Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale (4 page)

Corinne looked up from the notes she’d been jotting down.
“What did they see?
A little man in a red-and-white suit with a pointy hat and a sack full of presents?”

Hank ignored her.
“Witnesses reported seeing an extremely fair blond man, about six feet tall, with hair almost down to his butt and pointy ears.”

Corinne latched onto that with all thirty-two teeth.
Maybe she could still play this off?

She rolled her eyes with exaggerated flair.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Hank.
That’s not a believable elf sighting.
That’s just an escapee from a
Lord of the Rings
convention.
Some teenage geek with way too much time on his hands dressed himself up like Orlando Bloom and paraded down Fifth thinking he was the shit.
Case solved.
Can I go home now?”

Hank shook his head.
“Not so fast, kid.
I’m not done yet.”
He shifted his shoulders and continued.
“Now, the man in and of himself wouldn’t have raised so much as an eyebrow under normal circumstances.
This is Manhattan, after all.”
Corinne grumbled under her breath, but she didn’t interrupt.
“So almost universally, the witnesses initially dismissed the weird guy as just that—a weird guy.
But that was before he started doing magic.”

Corinne sighed.
Damn his persistence.
She tried to match it.
“Okay, forget the convention.
He was an escapee from a Dungeons and Dragons tournament.
Did the ‘magic’ involve dice rolls and phrases like,
My wizard calls on the House of Illusion to summon forth a seventh-level Temporal Distortion plus three
?”

“From what I hear, it just involved a temporal distortion.
Would the plus-three thing have been more impressive?”

Her pencil paused over her notepad, and Corinne looked up.
Christ, did someone have
evidence
on this guy?
“What did you say?”

“Would the plus-three thing have been—”

“Not that,” she growled, her eyes narrowing.
“Before that.
The part where you said it did involve a temporal distortion.”

“That’s what the witnesses say.”

Corinne looked longingly at the aspirin and debated pretending she hadn’t read the warning label about permanent liver damage.
“You’re telling me Orlando waved his magic wand and opened a rift in the time–space continuum?”

“Get real,” he scoffed.
“You’re just mixing metaphors.
Magic wands and time–space continuums are two totally different animals.
Besides, no one mentioned anything about a wand.”

Her hand inched toward the aspirin.
Who really needed a liver anyway?

“Forget the wand,” she snarled.
“I think the rift is the material question here, no?”

Hank shrugged.
“Whatever.
It’s your story.”

“Are you trying to kill me?”

Hank ignored her, or maybe he just didn’t hear the question, since her face was buried in her arms and smushed up against the surface of her desk.
It muffled the whimpering.
“The witnesses claim that the man in question walked up to the wall of an abandoned building, and the bricks slid apart to let him through.”

Corinne turned her head just enough to glare at her boss through one narrowed eye.
“Meaning that Orlando Bloom took a trip to Neverland.
Did he fly away on a tornado or take a trip through an enchanted wardrobe while he was at it?”

“They said the air around the wall seemed to shimmer, but after he went through, it looked totally normal, as if nothing had ever happened.
The same sort of story has been reported by individuals uptown, downtown, and midtown, and that’s why I want you checking out if it’s true.”

“I can answer that for you right now,” she said, lifting her head and grabbing the assignment sheet to wad it up into a little, crumpled ball.
“It’s not true.
Now can we talk about that proposal I sent you on the Columbia students arrested during the animal rights protest?”

“Looks good.
I’ll look forward to reading it.
Right after you turn in the elf article.”

“Someday you’ll pay for this, Hank.
I hope you realize that.”

He shrugged and looked remarkably unconcerned.
“I’ll live in fear.”
His weathered face wrinkled into a grin, and he clamped the toothpick between his molars, chuckling.
“Look at it this way.
I didn’t make you check out the lead this spring when that cabdriver said he picked up two werewolves outside Central Park.
I know when a story’s complete crap.”
Then he turned and ambled back to his office, chortling to himself all the way.

Corinne soothed her temper by making an obscene gesture at Hank’s back with one hand, while she used the other to rub the elbow she’d smashed on the desk when he’d made the werewolf comment.
For God’s sake, those werewolves had been her friends.
Well, her friend and her friend’s furry husband-to-be.

Throwing caution and the potential for irreversible liver damage to the wind, Corinne popped another two aspirin and slugged back the last of her cold coffee.
Staring at the dregs left behind in her cup, she realized her need for caffeine superseded any attempt to appear to be starting work on her new assignment.
Without a new dose of her drug of choice, she wouldn’t be able to so much as lift a pencil, let alone figure out what she was going to do about the impending collapse of reality as she knew it.

Hell, as
everyone
knew it.

Grabbing a handful of change from the bottom of her purse, she shoved herself to her feet and headed for the door.
Weaving her way among the desks of her colleagues, she ignored their absent greetings as easily as she ignored the ringing of telephones and the clacking of computer keyboards.
All her attention remained focused on the front doors to the
Chronicle
’s office suite and the elevators just beyond.
Those elevators were her ticket to the basement of the building and the vending machines that stood there, patiently waiting to dispense the sweet, dark nectar of the gods.

She tapped her foot impatiently while she waited for the car, punched the button marked b a dozen times in rapid succession as soon as she stepped inside, and stared at the digital floor indicator as it counted down.
Just as the thick metal doors slid open, her pocket started to trill the opening bars to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue.
She cursed and debated whether or not to answer the call.
On the one hand, the person on the other end was usually at least as much trouble as she was worth and was distressingly good at detecting when something was bothering Corinne and then metaphorically beating out the truth.
On the other, Corinne couldn’t think of a time in her life when she’d more needed a distraction.

Sighing, she dug out her cell phone and flipped it open.
“Yeah?”

“I give up.
I surrender.
This is the official white flag I’m waving in your ear right now.”

Corinne fed six quarters into the vending machine and scowled.
“Ava, what the hell are you babbling about?”

“I am not babbling,” the other woman snapped, her voice crackling over the line even though the cell signal came in clear as glass.
“I am informing you in perfectly rational and reasonable terms that I am throwing in the towel and washing my hands of the whole mess.
I may decide to take religious orders.”

The machine button protested the amount of force Corinne used to punch it, but it yielded an icy can of soda with a reluctant
thump.
“Yeah, right.
Sister Ava Immaculata.
I can see it now.”
She pinned the phone between ear and shoulder so she could lift the metal tab.
“Mind telling me why you’re in such a tizzy?”

“This is no tizzy, Corinne Magdalena.
This is utter exhaustion and despair.
I give up on the whole lot.
I just needed to call and wish you a nice life before I leave for the nunnery.”

Corinne raised the can to her lips and leaned against the clean-ish white wall beside the snack machine.
“Same to you.
Leave an address, though, or you won’t get a Christmas card.”

The curse Ava muttered managed to retain an unexpected air of grace and elegance solely due to its manner of delivery.
It had certainly never sounded the same on the lips of the dockworkers who more frequently used it.
“You fail to amuse me, Corinne, darling.
But then, most things fail to amuse me when so many people I’ve tried to care for turn their backs on me within the space of six months.”

Corinne swallowed fast to keep from choking on her drink.
“Turn their backs on you?
Going for the melodrama here?”

“What would you call it when people ignore everything you try to do for them and shun the perfectly lovely dates you slave to fix them up with, only to end up making horrible decisions on their own?”

“Reality?”

Ava never raised her voice, but Corinne still had to fight the urge to pull the phone away from her ear and wince.
“I can see I’ll get no support from you.
And why I should have thought I might is beyond me.
After all, weren’t you the first rat to desert my ship?”

“Okay, first of all, get control of the metaphors, Av.”
Corinne stabbed the elevator button, since she couldn’t stab her friend.
“Second, I did not ‘desert’ any ships.
It’s not like the fixes were working out anyway.”

“They would have, if Regina and Melissa had done as they were told.
I found them perfectly nice men, but no—”

“Ava, you’re gonna have to let that one go.
They managed to find their own men.
We might see their choices as somewhat…unfortunate, but—”

“Unfortunate?
Corinne, they married outside their species!
That is not something that a person just ‘lets go.’
That’s…that’s…well, it’s just unnatural.
And more than that, it forces us—and by us, I mean me—to talk about characters from the late, late, late movie as if they were real.
It’s altered the entire fabric of my reality, and I have to say that I am less than pleased.”

“Yeah, Av, I think we all got that memo, but there’s not a whole lot anyone can do about it,” Corinne snapped.
God, she was sick of this entire topic.
Could she please just go five minutes without talking about the Others?
“The ‘creatures,’ as you call them,
are
real.
Dmitri is really a vampire and Graham is really a werewolf.
And now Reggie is a vampire as well, and Missy is pregnant with another werewolf-to-be.
This is the new reality.
Grasp it and move on.”

“How can you possibly sound so casual about it?”
Ava demanded in a petulant voice.
“Aren’t you the least little bit freaked out by having your entire notion of life, the universe, and everything suddenly flip on its axis?
Doesn’t that give you the least littlest wiggins?”

Corrine laughed, but honestly, it sounded more like a bark.
Not really surprising, given how completely unamused she felt at the moment.
“Believe me, casual is the last thing I feel at the moment.
I just think the ship for getting upset about the demise of the fantasy fix-ups has pretty much sailed.
We all have bigger things to worry about now.”

She heard Ava sigh and imagined the other woman giving one of her vaguely Gallic shrugs.
“I suppose it’s an ever-changing world.
One must find ways to adapt.”

Which was exactly what she had just spent the last few minutes saying.
Corinne seriously debated making an extremely obscene gesture, but figured the effort would be lost since Ava wasn’t around to see it.
So she just pictured it in vivid Technicolor as she pushed away from the wall and punched the call button for the elevator again.
“Yeah, right.
Well, it’s been nice talking to you, Av, but I’ve got a pretty busy schedu—”

“Oh, no you don’t.
Honestly, Rinne, did I tell you I was finished with this conversation?
Did your mother teach you no manners whatsoever?”

Corinne pictured her staunchly Italian Catholic mother—who had been known to slap the backs of her children’s heads for slouching at the dinner table—and clenched her jaw.
“I’m not in the mood to listen to you talk about my mother, Ava, so watch it.”