Enchanted

by Barbara Bretton

  “My diary,” I whispered as I picked up the tiny locked volume. “My father taught me how to read and write when I was four.”

  The two women exchanged glances.

  “He sounds like he was a good dad,” Bunny said carefully.

  I nodded, my heart bursting with remembered joy and fresh sorrow. “He was.”

  I pulled out a wrinkled white handkerchief, three knitted swatches in various shades of purple, one mahogany knitting needle, a set of car keys on a cheap fob, and a man’s argyle sock in progress.

  “Maybe there are some photos in there,” Meghan said. “I’d love to see a picture of your parents.”

  “So would I,” I said softly. “But there aren’t any.” Not anywhere.

  “Not even a wedding photo,” Meghan went on, “or maybe something from your christening. You--”

  Bunny gave her daughter a kick in the shin.

  “What?” Meghan protested. “Like you don’t wonder the same thing, Ma?”

  “Regret,” Bunny corrected her, “not wonder.” She met my eyes. “Of course we’d love to see a picture of the people who brought you into the world, but I know you don’t have any.”

  Their open curiosity didn’t matter to me. I was swept back to a time when I had been happy, safe and secure with two parents who loved me. A time I thought would never end.

  It felt like someone else’s life. Someone else’s dream.

  But it was mine and it was coming at me like a freight train.

  I am buckled into the back seat of the car, snuggled beneath a mountain of blankets, and surrounded by some of my favorite things. My diary. My Sleeping Beauty coloring book and a fat box of crayons.

  And Oscar.

  Oscar is my favorite. I refuse to go anywhere without the stuffed frog. He has been with me as long as I can remember which, considering the fact that I am barely six years old, isn’t that long.

  Music spills from the radio. It’s been a long day and I am dozing off in the warm car.

  Snow falls beyond the windows, a wintry landscape rolling by my sleepy eyes.

  In the front seat, my parents talk softly as my father guides the car safely along the icy road. Bits and pieces of their conversation float past me, a jumble of words I don’t really understand and for many years won’t remember.

  “I hope we did the right thing, Guin.” My father’s voice is warm, like a hug after a nightmare.

  My mother is quiet and I wonder if she fell asleep but then she speaks. To me her voice sounds like music. “She’ll be protected all her life,” I hear her say. “Given our situation, that’s no small thing.”

  “It’s like living in some strange fairy tale written hundreds of years ago,” my father says, his voice snapping like branches breaking in a storm. “We could move away. Start fresh somewhere normal—“

  “Sugar Maple is our home,” my mother says. I see her hand reach out and stroke my father’s dark hair. “One day Chloe will be the heart and soul of it.”

  The silence stretched.

  “You’re not listening to me, Teddy. Nothing like this has happened before in our history.”

  “Three hundred years and nobody else fell in love with a mortal?”

  “Friendships were almost impossible between magicks and mortals until fairly recently. A marriage . . . a child –“ She paused for what seemed like forever. “They’re terrified this will somehow make it possible for the humans to destroy us.”

  “I’m human and they’ve accepted me.”

  “To a degree. The collective memory is strong. We’re only a heartbeat away from the days of cruelty and persecution.”

  “And you think our decision will keep Chloe safe if things go bad?”

  “As soon as we cross the Sugar Maple town line, the Fae will know and the news will spread like a blessing.”

  “And this decision will keep her safe?”

  As always, my mother’s touch soothes my father in ways I sense but don’t understand.

  “Trust me, Teddy.” Her voice is low and melodic. “If we change our minds, we can break the bonds up until her twenty-first birthday.”

  “There’s time,” he says at last, glancing toward my mother. “Plenty of time.”

  * * *

  Except there wasn’t.

  “Oh, look!” Meghan’s voice brought me back into the moment. “Laria wants to check out the shoebox.”

  The baby wiggled her way out of her grandmother’s grasp and was stretching her chubby arms toward the box on my lap.

  “Good grief,” Bunny said. “She wants that scruffy little pink frog.”

  “No, sweetie.” I thrust poor Oscar behind my back. “I think he might be toxic.”

  “It’s the light,” Lilith, our town librarian/historian, pointed out as she scurried past with a broom and dustpan. “It’s captured her attention.”

  We all looked at each other.

  “What light?” I asked.

  “She knows,” Lilith said, laughing, as Laria thrust a baby fist into the shoebox and pulled out a ring.

  The ring was the deep burnished color of Welsh gold, same as the ring that I had inherited from my mother, but the resemblance ended there. My ring was an unadorned circle of gold. This ring was all bumps and angles and deep scratches along the surface.

  And it glowed.

  “It seems like it’s lit from within,” Meghan said.

  “It’s the sun.” I pointed toward the window. “See how it’s hitting the ring just right?”

  “The ring itself is glowing, honey,” Bunny said. “Since when does gold glow like that?”

  “Aftershocks.” Janice swooped in on us. “It’s all an optical illusion.” She went on about refraction and angles and degree of sunlight until our eyes started to cross.

  “I thought you did hair,” Meghan said. “You sound like a scientist.”

  “Janice went to Harvard,” I said. (As if that explained her string of malarkey.)

  Bunny and Peggy exchanged looks that Janice pretended not to see.

  Laria, however, didn’t much care why the pretty ring was lit up like a glowstick.

  She just wanted to eat it.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” I began to gently pry those chubby fingers away from the ring. “We don’t eat jewelry in this house.”

  Her grip tightened.

  The MacKenzie women zeroed in.

  “Laria,” I said in my best mommy-means-business voice. I could feel my cheeks burning. “Give that to me.”

  Superbaby gave a tug worthy of a Marvel Comics hero and I almost fell off the sofa. I played it for comedy value but I was the only one not laughing.

  Please don’t, Laria! This isn’t the time to parade your magick in front of your Daddy’s family.

  “Give a little tug,” Bunny advised. “You won’t hurt her.”

  I nodded and tugged, but to no avail. I didn’t tell Bunny that I was more concerned that Laria might accidentally dislocate my shoulder. Her magick was both powerful and uncontrolled, while mine was still a work in progress.

  Lynette, who had been watching from the far side of the room, did one of her patented canary whistles. Laria’s grip lessened.

  “That’s it!” I said. “Lynette, keep distracting her.”

  Lynette’s whistles grew louder and more intricate and the baby clearly loved them. She pursed her lips and emitted a clear, high sound that was probably heard in Montpelier.

  “Holy crap!” Luke’s sister-in-law Tiffany shouted out from the front porch. “Is somebody hailing a cab on Saturn?”

  I didn’t know where this was going, but I knew it wasn’t good.

  Who would have expected Renate Weaver to come to the rescue again?

  “Step aside,” she said with her usual degree of Fae self-confidence. “Let me show you how it’s done in Sugar Maple.”

  She bent down until she was on eye level with Laria. No whistles. No whispers. No tricks. She leveled her amethyst gaze on the baby and instantly Laria’s atten
tion shifted from the ring to the woman in front of her.

  While I was grateful for the help, I wondered what exactly my frenemy Renate was conveying to my daughter. She had been a vocal part of the uprising that had nearly resulted in Sugar Maple leaving the human realm and retreating beyond the mist to one of the Fae dimensions. There had been a time when I considered Renate and the other Weavers as friends, good friends, but the trust had been broken and I wasn’t sure it would ever come back.

  Laria’s grip relaxed again and I took the ring from her.

  “Thanks, Renate,” I said, hoping to break the almost palpable connection growing between her and my daughter. “I don’t know exactly what you did, but it worked.”

  “Practice,” Renate said with a guileless smile. “Four children, eight grandchildren. You learn.”

  “Seven and fifteen,” Bunny said with an equally guileless smile. “I have a few tricks up my sleeve, too.”

  I could hear Janice and Lynette stifling their snickers from across the room.

  My future mother-in-law was good, but when it came to tricks, never bet against a Fae.

  “It’s huge,” Meghan observed of the ring. “You need man hands to wear a ring like that.”

  “Maybe it was your father’s,” Bunny said. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” She looked closer. “Is that an inscription?”

  “I don’t know.” I pointed to the Welsh gold circlet that I never removed. “This one was my mother’s.” And her mother’s before her, all the way back to Aerynn and the beginning of our line. “I’ve never seen this other one before.”

  “But it was in your toy box.”

  I took a deep breath, held it a moment, then exhaled slowly. “Those were the things I had with me when my parents died.”

  Looking for a way to change the conversation? Death is a pretty good place to start.

  “Oh, honey…” Bunny placed a hand on my shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I had no idea.”

  “Neither did I,” I said. Not until a second ago.

  The memory cut through to the center of my heart. I could see myself shivering in the gleaming white hospital corridor, waiting for Sorcha, my new surrogate mother, to sign the papers and take me away from that terrible place. I wanted to be back in the warm car with my mommy and daddy, safe and secure, the way every six-year-old child should be, but that life was over.

  I recalled watching, frozen in place, as a nurse handed Sorcha a shoebox filled with all that remained of everything I had known.

  That was the last time I’d seen the shoebox until today.

  I could hear them talking all around me as they tried to determine the ring’s provenance, as if Antiques Roadshow had come to life in northern Vermont.

  The ring was gold, I could see that clearly, and it was definitely antique. It was also heavy and large. Did my father wear rings? I didn’t think so. He had worked as a carpenter. A ring like this would be an encumbrance. I also couldn’t imagine it on my mother’s slender hand or my then-childish one.

  As was the case with so many things about those years, I would never know.

  However, there was little doubt that it held magick within its depths. That glowing light had nothing to do with refraction or any of the mumbo jumbo Janice had spouted, and I was grateful that either she or Lynette had cast a quick spell over the ring in an attempt to cloak its glow.

  But even without the glowing light to capture her attention, Laria was still transfixed. She made another grab for it but I slipped it onto the index finger of my right hand. It was huge on me and I curled my fingers into a loose fist to keep it from falling off.

  I needn’t have bothered.

  The ring started to blink, then seemed to encircle my finger with peace and promise, shrinking to fit before I realized what was happening. It didn’t feel like metal at all but a warm, living entity that was meant to be part of me.

  It felt a lot like destiny.

  Suddenly I knew this wasn’t going to end well.

  Chapter 4

  GAVAN

  Beyond the mist

  * * *

  Their time was running out.

  It had long been obvious to Gavan that their world was in its dying days. He only wondered how it was that so many of his clan didn’t realize it too. Not even the combined magicks of Fae, witch, sorcerer or Others could stop the inexorable end. Like the rotation of planets around the suns and the birth of new stars, the end of their dimension was writ large. Soon it would be into the cosmos and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

  The time had come to choose: either reunite with our sister clan in their earth sanctuary or pierce the veil for eternity.

  When the summons came from Rohesia, he made haste to the mountainside. Rohesia was the mother of his mother, the most powerful overseer since the ancient splitting of the family aeons ago. They were a mixed clan of Fae, witch, troll, sorcerer, sprite, vampire, and Others. Over time they had found strength in diversity but it had not been without conflict. Rohesia was pure Fae, blessed with beauty and arrogance and a keen sense of survival.

  She was waiting for him in the soaring natural cathedral-like cave that she called home. Some said she had conjured it from the collective memory of their beginning in an earth place called Wales but that might be legend and not fact. But it did evoke another time and place long gone when his kind had lived in peace with humans.

  Before the murderous brutality that forced his kind to flee beyond the mist.

  Those memories had been part of his education, a constant reminder to be on guard, to protect all they held dear, to remember that humans were a duplicitous species capable of genocide when threatened. The younger members of the clan had been making exploratory visits to the human dimension, returning with stories of peace and harmony between mortals and the Other. These days humans restricted their destruction to their own kind.

  Rohesia, however, believed none of it.

  Humans were devious, seeking to gather the magicks together in order to facilitate their destruction. Sugar Maple was a fortress that Aerynn had established to save her people from a brutal end in Salem.

  Clearly, humans were not to be trusted.

  He entered the cave. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the absence of light. He sensed rather than saw her presence.

  “I am here at your request,” he said, bowing his head in a gesture of respect.

  She manifested with the practiced ease of one at the height of her powers. Only the faint shimmer of carnelian glitter revealed the effort it took.

  The pleasantries were brief and she swiftly launched into the reason for the summons.

  “Not long before the birth of your mother, the light flashes first appeared. We believed they were of little concern, only the thinning of the dimension’s borders. A warning, as it were, of the eventual moment when we would blink out of existence. “

  He nodded. The flashes of lightning were part of the life they shared beyond the mist.

  “We believed we had an abundance of time to examine our choices and make plans for our future.” Her gaze softened as she met his eyes. “We were terribly wrong.”

  His gut twisted. He saw his future drawing into a knot he could never untangle. Suddenly he felt the weight of the ring on his finger in a way he never had before. It seemed to grow warmer as he stood there.

  “We intercepted a multidimensional blueflame sent by the Fae of Aerynn’s clan. Your betrothed is marrying a human in two earth weeks’ time.”

  He maintained a blank expression against a rising tide of relief. “The betrothal is broken?”

  The force of her fury shook the walls of the cave. “The betrothal went into full effect when Chloe turned twenty-one human years. Our dimensions perceive time very differently. We waited patiently for her people to contact us about a joining, but they clearly broke our trust. That is a mistake we will now rectify.”

  With a wave of her bejeweled hand, she activated the betrothal rings. He felt a s
urge of power as the ring encircled his finger in a way it never had before. It glowed as if lit from within and then began to blink slowly. A noose, he thought. He would be forever bound to a half-human stranger named Chloe. A half-human stranger who had pledged herself to marry another.

  Rohesia was clear in her directive. He would travel to the human dimension and after taking stock of the situation, claim Chloe of Guinevere as his own.

  She would not be allowed to wed the human.

  He would not be allowed to seek his own mate.

  Rohesia declared that their individual lives were of little consequence when compared to the imminent destruction of an entire dimension and its people.

  Gavan had no choice but to make it happen.

  Chapter 5

  CHLOE

  * * *

  Nothing like a faux earthquake to put a damper on a bridal shower. The MacKenzies couldn’t wait to get the heck out of Sugar Maple and back to the Boston area before another earthquake struck, and the locals couldn’t help them leave fast enough.

  I owed Forbes an extra piece of wedding cake.

  The shake-up had unnerved everyone, albeit for different reasons, and by five o’clock, I was back home in yoga pants and a t-shirt.

  “I did the drive-by and didn’t see any evidence of seismic activity in the area,” Luke said as we picked at leftovers from the shower.

  “I’m not surprised,” I said, shaking my head. “It wasn’t an earthquake; it was Forbes.”

  He grabbed a handful of pinwheel sandwiches and popped them into his mouth, one right after the other. “Forbes?”

  “Forbes and a forty-foot shower gift that he accidentally dropped in my backyard.”

  “You want to run that by me again?”

  “I’m just repeating what Janice told me.” I gave him the details. “A fleet of house sprites managed to whisk the tree away before anyone saw it.”

  “Forbes is nocturnal,” Luke said. “What the hell was he doing up during daylight?”

  “Coffee,” I said, unable to suppress my laughter. “He ran out of decaf and downed a bucket of espresso.”