She just wasn’t sure how to pass on the message in time to do any good. The usual ways she found him would all be too late, and he hadn’t exactly been responsive the last time she saw him. Then she remembered that when she’d been kidnapped before, Sophie had managed to find someone to bring her food and water in Eamon’s library. What was it she’d said, the roots of an oak tree, cream, and asking a favor of the Good Neighbors? It sounded silly, but it was worth a shot.
She scribbled out a note to Eamon on a piece of scrap paper before she left the shop. On her way to the park, she tied Beau up outside a corner store and dashed inside to buy a carton of cream. It seemed a bit strange to be walking in the park with a carton of cream, but there weren’t that many people around to notice.
Most of the tree leaves had fallen, which made it hard to spot an oak, but she looked for an area with a lot of acorns on the ground. She spotted a likely tree on a hill. It even had a hole under one of the big roots. After a glance around to make sure no one was watching, she poured a little of the cream on the ground and called out softly, “Good neighbor, I bring you a gift and would ask a favor.”
It shouldn’t have been a surprise when it worked, not after all she’d seen and experienced, but she was still shocked when a wizened head popped out of the hole and lapped at the cream before looking up at her. “And what boon do you ask of me, my lady?”
“I need a message delivered to Eamon the scribe. Tall guy with silver hair and eyes. He has a big library in a little hut.”
“I know of the scribe.”
Emily handed over the note she’d written and the rest of the cream. “Then take this cream.”
“I am pleased to be of service to the blood of the queen.” The creature disappeared into the hole, and Emily stood, brushing off the knees of her jeans.
“Huh, I didn’t think of it that way, but I guess I count as a fairy princess,” she remarked to Beau, who was sniffing around the edges of the hole.
She heard music wafting through the air as she headed toward the park exit. That wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary, but at this time of year? It was cold, and snowflakes flurried around. Anyone practicing an instrument out here would have to be insane. Or fae. Or in one of those little bubbles of the Realm.
“Maybe we should go check that out,” she said to Beau, but when she tried to head that way, he refused to budge. Instead, he headed toward home. “Come on, boy, just a look. Music isn’t that dangerous, and I want to see what’s going on. Then I can report it to Michael, Sophie, or the enchantresses.”
She wasn’t sure why she was trying to reason with a bulldog, but it looked like she was going to have to pick him up and carry him if she wanted to go investigate, and she wasn’t sure he’d cooperate with that. Sophie had said Beau had good instincts. Maybe for once she should heed them. “Okay, have it your way,” she said. “I didn’t really want to do that anyway. But don’t blame me if it nags at you all day and you end up dying of curiosity.”
Beau’s grunt told her exactly what he thought of that.
Twenty-five
Lincoln Center
Wednesday, 6:45 p.m.
“I can’t believe you’re dragging me to the ballet,” Mari grumbled as she and Michael waited in the lobby for the theater doors to open.
“I told you, it’s Emily’s sister and Emily can’t be here, but she wanted there to be some familiar faces in the audience, so she gave me her tickets.”
“Yeah, but why do I have to be here?”
He grinned at her. “So I can tell everyone at the precinct that I went because you wanted to go.”
“Yeah, like anyone would believe that.”
He saw Amelia and Athena on the other side of the lobby and felt bad for hoping they didn’t approach. He didn’t think he could begin to explain his relationship with them to Mari. It wasn’t exactly common for a man to maintain a friendship with people who ran a shop his late wife used to patronize years earlier or for him to socialize with his downstairs neighbor’s former employers. No matter how he described it, it was bound to set off a whole new round of “nice to old ladies” jokes. His desk would soon be covered in fake merit badges for helping old ladies cross the street and carrying their groceries. The angel thing was bad enough; he didn’t want to get anything else started.
Besides, it was probably best to make all this look somewhat natural. If they were conferencing before the performance, it might be obvious that they were here for some reason other than supporting Sophie. Athena caught his eye and gave him a wink, but he sighed in relief when she didn’t approach.
He turned his back slightly, just to make sure she got the message, and found himself staring across the room at Josephine, who’d made a grand entrance, fur coat and all.
“Whoa, check out Cruella de Vil over there,” Mari said. It was hard to miss Josephine, and he suspected she intended it that way. Now he really, really hoped she didn’t approach. He couldn’t begin to imagine what would happen if Mari found out someone like Josephine knew him, and he didn’t have any desire to start collecting Dalmatian knickknacks.
“Yeah, the preview is mostly for patrons of the arts, so the place will be full of society ladies,” he said. He noticed that there were a few elegant women in Josephine’s wake. Other enchantresses? That was a very good sign that this was going to be her chosen moment for outing Sophie as a fairy, just as Emily had suspected. He had some bits of anti-fae protection on him, but he wasn’t sure he could do anything to protect Sophie from enchantresses. Amelia and Athena couldn’t risk going against Josephine in public. What really concerned him was the possibility that this could ruin Sophie’s dance career. He’d heard how she sounded when talking about it, and he knew that meant more to her than being an enchantress.
They opened the doors to begin seating, and Michael lost sight of Josephine and her entourage as he and Mari entered the theater. “You owe me big for this, Rev,” Mari said, taking her seat. “I never went in for this sissy stuff. I was more into sports.”
“Dancers are really well-conditioned athletes,” he said, quoting something Sophie had once said.
“This dancer friend is the one Tank’s afraid of?”
“Yeah.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Okay, then, it could maybe be interesting. I’ve been curious about her.” A slip of paper fell out of her program, and she looked at it. “Oh, is this your friend?”
He found the same insert in his program, announcing that Sophie Drake would be dancing the role of the Snow Queen. He hardly recognized the glamorous woman in the black-and-white photo on the slip, and the list of credits seemed impressive to him. She’d won a lot of awards and had danced all over the world, and from what he knew of her history, she must have done all that as a teenager. “Yeah, that’s Sophie,” he said. “She’s a last-minute fill-in, so I guess the program was already printed.”
Mari read the slip before tucking it back into her program. “It sounds like she’s a big deal.”
“Yeah, seems like it.” He glanced over the program page that outlined the ballet. “She’s not on until the second act. Emily warned me that the first act is kind of boring. That’s the part where all the kids get roles. The real dancing kicks in at Sophie’s part.”
Mari looked distressed. “There are kids? You didn’t mention kids. You said there would be men in tights.”
“Think of the men in tights as your reward for getting through the kids. And don’t tell me you’ve never heard about The Nutcracker.”
“Ballet isn’t a big deal in the barrio. Have you seen it?”
“No,” he admitted.
“And would you be here if your friend wasn’t in it?”
He didn’t think he could get away with a lie. “No.”
With a grin, she said, “I can’t wait to see this woman. You know, I think this is the first time you’ve so much as mentioned anyone in all the time I’ve known you. She must be something special. But I don’t see you as the type to go fo
r ballerinas.”
“Jen was an actress. I guess I have a thing for divas. How do you think I manage to put up with you?”
Any retort she planned to make was cut off by the lights dimming. The first act was as boring as Emily had warned him, just a bunch of people miming being at a party. It picked up when the rats attacked. During the intermission, Mari grumbled, “This thing is seriously short on men in tights, though that nutcracker prince guy wasn’t so bad there at the end. You must really like this woman to sit through this for her.” She elbowed him in the side and gave him a knowing wink.
“I’m broadening my cultural horizons,” he said. “And I owe Emily for everything she did for me when I was hurt. The least I can do is show up for her sister.” The truth was, he wasn’t sure he’d have come if it was just about Sophie. He was here because there was a good chance that something might happen. But he couldn’t exactly tell Mari that he was only here because he anticipated some kind of magical showdown.
The next act started with rows of women in long, poufy skirts fluttering across the stage on their toes. He found himself leaning forward in anticipation as he recognized the music Sophie had been practicing to that day he’d visited her in the studio. She appeared, leaping across the stage, so high she could have been flying on wires. A wave of appreciative applause rose from the crowd.
She wore a skirt like the one she’d been practicing in, and the bodice of her costume was white satin with a white fur-like collar around her shoulders and little bands of more white fur at her wrists. On her head sat a crown that looked remarkably similar to the crown of the fairy realm, but with more bling. If he hadn’t known this was the part Sophie was dancing and hadn’t seen her practicing, he might not have recognized her, even through his binoculars. She wore a lot more makeup than he’d ever seen her wear, and her face and hair were liberally dusted in silvery glitter.
After her opening leaps, she spun around the stage, greeting each of the women who were arranged in a big half circle around the back. She did some dancing in the middle of the circle, then leapt offstage again. The rest of the dancers did their thing, moving in perfect unison. The girl from the first act (who Michael could tell through his binoculars was no child, more like a teenager) danced and played with the human snowflakes until Sophie came out again, looking harsh and forbidding even as she wafted delicately about. Her feet moved so fast she seemed to blur, and when she slowed down, she balanced for what seemed to be an impossibly long time on her toes. He didn’t know much about dance, but he could tell by the way the people around him reacted—with gasps and bursts of applause—that this was good—inhumanly so. Somehow she managed to be powerful and weightless, all at the same time.
“Dios mio,” Mari breathed next to him, then clarified, “That was a prayer, not swearing.”
“Whatever,” he murmured, not taking his eyes off the stage. He couldn’t help but wonder what the audience would think if they knew the snow queen on the stage really was a fairy princess.
In all her whirling around, she swept the rest of the dancers into a frenzy of movement that caught up the girl, sending her caroming around the stage. It was a reasonably good depiction of a blizzard, enhanced by the snow that began falling.
“Good special effects,” Mari muttered approvingly.
Were they special effects? It looked an awful lot like real snow—too real. He thought a few of the dancers flinched as flakes touched them, and at least one faltered. Even Sophie seemed a little startled. It didn’t affect her dancing at all, but her focus was on the space above her rather than on the audience, the way it had been.
The snowflakes falling on the stage coalesced into a vaguely human-looking form that twirled and leapt in the air, mirroring Sophie’s movements. Michael was pretty sure that wasn’t special effects. Josephine had to be making her power play. Could Sophie fight it off without using any fae magic?
It was hard to tell from the audience’s reaction whether they saw what he was seeing. They’d seemed enthralled before things got weird, and even without the freaky stuff, the dancing was getting pretty exciting. Mari had commented on the special effects, and she was grinning as broadly as all the little girls in their velveteen dresses in the audience rather than reaching for her gun, so perhaps things didn’t look too weird to the normal human eye.
He had to admit that adding an actual snow monster had livened up the ballet significantly. Sophie had been right; the story needed a little more conflict. Onstage, the flock of snowflake dancers swirled around the edges as the girl ran among them. The kid looked truly frightened. In the middle of the stage, Sophie kept dancing. She did this thing where she kicked her leg up high in front of her while she rose up on tiptoe, then she somehow whipped her body around without moving the raised leg, so that it was then behind her body in almost the same exact position. She did this back and forth at lightning-fast speed while flicking her wrists in the general direction of the snow monster so that it was kept back from the others. The appreciative applause from the audience made him wonder if this dancing was something special or if they were enjoying the snow battle.
“You’re right, Rev, the ballet is pretty cool, even if it is short on men in tights,” Mari said enthusiastically.
He just hoped it didn’t get so cool that the theater froze over.
Twenty-six
Lincoln Center
8:10 p.m.
Sophie didn’t have to act angry as she fought off the snow monster. She’d finally made it back to the big show, and this had to happen? Josephine was definitely going down for this. What she did have to fake was the fact that she was trying to protect Clara rather than attacking her. She had to look like she was whipping the dancers portraying snowflakes into a frenzy against the interloper even as she threw everything she had against the real snow creature whirling around in the air over the stage. To make it all more difficult, she had to be sure to use enchantress magic that took conscious thought and specific procedures rather than the fae magic that came naturally to her. She was bound and determined not to let Josephine’s scheme succeed.
The dancers around her, including the teenage apprentice playing Clara, were total pros and were doing a masterful job of not reacting to the strangeness. She could only imagine what they thought was going on—probably untested special effects going haywire.
Sophie wasn’t sure if the snow creature was actually malign. The real danger was a wet stage. She created a warm, dry breeze that evaporated the snowflakes before they could hit the stage and another gust of warm air higher up that she hoped would deter the creature.
What was that thing, anyway? If Josephine had created it, it wasn’t from a spell Sophie had learned. Or had one of Josephine’s fae coconspirators cooked this up? It was a good thing that she’d committed the choreography to muscle memory over the past few days because she was completely sidetracked by trying to figure out what was happening and what to do about it.
The music built to an ominous climax as the nutcracker prince leaped into action to rescue Clara from Sophie’s Snow Queen and haul her off to the Land of Sweets, where she’d be bored by nearly an hour of people pretending to be candy or perpetuating ethnic stereotypes. Sophie wondered if the snow creature would follow her offstage or stick around to liven up the final act. It would be much more obvious there, so she needed to stop it now.
She took advantage of the moment when the prince flung her away from Clara to face the creature directly. The choreography called for her to whip her arms upward in fury, so she used the movement to fling a burst of pure power at the creature. “Go find a desert,” she muttered. She wasn’t sure if she’d killed it for good or if it had just conceded defeat in this battle, but it disintegrated, going from a ghostly woman formed of snow flurries to a great burst of snow that Sophie had to act quickly to evaporate.
The timing even fit the music, which calmed as the snowflakes formed a lane for Clara and the prince’s sleigh to travel to the next act as Sophie bourréd
offstage to enthusiastic applause. The curtain fell at the end of the act, and Sophie went back onstage to bow. There were even a couple of roses thrown onto the stage. Not bad, she thought.
When she headed back into the wings, she remarked to one of the stagehands, “Wow, y’all have really raised the game in special effects since the last time I danced here. It was almost like real snow.”
With any luck, that would keep anyone in the ballet from blaming her presence. But how would the enchantresses take what she’d done?
Twenty-seven
The Theater
9:30 p.m.
As soon as she left the stage for intermission, Emily made a beeline to her dressing room to check her phone for messages. There was nothing from either Sophie or Michael. She wasn’t sure what she expected, but she was sure that if something truly horrible had happened, Michael would let her know. Her phone being reassuringly free of messages from the ballet contingent didn’t stop Emily from worrying about her sister.
There was a rap on the door, and Olivia stuck her head inside. “You okay? You seemed a bit distracted out there.”
“Did I?” Emily asked in horror.
“Don’t worry, I don’t think anyone else would notice. You’re still amazing, but I got the sense there was some autopilot going on, which was weird when Mr. Knightley was really bringing it. I actually found myself liking him.”
“Wow, now that you mention it, he did seem different. But no, I guess I’m just thinking about Sophie. She had her big preview performance tonight, and I wish I could have been there.”
“Oh, right. I guess that’s the hard part of having two performers in the family. You can’t be there for each other.”
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