by D. R. Perry
The imps were wizened little creatures, similar in looks to Gnomes except that they had their own teeth and didn’t shave their beards. But that’s where the similarities ended. Gnomes refracted time by a few minutes in either direction. Imps worked flat-out miracles but only for a price. Usually it was an item or immediate service of value but on rare occasions they’d ask a future favor.
I squinted at the electronic entry before me. The passage about those rarely asked-for favors was highlighted. I wondered who’d done that. The last thing I wanted to do was ask Thurston a stupid question.
Filing my suspicions away for later took willpower. Good thing I’d developed that in spades since my literal affair with impulsiveness resulted in becoming another teen pregnancy statistic.
I quit my internal whine-fest. I was here now, at college with a second chance. Life gave those, sometimes, even if the Faerie monarchs didn’t. I’d been scoffing at Thurston’s blistering lesson plan, thinking her school and the mortal world it catered to was soft and weak. I closed my eyes for a moment, the visual echo that the screen’s glow left on the back of my eyelids lingering.
Maybe the world wasn’t too soft. Or I’d grown too hard. The only luxury I’d allowed myself for seven years was love for my kid. I had to be soft with her because that’s what kids need. But that love, gentle as it might be, still surged wilder than the stormiest sea.
The memory of that feeling stayed with me when I opened my eyes. One glance at the clock told me I’d never beat Frampton’s record if I didn’t buckle down. She might have made that time trying to prove herself competent in a school full of extrahumans. But I had the one person I loved more than anything else in either world at stake. When I set the tablet down, I gazed at the three-handed face on the wall.
I’d beaten Lynn Frampton by seven seconds.
“Piece of cake.”
“Tomorrow Captain Tolland.” Henrietta Thurston opened the door, letting air from the disused hallway into the classroom. “Bright and early, oh-five-hundred hours.”
I shuffled out of the room, waving my hand once in farewell. Pausing, I gazed down the long hallway toward the door at the end where I could see the regularly paced students bustling by on their way to dinner.
“Aye aye, ma’am.”
Headmistress Thurston had earned my respect. On that day, she had me convinced I could handle this challenge and study my way back into my daughter’s immediate presence again.
Neither of us had any clue how wrong that idea was.
Hope
“Lady Harcourt, may we visit with the baby egg please?” I ducked my head in a sort of bow because I hate curtsies. Ed put his hand on his tummy and did a proper one. I bet his brother Sir Fredrick had taught him that.
“That’s may. And yes.” The dragon lady everyone and their Grandma was scared of smiled and opened the blanket so I could get a look.
“Thanks!” I put my hands together. Not to clap, just so I didn’t make a mistake. See means look, not touch and no matter how nice the dragon lady seemed now, that’d change fast if we spooked her. “Hey, why’s it got blue and green spots?”
“Those colors come from their parents,” said Ed. “The spots tell us that baby’s mom has Poison magic and the dad was an Air dragon.”
“Was?” I blinked, then bit my tongue to keep from saying the horrible thing. The poor baby dragon wasn't even born yet and was half an orphan already. I remembered Mama talking to Grandpa about how a dragon named Wilfred got killed by Pharaoh’s rats a bunch of months ago. I looked at my shoes instead of the egg. There’s something you’re supposed to say to someone when a person they care about dies, so I did.
“Sorry, Missus Harcourt.”
“Thank you, child.” Her eyes got all glittery, but she didn’t cry. That made no sense, mostly because she wasn’t a Pirate. But what if she was something like a Ninja or a Viking that didn't cry?
Or maybe dragons couldn’t cry. She could have got used to not crying. I wasn’t sure what to say next, but Ed figured it out. Of course. He seemed like a teacher’s pet kind of kid besides being older than me.
“If you don’t mind, I have a question about dragons, Mrs. Harcourt.”
“I’ll probably answer it, but you’ll never know if you don’t ask.”
“Okay.” Ed chewed on his bottom lip, the way Grandpa always did when he had to write a court letter to the king. “Two dragons always make an egg. But what about a dragon and someone who isn’t one? After she marries Blaine, will Kim Ichiro lay eggs like you did?”
Hertha Harcourt’s face got all scrunched, like when you bite a lemon. And then she leaned against the wall behind her and laughed. The egg in her arms bounced up and down the same way humans bounced their tiny babies. I saw a shimmer around it like a smile, even though eggs don’t have faces. Well, not unless you draw one on with a marker.
“It’s more that only two dragons ever produce eggs, Edward. And please, both of you, call me Hertha.” Hertha dabbed the corners of her eyes. “No, Kim won’t lay eggs. She’ll have babies the usual way and if we’re lucky, they’ll grow into dragons. Girls, I hope.”
“Yeah!” I pumped my fist in the air. “Girls are awesome!”
Ed’s eyes moved to the left, right, and back again. He shrugged. Hertha shook her head.
“Yes, Hope, I agree that girls are awesome.” She patted the egg that sat in her lap now. “But the reason I hope my grandchildren are girls is that there aren’t too many dragons in the world anymore. The ones left who can still have babies are boys, except me.”
I didn’t bother saying that Hertha was a girl because I didn’t want to be like Captain Obvious. His name was really Ozymandias but I always call him Obvious because that’s how he talks. Everyone puts up with it because he rescued a bunch of extrahumans a hundred years ago or something. I realized that I’d probably never see Obvious or any of my other Unseelie friends again. I looked away from Hertha and her egg.
“Hope?” A hand not much bigger than mine patted my elbow. “You okay?”
“Dunno.” I looked up. “Maybe I miss Mama a little.”
“Yeah, me too. A little.” Eyes like the sky peered out from under bangs that needed a bowl and a pair of scissors. After that, Ed looked past me.
I turned to see who he’d rolled his eyes at and came face to face with the ghost lady. She had two long black braids and wore a red flannel shirt with scuffed boots over dirty jeans. Something like belts crossed her shoulders, and I remembered the harness Grandpa wore his pistol in. Hers was more old-timey, though. Dustier too.
“Quit making googly eyes at us, Kasa.” Ed shook his head. “Anyway, I need you to go check on some things for me.”
“Don’t you mean people, kid?” Her laugh reminded me of wild dogs. “And why should I do what you say?”
“You ghost, me medium, that’s why.” Ed crossed his arms. He looked a little silly, standing up to an armed lady twice his height. Did I look like that? It didn’t matter. Ed was right; she was a ghost, and he was a strong Psychic. He could order her if he wanted.
“Fine. I get it.” Kasa smirked. “You catch a case of regrets and want me to check on your family. But I—”
“I know. You can only check on Fred because ghosts can’t cross between the Under and the mortal realm.”
“Is that ghost giving you trouble, Edward?” Hertha peered at the air around Kasa.
I could tell she couldn’t see dead people like Ed and me could. Good thing, too. A dragon medium would be super powerful, which also means scary. If you don’t believe me about power being scary, you haven’t been paying attention. Start. Anyway, Kasa answered Hertha.
“Tell her I’m not.” The ghost turned her back and waved, heading off through the wall to the courtyard. “See ya!”
Explaining the whole ghost business to a dragon lady distracted me from all the sad stuff for a while. And then, Ed pretended with me that the giant tree jungle gym thing was a real pirate ship. And after that, even t
hough the sun stayed in the middle of the sky, we got sleepy because it was way past our bedtimes.
We fell asleep in hammock-like branches, listening to Hertha sing lullabies to her egg.
Chapter Four
Albert
“Your Majesty.” I took a knee. The gesture felt more hollow than the old oak by the Planetarium in Roger Williams Park, but less rotten. I was the biggest stinker.
“Sir Albert, rise.” The queen sat on her throne more than in it.
She never quite seemed to be in anything at all. I always thought that part of her lived elsewhere, the observation a luxury most of her subjects didn’t have. One of the few who did sat at her left. Richard Hopewell didn’t deserve a full glance. The view from my peripheral vision was too much and even added something extra to my observation.
Hopewell’s glamour, the magic hiding his faerie side, had grown patchy and tattered. Even his ability to cast multiple schools of magic couldn’t stop the inevitable need to choose a Monarch and tithe. His time was shorter than even Fred Redford’s had grown the day he rescued his brother from this throne room.
Why hadn’t the Redcap knight returned with Bianca Brighton from the beach? She’d fallen through a portal over it the night before. I’d sent a message to Fred via Pixie, but heard nothing back.
“I take it the children are with their protector in the nursery.” The queen hadn’t asked a question. She wasn’t born at night, let alone last night, or so rumor had it. Both Monarchs kept their origins a mystery. Maybe they hadn’t been born at all in the usual sense.
“Yes, Majesty.”
“Good. Then you can give me your version of the tale about why my suitor is unable to return to the mortal realm.”
I explained without preamble or excuse, giving her information as she always compelled. Twice per week, the Sidhe Queen expected my figurative guts to spill in front of her and the evil suitor who used all my information against my classmates. The queen wanted nothing but facts, regardless of how many mistakes I made in the process of getting them. And she trusted Richard.
The truth-inducing arrow Olivia Adler had shot Gino Gitano with meant all of Richard’s skeletons emerged from their closets. An unflinching narcissist, Gino would leverage his inability to lie for the rest of his life in his favor, as far as courts of law were concerned. The queen’s court was another matter.
“I’m giving a standing order to detain Gino Gitano on sight and brought to my demesne.” The queen’s voice rang with magical authority though her eyes remained flat, the usual twinkle gone.
Any of her standing orders carried through the entirety of her half of the Under and this one was no exception. I set my features into a mask of dutiful neutrality and nodded, confident that my puzzlement wouldn’t show. A lifetime of hiding my true feelings meant only a Telepath or Precog could know my heart without my consent.
I couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t given a kill order. If Richard Hopewell was important to her, either for love or power, detainment was a weak response to the threat Gino posed. I didn’t dare question my Queen, however. Risking her wrath or indebtedness was a zero-sum game.
“Majesty.” The voice came from the queen’s right. I knew better than to assume that space was empty. A long, tall, slender creature stood there, easily mistaken for a stalk of bamboo. I knew better.
“Speak your piece, Brownie.”
“Gitano is too dangerous to leave walking the mortal realm. In a legal sense, his presence there could cause trouble for Seelies in the mortal courts of Law.”
“That is why I have a duchess and a knight working in the mortal courts. You know nothing.”
The brownie stood, remaining silent, but it crackled, bending as though the queen’s dismissal had been a strong gale. I understood how it felt only a moment later as she turned her attention my way again.
“Tell me about this errand you sent Sir Frederick on.”
“A friend came through a portal unintentionally, Majesty. Due to the delicate nature of your new long-term guest, I sent my peer on the mission I could not manage alone.”
“You shouldn’t have and you will not in the future.”
“As you wish, Majesty.”
“Sir Frederick will answer to me with the results of said mission. You will concern yourself with it no longer.”
I hid my blinking by pushing my hair behind one ear. In the mortal realm, I'd have pushed my glasses up my nose but I didn't need those here. Counting to three, I breathed in and then out the same way. Only after two repetitions did I realize that the queen’s order stood unanswered.
“Understood, Majesty.”
“Mere understanding is not enough, Sir Albert.”
“Yes, your Majesty. However, I must advise, a promise of obedience may not be the wisest course in the matter of a medium’s presence in the Under.”
“So, there is more to this errand of Sir Frederick’s than its surface appearance.” The queen closed her eyes. I measured the moments and found them longer than the day Fred had tithed to her in the thirteenth hour of his Quest to save his brother. “Richard, it’s time.”
The nemesis in yellow bowed and murmured something to her I couldn’t make out. The queen blushed, bringing back a memory I hadn’t revisited for close to a decade, since Prep School at Trout Academy. Back then, I’d evoked the same response in Gemma Tolland. A sour emotion dropped in the pit of my stomach, a grim and familiar sort of gravity.
“Sir Knight, you will announce to the court that the time is nigh.” The queen’s voice sang with the power of her full authority. “Richard Hopewell will tithe to my service at the thirteenth hour tomorrow. Assemble my guests. You are dismissed.”
I had no choice but to do as she commanded.
Ed
The Sandman must have visited. I wasn’t sure whether he was real or what kind of extrahuman he’d be if he was, but my eyes sure felt gritty when I rubbed them. After that, I waved the arm I wasn’t lying on at whatever had broken into my snooze time.
“Go ‘way, ‘m sleepin’.” Something like that came out of my mouth, anyway.
“No.” Something cold poked my cheek. Kasa didn’t understand that I lived with the most prankish poltergeist in Rhode Island, which made me immune to most ghostly tactics. “Wake up, kid. It’s important.”
“Ed.” This new voice was familiar. My best grown-up friend besides Fred.
“Bianca?” I opened my eyes and wished I hadn’t.
After that, I opened my mouth but sound and breath left before I could think of words to go along with them. My brother, my personal hero, had run off to rescue Bianca Brighton. Disbelief got in a fistfight with disappointment, short-circuiting my brain like a smartphone in a toilet. Thoughts swirled.
Bianca was the second youngest medium on Rhode Island’s Registry and I was the first. She’d done a lot to help me, especially after my mom got arrested for putting Professor Watkins in a coma. If it hadn’t been for Bianca, the ghosts at our house might have gone from helping to one of the worst hauntings in over a hundred years.
A kid medium like me couldn’t handle that many ghosts. The rule was one for every year you’d been able to see them. Bianca helped by moving some, coaxing them over to the college or public works, or helping them move on. Instead of the thirty ghost crew, our house back on the East Side only had seven now.
The overworked girl hovering in the air next to my hammock had lived through a fatal-to-others car accident, the Nocturnal Lounge's destruction, and a pair of Mafia hitmen. It wasn’t the slow-fall wards keeping her aloft, either. She’d died and, from the looks of her ghost, the diabetes had done her in.
“Oh no.” Hope’s warm hands gripped my arms, resting her pointy chin on my shoulder. Rainbow wings wrapped around me, stilling shivers I’d barely noticed “She’s stuck here, without her ghost friend.”
“Look, I have to talk fast. Quiet, too.” Bianca glanced at Hertha. The dragon lady still slept, curled on a bench around her egg.
> “Okay.” I nodded.
“Hopewell didn’t bother killing me. He just took my purse and tossed it into a portal he’d made. It’s why I’d died. My insulin was in there. But anyway, I also had something else. A box.” Bianca scrunched her forehead and put her hands flat in front of her, turned up like she held a bowl.
The air just above her hands got darker, turning into some kind of rectangular box. Marks etched their way into its sides. Those marks reminded me of the decorations my dad put on the stuff he made.
“It’s important.” Hope whispered. “Not the box, what’s in it.”
“Yeah, you get it.” Bianca smiled. “Good. So, you need to get the box to the right person.”
“When’s it supposed to do that?”
“I don’t know. But Duke Ismail told me that a Sprite gave it to him. It's important.” Bianca glanced at Hertha and then the door. “I gotta get out of here.”
“Out of where?”
“The queen’s demesne, and before Hopewell tithes. He technically killed me and if I’m not in the king’s side of the Under before everything he’s done goes to the Seelie crown, I’m stuck in this castle like Kasa here. Anyway, this is important. Just get the box back.”
“He’ll do it.” Hope opened her wings instead of shouting, making the hair fly back from my face.
“Wait a minute, wouldn’t it be better to get Al or—” I swallowed my brother’s name. Bianca wouldn’t want him on this box retrieval thing. She said she didn’t blame him to make me feel better. I shrugged. “Someone who’s not a kid?”
“Nope.” Bianca shook her head, then glanced at Hertha again. Had the dragon lady moved? I didn’t know. “You're perfect. Hopewell will underestimate you for sure. But he’ll only make that mistake once, so you get one shot each. I’d wish you good Luck but I think you can do it without that.”