by J. C. Nelson
Seventeen
IF I HAD a dime for every time I’ve heard “We’re all going to die” or “I’ll kill you,” I could afford a better apartment. You can only listen to so many threats of destruction, doom, or death before you start tuning them all out. So I followed the wolf out of the building, then went home. The first year I worked for Grimm, I treated every threat as personal, every invasion as imminent, and every apocalypse as inevitable. One evening, Grimm presented me with a bound book and pen, and asked me to keep a record of every time I rang the emergency bell. A year after that, we sat down and reviewed. Tyrannosaurs remained extinct. Intelligent apes completely failed to take over anything but the government. Several boy bands did rise to fame, but the only thing that proved was that there was no accounting for bad taste. So when I got back to my apartment, I penned the wolf’s words down right under the line that said “Bell-bottoms are the next fashion fad” and went on with life.
When I told Grimm to send me whatever else he wanted to by post, I expected a few more boxes. Judging from the mountain of packages piled against my door, either Grimm had shipped me everything in his private library or Ari had stayed up all night watching the Shopping Channel again. I hoped it was the Shopping Channel. One heft of the packages said most of them were books though.
Ari stood at the stove, cooking dinner, as I unwrapped. “What are all these?”
The girl could cook. Her dad had bought her chef’s lessons at the Culinary Institute for her fourteenth birthday. I figured if she was going to sponge off me, a meal or two wasn’t so much to ask. I tossed another book into the I-can’t-read-Ancient-Sumerian pile. “Grimm’s trying to keep me busy. It’s like school all over again.”
“I wanted to go to school, but she wouldn’t hear of it.” Ari stabbed a defenseless fried egg for emphasis. From what little she said about her stepmother, this was about normal.
“Community college is cheap, but don’t tell that to Grimm. He still acts like sending me was the greatest act of charity ever.”
“Dad would never dream of letting one of his children go to public college. It was Ivory Tower League or nothing. Better we nobility didn’t go at all than mix with the common folk.”
I poured a glass of wine for myself, and after a moment’s thought, a smaller one for her. “That him talking or you?”
“Do I look noble?” She gestured to herself. “My sisters looked the part, and they all took their places in the courts and the balls and did what Moth—, what Gwendolyn wanted, so things were okay for them. But she and I kept fighting. Arguing, yelling, screaming and . . .” She bit her lip so hard I was afraid she’d cut herself.
“She hit you.” I knew how words became fists, but I’d never thought that royalty did that sort of thing. The smell of burning eggs filled the apartment.
Ari kept her eyes fixed on the stove, and when she spoke it was through gritted teeth. “She has magic too.”
I thought for a moment. In fact, the more I thought about it, the less those birthmarks on Ari’s back reminded me of birthmarks, and the more they reminded me of the scars I’d seen on battle mages. I knew that sometimes moms and daughters didn’t get along. I didn’t think that they’d ever use magic like that on each other.
“When Dad brought me the Glitter, and he told me where to go, I went. I am never going back to live in that house. Ever. I will sleep on the street. I will live in a Dumpster and fight with the rats.” Now sobs punctuated each of her words. “I will die before I go back.”
She turned off the stove and opened the window to trade smoke for air. “I’m sorry. I’m not hungry right now.”
Ari went to her room, and I pretended I didn’t hear her crying. That night I opened books, and there were a lot of them, but the last book was the one that caught my eye. The cover was burned, as were the edges of the pages, but the spine still held the print. An Account of Her Majesty Queen of Thorns, the Black Queen. I opened the cover and a note fell out. I recognized Grimm’s script, though given that he has no hands I can’t say how he writes.
I keep my promises, but read this one last—G
Of course I thought about ignoring his warning. I certainly wanted answers I knew I’d find inside. The other part of me thought about a couple of blessings bound to me in a way that I couldn’t shake off. So I picked up my copy of Spellwork and Curses and read more. When Ari came out to make breakfast, I was still reading.
She took out another carton of eggs. “Final exam tomorrow?”
“Reading about curses. Sort of a recurring theme with me.”
“After breakfast let’s get the run out of the way. I want to enjoy the sun afterward.” She leaned out the window and looked up at the clear sky.
I had other plans. “Not today. We’re going for a different kind of workout.” The wolf had me worried. Not because I thought his threat would come true. Up until now I’d thought Ari and I were a couple of ants in a hill of millions, but the wolf had found us. Or found me. I wouldn’t mind an attack every now and then if I were alone, but with Ari around, I could never truly relax. After breakfast, we drove down the interstate, out of town, to a dingy shop built into a hill.
Ari watched the road signs as we passed. “Where are we? I’ve never been this far south.”
I opened the door and the sounds of gunfire rang out.
Ari flinched with each pop and roar.
I waved her on in. “It’s a gun club, not a shootout.” After I checked Ari into her class, I practiced my normal shots, then did a few rounds of movement shooting before checking on her. She stood, dwarfed by the instructor, with earmuffs tightly on. Beside her sat a tray of gleaming steel death, everything from a revolver to a shotgun. I remembered my first trip here. How the gun had leaped in my hand and the stench of spent powder.
He guided her as she leveled her gaze, sighted, and squeezed. When the gun went off she nearly hit the floor, but I didn’t laugh. She pushed the old man away and sighted up again and squeezed, and this time the gun only leaped a bit. And again, and again, and again. I sat for hours as she worked her way through the weapons. Revolvers she hated, and she rejected the tiny palm gun right away. After a few hours the range owner motioned me over to the booth.
“What’d you like for her?” I asked.
“Something smaller, but she ain’t budging. That girl’s made of brass.”
She came over and pulled out her earplugs. “I want number six.”
“That doesn’t fit in a purse. That doesn’t weigh less than ten pounds. I’m not even certain you can buy ammo for that if you aren’t military or police,” I said.
“I’m not going to carry it. I’m going to keep it handy at home; if I shoot something, I want it to stay dead.”
It was a pain in the ass to get a carry license, and I’m convinced the only reason I had one was that Grimm worked his magic on it. The real kind. It was time for a late lunch and a drive across town. When we pulled up at our new destination, Ari understood what I had in mind. She looked at the kanji written across the window. “Awesome.”
That’s what everyone said before the bruises.
We walked into the dojo, and I waited. When Mrs. Roselli came out, it was like talking to a penguin in a gi. She was two inches shorter than I, and weighed about a hundred pounds more, with olive Italian skin, gray hair, and bifocals. She looked fat, but six years of lessons had taught me her body was covered in layers of pure mean. You did not mess with Mrs. Roselli more than once. She taught the first self-defense course I’d ever attended, and my arms still hurt thinking about it.
“Mrs. R,” I said.
She gave me a hug that nearly crushed my ribs. “Marissa, have you come back to learn to break the bones?”
“Evangeline’s got that covered, but Ari here could use a little help. Living with me is turning out to be a little more dangerous than expected.”
“You don’t become a ninja overnight,” she said.
I held out my credit card. “I was thinking somethin
g more basic. Right now, she’d lose a fistfight with a Girl Scout.”
I paid the private lesson fee, and I watched. Watched Ari learn how to stomp the inside of the foot. How to grab someone by the ears and push her thumbs into their eyes. When the lesson was done I had one battered, bruised, and beaten princess. I almost felt bad for her. Mrs. Roselli hugged Ari and told her how great a student she was. When I took the class I got yelled at before, during, and after.
“Do you do this every week?” Ari took the complimentary ice pack that came with the class and pressed it to her hip.
“No. I passed that one a few years ago. Let’s head home.” I had this weird moment when I said home, and thought of her there.
That night I had an idea. While I was exhausted from my all-night study session, I wanted to make more progress. So after dinner, I dumped a book called Spell Well in Ari’s lap.
“You wanted to learn magic,” I said. “Help me get through this.”
So we sat up until midnight and compared notes as I struggled through yet another chapter of curse material. Afterward, Ari disappeared into my recliner, spell book in hand.
When I finally slept that night, I dreamed of the Fae Mother. In my dream, Ari’s dressing mirror lit up like the sun, blasting white light until she stepped out. I floated in my dream, watching her move through the apartment, looking at my books, and giving a disapproving nod to my sink full of dishes. She watched Ari, sleeping in the recliner, then moved on to my room. I thrashed, pinned by my nightmare, unable to raise a hand to defend myself. The Fae Mother leaned over my bed and whispered something.
I sat up in bed, dripping with sweat and shaking in fear. I clicked on the light and grabbed my gun from the pillow beside me, but my bedroom was empty.
In the living room, Ari snored softly, still clutching her spell book. When I was finally certain we were alone, I lay back down, unable to sleep. It wasn’t my nightmare. It was her words, which at first I didn’t think I heard. The longer I lay in the darkness, the more certain I was I knew what the Fae Mother had said: “Find it.”
Eighteen
WE HEADED OUT early, not even waiting for breakfast. I drove and Ari sat in the front, the Spell Well book in her lap. She wore a light green pantsuit that Grimm had bought for her during her makeover, and had straightened that wild auburn hair into long, obedient locks. She looked less like an intern and more like an executive.
“You ready to hurl lightning?” I asked.
She gave me a frustrated glance. “I don’t understand all the words, and I can’t do what little I understand. ‘Gather thyne energy.’ Okay, that’s no big deal, but ‘send it out along a spindle drop,’ that’s barely English, let alone understandable.”
I shrugged. “You’re doing better than I would. I’ve got zero magic talent. I can’t even draw a protection sigil. Thank Kingdom I can draw a gun.”
“After yesterday, I feel like an honorary agent.” She gave me a little grin, like a child who’d discovered a new toy.
Right about then, it occurred to me how stupid my plan was. One day of firearms training barely taught Ari how to avoid shooting herself. One class of self-defense probably made her more dangerous to herself than anyone attacking her. And now she had this idea that being an agent was good. It made me sick to my stomach.
“It’s no honor. Anyway, Grimm’s got a strict ‘No Princesses’ rule for his agents. Some sort of human resources violation. I don’t think I’m even an agent anymore. I got demoted to handmaiden.”
She shut the book and put it beside her. “How’d you start working for Fairy Godfather?”
I thought of all the different lies I’d used in the past. Recruited for my talent, chosen for a rare gift of prophecy—I’d come up with a lot of lines. “My sister was born sick. She needed a miracle to keep her breathing, and she needed it soon.” I shifted lanes, gaining speed as I spoke. “Mom and Dad were getting desperate, and that’s the key to finding Grimm. You have to need him badly if you are a normal person. Folks with Glitter can walk right in.”
“I needed his help.” Ari’s statement seemed like a challenge, one I wasn’t interested in taking.
“I remember some of it. Dad crying, and Mom being upset, and Grimm talking to me from a mirror. He said he could help Hope, and he would do it, but there would be a price.” I swerved around a truck and punched the accelerator down, flying along so the wind hurt my eyes.
“So I said yes. I thought when I was done, I’d go home and my sister would be waiting for me. I thought they’d all be waiting for me, but the truth is, I won’t ever be free. I earn Glitter for every job and I work every chance I get and I’ll never be free.” I jingled my Agency bracelet. “Basically a part of him. Keeps me on a leash. Lets me talk to him. Lets him talk to me.”
“So throw it away and leave.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. I snapped the bracelet off and threw it out the window. The wind whipped it away.
Ari turned to see where it landed. “You ever visit your family?”
Her question touched a sore spot in my heart. I had a gap there the size of my memories, and I spent a lot of time not thinking about it, not mentioning it, and praying every time I woke up that that day I wouldn’t be reminded of what I’d lost. I slammed on the brake, skidding over to the side of the road. There were so many things I didn’t want to explain to her, and yet I needed someone to understand. I didn’t talk about this with anyone. I wasn’t even sure Evangeline knew about the memories. In fact, I hoped she didn’t. She’d take it as another sign of weakness.
“When I came to work for him, I was sad. Couldn’t work, couldn’t learn. So Grimm made me a deal. I let him hide most of the memories of my family. If I ever pay him off, I’ll take them back and I can go home.”
“Home as in where?” She took off her sunglasses to look at me. For a moment I felt like her eyes saw right into my soul.
“With them.” Where else could there possibly be?
Ari squinted at me like she used to before contacts. “How old are you?”
I knew how things were supposed to work. You got older. You moved out. You lived on your own, but the normal order of things never seemed to apply to my life. Everything had changed on that bitter December night.
I’d spent six years telling myself that this was “for now,” or “only until.” Even if I were free, I wouldn’t be that sixteen-year-old girl. Mom and Dad would welcome me for visits, I was sure. The truth was, I was never going home. I’d left on my eighteenth birthday, too foolish to realize what it meant.
“Mom and Dad said this was until . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. I held up my arm and showed her the bracelet, hanging where it always did.
Ari reached out to touch it, making sure it was really there. The look of pity on her face made me jerk my hand away. Agents didn’t get pity until their funerals. We kept the silence the rest of the way.
• • •
THE WOLF TOWN was off the main highway, but I knew long before we arrived something was wrong. The smokehouses had no fire and the air stank of rotten meat that I hoped was pig. No guards at the branch road, no eyes on me as I pulled into town.
Ari wrinkled her nose. “What is that smell?”
“Meat.” I hoped she wouldn’t ask more.
I got out of the car and looked around. “Anyone here? I want to talk.” My voice echoed back to me with the sound of crows.
“Come on,” I said to Ari, and I headed over to the building where Billy had gone to negotiate with the wolves. The odor of death filled the air as I opened the door and a cloud of flies buzzed out.
Ari vomited at the stench of decay. I was used to it.
The wolves lay dead where they had stood. Some slumped at tables, some lay on the floor, and the bartender draped across the bar. The worst was the flesh. Whatever it was had torn the skin from their bodies, tossing it onto the ground a few feet away.
Outside, the air smelled sweet with only the aroma of rotten
pork.
Ari gagged again. “What? What happened?”
“Something magic. Fae magic.” The fae guard’s ability to tear people apart was legendary. Most legends had a grain of truth behind them. This one apparently had a boulder.
The larder, where the children had been kept, stood closed. I opened the door, praying that Billy and Evangeline had been to town recently. Inside, tiny figures slumped against the back wall. Flies spared me the need to check on them. I kicked the larder door in frustration and anger, glad that Ari wasn’t there to see me cry. She’d seen that enough already.
I was headed back to the car when it attacked: a half-wolf, tearing across the street toward Ari. She saw it and froze. I cursed her for blocking my shot, but it was already on her, teeth bared. It bit her once on the shoulder and rolled away, gagging and choking. I didn’t give it a chance to get up.
I put two bullets into each leg and another into its stomach. With the third bullet the half-wolf collapsed into the dirt. I rolled it over with my foot and put my gun to its head. It changed slowly, becoming more human. Ari approached, her arm dripping red.
“Tell me what happened or I keep shooting. Then I reload, and I shoot you some more.”
“The fae came for it, but we didn’t have it anymore. They took it. You took it,” said the wolf, now almost a man.
“Exactly who took what?
He convulsed and shivered, pain and fear wracking him. “The servants of the mirror.”
Nineteen
I LEFT HIM in the dirt, choking on his own blood. Wolves could survive a lot, and if he did, I didn’t care. I wasn’t usually a killer, though he frustrated me. Wolves were smarter than goblins, but pronouns must have given them headaches. “It” was not a proper name, though I suspected “it” might be as close as the wolf could come to naming the thing.
I took Ari to get her celebration stitches and slipped the doc an extra twenty to claim pink was the only color suture thread they had left. I’m pretty sure she knew. Ari held her arms and rocked in the seat as we drove across town. “How do you deal with it?”