I followed her to a small office with three desks. She sat behind one of them and pulled a visitor’s chair over for me.
“Look at this.”
On her screen she called up a map of the world. Like the one on the big screen in the monitor room, this map showed glowing lights—but these lights weren’t confined to Australia. The whole North American continent was ablaze, as was most of Europe, parts of China, all over Asia, even some in Africa. The only big empty parts were the places where no one lived, like huge swathes of Russia and some African deserts.
“I’m guessing this isn’t good news? What is this—aether all over the world now?”
“No, thank God, not that bad. But almost—this shows the spread of belief in magic. I’ve been mapping my results from monitoring internet traffic to where discussions of magic and fairies are occurring.”
“Wow. That’s a lot of people talking about magic.”
“Yep.” She stared at the screen and chewed at her lip anxiously. “That much belief is like a shot in the arm for the Sidhe. It’ll give them more power than they’ve had in centuries.”
“Enough to break out?”
“I don’t think so. No more than they’ve done already, anyway. Belief alone won’t destroy their prison.”
“Then what will?”
She sighed. “I wish I knew. Then we might be able to figure out what the hell they’re doing.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Nearly two weeks later, CJ and I had become experts on bears in fairy tales, but were no closer to finding a solution for Dad. I still hadn’t managed to see Puck, though I’d tried a couple of times. I hadn’t rung Zac either. Every time I’d walked past a phone the first couple of days I’d been like a smoker trying to quit. Just one! One call won’t hurt. Then I’ll be good. My hand would twitch toward the phone, and my heart would start racing. But then I’d think of how much shit I’d be in if something else went wrong because of that one phone call, and every time I chickened out.
After a few days of that, the fact that I hadn’t called was the problem. What must Zac have thought when I didn’t ring the first day? He probably thought I’d changed my mind. And how would he react now if I did? For that matter, how could I explain the situation we were in? Oh, yeah, there’s a whole organisation dedicated to keeping the world safe from magic, and my parents just happen to be running it, and by the way my dad’s a bear and we have a fairy locked up in the basement. Plus anyone we know could be a fairy in disguise, which is why I can’t actually see you in the holidays. No, I’m not crazy, thank you very much for asking. Yeah, that was a conversation I couldn’t see myself having. Instead I’d spent the last two weeks reading every book of fairy tales I could find in the library, sneaking moments on borrowed computers to scour the internet with CJ for information on bears in general and fairytale ones in particular, and just wandering around talking to people when it all became too overwhelming. Oh, and trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for when I finally saw Zac again at school.
I tried not to get underfoot. Everyone seemed too busy to chat, though I caught rumours of investigations. Traitors and magic leaks were whispered about, but no one wanted to let me in on the secrets. It was driving me nuts. We were getting nowhere with our bear research and, for all the activity around HQ, no one else seemed any closer to finding answers either.
Mum had found Dad in the Paris zoo. He seemed to recognise her, and had the zookeepers confused, because he was the friendliest polar bear they’d ever seen—but he was still a bear. He didn’t turn human again at night, and Mum was still wading through the complicated arrangements to have him shipped to Australia, posing as a cashed-up buyer from Taronga Zoo. Forging documents hadn’t seemed to be a problem. I just hoped nobody thought to check with anyone else at Taronga.
When I needed a break, I often visited in Kerrie’s room. Sometimes Emmet was there, running another experiment, or Dena, but there was always someone sitting with her regardless, just in case she woke up or her situation changed, and that person was often happy to chat to pass the time.
Often it was her brother Bryan, but when his duties as a warder kept him away it could be anyone, and I’d met a lot of the staff this way. This afternoon it was Kyle, and he was telling me the latest diplomatic hurdle Mum had come up against in her efforts to bring Dad home. It annoyed me that he knew more about it than I did—I was her daughter! Why wasn’t Dorian telling me this stuff instead of leaving me to find it out on my own? But mainly I was just glad to hear it at all.
“At least your Dad’s a fairytale bear,” Kyle said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he’s not aggressive, like a real polar bear. He seems to have retained his humanity underneath the bear skin.”
“Like Warder Nabukov.” The ogre still knew who he was, though he was so distressed at his transformation he had to be kept sedated, and spent a lot of time asleep. You could hear the thunderous snores from his room as you passed in the corridor.
“Yes. If your Dad had become a real bear they might have had to shoot him.”
I shuddered. Dad had been found sitting quietly in the courtyard outside the Louvre as the first early birds turned up for work at the famous gallery. Despite the screams, he hadn’t moved, except to lie down meekly when a policeman with a gun appeared. Thank God he hadn’t attacked anyone. In fact, he probably would have climbed calmly into the zoo truck when it finally arrived, but they’d shot him with a tranquilliser gun anyway, thoroughly confused by the bear’s unbearlike behaviour. I’d seen the footage of the “capture”.
Me and six billion other people. Could there be a person left on the planet who hadn’t seen it? The fairytale attacks were the only thing anyone talked about on TV any more, and the internet had suddenly sprouted a thousand “experts”, all pushing their own agenda. Predictably, some were convinced it meant the end times were here, and were busy exhorting the world to repent before Jesus returned and damned them to hell for all eternity. There was still a vocal minority that thought it was all an elaborate hoax, and there were various explanations put up as to who had done it and why. But an increasing number of people were starting to believe in magic, and Gretel was looking more and more worried as the days passed and her map of belief kept lighting up like a Christmas tree.
“Why do you think the Sidhe are attacking us with fairy tales?” I asked Kyle.
He sprawled in an armchair by Kerrie’s bed, looking glad for the chance to sit down. Everyone at HQ looked tired these days—well, except Kerrie herself, of course. Snow White looked beautiful, absolutely prince-ready. There were no monitors in the room; no tubes or drips. The magic itself kept her alive as it kept her unconscious. She needed nothing more.
“Why not? Just because they can, most likely.”
“I wish we could ask Puck. We’ve got a Sidhe sitting right there, and we can’t use him.”
“It wouldn’t do you any good. You can’t trust anything they say. He’d have you convinced you could breathe underwater, and laugh as you drowned.” He frowned, giving me that this is serious face that adults all do when they’re trying to convince you to listen to them—even though he was only a handful of years older than me. “The Sidhe aren’t like us. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking they are, just because they look like us. They think, and feel, in completely alien ways.”
Wow. That was probably the longest speech I’d ever heard out of Kyle. He had a tendency to fade into the background when others were around. Simon seemed to do most of the talking when they were together.
“Did you know her?” I nodded at the still figure in the bed. “Before this happened, I mean.”
“I knew of her, but I’d never met her. Simon knew her when they were both in Perth; he said she was a lot of fun. Great sense of humour.”
Well, what do you know? I wouldn’t have thought Simon would know a great sense of humour if it jumped up and bit him on his grumpy arse. I looked at Kerrie again. Sh
e lay so still, never moving in her sleep, not even a twitch. It was hard to imagine her as a living breathing person, telling jokes, having a few drinks at the pub on a Friday night after work. She’d become a symbol, an archetype: the classic damsel in distress.
What was her favourite food? Did she like romantic comedies or action movies? Or maybe both?
“I heard a rumour,” Kyle continued, “that Simon was pretty keen on her at one stage, but he got sent out on field work for a month, and by the time he got back she’d hooked up with someone else, so it never came to anything.”
“Really?” Poor Mr Happy. So CJ was right. Was that the reason he always seemed angry at the world? Was there a broken heart beating in that poor disappointed breast? That seemed way too romantic for the grumpy seeker I knew.
Kyle frowned at me. “Don’t tell anyone I told you that.”
Don’t tell your sister I told you that, he meant. He hadn’t gotten into trouble the night of the formal, but he didn’t trust CJ any more.
“Maybe he should try kissing her, then. She might wake up.”
His frown deepened. “I wouldn’t suggest that to him, if I were you. Let’s just leave it to the experts. People who don’t know what they’re doing mucking around in it could just make it worse.”
And by “people who don’t know what they’re doing”, he meant me? Oh, nice one, Kyle. What did he expect? Of course I knew nothing—no one would tell me anything! But at least I was trying, not just sitting around staring at a comatose girl going oh, gosh, this is sad. It was like the whole organisation was paralysed by the fairytale curses.
If the Sidhe could see us from inside their prison, they must have been laughing their heads off.
***
Simon eventually persuaded Dorian to let us leave HQ under his supervision, proving that maybe he wasn’t always such a grump. There were only two more days left before Term 4 started, Mum and Dad still weren’t home, and we’d all but given up hope of finding a way to help Dad. The only bright spot in our dark days was that Emmet had handed over our new collars and we could speak freely again.
Maybe he was going a little stir-crazy himself, since he’d mainly been confined to HQ keeping an eye on us, but it was still nice of Simon to offer. I didn’t care too much about his motivations as long as I got to escape the atmosphere of gloom at HQ for a couple of hours.
We headed out into a bright spring afternoon. The Rocks was full of tourists—tall German backpackers and big groups of excitable Japanese lugging enormous cameras—and everything seemed new and wonderful. Actually, it was pretty new, since we’d hardly had a chance to see Sydney yet, and I felt like a tourist myself, gawking at buildings and checking out the Akubra hats, boomerangs, and T-shirts in the tourist shops. For a little while I could forget the dark clouds that hung over us.
There was a bustling craft market set up in the heart of The Rocks. They’d closed off part of the main street and set up awnings across the road. Underneath, throngs of people browsed everything from clothes to pottery, kangaroo balls on key rings to delicate stitched artworks.
“Can we look?” CJ begged.
Shopping was a cure for just about anything, and CJ needed a break just as much as I did.
“There’s too many people.” Simon looked around uneasily, as if he expected a Sidhe to leap out of the crowd any minute and turn him into a toad.
“Please! Just for a few minutes? We’ll stay right with you.”
It was hard to resist those big blue eyes of CJ’s. Tougher men than Simon had crumbled before.
“Five minutes, then.”
She plunged into the crowd and we hurried to keep up with her.
“Look at these!” She held up a candle that looked like a ball of stained glass, or a miniature Tiffany artwork. It was beautiful. When I looked closer I could see some of the candles on display showed tiny street scenes; some were even adaptations of famous paintings. “They smell divine.”
The next stall had dreamcatchers and wind chimes, threaded with feathers and beautiful glass beads. Already Simon looked like a man who regretted his decision.
“Five minutes,” he said again.
CJ flitted on through the stalls, the most animated she’d been since the night of the formal. It was nice to see her smile again.
“Keep up,” said Simon. “We don’t want to lose her in the crowd.”
He forged ahead, calling to CJ to wait, and I strolled after them, trying to take it all in. I’d just stopped to look at some silver jewellery when a voice behind me said, “Hello, Violet.”
I jumped. “Oh, hi, Miss Moore.”
Why did she have to sneak up on me like that? My history teacher looked as glamorous as ever, in skin-tight black jeans and a deep burgundy top with the most plunging neckline I’d ever seen. Even I had trouble keeping my gaze out of her cleavage; the old guy manning the necklace stall had no chance. I doubt he had the faintest idea what her face looked like. A silver pendant nestled in the deep curve of her breast, a feather worked in the finest detail.
“How are you enjoying the holidays?” I asked, willing my heart rate to return to normal. Not that I cared, but she was staring at me expectantly, so I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. She had a knack of unsettling me; I never felt comfortable around her. I’d never managed to shake the bad impression of that first bloodthirsty Ancient History class.
“Very much,” she said. “How about you? Have you bought anything at the market?”
“No, I’m just looking. Still new here. We’re just getting to know our way around.”
“Me too.” She pulled a handful of origami figures out of one of her shopping bags. “Look what I found down the other end. Aren’t they amazing?”
I’d never seen such intricate folding. There were birds, dolphins and even something that looked a little like a bear. It was probably meant to be a koala. All done in beautiful Japanese papers.
“Here, have one.” She offered me one of the birds.
“No, that’s okay,” I didn’t want anything of hers, despite how pretty it was. “I wouldn’t want to deprive you.”
“Nonsense. I’ve got plenty. You can’t just window shop at your first markets—you need a souvenir.” She pressed the little bird into my hand.
“Thanks.” Her eyes were so intent on me, it seemed impossible to say no. My mouth just wouldn’t form the word. Instead I found myself nodding stupidly and tucking the little thing into my pocket under her watchful gaze. Well, I’d just have to throw it out when she’d gone.
“You’re welcome. Enjoy the rest of your holidays—I’ll see you on Monday back at school.”
I watched her walk away, irritated by the nagging feeling that I’d meant to do something when she’d gone. What was it? My head felt thick, as if I’d just woken up. She disappeared into the crowd while I stood there, trying to remember. I could see Simon’s head peering this way and that, anxiously looking for me, so in the end I gave up and went to join the others. It couldn’t have been that important.
“There you are,” he said when I caught up with them. “I think we’d better move on. There’s something I want to show you.”
He shouldered his way out of the throng of shoppers and we tagged along in his wake. He led us away from George Street, up the hill toward the sandstone cutting under the road that led onto the Harbour Bridge. Dad had pointed it out on our first trip to HQ, said it had been partly built with convict labour. The Argyle Cut, it was called. Now we weren’t flashing past in a car, I could actually see the chisel marks in the stone. Crazy to think that convicts had put them there. That was such a long time ago, though I guess it didn’t seem that way to the warders, who were dealing with problems that began centuries ago—but it seemed like a long time when you were seventeen. I wondered what it would have been like to be seventeen back then. No internet. No phones. I was certainly glad I lived in this century.
Though I could have done without the threat of fairy invasion.
“To Observatory Hill.”
Simon led us past galleries and cute little stone cottages, past steakhouses and pubs where the clientele spilled onto the footpath along with a rich beery smell, through the Argyle Cut, and up a steep flight of stone steps so old the passage of feet had worn a hollow in the middle of each step.
“What’s at Observatory Hill?”
“An observatory.” Well, derr. “A famous piece of Sydney history—but also a vital piece of magical history. You won’t find that mentioned on any of the tourist guides, though.”
At the top of the stairs we crossed a road and entered a park. The observatory itself was a handsome old building with a green copper dome. Like most of the historic buildings in the area it was built from the local sandstone, and glowed a warm honey gold in the afternoon sun.
“What’s that yellow thing on top of the tower that looks like an upside down Chupa-chup?” I asked.
“That’s the time ball. It’s the whole reason the observatory was built here. Every day they raise the ball up the spike, and at one o’clock exactly they let it drop. It’s important for navigation to know the exact time. From up here all the ships in the harbour could see it, and they used it to set their chronometers to the right time before they started a long journey.” He smiled, an expression you didn’t see too often on his face. It made him look a different person. “And from Australia, every sea journey is a long one.”
“But what’s that got to do with the observatory? Couldn’t they have just built the tower by itself?”
“The observatory is how they know the correct time. It’s the astronomer’s job to set the time from observing the movement of the sun and stars.” He shook his head. “Of course, sightings of the stars aren’t what they used to be, now a big modern city’s grown up around the observatory. Too much light pollution. But anyway, that’s only the mundane history.”
The Fairytale Curse (Magic's Return Book 1) Page 21