by Jessica Grey
“We are going to be traveling on a bus. It’s like, um, a horse drawn carriage?” At Lilia’s nod she continued. “But very large, so that lots of people can ride on it together, and there are no horses, it moves on its own, but has the power of hundreds of horses.”
“Is it made to go by magic?”
“No, not by magic, but good old American engineering, or more likely Japanese engineering.” Alex laughed at her own joke. Lilia looked at her blankly. “Nothing is magic here, everything is by science. People make machines and power them with electricity—the same thing that makes the lights in the museum go on.”
Lilia looked concerned. “Is this bus a proper conveyance for royalty?”
“My guess is you will be the first royal to ever ride this particular city bus,” Alex offered drily. “However, I don’t have a car of my own, so if we want to get anywhere the bus it is.”
Alex led Lilia out through the side employee entrance, up the alley, around the lawn, and down the two blocks to the bus stop. While she had been inside the museum, the thin, pearlescent gray clouds of the early morning marine layer had coalesced into dark, heavy-looking rain clouds. A biting wind whipped up the street sending litter missed by the street sweeper skittering along in the gutters.
“I’m cold,” Lilia said plaintively.
“So am I.” Alex eyed the storm clouds dubiously as an empty plastic bag floated by the bus stop. “It shouldn’t be this cold…” she trailed off as the bus pulled up. Noting Lilia’s wide-eyed stare Alex said quickly, “It might be best if you don’t talk too much while we are on the bus. If you have any questions, save them until we get to my place.”
The rain started to fall just as they were boarding. Alex scanned her bus pass, while digging in her pocket for change to pay Lilia’s fare.
“Crazy weather, I’ve never seen rain in July like this before,” commented the driver as the first fat drops plunked on the bus windshield. “And after that earthquake last night, weird stuff I tell you. End of times.”
Alex smiled weakly at him before tugging Lilia down the bus aisle and finding them seats next to each other. She grabbed the window seat and gestured for Lilia to sit down. Lilia looked at the stained seat in disgust and shook her head. Alex reached up and pulled her down into the seat just as the bus jerked to a start.
“Renaissance Fair,” she said to the woman seated across the bus aisle from them when she looked askance at Lilia’s long, ornate dress. The woman shrugged her shoulders slightly and went back to fiddling with her iPod. It was a testament to the eccentricities of Los Angeles, Alex mused, that she could drag an almost nine-hundred-year-old enchanted princess halfway through the city and only get one or two inquiring looks.
“Alex, what are those young ladies wearing? It is men’s trousers like you are wearing, but very short, they are showing a scandalous amount of their legs.” Lilia leaned halfway across Alex in her effort to look out the window at the pedestrians running for cover as the skies opened up.
“Oh my goodness,” she continued, swiveling her head to look at a man a few rows behind them on the bus. “What is wrong with that man’s hair, it appears to be standing straight up!”
“Lilia!” Alex hissed. “What did I say about not talking? We don’t want to offend anyone, okay? Just wait until we get to my apartment.”
Lilia settled into a disgruntled silence. Alex stared out the window, her view obscured by fat raindrops sliding down the bus windows. The sky grew darker and the rain heavier. A streak of lightning flashed to the north of the city, followed quickly by an additional burst of light as a transformer blew up. The echo of thunder rattled the metal floorboards of the bus. “Thunder, lightning, and rain in the middle of July,” she muttered to herself. “I swear if a witch goes spinning by in a tornado, I’m going to just crawl into bed and hope I wake up once it’s all over.”
Alex fished her phone out of her backpack. Still no call from Nicholas. She wished she could talk to Luke. She had a feeling that if she’d found anyone else lying in that bed, he would have been the first person she called. Irreverent and carefree as he may seem sometimes, Luke had always had a good head on his shoulders, the type to stay calm and rational in an emergency situation. He also, thought Alex with a bit of chagrin, had always been a heck of a lot braver than her. Although, she decided, maybe Luke wasn’t so level headed in emergency situations. Maybe he would just go do something totally idiotic like kiss a comatose hot girl he knew nothing about.
The strange longing to talk to Luke faded as she considered that someone was going to eventually have to explain Luke’s absence to his mother. As she was currently the only person—well at least the only person born within the last century—who knew where he was, Alex had a horrible suspicion the task was going to fall to her. She desperately wanted to find Nicholas so she could just hand off the princess, and the responsibility for the whole disaster, to him.
She flipped through the pathetically small list of contacts on her phone, unsure of what to do. It wasn’t like she could just call her mom at work and say, “Hey, Mom, guess what? I’m coming home with a formerly enchanted princess from the dark ages, and here’s the kicker: your best friend’s son is now currently under a spell and asleep for God knows how long. I’m not sure what to do with either of them—any thoughts?”
Alex found who she was looking for and hit call just as another flash of lightning lit the sky.
~ Chapter Five ~
ALEX WAS SEARCHING in the fridge for something to feed Lilia when the doorbell rang. She had hurriedly wiped off her glasses, wet from the mad dash through the rain from the bus stop to her apartment building, but her bangs were still dripping. She’d figured it was easier to feed Lilia and put a stop to her increasingly agitated demands for food before she changed out of her wet clothes.
Lilia sat at the kitchen table, her sodden dress creating a small puddle on the floor beneath her. Alex thought she might have a sweatshirt or two that could work for the princess, but their height difference was extreme enough that no pants she had in her closet would even come close to working. So for the moment, Lilia was going to have to make do with her wet dress.
She grabbed a bottle of water and an apple from the fridge and set them down on the table in front of Lilia.
“I’ll get you more in a minute,” she promised as she ran to answer the door.
Becca stood on the walkway outside Alex’s apartment under an oversized pink umbrella.
“Hey,” she said when Alex opened the door. “What’s the emergency?”
“Hi! It’s…um…a visual kind of thing. Here come on in.” Alex opened the door wider and Becca closed her umbrella and dashed in.
“Where do you want me to put this?” Becca held up the dripping umbrella
“Just set it up against the wall here. Okay, I know you are probably going to think I’m crazy—”
“Alex, you are probably the least crazy person I have ever met,” Becca said with a smile.
“Most likely true; make sure you hold onto that. You are going to need to keep a really open mind here. Nicholas called me last night—”
“Nicholas Hunt called you? On your personal cell phone?” Becca interrupted, shocked.
“Yes,” Alex said somewhat defensively. “He’s only called once or twice, just about museum stuff.”
“Oh, I just didn’t realize how things were there.”
“Things aren’t any way there…or here, whatever. It was just about the new collection. Well really, I think that’s what it was about; he was very rushed and barely understandable, but he asked me to meet him at the museum this morning. He wasn’t there when I got there, so I let myself in and went to look in the storage rooms. And oh my god, Becca—promise you won’t think I’m insane—in one of the storage rooms it looked like someone had started to unpack the artifacts—”
“The new French ones? I thought I heard him say something to Luke yesterday about staying to help unload a shipment and I wondered if
it was the stuff from Dr. Gagnon.”
“Nicholas asked Luke to stay later last night?” Alex asked sharply and Becca nodded. “Well, that makes a little more sense. So, it looks like they had started to unpack the crates, and apparently in one crate there was a huge four poster bed. I can’t even describe it to you, gold and silver metalwork with the most amazing gems. You are going to have a heart attack when you see it, some of the rubies are the size of golfballs…”
She could feel herself straying from the main thrust of her story, and Becca’s reminding look pulled her back. “Sorry, but they really are the most spectacular specimens I’ve ever seen. Anyway, this bed is huge, and old, and dusty, and cobweb covered, and—”
A soft sound, probably Lilia biting into her apple, came from the kitchen.
“Is someone else here?” Becca asked, looking toward the kitchen.
“Yes, that’s what I wanted to tell you about, that’s the visual part.” Alex grabbed Becca’s arm and guided her into the kitchen. Lilia was still sitting at the table, her impossibly golden hair beginning to shape itself into ringlets as it dried.
“Lilia, this is my friend Becca, and Becca, this is Lilia de la Fôret.”
Lilia stood up and dropped a slight curtsy. “Princess Lilia de la Fôret,” she said sweetly, flashing a blinding smile at Becca. “But any friend of Alex’s may call me Lilia.”
Alex could tell by Becca’s slow blink that Lilia’s smile had affected her the same way it had Alex the first time she saw it. There really was something almost lethally bright about it.
“Lilia is a princess,” Alex added, “from, wait for it—1152. I found her at the museum—”
“Actually, 1153,” Lilia interjected helpfully. She sat back down at the table and started back in on her apple.
Becca looked back and forth between Alex and Lilia, her mouth gaping slightly open.
“What do you mean, you found her at the museum? Are you sure you didn’t see Nicholas there? Did he give you something?” Becca flushed.
“Give me something? No, he wasn’t there.” Alex laughed as she realized what Becca meant. “You don’t think I’m high do you? And even if I was, it doesn’t explain her. Wait,” she held up a hand as Becca opened her mouth to argue, “there’s more. She came with the bed. She was asleep in it. An enchanted sleep.”
“Alex, there’s no such thing as an enchantment. Maybe she is just a—“ Becca glanced at Lilia and lowered her voice, “a crazy person that somehow found her way into the museum. We should probably check with local hospitals and stuff to see if they’re missing any patients.”
“I’m pretty sure she isn’t from any local hospitals. The thing is there is someone else asleep in her place now. He woke her up with a kiss and the enchantment transferred to him somehow.”
Becca quirked an eyebrow. “Okay, I’ll bite. Who’s in the bed?”
“Luke.”
“Luke Reed?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re sure he isn’t just asleep, like regularly asleep, not enchanted? I assume you tried to wake him up?”
“Rather forcefully,” Alex said. “Becca, he isn’t just asleep; it looks like he’s been there for years, his hair—” she broke off for a minute, with two images warring in her mind—the image of Luke’s hair glinting in the sunlight as he stood outside the museum with her just the day before, and the image of his hair twisting and growing all over the four poster bed. “His hair,” she continued “has grown really long, like years and years of growth and it is all over the bed. I don’t believe in enchantments either, but this has to be one.”
Becca went quietly over to the table and sat down in the seat across from Lilia. She sat looking at the younger girl as she crunched through her apple for a minute or two.
“Lilia,” she finally asked. “You believe you were in an enchanted sleep?”
“Yes.” Lilia finished her apple and set the core aside, folding her hands neatly in her lap. She smiled again at Becca, apparently glad to have a new person to tell her story to.
“And you are a princess? From France?”
“No, not France. From Arraine, it is a small kingdom that shares a border with France. My father is…” Lilia trailed off as it appeared to hit her that whatever her father had been, he had likely been dead for over eight hundred years. A brief look of sadness flitted across her face, but she refocused on Becca. “My father was King Edmond de la Fôret and my mother was Queen Liliana. So yes, I am a princess”
Becca reached over and laid a hand across Lilia’s folded hands sympathetically. She looked at Alex, who shrugged. Neither of them had ever heard of Arraine.
“Lilia,” continued Becca. “What language is spoken in Arraine?”
“Why, we speak French, of course.”
“But you aren’t speaking French now,” pointed out Becca.
The princess looked truly surprised. “I am not?” She looked over to Alex, still standing near the kitchen door, who confirmed with a nod. “Whatever am I speaking?”
“You’re speaking English,” Becca told her. “Very good American English actually. You barely even have an accent, only a very slight one, but it does sound vaguely French.”
“That is most extraordinary! I suppose then, that you are also speaking English? And yet, I understand you quite well. I only studied English very briefly with my tutor. A very rough language, mostly Germanic, is it not? I do not know much of it, but you say I am speaking it? Extraordinary.”
“I’m beyond thinking anything is extraordinary at this point,” Alex said.
“Lilia, do you know why were you enchanted?”
“I was actually cursed as an infant by a fae. I am not entirely sure of all the details because my parents did not often talk about it in front of me.” Lilia looked irritated. “I always believed, were the curse to come true, that I would be awakened by a prince, but she assures me that this friend of yours, Luke, is not a prince.”
“No, he isn’t a prince,” confirmed Becca.
“Then why would he try to kiss a princess? It really does seem like a very forward thing for a mere peasant to do, does it not?”
Becca choked back a laugh. Alex pinched the bridge of her nose as anger flooded through her. It was almost physical, like a bright red flash behind her eyes. She was glad she had called Becca because she was having a harder and harder time remaining calm. She kept thinking of Luke lying helpless in the bed. All of Lilia’s protesting that she should have been awakened by a prince was not helping them arrive at a plan to help Luke. Becca, though, was taking a very calm, sympathetic approach with the princess.
Becca looked up at Alex, no doubt sensing some of her irritation. “And you haven’t been able to reach Nicholas?”
“No, I’ve left several messages and he hasn’t called back. I don’t know if he knows what happened or not, or where in the heck he is at this point. I am just really not sure what to do with her.”
Becca glanced at the thin silver watch on her wrist. “There’s about an hour and half before the museum opens, and I doubt anyone will get there before an hour or so from now. It might be best to take Lilia back there. We can take my car, and wait for him. We don’t really want anyone to find Luke before you get a chance to talk to Nicholas anyway, right?”
Alex was immensely relieved that Becca had not only accepted the crazy circumstances, but was volunteering to help. Suddenly the stress and worry felt like a significantly lighter load to carry.
“Let me just go change into some dry clothes. I have a sweatshirt that Lilia can put over that dress, but nothing else I have is going to fit her.”
“Yeah, that’s going to be a major issue if we don’t find Nicholas right away and get things sorted out. Although, he probably doesn’t have any women’s clothes hanging around his office or anything.”
Alex smiled, “Yes, but he does have something I don’t—an actual job with a paycheck and a credit card, and responsibility for our little Miss Artifact, here.”
>
“Who is this Nicholas?” Lilia wanted to know. “Alex keeps talking about him on her little black box.”
“He’s the one in charge of your magic bed, so once we find him, he’ll be deciding what we are going to do next,” Becca explained as Alex headed down the hall to change.
“Is he a prince?” she heard Lilia ask hopefully.
This time Becca didn’t even try to suppress her laughter. “Some might think he is like a prince, but in my opinion Nicholas is definitely not princely material.”
Alex winced at her assessment as she closed her bedroom door softly. Well, prince or not, she was hoping he’d at least know what to do with one extremely out of time princess.
~
It was still pouring when the three girls ran from the apartment and piled into Becca’s Jetta a few minutes later, but this time they were prepared. In addition to Becca’s huge pink umbrella, Alex had managed to find an umbrella with the logo of the law firm her mother worked for emblazoned on it at the back of the front closet. Alex had switched out her damp jeans and sweatshirt for another pair of jeans and a gray hoodie. She’d managed to find something for Lilia as well. The princess was currently wearing an oversized blue sweatshirt with Mickey Mouse in swim trunks on the front of it. It had taken a bit of explanation to help Lilia understand why anyone would wear a half-dressed mouse on their chest, but after having travelled through part of the city even she understood the need to tone down her antique brocade dress.
Lilia decided she would be more comfortable in the back of the car, likely because she’d been used to being driven around in a carriage. This was fine with Alex, who wanted to spend as much time conferring semi-privately with Becca as possible.
“How familiar are you with fairytales? ‘Cause honestly, what I know about them could be printed on the back of a postage stamp,” Alex asked as they pulled out the apartment visitor parking lot.
“Hmm, fairytales? Not very. Do you think we should take side streets or try the freeway?” Becca stared at the gridlocked traffic in front of them in concern.
