by Gina LaManna
We waited for several minutes then, until the shadow of a woman’s figure appeared in the doorway, and a soft voice spoke to the man. “All is well. You have two beautiful girls, my King. Would you like to come meet your daughters?”
The king spoke in a tight voice. “And my wife?”
The woman’s voice filled with sadness. “You’d better come quickly.”
The king disappeared inside the igloo.
My father took this moment to squeeze my hand. Not a soul—human or otherwise—paid the slightest bit of attention to us. We weren’t here in any capacity except to watch and learn. We couldn’t interfere in any way, change any course of history—we couldn’t even speak aloud. All we had was the warmth of our interlocked hands.
I started as the narrator’s voice returned. “Since the days of the first Frost King, all his descendants have borne a set of twin girls. One of them has tendencies toward ice, while the other rules with fire—”
A crackle sounded, like static from a cassette player with a rough patch of tape. I’d never heard anything like it from The Storybook before. The Author never stumbled, never misspoke, and he certainly didn’t stop once he’d begun a piece of history.
I tried to whisper to my father, but my voice didn’t work. He glanced at me too, a ray of confusion in his eyes mixed with intense curiosity. He’d never seen this before, either.
We waited, but the images before us stalled. The cries of the babies hung in the air, as if a movie had been paused or the Wi-Fi needed to buffer. The narrator’s voice crackled a few more times as he tried to speak.
“W-w-w-e-e…” The Author’s voice faded. “W-w-w-w-w-”
The “w” repeated on a loop, the stillness of a world where time had stalled to a stop a new level of terrifying. What if we were stuck here? Unable to speak, unable to move forward or backward, unable to return?
Then suddenly, my ribs constricted more painfully than before. Instead of easing out of the story normally, a sensation similar to that of waking from a pleasant dream, I was ripped from the pages with a violent tug.
My skin ached as if someone had been running sandpaper over my limbs. I tried to scream, but my voice shrank into an abyss of nothingness, and then the sandpaper turned into needles and my head felt squeezed, my mind going blacker and blacker until I couldn’t think, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t breathe, and…
“Darling? I have your cake ready. My oh my, you two were sure wrapped up in that book.” My mother’s voice cut through the pain in my skull. “Are you ready to come eat? I called you about ten times. Just like the olden days, I can’t tear you two away from your little projects.”
My dad shook his head, glancing at me out of the side of his eye with an expression that said: Please don’t tell mom what we just did, or she’ll kill me.
I gave my dad a subtle nod. “I’m going to wash up, Mom, and I’ll be right down.”
“I’m going to wash up too, Amalia,” my dad mumbled incoherently. He trailed off, whispering to himself as he stared at the blank page, transfixed at the nothingness before him.
“You are two peas in a pod, you know that?” My mom rolled her eyes at us; I was staring at the same blank page. “Be down in five minutes now, or I’m eating all the Twinkies by myself.”
When my mom left the room, I met my dad’s stare. “What was that?”
He gave a bewildered shake of his head. “I have no idea. The story…it just shorted out. I’ve never seen that, never heard of it happening before.”
“It never hurts like that,” I said. “Usually The Storybook releases us from its pages gently.”
“We were ripped right out,” my dad said slowly. “Almost like somebody didn’t want us to hear what The Author had to say.”
We lapsed into silence, the mystery too big to ponder while there were Twinkies waiting downstairs.
“Do you have plans tonight?” My father asked as my mother banged some pots and pans extra loudly in the kitchen downstairs. “I have someone you need to meet.”
Chapter 8
“How are you coping, dear?” My mother, a blonde, peppy woman with a petite frame and a wardrobe filled with bright colors, bustled between the dining room and the kitchen on the first floor of our home. Originally, it had been a modest rambler, and then it’d expanded with each of my siblings.
Both of those siblings had since moved away, but the extra-large house remained. My parents had built both up and out, creating a home that resembled Noah’s Ark balanced on a pencil.
Our home was barely up to the regulatory codes set by MAGIC, Inc. Regulations stated that although magic may be used to build a house, the house must be built in a way that makes sense according to physics.
We weren’t allowed to use invisibility or masking spells to cover the appearance of our house. It had to be built in compliance with normal human standards to prevent questions when the spell inevitably malfunctioned.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa was one of our most famous examples; though it had been built by magic, it just tickled the edges of regulations. Theoretically, that thing should’ve fallen over years ago, but thanks to a bit of magical maintenance it had become a tourist attraction instead.
“Coping with what?” I sat on one side of the dining room table as my mother waved her hand and floated out plate after plate of food she’d whipped up in the kitchen. My father took the head of the table across from my mother, and there was one more place setting. “Is Grandmother coming?”
My father blinked and pretended to look indifferent, but I wasn’t fooled. Neither of us particularly wanted my grandmother’s appearance at dinner.
“Of course she is,” my mother trilled. “Just coming back from the club. Ah, here she is—hello, Mother!”
My grandmother entered the room with her long neck tilted upward, her nose pointed slightly higher than it needed to be, and her steps soft and regal as if every step she took deserved to be upon a red carpet. Her head was topped with a tight gray bun of hair swept back from her face, not a strand out of place, and as she raised a hand in a dainty wave at my mother, her manicured nails flashed with the effort.
“I need a glass of wine, darling,” my grandmother said. “Quickly. The club was abhorrent today like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Did someone show up with a piece of lint on their clothes?” I muttered under my breath to my father in an exaggerated voice, and he gave the smallest snort of laughter.
Then my mother gave him a stare that sent his snort right back where it came from, and he straightened his face and greeted Andalina Erlandson, the Queen of MAGIC’s most prestigious country club. “Good afternoon, Mother.”
Andalina frowned at the name, preferring to be called Ms. Erlandson by everyone—even her son-in-law. Before she could comment, however, my mother had shoved a glass of wine and an aspirin into her hands.
“Here you are, Mother,” my mom said, depositing Andalina in the seat across the table from me. My mother was an expert at maintaining the relationship between her husband and her mother, though it’d taken years of practice. “One second and we’ll eat.”
“Do you have a cake, Amalia?” she asked in a clipped tone. “Or are we eating those disgusting Twinkies?”
My father cleared his throat and crossed his arms. “My wife made a wonderful cake. Unfortunately, the recipe was wrong.”
“So you’re having Twinkies.”
My father glanced at me, but I was busy hiding a laugh in the miniscule glass of wine my mother had poured for me. I’d need a lot more of it to endure a birthday dinner with my grandmother.
Andalina harrumphed at the idea that a Twinkie would ever cross her plate, and I caught a glimpse of my mother’s blush.
“My wife cooked you a wonderful dinner,” my dad said mildly. “If you don’t want a Twinkie, that just means more for the birthday girl.”
My whimsical, adventurous father was the polar opposite of my grandmother, who stood as the epitome of class, grace, and fi
nesse. Luckily, I took after my father. Unluckily, this made my grandmother’s most common expression at me one of disappointment accompanied by a slow shake of her head.
“Ainsley doesn’t need another Twinkie,” my grandmother said, peering over my figure. “How old are you now, twenty-three? Are we expecting another guest for dinner?”
She looked pointedly at the empty area next to me, as if expecting a boyfriend to just poof right out of thin air. Since I didn’t happen to know any genies up for wish granting at the moment, I was out of luck.
“I probably don’t need a Twinkie,” I said. “Singular. More than likely, I need two. You know, since I don’t have a boyfriend, I should probably stress eat his portion.”
“Dinner is served!” My mother spoke in an odd sense of falsetto, lowering her hands and crashing at least ten dishes of green beans, potatoes, and chicken onto the table at once.
A bit of cranberry sauce formed a little river down the center of the table, which my dad made discreetly disappear with a mutter and a wave of his hand underneath the table.
“Eat!” my mother instructed.
My grandmother went first, loading up her plate with exactly one green bean, which she patted down with a napkin in case any hint of olive oil had touched it. She didn’t approve of fat. She shook her head as my father passed her the salt. “I don’t want to bloat, Frank,” she snapped.
My mother’s hand gripped her fork so tightly it twisted into a pretzel.
My grandmother noticed, then sniffed and turned back to my father. “Thank you anyway, Frank.”
I scooped up the salt, poured half the bottle onto my green beans, then dug in, much to my grandmother’s dismay. We managed a civil dinner until the dessert came out, and then the sniffing from my grandmother started again as the Twinkies appeared on a platter.
Twenty-three candles decorated the tops of them, the flames loudly singing an off-key rendition of Happy Birthday that didn’t make much sense. My mom must have picked them up from the bargain bin again.
I blew out the candles when their song wheezed to a clumsy stop.
“You’re supposed to leave one glowing,” my grandmother said. “One boyfriend.”
“I should have left a few glowing then,” I said. “Start with five boyfriends and narrow it down.”
“Ainsley,” my mother said tensely. “Can I cut you a piece of cake?”
I nodded, mostly to give my mother something to do. She dove into a Twinkie with a knife and sawed it until the stuffing oozed over the plate and the crumbly outsides were smashed in a lump.
“Thanks Mom,” I said, when she deposited the mess in front of me. “Yum.”
“I heard a rumor at the club today,” my grandmother said. “About you, Miss Ainsley.”
“Is that right?” I poked at my mother’s demolition project, debating where to start. “Which rumor?”
My grandmother’s eyes blazed at the idea that my name might be tied up in more than one rumor at a time. “The crime scene.”
I blinked and went for it, taking a bite from the center of the Twinkie mess. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Who said that?”
“You know what I’m talking about,” she said. “The castle in the suburbs.”
“Why were you at a crime scene, Ainsley?” My mother forked an entire Twinkie and took a bite out of it. “I thought you hadn’t been reassigned yet. Have you heard from Lily, by the way? She seemed so sweet from all you’ve said.”
“I imagine she’s good,” I said. “Her aunts let me know they reached The Isle. I have no doubt she’ll be happy there. It’s where she belongs.”
“Are you going to visit her?” my father asked with excitement. “You can take Blimpy! It’ll be good for him to stretch his wings.”
I shrugged, not all that thrilled by the idea of taking my father’s invention for a ride. Blimpy was a big old boat that was made to fly under the cover of darkness, and it worked most of the time. “I don’t know. I suppose it depends on how long it is before they reassign me to another case.”
“You’re unemployed right now, and you’re still at a crime scene?” My grandmother shook her head. Then she looked at Frank, like it was all his fault. “Can’t you control your daughter?”
“She’s curious,” Frank said. “And I’ve taught her how to take care of herself. She’ll be fine, won’t you, pumpkin?”
I nodded. “I’m careful,” I said, purposely omitting the bout of careless flying that’d landed me on the asphalt just the night before. “What were these rumors saying?”
My grandmother’s shoulders stiffened. “That you’re wrapped up in the Frost Clan.”
My mother sat bolt upright. “The Frost Clan? Ainsley…”
I looked in bewilderment between them. “I’m not!”
“You don’t want to be mingling with those people,” my grandmother said. “They’re brutes up there.”
“They’re not brutes,” my father broke into the conversation. “I met the previous Frost King and many of his people. They’re tough because they have to be, but brutes? No.”
“Either way, Ainsley’s name shouldn’t be mixed up in these rumors,” my grandmother said. “The club was alight with news over you, and guess who was the last person to know about it? Me! Being informed of news about my own granddaughter—can you imagine the embarrassment?”
“Sorry, Grandmother,” I said. “Next time I’ll let you know when I plan to break the rules.”
“Ainsley,” my mother said. “More Twinkies?”
I snagged one before my mother could butcher it into nothingness.
“They say Dimitrius is in town…without permission,” my grandmother said in a hushed voice. Apparently now that she’d started the gossip train, she didn’t want it to stop. “They say he brought his sister with him.”
I glanced at my father, the incident from The Storybook fresh in my mind. “His sister?”
“The Ice Princess. I wonder if this is the prophecy coming true,” my grandmother said, her eyes shining as she broke the biggest news of all. “The Frost King prophecy. There’s been speculation for ages.”
“Enough,” my mom said. “Mother, you simply cannot tell Ainsley to avoid these rumors and then go feeding nonsense into her head.”
“What prophecy?” I leaned in closer toward my grandmother. “Do you know what the prophecy says?”
“Nobody does,” my grandmother said in a polite whisper she’d developed from years of passing gossip across the club. “That’s why there’s all the speculation. Even if the prophecy is coming true, how will we know? The contents are secret.”
I side-eyed my father. “Have you heard of this prophecy?”
My father cleared his throat, pinned to his chair by my mother’s murderous gaze. “No,” he said with a botched cough. “Not really.”
That was a big fat lie if I’d ever heard one, but I didn’t press him. He and I had plans that night, and I had a feeling this mystery contact might know a thing or two about the prophecy.
“Thank you for dinner,” my grandmother said suddenly, looking down at her empty plate. “I’m stuffed to the brim.”
“Hopefully you don’t have to unbutton your pants after that single green bean,” I said. “It was a long one.”
“Since you’re unemployed, Ainsley, I imagine you’re looking for the next step in your career path.” My grandmother turned her hawk-like eyes on me. “I would be pleased to secure you a job at the finishing school. We have an internship program where you learn alongside the students for three months, and then you get to help with the children. Should I apply for you? I can’t guarantee you’ll be accepted with your attitude.”
My grandmother owned and ran one of the largest schools for magical children in the world—well, magical girls. It was called The Finishing School for Witchlings, and it not only taught young witches how to use their powers, but also how to powder their noses, set the table, and hook a man for marriage. Luckily, my mother hadn’
t shackled me there for an education. Unluckily, my grandmother was still trying to get me in the door.
“Really, it’s okay,” I said. “Millie’s putting my name in at the library for a temporary position.”
“Oh, how wonderful!” My mother clapped her hands. “Libraries probably have benefits, and normal working hours. It’s such a nice, clean job, Ainsley. Can you imagine how relaxed you’d be if you worked at the library?”
My grandmother couldn’t argue this time because any job, in her mind, was better than being a Guardian. “I like my job, Mom.”
“Just don’t discount a career change!” my mother said as I helped clear the table. “Keep an open mind.”
“Speaking of open minds,” my dad whispered as he snagged me aside while my mother set a dishwashing spell to work. “I was going to give you the same advice tonight. Meet me at eleven p.m. in the treehouse. Remember, you must keep an open mind. The person we’re meeting is…” He hesitated, shifting uncomfortably. “She’s something else.”
Chapter 9
I hadn’t snuck out of my childhood bedroom window for years.
After dinner, I’d stuck around for a cappuccino at my mom’s insistence. By the time we’d wrapped up our post-dinner conversation, it was too late for me to run home before meeting my dad for our adventure.
Instead, I’d flopped on the bed in my childhood room and flipped through old yearbooks, wondering how in the world I’d grown into a twenty-three-year-old witch. When ten thirty rolled around, I climbed onto my windowsill. As I squeezed out, I wondered when the window had shrunk; I couldn’t bear to think that it was the Twinkies responsible for expanding me.
I shimmied onto the trellis pressed against the wall that was my way out of here. Then I looked down and had second thoughts.
The trellis seemed flimsier than I remembered. It also seemed like the house had grown a few stories higher. Taking a deep breath, I located the well-worn groove in the rails, hooked my hands deeper into the holdings, and took careful steps downward.
