Glimmers of Scales

by Emma Savant

  I rubbed my arms briskly as a night breeze crept down the collar of my jacket. Spray kicked up from the Fountain and misted cold across my face.

  “Fear is their enemy,” she said. “Courage must be our ally. We must cease fearing who we are, and who we may become. If allowed to flourish, who can tell what greatness we may achieve? But no Glim can grow in a field choked with weeds. Only when there is room to breathe will we reach our full potential. Do you understand, Olivia Feye?”

  I felt my tongue move, warm and damp in my mouth, but my jaw seemed frozen. Pull it together, Feye, I ordered.

  I was Olivia Feye. The Faerie Queen had chosen me to be here, for this conversation, in this moment. I could do this.

  “I think I understand,” I said. I forced my mouth to stay open, to keep talking. “You want the Humdrums gone. You think we’ll be better off without them.”

  The air around the Fountain seemed to disperse, as though the water itself had let out a great sigh.

  “The Faerie Queen has approached you, I believe,” she said.

  I clenched the hand with the ring on it. I hadn’t told anyone about that. Queen Amani had said she wouldn’t tell anyone, either. Even the Oracle shouldn’t know about something the Faerie Queen had promised to keep quiet.

  But of course, she’d been watching.

  I was so tired of being watched.

  “The Glimmering world is changing,” the Oracle said. “It changes every day, more and more quickly. And it needs you, for you can alter the tides.”

  I squinted at the fountain. She spoke in riddles—great magical beings usually did—but this was the first time I had ever felt truly, genuinely like I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

  “You will not have noticed your importance, no doubt,” she said. “Your eyes are turned away from our world, toward your commonplace goals of school and career. You do not sense there could be something more. This is not surprising. Many of the greatest Glimmers have been unable to use their gifts for themselves. But it is time to pay attention, Olivia. It is time to see your potential.”

  Suddenly, and for reasons totally unrelated to the late hour and the danger of prying into the Oracle’s affairs, I wished I hadn’t come. My stomach tied itself into a sinking knot I couldn’t interpret.

  “Queen Amani has extended the role of the next Faerie Queen to you,” the Oracle said, and it wasn’t a question. “I have seen this much through divination. She shows her wisdom in this. But I also desire you at my side.”

  “This is wrong.” The words burst out of me, loud enough to interrupt, loud enough to cut off the crazy, overwhelming thing she was saying at the source.

  But my reprieve lasted only a moment. The Oracle wasn’t my parents or Imogen, and I couldn’t talk over her voice in my head.

  “War is coming,” she said. “It is coming quickly. Glimmers will side with their own kind or with the Humdrums, but we must all choose a side. I want you on my side. You can lead this fight, Olivia. You can make our world blossom into the majesty fate has always intended.”

  My eyes were so wide I felt the breeze drying them out. I could imagine a bug flying into one at any second, just because it couldn’t help running into anything so large. But I couldn’t relax my eyelids. I couldn’t blink even for a second.

  “War seems super unnecessary,” I said. “War is the first thing I would rule out if I were as important as you think I am.”

  Her voice thundered into my head. “Necessary or not, it is coming, and you will not escape,” she said. “Make your choice. Someone else already has.”

  I stared at the Oracle as her white face rippled under its curtain. She met my eyes with her black hollow ones, and then her face shifted ever so slightly to look behind me. I spun around.

  Imogen stood in the sharp yellow lamplight. Her eyes were water-dark and stared straight through me.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Oracle’s eyes fixed on me. She blinked, and her face slid back into the shadows, leaving behind only water rippling with darkness.

  Lily, who had been distracted from her wait for Evan by Imogen’s appearance, looked between Imogen and me and seemed to slink back. She held up her phone.

  “Evan is almost here,” she whispered. “He drove too far. I’ll be back.”

  I heard her footsteps disappear down the sidewalk along the edge of the darkened park. And then it was just the two of us, staring across the empty ground at each other. The gentle burbling of the Fountain laced through the air around us.

  “She chose you,” Imogen said, her voice as dull as her eyes.

  My feet moved me toward her before I could think about it.

  “Imogen,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t blink, just stared at me with that blank expression.

  “She chose you,” Imogen said again, the slight inflection barely enough to make a dent in her flat monotone.

  “So? I don’t know what she’s talking about,” I said. I reached out a hand but didn’t dare touch her. “Gen, what’s wrong?”

  “Not the Oracle,” Imogen said. “The Faerie Queen. She chose you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”

  We stared at each other for a long moment. Her jaw twitched, just once.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “The Oracle called me,” she said.

  “Why?” I said.

  She blinked, but she looked into the distance as though I might have not been there at all.

  “Why did she call you?” I demanded.

  She was silent a long moment, and then, with a wave of heat like someone had opened a furnace, her eyes snapped to mine, fully conscious and blazing. I jumped back as though I’d been burned.

  “Someone had to choose me,” she hissed.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Hot faerie anger rolled off her. I let it engulf me.

  “People choose you all the time,” I said.

  “Lucas,” she said, and the name tossed off her tongue like it meant nothing. “Yeah, great. I get the Humdrum boy. You get our kingdom.”

  Her jaw twitched again. I saw her hands in my peripheral vision, clenched into white fists at her sides.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “Are you going to hit me?” I said. “Just because someone picked me over you for once in our lives?”

  Imogen Dann had the spoiled little rich girl act down to a science.

  “You’re lucky if I don’t,” she said.

  “I don’t care if you do,” I said.

  I felt my own anger rise off my skin like scalding steam. Her magic sparked gold outside the frame of my glasses. It sputtered and showered down on us with a feeling like hot pinpricks.

  “The world isn’t about you, Imogen.”

  “You’ve made that perfectly clear,” she said.

  “I’ve made that clear? I’ve made that clear?”

  I could hear my voice growing shrill, but I couldn’t stop it. I wanted to scream into her face just to make her hear me. Suddenly, it didn’t matter that the Oracle was watching.

  “I have lived in your shadow since we were nine,” I said. “When Queen Amani asked me, I said no, because I’ve had the spotlight so rarely that I don’t even know what to do with it. And I’m the one with the problem?”

  “I don’t care about the Faerie Queen,” Imogen said.

  A laugh barked up from my throat. She was about to knock me over with the worst spell in her arsenal, judging from the way the magic gathered around her. I brought my hands up and threw out a pulsing white shield. It was only visible outside my glasses, leaving the center of my vision as two dark rectangles framing Imogen’s flushed face.

  “You just care that she didn’t see how special and magical and sparkly you are first,” I said.

  Imogen’s lip trembled, her fury turning her face into a mask with hot red cheeks.

  “You lied to me,” she said.

  “Now you know ho
w it feels,” I said.

  “You lied to me first,” she said.

  I opened my mouth to tell her she was crazy and needed to get off her damn high horse. And then I remembered.

  She was right.

  I’d forgotten.

  I silently counted back how many months it had been in my head. With each number, my stomach got a little heavier until I couldn’t quite breathe.

  The shield around my body rippled and dispersed, the white membrane pulling apart and dissolving into nothing.

  “You lied to me,” Imogen whispered.

  “I—”

  “I thought you were being weird,” she interrupted. “And I thought it was just your parents freaking you out. And then everything happened with Lucas and it was way too fast.” She took a step toward me. “You know how I am with guys, Olivia.” As if it was my fault, as if I should have seen her coming. “And I tried to tell you, I swear to Titania. But then you flipped out at me and I didn’t know what to do. You wouldn’t freaking text me. You’ve never been mad enough that you wouldn’t text me.”

  Any reply I might have made was a ball in my throat.

  Had I really not told her?

  I remembered thinking that it was complicated, and that Amani had asked for privacy.

  “She told me not to tell anyone,” I said, but my voice was even weaker than my words.

  Yes, Amani had asked for secrecy. But now, staring at Imogen, it hit me as if all the cold water from the Oracle’s Fountain was crashing over my head at once: She hadn’t meant this. I could have at least asked.

  I cleared my throat and tried again. The words struggled to get out.

  “I didn’t want you to be disappointed in me for saying no,” I said.

  For some reason, this truth was harder to admit than the comfortable excuses I’d given myself for months. Everyone was always disappointed in me. Adding Imogen to that list would have made me worse than nothing.

  “And then the Oracle told me,” Imogen said, like I hadn’t spoken. “I wanted to talk to her about you, because I knew I’d been stupid about Lucas, but you wouldn’t even let me apologize.” She scoffed. “Not that an apology would have done any good. You’re going to run off to that stupid Humdrum college no matter what I do.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You really think we would have survived that?”

  I stared at Imogen, waiting for her to make some sense, but her face was as cold and white as marble.

  “You hate Glims,” she said. “You’ve always wanted friends like Lucas, friends who don’t remind you of our world. Your stupid college would have been full of them. But I still tried, Olivia. I still went to the Oracle to see if maybe she thought our friendship could be saved. You are the one person who is important enough that I would bother the goddamned freaking Oracle over you not talking to me.”

  Her words sounded almost as strangled as mine. And while her face seemed still and under control, I saw her jaw twitch, and I saw her eyes flinch. She could pretend not to feel it, but I knew her better than that.

  I knew us better than that.

  “I tried to talk to you,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “At my sister’s wedding, which you were not there for, which you did not help me with. You knew how stressed out I was about that wedding, Olivia. You knew that. And so you just skipped all the time leading up to it and showed up in time for cake.”

  “I came to apologize,” I said.

  “Why should I have let you apologize?” she said. “I’d been trying to tell you I was sorry for months.”

  “I was upset.”

  Her words cut over me. “I went to the Oracle to ask about you,” she said. “And she said you were probably just stressed because of Queen Amani. And I asked her what she was talking about, and she said she’d assumed you’d told me. Even the Oracle made that mistake. Even the Oracle assumed you would tell me about something like that.”

  Neither of us could keep the tears from rising. We stood there staring at each other like a couple of weepy babies, and I fought the water back into my eyes.

  The Oracle, Lily the ocean princess, Queen Amani’s palace hidden behind Oregon’s tallest waterfall—there was too much water everywhere, too many glimmering waves threatening to crash over me. I fought to breathe. But there was no breathing, and there was no thinking straight. There was just me, messing up.

  All these months, I’d been thinking about Imogen—how Imogen had stolen Lucas, how Imogen had turned on me, how Imogen had betrayed me and spilled my secrets and done everything she could to hurt me.

  But I hadn’t thought about me, not once. I’d thought about my feelings, and about all the ways Imogen had ruined my life, but I had pinned all the blame on her.

  And that wasn’t fair. We weren’t standing here, staring at each other through the darkness, just because of her.

  I could see it now, in the tightness in her shoulders and the shaking of my hands. It had been both of us. We’d taken turns making the wrong choices. Each of us had taken steps forward to meet in this moment.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  She watched me, her face as pale and blank as the Oracle’s. Even so, she had to be hurting just as much as I was.

  Any why not? I hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her about Amani. I had been too afraid and too cowardly to risk her disappointment, and so I had shut her out of my life and hurt her just as much as she’d hurt me by not telling me she had feelings for Lucas.

  She’d been wrong about that, but it wasn’t all on her. I could have talked to him. Even after they started dating, I could have at least told him how I felt. Nothing had stopped me but me.

  I could have responded to just one of Imogen’s texts and let her sneak an apology in under all my anger. I could have given her one conversation—one interaction that would have been long enough to show me that she wasn’t all right, that something was deeply and desperately wrong inside her.

  I could have been there for her.

  Maybe I could have even stopped us from breaking.

  And maybe I could have stopped her from coming here, to make whatever decision she was going to make.

  Beside us, the Fountain loomed, dark and threatening.

  I bit the inside of my cheek. The pain gave me something to focus on, and I forced myself to take a big enough breath to squeeze out the words.

  “Gen, I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I was wrong. We both were.”

  Imogen looked up at the trees shifting darkly above us, then swallowed and looked back down at me.

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  I wrestled with my face, trying to keep it from crumpling. And then my head jerked up, and Imogen’s snapped to the side, because there were footsteps running toward us. I bit hard on the inside of my cheek and waited for whatever Glimmer was running to catch the Oracle while she was still awake for midnight. Let them have the Oracle and her horrible advice. I was done.

  But it wasn’t a Glimmer. It was someone who shouldn’t have been there at all.

  Lucas jogged into sight, his hair flopping and his figure looking even lankier than usual as he ran. He saw us and ran down the steps, relief all over his face.

  “I’m so glad I found you,” he gasped. He grabbed Imogen by the shoulders. “What do you mean, Have a good life?”

  She wouldn’t meet his eyes. Her face looked too skinny. I wondered if she’d been eating. She dieted too much when she was stressed.

  “I meant it,” Imogen said. Her gaze flickered to me for the briefest second before landing back on him. “You’re a good guy. You deserve to have a good life.”

  “What do you think you’re going to do?” he said. “You’re scaring me.”

  “I’m not suicidal,” she said, voice dull again. “I’m just done.”

  “Done with what?”

  I edged away. This felt too private.

  “Done,” she said. “With us, with you, with school, w
ith my ‘normal’ life.. You can have normal.” She looked suddenly up at him, her gaze hot again. “I’m finished.”

  Lucas pulled her close, crushing her in a hug that she didn’t return.

  “Don’t be done,” he said, and he sounded way too vulnerable and upset. I wanted to comfort him but knew that would only make it worse. I stepped back again.

  He looked over at me. An edge of confusion entered and then left his expression.

  “Hi, Olivia,” he said.

  I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  He turned back to Imogen. “What’s going on?” he said. “Come on. You can talk to me.”

  She laughed, totally without humor. “I can not talk to you,” she said. “Good Titania, the levels on which I cannot talk to you make my head spin.”

  His eyebrows drew up as though they were trying to recoil and protect themselves. He held her at arm’s length and tried to look into her evasive eyes.

  “Could you maybe just try?”

  “No,” she said loudly, staring at him as though trying to explain something to a slow toddler. “It’s illegal for me to talk to you, Lucas.”

  “How are you here?” I said.

  The Oracle’s Fountain was alive. No Humdrum should have been able to step onto this block.

  He shrugged one shoulder. “I drove,” he said. “My mom’s car.”

  It wasn’t what I’d meant, but I couldn’t explain what I’d meant. Especially not in front of the Oracle. Imogen was right. It was all kinds of not permitted. I ran a hand all over my face. Tension dispersed and tingled all across my skin.

  Imogen carefully, firmly, pulled Lucas’ hands off her shoulders.

  “But you know what?” she said. “Screw it. Screw all the secrets.”

  She dropped his hands to his sides and turned back to me. She stared at me, eyes harsh in the darkness, and opened her mouth. But she couldn’t seem find anything to say, because I wasn’t worth the effort. She closed it again and shook her head as if she could brush me off like an annoying fly.

  She straightened her shoulders and walked toward the Oracle’s Fountain, where the water rippled quiet and black.