by Sarina Dorie
Thatch walked with purpose, his stride confident but not overly quick. His hand was hot against mine, the humid air making my skin clammy with sweat.
“I take it you’ve been here before,” I said.
“A few times.” He kicked a can out of the street as we walked. “I’ve found former students here. Last week I decided to do further research in the area in order to determine a suitable establishment for a date.”
We walked for another couple of minutes before coming to a restaurant painted the same hot pink my hair had been earlier in the day. The interior was decorated with flashing neon lights in the shapes of palm trees and water. The colors inside were just as loud as the exterior.
A waitress greeted us and guided us to a table in the back, farther away from the flashing lights. I could barely understand anything she said. The restaurant wasn’t busy, but we passed a few families at tables.
Thatch slid out a chair for me, and I sat down. For the first time I ever recalled, the indifferent boredom he wore on his face was replaced by awe as he gazed at me.
The waitress asked us in rapid, almost undecipherable Spanish if we wanted to order drinks.
I ogled the menu, trying to find something familiar. “A margarita?”
“No alcohol,” Thatch said to me. “I don’t know how the supplement will react to alcohol.”
“What supplement?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” he said with a smirk.
My Spanish was rusty, but I mostly understood the menu. Thatch nodded for me to go first. I ordered a soda in Spanish before turning back to him. “Do you want me to order for you?”
“No thank you. Spanish is close enough to Latin and Italian, and as you often say, I’m good at everything.” He winked at me.
I rolled my eyes. More like arrogant about everything. He ordered in perfect Spanish, though his accent sounded more Castilian or Italian than Cuban. He asked for recommendations on food. After the waitress listed them, he repeated them back to the waitress slowly, probably for my benefit, translating an occasional word into English.
“Do you know what you want?” he asked. “Or do you need a minute? I know what I want.” He looked me up and down with mischief in his smile. I blushed. I understood he wasn’t talking about food.
I kicked his foot playfully under the table and tried to ignore his smug smile as I ordered.
He waited for the server to leave before he took my hand and gazed into my eyes.
“Compliments are obviously important to you,” he said. “So I will say it again. You look pretty.”
In his old-fashioned and socially awkward way, I could tell he was doing his best to make this a nice, normal date for me.
“Thank you. So do you. I mean, you look handsome, not pretty.” I laughed at myself, suddenly feeling tongue-tied at all this attention. “I like the dress. How’d you know my size? And don’t just say ‘magic.’”
His eyebrows raised expectantly. “What do you mean?”
“Stop playing innocent. I know it was from you.”
“Of course.” He smiled, his teeth bright and sharp in the dim light. “Go walk across the room and let me admire you in your dress.”
“Sure.”
I stood up, twirled so he could see it, and walked across the room, swaying my hips as much as I could in the small aisle between tables. When I glanced over my shoulder at him, his gaze was intense. It took him a second too long to smile back at me.
Looking over my shoulder and walking at the same time in high heels turned out to be a hazard. I stumbled into a chair. I shook my head, laughing at myself. When I glanced back, I noticed Thatch’s lips moving. His hands were under the table, discreetly gesturing so that the other diners wouldn’t notice him. I wondered what kind of spell he was casting.
He shooed at me with a wave of his hand. “Keep walking,” he said.
“Hola, senorita,” a man at the bar in sunglasses said.
I nodded to the man, but I was far more interested in my date and what he was up to.
I turned back to Thatch. He’d dimmed the light from his wand under the table. It looked like he might have held a cell phone, only the light was purple. I recognized that spell from when he’d tested my cookies and from when Elric had given me the earthquake cake brownies. He’d used it on the flowers and just about a million other times to check for poisons and spells.
I slumped back into my seat. “Why are you using a poison-detecting spell?”
“It isn’t just to detect poisons for dinner. It’s useful for detecting Fae magic, hexes, and curses.” He smiled, but the expression didn’t reach the corners of his eyes.
Uneasiness settled over me. That wasn’t why he was doing this spell. “This dress isn’t from you.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“It was a gift from you, then?” A spike of hope rose in me only to be crushed again.
“I didn’t say that either.”
“Stop being so secretive. Tell me the truth. You promised me you would start telling me the truth.” My voice rose in my agitation. “Am I wearing a cursed dress? Someone came into the school—into my room—and gave me this dress because he or she knew we were going on a date tonight?” Someone who had overheard a private joke between us regarding Cinderella?
“Keep your voice down,” he said quietly. “We are in the Morty Realm.”
“No one will understand us.”
“They might.” He leaned back in his chair, studying me thoughtfully. From the glow still coming from under the table, it was obvious he continued conducting his test.
After a moment, he said, “I detect no magic whatsoever. I can’t even sense that a Fae has touched this dress. There are no traces of poisonous herbs or other substances that could irritate the skin, but there are two substances I do detect.”
I folded my hands over the table, trying to be patient as he explained.
“First is the formaldehyde. Next is the perfume, possibly to mask the scent of the formaldehyde.”
“So this is another I-want-you-dead message?”
“It’s possible. Though I can’t see why one would go to the trouble of masking the scent, unless it’s meant to dissipate later after you had been wearing the dress for several hours so that you would realize you are covered in embalming fluid. It could be a fear tactic.”
Or it could be another gift from Vega. If it was, that probably meant she’d removed it from a corpse. Ick.
The fabric against my naked skin no longer felt as silky and smooth. I stared down at the dress. “Can I change out of this in the bathroom? Will you magic me something else to wear?”
“We can go shopping if you would like. But as I said before, there are no spells cast on that dress. I wasn’t going to mention anything about it at all. I didn’t want to worry you. But—” He gave me a pointed look. “—you’re always the one chastising me for not telling you the truth. I did. Let our enemies see their petty attempts at making us worry are for naught.”
The server came with our drinks and said she would be back.
I experienced a moment of déjà vu. This felt like the first date Derrick and I went on back in high school, the waitress setting down our waters as Derrick tried to convince me my sister was powerless against me after using up all her magic. He had been right, but we hadn’t known the true danger would come from ourselves.
I didn’t know if the resurrection of this memory was a bad omen.
Thatch pried one of my hands from where it gripped the table, smoothing his fingers over mine. “I have a surprise for you.”
“The big surprise.”
I continued thinking about the dress, about the woman who had tried to kill Vega to get to me. Was this another gift from the Princess of Lies and Truth? Had her magic been dulled enough by my affinity that she hadn’t been able to cast a spell, only soak a dress in formaldehyde in a weak attempt to make a jab at me? Or was this an actual thank
-you present from Vega?
There had to be more we weren’t seeing.
“Don’t you want to know about the surprise?” His dark eyebrows rose in hope. Disappointment showed in his eyes.
“Yes, tell me about your surprise.” I refocused, not wanting to ruin this evening for him. If he wasn’t worrying for once, I probably could stop obsessing over my secret enemy.
He pulled a small pouch from under his sleeve, loosened the strings, and shook out a large green tablet. It looked flakey, like a bunch of compressed seaweed.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a lozenge.”
“Your chill pill?”
He snorted. “Based on your survey, I decided you would enjoy dancing to something upbeat and lively. I selected salsa. I don’t salsa. I cast spells and make potions. It took me two weeks to prepare this, thirty hours in total, but I created a supplement to aid me.”
“Thirty hours? No wonder you were so busy. You know, if you spent that much time doing this little thing called practice, you wouldn’t have to waste thirty hours of magic. You could just learn dancing.”
“I still wouldn’t have been proficient. Thirty hours perfecting my craft while simultaneously performing a deed to make you happy was well worth the effort. I now have a new spell, an ample supply of toadstools harvested from a fairy ring under a waxing moon, and a cure for two left feet.”
“But it’s cheating. You’re always telling me not to waste magic on trivial things.”
“This isn’t trivial. It’s quite important.” He lifted his chin. “In comparison, you use magic to change your hair color, get rid of your freckles, or make chocolate mousse fat-free. The amount of time and resources it takes to dye your hair with chemicals is less costly than using magic. You think I just snap my fingers, and I make magic happen. There’s preparation involved.”
“There’s prep work involved in dancing too.” Something about his words needled under my skin. “People have to study salsa for years to perfect their craft. You spent a few hours. I studied salsa for six months in college, and I was never good at it.” And now without any practice, he would yet again be better at something than I was.
“Magic has a price. That price is time and energy. It only took thirty hours because I used my affinity. If I had frolicked in nature and used tree and plant magic, it would have taken sixty hours.” He grimaced as though the idea of it were disgusting. “For a lesser Witchkin, it might have taken six months. The cost might exceed learning the old-fashioned way. It is hardly cheating. Unless you consider pragmatism cheating.”
I didn’t answer. This date wasn’t going the way I had planned. I should have been happy he was willing to take me dancing, that he was in a pleasant mood. But the grouchiness of his mood at school had contaminated me like the flu, a timed delay finally going off in me just when he had grown out of it. I felt icky in the red dress and wanted to be in comfy pajamas instead. I wished I’d worn a bra.
“Are those study skills you’re teaching those failing students considered cheating?” Thatch asked. “Are the sticky notes and highlighters cheating?” He placed the pill under his tongue and sipped from a glass of water.
I groaned. I hated it when he was like this, superior and all-knowing. “You’re always so good at everything. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could cheat with you.”
He smirked. “Of course you can. You can learn to make your own potions.”
A typical Thatch response. Naturally he would tell me to learn magic. He would rub it in that I couldn’t. I looked away from that smug expression on his face. A man smoking at the bar watched us. He winked at me, and I looked at the family of six eating together instead.
Thatch squeezed my hand. “I’m teasing you.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to shrug off his words.
“I know you haven’t learned the kind of magic you need to make this potion.” He shook another pill out of his pouch and held it out. “I made one for you so you would be able to keep up. Do you really think I would want to be seen in public with someone inferior to me in any way?” He laughed in that wicked way of his.
“Is that supposed to be a joke? Because it isn’t funny. I am inferior to you magically. I’m younger than you, and I don’t know as much as you, and you like to rub it in. You always get to be right, and I’m wrong. You don’t ever want to be seen in public with me.” This was the whole reason I’d wanted to go on a date with him, for him to show the world he wasn’t embarrassed to love me—that he wasn’t ashamed of who I was. My breath hitched in my chest. “I thought you were going to take me Irish dancing in Lachlan Falls.” I hadn’t actually thought that. Secretly in my heart, I’d wanted that even if I knew it was impossible.
He wet his lips. He didn’t answer right away, but when he did, his voice was low. “You know I can’t take you to Lachlan Falls. Students will see. It would be unprofessional. Staff would see, and I might lose my job. You might be fired. Josie would learn about us, and you would lose your best friend.”
He sandwiched one of my feet between his own, capturing my attention. “Worst of all, someone would report our relationship to the Raven Queen. Have you truly considered what she might do to punish me if she learns that not only have I defied her and not brought you into her care as she wished—but I’ve also kept you to myself? Do you know what she would do to you to spite me?”
He had to be right again. His words managed to hammer guilt into me.
He lifted my hand to his lips. “Have you gone to any céilís since that time with Julian Thistledown?”
Warmth drained from my face. “Thanks for being such a killjoy.” I tried to withdraw my hand.
He held on. “Wouldn’t it have reminded you of him if I had taken you there?”
I shrugged, noncommittally. Two points for Felix Thatch, zero points for Clarissa Lawrence.
“I’ll take you céilí dancing in Ireland if that’s what you prefer, but we’re here, and on your list you said you wanted to go to the beach. This one is a tad bit warmer than the ones in Ireland.” His attempt at a smile didn’t touch the sorrowful gray of his eyes.
His offer of a compromise made it easier for me to do so. “We can stay here.”
“Do you understand the danger it puts you in if you’re seen with me in public in the Unseen Realm and the Faerie Realm?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I am doing this to protect you. Everything I do is to keep you safe.”
He’d never put it quite that way before. It made my resentment seem that much more trivial. I wished I had a rewind button on my life.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You are a beautiful, talented, and incredible woman. I am not ashamed to be seen in public with you. If I could, I would announce my feelings to the world.”
“Right.” He was private about everything.
He straightened in his chair. “You doubt me?”
“I believe you,” I said, my tone about as monotone as his usually was.
He stood up and dinged a spoon against his glass. “Pardon me, good patrons of this fine establishment. I wish to make an announcement. I am in love with this woman, this delightful, adorable woman whom I greatly respect and admire.”
Some of the diners turned, staring at him in confusion. He repeated himself in Spanish.
A man at a table asked if he was drunk. A woman slapped him on the shoulder. “Silencio! El esta enamorado.”
I thought she was saying Thatch was in love. A few cheers went up around the room. I didn’t know enough Spanish to follow most of their rapid replies. Thatch sat down, a grin stretching across his face. Adoration glowed in his eyes. I felt ashamed about being so grumpy earlier. He loved me, and I understood his reasons for not wanting to show it in the Unseen Realm, even if I didn’t like it.
He held up the green lozenge. “Are you ready for your ‘chill pill’ as you called it?”
I held out my han
d.
“Place it under your tongue, and let it dissolve.”
It tasted worse than one of my fairy godmother’s kale smoothies. I made a face. He handed me my soda.
“I like that concoction you made that tastes like butterscotch,” I said.
“So do I.”
I washed down the bitter aftertaste with more carbonated corn syrup. “How does this magic work?”
“There’s an hour delay before the supplement starts. Any new skills you attempt to learn will slowly build and peak at the two-and-a-half-hour mark. Within four hours, the effects will wear off. You’ll be exhausted, but you will have learned a new skill set, and it’s possible you’ll retain some of that knowledge.”
“How do you know this works?”
“I tested it on myself earlier this week. I didn’t poison myself, which it should be noted. I also learned swing dance with Vega. She was most impressed.”
“Are you freakin’ kidding me? You took Vega dancing, but not me?”
“For the record, I didn’t take her dancing. I accompanied her. We have an arrangement. She helps me with tasks, like teaching you magic or watching out for you. In return, I escort her to her swing clubs. It used to be that she liked me to go with her because I made it look as though she had a boyfriend. She thinks it weeds out the ‘nice’ fellows whom she wants to avoid. She only wants to date—What do you Americans call them? Bad boys? She wants men who get excited about seducing a woman who is emotionally unavailable.”
“That is so messed up.” Someone walked by, the scent of formaldehyde momentarily increasing as the air wafted around me.
“I don’t judge,” Thatch said.
“Sure, you don’t.”
He shrugged. “In any case, she now has Elric to accompany her. From the way they quarreled when he showed up, I took it that she was using me to make him jealous.” From that pleased look in his eyes, I didn’t doubt he enjoyed making Elric jealous.
I giggled at the idea of that. “Did Vega’s diabolical plan work?”
