by Emma Savant
“Probably,” she said. “And I’m going to be the most awesome Heir our world has ever seen. Olivia Feye, the genius leader who can’t even track down a Secret Santa.”
I handed her a dog treat from the basket hanging on the wall between the kennels. She fed it to a quiet mutt that had been observing her. The dog’s tail wagged, politely. It was like he could sense she didn’t need anything extra to think about.
“Liv?” I said. “It’s weird that you care.”
“I know!” she said, and the sound burst out of her with a rush of pulsating emotion. “It’s so weird. I hate it. What if I’m terrible at this? I mean, not that that’s a big what if, because obviously I was never going to be good at it, but—“
“Stop,” I ordered.
“I seriously have no idea what I’m doing.”
“So?” I said. “No one does. Not even Queen Amani knows what she’s doing half the time.”
Olivia’s eyebrow quirked up. No one could look skeptical like her. I held back a snort. Tried to, anyway.
“I spent a lot of time with Kelda,” I said. “Kelda talked about Amani a lot. Kelda talked to Amani a lot. And Amani is just as clueless as you and me.”
“She’s gifted, though,” Olivia said. “She has tons of experience.”
“And she still fakes it just like the rest of us,” I said. “Trust me, I know a thing or two about faking it.”
I didn’t like the way the words tasted coming out of my mouth. They were too real and raw.
I knew how I seemed to other people. They thought I was pretty, and confident, and knew what I was doing. I could feel their impressions of me rising off their skin. I could see it in their eyes when they looked at me.
But they never saw me in return. They didn’t see the way their nerves kickstarted mine or the way their broken hearts made mine feel like it was about to burst. They didn’t see the tiny yardstick in my head that compared everything I ever did to my sisters, who had done everything first and done it better. They didn’t see the constant anxiety that reverberated in the pit of my stomach, soothed only by a sprinkle of fairy dust that could disguise the fear as sparkling excitement.
“You’re going to be a great queen,” I said.
Silently, I begged her just to listen to me. To see what was happening in my head, and to believe it.
She reached out a hand, pointer finger up. Warmth pooled in the pit of my stomach. I touched my fingertip to hers, in the tiny, silent high-five that had always been ours.
“Thanks,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
A door opened at the far end of the kennel. “Closing in ten minutes,” a voice said, and the door clicked shut again. Olivia stood up and heaved a sigh.
“You want to go grab dinner somewhere?” I said. The thought of a quiet meal by ourselves sounded like paradise in comparison to listening to Maia blabber on about how the various nutrients in the meal might affect her already gifted-and-talented developing fetus.
Olivia wrinkled her nose. “I wish I could,” she said. “There’s a reception tonight for the director of the Pegasus Society. She’s come over from Greece. Do you want to come? It’ll be boring, but I’m sure Amani wouldn’t mind.”
Amani would mind. I could tell by the tiny flutter in Olivia’s aura as she spoke. But I loved her to death for asking.
“I’ve got some errands I have to run,” I said, and the flutters instantly settled. “But thanks.”
We parted ways back at the Fountain. She stepped inside and whirled away, and then I turned around and walked straight back to the animal shelter.
I was going to get her the best freaking Christmas present in the world.
A tiny bell tinkled above the shop door. The instant I stepped inside, I was hit with a rush of warm, silky, almost familiar magic that came with just a bit of extra spice. The shop smelled like vanilla and juniper, a scent that brought to mind Christmas and mountains and being inside on a cold day.
Around me, fabric exploded in a hundred different handmade rainbows. Magic snaked through the small shop like perfume. I ran my hands over a moss-green corduroy jacket hanging on a rack. The enchantment woven into the fabric tingled against my skin, making the jacket seem twice as soft and cozy as it might have been alone.
“Welcome to Elvira’s!” a woman about my age said, coming up to me with an arm full of scarves. “Let me know if I can answer any questions or help you with anything.”
“Thanks,” I said. She turned away and started draping the scarves on a mannequin bust on a table, and I examined her for a long moment. She looked like a human, but a distractingly pretty one. Her skin glowed with a warm tan that seemed odd for both the city and the season, and her hair held a dozen shades of brown, the darkest of which matched her eyes. Her beauty didn’t seem to come from a charm or a glamour; when I edged closer, on pretense of looking at a stack of bamboo T-shirts, it was clear the energy that surrounded her was low-key and natural.
She was an elf. I’d bet a jar of fairy dust on it.
“Excuse me,” I said. She turned and waited, her smile welcoming. “I’m looking for something specific, actually,” I said. “Do you still carry the long cream skirt embroidered with plants? This girl I talked to at the animal shelter said she got hers here.”
“They’re right by this wall,” she said. I followed as she took off toward the back of the store. “It’s so nice to hear you liked our work! Everything here is handmade and personally charmed by one of us.”
“You make your own products?”
“We do. There’s four of us: Elliot, Violet, Irene—that’s me—and Anastasia. Together we’re Elvira. El, V, Ir, A, get it?”
It took me a second, but then the pieces clicked.
“That’s clever,” I said.
“I think so,” she said. She stopped at a circular rack by the wall that was practically bursting with skirts. She thumbed through the hangers, passing shades of blue and pink and glittering gold, before pulling out a skirt that looked like Alicia’s.
She held it out to me.
“One size fits all,” she said. “It’ll size itself to you when you put it on.”
“It’s for a friend, actually,” I said. I held the skirt up and rubbed the fabric between my fingers. It was light and airy. Olivia didn’t wear skirts much, but I knew she’d wear this one. The petals of the carefully stitched flowers seemed to be almost swaying in a light breeze. I glanced discreetly at the price tag. It was expensive, right in between “yikes” and “ouch,” but that didn’t matter. Olivia was going to love this.
Irene went back to arranging scarves, and I spent a few more minutes browsing. There was huge variety in the styles, but everything here was beautiful and the whole place tingled with magic. I could live here and be happy.
As I was browsing through a stand of pendant necklaces—each dangling with an enchanted gem, tiny bottle full of fairy dust, or winking silver star—I heard voices in the back. They came through a small door covered with a curtain of dark green satin fabric embroidered with gold and sequins. Working through high school as a Proctor had made my already bad eavesdropping habit worse. Since I couldn’t think of a good enough reason to resist the urge, I sidled toward the door, tugged my ear to raise the volume of their conversation, and listened.
“We’re going to have to be quick about it,” a melodic male voice said. “They police the park pretty heavily at night.”
“Could we just glamour the whole thing until we’re done?” another voice replied.
“Maybe? I don’t know if I could manage something that size. We could try, though.”
“We have time for a test run,” said a third voice. “Elliot, would you hand me that—yeah, that one. Thank you. We’re not going to hit the place until tomorrow, so we could go over tonight.”
The sound of a sewing machine whirring to life obscured their voices for a moment. Then I heard one of them—Elliot—say, “Eleven, then.”
“
Works for me.”
“I can do that if we’re quick. Need to come back here after and finish these hats, though.”
“I’ll help.”
I heard footsteps, and instantly flitted away from the door. Irene, still down by the shop’s front, was now busy fiddling with the window display and didn’t notice me.
I made my way to the counter just as the back curtain opened. I caught the man’s eye and he came straight to the counter.
“Are you ready to check out?” he said. His voice was gentle, as well as melodic, and so were his eyes. He was crazy tall, too, and kind of beautiful. I smiled up at him and put the skirt on the counter.
Nothing about this shop felt sinister, and nothing about Elliot set off warning bells, except maybe those alerting me that a gorgeous man was in my vicinity. His aura was nice. Everything about him felt warm, compassionate, and thoughtful.
But something was weird here, and I had the feeling I knew exactly what it was.
Olivia’s new apartment would have taken forever to get to without the new fountain system. With it, I travelled from my neighborhood to the forest around her place in what felt like moments. A new fountain had been installed on a secluded trail that wound through the trees, and from there it was a short walk to her apartment.
Or, rather, her waterfall.
The Faerie Queen’s residence, the Waterfall Palace, was only a few miles away, concealed beneath the towering Multnomah Falls. Here, beneath the smaller Bridal Veil Falls, was the Heir’s Residence. It wasn’t big—not compared to the Waterfall Palace, anyway, which Olivia said was so sprawling she hadn’t even seen a fraction of it yet—but it was better than my Institut Glänzen dorm room and much better than any Humdrum dorm Olivia had expected to be living in.
Even in the cold, drizzly weather of this Saturday afternoon, a few Humdrums stood on the wooden platform that looked out at the waterfall. A man held an umbrella over a woman’s head as she snapped photos. Another woman beside them hugged herself and shivered while she watched the water tumble down.
I walked downhill past the people on the platform. Around me, the trees were heavy with moss and the air smelled like decaying wood chips and soil. The rain rolled off my hair and skin; thanks to a charm, I stayed perfectly dry and warm. I skidded down a steep incline toward the pool the falls splashed into and headed toward a giant boulder that sat at the edge of water.
The Humdrums were still up on the platform. I could see them, but their eyes slid over me like I wasn’t even there.
I found the tiny gold inscription on the rock face. To Humdrum eyes, the five-pointed star would have looked like an imperfection in the rock. I pushed my fingertip against it.
“Imogen Dann,” I said.
Spray from the falls blew toward me. Like the rain, it rolled right off.
The star began to spin and twinkle under my fingertip. Then the stone began to erode smoothly away. When the doorway was big enough to let me through, I stepped into the blackness.
The stone wall closed up behind me, and the lights twinkled on.
The entrance to the Waterfall Palace was all silver. I’d seen it once with Olivia, when I’d visited the palace for a charity event right before I’d left for school. But the Heir’s Residence was warm with twinkling gold and bronze and copper. The small circular room was wallpapered in shifting gold, and the light from the bronze and glass lamp hanging in the center of the room reflected off the gold, honeycomb-patterned marble floor. I took off my coat and set it on the table next to an enormous bouquet of yellow and cream roses.
The small elevator set into the wall next to the table was closed in by a vintage bronze grille. The grille slid smoothly apart as I approached. Inside, I scanned through the dozens of bronze buttons, each labeled with a room name in a hard-to-read script. I crouched down and scanned until I found Private Sitting Room.
I pressed the button, and the elevator slid smoothly down into the floor. The single lamp inside the elevator gave off a gentle golden glow. I felt the elevator stop, then move left, and then up again, then spin around. By the time it stopped, I’d lost track of the twists and turns, as usual. A quiet bell chimed, and the doors slid open.
“Holy crap, Olivia,” I said. “Do you need more plants in here?”
“Don’t judge me,” she said. She didn’t move from the deep, comfortable couch, where she was sprawled with a mountain of pillows supporting her back and her laptop on her lap. A bag of spicy barbecue potato chips sat on the glass coffee table next to her. On the far side of the room, behind her, the top part of the waterfall tumbled down behind a glass window. And everywhere, on every shelf or side table, were potted plants. Vines twined around the lamps on the glass tables on either side of the couch. Leaves burst from hanging baskets overhead. An army of succulents in tiny fired clay containers marched across the top of the entertainment center, and some kind of quickly-growing ivy looked like it was about to take over her flatscreen TV.
I jumped over some kind of creeping thing with purple flowers and plopped on the other end of the couch.
“There are limits, though.”
“Don’t even. You gave me half of these.”
I glanced at the succulent army. A bunch of those pots did look familiar. I’d given Olivia so many plants over the years it was impossible to remember what they’d all been. I kicked off my shoe and nudged the chip bag with my foot, taking a second to admire my sparkling pink pedicure. Olivia tossed the bag to me.
“I think I found them,” I said. One chip, and already my fingers were coated in reddish residue. “The secret Santas.”
Olivia slammed her laptop shut.
“What?”
“Pretty sure,” I said. “Not, like, one-hundred-percent sure, but I think pretty close. We’ll find out in an hour or two. I tried to tell you yesterday but Mom confiscated my phone as soon as I got home so we could play board games as a family.” I made a face and dug around for another chip. She’d already eaten half the bag and the little crumbly ones were all that was left.
“What if they’d done something last night?” she said. “We would have missed them!”
“Nope. Last night was the dress rehearsal. Tonight is their actual attack, and I think it’s another one you’re not really going to have to worry about.”
“What are they doing?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But they sounded like total and utter do-gooders about it.”
I told her about the conversation I’d overheard, leaving out the details of why exactly I’d been in the shop. She watched me closely, dark eyes intent as she soaked in all the information and processed it.
“So why do you think it’s them?” I said.
“It just felt like them,” I said. “The shop felt kind of like the magic on the toys. Plus, the animal shelter’s in the same neighborhood. It makes sense that if they were going to do something at an animal shelter, it’d be the one closest to home.”
“Do you think she was in on it?” Olivia asked. “The witch girl there that we talked to?”
“No, I think Elvira keeps it in their little group,” I said. “They seem super close.”
“So what now?”
“They’re not going to do anything until dark,” I said. “Then they’re going to a park.”
“Which one?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “But I have this.”
I took a small wrapped package out of my pocket and tossed it at Olivia. She caught it, just barely.
“Open it,” I said. “But careful not to touch.”
She delicately pulled apart the wrapping paper and peeked inside. I just caught a glint from the beaded bracelet before she tucked it safely away again.
“I had the guy wrap it for me,” I said. “He touched it long enough that we can track him.”
“Smart,” Olivia said.
“Duh.”
“So what do we do until then?”
I glanced at the door on the far side of the couch. “
I was thinking nachos and Netflix.”
She was on it like a sorcerer on a spell book. I followed her into the kitchen and grated cheese while she chopped up peppers. And then we were back on the couch, downing nachos and drinking weird artisan sodas an imp artist had brought her as a thank-you gift for sponsoring his gallery showing. She put on a colorful, girly TV show and we zoned out, feet on each other’s laps, as the waterfall outside faded from gray to pale charcoal blue.
Titania, I’d missed her.
I had friends at Glänzen, of course. I got along with my roommate and there was a whole group of students I hung out with on the weekends. But none of them were Olivia, and it was heaven to be chilling with her on the same couch instead of via magic mirror halfway across the world.
She caught me watching her and nudged me with her foot. She grinned and handed me a chip loaded with avocado, which—as she knew—was always my favorite part of any dish.
When the waterfall was almost black and the glow from the lamps and TV was the only thing keeping us from sitting in darkness, Olivia paused the show and sat up. I picked up the bracelet from the table while she opened a cabinet and lifted a large oval mirror from where it hung on the inside of the door.
She propped the mirror on the floor and we sat on the carpet in front of it.
I handed her the still-wrapped bracelet. She shook it out of the paper and onto the carpet. The crimson and emerald-green beads looked jewel-like in the lamplight, and the single snowflake charm glittered white.
“Together?”
I nodded and grabbed my wand off the coffee table. Olivia pulled hers out of her hair. We held their tips over the bracelet, and I felt Olivia’s focus sharpen with mine.
A tiny pearlescent thread streamed up from the bracelet and twined around the tips of our wands. We lifted the thread carefully toward the mirror, careful not to break it, and touched our wands to the mirror. The thread latched to the silver surface immediately, and more threads began to creep across the glass in a spiderweb.
Olivia tapped the mirror once, and the web dissolved. The mirror’s surface rippled.
