To Spell & Back Page 14

  Since the no-arguing-while-party-planning pact was still in effect, the godmothers were having trouble remembering when a fight was allowed, and so they’d been avoiding them altogether. Good for me on a temporary basis, but I’d bet the bank there was tension building up that would eventually blow and make Vesuvius look like a pimple.

  Kin says I shouldn’t be pessimistic and prattles on about how new habits form in as few as 21 days. Kin has no idea what he’s talking about, and I’m considering calling him when the time comes. Let him take care of the fallout for once.

  I'm probably not that mean. Probably.

  “It's a Candyland/Stratego hybrid with a few more surprises.” The door closed so quietly behind Salem I had no idea he was in the room.

  “You scared a year off my life. What have I said about sneaking around?”

  “Hello. I’m a cat. Silent predator.”

  “Please, the only prey you’re sneaking up on these days is stuffed into storage containers in the refrigerator.”

  Ignoring his two-toned glare, I returned to the subject at hand. “Candyland and Stratego? Well, that probably explains the explosion. I was hoping for Clue, and ...well, I don’t know what would go with Clue. They didn’t see you, did they?”

  “I’m in one piece with no extra appendages, so I assume I got away unscathed. Nice welcome, by the way. I’ve been gone for days.” Forgetting his human size is bigger than mine, Salem settled on my lap and rubbed his head against my chin.

  “Did you find Mag?” He arched his neck like he wanted a scratch under the chin, which I declined. A fur-covered chin is nice to scratch; a naked one feels odd.

  “She’s alive.” At least he hit the headlines first. “I found her familiar and passed along the message that you wanted to talk.”

  “That’s it? You didn’t find out what happened or if Aunt Mag was hurt?” I’d started thinking of her that way already—as family.

  Rising, Salem stalked toward the end of my bed. “Jinx wasn’t especially chatty.” That was the last I got out of him because the next minute, he was curled up on the polka-dotted beanbag chair at the end of my bed making kitty snores.

  Mag was alive, that was the main thing to remember.

  I had time for a soothing bath with lavender and mint oil before Kin showed up. I nearly jumped out of the towel I still had slung around my midsection when I stepped out of the bathroom to find him lounging on my bed.

  “Hey, Babe.” He gathered me up for a kiss that made me wonder if we ought to forgo faerie game night and have our own version right here. “Terra says it’s game time. Everyone’s waiting for you downstairs.”

  On the way past, I gave Salem a poke. “Game time.” His response was a grumbling growl, and he settled deeper into the plush comfort. His loss.

  “Whoa. This is...wow!” Pretty much the standard response to seeing what the faeries could do when they wanted to have a little fun. Kin’s mouth hung open as he took in the backyard.

  Gumdrop mountains rose over the peppermint stick forest and the lollipop woods, and in the distance, I saw smoke rising from the chimney of the peanut brittle house. Talk about a five-year-old child’s fantasy coming true.

  “Do you smell that?” Kin nudged me with an elbow. “It’s the molasses swamp. I wonder if they went with the version that had some kind of plum tree in the center, or the licorice castle. Lord Licorice always gave me the creeps. Not as bad as Grandma Nut, though.”

  “You really know your Candyland, don’t you.”

  Kin blushed. “I like board games.”

  “Well, don’t worry. We had the earlier edition before they added all the characters in the eighties. It’s probably the gingerbread plum tree.”

  “I’m not the only one who knows the game.”

  “Just remember, this is the faerie version.” I warned. “It’s not going to have the same rules and who knows what else they’ve added into the mix. I did tell them they need to pick a shorter game this time.”

  “You work too hard; it’s good to have a little fun now and then.” Flix stepped into the room, closely followed by Carl who wore a similar expression to Kin’s. Nervous excitement.

  “A little fun does not last a week.” I turned to Carl to explain, “The faeries are convinced two games are better than one, so they combined Risk and Monopoly one time.”

  Frowning, Carl tried to imagine that particular combination.

  “We set the record for the longest game night ever.” I gave Flix a wicked grin, “And I kicked your butt. I am the queen of game night.”

  “Before you get fitted for your crown,” Terra interrupted, “let me tell you the rules for tonight’s festivities.”

  Again, Salem had been right. We would be playing a mix of Candyland and Stratego, as best I could tell. To reduce competition between us, Terra divided us into teams of two and paired me with Flix. Kin and Soleil, Carl and Evian, and Terra and Vaeta would be playing together.

  Each team was assigned a colored flag (already hidden in one of the stops on the game board). The first team to pass through the board, search for and collect any opponents’ flag, and reach the finish line would be the winner. Succumb to one of the many hazards, and your team was out of the running.

  “How is that fair? If you hid the flags, you have the obvious edge.”

  “I will be your game master for the evening.” Salem appeared from nowhere. He’d probably cat-footed it in here and then turned to human form at the time calculated to give me the biggest scare. He was mean like that. “In the spirit of fairness and impartiality, I was asked to hide the flags and the bombs. Now, as game master, I will sit here on the deck, warm my face in the sun, enjoy a tuna burger, and watch the rest of you act like children.”

  He was one to talk, with his constant attempts at making me jump out of my skin.

  “Bombs?” Kin mouthed to me from his position next to Soleil, who had poured herself into a pair of skintight yoga pants and was stretching her calves with a determined expression on her face. I grinned, shrugged, and wiggled my eyebrows. Now that he was on the opposing team, I wasn’t giving him any pointers.

  After Salem had tossed a pair of watermelon-sized dice to determine the playing order, team Sol-Kin stepped up to the starting line. As game master, Salem chose a card for them and shouted out their first move, landing them at the bottom of the rainbow bridge.

  On our first turn, Salem drew a card with an ice cube on it. I didn’t remember there being any ice in Candyland, but we dutifully moved forward until we turned a corner and the others were out of sight.

  “I think that’s it.” Flix pointed to a marker made from a solid shaft of ice, and we turned down the short trail leading into the designated area where we might find one of the flags. His longer legs put Flix ahead of me, which is why I slammed into his back when he stopped short. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Is that Don’t Break the Ice?”

  Sure enough, a small pond lay before us; its surface divided into squares. A giant with a hammer stood on the other side.

  “How does this work? Are we the red guy in the center, then?”

  Before Flix could answer, the giant boomed. “Step on ice. Don’t get wet. Get to other side.”

  Easy enough, right?

  But, no. This was ice. Evian ice. We slid onto a surface that felt like it had been greased with butter and crossed the first three spaces just from the momentum. The giant hammer hit the block in front of us, and it dropped out of sight with a splash. Flix skidded left at the last second and dragged me around with him, the arc of my body sweeping one foot out over the yawning hole before he pulled me to safety.

  “Do something.” A second hammer blow took out another block, and suddenly, Flix was in danger. Worse, his grip on my arm would take me over the edge with him.

  “Skates.” I pictured them with as much detail as I could, given the amount of adrenaline coursing through me, and called two pairs from the wall on the back of the garage.

  “Nice job.
” Flix turned the unavoidable slide into a professional-looking hockey stop when the skates materialized on his feet. I, on the other hand, did something that looked a bit like the splits and an attempt at a somersault combined into one awkward move that featured the flailing of almost every part of my body. Flix had to exercise superhuman strength and balance to keep me from taking us both down.

  With the grace of a gazelle, Flix avoided the gaping holes created by the next two hammer blows, and we landed in a heap on the far shore just as the sound of an explosion echoed in our ears.

  Once the echo died down, an air horn went off.

  “One down, two to go.” Game night bombs were never deadly.

  “Was there ever an igloo in Candyland?” Flix suspiciously eyed the domed structure we’d landed beside.

  “Maybe in one of the later versions. Not in the one we had, though. I don’t see a door anywhere, are we supposed to break in?”

  Cocking a thumb, Flix pointed out something I had yet to notice. A pickax leaned up against the curved wall.

  “Looks that way,” he ran a hand over a section of ice like he was looking for a weak point.

  “Or that’s what they want us to think.” There were three—no, four—possible scenarios that might play out depending on what we did next. Knocking a block out of the igloo and setting off a bomb or finding a flag accounted for two of them. The igloo being full of something else entirely was the third option. Anything from soup to nuts might be waiting inside. Or, as a final choice, we could walk away and leave it for the next unsuspecting team. It was time to decide.

  “I have an idea.” And this is why I am the reigning queen of faerie game night. “Give me a boost.” Flix caught on fast and nearly tossed me directly onto the top of the icy structure.

  “Hey, you with the hammer. I’m standing on thin ice here.” It seemed the pun was lost on him when the giant scratched his head and just stared at me. I tried another way. “Bet you can’t break this ice.”

  A mighty roar was all the warning I received, and I launched out of the way just in time to avoid the blow. Flix snatched me out of the air and dashed for cover behind a nearby fir tree. I’d been right to go with the option five, the out-of-the-box plan. The giant set off the bomb instead of us and got the surprise of his life when a deluge of confetti showered down on him. He wasn’t the most handsome giant, to begin with, but covered in blue glitter he looked like a man-shaped disco ball with blinking eyes.

  Choosing discretion as the better part of valor, we turned silent laughter into tears before Salem showed up to make the decision whether we had lost or could continue. He checked us for glitter particles and, finding none, cleared us to take our next turn.

  “Who got knocked out in the last round?” It was impossible to see from here.

  “Carl and Evian had an incident in the Peppermint Stick Forest. It wasn’t pretty. You should also know that Kin and Soleil found a flag under the Tootsie Roll-a-way bed inside the Licorice Castle.” Before he could tell us anything about Terra and Vaeta, I saw a streak of light overhead and heard a noise akin to the sound I imagine a plane makes when it falls from the sky—sort of a whistling whine.

  “That’s not part of the game.” A sense of urgency washed over me, and I set off for where I could hear Terra’s voice shouting something unintelligible. Salem streaked past me in cat form, and Flix was hot on my heels.

  Four faeries shot up from wherever they were and arrowed straight toward the source of the falling sound. Something was terribly wrong. Carl, red and dripping with mint-scented slime, rushed in from one direction while Kin came from another.

  “What happened? Are you okay?” I ran my eyes and fingers over Kin to check for injuries.

  “I’m fine.” He stilled my busy hands. “I’m not sure what’s happening, though. We heard a noise, Soleil looked up, and then she just took off like a rocket. They all did.”

  “Here they come.” Flix squinted up at the sky and pointed at what looked like a strange bird. A crumpled, feminine figure seemed to float gently downward, her clothing making flapping noises against the breeze. “They’re headed for the house.”

  We made it to the back deck just as the four faeries lit there with a fifth of their kind cradled gently between them.

  “Let’s get her inside.” I rushed to open the door. From what I could see, the poor thing had been run through the wringer, dried in tangles, and then run through again. She was covered in scratches, had a twin set of black eyes, and her clothes were in tatters.

  Under it all, she reminded me of Cinderella’s godmother from the animated movie. Plump, apple-cheeked, and grandmotherly, she lay on the sofa near the Balefire. Until she opened her mouth and killed that mental image with a spate of foul language that would have landed me in time out—the magic version which has nothing to do with sitting in a chair or a corner—and then she passed out.

  “What happened?”

  “Who is that?”

  “Where did she come from?”

  A jumble of questions came all at once.

  “I think I know her.” Soleil squinted and tilted her head. “Yes, I’m sure I do. It’s Fawn.”

  “Fawn? But isn’t she...” Terra pressed her lips together to keep from speaking, but Soleil filled in the blank.

  “Godmother to Serena Snodgrass.”

  Now my interest was piqued. “Serena’s godmother, huh? Poor thing. What kind of bad karma did she earn to end up with that assignment?”

  “Serena’s not wicked; she’s just misguided.” Fawn never opened her eyes. I guess she wasn’t unconscious after all. “And passing judgment on those you don’t understand isn’t exactly virtuous behavior.”

  “She’s too dumb to be truly wicked,” I muttered, somewhat abashed, and earned myself a sharp elbow to the ribs from Vaeta, of all people. Miss Foot in Mouth herself—who was she to expect me to be nice? Fawn’s comment must have taken most of what was left of her energy because her face grew even paler and took on a bluish tinge. Terra went into triage mode.

  “All right now. Evian, you know where I keep the good stuff. I need that bottle of boysenberry brandy. And Lexi, get me the green tonic from the cupboard by the stove.”

  If she was using the green stuff, the situation was more dire than I thought. I’d only seen her pull it out once, and that was when Soleil was flying around in her mini form and got sucked into a jet engine. That should tell you how tough faeries can be.

  I grabbed a glass and the tonic and handed both to Terra, who gave me a wink for the extra initiative and then poured a dollop of green liquid into the glass. A shot of boysenberry brandy sloshed and swirled into the viscous goo, and a puff of smoke or steam blew out. Before the tiny cloud had time to dissipate, Terra forced the contents of the glass down the injured faerie’s throat.

  Fawn let out another series of exclamations and levitated about six inches off the sofa. The wounds remained, and her eyes were still ringed with bruises, but her color came back.

  “Tell us what happened.” It was an order, even though Terra’s voice remained gentle, and I think Fawn would have ignored it if she hadn’t been so ticked off. Even then, she tried to couch her words to make Serena look like less of a jerk.

  “Someone,” she glared at me as though I might have been the someone in question, “taught Serena a summoning spell. I was minding my own business and the next thing I knew, I was being dragged backward through the...” Fawn blushed as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t have been doing, cut off the explanation, and then finished with, “...when I realized what was happening, I put the brakes on, there was a struggle of wills, and then I ended up here.”

  “Why would she do a thing like that?” Even before I learned a little more about how the faerie godmother process worked, I knew forcing one of the Fae to do anything was a recipe for disaster, trouble, and about six other unpleasant nouns. Serena should have known better. I already knew the answer to my query, but wanted confirmation.
>
  As if it just now occurred to her to ask that very question, Fawn paused, listened, then said, “Her head is filled with only one thought." She paused. "Who is Jett Striker and why does she want to find him so badly?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “LEXI BALEFIRE, AS I live and breathe.” Sinclair Fuller drawled from the other side of an eye-level display case housing chocolates, fudge, and a myriad of delicious confections that simultaneously made Sinful a diabetic’s worst nightmare and a dream come true. I couldn’t pick a favorite treat if I tried, so I always allowed Sinclair to load me up with whatever concoctions he thought I’d like—and he was always spot-on. So spot on it made me wonder if he had any relation to the witch with the gingerbread house, but no matter how hard I scoped him out, I sensed not an inkling of supernatural energy.

  “Long time, no see, I know. Things have been a bit crazy at work lately. I’ll take a ten today, but make sure there’s a pistachio something-or-other in there; I’ve got a craving.”

  “Everything all right? Anything more than a six and I start to get worried about you.” Sinclair was referring to the choc-o-meter stress scale we’d spent the last two years perfecting. An order of ten usually meant my anxiety level was through the roof. Even though I wasn’t lying when I said things had been crazy, I felt more in control of my life than I had in a long time.

  “Actually,” I beamed, “I’m planning on sharing, for once.”

  “Ahh, I see,” he returned my smile with an indulgent one of his own, “not just a bridesmaid anymore, are we? He’d better treat you right.” Sinclair winked as he dropped a few champagne truffles into the box gratis. Truth be told, if I could pick out my father, he’d be just like Sinclair Fuller—sweet, gentle, and just protective enough to allow me to make my own decisions.

  And the candy. Oh, the candy.

  “He certainly does. I’ll bring him by sometime, let you be the judge.”

  “I’m going to hold you to that, my dear. Oh, by the way, I saw the new business cards; you know you could have put a stack of them on the counter, right? I get loads of downtrodden singles through here, especially on the weekends.”