City of Villains

by Estelle Laure

  House of Fantasia

  I double-check the phone again, hear laughter coming from inside. This cannot be it. This can’t be where Bella lives. This is a house of fantasy, but even more than that, it has personal significance to me. In fact, if this place didn’t exist, I wouldn’t exist. Before the Fall, this is where people would come to float, to listen to music that would elevate them. Before the Fall, this was party central.

  I knock at the door, mostly sure I have the wrong place. But then Bella answers. She’s in a matching pink hoodie and sweat pants. This is the first time I’ve seen her actually approaching disheveled.

  “What are you doing here?” she says. “We’re done, Mary. Might as well go have some fun tonight or whatever you do, because tomorrow we’re both getting the ax. If you don’t mind, I’m not in the mood for any more failure right now. Have a good night.”

  She tries to close the door but I block it with my foot.

  “I need to talk to you. I have to tell you—”

  A woman sidles up behind Bella, looking at her curiously. She is in satin and feathers and has jewels in her hat, which is turban-style and gold. She also looks identical to Bella in all but stature. Where Bella is thin, this woman is curvaceous. Where Bella is bony, this woman is luscious. Where Bella is prim, this woman is anything but. She’s a vision in a blue satin kimono, feather boa resting around her neck. There is no question whatsoever that this woman is related to Bella, and yet it’s unbelievable.

  I smirk so heavily I’m sure my lips are going to come right off.

  “Bella, my darling,” she says, “what have we here?”

  “Hello, ma’am,” I say. “I’m Mary Elizabeth, Bella’s intern. On the task force.”

  “Oh, sure,” the woman says, smiling widely. “I’m Bella’s mother, the one and only Fantasia. Well, Fantasia the Fourth, of course, so I’m not the Fantasia from the sign on the door. But for now I’m the only one still alive and I think I’m too old to be having any more kids, so I’m probably also Fantasia the Last.” She lets out a belly laugh while I stare pointedly at Bella.

  “I know who you are, ma’am.” I look up at the sign again. “My parents met here.”

  “Oh, that’s magical! What are their names?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “I remember everyone,” she says. “That’s my job.”

  I almost never say their names out loud. It hurts far too much.

  “Leah and Aaron Heart.”

  This information usually produces one of two results: horror if they’ve heard the story, or blankness if they haven’t. Fantasia exhibits neither. Rather, she draws me into a soft hug. “Oh, baby, of course I remember them, and I heard what happened. Your sister, too. They were magical, wonderful people and I’m sorry.” She lets me go and takes me by the shoulders. “Didn’t even die in the Fall. That’s no way for Legacy to go. A hate crime like that.”

  I’m so distracted by her I almost forget what I came for, that I’ve decided to tell Bella everything I know. I want to ask Fantasia about everything she can tell me about my parents. I want to know if she remembers where they sat, what they drank, what their wishes and fantasies were and what she granted them. Perhaps it was she who granted them attraction and the quiet to get to know each other.

  Fantasia sweeps me farther into the house. The ceilings drip with gold-and-crystal chandeliers. The furniture is covered in all manner of good-feeling fabric, silks and satins and leather. Trinkets are everywhere; painted plates from far-off isles, small figurines of women, snow globes. While this house is run-down, it is still grand, and one room appears to lead into the next without end. We stop at the staircase, which reaches upward more than twenty feet.

  Fantasia goes toward the sound of the TV. “I’m going to tell my sister, Stella, to come meet you. We’ve been asking Bella to bring you over for a nice meal so we could meet you, but sometimes I think Bella’s ashamed of us.”

  “I’m not ashamed, Mama. I just don’t like mixing work and home.”

  “I’m sure,” Fantasia says.

  “You said you lived in a boardinghouse.”

  “This is a boardinghouse,” she insists. “Now.”

  “Why would you lie to me?” I sputter.

  There’s a story in this, but I don’t have time to delve into it any deeper, because Fantasia and Stella are back. Stella is significantly younger and thinner than Fantasia, but they are equally beautiful and stylish, and they wrap me in a three-way hug.

  “How’s Bella at work?” Stella asks. “Tell us everything. Is she annoying? Uptight? Obsessed with the rules?”

  “She’s amazing, actually,” I say. “She’s smart and funny and nice, too. It’s the worst.”

  Fantasia beams. Stella pats Bella’s cheek. “That’s our baby,” Fantasia says. Then they both exit, conspiring about getting us to eat a good dinner.

  Bella looks after them with a small smile and shakes her head. “I’m not ashamed of them,” she says. “But I do like to keep some things private. They can be a little much. It’s like the party ended but they didn’t get the memo.”

  At the word party it all comes back to me. James, how he did that thing with his thumb and made me what…pass out? I am so angry, but if I’m totally honest with myself, I just want my boyfriend back. No. He’s more than that. I want my James back, the person who is always there for me, and I want to show him I can be there for him, too. The problem is I don’t know if he’s even still there. He seemed so different, unhinged in a way I’ve never seen before, with those eyes, eyes like the ones in the mirror staring back at me.

  That was my face, but those were not my eyes.

  “Hey, Mary,” Bella says. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  “Are you sure? You’re crying.”

  “Oh, fairy dust!” I swipe at my cheek. “I don’t know what to do. Everything is terrible.” In spite of all my efforts to keep myself together, I am finally unable to stop the current of stress and sadness. I have made so many missteps in the last week and now I’m alone. I slump onto the stairs and let myself sob into my own hands. I feel Bella scoot in next to me, rub my back in soft circles. I cry for so long and so hard it seems like my tears could drown everyone in this house.

  “You can talk to me,” Bella says, when the tears have subsided. “You can trust me.”

  I think about Bella’s unwavering goodness. My friends aren’t like that. I’m not like that. James and Ursula have both fallen off some invisible edge, and I feel myself approaching it even though I don’t even know what it is. Yes, I promised them both I would keep secrets, but maybe we need someone who is plain-old good in our corner.

  Or maybe I just need Bella.

  I take a deep breath to shut out the voice that tells me I’m about to irreversibly betray James.

  “I’m going to tell you something that’s going to seem completely outrageous at first.”

  “Okay.” I can tell Bella is interested, but she’s also wary, looking at me searchingly as though for clues.

  “I saw Ursula.”

  “You what?” Bella stands and puts her hands on her hips.

  “She was in Miracle Lake night before last.”

  “I beg your pardon. Miracle…well, that’s impossible!” When I don’t tell her I’m kidding, she waves her hand at me. “Go on. Tell me everything and don’t leave anything out.” She stops and points at me. “Anything, Mary Elizabeth.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I say. “But you need to let me talk. Just listen.”

  She leans against the banister. “Fine.”

  I hesitate but push the words past my resistance. “Well, for starters, there’s this blue light. James has it. It’s…well, I think it’s magic. And I think I got some of it.”

  She’s just watching me now, listening.

  “I levitated.”

  I wait for her to laugh, but she only draws her eyebrows together.

  “I know how ridiculous it sounds,”
I say, “but Gia and all her friends saw. I also…um…went through the mirror at Wonderland and wound up in this office with jail cells. I saw Mally in one of them. She has horns.” It’s getting easier and easier to say all the things that have been happening. They sound crazy, but they are true and it feels good to tell the truth. “And Ursula. She’s the sea monster everyone has been talking about, and she’s through the mirror, too. She doesn’t have legs anymore. I mean, she can have them, but she likes her octopus legs better I think. I didn’t know until I saw her come out of Miracle Lake, which is obviously not a thing people can do, but nothing makes any sense anyway. And now James.” This is the part that really stings and I shore up against any more tears. “He knocked me out with the blue light. He doesn’t trust me because I’m a cop. He knows where Ursula and Mally are. He knows because the blue light told him. And now I know, too, only I don’t, not really, and I can’t get back. I broke the mirror and I don’t know what the rules are, if that means I can never—”

  “Okay,” Bella says. “Let me think.”

  “You believe me?”

  She nods. “Of course. Why would you lie about this? Unless you’re actually suffering from some sort of mental disorder—”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, then…” She sits down next to me again. “I suppose we need to think.”

  “Bella,” I say, “thank you.”

  “Yeah, sure. Of course.” She takes a minute, head in her palm, before she pops up and gets her bag. “Come on,” she says.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Dining room table. My mom and Stella are going to feed us, and we’re going to figure out what to do. We have to present our findings to the chief tomorrow and we are not going to tell her any of this.” She glances at me. “And it’s in her best interest for magic to stay good and dead. She will shake off anything we have to say about that, especially with no proof. Unless…” She leans back. “Can you maybe levitate on command?”

  “No, Bella, I cannot levitate on command.”

  She sighs as though disappointed in me. “Well, all right, then. Let’s get to work.”

  I hold my elbows tight and follow her shakily into the dining room as she pulls out her notebook and Ursula’s phone. She looks up at me. “Everything is going to be okay. There’s a pattern here. We can find your friends and fix this, I know we can. There’s a solution. We just have to find it.”

  And even though everything has been so awful and getting worse by turns, when I see Bella settle into the table and begin thumbing through worn pages, I believe she’s right.

  BELLA AND I WORK INTO THE NIGHT, AND I eventually call Gia to let her know I won’t be coming home. We go through everything in Ursula’s phone, including e-mail from a secret address, and we discover through a series of texts that Caleb Rothco isn’t like other regular #LegacyLoyalty followers. He thinks violence is the only way to get Narrows out of the Scar, that we need to split off and start our own state. By the end of the night, we aren’t any closer, but we’ve eliminated him as being involved. He did have a secret to protect, but he wouldn’t hurt a Scar-loving Legacy. That much is clear. We finally come to the conclusion that we’re looking for someone with money, based on what I saw when I went through the mirror. It’s someone or an organization that can afford a setup like that, with glass cages and fancy torture chairs and beeping equipment. It could be anyone from the Narrows, but at least we have an inkling what we’re looking for.

  My phone has no messages. Nothing from James. Nothing from Ursula. And although I ache over them both, I’m too exhausted to feel much of anything when I fall asleep in one of the guest beds upstairs in a cloud of sumptuous sheets and blankets.

  I dream of blue.

  When we get to the station the next morning, we commandeer one of the rooms and shut ourselves inside. We plan to make a mind map of the things we can share with the chief and show it to her this afternoon, backed with as much evidence as we can muster. We won’t mention magic, of course, but we’ll tell her as much of the rest of it as possible.

  There’s one window looking out into a beige hallway, but the station feels all but empty except for a few people typing up reports on computers, so we feel like we have privacy even as the day begins and cops dribble in. We have coffee and bear claws, and I feel semi-normal for the first time in days, or at least busy enough to pretend to feel normal.

  Now, without saying anything, Bella hurries to the supply room like she’s on rails and comes back with a huge piece of butcher paper, pins, Sharpies. She assigns me to research and print out pictures, then pin them to the board, then she makes lines between the different things so we can show the chief how they’re connected.

  Bella makes a square around a giant question mark right in the center of the paper. She motions to me without looking up, as though she doesn’t want to distract herself by making eye contact. “So we’ve got Wonderland, right?”

  “We have Ursula and the lake,” I offer.

  “But we can’t say that. We have to just say someone claims to have seen Ursula there. We can say we know Ursula isn’t officially ours but since we know they both disappeared from Wonderland…”

  “We can probably make a decent case for at least mentioning the sighting.”

  “Now you’re cooking with fire.”

  I look from point to point, all the little things we have here on the paper, but also what I’ve seen with my own eyes, the things we can’t talk to the chief about, at least not yet. A tremble of excitement surges through me. “Bella.”

  “Yeah?” She looks up, her hair a disheveled halo.

  “My parents used to have this theory. We have these Legacy markings, right? But what if they aren’t just random markings? What if they act like seeds and all they need is something to make them grow?” I spoke truth last night and it felt right. It felt just like this. “What if somebody figured out how to bring magic back? But what if something went wrong? When I was on the other side of the mirror, I saw this chair and there were notations, like someone was experimenting. What if Ursula’s tentacles are some kind of…mutation? Mally had horns. I mean, what if they figured it out, but they didn’t quite get it right?”

  Bella is staring at me with growing alarm.

  “Bella, this could be really, really bad. Like, catastrophically bad. What if someone tried to bring magic back, but brought back the wrong kind?”

  Bella makes a strangled sound, then clears it from her throat. “I hope not, Mary Elizabeth. I hope you’re very wrong.”

  “Helloooo, lovely ladies!” Tony helps himself to a bear claw and looks over my shoulder.

  “Good morning, Tony,” Bella says.

  “What are we doing today? I got stuck uptown with some tycoon and his love triangle. Bo-ring! He did have a dinosaur robot in his Rolls, though. Should have seen it. He had a special skylight made just so it could fit. These people are eccentric!”

  Bella stands to her full height as Tony grabs a chair and flips it backward, installing himself at the table, running his eyes over the map.

  “It’s awfully nice to see you, Tony, but we’re in the middle of something.” Bella opens the door. “Something private?”

  “Love the art project.” He points to the board. “Are you going to add some glitter glue, because I think that would really give the whole thing a je ne sais quoi.” He snickers, then reads our expressions. “Oh, come on. I’m just joshin’ ya. I’m sure this is totally relevant to solving your case.”

  Bella sighs loudly and crosses her arms.

  “Oh.” He points to the left side. “Is this that monster thing?”

  “Monster thing?”

  “You know…all the reports of scary monsters running around?”

  We both eye him stonily.

  “Because if it is, I would really suggest not insinuating that’s real. Chief is super agitated about riling up the fogies in the Scar with talk of magic being back, and a monster that can roam the city is defi
nitely a sign of magic. You were there, Bella. You heard her.”

  I look to Bella for confirmation and she nods slightly.

  “There was a meeting,” she says. “She says between the Magicalists and the Naturalists we could have another riot on our hands if we aren’t careful. Anyway,” she says to Tony, “A, this is none of your business because it’s not your case, and B, we don’t need you overseeing our methods. We’re just taking everything into consideration.” She glances at me. “And of course the lake monster isn’t real. You know, I don’t even know why I’m explaining myself to you. Why don’t you get up off your behind and go do your own work?”

  “Well, looky who’s come into her own.” He slides out of his chair. “I’ll give you this advice for free. You should leave fairy tales out of policing. Monarch is desperate for a diversion, and it’s so dusty in the Scar all it takes is one spark for the whole thing to explode. Don’t get taken in by some idiot who’s decent at Photoshop. That picture that’s circulating is a total fake.”

  “Picture? You mean of the suction cup markings?” I say.

  “No.” He pulls over the laptop sitting off to the side and types into the search bar. “You must have been in a hole over the weekend. This is all over the tabloids.” He’s right. There on the screen is a picture of Ursula from behind, all curves and legs…eight of them. “Whoever did this has an imagination I can’t argue with, though. She’s a babe. Wish you could see her up close.”

  I want to tell him she’s in high school, but Bella puts a hand on my wrist, her face betraying nothing.

  “Right,” Bella says. “You’re so right, Tony. What were we thinking?” She laughs, and it’s so fake it rings its lie through the room.

  “I don’t know sometimes. That’s what I’m here for. All right, thanks for the snack. I’ll be on my way.” He pauses. “Unless you girls need anything else?”

  “I think we’re good, thanks.” Bella’s voice drips with sarcasm.