A Fairy Tale

by Shanna Swendson

  He closed his eyes and groaned. “I thought I might be having some kind of ICU psychosis attack. So I really saw Jen?”

  “You certainly seemed to think you saw her, and there’s a good chance that she was there, if I’m right about what I suspect happened to her.”

  He tried to remember the details of the night before, focusing on the concrete things. He could sort out the weird stuff later. “It was her voice, that was what I noticed. It sounded just like her.” He frowned. “But how could she have been in the city this whole time, with every cop in the department keeping an eye out for her, without anyone even seeing her once?“

  She studied him for a moment, like she was assessing him. Then she said, “Do you want the easy explanation, or do you want the truth? Let me warn you, you won’t like or want to believe the truth. The easy explanation will let you go on the way things have been. The truth will change everything, and you can never go back.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “It is, believe me, it is.”

  “I don’t think I can make a decision like that before coffee.”

  “Both of us could probably use some breakfast. I don’t suppose you have any eggs.”

  “I may. Emily was making me breakfasts after I got out of the hospital.”

  “And I’ve got the skillet with me.” She unfolded her legs and swung around to sit on the edge of the bed, then looked back over her shoulder at him. “There’s just one thing. I don’t know how to make coffee.” She seemed sheepish about it. “I don’t drink it, so I figure there’s no harm in not learning to make it. But I could give it a shot.”

  “I can make coffee with one hand tied behind my back.” He moved in an attempt to get up, but sitting up was more than he could manage. Reluctantly, he said, “The coffeemaker is self-explanatory, and right now, I’m not going to be a critic. You could give me some grounds to chew on, and I’d be happy.”

  She gave him a sweet, almost shy smile and stood. “Okay, then, you stay put, and let’s see what I can come up with.” She paused on her way out of the room and spoke toward the floor. “Do you need to go out, or are you okay for now?” An answering snore told him that Beau was sacked out at the foot of the bed.

  Michael wasn’t sure how long it took, but it didn’t seem like long enough before she returned with a mug of coffee. She put it down while she helped him sit leaning against the headboard, then handed him the mug. He took a tentative sip, and that was enough to wake him up. He pictured his hair standing on end, like in a cartoon.

  She gave a worried grimace. “It’s awful, isn’t it? I’m so sorry.”

  He took another swig before shaking his head. “No, no, it’s fine. I like it strong. Strong is good.” He drained the mug and handed it back to her. “I’ll take another, if you don’t mind.” She took the cup warily and went back to the kitchen. He couldn’t help but grin. It wasn’t exactly good coffee, but it was as strong as the coffee in the precinct when it had been left on the burner overnight, only without the burnt taste, and that made it practically gourmet to him.

  While he let the caffeine work through his system, he tried to recall the night before. He remembered following Sophie to the park. It got weird after that, with a marketplace full of strange people on the grounds of Belvedere Castle, Sophie dancing, a confrontation between Sophie and a weirdly beautiful woman, and Jen, who didn’t recognize him. The mental images were so dreamlike that he wasn’t sure any of it was real. Things grew even hazier after he saw Jen. He remembered pain and fear and falling asleep in Sophie’s arms. He didn’t remember how he got home.

  Sophie returned with a tray loaded with two plates of pancakes, which she set next to him. She went back for his second cup of coffee and a mug of tea, then joined him on the bed, sitting so gracefully that she didn’t disturb the tray.

  She took a bite of pancake, chewed deliberately, swallowed, and took a sip of tea before asking, “Have you decided whether you want the easy answer or the truth?”

  The caffeine had made it to his brain, so he felt qualified to say in no uncertain terms, “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. What, exactly, happened last night?”

  She took another bite and drank more tea, clearly attempting to delay the inevitable. Finally, she composed herself, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “You must have followed me again, and you found a fairy market, a place where the world of the fae meets the human world.”

  Michael blinked in surprise. Of all the things he’d thought it might have been, this wasn’t it. “Wait, fairies? Like Tinkerbell? Are you kidding me?”

  “Real fairies aren’t like Tinkerbell or like the things you see on greeting cards. They’re not little and cute with dragonfly or butterfly wings. They’re supernatural beings who live in a realm below our world, but in a parallel universe, or something like that. I know how to go there, but I’m not entirely sure what the place is or how it works. They have magical powers that they mostly use to create illusions and make themselves beautiful. Don’t let the beauty fool you, though. They’re ugly to the core. They can be cruel, just for the fun of it.”

  He laughed and shook his head in disbelief. “You’re talking about these things like they’re real. Tank didn’t put you up to this, did he?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “What did you see last night?”

  “I saw a market on the terrace in front of Belvedere Castle.”

  “Was it there when you got there?”

  “They hadn’t turned the lights on yet, so I couldn’t see it until they did.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Really? Is that what you saw? If you expect me to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, you have to do the same.”

  In his mind’s eye, he saw her sitting on the empty terrace, putting on her dancing shoes. If there had been enough light to see Sophie, there would have been enough light to see the market being set up. “No, it wasn’t there,” he admitted. “And then it appeared.”

  “When?”

  “Midnight,” he said as he realized the truth. “Suddenly the place was full of booths and people.”

  “What were the people like?”

  “They were beautiful. A lot of them looked like hippies, all floaty rags and flowers and leaves. Then there were some dressed like something out of an old Rat Pack movie.”

  “Did they look human to you?”

  “Yeah. They had funny-colored hair, and they looked kind of surreal, but they were human. No pointy ears or wings.”

  “That’s what fairies look like—or the way they want you to see them. You only saw that market because of the four-leaf clover on your keychain. Otherwise, you could have walked through that whole terrace without realizing anything was going on.”

  “You’re serious?” He regretted eating breakfast because it threatened to come back up.

  “Quite serious.” He held eye contact with her for a long moment, but she didn’t waver or show the slightest sign of amusement. Nothing pinged his internal lie detector.

  “So, assuming for the moment that fairies are real, that woman you were sparring with, she’s the one who took Emily?”

  She nodded. “Yes. The same group also has your wife, and likely those other missing women you mentioned.”

  He shook his head, willing this to make sense. “But why? What do they want with them?”

  She closed her eyes and looked like she was in pain, then opened her eyes and said, “They’ve wanted Emily all along, and they took other women they thought might be Emily. To them, all humans look pretty much alike. They first tried to take Emily fourteen years ago. That was one of the reasons I wanted her to go to New York. I thought she’d be safe here, far away from home. But it turns out that our geography is meaningless to them. Here may as well be Louisiana. You just have to find the right gateway and know how to use it.”

  “Why do they want Emily?”

  She started doing all the things she hadn’t when Tanaka interviewed
her. She glanced down, smoothed the bedspread, straightened the folds of her skirt around her legs, and tucked her hair behind her ear before answering without looking directly at him. “That’s the big question, but I think Maeve actually wants me. She’s never been able to catch me, but she knows if she has Emily, I’ll come for her. She’s trying to take the throne to rule the entire fairy realm, and it’s possible that she thinks I’ll be useful for that, but I don’t know how or why.” A cold, hard smile crossed her lips, then vanished. “But I believe it’s wisest to stay out of her grasp, regardless.”

  Anger bubbled up in him. “You’ve known all along where Emily was? Why didn’t you say something? You let me play the worry card to get the police on the case right away, when you knew?”

  “I never asked you to do anything,” she protested. “I wouldn’t have even rung your bell if I’d known Beau had someone looking after him. I’d have taken care of it all by myself. What would you have done if I had told you?” She deepened her accent and raised the pitch of her voice to a girlish tone. “Oh, Detective Murray, there’s no need to call the police. Emily was kidnapped by the fairies and taken to their realm, and I’m afraid that’s out of the jurisdiction of the NYPD. You just sit tight, and I’ll take care of it.” She gave a surprisingly unladylike snort of laughter, then said in a more normal voice, “I can’t imagine that would have gone over well.”

  “I’d still have called the police,” he admitted, “and probably Bellevue.” Even now, that sounded like a wise course of action, though he’d have to have himself committed while he was at it because he couldn’t deny what he’d seen. “What about Jen? Did you know where she was, too?” He could forgive her for keeping information about Emily to herself, but not Jen.

  She chewed on her lower lip for a moment before saying, “I suspected, once I saw the wedding picture. There were too many similarities for it to be coincidence. But I didn’t know for sure until last night. I am sorry about that, but, again, what could I have possibly said that you might have believed?”

  “Were you ever planning to tell me?”

  “The plan was to get both of them back and then make it look like they’d just found their way home.”

  “That’s why you’ve been sneaking out every night, to go into this fairy realm and look for them?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s where you were the other night, when you were out all night and you said you were only gone a couple of hours?”

  She nodded. “But to me it really was only a couple of hours. Time does funny things in the Realm. A whole night went by out here in a couple of hours there.”

  “You lied about someone trying to kidnap you.”

  “Maeve’s people tried to get me, but I escaped.”

  “That’s how you got all those scrapes and bruises and that burn on your wrist the next night, another kidnap attempt?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry I lied to you, but I ask you again, what could I have said? You don’t even believe me after seeing it for yourself.”

  “I don’t know what I saw.”

  “Now you’re just being dense. But that’s how their existence has remained nothing but legend for thousands of years. People are all too eager to rationalize what they’ve seen with their own eyes.”

  “But I didn’t see anything that can’t be explained—well, other than that market appearing out of thin air, which is pretty big, I’ll admit, but I didn’t see any fairies or magic.”

  She sighed. “Yeah, you were out of it for the good stuff. You even missed our shortcut through the Realm.”

  He pointed at her accusingly. “See, that’s just it, you’re telling me about all this stuff that I didn’t see. How do I know you didn’t make up this whole story?”

  With a groan, she shook her head sadly. “You were the one who asked for the truth. I would have been perfectly happy giving you an easy, rational explanation. You would have been happier, too. So, you want to see magic?” She raised her hand, and the bottle of pills on his nightstand flew to her. “You could probably use one of these right now.”

  He ignored the pill she held out to him as he gawked at her. “What are you?” he gasped.

  Instead of having a quick answer for that, she shrugged and said with a soft laugh, “I have no idea anymore.”

  That admission from the incredibly self-assured Sophie took him aback. “What?”

  “I knew about some of this before. I’d met fairies when I was a kid and knew how to deal with them. The rest is new to me. I learned only the other day that I’m supposedly an enchantress. I’ve just started learning about that. I get the feeling there’s something else that nobody’s telling me—if they even know the whole story. Apparently, I’m quite the mystery.”

  She ran her fork through a pool of syrup on her plate. “You know, all this time, I thought that people actually liked me—or feared me—and it turns out I was using magic to manipulate them. I wonder what would happen if I turned it off entirely. Who would I be?”

  “Did you put the whammy on me?”

  “I have. A couple of times on purpose.” She looked up at him and shrugged. “I don’t know what I might have done unconsciously. I don’t know what parts of my life have been real. To be honest, I’m not sure how much of all this I believe.”

  “You believe in fairies. You were just trying to convince me that they were real.”

  “Because I’ve experienced them. Doing magic, that’s different.”

  “What do you call what you just did?”

  “Telekinesis? Maybe it’s some kind of psychic ability, not real magic. It’s the women Emily worked for at that shop who say I’m an enchantress. They know about the fairies, but I don’t know if they’re right about everything else.”

  He realized he was shaking. “I can’t take this. You can’t expect me to believe it. Maybe I’ll wake up soon.”

  “Then here’s the easy answer: Emily, and Jen before her, ended up with some cult of holdover hippies who like to party in Central Park in the middle of the night. They’re probably keeping them drugged so they don’t remember who they are and so they can’t escape. Does that work better for you?”

  “Not really. I don’t know what you are or what you’re up to, but I don’t like any of it.”

  “Then, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot to do.” She slid off the bed, picked up the breakfast tray and carried it to the kitchen. A burst of classical piano music from somewhere on the floor brought her back to the bedroom to get her phone. She looked at the screen and groaned before answering it. “Hello, Mama,” she said perkily. She listened for a while, then her eyes went wide with alarm. “What’s wrong? Oh no. But what about Bess, can’t she do anything? What set her off? Maybe if I talked to her.”

  She sat on the end of the bed, biting her lip and pulling one foot up under her. In a soft, gentle voice, like someone would talk to a scared small child, she said, “Hello, Nana, it’s Sophie. I went to New York to visit Emily.”

  She chewed on her lip while she listened, and then she said, “Easy, easy, Nana. I’m okay. I’m safe. I’m visiting Emily. It’s okay. I’ll be home soon. Why don’t we sing a song together? It’ll be just like I’m there.” She ran the back of her hand across her eyes, brushing away tears, before she started singing what sounded like an old folk song.

  Michael felt like he was eavesdropping on a private moment, so he forced himself to his feet and staggered into the kitchen, where at least he wasn’t watching her, even though he could still hear everything. He should make tea, he decided. She sounded like she could use another cup. He filled the teakettle and put it on the stove. Soon, the rattle of the kettle drowned out some of Sophie’s voice so he didn’t feel so much like he was eavesdropping.

  She was still singing when the kettle boiled and he poured hot water over a tea bag. Her voice was very different from Emily’s. Emily had a big, powerful voice that could reach the back row of the upper balcony. Sophie’s voice was soft and sweet, a voice mad
e for singing lullabies, which, he realized, was what she was doing. Her song reminded him of “Scarborough Fair,” the old Simon and Garfunkle song his mother had liked, with its repetitive pattern and seemingly nonsensical list of impossible tasks. It wasn’t a likely choice for a lullaby, but maybe it was an old song Sophie’s grandmother remembered from her youth.

  She was finishing the song when he returned to the bedroom. She looked up in surprise, then nodded in thanks as she took the mug from him. Her voice trembled slightly as she asked, “Is she better now?”

  Standing this close to her, he could hear the voice on the other end of the phone saying, “She’s quit screaming and yelling, but you should still get home right away. You don’t need to be playing in New York when your grandmother needs you.”

  And that, right there, made things add up. Now Michael understood her—that is, the human part of her life, the reason someone like Sophie had stayed in a small town instead of pursuing her ambitions. He put his hand on her shoulder in a gesture of silent support. “But I can’t, Mama,” she said. “My return flight isn’t until next week, and you know how impossible it is to make changes these days.”

  “She’s your grandmother. She’s not any relation of mine, and I can’t deal with her. She won’t listen to anyone but you.”

  “I just need a few days, okay, Mama? I haven’t had a break in ages, and Emily needs me right now.”

  A deeper, richer voice came on the line after a brief, muffled argument. “You stay right where you are and have a good time. We’ll be fine. Just call and talk to your grandmother every so often, you hear?”

  Sophie gave a shaky smile. “Thank you, Bess. And please let me know if there’s a problem.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Sophie gave a long, shuddering sigh after she ended the call, then she took a sip of tea and glanced up at Michael. “Sorry about that. I believe I have now dumped all my family drama in your lap.”

  He sat next to her. “Is it Alzheimer’s?”

  She nodded. “It started about a year before Daddy died—it’s his mother. She moved in with us then. She and Mama never got along, and it only got worse after he died. I can certainly understand Mama’s position. She got stuck looking after a mother-in-law who never approved of her.”