Spandex, Spells and Shadows

by Melinda Chase

  Before I had a chance to answer, the air was pierced by a high pitched, terrified scream.

  “DANNY!”

  It was Tanya’s voice. Everything felt like it was moving in slow motion as I turned to see what she was shrieking so loudly at.

  Tanya was on her feet, both of her hands covering her mouth as she tried to hold in her sobs. Her chest heaved, but no sound was coming out. Her dark eyes were focused in front of her, as if they were staring at something.

  Or someone.

  I turned my head back to Laslow, taking in the fuzzy edges all around his figure, the way he sort of glowed like stoplights do after you’ve spent far too long in the chlorine.

  And then I took in the way he wasn’t moving an inch. All he did was smile softly at me, maintaining the almost creepy expression on his face, like he was nothing more than a dream.

  That was when it hit me. The dream ritual we’d just done. The fact that Tanya and I seemed to be the only ones seeing figures. I’d written Laslow down on my paper. And I would have bet my life that Tanya had written Danny down on hers.

  “It’s affecting us differently,” I hollered to Grams and Mom as I rushed over to Tanya, who was now shaking.

  “You’re dead,” she was muttering. “Why aren’t you moving? Move, Danny.”

  “It’s not really him,” I tried to calm her, rubbing a hand awkwardly up and down her back. I’d never really been the nurturing type.

  By the time I looked back up at Mom and Grams, understanding had dawned on them. They linked their arms and closed their eyes, lifting their left hands high in the air above them.

  “Victusine!” They hollered.

  Laslow vanished in front of me, disappearing back into the air. My heart stuttered painfully, but I had to remind myself that it was just a dream. He’d never really been there in the first place.

  “Danny!” Tanya screeched in the same moment that Laslow vanished. “Danny, where are you?”

  She shoved me off of her and rushed forward, stopping exactly where I assumed Danny must have been and whirling in a circle, searching for him.

  I plopped backward to the ground, but I needed a moment to gather myself before I could go over to Tanya.

  “You saw your grandfather, didn’t you?” Deedee murmured. I didn’t even realize she’d come over to me. She wrapped me in her arms and wiped away a wayward tear that I hadn’t even felt fall, while Mom and Grams stood there, heaving. It had clearly taken massive strength for them to end the spell of their own accord.

  Tanya was kneeling on the ground, half sobbing, half panting. A second later, she shook her head and seemed to gather herself, standing once more with her shoulders back and her chin up high.

  “Are you okay?” I asked softly, standing too.

  The glare that Tanya threw my way was so sharp and deadly I could literally feel my skin prickling with the weight of it.

  “Did you drug my food?”

  The question was so out of left field my jaw popped open, and it took me moments longer than it should have to gather my thoughts.

  “No, of course not!” I assured her, aghast at the very notion. “We didn’t touch your food. It was the spell. I’m sorry, I should have thought that it might affect you and I differently since—”

  “No,” Tanya growled, throwing a hand up and making it clear she wasn’t in the mood to hear another word. “Magic isn’t real. It doesn’t exist. Stop trying to convince me, Shannon. What is wrong with you?”

  Tanya stormed off, shoving past Deedee and I without another word.

  “Wait!” I called after her. I was about to run to my new friend when Mom put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Let her go,” she whispered. “The poor girl has a lot to deal with.”

  She was right.

  I watched Tanya stomp across our yard and back into her car, throwing it into gear and ripping off so fast the tire squealed on the blacktop.

  The only other halfling I knew about was gone.

  9

  I watched after Tanya’s car for a long time. I’m really not sure how long, but all I know is that by the time I finally came back down to earth, Mom and Grams had cleaned up our ritual circle and there were twice as many stars in the sky.

  But Tanya was gone.

  I wasn’t sure what the totally numb feeling was. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t lost people before. Starting with Kenneth, and then Hunter, and countless friends along the way.

  But none of them had bothered me like this. I just felt… numb. Physically numb. I had to press my right index finger into my left palm to remind myself that my limbs were even attached.

  The one person who might have held answers had just disappeared. She didn’t know anything, but maybe she had a mom, or a grandma like me. Or maybe she had friends and family that knew the secret.

  Or maybe she had none of that. Maybe she was just a kindred spirit in a world that seemed built to terrify me. That would have been enough, as far as I was concerned.

  “Shannon, let’s go to sleep.” Mom’s voice was nothing more than a whisper behind me, but that alone was enough to bring me back to myself. The numbness disappeared, only to be replaced by a dull, throbbing ache that started just below my lungs and slowly shifted upward, pushed by every step I took, until it finally settled in my heart.

  That feeling was there to stay. I walked inside with it, I went to sleep with it, and I even woke up with it.

  I think I felt guilty, too. I wasn’t all that used to feeling guilty, but there it sat, heavy in my chest. I’d had no way of knowing that spell would affect the two of us so differently, and somehow make us see our dreams while we were awake.

  But I was still responsible. I couldn’t imagine the trauma I’d just unknowingly put Tanya through. I’d never lost anyone, certainly never a fiancé, but I could imagine it.

  If I ever lost Hunter, only to be forced to see his ghostly shell form again, I think I’d lose it the same way Tanya just did.

  Over the next two days, I became absolutely obsessive, in a way that probably would have been a little bit terrifying had Tanya not been the only other half fae I knew of.

  Okay, even with that information it was still a bit terrifying, but what else was I to do? I needed answers, and I was bone tired of not getting them.

  This time, my digging went a little deeper than a Facebook search. I’d noticed that her page didn’t have any pictures of parents or family. Just friends, and more than a few old memories of her dead fiancé.

  A Google search didn’t turn up too much, either. Tanya might have been a millennial, but her internet history was that of a baby boomer. It seemed the only thing she knew how to use was Facebook. Strangely enough, I couldn’t find Tanya’s last name anywhere on her page. She’d changed it to Mrs. Tanya Maines a month before she and Danny were supposed to be married, and there was no maiden name to be found.

  Luckily, she did have her high school listed on her page, which I then used to find her yearbook photo. It turned out, Tanya Maines was really Tanya Flickner.

  And that was when things got really interesting.

  Which was how I turned up on Annabelle’s porch with a hundred bucks in cash and my trusty old MacBook. She was just getting home from a shift at her new job as a Starbucks Barista. There were bags under her sparkling brown eyes, and her curls were a little more frizzy than normal. She looked exhausted, but at least I knew she was safe. There were no crazy demons casting memory spells on her.

  “Listen, lady, I told you I don’t work for you,” Annabelle said, climbing the porch stairs.

  “Right, I know,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry to just come over here like this, but I’ve heard you’re a really talented hacker and, well, I need some help.”

  I held up my laptop and the cash, knowing full well Annabelle was trying to save for school. She might not remember me, but I’d worked with her long enough to know the kid could never pass up an offer.

  It was also possible her mom had divulged tha
t Starbucks wasn’t paying Annabelle very much, and a hundred bucks could come in handy.

  “Alright,” Annabelle shrugged, pocketing the cash and holding her hands out for the laptop. “What do you need?”

  Annabelle was absolute magic with a computer. It didn’t take her long to find Tanya under her maiden name, and even less time to discover that Tanya Flickner was a foster kid with a somewhat spotty past.

  “Can you figure out why she was in foster care in the first place?” I asked, leaning over Annabelle’s shoulder.

  “Only if you stop hovering.”

  “Of course, sorry.” I leaped back and watched as Annabelle’s nimble fingers fly across the keyboard, quickly pulling up the information I needed.

  A news article had been attached to her foster care file. I scanned it quickly, and forced myself to keep my face completely straight.

  Tanya had been thirteen when she’d watched her mother, the only person she had in the world, get brutally murdered by what the child had described as a monster.

  But that wasn’t what sent chills up my spine. I’d spent enough time around murderers to know they were all metaphorical monsters. This one, it appeared, was a real monster.

  The article described him as a “tall green man with horns growing from his skull and devilish red eyes. The man wielded what the girl described as electricity, using it to murder Myra Flickner right in front of her daughter. The coroner’s office has confirmed the cause of death to be electrocution, though had declined to comment on the nature. Which leaves this journalist to wonder if the death of her mother caused Tanya Flickner to suffer a mental breakdown.”

  “That’s why she hates magic!” I whispered victoriously.

  “People think this girl’s crazy,” Annabelle breathed, clicking out of the news article and back to Tanya’s file. “One foster mom said she was—”

  “Thanks, Annabelle,” I said, grabbing the computer from her and dashing away.

  “Feel free to let me know if you’ve got any other jobs!” She called after me.

  I wouldn’t, though. I’d just gotten all of the information I needed to know about Tanya.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in magic. She hated the stuff, and I couldn’t blame her. After all, watching your mother murdered by a magical monster, only to be subsequently ridiculed when telling the story probably did a lot of damage to a kid’s psyche.

  And I’d only made it worse when I’d forced her to have a vision of her dead fiancé.

  But knowledge was power. I knew everything I needed to now.

  I just had to figure out how to fix it.

  10

  My first instinct was to step off of that porch, rush right down to the pub, and tell Tanya that I knew everything and I understood.

  But I knew that was the lonely halfling in me talking, the woman who was so desperate to be understood by someone else that she was willing to be way more reckless than the old Shannon McCarthy ever would be. Despite my sometimes reckless behavior brought on by the events of the last few months, I was still fully aware that rushing Tanya like that was ultimately a terrible choice. If anything, I was sure it would make her even more averse to speaking with me. I’d seen it a million times before as a D.A.

  Tanya was scared. Terrified, actually. I thought I understood that terror but, as I drove home, I realized that I probably didn’t.

  Foster kids had a whole other level of survival built into them. It became ingrained within their very DNA as they spent nights in stranger’s homes and bounced around from one school to the next, praying the move would be permanent, only to be ripped away with barely a moment’s notice.

  I was just about to pull into the driveway, my mind ablaze with all these thoughts of Tanya, when my foot suddenly slammed down the break. Thank God we lived on a dead end street and cars hardly ever drove down this far, or I would have been T-boned for sure.

  I couldn’t go back in my house right then. All the lights were on, and I could see Mom and Grams through the open curtains, sitting in front of a roaring fireplace and sipping on their five o’clock margaritas.

  I should have wanted to join them. Most other people probably would have welcomed the sweet bite of the alcoholic beverage, would have drank it down gladly and drifted off to sleep, leaving their problems for another day.

  After all, what else could I do? I knew barging into Jake’s Pub would be a massive mistake, if Tanya was even working tonight. I didn’t want to stress her out anymore than I already had. She needed time and space to process everything, and it was only right that I give it to her, especially after what I had just learned about her childhood.

  But Tanya wasn’t actually the reason I’d slammed the pedal down so hard pain had shot up through my foot and into my calf. I had this aching need to talk about it all, but not with Mom, or Grams, or Auntie Deedee. I didn’t even find myself wishing Marcella would come back just so we could cry and lament our fae blood.

  I needed Hunter.

  It was a primal sort of need, driving me all the way from my stomach. I could feel it form and grow, expanding beneath my ribs until it was stabbing my lungs, causing me to nearly gasp. I didn’t have questions for him, and I didn’t think he could help me.

  I just needed to see him.

  At that point, I realized that our whole plan to stay four and a half miles from each other at all times was imbecilic at best, and damaging at worst. I couldn’t be so far from him in moments like this. He was the first person to be completely honest with me about who and what I was. He’d never tried to hide that from me.

  Before I was even aware I was doing it, I spun the steering wheel like I thought I was some sort of action star, and my car ripped away from the curb and headed straight for Hunter’s hotel.

  The same valet was there, but I hardly glanced at him as he took my keys and gave me the ticket. I rushed to the elevator, accidentally cutting off a middle-aged man and his far younger date in my haste, and slammed the button for the fourth floor.

  By the time I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrored walls of the elevator, I couldn’t help but laugh.

  I looked like an absolute sight. My hair was barely holding its shape anymore, and most of the curls had turned into balls of frizz. The shirt I was wearing had a coffee stain from that morning at work, and my shoes were crusted with mud.

  I curled my finger in my hair, trying to give it a little bit of shape, before remembering that Hunter couldn’t even see me. It didn’t matter what I looked like.

  This time when I got up to his door, I didn’t freeze. I slammed my fist against the wood the way an entitled, twenty-something tech guy would, pretending I had all the right in the world to be there.

  Hunter swung the door open, and confusion only crossed his face for a split second before it formed into an expression that was part amusement, and part annoyance.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” he announced, staring into the hallway with a raised eyebrow. “I thought I made that pretty darn clear.”

  “It was here or a mental institution,” I shrugged, sweeping past him as I did so.

  “Are you being dramatic or did something happen?” He asked, worry coloring his voice.

  I glanced around the room, which had been tidied up since the last time I was here, and sighed.

  “A little bit of both, I guess,” I shrugged.

  The mini-fridge under the desk caught my eye, and I yanked it open to see what was inside. At the moment, I could have really used a nice, cold Coca Cola, or maybe a Sunkist Orange.

  “Sorry I’m not the most hospitable right now,” Hunter grimaced as I noticed the three takeout containers and a single bottle of half drunk water. “Hotel living doesn’t leave much room for playing host.”

  “Don’t apologize,” I said quickly. “It’s my fault you’re here in the first place.”

  “Are we going to go through this again?” He asked. “You know I won’t let you take an ounce of blame, Shannon.”


  I glanced over my shoulder at him and couldn’t help the blushing smile that pulled my lips up. He was dead serious, and I knew if he could see my face right then he’d probably huff in annoyance and grumble about how little I knew about the magical world.

  But his inability to let me take blame warmed my heart in a way no one ever had.

  “Your nobility astounds me, sir,” I teased him.

  Taking full advantage of the fact that I was still invisible to Hunter, I plopped down on the bed not two inches away from him. The air between us was electric, pulsating with a very different sort of beat than it did when I was near another halfling.

  “It better,” Hunter growled, hiding a smile. “So, you gonna tell me what brought you here during happy hour?”

  “Oh I’m swearing off alcohol,” I joked, attempting to hide the reeling of my mind. But even blind, Hunter knew me well.

  “Spill, Shannon,” he ordered. “Before I have to kick you out again.”

  The memory of his angry, murderous face seared my mind’s eye once more. That alone was enough to get me to speak.

  “I found the halfling.”

  Had it not been for the fact that Hunter’s jaw dropped wide open and I could see his chest rising and falling with shallow breaths, I would have thought he’d gone unconscious while still sitting up. I didn’t push, though, and instead gave him a few moments to absorb this information.

  “You are one smart woman,” he finally choked out.

  “I had to be,” I chuckled. “I worked in a man’s world for a decade and a half. But I can’t really take all the credit for this one. I had a vision that led me straight to her.”

  “Those fae powers really come in handy, huh?”

  “Most of the time,” I replied. “So do you want to hear how it went?”

  “Well, you’re here, so I’m going to hazard a guess and say it didn’t go all that well.” Hunter stood and grabbed his water bottle from the fridge, then came over to sit right on the opposite corner of the bed, even closer to me than before. I couldn’t tell if he knew where I was, and so the move was purposeful, or not.