Free Agent

by J. C. Nelson

  “You mistook me for the guy you were supposed to be putting the moves on.” When he said it like that it sounded dirty.

  “Yes.”

  “So what was mistake number two?”

  I didn’t answer until we turned into the bakery parking lot. “I’d done that assignment so many times. I was lonely, and I was sad, and when I met you, it just happened—”

  “So many times? How many times have you done that before?” His voice was hoarse, and I felt his anger smoldering.

  “At least twelve. I forget sometimes. It’s easier,” I said, knowing exactly how he would take it.

  He spoke in a voice cold and dull. “Do you do the same thing with all of us?” His hands gripped the leather seat rest until it nearly bent.

  “Yes. Meet at the pier or someplace public. Have an accidental meal I arrange. Walk. Dance.”

  “Kiss,” he said, and I could feel the hurt I had sliced so professionally into him.

  “Yes. Then we break up, and you are ready for the princess to come into your life and put it back together. Ready to love someone. Someone else.” My sense of professional pride gave way to raw shame. I’d always regarded setups as a game, but never considered that it was one I always lost.

  I put the car in park, and he practically leaped out, so eager to be farther from me. “Well, you did it right. I couldn’t be more ready for someone else if I tried.”

  Twenty-Six

  THE BAKERY LOOKED wrong from the beginning. Everyone thinks of bakeries as little shops where a fat man pulls bread in and out of ovens. Modern bakeries looked like factories, factories that should have been full of workers. As we walked through the empty lot, I knew something was wrong. At eleven o’clock in the morning there should be people everywhere. I didn’t see a single fat man.

  Ari checked her map. “Fairy Godfather ever get the address wrong?”

  “Fifth Street Bakery” read the sign on the office door. I gave it a pull and found it locked. “Not that I’ve seen, but there’s a first time for everything.”

  “Shoot the lock,” said Ari. She’d obviously watched too many television shows.

  “Or we could look around. Most deliveries happen at night, and at the big places, they leave supply doors unlocked so you don’t have to let the truck driver in.” I walked around the side of the building, with Liam and Ari trailing. Experience paid off. At the back of the building I found three delivery bays, one standing wide open. From the doorway, a sour stench billowed.

  “Do all the places you go smell like this?” asked Ari. Wherever she grew up, hideous stenches didn’t make too many guest appearances.

  “No, most of them smell worse.” Inside, the machinery still hummed as though at any moment it would start up. The huge ceiling lights flickered. I sniffed and decided I’d smelled much, much worse. I once took care of an ogre with irritable bowel syndrome after he raided a Thai buffet.

  Liam pointed to a vat. “Rotten bread dough.” From the oven line, I smelled the char-burned smell of wasted loaves. I heard something moving, a shuffling sound that became the patter of running feet.

  Liam heard it too, and even Ari stopped her humming and backed slowly toward us.

  From behind a row of ovens, a man in white leaped. Flour covered him from head to toe like a ghost, but blood ran from his mouth, and as he came, he screamed.

  I swore at myself for not having my gun out. The man leaped over a stack of pallets, his arms flailing toward me, his eyes wide and empty.

  Liam caught him with a gut punch. Liam was taller than me, thicker, and he had a blacksmith’s arms. He about punched through the man, smashing his fist deep into the man’s stomach like so much dough.

  Ari stared at the man, and started squinting, even though I knew she had her contacts in. She took off at a run straight for him, shouting, “Get back! Don’t touch him.”

  Liam ignored her and stepped on the man’s chest, pinning him. Ari pushed on Liam, like a flea trying to move a bulldozer. She put her hands on the side of Liam’s face, forcing him to look at her. “Can’t you feel it?”

  I dragged a fifty-pound bag of flour across the man, and as I stepped over him he tried to bite me.

  “Get back,” said Ari, pulling at my arm. She had a tone I’d never heard from her before. She leaned closer, looking at his face. Blood caked his mouth and ran from his eyes. “You,” she said to me, “keep an eye out for others. Beefy, you go get another bag of flour. And don’t let him touch you.”

  I pulled my gun, scanning rows of assembly lines. “Want to explain what I’m looking for?”

  Ari put her hand on the man’s forehead. “Others. He’s probably killed them all by now, but if there are others, it would be bad.” She knelt on the man’s wrist so he couldn’t scratch her.

  I watched the empty floor, stealing occasional glances at her. “You said no touching.”

  “You’re not a princess, and Liam’s not a prince. It won’t affect me the same way. It’s magic. Some sort of poison.” Her voice had this weird echo to it as she spoke, and the magic that drifted off of her looked like a snowstorm.

  Liam lumped a couple more bags on the man’s legs and arms. “Is everyone around here crazy?”

  I could live with his anger at me, maybe. I didn’t feel like letting him direct it at Ari. “She’s not crazy. She’s a princess and the seal bearer for her house. She’s also my friend.”

  “How long were you hired to be her friend for? What the hell is she doing?”

  Ari knelt over the man. I recognized the feeling of static electricity that swept across me. A wind whipped through the bakery, sending tiny tornadoes of flour spinning, but Ari wasn’t paying any attention. With an ease that made me nervous, she gathered her power.

  She held her hand over his head and closed her eyes. A green mist seeped from his nose and mouth, forming a cloud above him. The mist solidified, taking the form of her family crest for a moment, and then the wind rushed in and tore it away. Ari fell over, crumpling to the ground.

  The man opened his eyes. “Where am I?”

  I ignored him, rolling Ari over. She was breathing, thank goodness.

  “What did you do?” I asked, brushing her hair out of her eyes.

  She tried to sit up. “He was poisoned. I took it out.” When she made the foxfire, it took her days to feel better. Either she was getting better at magic or curing poison wasn’t as hard, because she didn’t look like death this time. Sweat rolled down her face and her hair clung to her face. If I’d known that magic was that much of a workout, I’d have said forget the laps, and made her sling spells.

  “Where am I?” the man asked again.

  “You’re in a bakery,” said Liam, “and that stuff on your mouth and face is blood.”

  The man’s hands went to his face. His fingers ended in bloody stubs where he’d torn the fingernails out. His crusted lips quivered as he spoke. “Accident. There was an accident.”

  “What happened?” I asked, leaning over him.

  “Too many hours straight, I told them. Too dangerous, but they insisted. She said a war was coming.”

  Ari failed to get up for the fourth time. “I need to rest.”

  Liam walked over and hoisted her like a two-penny nail. He carried her over to the office. Plenty of nice chairs in there, for sure.

  I held up my phone. It showed a picture of the heart seeker, coiled up lifeless on Grimm’s desk. “I’m looking for something.”

  His eyes went wide. “I didn’t know you worked for her. Please don’t hurt me. Just take them and go. They are in the kitchen.” With his free hand, he pointed to a small kitchen where they tested dough before large-scale production.

  Inside, the stench of rotten food and something wet and dark filled the air. Where the light cut in from the doorway, a hand lay, smeared in blood. I felt for the light and clicked it on. I caught my breath. Bodies lay scattered across the floor, but I’d seen a lot of bodies, and that didn’t bother me anymore. On the center is
land stood a baker’s rack, and on every level were rows and rows of apples.

  Now, you might be tempted to think I had an allergy to apples, or I considered myself more of a citrus girl, but those apples were only related to fruit in the same way a hand grenade was related to a pineapple. They oozed magic. It took every ounce of will I had to avoid touching one.

  Apples went out of style as weaponry about four hundred years ago, at least. See, until the invention of the explosive shell, you had to convince your enemy to actually take a bite. It only took one or two times of seeing a prince turned to applesauce that people started eating oranges instead.

  The invention of the explosive candy shell was supposed to be the next big thing, but by that time there were easier ways to kill people. Only witches and hags still considered apples a decent form of self-defense, because of who they most often used them against: each other.

  Poison apples worked best against those with magic in them. The explosions made hamburger out of a normal person. If you had a protection spell, the goo the apple scattered ate away at the spell, and then snacked on the person. The more magic, the better it worked, unless you were a princess, of course. For them, the worst thing that happened if they ate a poisoned apple was they got to take a nap. Those girls got all the breaks.

  I took a few steps farther in, checking the other bodies. The smell nearly overwhelmed me.

  Liam came to the door and stood looking at the carnage. He’d obviously never seen death firsthand. He recoiled, forcing his eyes closed, with an awful grimace. People only did that the first five or six times they saw a massacre. “What the hell happened in here?”

  “You might want to stay back.” I opened my compact and called Grimm. “You probably want to see this.”

  His eyes appeared in the compact and I moved it around so he could get a full view. Grimm spoke with authority, his voice deeper, his tone grave. “Marissa, get out of there. I will call the hazmat team immediately. Don’t let anyone into the building.”

  I closed the compact, and that’s when the feeling hit. The feeling of being watched, like I had at the ball. “Where are you?” I shouted to the empty room. The whole place was stainless steel, where it wasn’t spattered with blood. “I know you’re watching.” I felt a hand on my wrist and nearly broke Liam’s nose.

  “Come on. You heard your boss.”

  A particular body caught my eye, one that lay across a serving platter. A body sheared in half like a giant razor blade had cut it off at the waist. The platter was an old one; black tarnish marked it as true silver. The edge I could see was dull gray, the same color I had seen in the feast room in Kingdom. Fleshing silver. I reached out, pulled the body over, and recoiled. The body was Clara, her eyes dark pools of blood. The other half of her body had to still be wherever the mirror once led.

  “Come on,” said Liam, giving my arm a pull.

  Before I could move she spoke.

  “Most have the sense to fear me, darling,” said the Fairy Godmother, her voice coming from Clara’s ruined face. “Or flee if they live under my shadow.”

  A mist blanketed the world, the way it had when the Fae Mother spoke to me. I felt Liam pull on my arm, or someone’s arm, and he was yelling, I think.

  “Once you strike me, and thrice I return it. Your desires are delicious. What shall I give you, that you may understand the error of your ways?”

  I fought to let go of the mirror but it stuck to my fingertips like frozen steel. “I don’t want anything from you.”

  “No, but you do want something. Your family. For your first wish I give you the truth of your family.”

  Something like a train hit me, and I landed in snow. Maybe not snow, the memory of it, cold and cutting and bitter. “Stop interfering,” said Fairy Godmother, though not to me. “On second thought, there’s always room for one more.” Someone joined me in the memory. I knew with a sinking heart it was Liam, meshed in her spell.

  “You’ve forgotten so much, darling, about your parents’ wish. I give it back to you and more. The important part isn’t the what. It’s the why.”

  I would have told her off, but I could neither speak nor move. The memories started to come back. This was my house. I remembered so much about it, baking cookies and playing in the tree and a thousand days of summer. A smile came to my heart as I realized I knew where home was. I remembered everything.

  Mom and Dad stood outside in the wind and the cold, and they were fighting. Mom’s raven black hair held down in her hood. She grabbed Dad’s hand. “There isn’t time. We must call him now.” As she said it, I knew what night this was, and a sickness swept over me.

  “There’s got to be another way,” said Dad. I remembered him holding me, the way he smelled of shaving cream, aftershave, and how rough his chin was. His eyes were as blue as hers.

  “They are lovely,” said Godmother. “So unlike you. Where did you get those plain brown eyes?”

  My mother turned her back, facing the storm so it lashed her. “It’s the only way, Roland. He’ll take good care of her, and when she’s free, she can return to you.”

  “To us.” I saw the hurt on my dad’s face, along with determination. His hands were balled into fists, his entire body tense.

  Mom dropped his hand. “She wasn’t yours to begin with, and she’s not mine. I’ve raised her for you, but it isn’t the same. Not the way Hope is.”

  Dad shuffled his feet, kicking at the snow. “Make the call.”

  Godmother ripped the world from me and formed it again, oozing into place like molten wax. I was sixteen, with too much makeup and my hair looked like it was at war with my head. I sat at our kitchen table, Mom and Dad behind me. On the table stood my makeup mirror, and in the convex side I looked like a clown.

  Grimm looked out from the mirror, and the look on my younger face was one of awe as he spoke. “This isn’t how things normally work. Roland, I didn’t expect to hear from you again.”

  “You know why we called you,” said Mom.

  “I do,” said Grimm. “Young lady, do you understand?”

  I didn’t. I couldn’t, but my teen-self looked to Dad and nodded.

  “You would work for me only until their debt is paid,” said Grimm.

  I knew now how long that could be. Teen me was all too eager to please. “I’m getting a job at the Burger Hut this summer to practice.”

  Grimm laughed. “I’m sure you will do wonderfully, Marissa. So do we have an agreement?”

  I looked at Dad and he nodded. Mom wouldn’t look at me, but I knew what she wanted. What I wanted more than anything was to please her.

  “You will fix Hope?” I watched Grimm with all my teenage skills of lie detection.

  “I give you my word, young lady.”

  Young me paused and looked up to Mom. Even at sixteen I had the good sense to think before I acted. “How long will this take?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Mom. “You’ll be an adult soon. You’re getting a head start, Marissa.”

  Young me glanced back to Grimm, and I saw a tiny smile flicker across Mom’s face. “I’ll do it.”

  “Then it is done,” said Grimm.

  Mom hugged Dad and started crying.

  Young me felt something at her wrist and held it up. A tiny gold chain hung from it. “That’s amazing,” she said.

  Grimm began to fade away. “I give these to all my employees. I am never far away now. Call me if you need anything.”

  “How many years,” said Fairy Godmother, whispering, “have you traded your freedom for their happiness?” If I had a mouth to scream, lungs to sob, or eyes to cry, I would have. A cry of despair rose within me, but without an outlet, it could not drown out her whisper. “Twice more, child, and then you may ask for your death.”

  The floor stank of blood and sour and death, and yet the feeling and smell was so rich it was actually good. I blinked and had eyes.

  Liam loomed over me, looking like a giant. “Here,” he said, picking me up
like a bag of flour, “We’re getting out of the building like the mirror man said.” He cupped his hands and yelled. “Princess, move it.”

  With his help, I limped to the door.

  Ari came walking out of the offices with a box of papers. Her jaw was set and her free hand clenched in a fist. “I told you to call me Ari.”

  I was lost in memories I’d dreamed of having back, dreams that I knew would be nightmares from now on. I remembered it all. The fighting, the crying. The endless meetings with doctors that had culminated that night. The night my parents had traded me to Grimm.

  Ari came running to me. “M, are you all right?”

  I couldn’t answer. I could barely walk. Only Liam’s incessant pull on my hand kept me moving long enough to make it out of the building. The hazmat team came pouring in, followed by the bomb squad, and the police.

  “I’ll drive us back to the Agency,” said Ari.

  I tossed the keys toward her. At least it would be entertaining to see her try.

  Liam caught them, holding them out of her reach. “I want to live.”

  When we got back to the Agency, I stayed in the car, in the dark parking garage. I still heard Fairy Godmother’s voice in my head, and the images wouldn’t go away. I knew now why I’d made a deal with Grimm to hide my memories.

  “I’m sorry,” said Grimm from the rearview mirror, “Liam has explained what she did.”

  “He knew it was a spell?”

  “He knew it was something. It’s not the sort of thing he would forget. Nor will you now. If I attempt to modify your memories again, it might kill you.”

  I sat up and my head spun, or the world spun around me. “You said she couldn’t hurt me.”

  “Marissa, I said she couldn’t so much as scratch you. I never said she couldn’t hurt you. That would have been a lie.”

  I grasped for reasons, anything that would make what I saw, what I knew, untrue. “Would she tell me the truth?”

  Grimm didn’t answer immediately. He rubbed his forehead with one hand. “If it hurt you worse than a lie? Absolutely. You will understand in time what a parent would do to save their child. For now I would like you to come and speak with Ari. She’s proven herself resourceful, and you should see this. There will be plenty of time for tears later.”