A Fairy Tale

by Shanna Swendson

  The woman paused to pose until she was certain that every eye was on her before she stepped gracefully down into the room. She sashayed across the floor to Emily, then stood in front of her for a long time, studying her with eyes that were as hard and as glittery as diamonds. She reached up a hand to stroke Emily’s cheek, and it took all of Emily’s self-control not to wince at the icy touch. Other memories were now returning. They were hazy, but Emily recalled being afraid, and it had been because of this woman.

  The woman frowned and tilted her head to one side before turning to Eamon. “Are you quite certain?” she asked. “She doesn’t feel right.”

  He took the Playbill from his jacket pocket and showed the autograph to the woman. “She gave me her name.”

  The woman studied the signature, then gave him a brilliant smile. “Eamon, darling, you’ve done it,” she purred. “You’ve brought me my prize, at last.” She turned back to Emily and said conspiratorially, “You have no idea how gratifying it is to learn that there is someone competent around here, after so many failures.”

  Eamon gave a stiff bow. “I am honored to have pleased you.”

  The woman laughed and swatted at his arm. “I’d ask you to give my court lessons in competence, but you’re such a dreadful bore that I couldn’t stand more like you.” She gestured toward a flunky, who handed Eamon an old, leather-bound book. “Here is your reward, as I promised. Now, run along, back to your library.”

  Eamon seemed more relieved than insulted to be dismissed like that, and his attention was already more on the book than on his surroundings. He gave the woman another stiff bow, nodded to Emily with a faint smile, then left the party. Emily felt a pang of loss at his departure. She’d thought he liked her, but she was nothing more to him than the object of a quest. That’s the last time I let a fan walk home with me, she thought.

  The woman took her hand and gave it a squeeze, sending a chill all the way to her elbow. “Now, my pet, we never got a chance for proper introductions before. I’m Maeve, but you may call me Your Majesty.” Still holding Emily’s hand, she led her to the sofa, which immediately cleared as the other fairies scattered, returning to their party. Once she and Emily were seated, Maeve continued, talking as though this was a normal conversation happening in a normal place. “How have you been doing? And how is your sister?”

  Now Emily remembered more from that time before, something about a confrontation between Maeve and Sophie, and although Emily had hated to leave the fairy world, she’d been glad to be away from Maeve. Fear welled up inside her. This wasn’t about a party at all. There was something else going on, and she wished for the first time this evening that her big sister would show up and get her out of the Realm again. She gave Maeve what she hoped was a steely smile. “Sophie’s probably on her way here already. She always knows when I need her.”

  Maeve returned Emily’s smile and said, “Good. I’ve been looking forward to seeing her again for a very long time.”

  A chill that had nothing to do with Maeve’s touch surged through Emily’s veins. This was the first time she’d ever encountered anyone who’d had a run-in with her sister who had any desire to repeat the experience. She knew then that she was in big trouble.

  Sophie, come get me! she screamed inside her head even as she tried not to let her panic show.

  Two

  Maybelle, Louisiana—The Drake Residence

  Wednesday, 1:30 a.m., Central Daylight Saving Time

  Sophie Drake woke with a start, gasping for breath. Then she buried her face in her pillow and groaned, “Oh, Emily, not again.”

  With a deep sigh, she rolled out of bed and crossed her bedroom, yanked her closet door open, pulled her suitcase down from the top shelf, and began packing to go to New York. Maybe this time she could settle things once and for all.

  Three

  The Realm—The Apartment

  Soon Afterward

  Maeve didn’t seem to notice Emily’s fear. “Now, how long has it been?” she asked. “You’ve become an adult since I last saw you.”

  “It’s been fourteen years,” Emily said tightly.

  “Oh, really? Is that a long time?” According to Sophie’s fairy indoctrination, time did funny things in fairyland. Emily could spend what felt like months here and return to the real world at the moment she left it, or she could spend what felt like minutes, only to return to the real world and find that a century had passed.

  Needless to say, she preferred the former option. It would be far less detrimental to her career.

  It was possible, then, that to Maeve it had only been a day or two since her last visit. “It’s about half my lifetime,” Emily replied.

  “Then that charming sister of yours should be an adult now, too.”

  “Well, yes. She’s nearly four years older than I am.” This was the kind of conversation Emily could follow with only half her brain, so she concentrated the rest of her mental capacity on thinking about how to deal with her current situation. She resorted to the problem-solving method that had worked for her since she was a child. “What would Sophie do?” she asked herself.

  It was a trick question. Sophie wouldn’t be in this situation because she’d have known Eamon was a fairy and would have sent him running in terror instead of going with him. But if the fairies got smart and hired a bunch of mercenaries to sneak up on Sophie in a dark alley and surround her, and if one of the survivors managed to whack her on the head so the fairies could haul her into fairyland, and if she were then stuck in a crazy fairy queen’s lair for some unknown purpose, then what would Sophie do?

  “What is your sister doing now?” Maeve asked. “She used to visit us all the time, but she stopped coming and we miss her. She’s a lovely dancer. Of course, she did have the best training.”

  That got Emily’s attention. She knew Sophie knew a lot about fairies, but she’d thought that was just part of Sophie knowing pretty much everything about everything, not because she was a regular in fairyland. In spite of her wish just a moment ago that Sophie would come to her rescue, she felt a pang of the familiar “It’s not fair!” younger sister lament. If Sophie went to the Realm all the time, then why did Emily have to stay away? She supposed that Maeve could have been lying, but if she didn’t know Sophie beyond her rescuing Emily before, how did she know Sophie was a dancer? Not that Emily wanted to let Maeve know this was news to her. “She’s teaching dance now,” she said.

  Maeve’s smile was creepily reptilian. “Is she, now? Really? You mean she’s not dancing anymore?”

  “She does that, too. Sometimes.”

  Maeve threw back her head and laughed. Emily didn’t know what was so funny. Yeah, Sophie had been on the fast track toward international ballet stardom and had surprised everyone by staying home to teach instead, but she had her reasons. Come to think of it, Emily had never actually asked her sister about that. She’d been too grateful that Sophie staying home had made her own escape easier.

  With a wave of her hand, Maeve summoned a serving girl who bore a tray of cocktail glasses filled with pastel liquids. Maeve took a glass, then said to Emily, “Have a drink.”

  “I’m not thirsty,” Emily said firmly, even as her mouth seemed to fill with cotton.

  Maeve laughed again. “I suppose your sister taught you not to eat or drink here.” She gave a smug smile. “I don’t think it will make much difference.”

  Her smile vanished instantly as she turned back to the human serving girl. “Why are you still here?” Maeve snapped. “She doesn’t want a drink. Leave us.” Emily tried to give the girl an encouraging look, but the girl didn’t raise her eyes as she scuttled away. “I shouldn’t expect too much from her,” Maeve said with a weary sigh. “She is only human.”

  Her mood shifted abruptly again as the apartment door opened and two women entered. She waved them over to the sofa. “Oh, good,” she said, “just in time. Here are some people I want you to meet.”

  The women were dressed in the same Doris
Day style as all the fairies, one wearing a pale blue dress with a full skirt and the other a buttery yellow sleeveless sheath. Both of them gave deep curtsies to Maeve as they chorused, “Your majesty.”

  “Hello, my pets,” she crooned to them. “I’ve brought you a new friend.”

  Emily felt like she was at a casting call where they’d specified a particular physical type. The women fit her general description, even though they didn’t look much like her. They were both in their twenties and were tall and slender, with reddish hair. Although they were pretty, they didn’t have the unearthly beauty of the fairies. They were human.

  “You’ve come to join us!” the woman in yellow said. “We’ll have so much fun!” She turned to Maeve and asked breathlessly, “Is she the one?”

  “Yes, she is, finally.”

  “They thought we were the one, but her majesty said we weren’t,” the one in blue explained to Emily. “She let us stay, though. She’s very good to us.”

  Emily cringed at the realization that these women must have been kidnapped because they resembled her. She hoped they weren’t angry that their lives had been disrupted.

  They didn’t seem to mind. They jumped up and down like demented cheerleaders, crying, “Yay! You’re here at last!”

  A fairy man in a Rat Pack suit approached the sofa and bowed deeply to Maeve. She sat up straighter, and her eyes lost even the slightest hint of warmth. “Do you have something for me?”

  “Yes, your majesty.”

  Maeve rose gracefully from the sofa. “You girls have fun. Keep an eye on Emily for me.” She took the man’s arm and let him escort her out to the terrace.

  Once she was gone, the two human women sat on either side of Emily. The one in blue crossed her legs daintily at the ankles. “Queen Maeve has been dying for you to get here,” she said. “She likes us, but you’re the one she wants.”

  “And when the queen is happy, everyone is happy,” the one in yellow said. Although her tone was cheerful, Emily thought she saw fear in her eyes. If she was afraid, then maybe she was still rational enough to know what was going on. These two weren’t ideal information sources or allies, but Emily knew she had to start somewhere.

  “I’m Emily,” she said. “What are your names?”

  They frowned and looked at each other. “I forgot,” the one in blue said, looking momentarily troubled.

  “Me, too,” the other one agreed.

  “What do they call you?” Emily asked.

  “They don’t really talk to us,” the one in yellow said with a shrug.

  “You have to have names. What should I call you?”

  They looked at each other again, then said, “Emily!”

  Emily swallowed a scream of frustration. “No, you can’t be Emily. I’m Emily. It would get confusing. Now, what else would you like me to call you?”

  Her pretty forehead creased in a frown for a while, then the one in blue said, “I’ll be Emma.”

  “And I’ll be Leigh,” the other one said.

  “Okay, I can live with that,” Emily said with a sigh of resignation. This looked like a hopeless cause, but she pressed on, asking, “How long have you been here?”

  They looked at each other again. “I think it’s been years,” Emma said, then frowned. “Or has it been days? I’m not sure.” She giggled. “You know what they say about time flying when you’re having fun!”

  “And we’re having fun!” they chorused in unison. Emily shuddered. This was very Stepford Wives, sorority house edition. She noticed that although these women were clearly human, they had a hint of fae unearthliness about them. They must have been drinking the local Kool-Aid. Now she understood why Sophie said that was a no-no. Was this what she’d be like now if Sophie hadn’t rescued her before?

  “How nice for you,” she said with a thin smile. “But don’t you want to go home?”

  “Why would we want to go home?” Leigh asked with a shrug. “Here we don’t have to work. We just go to parties and dance and sing all day, and we get to be around her majesty.”

  Emma looked more wistful, like she was remembering something she’d lost. “What is it?” Emily asked gently.

  “I forgot,” Emma said with a sigh. “Sometimes I think there was something that made me happy before, but it can’t have been as good as this, could it?”

  “Did you ever try to leave?” Emily asked, but a handsome fairy with blue-black hair took Emma by the hand, pulled her to her feet, and danced off with her. Her wistfulness disappeared instantly. She threw back her head and laughed while she spun wildly with the fairy man. His hands strayed onto some rather intimate places, and she leaned into him. Pretty soon, they’d be in “get a room” territory, Emily thought. She turned her attention to the other girl and repeated her question.

  “There’s no way out,” Leigh said.

  “There has to be. My sister got me out before.”

  “Some of the Gentry come and go, but they tell us humans can’t pass through the barriers on their own.”

  Well, yeah, they would tell you that, Emily thought. “Do you know why they were looking for me?” she asked, but Leigh was being pulled away by another fairy to dance. Emily shook her head at the fairy man who approached her, even though the music made her twitch with the desire to dance. Dancing might be giving in. She swore to herself that she absolutely would not go native.

  Alone again, she was back to the question of what she should do. She imagined Sophie would figure out if she really was a prisoner, test the defenses to see if she could escape, gather and analyze information, and then come up with a plan.

  Emily could do that. She glanced around the room, looking for potential exits. There was the front door, a door opening from the other side of the living room, and the terrace doors. Nobody stood at any of those doors in a guard-like pose, but there were also plenty of fairies between her and all the potential exits. She figured she should see if she really was a prisoner.

  She got off the sofa and ambled across the room, aiming toward the buffet table but passing right by the front door. A fairy man moved between her and the door as she passed, his movement almost unobtrusive enough to be casual. She wandered by the interior door as she went to examine a painting on the adjacent wall and, again, someone just happened to move in front of the door. Yeah, she was a prisoner, all right.

  Maeve had entered and exited through the terrace doors, so they had to lead somewhere other than just a terrace. While Emily didn’t want to run into Maeve, she thought she might learn something by heading in the direction Maeve had gone. But if that was a way out, she doubted they’d let her go.

  What she needed was an excuse to be near the terrace doors. She could stand there and stare at the view until they got bored watching her and figured she was just looking out the window. They’d still probably do something if she tried to go outside, though.

  Then an idea struck her. If they wouldn’t tell her why they wanted her, then she had to guess, and why would they take a Broadway actress right after she made a stunning—if she said so herself—debut in a starring role? It was safe to assume (or pretend to assume) they wanted her to perform. She was pretty sure she remembered something about fairies stealing humans to make them sing and dance. She glanced around for something that would make a good prop while also being useful as a weapon. Unfortunately, the Doris Day life didn’t come with many potential makeshift weapons. The best she could do was a big, frilly umbrella with a pointed end that she found in an umbrella stand by the door. That gave her an idea of something to perform.

  After a mental rehearsal to make sure she remembered all the words, she sang the opening lines to “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” There was stunned silence as every fairy in the room turned to face her. As the song picked up steam, she danced forward, twirling the umbrella, then moved back and stepped up on to the room’s upper level. The fairies turned out to be much like any other audience, and soon she felt she had them eating out of her hand. If this had been an
audition, the part would have been hers for sure.

  She treated the upper level like a stage, dancing along it. When she reached the bridge of the song, she moved to the heavy drapes hanging to the side of the terrace windows. She clung to the drapes while checking behind them to see that there was an open door there, and then she moved forward to the front of her “stage.” She made another trip back to the drapes, then forward again, so they’d get used to the idea of her approaching the drapes and returning.

  At the end of the song, while she was still holding the final note, she stepped behind the drapes, bending backward for a grand finale before making a dramatic exit. She heard the applause as she slipped through the doors and out onto the terrace.

  But she wasn’t really outdoors, she realized. It was like a sound stage, giving only the illusion of the outside world, and the terrace was incomplete. One more apartment doorway opened from it, but then the terrace shifted and became a balcony on an entirely different building. Through the windows she saw what looked like an Art Deco-era hotel ballroom full of people doing the foxtrot. That wasn’t any closer to home for her, but the voices behind her meant she didn’t have the luxury of picking her next stop.

  She might be leaving the frying pan to throw herself into the fire, but she didn’t think things back in Doris Day land would go well for her now that she’d tried to escape. Without a backward glance, she stepped through the French doors and into the ballroom.

  Four

  The Upper West Side, New York City—The Murray Residence