by Lex Chase
“Mr. Ten?” Rachel asked and bounced on her toes. Her sneakers squeaked and lit up with their pressure-sensitive lights. She giggled and spun in a cheerful circle.
Taylor arched a brow and cracked a slow smile. He didn’t know what it was about Corentin, but he even had five-year-old screaming fans. Did he have all of Hancock County under some spell? Or his rakish charm? Maybe he poisoned the well water.
Rachel started to hand over the letter but stopped in her tracks. “Oh! I should put my name on it!”
As she scuttled back to the activity area, Taylor followed close behind. He noted where Miss Miriam and Devon were amid all the other children. Devon smiled at Taylor as she prepared the snack trays. Miss Miriam was instructing Bennett to use his right hand instead of his left.
Rachel yanked out a black crayon and scribbled on the paper. “Tooo…. Misssteeeer…. Teeeeen…,” she said as she wrote. “Looooove…. Raaachel.” She handed Taylor the page in a flourish, as if she were a newspaper reporter flinging notes. Taylor took the letter and made sure he could still read the pertinent information under the markings.
Devon plucked a cookie off the tray, handed it to Rachel, and winked at Taylor. “Rachel has a present for Corentin, huh?”
Taylor pressed the letter close to his chest, trying to hide the paper. “Mmmhmm. Very special.”
Rachel overdramatically swooned in her seat. “When I’m old enough, I’m gunna marry Mr. Ten!”
Taylor slapped his hand over his mouth and glanced at Devon. Her cheeks puffed as she held in a laugh. Don’t, he tried to tell her.
Devon grinned instead and gave Rachel an extra cookie. “And you’ll be his princess?”
Rachel bounced in her seat. “Like Sleeping Beauty!”
“Okay!” Taylor squeaked, and all eyes turned to him. He coughed and swallowed as the embarrassment stung every pore. “I’m”—he pointed toward the break room—“going to get some more glitter.”
He tacked on a smile and hurried to the librarian lounge. Once he crossed the threshold, he made sure to lock the door behind him, then collapsed onto the nearby couch. The letter slipped to the floor.
Ringo fluttered down from the bookcase and settled on the floor. He paced around the letter and rubbed his chin. “I’m no art critic, but that is a creepy-assed drawing.”
Taylor folded his arms behind his head and sighed. “Tell me about the Library.”
Ringo blinked. “We’re in one?”
Taylor narrowed his eyes. “The Queen of Hearts wants to recruit us.” It wasn’t lying, not really. He pulled his right arm from behind his head, held up his palm, and flexed his fingers, imagining a knife there.
“Oh,” Ringo said. “That Library. The Big L.”
“Yeah. Big L.” Taylor snorted.
Ringo wrung his hands. “It’s kind of a long story.”
“Well, skip the ‘Once Upon A Time’ part and get to the point.” Taylor stared at the ceiling. Was this what it was like for Corentin when he had a bad day? Everything going topsy-turvy? Too much to digest all at once? Too many things that were pure coincidence, but had to be fate?
But the questions remained. Did Corentin really have to kill Taylor to break his curse? And the only part he needed for the spell to work was to make true love’s sacrifice? Taylor knew he had been a selfish person before, but now he had things in order. He’d changed. The truth prickled like the hair on the back of his neck. The selfishness had never left him. He would stay alive if it meant he could be happy with Corentin forever.
None of it made sense. His eye twitched like someone had taken an icepick to the bridge of his nose. He needed sleep. Who knows how much of the day so far was all in his head. Did he even go to bed last night? Was he dreaming? He snorted in derision. Taylor was Sleeping Beauty after all, the technical expert on dreaming.
He waited for Ringo to explain it all away so everything would fall into place.
“They don’t exist.”
Instead, Ringo’s words ruined everything.
Taylor fixed him with a dour look. “You’re kidding.”
Wringing his hands, Ringo hung his head. “They’re kind of an urban legend.”
“Hello, we come from a race of fairy tales and urban legends.”
Ringo nodded. “Well. Yeah. You see, the Library is one of those things you’re better off pretending isn’t real.”
Taylor perked. “Are they spooky or something? C’mon. Give me something.”
Ringo huffed and tossed up his hands. “Look. I don’t really know the particulars, okay? It’s not like I met anyone from the Library. I just heard rumors about it, is all.”
Sitting up, Taylor blinked away the dizziness from the lack of sleep. “But I met the Queen of Hearts. She was just here.”
“So you did.” Ringo paused for far too long and thumbed his chin.
“Yeah, I di—”
“Let’s just ignore you did.”
“What?” Taylor gaped at him.
Ringo crossed his arms. “We need time to figure this out, okay? No one’s seen the Queen of Hearts for years. Last I heard, they did the whole ‘off with her head’ and everything.”
Taylor slowly pieced it together. “She’s a wicked queen, then?”
Ringo shrugged. “Well. She is the Queen of Hearts. She’s not known for being lovey-dovey. Some say she’s totally all Lady Báthory kind of deal.”
Taylor went silent and propped his chin in his palm. That explained why she wanted Corentin and not him. He was essentially the “sweet young maiden” for sacrifice. But it contradicted the Enchant legends—the princesses led the charge while the princes threw themselves on swords to protect their true loves.
Perhaps it was Taylor’s turn to do something good for Corentin in return.
But why did it feel so wrong? Taylor shook his head. His own selfishness was getting the best of him. He was so desperate to maintain his happy life with Corentin, he’d do anything to keep it.
Even lie.
“You’re right,” Taylor said.
“Right? About what?” Ringo blinked his disproportionately huge eyes.
Taylor forced a smile. “I probably made it up. You know. Sleep-deprived and all.”
Ringo nodded once. “If you say so.”
Pushing from the couch, Taylor watched Ringo. Would he lie with him? Or would he broadcast it everywhere? He held up his pinky. “Pinky promise?”
Ringo seemed to catch the gist and took flight to Taylor’s level. He tapped his tiny pinky to the offered digit. “Pinky promise.”
Chapter 5: Toy Story
May 3
Ellsworth, Maine
“THERE,” CORENTIN said as he plucked the hapless Barbie doll from the sewage pipe. The poor damsel definitely needed more than true love’s kiss to revive her, with her shit-slicked hair and toilet-papered dress.
He turned her over in his grasp and hummed. “She’s last year’s holiday edition.” It had only occurred to him from his journal and the photographs of him and Taylor visiting the Barbie Dreamhouse Experience in Minneapolis. He shook his head with a grin.
Corentin had kept his trap shut about the overload of pink and purple impugning on his manhood. He had mustered a charming smile for the little girls when Taylor and he had been assigned to a tea party table. A once-in-a-lifetime experience, Taylor had said. Corentin had promptly sought a palate cleanser of a Seahawks and 49ers game. He didn’t even like the Seahawks or the 49ers. But the battle of the gridiron was enough to recharge his depleted testosterone.
As he considered the doll, he smiled at her mangled face. “Girl, put on some lipstick, have a drink, and pull yourself together.” He pulled a trash bag from his bucket and shoved the doll in like nothing more than a corpse into a body bag.
“Got it,” he called up to the open living room window.
He caught sight of Ramona’s wavy blonde hair. Naturally she had the time to style it before he had shown up. She perked up from her magazine and then turned t
o the window. “My hero!” she squealed.
Corentin coughed into his elbow. “Got a place I can wash up?” He coughed again. Honeysuckle would turn him into a toadstool if he dared dump his soiled clothes in the laundry.
“You can use the shower.” Ramona pointed over her shoulder, indicating the bathroom somewhere in the house. She seemed eager, and her smile set Corentin’s teeth on edge. He was sure she was just being nice, but Taylor’s playful ribbing stuck out in his mind.
“No, ma’am.” He waved her off. “You got a hose out back, right?”
Ramona’s smile fell slightly but returned again. “Behind the rose bushes. I’ll get your check.”
“’Preciate it,” Corentin said as he hefted his bucket, with one Barbie doll ready for her dreamy date with an incinerator. The hose sprawled around the rose bushes in a tangled jumble of kinks and coils. Corentin reached into the bushes and felt around blindly for the spigot. When he found the familiar contours, he gave the faucet a stubborn, creaky turn, and the hose bulged with the first burps of water.
Corentin set his bucket on the grass and pulled out another trash bag. He unfolded the neat plastic square, then snapped the bag open. There was a tiny bit of ceremony as he lined his bucket with the trash bag and covered his tools.
He spied Ramona in the kitchen window over him. She smiled brightly. He smiled back. It seemed like the right thing to do.
The neighborly thing. Corentin could do neighborly.
He stripped off his tank top, which he was certain Honeysuckle would send to a fiery grave along with Barbie. The hose hissed with a handful of kinks in the line. After dropping his tank with a wet, smelly thump into the bag, he searched for the culprit in the coils and then jerked back when a blast of water hit him square in the bare chest.
Snatching the hose, he turned away from the kitchen window. He ducked his head and busied himself with scrubbing his hair. As the water dribbled over his fingers, he muttered, “Well, there’s the porn shot of the day.”
Had it been Taylor, it would have been a different story. And Taylor would have pissed himself with laughter at the ridiculous sexy-wet-guy cliché.
He wiped down his arms, and the grime bled away like the happy thoughts of Taylor, dripping into the soft grass. His hands caught him by surprise. As if he didn’t recognize them for a moment. He noted the deep marks of lifelines and heartlines, the lattice of lines in his joints, and the marks that beheld his destiny. That is, if one believed in such a thing.
Destiny be damned when he needed a good scrubbing under his nails. Did destiny collect dirt too?
“I have a towel if you need one,” Ramona said, her eyes alight with wonder. She was being nice again, and Corentin sucked up the awkward adoration.
“Thanks.” He forced a kind smile.
Playing it cool and suave had become incredibly difficult when he and Taylor settled down. According to his notes, they had a rather cute little life. Simple. Peaceful. A place where they could blend in with the mundanes. Be mundanes themselves if it suited them.
He glanced at Ramona again, and she smiled in return. Her green eyes shone brighter in the sun. He had never noticed they were green. Combined with her honey-blonde hair, she looked so much like Phillipa. He turned away, looking down at the blackness pooling around his feet.
Phillipa Montclair was the one Corentin never forgot, no matter how he tried to eradicate her from his memories before Taylor came along. Now, he treasured the last memories of her that he had.
Corentin cast a discreet glance over his shoulder at Ramona.
She met his gaze, and her smile grew. “What are you looking at?” she asked.
Corentin took a breath and then looked toward the trees. He couldn’t look at her. Of all the times he’d come over to fix something she purposely sabotaged, he only now recognized she could have been Phillipa’s twin. Or Phillipa herself.
She couldn’t be. Taylor wanted to believe everyone was a witch. Corentin wanted to believe she could be some relation to Phillipa.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “You remind me of someone I lost.”
Ramona pressed her fingers to her lips. Her eyebrows drew upward with notable concern. “Your wife?” she asked softly.
Corentin sputtered. He coughed, trying to figure out how to recover from that one. “N-No,” he croaked. “An old friend. She died years ago. Car accident.”
Had it been years? Corentin wasn’t sure. Each of his journals only held the last four years of his life. Even presidents had come and gone without him remembering the election.
“Oh… oh, Corentin,” Ramona whispered. All of her girlish flirting fell away into concern and sympathy. “I’m so sorry.”
The frigid Maine well water numbed his fingers as he scrubbed at his tattooed arm. It was impossible to tell lines of dirt and muck from the intricate Gustave Doré tree illustration inked from his left wrist to his shoulder. The seven branches reached across his chest and back of his shoulder. He seized with a jerk as he rinsed over his neck and down his spine.
“She and I had a hard time getting on at first,” he said as he concentrated on making his back relax.
He made the correct decision to leave out the crucial details of how he and Phillipa had played cat and mouse for years. He, a hunter after a beast; she, a beast after her prey. In the end, he wasn’t sure if he was the hunter or the hunted. Just when he almost had her, she struck back. Phillipa had left him with more scars than the miles he’d traveled in his lifetime. “Once we made amends….” He snapped his wet fingers. “Gone. Just like that.”
Ramona lowered her gaze to the grass, remaining silent. He was grateful for the silence. It was a small reprieve where he could work through processing it all. His grief of losing not only his greatest nemesis, the beautiful beast, but understanding he had been wrong about her.
“Life is a precious thing,” she said. Her voice was barely a whisper over the pitter-pat of water pooling at Corentin’s feet. “I lost my fiancé in Afghanistan.”
That caught his attention. The war, he recalled. Or a war. There had been a few. He turned to her, watching the distant sadness flow into her features. She wrapped her arms around herself for a lover’s embrace she’d never have again.
“I didn’t want him to go. We fought. I found out I was pregnant when his boots hit the ground.” She looked into the sky, her grief deep on her face. She turned into an old widow far before her time. She gave a small broken smile.
The water splashed and collected into a puddle between them, but it was an ocean between their worlds.
“You remind me of him.” She shrugged and talked to the clouds. “You have his eyes. His kindness.”
Corentin shut off the hose without a word. This was going to get awkward. He knew what she wanted. If his notes were any indication, he had known for quite some time. Why else would someone shove inappropriate objects into the septic system three times in two months?
Corentin flexed his fingers. He had to clear the air. “Ramona, I—”
“I know about you and Taylor.”
The hose hit the ground. Corentin swallowed. But her smile was brighter than before.
“It’s not a bad thing. You two are good for each other.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m sorry.” He chuckled with his embarrassment. “I guess I had it all wrong.”
Ramona laughed. “Well, can you blame me? At least you don’t have to act around me, like with your little fan club.” She held up her hand as if to indicate the width and breadth of Hancock County. “You do realize how much money you’d make if you did more than plumbing and roofing.”
“Taylor and Devon make constant jokes at my expense about what I should be doing for a living. I get it, okay?” He smirked, but his face heated before he could hide it.
“It’s the Southern thing,” she said, shifting her weight. She seemed to appraise him. “The accent. The tattoo. The lack of a ring.”
Corentin looked up into the clear sk
ies and held out his hands. He internally begged Mother Storyteller for a message. He sighed with the lack of response. Thank you for praying to the Mother Storyteller Hotline. All of our agents are currently taking other calls, please enjoy the Muzak.
They laughed together. His troubles washed away into the muddy puddles at his feet. Would it have been like this with Phillipa? The easiness? The laughter? After all his discomfort and uncertainty, Ramona only wanted his friendship.
“You are married, right? You just don’t wear a ring.” Her words hit him like a shot between the eyes.
“Um….” She had put him on the spot, and his stomach dropped to his feet. Mother Storyteller abandoned him in his moment of need. “It’s a bit complicated,” he said, then coughed into his fist. He thought if he gave her the right stare, she’d pick up the hint to let it drop.
“How so?”
Shit. She was a pushy one.
Corentin rolled his shoulders and popped his neck, buying some time before settling on an explanation.
You see, Ramona, Taylor is a fairy tale princess, and I’m the descendant of a witch and a horny fuckwit who ate a gingerbread house. Oh. And ate his sister too. Weird, right? Just go with it. So, Taylor is technically royalty, and by proxy, good. And I’m… not. We aren’t exactly meant to fraternize. Ever. In fact, I was assigned by Idi the Witchking to hunt and kill Taylor. Oh, who’s Idi the Witchking? Well. That’s someone else entirely. Head hurting yet? I can draw a diagram. But then I’d have to kill you. I may or may not be joking about that. I’m probably not.
“We come from very different backgrounds,” Corentin said instead. He shrugged. “His father isn’t the most accepting guy in the world.” There. That was mostly true. Well, true enough. “I don’t have any family to call my own.”