The Charming Way (4 page)

It seemed like every time she tried to
rally the troops, the troops scattered to the wind.

Still, she decided to go through this,
although she decided to shorten the protest to only a few hours for one day,
instead of several hours over the life of the conference. Maybe she could get
an interview—or better yet, some face time with some of the publishers
and movie moguls. They would understand.

Forty-five of her protestors were already
marching through the hall, shouting
Death
to Fairy Tales!
The rest were handing out flyers explaining PETA’s position
on fairy tales and why they were evil, along with the URL of the website she
had started back when she first conceived of the protest idea.

So far, all the TV people had done when
the marching started was shut the doors to the studios, so the sound of the
protests didn’t drown out the panels. Once the flying monkey got back with the
two extra signs she’d asked him to draw for her, she’d change the tone of the
protest a little. She’d have the entire group yelling
Book Unfair!
which was bound to get someone’s attention.

 
The hallway seemed smaller with fifty
bodies in it, even if all fifty were of varying (and often smaller) sizes. She
kept peering around the corner, waiting for that damn monkey, and she heaved a
sigh of relief when she finally saw him.

Although the relief turned to dread when
she saw who was following the monkey. Charming. Looking…angry?

For some reason she didn’t think any of
the Charmings got angry.

The monkey stopped when he saw her and
handed her one of the signs. He started to go into an explanation of his lack
of artistry—he really couldn’t do proper calligraphy with Magic
Markers—but she didn’t care.

Instead, she stepped past him and right
in front of Charming.

“You want to ban books?” he said, his
voice strained. “Are you kidding me?”

“Not ban them, exactly,” she said, hoping
she sounded calm. “Just reduce the lies a bit.”

“You think fairy tales are lies?” he
said.

“Well, you clearly don’t because—”

“Oh,” he snapped, “don’t start that
‘people like you’ crap again. People like me know that happily ever after is a
crock. I’m divorced, remember?”

She bit her lower lip. She really hadn’t
put that together.

“You know what your problem is?” he said,
his voice getting louder. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

His arrogance took her breath away. “Lucky?”

“Lucky,” he said. “You’re beautiful,
you’re smart, you’re successful enough to travel the Greater World, for
heaven’s sake, and all you care about is what people think of you.”

“I do not,” she said.

“You do too.” He swept an arm toward the
protestors. “Are you really an Archetype? Nowadays? Maybe a century ago, when
women didn’t have as many opportunities. And maybe when you couldn’t choose
your own identity. But who in this world knows who you are unless you point it
out to them? And when you do, they think you’re crazy.”

“You don’t know—”

“I do know!” He was yelling now. “Of
course I know. Do you know what some officious little American government prick
did when I told him my real name after I passed my driving test? Do you?”

She swallowed. “No.”

“He laughed.” Charming lowered his voice.
“He laughed and said my parents ought to be shot.”

She smiled. She couldn’t help herself.
She could picture that. She, at least, didn’t have to go around introducing
herself as the Evil Stepmother because that wasn’t her real name. Never had
been.

“Go ahead,” he said, with some heat. “Laugh.
But it’s not fun. I actually prefer Dave. No one laughs when I say my name is
Dave.”

“Hey!” A door opened near Mellie. A man
peered out. “Can you people pipe down? We’re taping in here.”

The nearest flying monkey—whose
name she always forgot—raised his sign and waved it in the man’s face. “This
book fair is unfair!” the monkey said. “It’s—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the man said. “Someone
is always publishing something someone else objects to. Whoopee ding dong do.”

Then he slammed the door closed.

Mellie stared at it for a moment. Her
heart sank. All this planning, to be dismissed with a single whoopee ding dong
do.

The protestors had stopped marching and
shouting.

“What do you want us to do, Mellie?” the
selkie asked.

She didn’t know. She had no idea any
more.

So she shrugged. “Take a lunch break.”

They set their signs down and bolted out
of the hallway. She wondered if she’d ever see them again.

She didn’t want to look at Charming. He
would be laughing. He would gloat. Or he would be gone already.

But she couldn’t help herself.

She looked.

He had an expression of compassion on his
face. “It really bothers you what they think, doesn’t it?” he said softly.

Her lower lip trembled, and she bit it. Hard.
Evil stepmothers weren’t supposed to cry. Nor were they supposed to care about
the opinion of a Charming.

But here she was, on the verge of tears,
in front of a Charming who actually appealed to her.

“Back when I was thin and shapely and
beautiful and oh, so young, I didn’t care,” she said. “But then more thin and
shapely and beautiful and oh, so young things showed up and I stopped being
important, and I would say something a little sarcastic, and I suddenly got
called old and bitter and jealous, and it just went downhill, no matter what I
did. Words hurt, Charming. Words hurt.”

He nodded. “So you thought you could
control the words.”

“Isn’t that what you do with that golden
voice of yours and that marvelously soothing manner? Don’t you control the
words?”

He gave her a rueful smile. “If I did,
don’t you think I would have ended up with custody of my daughters?”

Mellie looked at him, really looked at
him, for the first time. He was very handsome. Elegant, not quite as trim as he
could be, and just a hint of a bald spot that he might not even know about. A
few lines around the eyes.

Not as young as he used to be either.

Seasoned.

Like her.

Only no one called him old and bitter and
jealous.

But he had called himself a nerd.

“What are you doing here in the Greater
World?” she asked.

“Me?” his voice squeaked just a little. “Getting
books. I told you. I read a lot.”

She picked up his badge. It was purple,
not for royalty, like she’d initially thought, but for booksellers. “You got an
illegal badge?”

“No,” he said. “I sell books back home.”

“You’re a merchant?” She couldn’t quite
keep the incredulousness from her tone.

He straightened his shoulders as if by
making himself taller he would become more powerful. “It’s an honorable
profession.”

He was being defensive. That surprised
her. “I just thought being prince was profession enough.”

“Maybe in the Greater World,” he said. “Here
princes have to give speeches and do good works and have meetings with other
princes. Back home, all I do is wait for my father to die.”

He flushed a dark red.

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,”
he said.

“I know what you mean,” she said. “You
like it better here.”

He nodded.

“Why?”

He waved his badge at her. “People don’t
have any expectations of Dave the Bookseller. Except one.”

“What’s that?” she asked, actually
curious.

“They expect him to know a lot about
books.”

***

And as he said that, he suddenly knew how
to solve her problem. He held out his hand.

“Come with me,” he said.

She frowned at him, then she looked down
at his hand as if she expected him to be holding a dagger. “Why?”

“Because you’re going about this wrong,”
he said.

“Going about what wrong?” she asked.

“Getting them to think better of you,” he
said.

“They need to know that we’re not evil.
We’re just people, doing the best we could with a bad hand—”

“I know,” he said. “I know what the
perception is, and I know how wrong it is. But you can’t change it by telling
people they’re wrong. That whole ‘people like you’ thing—”

“I’m sorry I said that,” she said. “It’s
rude.”

“So are these placards,” he said. “They
insult book people.”

“They do?” she asked.

“But I know another way to convince
them,” he said.

“A Charming way?” she asked.

“Exactly,” he said, and grabbed her hand.
“Come on.”

***

He dragged her to the exhibition hall. She
had only walked past it; she hadn’t looked inside. But she did now.

It was bigger than any castle audience
hall she had ever seen, and it was crammed full of booths and books and people.
More people than she could ever imagine.

One of the security guards looked for her
badge, but somehow Charming got her past him. Something about an assistant. She
didn’t listen closely. She was too awed by the size of this hall.

She had no idea how many books there
were.

“What do you think of vampires?” Charming
asked as they hurried down an aisle.

It was such a non sequetor that she
actually stopped. “Vampires?” she said.

“Or werewolves,” he said. “Or zombies.”

She shrugged. “Zombies don’t exist,” she
said.

“Okay, then. Vampires. Werewolves.
Creatures of the night. You think they’re misunderstood?”

“I think they’re scary,” she said. “The
handful I’ve met anyway. Predators. Real predators who think of us as prey.”

“Yet they’re half human, right?”

“Werewolves are,” she said. “Technically
vampires used to be human, and they have some vestiges—”

“So that’s a yes,” Charming said. “They
care about their reputation too. About the time we started dealing with those
Grimm people, they had to deal with someone named Stoker. He let the Great
World know about them—”

“So?” she said.

“And the Greater World heard how evil
they are,” Charming said.

“And you think that’s bad?” she asked. She
didn’t think so. Vampires scared her more than werewolves who were, at least,
predictable.

“What I think is irrelevant,” Charming
said. “But what the Greater World thinks, now that matters.”

He swept his arm toward a wall of books.

“Behold,” he said.

She looked at what he was pointing at. Book
after book after book about vampires. Not about how evil they were or how
dangerous. But how sexy they were. There was even a movie magazine dedicated to
the rise of the sexy vampire, and movie posters with the vampires looking
longingly at young women—not like they were going to eat the women, but
like they were in love with them.

“You’re kidding, right?” she said.

“No,” Charming said. “Vampires are all
the rage now. Teenagers dress up like them. Prince Charming is passé. Now they
all want to fall in love with Edward.”

“Edward?” she asked.

“Long story,” he said. “Suffice to say
that the vampires used to be as angry about their own image as you are.”

“So what did they do?” she asked.

“They started writing.”

She blinked at him. Writing? Seriously?

He must have seen her shock, because he
said, “You can’t defeat the power of the book. But you can make it work for
you.”

“You think I should write about being an
evil stepmother?”

“Why not? It worked for the Wicked Witch
of the West.” He grabbed a book off the shelf with a green witch on the cover. “She’s
got her own sympathetic Broadway play now and it’s going to be a movie or so I
hear, and she has her own soundtrack, not that horrible thing from the
Wizard of Oz
, and—”

“Me?” she said. “Write?”

“If you can’t,” he said, “I’m sure there
are a lot of writers here who’ll write the book for you.”

“They’d do that?” she asked.

“For the right amount of money,” he said.

“You’re playing some kind of joke on me,
right?’

“No,” he said. “Ask anyone.”

So she did. She started walking down the
hall, asking people about vampires. She got a lot of opinions. Older people
thought they were evil, but the younger ones talked about how sexy they were,
and some even tried to shove vampire novels in her hands.