Hidden Charm

by Kristine Grayson

  Zel’s smile faded just a bit. It was one thing to accept that other people had a crush on your husband, another to be confronted with the sexual side of that crush in such a blatant way.

  “I’m worried about him,” the driver said. “And the worry has gotten worse.”

  Zel let out a small sigh. “Me, too,” she said.

  Then she reached across the back of the seat, extending her hand. “My name is Zel,” she said. “I’m…one of Sonny’s oldest and closest friends.”

  The hesitation was slight. The driver probably wouldn’t even have noticed it, but Henry did.

  “Payton Lake,” the driver said, extending his left arm around his torso so that he could take Zel’s hand and shake it. “So you’re the Zel he’s always talking about.”

  “I don’t think he knows another Zel.” Zel kept that warmth in her voice.

  “He thinks the world of you, sweetie,” Lake said.

  Those words felt like they were directed straight at Henry, even though they probably weren’t.

  “I think the world of him too,” Zel said.

  The car hit several more ruts in the road, these caused by construction, not by speed bumps. This neighborhood was obviously bad. Houses built hillside, then left to rot, some with boarded-up windows and overgrown and dried up lawns. But the sky had gotten lighter over here. The smoke was no longer visible. In fact, it wasn’t even obvious that part of the city was buried under a dark and menacing cloud.

  “Are you worried? I mean, is he caught up in that mess back there?” Lake asked Zel.

  “I’m worried,” she said. “He vanished this morning, and no one has seen him. Can I give you my cell phone number? If you see him, will you call me?”

  “Sweetie,” Lake said, “I have your number. I just need your permission to keep it.”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “Because I called for a lift.”

  Technically, she had used Henry’s number to call for the ride, but the effect was the same. He wasn’t going to turn away any information on Sonny.

  “Why don’t you input mine now, since we’re almost to Alessandro’s office?” Lake asked.

  Zel pulled out the phone, as if holding that kind of technology didn’t bother her at all. After receiving her go-ahead, Lake recited the numbers, and Zel inputted them with her thumb, showing a mastery of the technology that Henry found damn near miraculous.

  As Lake recited the number, he turned the car onto a side street that wound up a narrow hillside. The street ended in an ancient cul de sac. All of the houses here had been turned into offices, seemingly a long time ago, judging by the peeling white (ish) paint.

  Lake turned onto the cracked driveway leading to the center house. It was an adobe-style ranch, with arches over the entry, and dying plants out front. The house looked as unassuming as the rest of the houses on the cul de sac, maybe even more so.

  “You want me to wait?” Lake asked. “If you need to go somewhere else…?”

  Zel seemed to trust him, but Henry wasn’t in the mood to trust anyone he didn’t know right now. Especially given the level of comfort magic in this cab.

  “We’ll be fine,” Henry said before Zel could answer.

  She glanced at him sideways, a frown between her brows. He tilted his head just a little, hoping she understood why he was making this choice.

  “How much do we owe you?” Henry asked.

  “I already took care of it,” Zel said quietly.

  “How?” He hadn’t seen her take out any money.

  She waved that phone at him. But that was his phone. He didn’t keep any financial information on it, not that he had much. He didn’t use most of the modern conveniences, and only had one credit card because it was impossible to live in Los Angeles without one.

  “What?” he asked. “But…”

  “Through the app,” she said with an indulgent smile. Not that he understood entirely what she meant.

  Then she opened the door, and slid her legs out.

  “You’ll let me know when you find him?” Lake asked.

  “First thing,” Zel promised. She reached back, grabbed the sword, and then got all the way out of the car.

  Henry wanted to say something to Lake, warn him maybe not to mention this, or to keep to himself or to avoid the magic cloud growing out of that old neighborhood, but he didn’t. He wasn’t entirely sure if Lake was friend or foe, and Henry wasn’t sure if it mattered.

  They might not see him again.

  “Henry!” Zel leaned back into the car. “C’mon.”

  He wished she hadn’t said his name. He wished she hadn’t given Lake her real name, even though she hadn’t given all of it. Just her nickname. But still. That bothered him.

  He opened his door, and got out, nearly hitting his head on the door frame as he did so. He had forgotten that the damn car didn’t seem that tiny on the inside. He staggered outside, and realized that the air smelled fresh here—or, at least, as fresh as air in Los Angeles could smell.

  He slammed the door, rocking the little car, and Lake drove it around them, using the cul de sac as it was intended—as a designed turn-around.

  Zel watched him drive off. “Maybe we should have asked him to stay,” she said.

  “We don’t know him,” Henry said.

  “But he knew Sonny,” she said. “He sensed Sonny’s disappearance.”

  “Or he was involved in it,” Henry said.

  She shook her head slightly, as if she hadn’t even thought of that possibility. And then, she asked, in a lower voice, “Do you really think so?”

  “I’m not trusting anyone right now,” Henry said. “Not after what happened back at your house.”

  He almost said after what had happened to Selda, but it wasn’t just that. It was the smoke and the explosions and the nasty spell that had nearly taken out the faeries.

  Zel’s shoulders slumped. For the first time, it seemed like the sword she held was too heavy for her.

  “You don’t think he wanted to hurt us,” she said, almost as if she couldn’t believe the idea that anyone would want to hurt them, even after all that they had been through. “He was so—”

  “Nice?” Henry asked. “Yeah. He was. And that means nothing. And now he knows where we are. So let’s go in and get this done.”

  But Zel didn’t move. “He knew where Sonny’s office was. He knew Sonny’s real name.”

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “And he might have gotten that through magic, and not through an acquaintance. Did Sonny tell people his real first name?”

  “Some…people,” she said softly, and Henry looked at her. She shrugged. “Some people, especially here in LA, they don’t take a name like Sonny very seriously. So he used variations of his own name all the time.”

  Henry let out a small breath. That didn’t alter his mistrust entirely, but it did take out some of Lake’s suspicious conduct.

  “Well,” Henry said, not quite sure how to respond. “Let’s just go inside and see what we can do from here.”

  Zel glanced at the overgrown house. “I haven’t been here in a long time.”

  It didn’t look like anyone had, Henry noted but didn’t say. And that worried him. That worried him more than he could say.

  Chapter 26

  Zel clutched Sonny’s sword with both hands. It seemed even heavier now than it had a few moments ago. It had grown heavier as Henry expressed his concern about Payton Lake.

  Zel had trusted Payton Lake. He seemed nice enough, and she felt very comfortable in his car. Henry had gotten him to say that Sonny had made sure the car was full of comfort magic, so that explained the ease she felt.

  But Henry hadn’t liked it, and Henry had a lot more experience with magic—all kinds of magic—than she had. So maybe things had gone really wrong.

  She had no idea.

  And she also had had no idea how standing in front of Sonny’s office was going to make her feel.

  She felt sad and scared and uncertain. She hadn�
�t been to his office in a long, long, long time. She had no idea how long. But the last time she had been here, the paint on the building had looked fresh, and the shrubs were smaller. The lawn wasn’t dried out, and there were no cobwebs on one of the trees. It looked like no one had been here in quite a while.

  But that wasn’t possible, was it? Sonny had come to his office every day, and he would have told her if he had moved it. She would have seen it in their financials, right? Because she handled most of their real-world concerns, from the technology to the money.

  The sword felt heavy in her hands, but at least it hadn’t heated up. And despite what Henry had said about Payton Lake, the sword hadn’t reacted angrily toward him.

  Unless magical swords were susceptible to comfort magic, just like humans were. She doubted that though.

  Irritation flashed through her. There was so much she didn’t know. So much she hadn’t let herself know.

  In some ways, it was as if she was still stuck in that tower, unable to see more than the tops of the trees around her. Now, she was just beginning to figure out what she did and didn’t know.

  “Can you get into this place?” Henry asked.

  She nodded, hoping she was right. They didn’t use regular keys. Sonny had set up the doors to respond to her touch as well as his. And, if the touch didn’t work, she had a hunch the sword would.

  What Henry didn’t know—what most people didn’t know—was that she and Sonny owned every house on this cul de sac. Sonny had used them to house people he rescued from the Kingdoms.

  Maybe he had spelled the entire cul de sac to look abandoned so that no one would give it a second glance. But Sonny wasn’t the hide-in-plain sight type. He liked fixing up their house, and, she suspected, he liked fixing up the houses here.

  But she didn’t know that. She didn’t know so much.

  She glanced at the other five houses on the cul de sac. They were—from the outside, anyway—in as bad shape as the main house, the main office. And she couldn’t get rid of this sense of emptiness.

  If Sonny’s presence was anywhere—if Sonny’s stuff was anywhere—it would be in the main office.

  She steeled herself. She might not like what was in there. But she had already been through a lot today. She could handle more, because she had to handle more.

  She crossed the driveway, onto the broken sidewalk. Weeds had grown up through the cracks, and then died in the heat. They broke off as her feet hit them.

  Henry was just behind her. She didn’t know what she would have done without him. He was steady and strong, and he knew so much more about magic than she did. Even though he had made her nervous about things, like Payton Lake, Henry also reassured her that they would get through this, just through his steady presence.

  She glanced over her shoulder at him. His carefully combed hair from earlier had become wild and his mouth was set in a thin line. He clearly didn’t like what he was seeing either.

  She reached the steps up to the front porch. They were made of concrete. Sonny had told her years ago that he wanted swap them out, put some kind of modern steel porch leading into the house. He had wanted to get rid of the arches, make this office into a show place.

  But she couldn’t remember how long ago they had discussed that.

  The door was the same oak door that she had loved and Sonny had hated. He had said it reminded him of castle doors, and he wanted castles out of their lives.

  The oak door was scratched though, especially around the levered door handle and the locks, as if something had tried to scratch its way in.

  The adobe walls were actually dirty, years of grime layered over the paint. At least there were no spiderwebs here.

  The spiderwebs tinged something in her memory, something odd. She couldn’t remember seeing outdoor spiderwebs in Los Angeles. The webs had been a feature of the forest where she grew up—inside every nook and cranny of the tower—and again, in the canopy near the moat.

  Not here. Not in any place she and Sonny had owned together.

  Her heart was pounding. She glanced over her shoulder. Henry was crowded up against her. Usually that kind of stance from a man made her nervous, but she only felt protected with him that close.

  She shifted the sword to her left hand, and touched the door itself with her right. It didn’t feel like oak. It didn’t feel like anything at all.

  Instead, it rippled. For a moment, the image of the oak door, with the scratches and the damaged handle, shimmered, as if it was made of water.

  She brought her hand back, startled.

  “Did it hurt you?” Henry asked.

  “No,” she said. “It didn’t do anything.”

  He made a sound, almost like an acknowledgement, without actually saying a word.

  She made herself take a deep breath. Sonny always told her that remaining calm enabled magic to work better.

  She wasn’t calm, but she wasn’t as agitated as she had been.

  Maybe she was just numb.

  “Try putting your hand all the way through,” Henry said. “As deep as you can go, until you do feel something.”

  She exhaled slowly, then made herself take another deep breath. She actually counted—in for five, out for five, just like Sonny had taught her—before raising her right hand. She held it up, almost as if she was going to be sworn into a courtroom proceeding.

  Then she moved her right hand forward ever so slowly. It hit the door, and the doorway rippled again, swirling almost around her hand and wrist. But she felt nothing. She kept pushing forward, not straining, extending her hand farther and farther away, until it slammed into something metal.

  The shock jarred her. The metal was cool beneath her fingers. The sword moved just a little.

  She glanced down at it, startled, but the blade remained its normal silver. Nothing seemed unusual about the sword at all, except that it had moved a slight amount as her hand hit that metal.

  The door continued to ripple. Then it swirled like an image from a bad 1970s psychedelic movie. The image kept swirling and swirling, mixing brown and gray from the concrete and a bit of dying green from the nearby plants. The white scratches remained vertical for a long time, then they too started to swirl.

  “What are you feeling?” Henry asked. He didn’t sound calm, but he didn’t sound panicked either. Somewhere in between.

  “Um, some metal,” she said.

  “Around your arm? Where it’s rippling?” he asked.

  “I’m not feeling anything,” she said, and that was as clear a description as she could give. Because even she felt like she should have felt something. A suction, maybe, from the ripples, or a tickle as the door swirled around her, or maybe even some kind of pain from the material hitting her skin.

  Instead, it felt like she had extended her arm through normal air, and her hand had hit a metal door.

  With that thought, the swirling stopped. The door froze mid-swirl, and then there was an audible Pop! before the door vanished entirely, leaving a stylish gun-metal door with black trim and a square of occluded glass.

  The kind of door Sonny would have picked out, if he had been remodeling.

  Then another Pop! echoed around her. The wall to her left popped away, revealing new adobe, painted a lighter gray to offset that door.

  “Can you open the door?” Henry asked. Now he sounded a bit panicked, as if he was afraid of something.

  She pushed, and the door creaked open on its own.

  He crowded her inside, almost making her trip, and then slammed the door behind them.

  “What was that?” she asked, turning slightly.

  “That illusion has been protecting this place,” he said. “Your touch was making it vanish. We need the illusion to remain. Unless you have the ability to repair it…?”

  Of course she didn’t, and she felt a little insulted that he had asked in the way he had. He knew she didn’t have enough magic.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t repair it.”

 
She wiped her hand on her jeans, although she wasn’t entirely sure why, since her hand felt completely normal. The sword felt lighter again, although holding it tired her. She wanted to set it down, but she wouldn’t, not yet.

  Lights had come up inside, not very far. Emergency can lighting, enough to illuminate the area they were in, but not make everything really bright.

  The lights revealed shiny black floors with thick white fur rugs underneath white and black upholstered furniture. The couch looked like real leather, and had a white fur blanket folded over the back.

  In spite of herself, Zel smiled. She and Sonny had argued over this décor before, when he had wanted to put it in their house.

  I don’t want something that looks like a reject from The Sonny & Cher Show, Zel had said to him that day. She had almost been able to imagine Cher wearing that rug as a vest—and she should know: she had worked on Cher’s wigs for one season of that show, before she got hired away for some movie projects.

  “What is this?” Henry asked.

  “This is Sonny’s taste,” Zel said. “I recognize it.”

  She turned and looked behind her. There were no windows—or no obvious windows—on the walls.

  “Do you think I can raise the lights?” she asked. “I don’t think it’ll be visible outside.”

  “Not yet,” Henry said. “We need to make sure this place is safe.”

  She glanced at him. He was turning ever so slowly, as if he needed see everything. As if he could see everything. But the expression on his face said that he couldn’t see anything.

  But he wasn’t stepping farther inside, wasn’t looking to see if there were nearby windows, or someone down the hall.

  It took her a moment to realize he wasn’t really talking about physical safety. He was talking about magical safety.

  “Can you see if it’s safe without using magic?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t have that skill. Do you?”

  “No,” she said. She wasn’t even sure if Sonny did. She had no idea what he did to test for stray and evil magicks.

  Her eyes were adjusting to the dim lighting, but if she wanted to see details, she would either have to get close to whatever she was looking at, or she would have to bring up the lights somehow.