by Jessica Grey
“It is done.”
“Wow,” Becca whispered in awe, “this stuff is intense.”
“Yeah.” Alex was still slightly creeped out by seeing magic performed right in front of her. “Who else is here?” she belatedly thought to ask Becca.
“Oh, just Dr. Fredericks, he was in his office with the door closed though.”
Alex turned to Lilia. “How strong is this distraction spell? Would it work on another door that multiple people passed several times a day?”
Lilia’s forehead creased. “Yes, I think so.”
“What’s up, Alex?” Becca asked.
“I was just thinking, maybe Lilia should do a distraction spell on Nicholas’s office door. If we turned the light on, closed the door, and Lilia put the spell on it, maybe everyone would think Nicholas is just in there working and not go looking for him.”
Becca raised an eyebrow. “That would be pretty cool! How long can your distraction spells last Lilia?”
“I cannot be entirely sure.”
“At least eight hours?” Becca pressed.
“Oh yes, I think I could say at least that long.”
“Well, we can always come back and have her redo it later tonight, right?” Becca asked.
“Yeah.” Alex stuffed her hands in her hoodie pockets and nodded toward the offices. “Why don’t I take Lilia over to Nicholas’s office? I’ll grab an absence slip while I’m there and stick it on Maureen’s desk and then maybe you can just call in sick.”
Becca faked a cough. “I am at death’s door,” she croaked. “However,” she continued in her normal voice, “that takes care of everyone but Luke.”
“One problem at a time,” Alex sighed. “Once we get him to wake up, I’m sure he will have no problem charming his way back into Maureen’s good graces.”
Alex and Lilia parted ways with Becca at the employee entrance and snuck, as quietly as Lilia’s rustling skirts would allow, past Dr. Fredericks’s closed office door.
“Here,” Alex mouthed to Lilia, as she stopped in front of Nicholas’s office. She turned the knob carefully and let them into the office. She’d spent hours in here working on paperwork, but creeping in like this felt, well, creepy. Alex flipped on the overhead light and located the absence request forms. She filled one out for herself, forging the loose scrawl that passed for Nicholas’s signature at the bottom. She took a few extra slips in case they needed them later, folding them neatly and putting them in her back jeans pocket. Although, if they weren’t able to wake Luke, and somehow their involvement in knocking out their advisor came to light, she supposed she’d have bigger problems to worry about than perfect attendance at her summer internship.
“Time to put the spell on it and leave,” she said in an undertone to Lilia before sticking her head out the door and looking up and down the hallway to make sure no one had come into work while they’d been in the office. The girls slipped back into the hallway, Alex closing Nicholas’s door and wincing at the small click it made as it latched.
This time Alex was too busy trying to watch all directions at once to be properly awed by Lilia’s use of magic. As soon as the princess’s eyes refocused Alex reached out and tugged her wrist, pulling her silently back in the direction of the employee exit.
~
It was still raining. Luckily, the thunder and lightning appeared to have subsided. The wind had slowed significantly as well, which meant the clouds were no longer scuttling across the sky. They hung, dark and heavy, sullenly dropping the rest of their rain on the beleaguered city.
As they drove out of the museum parking lot Becca nodded at a dark sedan parked a few spots away from the entrance to the walkway. “Nicholas’s car will help with the illusion that he’s in his office.”
“Yeah, let’s just hope the distraction spell works as well as it’s supposed to. Maybe no one will even think about where he is.”
As they drove through the city they could see gutters full of rushing tides of water and streets that were already starting to flood. The earth, at least the parts of it that weren’t paved over, was dry, but it could only absorb so much. Judging by the amount that had already fallen, and how long it had been since a heavy rain, Alex guessed the foothills were in for a few serious mudslides. She wondered briefly if there were anything they could do to stop the storm.
“I’ve never felt responsible for the weather before,” she said out loud.
Becca shot her a sympathetic look. “I know what you mean. It feels like it’s all tied up together and it’s up to us to figure it out. Beyond stressful.” She glanced at the dark circles shadowing Alex’s eyes. “You must be exhausted; what time were you supposed to meet Nicholas?”
“Six, but I left the house close to five. I think all the drama wore me out.”
“Why don’t you rest? I’m thinking we really should go to the boutique where my sister works. I figure there we’ll get less questions about Lilia’s current outfit and none of her co-workers will worry about whose credit card I’m using. Oh,” Becca smiled as a thought occurred to her, “I bet they’ll give me her employee discount too; they did the last time I had to buy something there. My dad got remarried and I had to wear a dress. An actual dress. It was kind of a horrifying experience.”
“A discount would be fantastic.”
“It’s going to take us at least a half hour to get there with this kind of traffic, so I don’t mind if you really want to rest, I can entertain her if need be.” Becca looked in the review mirror at Lilia, who had resumed flipping through the stash of magazines in the back seat. “Although she seems perfectly capable of entertaining herself,” she added with a smile.
Alex leaned her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes. Within a few minutes the motion of the car and the rhythmic sound of the wiper blades lulled her to sleep.
~ Chapter Eight ~
ALEX WAS STANDING at the end of the main hallway in the athletic building at Monroe High School. The hallway seemed longer than normal, distorted, almost as if she had some kind of tunnel vision, dark and hazy at the periphery. Alex blinked, but the edges of her vision refused to come into focus. She was standing still, but she had the distinct feeling she had just come through the far door, the one that lead out past the tennis court and then to the practice baseball diamond. She was momentarily discombobulated, because as a student she had avoided the athletic complex as much as possible. Most of her tortuous Phys Ed experience had taken place in the older gym and the track where she was forced to pretend that running didn’t slip her knees painfully out of joint. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d even been in this building. She’d tended to avoid it like the plague, especially after the incident in ninth grade.
Alex became aware that she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t sure if it was that the boys standing near her had been obscured by her weird, shifting vision, or if they had just appeared, as if the dream were being built layer by layer.
She could hear the boys laughing, and she looked around at them, feeling an odd, intense urge to fit in, to be liked by them. She was able to briefly focus on a few faces, and realized with a start that she knew them. They were boys she had gone to high school with. All of them had been older, all of them popular, and all of them had been on the varsity baseball team.
God help her, these were Luke’s friends.
They were talking and laughing, but the words were muffled and indistinct. Her hearing was just as distorted as her vision. She caught the names of several girls, a few years older than her, and some more laughter. She felt herself laughing along with the group, although the laugh rumbled strangely in her chest and throat—deeper and stronger than her normal laugh.
“What about the freshman?” one of the boys, Alex was pretty sure his name was Blake, asked. “There are always a few hot ones in the group,” he nudged Alex in the shoulder. “What about it, freshie?”
All around her boys started calling out names, most of which Alex recognized as the pret
tiest girls in her freshman class, as well as several lewd suggestions about what they’d do to each of the girls if given half an opportunity. Alex’s sense of disorientation was increasing rapidly. Why in the world were these jocks discussing this with her?
Suddenly, Alex heard her own name mentioned. She snapped to attention, able to focus her blurry vision on the speaker. Rick Matthews. She was floored. Rick Matthews was three whole years older than she, a senior the year she was freshman. She had only known him by reputation, and he had quite a reputation. He was a stellar athlete, smart, and gorgeous. She was pretty sure half the female teachers had crushes on him. As for the students, almost the entire female population of the school had been obsessed. Alex had thought it kind of funny, she always liked to imagine him walking through the halls like a demigod, having to step over the piles of girls throwing themselves at his feet.
“You know Alexandra don’t you?” Rick asked. A sick and desperate feeling was brewing in the pit of her stomach as Rick continued, “She’s got a smoking little body that one, but she’s kind of a geek. Think she’d let me loosen her up a little bit?”
The nausea intensified, along with a strange feeling that she needed to protect someone. Alex felt the words welling up within her unbidden. She was putting no conscious effort into speaking.
“Yeah, I know her, she’s not worth the trouble.” It wasn’t her voice coming out of her mouth. Oh god, it wasn’t her voice, but she knew whose it was.
“I don’t know,” Rick said. “Maybe she’s a tiger under all that seriousness. She’s certainly got tight little—”
“Trust me,” she cut him off in Luke’s voice, words that she remembered all too well tumbling out of her before she could even think. “I wouldn’t do Alexandra Martin if she was the last girl on the face of the earth. She’s a total non-starter.’”
Amid the laughter of the guys standing around her, Alex heard the soft sound of the exterior door at the end of the hall clicking shut as it closed behind someone who had just come into the building. She didn’t want to look toward the sound because she knew what she would see.
Apparently, she wasn’t in control of her dream body, because her eyes glanced away from Rick’s laughing face and down the hall anyway. Alex saw herself standing just inside the door, a stricken expression on her face. Her eyes were so huge behind her glasses that she could see them glistening with the tears that she knew she would shed minutes later in the girl’s bathroom in the library. I look like a puppy someone just kicked, she thought irritably. And she’d felt like one too as she spent the next few weeks avoiding Luke as he tried to catch her in the hallways. And then the semester break had given her some breathing room. By the time they’d gotten back to school, he’d been so busy with baseball that she no longer had to worry about avoiding him; he wasn’t looking anymore.
Alex knew what would happen next—the group of boys surrounding Luke would burst into hysterical laughter as she turned and fled the athletic building. She’d come to say hi to Luke and congratulate him for making varsity. They hadn’t spent much time together the previous few years. Luke was always busy, and they only had a few classes together, but she was proud of him, and she had just wanted to let him know. I was stupid, is what I was, Alex thought derisively as the dream began to slow down around her, time stretching out.
“Lex,” Luke’s voice reverberated inside her, or his, head. “Oh man, Lex…Didn’t mean it that way.” The words were bouncing around inside her mind, causing a weird echo and a slight headache. Her chest tightened, and a feeling oddly like regret settled there.
The dream had slowed down so much that no one was moving. She kept waiting for the dream Alex at the other end of the hall to turn and run like she knew she would, but she never did. The edges of her vision were still blurry, but she could tell the boys in the group were still, all of them had seemingly paused in the act of looking down the hall towards the Alex in front of the door. However, she could make out movement along the walls of the hall.
Vines, gray-green and studded with wicked looking thorns, were snaking their way up the walls from the floor. Within seconds they had covered the entire wall on either side, twisting in and out and over themselves as leaves unfurled and buds appeared, then opened. Heavy perfume curled through the air as hundreds of roses opened almost in unison. Alex almost gagged on the scent. It was like, she thought unsteadily, watching one of those time-lapse nature videos, except the scent made the whole thing some frighteningly more real.
She reached out to touch a flower and a vine curled around her arm. It was tough and sinewy and surprisingly strong as it wound around her—no Luke’s—forearm. It twisted tighter and tighter, the sting of the thorns beginning to set her skin on fire.
Her vision darkened completely and when it cleared she was standing at the other end of the hallway. She could see Luke down the hall, surrounded by the other ball players. The scene was exactly as she remembered it. Except for the boys being frozen in place, and of course, the rose vines.
Petals were beginning to drop off the flowers at a steady pace, creating a carpet of brilliant red on the hallway floor. Each time a petal fluttered down the scent of the roses became more cloying. It was unbearably strong. Alex watched in horror as the rose vines curled around Luke’s arm, thorns biting through his shirtsleeve. As she stood there more vines snaked off of the wall, along the floor, and began winding sinuous and cobra-like up his legs and torso.
“Luke!” she screamed, trying to run toward him. But she was unable to move. She looked down. Vines were twisting their deadly way up her as well. Her legs thrashed helplessly against them instead of propelling her forward.
Luke gazed at her from down the hallway.
“Lex!” he shouted. Oddly, his voice didn’t reflect any of Alex’s fear at all. He sounded urgent but authoritative. “Alexandra! Wake up now. Do you hear me? Wake up now!”
Alex started awake in the front seat of Becca’s car, the scent of roses still in her nostrils.
~
“I don’t suppose you’ve come up with an absolutely fabulous plan you’ve yet to tell me about?” asked Becca mock-hopefully as they waited outside the dressing room of the boutique. Lilia was inside trying on the stack of clothing she and the sales girl, Marissa, had picked out.
Alex shook her head as she eyed the huge armful of clothing Marissa was adding to the stack outside the dressing room. She was pretty sure that Lilia currently had more clothes with her in the dressing room than existed in Alex’s entire closet.
Marissa had recognized Becca, and since there was no one else in the store—the fact that it was raining cats and dogs was apparently keeping most sensible people home and out of trendy clothing boutiques near downtown, Marissa was now playing personal shopper to Lilia. Whether or not she believed Becca’s half-hearted story about Lilia losing all of her luggage, which seemed doubtful since she had quirked one pierced eyebrow at Becca’s halting explanation, she didn’t question them. And really, compared to Marissa’s current outfit, Lilia’s was not all that out of place.
Becca sighed. “I’ll take that as a no? Me either.”
Alex ran her hand through her bangs, trying in vain to smooth them so they wouldn’t dry in weird clumps. “I think we need to sit down with Lilia and pick her brain about the curse and whoever put it on her. I don’t think we will be able to come up with a war plan until we have as many facts as possible.”
Marissa ducked out of the dressing room and went back out to the showroom, coming back a few moments later with another armload of clothes.
“Why,” asked Alex, “do I have such a bad feeling about this? Does she really need more clothes to try on?”
“It’ll be fine. I’ll try to talk her down to just a few outfits.”
“Maybe I should just give you the credit card and let you deal with her.”
“I don’t really see the problem with letting her buy what she wants,” Becca said. “At this point I sincerely doubt she’s goin
g to just go back from whence—or from when—she came. She’s kinda stuck here. She probably will need more than just a few days worth of stuff to wear. And like I already said, I also don’t see a problem with letting Nicholas pay for it. He should be here helping us.”
“I know. It’s just hard for me to spend other people’s money, even when I have their okay. Doing it without his consent is freaking me out.”
“Let’s also not forget we are dealing with a half magical being here. She seems to like us enough, more me than you.” Becca laughed. “But I don’t know for sure that she won’t just use magic to get what she wants, I’d hate to find out the hard way.”
Alex grimaced. “Let’s not even open that can of worms if we don’t have to.”
“Would you rather wait in the car, and let me deal with the negotiations?”
Alex nodded, relieved that she’d offered. She would have felt cowardly suggesting it herself, but it would probably be for the best. Becca had a much more calm, sweet approach with Lilia than she did, plus she had no patience for fashion to start with. She tended to buy the same pair of jeans and t-shirts in multiples whenever she found ones she liked.
When Lilia and Becca came out of the boutique almost forty-five minutes later, and ran through the pounding rain toward the car Alex was impressed with the fact that they only had four bags. She had figured on at least twice that many. Lilia had changed out of her brocade dress and was wearing a pair of tight fitting jeans that hugged her curves and a lavender cable-knit sweater that dipped off of one shoulder. Her golden hair was flying behind her as she ran, curling wildly in the damp air. As she laughed at something Becca said, her beauty was only enhanced by the modern clothing.
“Hello, trouble!” Alex muttered. “We are going to have beat the men off with sticks.”
She leaned over and opened the driver’s door as they ran up. A dripping Becca jumped into the car, and shoved the bag she was carrying at Alex.
