by J. L. Ray
She shook her head. “It feels like it’s at the tip of my tongue, like it would leap out if the right spell were cast or...” she paused and blushed, “if the right prince did kiss me. It is almost there, but I cannot make it come out.”
“You’re under a spell,” he murmured, and didn’t add that for a spell of that kind to work in Mundania, it must be an extremely powerful one. He realized that it must be the spell that Crystal Winkowski had used back at the shop.
“Of course,” she agreed. “I wish I knew who has done this, and why!” She stared out the window at the scrub trees that lined the Interstate. Once in a while, a big box store or hotel popped into sight off in the trees beyond the interstate, and she would turn to watch it before it disappeared from sight.
Tooley drove silently for a bit, wondering how much to tell her of what he knew. He wanted to trust this girl. She seemed like a total innocent. The fact that Winkowski had put her under some type of spell suggested that she might actually be as innocent as she seemed. But he knew from experience, in Fairie, looks could be more than deceiving, they could be deadly. With few exceptions, most of the inhabitants of Fairie looked the way they wished to look. For example, a goblin’s standards of beauty might differ greatly from the high or low fae, but each of them had enough magic to adhere to his or her own idea of the beautiful. Perception became so manipulative and manipulated in Fairie that most magic-wielders used low-level spells to assess mpsi and age, just to be able to interact with other Beings without offending them. In fact, both magic-holders and magic-wielders could usually sniff out such details, though magic-holders had to actively probe rather than relying on an auto-check.
Though he was closer to fifty-five, since he didn’t age like a full-blooded Natty, Tooley looked like a twenty-two year old. He found that useful since Natties would underestimate him as a young Being. The girl next to him looked to be about five years older than he, though her wild hair suggested youth to him since he had spent most of his life as a Mundane-dweller. Most older Natties opted for more natural colors after a certain age because of the expectations of their jobs, a concept foreign to the Fairie Realms, excepting in the case of the servants of the more powerful. He would ask her about her age, but he doubted she would know.
“Do you know how old you are?”
She shook her head, lips pressed together.
“I’ve been calling you Strawberry Shortcake in my head.”
“Why?” she asked.
He grinned. “Your hair color reminds me of a doll I gave my brother when he was young. It was a girl with hair the same color as yours.”
“Oh.” She smiled a bit.
“I thought I might call you Berry? For strawberry?” He reddened a bit. “I mean, you need a name, and even Shortcake is rather a mouthful.” Then he laughed.
She looked at him. “Why is that funny?”
“Strawberry shortcake also refers to a dessert, one that is light and sweet, but rather a mouthful.”
She giggled, and he grinned in response, but then he got serious.
“I may be able to find out something about you, but I want to ask your permission first.”
She turned large green-gray eyes on him and nodded, equally serious. “What will you do?”
“I have to run a spell-check on you. May I?’
“Will it hurt?” she asked, certain that whatever she didn’t know about herself, she did know that she was no stranger to pain. Her hand crept up to rub absent-mindedly at a recent scar on her chin.
“Oh, oh no,” he gasped. “It’s a very simple spell. Most magic-wielders use it. Interacting with others without using a simple spell-check can lead to real social errors. It’s always a good idea to use spell-checks. Besides, I wouldn’t do it if it hurt.” He glanced at her, noticing the scar on her chin, and he was surprised by the flash of anger that came over him. “It is considered an invasion of privacy in the Mundane Realms by most Natties, which I find a bit hypocritical. They can run mageline background checks on people they don’t know. I thought I should ask because, even if it is legal here to run this kind of spell-check, it is still rude.”
“Oh,” she said, not fully certain what he meant but happy to agree to anything that made him happy. She didn’t know how she had gotten here, or what had been planned for her, but she felt that she could trust this Being and was grateful that he had been there and helped her escape. “I give you permission. You may do whatever you like.”
Having just suffered the attentions of Crystal Winkowski, this made Tooley frown a bit, but he shook it off. “Be careful with other people, Berry. Don’t offer that kind of trust so easily.”
She nodded, wide-eyed and serious. “I won’t, Tooley.”
“Why do you trust me?” he asked.
“You smell right,” she told him.
“Okay,” he said, nonplussed, but went ahead and cast the spell to check her age, mpsi level, and Supernatural origins. Her age held no surprises. She was close to the age she physically presented, although twenty-eight rather than twenty-five, so just a little older than she looked. Her origins were…confusing. The aura he saw suggested more than one type of fae, yet only one type was clear. But when he checked her mpsi, he was so shocked, he almost ran off the road. He looked over at her where she sat, fiddling with her seatbelt, smiling at him shyly, her face open and hopeful.
“Did you find out anything about me?” she asked hesitantly.
For a moment, he considered lying, but rushed into the truth. “Yes, some things, anyway. You are twenty-eight years old, and your mpsi is off the charts.”
She nodded, but then shook her head. “What’s mpsi?”
He rolled his eyes and grinned. “Magic power per square inch. Let’s just say, you don’t really need that sword to protect yourself.” Then he added more grimly, “And I have a really, really bad feeling about why you were brought here.”
“Why?” she asked.
“You’re a Mundane/Fairie mix. Witch, specifically. Like me.” He frowned. “There is something else going on there as well, but I can’t get a handle on it.” He thought about the spell that Crystal had mixed to keep the girl under control.
“I’m sorry, I still don’t know what all of that means.”
He shook his head. “It means that, given your lack of memory, someone has big plans for you, and I don’t think the person intends to let you in on those plans.” He turned and gave her an intense look. “I think you’re a pawn in a game we don’t see yet, and I think we better figure out what’s going on before whoever arranged this finds you. Because if you are as important as your mpsi suggests, this means trouble, and lots of it.”
“I am trouble?” she asked.
He turned his eyes back to the road. “I don’t know. I know that the…the bad woman we are running from placed some kind of spell on you. I’m not sure what it was. We need help to deal with this, and I know who to get it from.”
“Who?”
“Pernella Packlead. My mum.”
Chapter Twenty
Tony leaned back from her screen and rubbed her eyes. She looked at the time on her f-light and snorted. Five minutes had passed since the last time she checked it. She wondered if the Bureau had been hit with a time-bomb. This day felt like it would never end. Surely it had to be some kind of evil spell.
She looked over at the lieutenant’s office. No word from him since he had let her know that he had gotten a message sent to Naamah in the Fairie Realms through an official PTB courier. She could only hope it was in time to catch Phil and Cal before they went to interview the Willow and Sammeal. They probably wouldn’t know whether the message had helped until Phil got back. And Cal. Until Cal and Phil got back. Dammit. She had just gotten accustomed to the idea of her and Phil and together. She was having a really hard time re-adjusting. No wonder she didn’t date much.
She looked over at Baz. He had had no luck at all finding an address for Gandalf. Unless he called them or went back to the warehouse
, they were in limbo on that angle. In the meantime, Baz was still sorting through the records from the busts that had brought in word of smuggling rings in the city. He had actually gone so far as to fetch some of the evidence boxes to look at the few pieces of physical evidence from the arrests. No one had caught any Fairie contacts in the Realms, but then, the PTB didn’t actively police much of anything there. Only people on the Mundane side had been picked up. In some cases, even they had not been caught, but the shipments had been taken from the Mundane operatives, who had escaped. The witness descriptions were sometimes the only clues into who ran the operations, either in Mudania or Fairie. Some of the older witnesses weren’t much help, especially those who weren’t from the United States. Not surprisingly, given the number of immigrants and ambassadors in D.C., many of the witnesses were from foreign countries and retained rigid beliefs concerning the “Fair Folk,” refusing to bear witness against them, even to save themselves from coming under investigation. Tony shook her head. In some countries, the attitudes about magic led to some pretty awful situations, and the Geas didn’t always make that right, one way or another. Despite working for the SCIB, or maybe because of working for it, she frequently wondered if the Geas was really all that helpful in the long run.
Tony stood up and stretched. Baz hadn’t turned up anything new for quite some time, but if just staring at an artifact might make it talk, he would be overflowing with new information. He kept reading and then looking through the various artifacts in the evidence boxes. She squinted. He seemed to have one box that she hadn’t seen yet. She realized that he must have fetched it from the evidence room during a time when she’d taken a bathroom break.
“Baz,” she said as she walked toward him.
“Yes, Tony?”
“What’s in the box?”
He looked at her and flicked a hand toward the space in front of his desk. “Which one do you mean?”
She pointed at the one that she hadn’t seen earlier.
“Ah, that is the box with the artifacts that we brought back in our roles as Mickey and Maybelle.”
“Cool! What was in the crates?”
He swiveled around to face her. “As the lieutenant said, for the most part, low-level charms and artifacts, things unlikely to get our cloaked friend noticed under normal circumstances, but good articles to sell at a market.” He swiveled back around and picked up a flying pig statue. “This one, for instance, grants the holder one wish, but the parameters are very tight on that wish.”
“What do you mean?”
He scrunched his face in thought. “The wish must be for something highly unlikely to ever happen, and it will only allow that event to happen the one time. For instance, look at American politics. Perhaps I am frustrated with my representative. I might want to ask that politician to compromise on a vote, vote against his party’s line, for instance, and this statue would make it happen, but only once. It makes the very unlikely happen, but only once.”
Tony raised her brows. “So the statue? The flying pig?”
He nodded. “We had that saying, ‘when pigs fly’, in my country as well.”
He and Tony grinned, and she realized that she was almost comfortable around him again, as long as he didn’t say anything ugly about Phil.
“Hey,” Tony said, “does that mean it could grant destructive wishes?”
“No.” Baz frowned. “From what I have heard of this charm, it is relatively benign.”
“Be careful what you wish for?”
“Yes. For instance, if someone did use it to get a politician to vote a certain way on a bill, it couldn’t be a bill that caused excessive harm. The thing that the bearer asks for can’t cause harm to others. I could not ask, as my one wish, death to my enemy,” he finished darkly. She knew exactly whom he meant at that moment.
She distracted him. “So it can’t actively cause a lot of harm, but it won’t protect the wisher from stupid choices?”
“Exactly,” he agreed. Then he gestured at the assorted items on his desk, and Tony looked around at the pile that included an arrow but no bow, a ball of yarn in a non-distinctive shade of green, a shoehorn, and a small green apple. “All of these have a one-spell use. None of them are particularly harmful. In fact, most are meant to remedy a single situation.” As he said this, he carefully palmed the apple and tucked it away.
“Huh.” She was poking around in the pile and didn’t see him slip the apple out of the pile and into his pants pocket. She looked back at the flying pig statue. “So the person using this can’t wish for something to happen that might harm anyone? Not any of these?”
“Exactly. Nothing here will deliberately harm anyone. However, they are not sentient spells, so if there are other consequences from the wish, the spells will not anticipate that. They cannot. As long as the initial wish is not directly harmful, the spells will activate. That is all. I have been researching, and all of these are associated with hedge witches. They are granny magic, the kind sold even here in Mundania in the medieval period before the Purges.”
Tony shuddered, wondering if any of her relatives had died in those, but she didn’t say it out loud. It was past time to tell Baz about her newly discovered heritage, but she kept putting it off. Little as she trusted Glinda, after hearing Baz’s story and seeing him angry, she’d rather skip that revelation for, well, ever.
“Hey Baz, if you could use the flying pig statue, what would you wish for?”
Baz picked up the statue and looked at it. He started to speak, paused, then nodded and said grimly, “I would want Bergfrid—to see her and have her tell me why, why she did this to me, why she took up with that devil Mephistopheles.” He started shaking his head. “I just want for her to look me in the eye and tell me, before I die, why our lives changed so much, why she betrayed me. I want to understand.” He looked up at Tony with desperation. “I really just…I want my true love back…” He looked down at the pig as he said that, and a little tear slid down his face.
Tony felt so bad for him that she put her hand out on top of the one in which he held the statue just as he finished speaking. Both of them were shocked when, with a sudden thin squealing sound, the statue in Baz’s hand disappeared in a sparkling fog of pink.
“Uhm....what just happened?” she asked Baz.
He swallowed. “I think that maybe I just used a piece of evidence.” He turned to Tony. “I have to tell lieutenant Azeem and the Evidence Room Sergeant.”
Tony’s eyes got wide and she whispered, “Oh, wow. I’m so sorry.”
The sergeant in charge of evidence, Bluebeard, really, really hated checking boxes out to detectives, even though it was part of the job. In fact, when he handed out the boxes, they each had a magic key to open their locks. If the boxes didn’t contain all the items listed on the inventory, the key turned from silver to a tarnished black. No one, absolutely no one, wanted to return a box with a tarnished key back. There were consequences. No one was sure what those consequences were because no one had ever taken a tarnished key back. Ever.
Baz’s hand crept to his pocket. The apple he had palmed off the desk was a single-use infatuation spell. He had experienced a sudden urge to take it when Tony had walked over, but after glancing at the key to the evidence box, now blackened and hideous, he surreptitiously eased the apple back to the desktop. One piece of evidence destroyed was an accident that he hoped he could explain to the terrifying Sergeant of Evidence, despite Bluebeard’s reputation. Two pieces destroyed, or in this case, activated? Baz pulled at his shirt collar. He couldn’t believe he’d taken the thing in the first place.
“Soooo,” Tony drawled the word out. “What do you think you did with that wish?”
Coming out of the funk he’d been in, Baz thought back to his words just before the pig vanished. “Blood and Bones!” he said. He looked at Tony in round-eyed horror, “I wished to speak to Bergfrid.” He shook his head. “No. No, no, no. The spell isn’t strong enough.”
Tony cocked her he
ad. “What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “She resides in Fairie.”
“What?” Tony was stunned. “For some reason I assumed she was long dead.”
“No, my people are long-lived. She could yet be alive. Very old, but alive. Until I moved to this country from Norway, I assumed she was still with your demon friend, but I suppose he left her at some point.” He glanced at Tony, “He probably left her sooner rather than later. From what I heard after I became consistently human, he does not keep faith with his paramours.”
Tony turned away, rolling her eyes. Baz’s rancor was getting old, but she’d be lying if she didn’t admit that his words bothered her. She didn’t think of herself as the type to chase after bad boys, like some of her friends in high school and college, but then again, she hadn’t been on a date in over a year, until last night. Becoming a detective in SCIB had consumed her free time, and she hadn’t even thought about dating for months. If Cal and Berthell hadn’t been on a matchmaking binge for the last couple of months, she wouldn’t have thought of it at all. Happy couples like to make more happy couples. It was a thing. She had put them off easily enough. Then she met Mephistopheles on this last case, and something about him just wouldn’t get out of her head. Even now, even as pissed off at him as she felt, the thought of him wouldn’t leave her alone. She wanted him, and it was just that simple. She sighed, “Okay, so your ex is probably in some Viking nursing home in Fairie, and the one-shot spell isn’t strong enough to bring her over. So no harm, no foul?”
Baz gave her a puzzled look.
“The spell probably wore its little pink self out trying to comply and then fizzled.”
Baz looked unsure but said, “We can hope.” He added, “I’m not sure what the Geas would do to her if she did come over. I have to assume it would be an illegal entry.” He added, “I have to assume she counts as dark fae, given our history,” he gestured to himself, “and given her involvement with the witch and Mephistopheles.”
Tony wanted to argue with him, but without hearing the whole story, she couldn’t. “So you think the Geas would hurt her?”
