Hidden Charm

by Kristine Grayson

  He hopped to the edge of the pond, his sore feet landing in the damp grass that the neighbors had lined the pond with. One of the fish raised its head as he did so, as if trying to figure out what Henry was doing.

  His skin still hurt, but at least it wasn’t so dry that it felt cracked. Zel had done the right thing dropping him here. But he couldn’t stay.

  He summoned his clothes before he did anything else. They took forever to arrive. He had just started to think he needed to get some from home when his shirt fluttered in, followed by his pants.

  The T-shirt was tattered but wearable. The pants seemed completely unharmed. His shoes were covered in dust.

  He stood on them, looked around to see if any mortals were around, and didn’t see anyone. But he couldn’t see through the windows of the nearby house.

  Of course, if someone had been in there, they had had a front row seat to the entire debacle next door. They probably hadn’t even noticed the tiny frog in the yard.

  He hated transforming in public. Heck, he hated transforming at all, which was why he often stayed in his frog form, and why, if he was in his human form, he would send his frog avatar to the Archetype Place.

  He made himself take a deep breath, which always resulted in a loud ribbit!, something he really didn’t know how to change. Then he closed his bulging eyes, and transformed to his human self.

  He had it down to a science. His body stretched and lengthened, his skin stretching with it, and changing color back to the pasty white he hated so much. His legs always ached as they transformed, and his feet actively hurt, because the changes were so vast.

  This time, though, his skin hurt too. It felt too dry to shift. It actually cracked as it changed, making him wince. He pulled the pants to him, but caught the shirt in his right hand rather than slipping it on.

  The transformation ended with him holding the shirt, the pants on, and his feet still bare. Everything hurt.

  He looked at his skin, saw it baked red from the heat. Some kind of minor burn, probably. He used a tiny healing spell, and when that didn’t work, he coated himself in aloe. The scent actually took the smell of burnt sugar out of his nostrils.

  Then he gingerly slipped the shirt on. It stuck to the aloe, annoying him. He slipped his feet into the shoes, feeling the encrusted dirt against his sore skin. But the shirt, the burns, everything was unimportant compared to what was happening next door.

  He couldn’t just appear next door. He couldn’t visualize where he was going, for one thing, because everything had changed so much. And secondly, he didn’t want to arrive on top of the faeries, pixies, and any other injured magical.

  So he jogged to the fence between the two properties. It was just tall enough that he couldn’t peer over it without leveraging himself upward. It had been a long time since he had done anything physical.

  But he was still trying to avoid magic as much as possible. That transformation spell might have called some attention to him from whatever had destroyed Zel’s house.

  That thought finally registered: something—someone—had destroyed Zel’s house. While Zel was still in it. She had survived—somehow—but it had probably been a near thing.

  The magic that had been in that house was powerful. He paused, thinking about it, the sirens whooping nearby. He had had a lot experience with magic more powerful than his, and he had always vowed to keep a low profile, so that someone else’s power would never destroy him again.

  And here he was, in the middle of a mess that had nothing to do with him. His clothes were tattered, and his skin burned. No one would blame him if he walked away now.

  The sirens were so close that they made the burping, bubbling sound sirens made as they were shutting off.

  The first responders would take all of the magical’s attention—that which wasn’t given to the crisis. Henry could slip away, resume his life, and no one would say a word.

  Oh, Selda might give him one of her looks the next time she saw him, but she wouldn’t comment. He had disappointed her too many times already. She probably expected him to disappear.

  But Zel…that lost look on her face when she had come into the Archetype Place. The tears that lined her eyes when she saw the image of Sonny in their house. The way that her hair had commanded a difficult situation, saving faeries, when she could have just as easily run away.

  Like he was contemplating doing.

  His face flushed, and this time, it wasn’t from the burn. He embarrassed himself sometimes.

  He put his hands on the top of that fence and pulled himself up, feeling the tug in the muscles in his arms and back. Then he brought his right leg over and straddled the top of the wood.

  Zel’s side of the fence looked like Armageddon had come and left nothing but destruction in its wake.

  The house crater remained, and noxious black, gray, and purple smoke billowed out, along with the occasional orange flame. It almost seemed like a dragon lived beneath the house, sending out the occasional flame to discourage anyone from its lair.

  The thought made Henry frown for just a moment, and he made a mental note about it. Then he glanced at the rest of the destruction.

  An awning that had been behind the house still stood, but ash was burning tiny holes in it. It would only be a matter of time before that thing caught and probably ignited everything else that could burn.

  The fence was damage free at the moment, except for the debris that had hit it in the explosion. But the damage from that explosion was contained to the yard, which was strange by any calculation.

  He put another mental pin in that as well, to think about later.

  The front lawn looked like it was crawling away from the damaged building. It took a moment for his human vision to completely reinstate itself. The moving lawn assembled itself into its component parts—shattered bits of brick and wood from the house, parts of tables and the stuffing out of chairs, pillows and towels and shards of crockery—all of it moving slightly, as the creatures those things had landed on were trying to free themselves.

  Everywhere he looked, he saw green-and-yellow faeries pulling wreckage off other faeries. Pixies were moving the tiny shards aside. The griffin was sitting like a human being, his hind legs splayed out in front of him, back against the fence as he plucked splinters out of his body.

  Someone had erected a low magical barrier near the front gate. He could only tell that because debris had piled against it. The barrier would serve two purposes: it would make certain that whoever behind it hadn’t been hit by flying projectiles, and it would keep the non-magical out of the area until the crisis got resolved.

  Henry couldn’t see the Very Serious Witches or Selda or any of the magical crime scene folks. He suspected they were the ones who had erected that barrier. It was too big for the faeries to have created it, and some of the magical creatures around didn’t have that kind of magic.

  He should have seen the Very Serious Witches and Selda moving behind that barrier, though, and he didn’t. He had to hope they were around because the sirens had stopped completely, which meant that the mortal first responders had arrived.

  But, honestly, he wasn’t really looking for any of them. He was looking for Zel. And he couldn’t see her. She had to be somewhere because she had rescued him, and she had to be somewhere high up, because she had seen him. Plus, the hair tentacle hadn’t hit anything as it swung him toward the koi pond.

  He looked at the fence across from him first, then at the neighbor’s roof across the way, but didn’t see her. A good dozen purple-clad faeries were laying on the roof, looking only partially alive, with two green-and-yellow faeries buzzing around them.

  His lips thinned. The damage, the carnage—what was the point of that? Why would anyone hurt the faeries like that? Why would anyone attack this house the way that it had?

  He had no answers, and he wasn’t sure he entirely wanted them anyway. He looked to the street beyond and thought he saw some gray haired women standing on the sidew
alk. He did see mortals in their blue uniforms, talking to Selda.

  So she had the first responders well in hand. A few neighbors stood in open doors, arms crossed, watching what was happening in the street.

  But no Zel.

  He looked back at the yard, and then realized that the palm tree on the side of the smoking cauldron looked weird, and not because of the smoke.

  The tree was wrapped in hair.

  He let out a small sigh of relief. She was near that. He looked up into the branches, saw…no one. Some knives and swords stuck into the trunk, which looked almost deliberate, but no Zel.

  Then something moved on the far side of the tree. He saw a blackened hand gripping the hair, and a leg waving as it tried to find purchase.

  He leaned back a little just in time to see a short, slender, bald person step gingerly on a ring of stones around the palm tree. It took a moment for him to connect that person with Zel.

  Her hair was gone. Her face looked like it had been painted with black camouflage paint. Her clothing was blackened too, and ripped and tattered.

  Henry didn’t remember the soot-covered face when she rescued him, but that might have simply been the result of frog vision. She didn’t seem injured, but he couldn’t really tell from his vantage point here.

  She put a hand against the hair-covered tree trunk as if she were bracing herself. She scanned the yard, apparently as unwilling to move as Henry was.

  Or maybe she was unable. Injuries did catch up with a person once the adrenalin left the system.

  He looked down, saw that the debris on this side of the fence was minimal. The explosion had sent material in all directions, but certain parts of the yard got more than other parts. The bulk of the debris had gone directly behind the house and directly in front of it. On the side, like he was, the debris seemed a lot more fragmented.

  Still, he was going to have to be careful as he clambered down from that fence.

  If he wasn’t so afraid of the magic still spewing out of that hole in the ground, he would have floated above the ground, not touching anything. But he didn’t dare.

  He swung his other leg over the fence and lowered himself gently, placing his feet alongside a chunk of drywall the size of an end table. It was hard to get his balance standing like that, but he managed.

  He peered underneath the drywall, and then looked at the material he would have to cross just to get to Zel.

  He would have had to go over more bits of drywall, several shredded two by fours, the remains of a couch, and a television that had shattered in the middle of the lawn.

  Plus the lawn kept moving, as more and more creatures pulled debris off themselves, sat up, and tried to figure out what was going on.

  He licked his lips. They were chapped, and his throat so parched he wasn’t even certain he could speak. He wanted to catch Zel’s attention, but he wasn’t sure how to do it.

  He scanned the area, looking for safe places to walk. The only thing he could comfortably do was walk along the fence line, maybe get to the gate, and see what was going on.

  He didn’t want to be the one to decide whether or not to use magic. He wanted Selda to make that call…so that, he realized as he had the thought, he could blame someone else when it went wrong.

  If Tiana were still alive, she would give him one of her compassionate looks. You’re still afraid of her, aren’t you? Tiana would have said, and she wouldn’t have been talking about Selda. She would have been talking about Aite.

  And he was still afraid.

  He was terrified.

  Which was probably exactly how Zel felt.

  She looked so alone over there, staring at the crater that had been her home. She hadn’t even really looked at the yard, covered with the remains of the house, and the slowly stirring magical.

  They had all been in a battle, a battle they hadn’t expected, but one nonetheless. It had nearly devastated the faeries, and he had no idea what it was doing to the rest of the magical in Los Angeles.

  He squared his shoulders. He didn’t feel quite human yet. The frog form usually made him feel protected, almost invisible, and this time, it had made him feel useless.

  But he didn’t know how to be useful any longer in his human form. He had been useful once. He had become a good husband and was preparing to be a good father.

  He blinked, expecting tears to well as they always had before when he had such thoughts. Only they didn’t. Maybe his eyes were too dry still from getting too close to that burning crater.

  Or maybe having something to focus on had stopped him from feeling sorry for himself.

  His mouth thinned. He couldn’t cross the yard to get to Zel, not without hurting someone, so he carefully picked his way along the fence line. He would take the long way to her.

  And as he walked, he would figure out how to fix all of this.

  He would figure out how to fight back.

  Chapter 16

  Zel’s entire body ached. She kept one hand braced on the hairy trunk of the tree as she tried to figure out how to get across the lawn. Part of it seemed alive. She wasn’t skilled enough in magic to know if that constant movement was another spell or if she was missing activity she should have been seeing.

  The smoke made her eyes water, and after that first long look, she couldn’t even really stare at her house. Or what remained of her house. And she didn’t want to think about what that meant for Sonny.

  Not until she found Selda.

  Selda would know what to do.

  At least Henry was safe.

  Then Zel saw him. He had started to pick his way along the neighbor’s fence line. Then he stopped, put his hands on his hips, and frowned. He shook his head slightly, turned toward the fence, and levered himself up and over it in one smooth movement.

  He was right. Rather than cross this damaged yard, with its seething debris, she needed to get out. She could get into the other neighbor’s yard, the closer one, the one without the koi pond, walk around and let herself in the gate. That would probably take her to Selda or at least some of the magical who might actually know what to do next.

  Zel wasn’t tall enough to lever herself over the fence. So she had to use the trunk of the tree and the hair ladder she had made to pull herself high enough to put her hands on the top of the fence.

  The neighbors on this side used to complain about the twisted palm tree that hung partially over their fence. Sonny had meant to hire someone to trim it back, but Zel had never really encouraged it. She had always liked the way that tree leaned, and now she knew why.

  She could use it to help her over the fence.

  She climbed back up part way, then stretched along the break in the trunk until she reached the top of the fence. The wood was smooth here, the tops even, and she mentally thanked the landscaper who had convinced them not to build a picket fence, saying it would look bad.

  Who cared how it looked? A picket fence would have hurt to climb over. This one was just wide enough that she could sit on the top of it, and then lever herself into the neighbor’s yard.

  She sat on the top of the fence for just a moment, making sure she wouldn’t land on anyone important. Most of the debris had stayed in her yard, but some of the soot and the smoke had filtered over here, along with the tinier particles.

  One of Sonny’s swords had slammed into the side of the neighbor’s house, near the roof. And on the roof, dozens of injured faeries lay, their pink-and-purple dresses tattered, their skin blackened from the debris. Some of the green-and-yellow faeries flittered above them, as did some smaller creatures that Zel could barely see from this angle. Those had to be pixies.

  The numbers of injured faeries made her shudder. She was going to have to make this up to them somehow, some way. But that was a later concern. The current one was just finding Selda and figuring out what all this meant.

  Plus, they couldn’t lose track of Sonny. Zel wouldn’t let them.

  She was afraid that the burning hole behind her m
eant that they wouldn’t be able to recover Sonny, that the path to him was obliterated, and he was beyond their reach forever.

  She shook off the thought. One thing at a time. The first thing was to get to Selda.

  Zel looked down. The neighbor’s prized landscaping—some kind of flowering plant that managed to thrive in the dry climate—was at its peak. And she was going to have to step in it.

  Funny that it bothered her at all. The magical were injured and maybe dying around her, and her house was gone, and she was worried that she would piss off the neighbors by jumping in their flower bed. Showed just how difficult those neighbors were.

  Or how fragile she was. Or how fragile she had been, that she would let such pettiness seem important.

  She jumped down, a little sideways so she didn’t land on any plants and turn her ankle, but without a lot of regard to the smaller flowering blooms. She stepped onto the ridiculously thick grass, which probably used way too much water by city regulations (again, pettiness), and ran across it, feeling like she had somehow stepped back into the real world after standing in a nightmare of flames and smoke and destruction.

  She might believe it too, if only she couldn’t keep smelling burnt sugar and wood smoke, and hearing the flames spark out of that hole. The air felt close and thick here as well, in a way that she had never really experienced before.

  She reached the neighbor’s gate, and pushed it open, and stepped into yet a whole other world.

  The Greater World.

  There had been an explosion in a neighborhood, and just like they were supposed to, the police and fire departments had arrived. Red lights circled on top of the fire trucks, and hoses were scattered along the street. Police cars were parked sideways so no one could go in or out, their blue and red lights spinning.

  The neighbors who were home in the morning stood in their doorways, arms crossed, watching with tense expressions. A few were packing their cars, probably expecting some kind of evacuation order.

  Zel understood the mortals, maybe better than she understood the magical. Her neighbors were wondering if whatever had caused this had been something that would hurt their homes too. They were wondering if they should leave.