by Emma Savant
“Where’d you get the car?” I said, looking around at the interior. It was new, maybe from the last few years. “I thought you didn’t believe in driving.”
“It’s Mallory’s,” she said, slinging her purse over her shoulder and into the back seat. “I talked her into letting me use it today.” She winked at me and flashed a beaded carnelian bracelet. It only took me a second to figure out the spell that was coming off the irregular rust-colored beads.
“Influence,” I said.
“Yep!” Elle said, her tone much brighter than I approved of. “The earrings are for beauty and seduction, and you recognize the necklace.” She lifted the heavy brown stone hanging down the front of her shirt. “This has changed my life.”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
I was light-headed just being around all those charms. No Glimmer in their right mind would wear that many at a time, at least not unless they were in the middle of performing a spell or ritual. My mom never wore more than her little enchanted ring and maybe a pair of earrings, and she was a pretty powerful faerie, even if she never bothered to act like it.
But Elle didn’t look sick or dizzy. She looked higher than a kite.
“Absolutely amazing,” she said. “I can’t believe I’ve gone my whole life not being part of your world!”
“You’ve definitely missed out on some stuff,” I said. Like training on responsible spell use, I added silently, remembering the awkward “Spell Responsibly!” skits Imogen and I had always been confronted with at faerie summer camp. They had been super uncomfortable to sit through, but at least they’d helped me figure out how not to be an idiot. “Sometimes it’s dangerous to mix volatile charms,” I said carefully.
Elle cut me off, laughing. “That’s what the guy at the Saturday Market said when I got all these,” she said. “Seriously, you’d think he’d be trying to sell me more, not less.”
“Maybe he’s a responsible business owner,” I said. Hadn’t that been Elle’s goal, like, a week ago?
She shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “But don’t worry about me. I’m not getting bad side effects or anything. The last couple weeks have been amazing!” She turned to me, twisting her torso in the seat and propping her elbow up against the headrest. She laced her fingers through her hair and propped her head against her hand, looking at me with a delighted expression. “Tyler is crazy about me. Absolutely crazy. Whatever that spell was you threw at him, it worked. Great job.”
It felt odd to meet her look of enthusiasm with solemn concern, but I couldn’t muster up a lie. “I thought you didn’t want it to work,” I said. Rain splattered heavy against the windshield and drizzled down in glassy rivulets.
“I didn’t,” she said. “But I should have known my faerie godmother would know better than me about that kind of stuff.”
I felt a rush of satisfaction and pride come flooding into my blood, then stopped it short with a slight wave of my fingers. It wasn’t real. It had shot straight out of Elle’s bracelet and into my energy field.
Her influence wasn’t going to work on me. I was a faerie, and a Feye on top of it. I may not always like my dad, but at least he had taught me the first rule of being a Feye in a magical world: We didn’t fall for that nonsense. Letting ourselves be manipulated meant letting the integrity of the Council fall by the wayside, and that could never be allowed to happen. Normally I resented his self-important blustering. Just this second, though, I had to admit he had a point.
Elle didn’t seem to notice she’d tried to enchant me. She was too busy bubbling over with how great her life was. “Tyler’s really not that bad,” she was saying. “I judged him way too harshly to begin with. I mean, he’s probably not the guy I’m going to spend the rest of my life with, but he treats me really well, and, more importantly, he’s got a lot of influence. Imogen was right. I can use him and his friends to circulate petitions, have sit-ins, buy a ton of the totally ethical coffee I just started selling without telling my dad and then boycotting the rest. I’ve been tracking the total number of people who buy the good stuff versus the crap. At the end of the month, I’m going to show him the numbers. Tyler has almost single-handedly guaranteed that they’re going to be freaking amazing.”
“Yeah, Elle, I don’t know how ethical that is,” I said, but she wasn’t listening.
She bounced in her seat like a chihuahua who’d just chugged a pot of coffee. “And anyway, maybe my dad was at least right about one thing. It’s kind of cool to have friends, especially rich, popular friends. I think I only hated rich, popular people because I was jealous, you know? That’s what Tyler said when I told him I used to not like him.”
Apparently even a love spell wasn’t quite enough to check his particular privilege.
“Makes sense, right?” she said. “Anyway, it’s nice to just be around someone like that, you know? He makes me feel special, like I’m important or something. No one ever makes me feel important. Well, except for Kyle, but Kyle has no social life so it’s not surprising I’m the most important person in his world. I think Tyler’s going to ask me to prom. I hope he’s going to ask me to prom. We’ve only got like a month left. Well, more like two months. It’s at the end of May. Is it weird that he hasn’t asked me yet? I think it’s kind of weird. He has to ask me, right? I mean, with your spell and all this?” She waved her wrist wildly around.
I caught her wrist before she knocked my glasses off and gently lowered it to her lap. “I’m sure he will,” I said. “Maybe you’re using so many charms it’s confusing him.”
“Yeah, right,” she said, and laughed like I’d just made the funniest joke ever. “Like that’s possible. I’ve turned myself into his total dream girl. These earrings make me beautiful. So does this makeup. It’s got fairy dust in it.”
That explained the faint glow on her skin. Even though her beauty charm probably wouldn’t work on me like it would on a Humdrum, she did look pretty. Really pretty, like someone had airbrushed her a few too many times. If she could have seen her new-and-improved self two weeks ago, she’d have been horrified.
“That’s a lot of magic,” I said. That sentence made “understatement” feel like an understatement.
“That’s the point,” she said. “I didn’t have a chance with a guy like Tyler before. Do you know what he said to me last year?”
“He told everyone you were a lesbian,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “But first, he told me I was an ugly freak and that he’d never be seen dead with a girl like me.”
I felt my face pull into a look of disgust. I’d pinned him down as dull and entitled, not cruel.
“But it wasn’t him,” she went on. “He said that girl who’s always hanging out with him, that blond bitch who thinks she’s his girlfriend? He told me she made him say that, because she’d caught him staring at me and didn’t want me as competition. And last year, he was too much of a pansy to stand up to her. But now, with all this magic helping me? He has to be brave. He has to stand up to her and tell her he likes me more. But he still hasn’t asked me to prom. If he asks her to prom instead of me I’m going to kill him.”
The crazy gleam in her eye made me think she just might.
This was how it was supposed to be, wasn’t it? She was supposed to be in love with Tyler, and he was supposed to be in love with her and take her to the big party where she’d feel like a princess. I told myself not to interfere. I told myself to leave her alone and let her be as excited as she wanted about Tyler, because her being giddy over him meant my job was going well.
Then I told myself not to let my job interfere with the demands of reality, because the reality was that if she kept playing with magic like this, she was going to burn up like a shooting star. I had to figure out how to get these spells off of her, or at least how to make it so she could handle the side effects without coming off like quite so much of a speed addict.
“He’s probably just planning a big thing where he asks me in front of everyone,” she sai
d. Her voice was louder than it should have been, and her eyes were too big in her face.
“I thought you didn’t even want to go to prom,” I said. My mind whirred. How could I get those stones off of her? “I thought you were going to NebulaCon with Kyle.”
She waved a hand, again almost hitting my glasses. “He’ll forgive me,” she said. “There’s always next year.”
“Hey,” I said, like I’d just noticed something. “Your necklace is about to fall out of its casing. It keeps wiggling like it’s coming loose.”
A panicked hand flew to the brown agate on her necklace. She squeezed it, like somehow she’d be able to squish it back together if she pressed hard enough. I held out a hand. “Let me see it,” I said. “I know a spell that will make sure it doesn’t fall out.” It probably had a spell like that on it already, but Elle didn’t need to know that. With a grateful sigh, she lifted the necklace over her head and pushed it into my hand.
I held it in my palm, then raised it dramatically while I focused all my scrambling thoughts into the most slap-dash spell I’d come up with in a while. When the magic was ready, glowing like gold heat in the palm of my other hand, I waved the spell around the necklace three times. The first two times, I pressed the gold heat into the necklace.
It wasn’t a spell for gluing the thing back together again. It was a spell made out of earth and rocks and other solid things, a spell that would shield her just a little bit from the effects of the others. If I did it right, this would play nicely with the magic embedded in the necklace; the stone itself would protect her from outside spells, and my charm would protect her from the side effects of the ones she meant to inflict on everyone else. I only wished I could do more.
The third time I waved my hand around the necklace, I sent down a shower of white sparks, just for show.
I handed it back to Elle, whose eyes were as wide as coat buttons. “Wow,” she said, her face as expansive and lit-up as if it were Christmas. “That’s amazing. I’m so glad you’re my faerie godmother.”
“Me too,” I said, and I thought I deserved a medal for how little sarcasm made it from my heart into my voice.
Chapter 21
Pumpkin Spice buzzed with conversation. Tyler had taken up residence on one of the couches, surrounded by a posse of the kind of people who usually didn’t acknowledge me when I passed them in the halls. He didn’t join in on the conversation going on around him. Instead, he stared dreamily toward the counter, where Elle was blowing kisses to him in between making lattes. He’d glanced at me when I walked in, said, “Hi! Elle’s friend!” and then gone back to staring.
It occurred to me in that moment that I wasn’t just screwing with Elle’s life. I was screwing with his, too. What if he had other stuff he needed to be focusing on during his last two months of high school? What if the blond girl—who still kept finding ways to sit next to him—was the one he was supposed to be with? He was completely ignoring her these days, except to tell her how spectacular Elle was. What if I was breaking her heart?
I’d come to Pumpkin Spice hoping to discover my charm on Elle’s necklace had performed even better than expected and brought her down to something approximating normal. But she still giggled loudly enough to be heard from across the room and made kissing faces at Tyler. Nothing had changed.
I turned to leave, then saw Kyle sitting at the right-hand table by the window. He was buried in a giant red sweatshirt with REDSHIRT: Because tomorrow may never come emblazoned on the front in blocky silver lettering. He stared vaguely at the space behind me, then his face jerked into a smile and he waved me over.
I slid into the seat opposite him, slipping my purse off my shoulder and onto the floor.
“Hi,” he said.
“You okay? You look kind of out of it.”
He blinked several times, then looked pointedly over at Elle and back at me. “Why is she broken?” he asked.
It was such a concise way to put it that I couldn’t help laughing. No one else would have thought she was broken. Her dad was probably thrilled. But I could see it, and Kyle could see it: She wasn’t herself. The cogs in her brain weren’t connecting right. Something had snapped.
“She’s been exposed to a lot of magic lately,” I said.
“This is your fault?” he said. He looked about ready to pin all the blame on me. I deserved it.
“You see all that jewelry she’s wearing?” I said. “It’s all charmed, and she bought it all for herself. I tried to stop her but stopping Elle is like trying to convince the sky not to rain.”
He pulled a chair over from a nearby table and propped his feet up on it so that he was sitting sideways. He turned his head to look over at me. “Where would Elle get charmed jewelry?”
“Saturday Market,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “but how?”
It took me a second to realize what he was asking.
“Oh,” I said. I shrugged. “Elle’s a Glim.”
His eyebrows furrowed and he stared at me. Then he swung his feet off the footrest chair and spun to face me full-on. “She’s a what?” he said.
“A Glimmer,” I said. I frowned. “I thought you’d put it together. Faerie godmother and all.” I waved toward myself.
“So?” he said. “The original Cinderella was human, wasn’t she?”
No one knew who the original Cinderella was, and it wasn’t like we godmothers just randomly picked deserving souls out of a hat. But of course, he was a magician. He didn’t know how this all worked.
“Her mom was an earth witch.” I’d looked it up a few days ago. Elle must have pulled in a recessive gene from a great-grandmother or something, though, because she definitely leaned more toward the fire spectrum. Titania knew she hadn’t gotten that spark from her dad.
Kyle made a soft choking sound. I’d thrown him into shock, or at least something close. His mouth opened and shut again a few times like he was a goldfish with a head injury, then he said, slowly, as though just figuring out how language worked, “Elle… is… one of us?”
I wondered if I should get him a coffee before realizing he already had one on the table. “Yes,” I said. “She only found out a few weeks ago.”
“Elle is a witch?”
“Something like that,” I said. “Except really not trained.”
“Obviously,” he said, shooting a glance over to the counter. “How is she not throwing up?”
“I threw a protection on her necklace,” I said. “She’s actually looking a little calmer than she was yesterday, if you’d believe that.”
He leaned back in his seat, still staring at me. It would have been uncomfortable, but Kyle had already warned me he was socially awkward, so I just leaned back in my chair, too, and stared back.
“I don’t even know what to say right now,” he said—then, immediately, said, “Yes I do. Elle is one of us. My best friend is a Glim. Do you know how long I’ve lied to her about who I am? Do you have any idea how hard it is not to tell your best friend who you are?”
I raised one shoulder and shook my head. Imogen had been my best friend since we were little kids. The closest I could compare was the year I spent hanging out with Lucas, and I’d never really wanted to tell him who I was. It had been more fun pretending to be like him.
Kyle stood up, his sandy hair tousled and on end. The excited expression on his face looked worrisomely like the one on Elle’s. “I’m going to go tell her,” he said.
I grabbed his sleeve and tugged him back down toward his chair, which only made him sway on the spot. “Slow down there, space cadet,” I ordered. Elle was in no kind of state to listen to him reveal his true self to her. I’d be impressed if she could even focus on him that long.
He tugged his sleeve back away with enough force to yank the red fabric from my grasp. “You don’t understand,” he said. He bounced up and down on the balls of his feet. “I’ve been friends with Elle since we were in third grade, except for that time I disappeared during middle sc
hool because of the toad thing, and even then I emailed her from ‘boarding school.’ Do you have any idea how hard it is to type when you’re a toad? And I’ve never told her who I am. Never.” He stared at me, like he was waiting for some kind of dramatic reaction.
I put a firm hand on the table. “She’s basically high right now,” I said.
Elle walked around the counter with five drinks somehow wedged between her arms. She almost skipped across the room to a table where a handful of middle-aged customers were watching her, clearly expecting the drinks to crash to the floor at any second. She slid the mugs across the table to each person’s place like she was some kind of small-town diner waitress from a movie, then fist-pumped the air and danced her way back behind the counter.
Kyle watched her for a moment, a tiny frown creasing his usually open face. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. Nervous excitement fluttered off of him. “I’ve got to tell her.”
He walked off, bouncing like his shoes were attached to tennis balls.
Everyone in my life was an idiot. Everyone except for Imogen, who was a saint, even if she hadn’t been quite enough of a saint to agree to come here with me today. “I’m not equipped for that kind of crazy,” she’d said, spinning her fingers around her temples. I knew what she meant. Even without her spectacularly developed empathetic gifts, the weird vibes coming off charm-overdosed Elle, love-drugged Tyler, and excited-puppy Kyle were enough to make me feel like a tangle of static was forming in my head.
Elle waved Kyle over, shouted, “Hey! Hand me the vanilla cream!” even though it was behind the counter and much closer to her than him, and then swirled around to grab a bottle of raspberry syrup. She almost knocked it to the ground, but caught it in one lightning movement and lifted it into the air, laughing. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought she’d been injecting fair trade coffee directly into her veins.
