Hidden Charm

by Kristine Grayson

  She didn’t squirm away, but she didn’t hold him either. She was as thin as she looked. She felt even more fragile than she had when he and Polly brought her here, maybe because she was still vibrating with fear and upset and anger at herself.

  Maybe he should pull his arms away. Maybe he should lean back, and not touch her at all. Maybe she was one of those people who tolerated other people’s touch without saying a word, hoping they would back off.

  All he wanted to do was comfort her, and he didn’t feel like he was providing that. He was about to shift when she put her head on his shoulder, and sighed. Then she shuddered again.

  He tightened his arms around her and she leaned into the hug. Her arms came up and her hands lightly touched his back. Her breath hitched, but he didn’t feel tears warming his shirt.

  “We’ll figure out what we need to do, you and me,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”

  She nodded against his neck.

  She squeezed him real tight and let her hands drop. He did the same, moving out of the hug.

  She raised her head, her gaze meeting his. Her lashes were still wet, but her cheeks were dry.

  “Why you and me?” she asked. Then she frowned, seemingly at herself, and said, “I mean, why do you want to be involved in this?”

  Didn’t she feel it? That connection between them? Was he making it all up? (It was possible he was making it all up. He had been alone for so long. He was lonely and a little sad and was this how people imagined themselves into relationships?)

  But she deserved an answer, and he wanted to give her a truthful one, without scaring her off.

  “I’m in the middle of this now,” he said. “I want to see it through.”

  Her frown deepened. “At great cost to yourself,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “But I haven’t helped people for a long time. It’s time I stepped up.”

  “But this…” Her eyes closed for a second too long, then opened again. “Sonny might already be dead. All of those faeries, they’re injured or worse. You could die, helping me.”

  And who would care, really? he almost said. But that was a pitiful statement, and it was more about him than her. She didn’t need to know that, not right now.

  “I suppose,” he said. “Or I could actually make a difference.”

  That frown deepened even more. She had an epic frowning ability. “Those aren’t mutually exclusive,” she said.

  He shrugged again. He didn’t want to have this part of the conversation. He hoped that was becoming clear to her.

  “You need my help,” he said, and then decided as the words came out of his mouth that they were a bit too revealing. “Sonny needs my help. Let’s just move forward and worry about the whys later.”

  Her frown did not get any deeper, but she looked away, as if what he had said made her think.

  “Okay,” she said quietly. Then she reached out her hand—not toward him, but toward that sword. Her fingers caressed its surface, and it glowed warmly at her touch.

  He felt a surge of jealousy and smiled at himself. Jealous of a sword. He really had been lonely. He really was screwed up.

  He would help her, and then he would fade away. He didn’t belong in her life. But he was going to do what he could to make sure she actually had one.

  “How do we protect the sword?” she asked.

  “I have some ideas,” he said. “I’m just not sure how to implement them.”

  Her fingers kept running across the top of the sword, as if it gave her comfort. Maybe it did, with that glowing warmth that radiated off of it.

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “We find someone to stay with it. Someone who can protect it,” he said.

  “Who could do that?” she asked. “And how would we find them?”

  That was what he wasn’t sure of. He had been working it around and around in his head, and he still wasn’t sure.

  “I think I’m going to have to fetch someone,” he said, “but that means leaving you alone with the sword, and I don’t like that.”

  Her fingers rose off the sword for a moment, and her frown was back.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  He could lie to her and tell her that she wasn’t powerful enough, but he suspected she was. She just didn’t know it yet.

  But he needed to tell her the truth. She needed to think about what might really be going on.

  “You think whoever it is might come for the sword,” she said into his indecision.

  “Um.” He shook his head. Then sighed. Then looked at the sword, still glowing, even when she wasn’t touching it.

  Panacea had been right: Sonny really loved Zel. He loved her enough to order his sword to protect her, and the sword took pleasure in doing so.

  “All of this that happened,” he said slowly. Carefully. Not sure, even as he was in the middle of discussing it, that he should say anything. “It might not be about Sonny.”

  “Of course it’s about Sonny,” she said. “They went after him. They destroyed the house. They damaged his sword.”

  “He’s your husband,” Henry said. “That was your house. And I think the sword was just collateral damage.”

  Another epic frown. “But why not come after me directly then?” she asked. “I’m easy to find and I have no real power.”

  She had a lot of power. He didn’t know how to tell her that.

  “Maybe they didn’t want to destroy you physically,” he said, wishing he hadn’t brought this up. “Maybe they wanted to destroy you emotionally.”

  She looked away from him, clearly thinking about what he said.

  “By destroying my life,” she said. “By destroying someone I love.”

  The word “love” didn’t bother him as much as he thought it would.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Someone would really have to hate me to do that,” she said.

  Or, he thought but prevented himself from saying, someone would really have to have loved you and felt deeply, destructively, betrayed by you.

  He didn’t want to go into those waters. Crazy people often mistook rejection for something deeper. And she had been imprisoned by Aite, who hadn’t been the most rational person on the planet.

  “Yes,” he said quietly.

  “No one knows me well enough to hate me like that,” she said. The dismissal in her tone settled it. Even if that was an option, she didn’t want to believe in it. So they would operate as if it weren’t.

  “Then we need to look at everything Sonny has done,” Henry said. “And we need to use his things to find him.”

  “From his office,” Zel said.

  Henry nodded.

  “But we have to get there first,” she said. “We could take the sword with us.”

  “No,” he said. “It might be a beacon, and it might attract the wrong people.”

  The people who had taken Sonny. Who had destroyed the house. They might not be looking for the sword at the moment, but if they were using the sword as a beacon, they might look later, when everything had settled down.

  “If that’s true,” she said, “we don’t have much of a window to get this protected. We could take it back to the house.”

  The house is gone, he wanted to remind her, but that was just cruel.

  “I think that would be the wrong thing. They expect the sword at the house,” he said. “They don’t expect it here. This house is warded enough that with a cursory search, no one can find the magic in it.”

  Which means they can’t find you.

  But he didn’t say that either.

  “Cursory search,” she said. “But with something deeper…”

  “They’ll find it,” he said.

  “So,” she said, “I have to get back to my house—where my house was…” She winced again, then frowned at him. “…you know. I have to get back. And find someone to help us.”

  “I’m pretty sure someone would be looking for you there as well,” he sai
d. “I’m going to go. I can go there and back quickly. And no one will think anything about my presence.”

  He could see it in her face: she didn’t want to be alone. He didn’t want her to be, even though his home was probably the safest place she could be.

  If someone else who was magical had been stalking her, they had never seen her here. And if they tried to track her through magic, they wouldn’t be able to penetrate his wards—not without coming here and knowing how to find them.

  And since they didn’t know about him, they wouldn’t be coming here.

  He hoped.

  He could only hope that those snake-like things hadn’t been intelligent enough to report their location to whoever was in charge. He also hoped that no one or no spell had followed him when they brought Zel here.

  Safe. Maybe. With caveats.

  Zel was looking down at the sword, her fingers not quite touching it. She seemed reverent. Did she approach Sonny that way?

  Henry didn’t know. And he had to get himself together over it. He would have to go back to fake medieval times—not real ones, at least in the Greater World. He needed to go back to a time when knights pledged their loyalty to their ladies, married or not. He would help her, with nothing to gain.

  After all, people had helped him. A lot of people. From Tiana’s family so long ago to Selda now.

  “We have to make a decision,” Henry said quietly.

  Zel nodded, still not looking up. “I was thinking maybe I could leave it here. But I don’t dare. There’s something about it that’s different. And I need to protect it now, like it protected me.”

  Henry had never seen the sword before, so he had no idea what—if anything—was different. “Will you be able to leave it, even if I bring someone back to protect it?”

  One of those epic frowns furrowed her face. She waved her hand over the sword, as if she were trying to pull magic from it, and then she clenched that hand into a fist.

  She took a deep breath.

  He was glad she was considering this, but he also worried about the time it was taking. He wanted to get moving. The urgency he had been feeling all day was growing, and he wasn’t quite sure why.

  “Yes,” she said softly. Then she raised her head. “Yes. I’ll be able to leave the sword with a protector.”

  The word “protector” bothered him. It was specific and surprising at the same time.

  “Meaning what?” he asked.

  “Someone with the magic skills to keep the sword safe,” she said. Her dark eyes were guileless. He wasn’t sure if she knew what she was asking.

  He wasn’t sure he did either.

  But the sword had powerful magic, and he had to bring in someone who had enough magic to keep it safe, and not covet it.

  A much harder task than he wanted. But he would do it.

  For her.

  “All right,” he said before she could change her mind. “I’ll be right back.”

  And then he made himself disappear.

  Chapter 20

  Henry vanished, leaving Zel alone in this strange house.

  Sonny could vanish like that, and so could most of the magical. She couldn’t, and it hadn’t irritated her until now.

  She wanted to call Henry back, to tell him she had changed her mind. She didn’t want to be alone here.

  She didn’t want to be alone at all.

  She nervously ran her hand over her skull, feeling the soft feathers of new hair where she had run her hand over her head before. She concentrated, for just a moment, on growing a cap of hair. Short, stylish, 1930s Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night.

  Growing hair soothed Zel. It was an old habit, a touch of her only magic, making her feel like she could control something when everything else was out of control.

  She sank onto the threadbare carpet, and stared down at Sonny’s sword. From above it had looked like it always had, but at this angle, up closer, it looked as frail as she felt. The blade had never been this thin before, and the hilt seemed about a fraction of its former self.

  It had lost a lot of mass, somehow.

  She didn’t think that mass was inside her. She had a hunch the magic use and the attack had taken a lot of magic out of it.

  Or maybe the loss of Sonny had done so.

  She held her hand over the sword again, thinking about it. If she touched it, she might be able to feel him.

  But she was worried about doing so, particularly alone. She didn’t have the ability to go to him, and even if she did, she couldn’t rescue him. She needed to go with the help of someone (Henry?) and she needed some kind of plan.

  Still, though, it would be so nice to touch the sword. To feel just a bit of Sonny, his determination, his power, and his cheerfulness in the face of all odds. She had relied on that more than she wanted to contemplate over the years.

  But, what if she touched the sword, felt Sonny, and sapped the last of the sword’s power? Then they might never find Sonny. Or maybe the sword was his only connection to the Greater World right now, and the loss of that connection might destroy him.

  Anything was possible, with magic.

  Anything.

  She rose, wrapping her arms around her torso for comfort. She was hugging herself, something she hadn’t done in years, maybe not since she had been imprisoned in the tower.

  She used to do that there when she felt alone, but she didn’t feel alone here. Henry’s presence was everywhere.

  She just felt powerless.

  Usually that didn’t bother her—she always felt powerless, compared to Aite, compared to Sonny. This time, though, Zel needed power, and she didn’t know how to command it.

  She made herself focus on the living room. It was old and shabby and hadn’t been updated in decades. The carpet was thin and might have been another color before it had turned gray. The walls were covered with thin 1970s paneling, the sofa she had rested on was uncomfortable, and the nearby recliner didn’t match.

  The recliner looked lived in, as if Henry spent all of his time there. A television sat in one corner, but was covered with a thin layer of dust, unlike anything else in the room.

  A bookshelf dominated the wall behind it, and the books looked like they had been put away haphazardly.

  She made herself move away from the sword, rubbing her hands on her upper arms as if she was cold. She wasn’t, but she was uneasy. She felt like she was prying into Henry’s life.

  He had been fantastic. He had helped her more than she wanted to contemplate. And he had done so for no reason she could understand.

  His home told her that he was lonely. He didn’t even have a familiar, which was unusual. Most of the magical used familiars to keep their magic alive.

  But he didn’t have one, and Sonny didn’t have one, and Zel had never had one. They were all unusual in that. Or maybe they had a different kind of magic, one that relied on something other than familiar-magic.

  She peered at the books. Most of them were fiction, by authors she was unfamiliar with. None of them had any fantastic elements. All of them seemed to be mysteries or thrillers, and mixed in with them was a broad swath of narrative nonfiction, mostly focused on history.

  Those books she recognized. She even had a few of them in her house.

  She had had a few of them in her house.

  The tears threatened, and she made herself look away.

  The house. Sonny. The sword. Everything, gone or nearly so.

  The enormity frightened her.

  And she had nearly died.

  Her arms wrapped tighter. She moved away from the shelf, into the kitchen.

  It was also old, with an electric stove in a shade of green that hadn’t been made since the 1970s. The refrigerator was newer, and actually looked like it had been used. If she opened it, she might find food inside.

  But somehow that seemed too invasive.

  Just like going down the hall, and looking at the other rooms, would be invasive as well.

  She went bac
k into the living room, and sat down near the sword.

  “Just you and me,” she said to it. They were all that remained of her old life, at least at the moment.

  She hoped there would be more.

  If she found Sonny—if she rescued Sonny—that would be enough.

  She knew it would.

  She had survived the loss of her home before. Not that the tower had been a home, in the warm sense of the world.

  But it had been the place she lived, the place she had spent all of her time, until she had abruptly left it.

  This time her home, a place she had loved, had abruptly left her.

  She leaned against the couch, felt the rough nubs of the weave against her cheek, and waited.

  Henry would be back soon.

  And then they could figure all of this out.

  She hoped.

  Because there really was no other choice.

  Chapter 21

  The smoking crater in the middle of a Los Angeles neighborhood was hard to miss. Henry eased himself down into the neighbor’s yard, near the koi pond that had saved his life.

  The pond looked smaller than he remembered. He had been thinking with his Froggy self, not his actual one.

  The entire neighborhood smelled of burning sugar, rancid grape soda, and brimstone, three scents he never thought would go together.

  He hadn’t hovered over the neighborhood itself, because he didn’t want to get into the whipping winds that were coming off of that crater. As he had passed close to it, though, it looked deep. So deep that it seemed to go all the way down to the Earth’s core.

  He knew it probably didn’t. It probably led somewhere magical, somewhere that was connected to the Kingdoms. But that was for someone else to figure out.

  He just needed a person to help him, to guard the sword.

  He wasn’t sure who, though.

  Normally, he would have asked Polly, since she had been so helpful with Zel, but something told him that Polly was the wrong person to ask. She had her own magical opinions and she didn’t take direction well.

  She might very well remove the sword from Henry’s house and take it somewhere “safe,” somewhere he and Zel couldn’t find it. Or she might try to come with them, wielding the sword, which was also not a good option.