A Kind of Magic

by Shanna Swendson

  Now, though, there were people shopping for antique china, probably to fill out sets before Thanksgiving or to give as gifts. Athena acknowledged Sophie’s entrance with a nod as she wrapped a plate in paper, then tilted her head in the direction of the table in the rear.

  Josephine sat there, tapping one expensively shod toe in tangible impatience. Amelia gave every indication of pointedly ignoring her while she answered a patron’s extensive questions about the history of a particular china pattern. Sophie remembered her discussion with Michael about enchantresses possibly looking for relevance and was suddenly suspicious of the timing of Josephine’s visit. She had no evidence, but she had a feeling Josephine wasn’t a friend. She would have ducked out of the shop, but Josephine had already seen her and was beckoning to her. Amelia gave Sophie the slightest of nods, indicating that she should obey, which irked Sophie even more. Reluctantly, she made her way to the back table.

  “You don’t work here as well, do you?” Josephine asked when Sophie was in range, her slight sneer suggesting that a shop like this would be beneath her.

  “Oh, no, I just dropped by on my way home from a dance rehearsal. Can I help you with something while they’re busy?”

  “We can hardly discuss that now.” Josephine’s gesture in the general direction of the customers made the diamonds on her fingers glitter. Sophie figured that either she’d married very well, she had a lucrative second career, or being an enchantress paid well. She’d have to ask Amelia and Athena when she could expect her first paycheck.

  Amelia finished advising her customer and sent her to Athena at the counter. She then joined Sophie and Josephine. “You must be finished with rehearsal,” she said to Sophie.

  Sophie thought she detected wisps of steam coming from Josephine’s ears at not being first in line for attention. “Yes. I was just about to head home and thought I’d stop by to see if you wanted me to pick up anything or get dinner started.”

  Only then did Amelia acknowledge Josephine, turning to her to ask, “Josephine, would you care to join us for dinner this evening?” That wasn’t what Sophie had planned, especially not after such a long day, but since it wasn’t her home, she could hardly protest the invitation, no matter how much the thought of dinner with Josephine made her whimper inside.

  Josephine pushed her chair back, picked up her handbag, and stood. “I was hoping to talk with you this afternoon, but I currently have no dinner plans.”

  “Excellent. You know where we live. We’ll eat at eight.”

  “I will see you then. Good day.” The atmosphere in the shop lightened considerably at Josephine’s departure. It was like the calm in the aftermath of a thunderstorm. Sophie would bet that sales were about to increase dramatically.

  “I hope you don’t mind getting some dinner started,” Amelia said to Sophie. “Use whatever you find in the refrigerator. Make anything that sounds good to you.”

  “I’d be happy to help.” Sophie hoped she wouldn’t be struck down for lying. Actually, she was glad of something she could do for the sisters, considering they were letting her live rent-free until she made a decision about whether to stay in New York and find her own place. She just wasn’t too happy about this particular task. “No preferences?”

  Amelia sighed wearily. “Just resist the urge to throw in some rat poison. If that becomes necessary, I have a few things that are less traceable that we can put in her drink.”

  The scary thing was, Sophie wasn’t entirely sure she was joking.

  Eleven

  The Theater

  6:45 p.m.

  Emily arrived at the theater a little early, hoping to catch Will before he got into costume and makeup. When he hadn’t yet shown up by the time she needed to get herself ready, she started to worry. She was slightly more tired than normal after her adventure the night before, so she could imagine what state he’d be in, especially if nighttime dancing had become a habit for him.

  She found him backstage after she was through with hair, makeup, and costume. He’d apparently arrived in time to be ready, but he looked haggard, in spite of the makeup. “Are you okay?” she asked. “You look tired.”

  “I took a nap this afternoon and overslept, so I guess I’m still a little groggy.”

  She wished she had one of those herbal bundles handy, but this was hardly an appropriate time to give him one. “Late night last night?” she asked.

  “No, that’s what’s weird. I was dead last night. I must have crashed as soon as I got home because I woke up at about five this morning on the sofa, still dressed. Then I went to bed, slept until ten, took a class around noon, and couldn’t keep my eyes open.”

  “You’re not getting sick, are you? Be sure you’re getting enough vitamin C. Have you been having trouble sleeping before now?”

  “Okay, Mom, what’s up with the questions?”

  She gave him a one-armed hug around his waist. “We’ve had enough bad stuff happening with this show. I don’t want anyone else getting sick or hurt.”

  “I really look that bad?”

  “Someone would have to know you really well to tell.”

  “Em.” His tone was tense with warning.

  “Okay, you look like you haven’t slept in a week and have a bad case of caffeine jitters. But you have slept, so maybe that means something’s wrong. Any weird dreams?”

  That might have been one question too many. He gave her a suspicious look. “How did you know?”

  “I just know that when I sleep a lot and wake up tired, I usually had really weird, vivid dreams. It’s like I was running all night. Or dancing.”

  She watched him carefully, waiting for his response. He looked thoughtful and unusually serious for a moment, then he tossed his hair out of his face and said, “You know, I think I dreamed about you yelling at me. No wonder I’m tired.” He sounded flippant, so she couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or telling the truth.

  She decided then to hide one of her herbal bundles in his dance bag. There was one big company dance number when she wasn’t on stage, so she might be able to sneak into the men’s dressing room then. If not, she’d waylay him after the show and drop it in while he was distracted. She’d find out if it worked if he was less exhausted the next day.

  Twelve

  Amelia and Athena’s Apartment

  8:00 p.m.

  Josephine arrived exactly on the dot of eight. Amelia and Athena left Sophie to entertain her while they finished getting dinner ready. Sophie wasn’t sure whether they were giving her a break after she’d done most of the preparation or making her do all the hard work. Small talk over champagne was the last thing Sophie wanted when she’d been up since two in the morning and had only caught a little catnap on the airplane.

  “Have you been in New York long? I detect an accent,” Josephine said, making it clear through her tone that this accent made Sophie inferior.

  “I’ve been here off and on for a while,” Sophie said. “It hasn’t been my permanent residence, but I’ll be here through the holidays because I’m dancing in The Nutcracker.”

  Josephine arched an eyebrow. “I suppose they have to bring on all hands for that. It requires a large corps.”

  “Actually, I’m dancing the Snow Queen,” Sophie said mildly, before taking a sip of champagne. Josephine’s startled reaction was quite gratifying.

  Josephine recovered quickly. “So, a ballerina and an enchantress. You must be busy.”

  “I was a ballerina before I was an enchantress.”

  “No, you weren’t. Not unless you danced your way out of the womb. You were born an enchantress.”

  “I only recently learned about that, so I’m still new to all this.” Sophie wished she knew what, exactly, the sisters had told Josephine about her. Since the enchantresses were meant to keep a check on the fae and maintain the balance between realms, she suspected they’d stayed quiet about her other role as a fairy queen. That wasn’t likely to go over well with the rank and file of enchantres
ses. Athena and Amelia themselves weren’t entirely comfortable with it.

  “It’s mostly ceremonial these days,” Josephine said with a casually dismissive flick of the wrist. “I suppose it’s more interesting than being in a book club. At least, until recently.”

  “Recently?” Sophie asked, fighting to convey a tone of casual interest rather than alarm.

  “That’s why I’m here. Surely you’ve noticed.”

  Sophie was spared having to answer—and lie—by Athena and Amelia bustling into the room to announce that dinner was served. Josephine didn’t wait too long past the “oh, this is delicious” niceties before she launched into the business that had apparently brought her to the New York enchantresses. “You must have noticed the danger signs.”

  Sophie had a sinking suspicion she knew what signs Josephine meant, but she fought to keep her expression blank and neutral. Amelia surprised her by saying, “Oh, you mean the awakening Realm? Yes, we were aware of that. Our sources tell us that a new queen is on the throne.”

  It was even harder for Sophie not to react to that. Upon further thought, though, she realized that pretending ignorance would only have given Josephine the upper hand. As it was, Josephine seemed somewhat taken aback. “So you did know.”

  “It was rather hard to miss,” Athena said with a smile. “And we have very good sources.” Sophie thought she sounded like a schoolgirl campaigning to be the teacher’s pet, eager for Josephine’s approval.

  “Then we have failed in our mandate,” Josephine said. “And now we must deal with the consequences in the aftermath.”

  “What do you propose we do?” Sophie asked. “Depose the new queen? Perhaps we should wait to see how her reign goes. There’s always the possibility that someone worse might take the throne.” If Josephine had any idea how close the human world had come to disaster at Halloween, she’d know that a few magical incidents were nothing. The current queen was Sophie’s grandmother, who was more human than fae.

  Josephine turned a steely glare on Sophie. “Wait and see? How many more deaths are you willing to tolerate? How many more missing children? How much more pain and suffering? Due to our work, there has been no queen on the throne in centuries. Now, we’re back to the days when the fae had great influence over the human world, and mankind no longer knows what to do about it. No one knows how to protect themselves, how to get their children back, what to do if they get taken to the Realm. What do you think will happen if the queen shows herself and demands tribute?”

  Sophie knew that was highly unlikely, since the queen would revert to a frail old woman in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease the moment she set foot outside the Realm, but she wasn’t sure this was a fact to be shared with Josephine. She waited to let Amelia or Athena respond.

  “You’re seeing these things, too?” Amelia asked. “The missing people, strange sightings?”

  “Everyone’s seeing them. That is, enchantresses are, all over the world. Where we still have enchantresses.”

  “You’re certain this activity is fae?” Sophie asked. She wasn’t so sure, herself, and she was part fae. There was something about all of it that didn’t ring quite right to her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “Everything I’ve seen has been ambiguous, at best.”

  “Didn’t you just tell me you were new to this?” Josephine asked in the kind of tone that implied the “bless your heart” would have been understood if she’d had a southern accent. “How would you know to judge?”

  “We have yet to find definitive proof,” Athena said hastily. “None of our sources have been able to verify anything more than a few creature sightings, and only then among those who have been touched by the fae. Even the tabloids haven’t picked up on any unusual activity, and you’d think they’d put this on the front page.”

  Sophie thought for a moment that Josephine was going to explode. Blotches of red formed on her cheeks, and her nostrils flared. Her chest rose and fell rapidly for several breaths, and when she spoke, she did so through clenched teeth. “Keep your heads in the sand if you wish, but I will carry out my duties. Our mandate is to keep the fae from influencing our world. We’ve grown complacent in centuries with nothing to do but monitor a few nature spirits and keep an eye on known passages to the Borderlands. Now is the time for us to rise up and be the enchantresses we were born to be.”

  “I didn’t realize I’d ever stopped,” Amelia said dryly before standing and saying, “Dessert and coffee in the living room?”

  Josephine barely waited for them to be resettled and served before she picked up where she’d left off. “If you need help dealing with the situation, I can offer the assistance of my circle.”

  “So far, it seems that most of the activity we’ve seen is relatively benign,” Amelia said.

  “Do you consider the missing children to be ‘benign’?”

  Sophie had just been throwing out ideas earlier when she’d suggested to Michael that someone was trying to make the enchantresses seem more important, but hearing Josephine’s attempt to rally them made it seem like a much more credible theory. Was Josephine the one trying to frame the fae? On an impulse, Sophie said, “That’s not fae.”

  The enchantress’s reaction was strong enough to be satisfying. She froze for a split second, then her lips tightened. “How do you know?”

  “I’ve looked at a map. The fae actually have a fairly hard time in this city. Too much iron. They’re active in the major parks where there’s plenty of green space, but they generally avoid midtown, and especially the high-rises made of steel.”

  “How do you explain children missing from rooms whose windows don’t open, in apartments locked from the inside?”

  “It’s definitely magic, but they weren’t taken by the fae. I’d hazard a guess that it was done by someone who wanted to make the fae look bad, but who had no experience with an actual fairy abduction—or assumed that no one else did.”

  Josephine’s reaction was more than Sophie could have hoped for. She turned stark white—livid—and went so still that she seemed to even have stopped breathing for a moment. But it only lasted a moment. A heartbeat or two later, she gave Sophie an icy smile and said, “Oh, so you’re an expert on the fae now, are you? I thought you only just learned you were an enchantress.”

  The reaction was all Sophie needed. She’d wondered who’d want to frame the fae, and now she had a feeling she knew. All of this had to be part of some kind of power game. But she couldn’t let on this early. Instead, she kept her eyes as wide and innocent as she could manage and said, “Oh, I don’t know much about being an enchantress, but my grandmother taught me all about the fae. We lived near the woods, so we had them around when I was growing up. They even tried to take my sister once. So while I wasn’t formally an enchantress, I suppose I was doing the same sort of work.”

  Amelia gave Sophie a sidelong glance, but if she was confused about Sophie’s line of conversation, that was the only sign. She jumped right in, picking up the thread. “That’s how we met Sophie and realized what she was. She was doing it all naturally.”

  “Yes,” Athena agreed. “She’s new to being called an enchantress, but she was doing the work all along, and she knows more about the fae than anyone I’ve met.”

  “I just don’t know who’d want to take children from their families,” Sophie said, hoping she wasn’t pouring it on too thick. “We know why the fae take them, but what other magic users out there would have a reason? Trolls and ogres are something out of fairy tales, right? They’re not really real.”

  “There are trolls under some of the bridges,” Athena said, “but they don’t interact with humans, and they don’t eat children.”

  “If it’s not fae, does it even fall within our purview?” Amelia asked.

  “Should we really debate jurisdiction when children are missing?” Josephine said. “I believe we have some obligation here, since ordinary humans are ill-equipped to deal with any kind of magical activity. I would be happ
y to help while I’m here in the city.”

  And what do you bet you miraculously happen to find those children? Sophie thought, fighting to keep her thoughts off her face. Not that it mattered how the children were returned, but she hated to let Josephine manage to get something out of the situation in spite of being caught screwing up.

  “I’m sure we can manage,” Amelia said. “Though it is kind of you to offer. You aren’t seeing activity like this in Philadelphia, are you?”

  “We did, but we got it under control very quickly.”

  “Shouldn’t we also look for enemies of the fae?” Sophie asked. “They must have some reason for trying to turn us against them.”

  “We are the enemies of the fae,” Josephine said sternly. “I don’t know what your grandmother taught you, but these aren’t the romantic figures out of fairy stories. They’re the enemies of humankind, and now they’re growing strong again. I’m sure you’ve heard the tales. You know what the world was like the last time the fae were this active.”

  “We were all asleep at the switch, I’m afraid,” Amelia said, leaning over to pour herself another cup of coffee. “Anyone else need a refill?”

  Josephine didn’t seem to notice. “How do you mean, asleep at the switch?”

  Amelia drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. “Well, it was the responsibility of the entire sisterhood to keep the throne empty, but none of us seemed to be aware that there was any kind of revival going on within the Realm. We’d all grown complacent. It’s been so long since the time of the last queen, back when children were taken, fairies were part of daily life, and tribute was demanded.” She raised one eyebrow. “You didn’t notice anything changing when the throne was no longer vacant, did you?”

  This time, Josephine allowed her displeasure to show openly. “No, I didn’t, but now that we know there’s a queen, we need to return our order to the strength we had in the heyday of the fae. We need to fill all the local circles, and perhaps even expand them. We need to take advantage of current technology and travel abilities to connect ourselves globally as never before. We will have to hold ourselves against this new queen. Imagine how fierce she must be to have revived and won the throne after all this time.”