by Elle Adams
“Blair,” she said. “I’m told you found a stranger under the influence of a spell?”
“I don’t know who he is,” I replied. “Nobody does. All we know is that he’s not from Fairy Falls, or he believes he isn’t. He’s with Alissa.”
She strode ahead into the corridor. I hesitated, then followed her. While I wasn’t really allowed into the patients’ rooms without permission, the stranger had seen my wings, and I wanted to find out why.
“I can’t read him,” I told Madame Grey. “I mean, my paranormal-sensing power isn’t working on him.”
“Is that so?” She arched a brow. “I’ll see what my granddaughter says.”
The man’s yells made it easy to find his room. He huddled in the corner, while Alissa and two other nurses stood over him, wands in their hands.
“Madame Grey.” Alissa backed up to her grandmother’s side, dropping her voice. “No spell will work on him while he’s unconscious, but he’s completely insensible. He won’t tell us who he is or where he came from. I’m not sure he actually knows, to be honest.”
Madame Grey studied him. “You say your paranormal-sensing ability isn’t working, Blair?”
“It isn’t?” asked Alissa.
I shook my head. “Sometimes it can’t figure someone out, but rarely.” I didn’t want to bring up the fairies yet, not with an audience. “I don’t know what the problem is.”
“There’s a simple way to get to the bottom of this.” Madame Grey conjured up a small flame in mid-air. Then she conjured a slip of paper and cast it into the flame. The fire devoured the paper until nothing remained but the smell of burning cloves.
“He’s not one of us,” said Madame Grey.
She didn’t mean he wasn’t a wizard. The man was a normal. Not a paranormal at all.
Impossible.
The man screamed, “Monsters!”
“Can you calm him down?” Alissa said to Lou, one of her fellow nurses. “I need to talk to my grandmother.”
I followed her and Madame Grey out into the corridor. While part of me was relieved that the lack of reaction from my paranormal-sensing power had a simple explanation, his presence here in Fairy Falls unnerved me. It wasn’t supposed to be possible for anyone to just wander in—though admittedly, I’d done exactly that myself the first time I’d come here. If someone had spelled him and brought him to town, though, they’d broken at least a dozen of the paranormal world’s most stringent rules.
“How’d he get here?” I whispered to Alissa.
“I don’t know, but he’s definitely under some kind of enchantment.” Alissa closed the door behind her. “He didn’t respond to any of our reversal charms, either. It’s more complex than it looks.”
“Especially if he found his way here without help,” said Madame Grey. “He saw through the town’s enchantments. Most normals who try to get close end up passing over the town altogether.”
Of course. It’d slipped my mind, given how quickly I’d adjusted to living here, but the first time I’d stepped into Fairy Falls had been accidental because I literally couldn’t see the place until I was already behind its wards. Powerful enchantments drove away any intruders who didn’t have magical origins.
“Are you positive he isn’t at least partially paranormal?” I asked Madame Grey. “Because he also saw my fairy wings.”
Which made no sense. Normal humans couldn’t see through glamour. Even witches and other paranormals couldn’t. It wasn’t supposed to be possible.
“He did?” Her eyes rounded behind her glasses. “No… the tests are never wrong. Even in your case, Blair, we found answers. But that’s very troubling.”
“He saw your wings?” said Alissa. “How?”
“Don’t ask me.” Something was definitely up. He couldn’t have found his way here alone. Not without help. “Has a normal ever wandered into Fairy Falls before? I mean, except for me.”
Fairy Falls didn’t even appear on maps, and when I’d been on my way here for the first time, the bus I’d taken had broken down miles away, leaving me to trek through the fields until I’d found some signs of civilisation.
“It’s rare,” said Madame Grey. “Very rare. When it occurs, it’s generally because someone unintentionally left a gap in our security or invited a friend here. If he has friends in Fairy Falls, though, it looks like they abandoned him.”
“Should I ask Nathan to send someone to check the border?” I asked.
“That would be a wise idea, Blair,” she said. “In the meantime, we can’t have him spreading our secrets to other normals. We’ll have to come up with a workable plan to remove him from town and place him back in the world he belongs in—once he’s recovered from the spell afflicting him, that is.”
“Can’t you erase his memory?” I asked. “With a… what do you call it, a Mind-Wiper?”
“They’re only available from the highest authorities,” she said. “Meaning, the regional coven leaders. We only just passed their examination, and the last thing we want is for them to find someone from our community may have violated the law and invited an ordinary human into our world.”
“Not to mention we don’t know what spell he’s under,” added Alissa. “Without removing it, it’s too dangerous to send him back into the normal world unsupervised. He might end up spreading the effect to others or causing them to find their way here to Fairy Falls, too.”
My heart lurched. It wasn’t his fault he was here, and if the regional witch council found out, it was Madame Grey who’d take the heat for it. Not to mention the town’s council… and poor Rebecca, already carrying the weight of the world on her eleven-year-old shoulders.
But if someone was revealing the magical world to outsiders, the entire town might face the consequences.
3
On my way home, I texted Nathan asking him if he could send out a team to the border to look around for more runaway humans before our date tonight. Half of me expected Steve to send Nathan out himself and force him to cancel our date—again—but luck was with me for once and he responded saying he wasn’t due to go out until later.
I met Nathan at our favourite pub, the Troll’s Tavern, where we ordered our food and drinks by tapping the menu and it appeared on the table a few minutes later. Some things in the magical world were complicated, but I really appreciated the small conveniences.
“I’m glad Steve didn’t send you out there,” I said, hearing the pattering of rain on the windows outside. “It sucks that you have to go out later, though.”
“I think I got off easy, considering,” said Nathan. “I’ve spent the last day catching up on paperwork, so I wouldn’t mind getting outside for a bit. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Steve saved every piece of paperwork in the whole office for my return.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me.” I dug into my meal. “Didn’t he take the whole of last week off to spend time with his mistress?”
The idea of someone wanting to date the grumpy gargoyle boggled the mind, but it seemed life was as illogical in the magical world as it was in the normal one. The gargoyle police chief had never quite forgiven Nathan for taking over his security team—even though it’d been Steve who’d hired him as a security guard in the first place—and took every opportunity to make trouble for him. He wasn’t much of a fan of me, either.
“You’ve got it,” he said. “In fact, Clare told me he showed up back to work a day late and someone had to cover for him. Luckily, I missed that debacle.”
“All this talk of Steve’s girlfriend is ruining my appetite.” I jabbed a fork into my baked potato. “Anyway, as you probably gathered from my text, the curse of Blair has started already. A normal wandered into town, and nobody knows how he got here or where he came from.”
A frown puckered his brow. “I heard a stranger showed up at the witches’ headquarters. I should have guessed you were involved.”
“It’s a law of the magical world.” I took a sip of my drink. “Whenever anything weird sh
ows up, it gravitates towards me. I suppose I should be grateful everyone else had a nice break while we were gone.”
Nathan shot me a smile. “Hey, we managed a fairly stress-free holiday.”
“You’re conveniently forgetting the fact that someone died at the hotel we stayed at.” Even on holiday, trouble dogged my steps. But a human wandering into town was a new one. The laws against exposing the paranormal world were strict enough that it’d taken me twenty-five years to even guess I was magical.
He sipped his beer. “I said ‘fairly’ stress-free for a reason.”
“Or ‘fairy’,” I added. “Speaking of which, our visitor freaked out when he saw me and called me a monster, which really wasn’t what I wanted to hear today. Also, I think he saw my wings.”
His brow furrowed. “He saw your wings? Isn’t that…”
“Impossible,” I finished. “Even Madame Grey can’t figure out how he did it.”
“She’s looking into it?” he said. “If she’s involved, I’ve no doubt she’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“I don’t know of any spell that can cause someone to suddenly develop the ability to see through fairy glamour, though.” I chewed a mouthful meditatively. “I’ll ask Alissa when I’m home. She and the other staff at the hospital are having to deal with our visitor, but they can’t risk letting him out in case he wanders back home and tells everyone about the paranormal world.”
This was not a good time for me to be considering introducing my own foster parents to the magical world, that was for sure. Imagining their reactions to my fairy wings was worse than imagining Steve with a girlfriend, if possible.
“I expect once they figure out what spell is on him, it should be easy to reintroduce him to the normal world,” he said. “It’s not the first case I’ve heard of, though it hasn’t happened since I moved to Fairy Falls.”
“Forgetting someone?” I gave a smile, though my mind was half on my foster parents. “Speaking of which, I need to make plans to see my foster parents without exposing them to this madness. They’re back in the country and they want to meet you, so I’m afraid you’re my cover story as to why I’ve been gone the last few months.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “It’s true, isn’t it? I was the first person you met here.”
“Yeah.” A smile tugged at my mouth at the memory. “You kinda scared me at first, I won’t lie.”
Dressed in hunter gear, Nathan had found me wandering around near the lake, unwittingly trespassing in a town I wasn’t supposed to be able to see. Ever since that day, I’d wondered if anyone else had ever arrived in the magical world the same way, but the new stranger’s situation was a different matter entirely.
He smiled back. “I hope I’ve made a better impression since then.”
“Don’t worry, you have,” I said lightly. “So… want to meet my foster parents?”
“I’m free this weekend if you are,” said Nathan. “Whereabouts were you thinking of meeting them?”
“Sloan, which is about an hour’s walk from Fairy Falls,” I said. “I’m still trying to figure out a cover story as to why they can’t come here, but we can meet up with them at a coffee shop or something. Pretty sure that’s far enough from the magical world to avoid trouble. Unless a pixie shows up again.”
“I can’t imagine a pixie would want to hang around a normal town,” he said. “Technology and magic don’t mix.”
“Yeah, I always wondered why I didn’t get on with public transport,” I said. “It felt like every bus I got on broke down within half an hour, and once I made an entire office of computers crash at the same time. I just figured I was cursed with bad luck.”
Bad luck aside, there were a dozen reasons I faced my foster parents’ visit with trepidation. After all, I wasn’t the same person I’d been the last time we’d seen one another. I lived a literal world away, and as for everything I’d found out about my birth parents? I couldn’t mention any of that to them. It was too risky.
“You needed to find the place you really belonged in,” he said. “Your parents will see you’re happy here without needing to know all the details.”
“It feels like tempting fate,” I admitted. “Bringing them into my world right after another normal ended up in trouble.”
“I’m sure that was a one-off,” he said. “It’s very rare for normals to experience anything related to the magical world.”
No kidding. I’d managed twenty-five years without it, but I’d had no known links with the paranormal world beforehand. My foster parents did have a link… me. And I attracted more magical trouble than the average person on a good day. My technology-destroying ways might have ebbed, but my bad-luck-magnet nature remained somewhere between unfortunate and the backlash of a Lucky Latte.
Still. As far as families went, I’d struck gold with Mr and Mrs Wilkes, and the very least I could do was give them an insight into my new life, even an incomplete one. Better that than cutting them out of my life entirely.
Nathan walked me home after our meal, kissing me goodnight on the doorstep.
“I’d better hurry to the police station before Steve starts nagging me,” he said.
I pulled a face. “Making you patrol in the cold doesn’t seem fair. It’s not like you have wings and leathery gargoyle skin to keep you warm out there.”
“I’ll be fine.” He drew me into an embrace and brushed a strand of hair from my forehead. “See you tomorrow?”
“Sure.” I released him, my heart giving a happy leap. My life might be as chaotic as ever, but Nathan kept me on an even keel.
I went inside the flat to find Alissa had returned from her shift at the hospital. She sat on the sofa with a cat curled up on either side of her.
“Hey.” She waved sleepily at me. “Good date?”
“Sure.” I went to join her. “It’d be better if Steve wasn’t working Nathan off his feet to get him back for disappearing for a week, but he’s free to come and meet my foster parents this weekend.”
I’d call them tomorrow and make a plan. For now… it was time for me to tell Alissa something else I’d been sitting on for weeks.
“Where are you going to meet?” she asked.
“Sloan, the town between Fairy Falls and where they live.” I squeezed onto the sofa next to my cat and gave Sky a stroke. “I’m still working on my cover story, but I’m pretending I moved to Sloan and not here. It’s all very well for me to visit them or meet somewhere for the day, but sooner or later they’ll want to know where I’m living, and I can’t very well tell them it’s a place that isn’t visible on any ordinary map.”
“There are spells…” She hesitated. “But I won’t force you to use them. It’s a personal choice.”
“You mean spells that will erase their memories of our meeting?” I guessed.
“Nothing that drastic,” she said. “I mean spells that will stop them from asking the wrong questions.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to manipulate them in any way. But that means I’ll have to work on an airtight cover story.”
“The town’s magic helps,” she said. “If anyone tries to walk here, they end up getting turned around and forgetting where they are, in a way that feels totally natural.”
“Except for that guy we met today, apparently.”
She grimaced. “We can’t figure out what spell was used on him. If we could do that, we might have an idea of who brought him here. Until then, we can’t risk letting him go.”
“I guess not.” I stroked Sky again, wondering how to broach the subject of the fairies. Part of the problem was that it involved secrets that weren’t mine, and which might spell consequences for more than just myself.
My phone buzzed with a message from Erin, Nathan’s sister. Back in town. Wanna go to the market tomorrow?
“Tomorrow?” I echoed. “I thought the market wasn’t coming to town until the weekend.”
“Who’s messaging you?” asked Alissa. “The market’s in Fox
Hollow, the next town over.”
“Buck must still be staying there,” I concluded. “Erin wants to go and check out the market tomorrow.”
“Any reason?” she said. “She just wants to hang out?”
“Guess she’s back in town.” The last time we’d all been in the same place, it’d ended with Nathan, Erin and Buck all being suspects in a murder case. While they’d all been cleared, I’d faced Erin’s return from visiting her family over the holidays with trepidation. On the other hand, it gave me an excuse to go to the market early and ask about the Pixie-Glass without risking running into people I knew.
“Blair?” Alissa waved a hand in front of my face. “You’re spacing out. What’s up?”
“My dad’s note…” I paused. “It said you might want to start with the market. Now it turns out the goblin market is coming to town. What are the odds?”
Her mouth formed an O of understanding. “You think this Pixie-Glass might be at the market? They do have a lot of weird magical stuff you can’t buy anywhere else, so it’s worth checking out. Is that why Erin wants to go?”
“I didn’t tell her about my dad’s note, so I don’t know.” Buck had been staying in Fox Hollow while he and Erin looked for work in or near Fairy Falls, so he must still be there. Sky crawled into my lap to demand a stroke and I used the interruption as a chance to draw my thoughts together.
“What is it, Blair?” Alissa leaned forward in her seat. “I know you need to find the Pixie-Glass so you can talk to your dad, but well… do you really want to get involved with the hunters again? Not counting Nathan, I mean. I know Erin quit, but her fiancé…”
“I don’t know if Buck is still an active hunter or not.” I drew in a breath. “But he’s a fairy. Like me.”
A heartbeat passed. “Seriously?”
“Yes, and I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell anyone or not,” I admitted. “Erin didn’t act like it’s a big deal, but only she and Nathan knew, the last I heard. If he moves to Fairy Falls, though, people will figure it out. Oh, and Blythe knows, too. She’s the one who pointed it out.”