and low. "You think he can handle it?"
"He has to, if we have any chance. At least the fact that he's from Neighborlee and he's kinda-sorta used to this kind of thing should... Well, not prepare him, but cushion the shock a little."
"A little." She sighed. "I hoped it works out for you two. Really. He's a great guy. And you need someone spectacular."
"As in... Need?" Lori giggled when Phill grimaced at her again, and squealed the next moment when the pillow slipped out from under Phill and swung at her. She ducked and called up a pillow three times bigger from her bedroom back home. In moments, a pillow fight reigned, augmented with swirls and sparks and streamers of magic in every color conceivable.
* * * *
"Take my advice. If you're as stuck on Lori as I am on Phill, you can't let anything get in the way. Grab the one who's right for you, no matter what, and hold on tight." Will levered himself upright, then slid out from under the blankets and tottered across the floor to the bathroom.
"I already figured that out," Brick said. He tapped the in-room coffeemaker, willing it to brew faster. He needed coffee just as much as Will seemed to. "So, Lori said she'd tell me everything tomorrow."
"Everything? As in...everything everything?" Will paused in the doorway of the bathroom. His color looked better, just getting upright.
"Everything that she's had to keep secret from me. Is that bad or good?"
"Good. Definitely. I think, living in Neighborlee, you might just be able to handle it."
"Handle what, exactly?" Brick thought back to what he had seen Harry do, what he had heard about the power outage last night. "Will, is magic real?"
"There's magic, and there's magic. What kind are you talking about?"
"Will!" He regretted making the light hanging from the ceiling vibrate, but didn't apologize, even when Will winced and bent over slightly, holding his head between his hands as if it would burst open.
"Okay, crash course. Give you something to think about." Will straightened and held out his hand. A giant Slurpee-sized glass filled with a fizzing, violent purple liquid appeared in his hand. He drank it down, though it took nearly two minutes to chug it all. Sparks spun out from his ears and the ends of his hair and Will turned that same violent shade of purple before a burst of steam exploded from seemingly every pore in his body.
He sagged, smiling in relief. "Yeah, that did the trick." He opened his eyes and his smile turned to a smirk. "And yeah, there's magic. Phill and Lori and me, we're magic. It's in our blood. We're Fae. And there's a lot of magic soaked into the ground and air here in Neighborlee, so that might just make things easier on the two of you. If you want to be together."
"Yeah. Together. Forever." Brick swallowed and finally let out the breath he had been holding since the glass appeared in Will's hand. "Tell me everything."
"Everything. Okay. Got all day?"
"I got all the time in the world, when it comes to making sure Lori and I are together, permanently."
"Is that your final answer?" He grinned, snapped his fingers, and the next moment appeared fully dressed and sitting at the table on the other side of the room, with plates full of every breakfast food imaginable covering the table. "Want to bring that coffee over and pull up a chair? We got a lot of talking to do, and you're gonna need all the energy you can get."
* * * *
"Anything?" Mr. Miller said, when Harry popped into the living room. The expectant look fell off his face a moment later. "Are you all right?"
"I've been up all night taking care of a sick friend." Harry shrugged. "How's Bethany?"
"I'm fine," Bethany said.
He narrowed her location down to somewhere in the far corner of the living room. Judging from the slight depression in
the couch and the decimated bag of peanut butter M&Ms, Harry guessed she had curled up there to watch TV and drown her sorrows.
"The problem is," she continued, "I've run out of witty euphemisms for being invisible."
"I swear, honey, if it wasn't an emergency last night, I would have been here the whole time. I did get a lot of reading in while Will was unconscious. Which was a lot." Harry gave Mr. Miller a pleading look.
"Give the boy a break, Bethie." He got up and gestured at the kitchen. "I'm gonna whip us up some lunch, then I recommend you let him get a good chunk of sleep. I may not know much about magic, but it makes sense that he won't do you a lick of good if he's dead on his feet."
Harry thanked Mr. Miller with a nod and a grin and started across the room. It made his head ache to call up enough magic to find Bethany and throw his anti-invisibility spell around her. Then he thought of something before he did it.
"You are dressed, aren't you?" He halted just in front of the coffee table, with it between him and the couch where Bethany was sitting.
"What kind of a question is that?" She laughed, and the sound came from his right. So he was wrong--she had gotten up from the couch.
"I'm going to make you visible, and I don't want to embarrass you."
"No. Whatever this magic is, it's creating a field around me so everything I'm holding and wearing becomes invisible with me, but anything I let go of becomes visible again. Which could be convenient if I wanted to become a cat burglar, and when I couldn't care less about fashion."
"Bethany, I'm so sorry."
"You look awful, Harry. How much energy does it take up to make yourself visible?"
"I don't know. It's unconscious now--except when I'm actually unconscious, rather than sleeping. Then everything gets reversed and I'm visible until I wake up and think about being visible and then the invisibility sets in again."
"And when we kiss. Then that negates... Hmm." She grabbed hold of his arm.
Harry let her lead him to the couch. He was about to protest that she had shoved him down into her seat, but then Bethany settled herself on his lap.
"Is that better? You know exactly where I am, and I feel a little more real and... Ah ha!" She giggled as she became a transparent, Bethany-tinted and Bethany-shaped mist. "I thought so. If the invisibility wrapped around me when we were close, then I figured the anti-invisibility would work just as well."
"You're a genius. You do the thinking for both of us from now on." Harry wrapped his arms around her and sighed in complete contentment when Bethany rested her head on his shoulder. Snuggling together for the rest of their lives, just like this, suited him just fine.
"Just how much energy does it take up, fighting the invisibility?" she asked after a few minutes of blissful, restful quiet. The sounds of her father opening cupboards and the refrigerator and chopping something came clearly from the kitchen.
"I don't know. It is a drain, I know that. Why?"
"You could just let yourself become invisible while you're indoors. Turn it off completely when you go lie down after lunch."
"Uh huh. And you wouldn't feel so alone?"
"I'm not alone. You're here," she said in a very quiet, small voice.
"Bethany... Okay, I'm gonna have to back up a little and explain all about the emergency that dragged me away last night before I can say this right. I came to a realization last night. I'm probably moving too fast, but after I saw how miserable Will and Phill made themselves and what happened last night...Okay, here goes."
"Wait. Will and Phill? That emergency last night was them? Dad's been getting bits of gossip. Of course, the way things work in Neighborlee, whatever explanations people are coming up with aren't anywhere near the truth. What did they do? What happened to them? Are they okay?"
"They're fine. Or they will be, when they wake up." Harry pressed two fingers against her lips, stopping her when she opened her mouth to speak again. He could see dozens of questions in her eyes. "Just listen, okay?"
Bethany glared at him, teasing--he didn't realized until that moment how glad he was to be able to see her glare at him--but she nodded. Harry took a deep breath, scooched around on the couch to get a little more comfortable, and let spill the whole tale of Will and Phill's explosion at the wedding reception. Then he explained the theory he and Lori had batted back and forth while they tended their unconscious charges.
"So the thing is, I figured, no matter what people say, no matter what stands in the way, no matter how weird the circumstances--"
"And in Neighborlee, everything is pretty weird, at one time or another," Bethany interjected. She giggled when he pressed four fingers against her mouth this time.
"When you find the one and you can't imagine living life without her, you tell her and hope she's willing to put up with all the trouble and work, because it'll be worth it in the end. So I figure, you're the one for me, Bethany, and I'll spend the rest of my life proving I'm the one for you." Harry braced himself, took his fingers off her lips, and waited.
"So..." She tipped her head to one side. "Are you sneaking up on saying you love me?"
Harry groaned, closed his eyes, and let his head drop against the back of the couch. "This is why I've been in this mess all my life with the invisibility. I forget the simplest and most important part of everything. Yes, I love you. Forever and always. Even if you can't become a Changeling. Even if we have to use an anti-invisibility spell for the rest of our lives. I'll stay out here in the Human world with you, if you want. Or I'll take us to the Fae realms for the rest of our lives, if you want to get away from Hollywood and the paparazzi. Or we can settle here in Neighborlee. Whatever you want to do."
"What about what you want, Harry?" she whispered, pressing her little hands against both sides of his face and looking into his eyes.
"I want to make you happy." He laughed. "I want you all to myself until the end of time, but that's pretty selfish, so--"
"Not selfish. Because that's how I feel about you, too. Despite everything." She giggled as she tipped her head slightly to the left and brought her lips to within a sixteenth of an inch of his. "Oh, yeah. I love you, too."
Harry thought maybe he had a small taste of that magical sonic boom that shook Neighborlee yesterday when Will and Phill kissed for the first time. Bethany's taste and scent and the feel of her in his arms and the rhythm of her pulse sank into him. Waves of magical energy shot out of him, rolling through the ground and the atmosphere and making the slits into other dimensions rattle and leak for a few micron-bursts. He didn't care. All that mattered was Bethany safe in his arms and the sweetness of her spirit flooding into him, merging with his, tangling together, melting together.
If this is what happens with a true love kiss... I am a dead man when we get to the stronger stuff.
"I can hear what you're thinking," Bethany whispered, giggling softly, against his lips.
"You two want to wait until after there's a ring on her finger before you go any further?" Mr. Miller called from the kitchen.
"Sorry, Daddy!"
"Uh, sir, I should have probably--" Harry began.
"If you're asking my blessing, you have it." Mr. Miller laughed. "Lunch is ready. Why don't you two come up for air and come get something to eat? Bethie, go out to the spare fridge and get my homemade pickles and corn relish, okay?"
"Oh, that's a good sign." Bethany slid off Harry's lap. It took all his self-control to open his arms and let her go. "Daddy's homemade stuff is only saved for special occasions. He wouldn't feed it to you unless he approved."
She winked at him and scurried out through the kitchen. Harry couldn't quite lever himself up from the couch until he heard the door into the garage open and close. He felt good, but kind of hollow at the same time. He knew he was tired, but there was a buzzing tingle or a fizzing in his blood that made him think he could keep going for a few more hours before he collapsed into a coma. That was Bethany's own brand of magic, he was sure.
"Welcome to the famil
y," Mr. Miller said, as Harry shuffled into the kitchen. He glanced over his shoulder at him and nodded toward the kitchen table. "Better sit down, son, before you're face-down."
Bethany screamed, and there was a crash of breaking glass and the splat of something liquid on cement. Harry and Mr. Miller nearly got jammed up in the garage doorway in their struggle to get out to her first.
She stood in the middle of a puddle of broken jars and dill pickles and yellow-and-green-and-red bits, holding out her arms and staring at them. She wore a ratty pair of blue sweatpants with holes in the knees, and a faded, bleach-spotted matching sweatshirt, and holey sneakers on her feet. Harry wasn't sure why he made note of what she was wearing. He was probably too exhausted to think clearly.
"Bethie--I can see you," Mr. Miller blurted.
Oh, yeah, that was it. She was visible, and she wasn't inside Harry's anti-invisibility field.
"The kiss," Harry said. "The kiss cured you."
"Uh, yeah." Bethany took several cautious steps out of the puddle of glass and spilled preserves, and let her father wrap his arms around her. "That kiss could raise the dead. I utterly believe it."
They found out some time later that his announcement wasn't quite accurate. By the time they got the corn chowder and pickles and broken glass picked up, and they sat down to eat lunch, Bethany grew transparent around the edges. The transparency had gained dominance by the time they finished eating. Harry realized that the same thing was happening to him. He gave himself a headache trying to give his anti-invisibility spell a boost.
"I think maybe we're in synch," Bethany said. "Let's see how visible we are after you've had your nap and you're back up to strength."
"If that's true." Harry wobbled a little as he got up from the table, and nearly dropped the dish he was trying to take to the sink.
"Off to bed with you, son," Mr. Miller said. "You're no good to me here. In fact, you're a hazard. Both of you. We'll be tripping all over each other with you two invisible."
"If that's true," Harry repeated, slower this time, because even his tongue felt thick and heavy and half-asleep, "then you gotta marry me."
Have Yourself a Faerie Little Christmas Page 22