A Fairy Tale (3 page)

That got Emily’s attention. She knew Sophie knew a lot about fairies, but she’d thought that was just part of Sophie knowing pretty much everything about everything, not because she was a regular in fairyland. In spite of her wish just a moment ago that Sophie would come to her rescue, she felt a pang of the familiar “It’s not fair!” younger sister lament. If Sophie went to the Realm all the time, then why did Emily have to stay away? She supposed that Maeve could have been lying, but if she didn’t know Sophie beyond her rescuing Emily before, how did she know Sophie was a dancer? Not that Emily wanted to let Maeve know this was news to her. “She’s teaching dance now,” she said.

Maeve’s smile was creepily reptilian. “Is she, now? Really? You mean she’s not dancing anymore?”

“She does that, too. Sometimes.”

Maeve threw back her head and laughed. Emily didn’t know what was so funny. Yeah, Sophie had been on the fast track toward international ballet stardom and had surprised everyone by staying home to teach instead, but she had her reasons. Come to think of it, Emily had never actually asked her sister about that. She’d been too grateful that Sophie staying home had made her own escape easier.

With a wave of her hand, Maeve summoned a serving girl who bore a tray of cocktail glasses filled with pastel liquids. Maeve took a glass, then said to Emily, “Have a drink.”

“I’m not thirsty,” Emily said firmly, even as her mouth seemed to fill with cotton.

Maeve laughed again. “I suppose your sister taught you not to eat or drink here.” She gave a smug smile. “I don’t think it will make much difference.”

Her smile vanished instantly as she turned back to the human serving girl. “Why are you still here?” Maeve snapped. “She doesn’t want a drink. Leave us.” Emily tried to give the girl an encouraging look, but the girl didn’t raise her eyes as she scuttled away. “I shouldn’t expect too much from her,” Maeve said with a weary sigh. “She
is
only human.”

Her mood shifted abruptly again as the apartment door opened and two women entered. She waved them over to the sofa. “Oh, good,” she said, “just in time. Here are some people I want you to meet.”

The women were dressed in the same Doris Day style as all the fairies, one wearing a pale blue dress with a full skirt and the other a buttery yellow sleeveless sheath. Both of them gave deep curtsies to Maeve as they chorused, “Your majesty.”

“Hello, my pets,” she crooned to them. “I’ve brought you a new friend.”

Emily felt like she was at a casting call where they’d specified a particular physical type. The women fit her general description, even though they didn’t look much like her. They were both in their twenties and were tall and slender, with reddish hair. Although they were pretty, they didn’t have the unearthly beauty of the fairies. They were human.

“You’ve come to join us!” the woman in yellow said. “We’ll have so much fun!” She turned to Maeve and asked breathlessly, “Is she the one?”

“Yes, she is, finally.”

“They thought we were the one, but her majesty said we weren’t,” the one in blue explained to Emily. “She let us stay, though. She’s very good to us.”

Emily cringed at the realization that these women must have been kidnapped because they resembled her. She hoped they weren’t angry that their lives had been disrupted.

They didn’t seem to mind. They jumped up and down like demented cheerleaders, crying, “Yay! You’re here at last!”

A fairy man in a Rat Pack suit approached the sofa and bowed deeply to Maeve. She sat up straighter, and her eyes lost even the slightest hint of warmth. “Do you have something for me?”

“Yes, your majesty.”

Maeve rose gracefully from the sofa. “You girls have fun. Keep an eye on Emily for me.” She took the man’s arm and let him escort her out to the terrace.

Once she was gone, the two human women sat on either side of Emily. The one in blue crossed her legs daintily at the ankles. “Queen Maeve has been
dying
for you to get here,” she said. “She likes us, but you’re the one she wants.”

“And when the queen is happy, everyone is happy,” the one in yellow said. Although her tone was cheerful, Emily thought she saw fear in her eyes. If she was afraid, then maybe she was still rational enough to know what was going on. These two weren’t ideal information sources or allies, but Emily knew she had to start somewhere.

“I’m Emily,” she said. “What are your names?”

They frowned and looked at each other. “I forgot,” the one in blue said, looking momentarily troubled.

“Me, too,” the other one agreed.

“What do they call you?” Emily asked.

“They don’t really talk to us,” the one in yellow said with a shrug.

“You have to have names. What should I call you?”

They looked at each other again, then said, “Emily!”

Emily swallowed a scream of frustration. “No, you can’t be Emily.
I’m
Emily. It would get confusing. Now, what else would you like me to call you?”

Her pretty forehead creased in a frown for a while, then the one in blue said, “I’ll be Emma.”

“And I’ll be Leigh,” the other one said.

“Okay, I can live with that,” Emily said with a sigh of resignation. This looked like a hopeless cause, but she pressed on, asking, “How long have you been here?”

They looked at each other again. “I think it’s been years,” Emma said, then frowned. “Or has it been days? I’m not sure.” She giggled. “You know what they say about time flying when you’re having fun!”

“And we’re having fun!” they chorused in unison. Emily shuddered. This was very Stepford Wives, sorority house edition. She noticed that although these women were clearly human, they had a hint of fae unearthliness about them. They must have been drinking the local Kool-Aid. Now she understood why Sophie said that was a no-no. Was this what she’d be like now if Sophie hadn’t rescued her before?

“How nice for you,” she said with a thin smile. “But don’t you want to go home?”

“Why would we want to go home?” Leigh asked with a shrug. “Here we don’t have to work. We just go to parties and dance and sing all day, and we get to be around her majesty.”

Emma looked more wistful, like she was remembering something she’d lost. “What is it?” Emily asked gently.

“I forgot,” Emma said with a sigh. “Sometimes I think there was something that made me happy before, but it can’t have been as good as this, could it?”

“Did you ever try to leave?” Emily asked, but a handsome fairy with blue-black hair took Emma by the hand, pulled her to her feet, and danced off with her. Her wistfulness disappeared instantly. She threw back her head and laughed while she spun wildly with the fairy man. His hands strayed onto some rather intimate places, and she leaned into him. Pretty soon, they’d be in “get a room” territory, Emily thought. She turned her attention to the other girl and repeated her question.

“There’s no way out,” Leigh said.

“There has to be. My sister got me out before.”

“Some of the Gentry come and go, but they tell us humans can’t pass through the barriers on their own.”

Well, yeah, they would tell you that,
Emily thought. “Do you know why they were looking for me?” she asked, but Leigh was being pulled away by another fairy to dance. Emily shook her head at the fairy man who approached her, even though the music made her twitch with the desire to dance. Dancing might be giving in. She swore to herself that she absolutely would not go native.

Alone again, she was back to the question of what she should do. She imagined Sophie would figure out if she really was a prisoner, test the defenses to see if she could escape, gather and analyze information, and then come up with a plan.

Emily could do that. She glanced around the room, looking for potential exits. There was the front door, a door opening from the other side of the living room, and the terrace doors. Nobody stood at any of those doors in a guard-like pose, but there were also plenty of fairies between her and all the potential exits. She figured she should see if she really was a prisoner.

She got off the sofa and ambled across the room, aiming toward the buffet table but passing right by the front door. A fairy man moved between her and the door as she passed, his movement almost unobtrusive enough to be casual. She wandered by the interior door as she went to examine a painting on the adjacent wall and, again, someone just happened to move in front of the door. Yeah, she was a prisoner, all right.

Maeve had entered and exited through the terrace doors, so they had to lead somewhere other than just a terrace. While Emily didn’t want to run into Maeve, she thought she might learn something by heading in the direction Maeve had gone. But if that was a way out, she doubted they’d let her go.

What she needed was an excuse to be near the terrace doors. She could stand there and stare at the view until they got bored watching her and figured she was just looking out the window. They’d still probably do something if she tried to go outside, though.

Then an idea struck her. If they wouldn’t tell her why they wanted her, then she had to guess, and why would they take a Broadway actress right after she made a stunning—if she said so herself—debut in a starring role? It was safe to assume (or pretend to assume) they wanted her to perform. She was pretty sure she remembered something about fairies stealing humans to make them sing and dance. She glanced around for something that would make a good prop while also being useful as a weapon. Unfortunately, the Doris Day life didn’t come with many potential makeshift weapons. The best she could do was a big, frilly umbrella with a pointed end that she found in an umbrella stand by the door. That gave her an idea of something to perform.

After a mental rehearsal to make sure she remembered all the words, she sang the opening lines to “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” There was stunned silence as every fairy in the room turned to face her. As the song picked up steam, she danced forward, twirling the umbrella, then moved back and stepped up on to the room’s upper level. The fairies turned out to be much like any other audience, and soon she felt she had them eating out of her hand. If this had been an audition, the part would have been hers for sure.

She treated the upper level like a stage, dancing along it. When she reached the bridge of the song, she moved to the heavy drapes hanging to the side of the terrace windows. She clung to the drapes while checking behind them to see that there was an open door there, and then she moved forward to the front of her “stage.” She made another trip back to the drapes, then forward again, so they’d get used to the idea of her approaching the drapes and returning.

At the end of the song, while she was still holding the final note, she stepped behind the drapes, bending backward for a grand finale before making a dramatic exit. She heard the applause as she slipped through the doors and out onto the terrace.

But she wasn’t really outdoors, she realized. It was like a sound stage, giving only the illusion of the outside world, and the terrace was incomplete. One more apartment doorway opened from it, but then the terrace shifted and became a balcony on an entirely different building. Through the windows she saw what looked like an Art Deco-era hotel ballroom full of people doing the foxtrot. That wasn’t any closer to home for her, but the voices behind her meant she didn’t have the luxury of picking her next stop.

She might be leaving the frying pan to throw herself into the fire, but she didn’t think things back in Doris Day land would go well for her now that she’d tried to escape. Without a backward glance, she stepped through the French doors and into the ballroom.

The Upper West Side, New York City—The Murray Residence

Wednesday, 3 p.m.

A persistent buzzing sound penetrated Michael Murray’s sleep. He swatted at it to make it stop, but his arm was trapped and didn’t work. Something wet touched his face, and he opened his eyes to find himself staring eye-to-eye with a glaring, slobbering bulldog. The dog barked once, as if to make sure he was awake. The buzzing noise repeated, and Michael gradually realized it was the front-door intercom.

“Hush,” he told the dog sleepily. “Maybe if we pretend we’re not home, they’ll go away. Anyone who needs to see me has a key.”

The dog grunted and sprawled on the floor beside the sofa. Michael let himself drift back to sleep when the buzzing stopped. He hadn’t completely lost consciousness when there was a polite rapping on his apartment door and a female voice called, “Detective Murray?”

That was harder to ignore. If someone had made it past the front door, then he ought to see who it was. With a groan, he struggled to sit up and then get to his feet. That would have been easier if his right arm weren’t in a sling and if he didn’t have to worry about stepping on the dog. The painkillers that made his head fuzzy didn’t help matters, nor did the fact that he was about a quart low on coffee for the day. Come to think of it, he hadn’t had any. He couldn’t be expected to function. Once he was standing, he waited a second to make sure he could remain vertical, then he staggered to the entryway.

Peering through the peephole, he saw a woman. She didn’t look too threatening, and both of her hands were visible, so she was apparently unarmed, unless her umbrella concealed a weapon. That didn’t make it any easier for him to open the door. Putting his hand on the knob, knowing there was a stranger on the other side, made his heart beat faster and beads of sweat break out on his forehead. Gritting his teeth, he unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door.

He instinctively made a mental note of the woman standing there, as though he was filling out a report: Caucasian female, somewhere between early twenties and mid thirties—she could have passed for eighteen physically, but there was a stillness about her that indicated greater maturity. About five foot three, slim build, red-gold hair, just past shoulder length, loose curls. Blue eyes. Wearing a flowered dress with a long, full skirt, a pale blue cardigan sweater, and flat shoes. He ran his good hand over hair that hadn’t seen a comb in days in an attempt to smooth it as he suddenly felt intensely conscious of just how awful he must look.