Alexandra's Riddle (Northwest Magic Book 1)

by Elisa Keyston

  “I’ve been busy keeping track of this interloper,” the creature said, narrowing its eyes at Cass, a hint of mischief in its voice. She frowned. What did it mean by keeping track of her?

  “Your name is Mr. Green?” she asked aloud.

  “I don’t have a name,” the creature responded shirtily. “Names are human inventions.”

  Cass rolled her eyes. Fae did, in fact, have names, at least according to Aunt Alexandra—but to know a fae’s true name was to have power over it, so surely the creature wouldn’t want humans to know about it.

  The fae hopped across the path almost like a frog, but it stayed well out of arm’s reach. It leveled a gaze at Cass. “But some humans have called me Green,” it said after a long moment.

  Cass quirked her head. There was an odd, loaded tone to its words, and for some reason, they gave her a strong sense of… something. Not quite a premonition. More like déjà vu.

  Before Cass could put her finger on the sensation, Lily asked, “What’s an interloper?”

  “An interloper,” Green said cheerfully, pointing to Cass, “is what she is.”

  “Ah,” Lily said, pretending to understand what the fae meant when she clearly hadn’t.

  “Do fae typically have genders?” Cass asked. Despite the imaginative—and detailed—drawings of Mr. Froud, she’d never seen any clear indication that any fae was male or female. From what she understood of them, fae didn’t reproduce like animals. They seemed to spring into existence spontaneously, or through magic or something.

  “More human inventions,” Green confirmed. “But the little one calls everyone she meets Mister or Missus, so I told her Mister is fine.”

  “It’s true,” Lily said, nodding serenely. She was practically radiating happiness at having the weird creature near. Cass tried to hold back a sigh. She was going to have to do a lot of work with this kid.

  “If you want, you can call me Mister, too. I sort of like the respect it adds,” Green said with a sly grin.

  “Lily,” Cass said, ignoring the fae and trying to keep her voice even and patient, “did my aunt know that you could see faeries?”

  “Ms. Alexandra? Oh, yes,” Lily replied, beaming. “She was giving me lessons… before.” At that, the joy seemed to drain out of her face, and her shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am.”

  Cass frowned. It was obvious from Lily’s reaction that she and Aunt Alexandra had been close. But why hadn’t Alexandra ever mentioned Lily to Cass when they’d spoken on the phone? It seemed a striking omission.

  “What sort of lessons?” she asked as Lily looked down at her feet. She was wearing saddle shoes. That was another odd thing about the girl, the old-fashioned, almost prissy way she dressed. While the other kids at the library wore jeans and sneakers, Cass had only ever seen Lily in skirts or jumpers. She wondered if the clothing was Lily’s choice or her parents’.

  “How to control my ability,” Lily said softly, still seeming off in a world of her own. To Cass’s surprise, Green moved closer, putting a small, spindly hand on Lily’s shoe in an almost comforting gesture. Lily looked up at him and smiled.

  “Your ability?” Cass asked.

  “Yes, her ability. Do you have to repeat every other word we say?” Green said, looking at Cass in annoyance. “You know what ability means, right? You should, seeing as you have one yourself.”

  Cass stared between the fae and the girl. “You mean my premonitions?”

  “Right,” Green said. “Those.”

  Lily turned to face Cass eagerly. “You have one, too?”

  “Yeah, I have premonitions. I mean… sometimes I can sense when something’s going to happen,” Cass explained. “Not always. But sometimes.”

  “That’s sort of like me!” Lily exclaimed. “Sometimes I can hear what people think. But not always. Just sometimes.”

  Cass blinked at the girl. “You can hear people’s thoughts?” Cass had never encountered anyone else with a supernatural ability apart from Aunt Alexandra, and her ability had been the same as Cass’s. She hadn’t realized that other abilities were even possible.

  Lily nodded. “Ms. Alexandra was helping me learn how to control it. Sometimes I don’t hear anything, but other times it’s like…” She hesitated, her gaze on the gnome, who had reappeared from the bushes and was collecting empty acorn caps that lay strewn on the ground beneath the oak trees. “Other times it’s like I have fifty people standing around me screaming in my ears. It gives me a headache.”

  “I can imagine,” Cass said, frowning. She’d thought she had it bad, being the unwanted harbinger of doom, but at least she didn’t have other people’s voices in her head.

  Lily sat quietly for a moment before saying, “Ma’am…”

  “Cass.”

  Lily nodded. “Ms. Cass… do you think you would be able to give me lessons?”

  Cass stared at the girl, her brows raised. “Me?”

  “You know, since you also have an ability. I thought maybe…” Lily trailed off and shrugged.

  There it was again, that same pang she’d felt in her chest when she’d watched Lily decorating for the party earlier, when Darcy said she’d spent most of her summer at the library. Had she been spending more time there because Alexandra was gone? Losing Alexandra was hard enough for Cass, even though she’d had her beloved great-aunt for thirty years. She couldn’t imagine how she would have felt if Aunt Alexandra had passed when she was only nine. It must have been so hard for Lily, not only losing someone she cared about, but also the only other person she knew with the Sight.

  Cass exhaled. You’re supposed to be avoiding attachments, remember? she reminded herself. How will Lily feel if she gets close to you and then you leave?

  Still, Cass was going to be here at least a few more months. And Lily clearly needed help. The last thing Cass wanted was for the girl to get spirited away because she hadn’t had anyone to warn her, to help her know better. Cass remembered the way she—someone who had been practicing ignoring faery influences for half her life—had been pixy-led last week. No, these woods were definitely not safe for a little girl to be wandering around in alone, especially not a little girl with Sight. Cass would just have to make it clear to her that these lessons were temporary.

  “Sure,” Cass said after a long moment. When Lily let out a little squeal of glee, she quickly added, “Now, I can’t make any promises about the quality of these lessons. I’ve never been a teacher, and I don’t know nearly as much about this as Aunt Alexandra did.”

  “That’s what you’ve got me for,” Green said from where he sat on top of Lily’s saddle shoe.

  Cass narrowed her eyes at him. “I never said you were going to be part of it. In fact, if I have my way, you won’t be anywhere near us.”

  “But Mr. Green always helped with my lessons with Ms. Alexandra!” Lily protested.

  Cass’s head jerked up at her. “Excuse me, what?”

  Green folded his arms smugly and nodded.

  Cass gaped at the two of them. What had happened to Aunt Alexandra over the last twenty years of her life? Letting brownies in the house? Giving lessons to some local kid without breathing a word of it to Cass any of the hundreds of times they’d talked on the phone? Befriending this… this… green thing? It was like she’d been living a double life!

  She squeezed her eyes shut and reached for the key around her neck, twisting it between her fingers. Just now, she’d give anything, anything, to be able to talk to her great-aunt one last time. To get some answers to the dozens of questions that had piled up over the last week. But it was impossible. All she could do was look forward. Lily was insistent that Alexandra had trusted Green. But could she be sure Lily wasn’t somehow bewitched? True, she didn’t seem bewitched. And, honestly, in the time she’d spent sitting on this bench with the two of them, Cass hadn’t felt any prickles of foreboding. In fact, it was possibly the first time since she’d arrived in Riddle that she’d gone this long without getting the c
reepy-crawlies.

  But still…

  “I’ll think about it,” Cass said at last. “But in the meantime, I don’t want you wandering around the woods here by yourself, okay? They’re dangerous.”

  “I know,” Lily said. “Mr. Green already warned me.”

  Just like he’d warned Cass when she was being pixy-led. Cass knew the fae was having the same thought—or, based on his behavior the other day, maybe even reading her thoughts—from the smug expression on his face.

  “Okay, then. Well, let’s head inside and we can figure out where to go from here,” Cass said.

  “Mr. Green can’t go in the house. Can we go in the solarium? That’s where Ms. Alexandra and I would always go for lessons.”

  “All right,” Cass said, wondering just how she’d managed to get mixed up in this mess. “You go ahead, I need to get some things together.” Like books or something. Aunt Alexandra was bound to have some books or notes related to Lily’s magic lessons, right? Somewhere in that labyrinthine house of hers.

  Lily nodded, scrambling off the bench and bounding down the path to the south side of the house. As Cass watched her, Green let out a snort of laughter. “You have no clue what you’re doing, do you?”

  “Nope.” She looked down at the fae. “Why do you care about any of this?”

  Green shrugged. “Gives me something to do. You’d be surprised how tedious living forever can be. Gathering acorns gets dull after the first ten centuries or so. Even playing tricks on humans gets old when you’ve been around as long as me.”

  “So you decided to study the humans rather than just conducting random experiments on them?” Cass said. “You’re what you might call a faery academic?”

  The fae shrugged again. “I’m me.”

  “Right. You. Green.” Cass frowned at that déjà vu feeling she had once more when she said the creature’s so-called name. “Are you the one who opened the door to the staircase earlier?”

  “No. Lily told you, I don’t go inside the house,” Green replied in his high, lilting voice.

  “Don’t or can’t?”

  Green rolled his eyes, an oddly human gesture. “Only household fae go indoors. Brownies and the like.” He wrinkled his nose, then added, “You’re not too popular around here for kicking the brownies out, by the way.”

  Cass ignored him. Instead, she drew the tarot card she’d found on the servant stairs earlier out of her pocket. She hadn’t had a chance to look at it before, but now she noticed that the image depicted a hand emerging from clouds holding a golden goblet. A white dove flew overhead, carrying in its beak what appeared to be a Eucharistic host. Bizarrely religious imagery, Cass remarked to herself, for something typically associated with the occult.

  “So you’re not the one who’s been leaving these around for me?” she asked Green.

  He looked at the card for a moment before saying blandly, “If I were to leave you a card, it certainly wouldn’t be that one.”

  Cass blinked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me, if you’re supposed to be so smart.”

  Cass groaned, biting the inside of her cheek. Twenty minutes in this fae’s company was already driving her up the wall. How was she supposed to put up with him on a daily basis? Part of her wanted to tell Lily right now that she’d changed her mind, but she knew it wouldn’t be that simple. Green would continue to harass her as long as she was here on Aunt Alexandra’s property. What she needed to do was get the house cleared out as quickly as possible, and then get the heck out of this town before the residents—human or non-human—managed to strip her of her last vestige of sanity.

  She put the tarot card back in her pocket, making a mental note to ask Emma about it later. For now, Lily was beckoning to her from the steps of the solarium. Whatever the mystery about these cards was, it would have to wait to be solved until another day.

  The next couple weeks went by in a blur. Lily came over to the house almost every day for her lessons—such as they were. Cass had found a few books in Alexandra’s collection that had some information on the subject of preternatural abilities, including one called Faery Blessings, the title of which made Cass’s eyes roll so hard they disappeared into her skull. As if her premonitions could be considered a blessing. Faery Curses, maybe.

  The book had explained that gifts like Lily’s were typically found in people with highly empathetic personalities. The more sensitive the possessor of the gift was to the feelings of others, the stronger the gift typically was, to the point that the feelings of others could sometimes be overwhelming to the possessor of the gift.

  Out of curiosity, Cass had looked up premonitions. According to the book, prophecy was typically given to people with controlling personalities. Well, more specifically, “someone who strongly desires to feel control over their situation.” Yeah, right. If anything, her premonitions had typically given Cass less control, since it seemed there was rarely anything she could do about it. When she warned people, they universally ignored her. To sometimes devastating results, Cass remembered grimly.

  The book was a crock, she decided. But regardless, there was logic to the assumption that Lily would be able to control her powers better by improving her own self-confidence. Becoming more grounded in her own self would help shut out the noise around her.

  Unfortunately, self-confidence-building seemed to Cass to be more the purview of a counselor or therapist, which Cass was most definitely not. Not that Lily seemed to mind all that much that Cass wasn’t doing much in the teaching department. For the most part, more than the lessons, Lily seemed like she just wanted company. She chatted with Cass (and Green, whom Cass found herself unable to shake; if anything, the fae seemed emboldened to appear more often now) about any little thing that came into her mind. Though she’d seemed quiet as a mouse when Cass had first seen her, once she opened up, it was hard to get her to stop talking. On the days when Cass worked—she was scheduled four days a week, usually Monday through Thursday or Tuesday through Friday—Lily spent her free time at the library as well, helping Darcy with projects or reading a book or, after school started, working on her homework.

  The school year began the first week of September, after Labor Day. With Lily back at school, Cass’s mornings—the few weekdays she wasn’t at the library, anyway—were free. She spent that time working on getting the house cleaned out. She’d decided to hold off on the books for the time being and focus on the more straightforward task of culling Aunt Alexandra’s clothing. She got most of it boxed up to take to the Goodwill drop-off truck, but a few items were too sentimental for Cass to part with just yet. She knew she’d have to at some point—she couldn’t very well hang on to all this junk, what with how frequently she tended to move, and the small apartments she usually wound up renting—but it was still too hard right now. She had plenty of time. She was satisfied with her job at the Riddle Library; Darcy was probably her favorite coworker ever, and Randy was pretty laid-back, as bosses went. Her paycheck was enough to cover groceries and utilities, and since the house was paid off, she didn’t have to worry about mortgage payments. There was no rush to get the house cleaned out overnight. She could handle the cleaning day by day.

  Besides, it was good for Lily to have a place to go. Cass had soon realized that Darcy hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said Lily didn’t get much attention at home. That much became clear the first day school was in session, when she’d come into the library after school, waiting for Cass to get off work at 4:00.

  “If you’re not taking the bus,” Cass had said, removing a book from the shelving cart and replacing it on the shelf, “how do you get home, anyway? Your house is a ways out of town.”

  “Sometimes I walk,” Lily had replied.

  Cass’s eyes had practically bugged out of her head. “Lily, that’s not safe!” she’d cried. It wasn’t just the typical stranger danger: the road into the hills where their houses were situated was steep and narrow, with a
lot of blind curves that a car might tear around without realizing a pedestrian was nearby. It was also a thickly wooded area that Cass would imagine was prime mountain lion terrain.

  “It’s all right. My friends watch out for me.”

  “You can’t trust them to look out for you,” Cass had hissed. When Lily had rolled her eyes, Cass had gone on, firmly, “I’m not kidding, Lily. They might play with you, but they don’t have loyalty the way humans do. They don’t understand right and wrong the way humans do. They keep you around because you’re entertaining to them, but if they decide that they’re bored with you—or if they decide that you’re so entertaining that they want to keep you—you could wind up in some kind of vale that you can’t get out of. Forever.”

  Lily had sighed. “Mr. Green isn’t that way.”

  “Green is different and you know it. Don’t you pay any attention to what I say to you during lessons? Or what he says, for that matter?” She had to give the creature credit—he’d been just as clear as Cass on the dangers of letting your guard down when fae were around.

  When Lily shrugged again, Cass had said, “I’m driving you home from now on, okay? Do not walk back to your house alone again. Even if I’m not here, you call my cell phone.”

  Later, Cass had brought it up with Darcy—the part where Lily said she walked home, not the bit about the faery dangers—and to her horror, Darcy had confirmed her story.

  “The times I’ve seen her walking, I’ve stopped her and driven her home,” Darcy had said. “But I know there have been plenty of times I didn’t see her.”

  “Don’t her parents care at all? How can they let their nine-year-old daughter walk home by herself when they live so far out of town?”

  “I don’t think it’s that they don’t care,” Darcy had replied, looking uncomfortable. “They just don’t seem to think. She’s supposed to take the bus home; I know that much from one of the times I spoke to them after driving her myself. The problem is that they’re never around, so they can’t keep tabs on what she’s doing. Mr. Kowalski is always at his investment company, and Mrs. Kowalski, she’s…” She’d leaned forward, lowering her voice. “She’s a lot younger than him. Like, close to our age. I don’t think she was ready for motherhood when it happened. She, uh… she spends a lot of time over at the Seven Feathers resort.”