A Kind of Magic

by Shanna Swendson

  She usually went out with her castmates after a show because it took time to unwind enough for rest, but tonight no one seemed to be making plans. “Sorry, babe,” Olivia said when Emily checked in with her. “I am pooped, and it’s going to be a crazy weekend. I really need my beauty sleep if I’m going to keep up this kind of pace.” That set off alarm bells to Emily. Olivia was usually the social director of the cast, organizing the outings. Oddly, everyone else seemed to be on the same page. They were all drained and wanted to hold on to the feeling of what they’d just accomplished. With hardly a word to each other, they went their separate ways at the stage door.

  Feeling like Nancy Drew, Emily set out to unobtrusively follow Olivia, in case she didn’t go straight home. But her attempted tail was short-lived. Someone was waiting for her at the end of the block, and she completely forgot about her mission when she saw him. He didn’t look like someone to make a girl’s heart skip a beat, more like a musty old professor in tweed, but she knew what he really was. Her senses had returned to almost normal after her adventures in the Realm and the various spells cast on her, but she retained enough of the effect to be able to see the brightness about him that told her he was fae.

  “Eamon! I haven’t seen you in ages!” she greeted him, holding back short of hugging him. The situation was potentially awkward. It was like running into a guy she’d had a promising few dates and a couple of intense makeout sessions with, but who had disappeared afterward. Actually, that’s exactly what it was like, if running around in the fairy world and trying to spark a revolution against a false queen counted as a “date.” He’d shown every sign of being as into her as she was into him, but then he’d been strangely aloof at their final farewell when he brought her back to the human world, and she’d heard nothing from him since then.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked, in part to cover her initial enthusiasm by acting like she was assuming it was business that had brought him here and in part because she was afraid that it really was just about business.

  “Wrong?” he asked, his eyes wide with confusion and swirling with color. No matter how human he managed to make himself look, his quicksilver eyes gave him away as fae.

  “Well, it’s just that I haven’t heard from you in a couple of weeks, and now you’re here, and there’ve been some weird things going on, and so, well …”

  “I wanted to see you, Emily Drake. I did not realize so much time had passed.”

  “Oh, right, time,” she said, laughing nervously. She’d forgotten that the immortal fae had no sense of time. She was lucky he hadn’t stayed away for years.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked, leaning toward her and touching her arm lightly.

  “I don’t know. There have been a few things that might be odd. Or they might not be. There’s not anything happening in the Realm, is there? No more uprisings or fake queens, or anything like that?”

  “Everything is going perfectly well with the new queen. I have become chief scribe to her majesty. That has kept me busy. She has wanted to review the archives.”

  Emily couldn’t help but grin as a relieved giddiness swept over her. “Yeah, that sounds like Nana. You can see where Sophie gets it. The nut didn’t fall far from that tree. And it’s great that you’ve gone back to the palace. You were a scribe to the old queen, right?” She usually tried not to think about that because there was something weird about having the hots for a guy who used to work for her however-many-greats grandmother centuries ago. That little detail made whatever feelings she had for him even more pointless than Sophie’s raging crush on Michael, especially now that Michael had officially given up his wife as lost forever.

  Fortunately, although Eamon was considered a scholar of humans among the fae, he was still pretty clueless about actual people, so he didn’t seem to have caught on to Emily’s nervousness or the reasons behind it. “Was the performance tonight one of those things you think might be odd?” he asked.

  “You were there?”

  “Yes. I enjoy this show.”

  “Did you notice anything different?”

  “I think it was better than the last time I saw it.”

  “Better how? I mean, like supernaturally so? It kind of felt like we were sprinkled with fairy dust, but were we?”

  “I am not familiar with fairy dust. Is it dust made from fairies? That sounds like a barbaric practice.”

  “No! Ew. It’s a figure of speech.” She noticed that his lips were twitching and realized he was teasing her. “And you know that because I know you’ve read Peter Pan,” she said, elbowing him in the ribs.

  “I assure you, I noticed no dust, magical or otherwise, descending upon your production. There was an energy in the air, though, but performing generates its own kind of magic, so it is hard to tell if it was imposed upon you or if you created it yourselves.”

  “Wait, acting is magic?”

  “Well, the music certainly can be, and given that there’s at least one cast member with fae blood, your performances do create some magic.”

  “Wow. I like the sound of that.” Figuring that his teasing her counted as flirting, she hooked her arm around his and leaned against him. “So, do you want to go somewhere and talk? Or we could go back to my place.” Her face grew warm when she said it as she remembered the last time, when she’d been very drunk and very amorous and he’d been quite the gentleman. “Or your place.”

  “What about somewhere in between? There is a revel and market tonight, and I thought you’d enjoy seeing one without having any other mission to worry about.”

  “Aw, no gangs of fairy thugs breaking the place up?”

  “I can’t guarantee anything, but I feel it is unlikely.”

  Fairy events usually started at midnight, so this would be a very late night for her, but she didn’t have to be at work until the next night, so she could sleep all day, and how could she pass up an offer like this? “Okay, you’re on,” she said, “but first I need to stop and get some coffee if I’m going to stay up so late.”

  The revel was in Central Park, as so many fae activities were. Sophie said it was because the fae were creatures of nature that didn’t coexist well with manmade industrial society. In cities like this, they had to limit themselves to spaces with grass and trees. Eamon was the odd fairy who’d managed to inure himself to buildings, streets, and sidewalks. Most others would have been fading rapidly after coming this deep into the city, away from the green of the park.

  The last time Emily had gone to a fairy market, it had been on Bethesda Terrace. This one was at the nearby Bandshell. Or it would be, when it started. She wrapped her hands around the large cardboard cup of coffee as she and Eamon stood nearby and waited for the market to appear. She thought she detected nearby movement, as of other fae living in this sphere who were coming to the event that formed a temporary bubble between the two worlds.

  “Do you know anything about kelpies?” she asked Eamon while they waited, figuring she might as well do some research while she was at it.

  “I find them cruel and arrogant, so I don’t spend much time with them,” he replied. “Why?”

  “Michael said he saw one in the park this morning. He thinks it killed someone.”

  “If the person was drowned, that is likely.”

  “So it’s not odd?”

  “For you, maybe. For us, that is what kelpies do.”

  “I mean, is it odd for one to be here?”

  “They do most of their mischief in the human world, where they are more likely to be in horse form. I suppose they may not have had the strength to venture out while the Realm was waning, but have been revived recently.”

  She felt a sinking feeling in her gut that she knew had nothing to do with bad takeout coffee. “Oh. So it’s because of Sophie and Nana, then?”

  “It’s not only the good things about the Realm that were reawakened. But I will let the queen know what’s happening.”

  “Good. Then we can leave Sophie out of it
so she can focus on the ballet. Oh, I forgot to tell you, she’s going to be dancing in The Nutcracker here. It’s a big deal. You should go see it. I think you’d like it.” With a grin, she added, “It even has fairies in it, though not any you’d recognize. Sophie’s the Snow Queen. I have shown excellent restraint in not saying anything about her being any kind of ice princess, no matter how tempting that is.”

  The world around them suddenly changed. The last time she’d seen something like this it had been mostly a market with some entertainment. This was more of a concert festival with a few booths. A band was playing in the bandshell, and the ground around the bandshell was full of fairies dancing wildly. Emily had been cold a moment before, but the eternal summer of the Realm had apparently come with the revel, and she soon had to unbutton her coat.

  As tired as she’d been after the night’s performance, her toes started tapping to the music. Within a minute, she put her coffee cup down and grabbed Eamon’s hand. “Come on, let’s dance.”

  As they whirled around in front of the stage, it occurred to Emily that she was doing the same thing she feared her castmate had done: dancing the night away with fairies. The difference was that she was doing so consciously. When she woke in the morning, sore and exhausted, she’d know exactly why.

  But that made her wonder if there were any humans here who didn’t know what they were doing. It was hard to tell exactly who was human and who was fae, since the fae could appear human and the humans who spent time in the Realm took on a fae quality. She also didn’t know if someone taken to dance all night would look like she’d been hypnotized or if she’d be fully conscious now and just have her memory wiped later. Her best course of action, she decided, was to look for people she knew. She knew most of the Broadway dancers in New York, at least by sight, so if she noticed someone she’d ever been up against in an audition, she’d investigate further.

  It was hard to do that while keeping up with a fast jig. It didn’t help that she was having so much fun that she kept forgetting to look out for people she knew. She couldn’t help but wonder if she’d ever been taken to dance and didn’t remember it. There had been that one time when she was a teenager and Sophie came to get her, but she’d been awake then. Recalling that incident, she figured that no fairy would have dared take her after that. They wouldn’t have been brave enough to face the wrath of Sophie, even before she became the queen.

  The next song was slower, so she had a chance to catch her breath. That is, until Eamon pulled her closer and she became breathless again for an entirely different reason. “Do your people do this sort of thing often?” she asked, speaking directly into his ear.

  “Dance?”

  “Bring humans to dance with you. Like, do you ever take people away, dance with them all night, then bring them back and make it so they don’t remember?”

  “I certainly don’t. But I am not much of a dancer.” He was better than many professionals she’d danced with, but he did seem almost clumsy compared to the other fae, so she didn’t argue the point with him.

  “But others do?”

  “It is done.”

  “How would you know if it happened to someone?”

  “They’d be tired even though they slept all night. And they might be sore, but not know why.”

  “Well, yeah, but a lot of people feel like that naturally.” At least, she thought so. Or were that many people unconsciously dancing all night? “But how might you tell if someone had been brought here unwillingly?”

  “It’s never truly unwilling. One who had no desire to dance would not be taken.”

  “Wow, blame the victim!”

  “Victim? No, we only come in response to an invitation, conscious or otherwise. When you fall asleep dreaming of dancing, you send out an invitation that some may accept.”

  “So, what happens? A fairy kicks in your door and draws you away?”

  “It’s more that the dance in the dream becomes real, but the dreamer still believes it’s a dream.”

  “Huh?”

  He bent his head until his lips lightly brushed against her ear. “Fall asleep dreaming of dancing one night and I will show you.” A shiver went down her spine as his cool breath tickled her neck, but it was a good shiver, a shiver of anticipation.

  “Does it work that way with other kinds of dreams?” she couldn’t resist asking.

  “I think the wish would have to be stronger and more specific, not just an idle thought, but an outright desire.”

  “Wow, I can’t believe that sort of thing has been going on all along and no one knew.”

  “I don’t think it’s been widespread, not for a long time. But the Realm is stronger now, so we are stronger.”

  She stopped dancing, and it took him a second to notice, so he collided with her and quickly caught her before the collision made her stumble. “Wait, so this is our fault again?”

  “How is this fault? It is the way things are, and order has been restored.”

  “Taking people dancing in the night is the way it should be?”

  “Taking people who want to dance.”

  “But they don’t know what they’re asking for. I’m pretty sure Sally didn’t ask to dance her way to a stress fracture and have to sit out a few weeks.”

  The music picked up again, and the dancers cheered before joining in the jaunty reel. Emily wanted desperately to dance, but she held herself back this time, scanning the crowd for familiar faces. There were humans among the dancers, though she had no way of knowing how willing—or not—they were. She realized that the humans were easy to spot because most of them seemed to be in nightgowns or pajamas, like they’d been taken from their beds. They did look like they were having fun, she had to admit. The question was how they’d feel in the morning.

  She glimpsed a blond head in the middle of a ring of clapping, stomping fairies and thought it looked suspiciously familiar. Elbowing her way through the crowd with an apologetic Eamon behind her, she forced her way to the edge of the circle and saw her friend Will doing an energetic tap dance as the fairies whooped and hollered in appreciation. His face was beaded with sweat, and there were perspiration stains on his shirt, but he kept dancing as though he had an unlimited supply of energy.

  The song ended and he finished his dance with a flourish, to great applause. Before he could enter into the next dance, she lunged forward and grabbed him. “Will!” she shouted, turning him to face her and staring into his eyes. “What do you think you’re doing? You saw what happened to Sally.”

  He showed no sign of recognizing her. She might have believed that she’d mistaken someone else for Will, but this close she knew it was her friend. He was even wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing when he left the theater, which suggested he’d collapsed as soon as he got home, without getting undressed. If this was how he’d been spending his nights, she could understand why he’d be that tired.

  Without even acknowledging her, he spun away and continued dancing. She started to run after him, but Eamon held her back. “No, he doesn’t hear you. He can’t. You’re essentially in different worlds right now.”

  “How does that work?”

  “It’s difficult to explain. He didn’t get here physically.”

  “We need to find a way to stop this.”

  From his expression, she realized this was going to have to be one of those agree-to-disagree things because he clearly didn’t get what the problem was. “This is the way our peoples are supposed to interact.”

  “Yeah, but I think the enchantresses are noticing something, and it’s their job to stop it.”

  “I thought the enchantresses were our friends.”

  “Amelia and Athena helped us before, but their real job is protecting humans. And then there are all the others out there who may start to figure out that something’s up with the fae. There’s already one here visiting. She may be looking into things, and if they find out what Sophie is, well, it could get bad for her.”

  �
��I’m not sure anything could get too bad for Sophie. Not that she couldn’t get herself out of.”

  “True,” Emily conceded. “But is there any way Nana could spread the word to knock it off or at least be more careful for a while?”

  “I will speak to her about it.”

  “In the meantime, is there anything that can be done to keep the fairies out of the bedroom?”

  “I am the wrong person to ask. That would be a question for the enchantresses or the wise ones.”

  Yeah, she wasn’t going to be talking to Michael about this, not even to get him to talk to his friend the magical bag lady. She’d end up with an armed cop watching her twenty-four/seven. Maybe Athena could help her.

  Suddenly, dancing the night away with the fairies seemed a lot less fun. “I’m afraid it’s getting late,” she said, “and I can’t really afford to stay out all night.”

  “I will escort you home.”

  “That’s sweet, but not necessary. I can get a cab.”

  “Then I will escort you away from the revel.”

  A part of her was tempted to turn back as the wild music called to her. Was being taken to dance with the fairies really that bad? And was it true that these people actually wanted it, that the fairies were fulfilling some deep-down desire? Would it be wrong to stop it? And was this the cost of having a world with a little more magic in it?

  Seven

  The Precinct

  Friday, 7:30 a.m.

  Michael nearly had to put a dollar in the penalty jar when he returned to the squad room and saw his desk. He liked the holiday season, but the one bad thing about it was the increased availability of things with angels on them, and ever since he was a rookie and someone remembered that St. Michael the archangel was the patron saint of policemen, he’d been deluged with angels.

  Today’s offering was one of those Swedish gizmos with burning candles that made carved wooden angels fly around. Those things were expensive, so someone had invested a lot in the prank. He couldn’t help but laugh, though he figured he’d just let the others think it was because he thought their joke was amusing. At least it was better than all the cherubs he got at Valentine’s Day.