Thoroughly Kissed (35 page)

Ninety-five degrees in the shade, and still the magical gathered outside Jodi's office, pacing through the landscaping, huddling under the gigantic palms, pushing past blooming birds of paradise that she spent a small fortune on, and leaning on the fountain she paid some city administrator extra just so she could keep it running in the middle of the day. She needed that damn fountain, not because she liked flaunting water laws, but because any minute now a cell phone would explode, and its owner would throw it in panic.

Usually the magical would have enough presence of mind to throw an exploding cell phone
at
water, although she had learned over her long and storied career that using the words “the magical” and “presence of mind” in the same sentence could be a recipe for disaster.

She pulled her sporty red Mercedes convertible into driveway, waved at her current, potential, and former clients, and parked under the carport, dreading the next few minutes. She would have to thread her way along the curved tile sidewalk that she put in a decade or more ago, before cell phones forced her magical clients to stand outside (she
hated
it when cell phones exploded inside). Back then, she thought the smokers might be a problem, so she installed an antique upright ashtray that she bought at a flea market—one of those ashtrays, she had been assured, that had stood on the MGM lot back when Clark Gable roamed the premises.

The ashtray still got a lot of use, but mostly the cell phone users had pushed the smokers aside. And no matter how much she told her magical clients that the longer they used a phone, the more likely it was to explode, they never listened to her.

Of course, you really couldn't survive in Los Angeles without a phone. She bought hers in bulk. The manager at the phone store finally taught her how to transfer her number to a new phone, so she wasn't stopping in every other day demanding an emergency phone repair.

She grabbed her purse, today's phone, and her briefcase, stuffed to the gills with contracts, memos, and all that junk computers were supposed to replace.

By the time she waggled her car door open, she nearly hit four dwarves (of the Snow White variety), two selkies (clothed, thank heavens), and one troll. He was a sweetie named Gunther whom she used to find regular work for in Abbott and Costello movies, before he returned to the Kingdoms. Now that he had come back to the Greater World, she was having trouble placing him, which she thought was just plain weird, given the popularity of fantasy movies these days. But whenever he went to a casting call, he was told to remove his costume, and he couldn't, since he truly was tall, gray, stonelike, and glowery.

She hadn't figured out a way around that yet, but she would.

“I don't have time, Gunther,” she said as she slung her purse over her shoulder and closed the car door with her foot. She hadn't looked, so she hoped she didn't catch one of the small magical in that move. Pixies in particular liked to get between cars and doors.

But no one screamed, so she was probably safe.

“I'm so sorry to bother you, Miss Walters,” Gunther said slowly, ever proper. He had nineteenth-century manners, which was another reason she loved him. “But I do need a moment—”

“Can Ramon deal with it?” she asked. “Because I have an emergency.”

She wasn't sure what the emergency was, but Ramon, her assistant, had called her out of a meeting with Disney and told her she was needed in the office. The Disney meeting was a bust anyway. For some reason the kid in charge, and he really was a kid (twenty-five if he was a day), thought she worked in animation. She couldn't seem to convince the kid that she
didn't
work in animation, so she was happy to leave.

Still, it was unlike Ramon to interrupt her at all. He was the best assistant she had ever had, which was saying something, considering how many of her assistants went on to manage Fortune 500 companies. Ramon knew how important the meeting was in Hollywood, even if it was a bust-deal with Disney.

“I
hope
Ramon can deal with it,” Gunther said slowly. He was trying to keep up with her, which showed just how panicked he was. Trolls didn't like to walk fast. “It's the first of the month…”

She stopped, closed her eyes, and sighed. The first of the month. Of course. The rent was due. And Gunther couldn't get work, even though when he returned to the Greater World she had told him she'd have no trouble placing him. All the
Lord of the Rings
knockoff films, the Syfy Channel, the five fairy tale movies in development in three different studios—she had thought at least one of them would need a troll. A real, honest-to-God troll, not something CGI-ed. But so far, no takers, and Gunther was reluctant to go home and ask for more gold from his family so that he could pay his rent.

“Okay,” she said. “Sit quietly in the waiting room. I'll have something for you after I solve this emergency.”

Gunther nodded. It took him nearly a half an hour to smile, and the smile was never worth the wait. (In fact, it was a bit creepy.) So the nod had to do.

At least his bulky presence had dissuaded some of her other clients from approaching her. She smiled at them all, held up a hand, and kept repeating, “Make an appointment, make an appointment,” as she headed to the front door.

Her office was in a 1920s Hollywood-style bungalow, which meant that it had been upgraded and expanded far outside of its original floor plan. The house had belonged to some important starlet before the Crash of 1929, and then purchased by an even more important starlet in the 1930s, “improved” by said starlet's second husband (a successful screenwriter) in the 1940s, and suffered a decline along with the studio system in the 1950s. An entire counterculture of hippies lived in it during the 1960s, and it was nearly condemned in the 1970s, until Jodi bought it, restored it, and “improved” it some more.

Now it had air-conditioning, a large pool for her mer-clients, a cabana, and four other side buildings. She had kept her office in the main building, the historic bungalow, even though she kept thinking she should move to the very back, away from the crowds.

And she had crowds, every single day. This client, that client, this friend of a client, that enemy of an old flame. They made her head spin. She had hired help, but none of them had the organizational magic that she did. They had all been competent, but none were as good as she was.

She had come from a family of chatelaines, the people who kept the castles and great manor houses of the Kingdoms functioning. Her family had served—and still did serve—some of the greatest rulers the various Kingdoms had ever known.

But Jodi was a modern woman, one who did not want to waste her time managing someone else's household. She had fled the Third Kingdom in the early twentieth century, when it became clear that modernity would cause tensions in the Kingdoms themselves.

Until the late nineteenth century, the Kingdoms were isolated from this place, which folks in the Kingdoms called the Greater World. Sure, there was occasional crossover, mostly from literary types. Shakespeare stole half his oeuvre from his Kingdom visits, and Washington Irving had written down Rip Van Winkle's story damn near verbatim, only changing the name of the poor hapless mortal who had stumbled through a portal between the Greater World and the Fourteenth Kingdom.

The Germans were the worst. Goethe claimed his Faust stories were inspired by legends he had heard in a tavern in Leipzig, when actually he had found yet another portal into a Kingdom and barely escaped with his life. And the Brothers Grimm had gone into the Kingdoms on something like an archeological expedition, there to map the Kingdoms themselves, and returning instead with the stories of people's lives, stories the Brothers Grimm exaggerated and mistold to the point of libel—had libel laws existed between the Greater World and the Kingdoms.

Sometimes Jodi found it ironic that she had escaped her fairy tale existence to come to a place that took the Grimm Brothers' lies and exaggerated them even further.

But she wasn't the only fairy tale refugee in Los Angeles, as her front yard now showed. Hundreds of malcontents fled the Kingdoms over the years to come here and have a real life, only to be disappointed at how plain, monochrome, and
real
the lives actually were.

She pushed open the solid oak door and stepped into what had been the living room of the bungalow, now a gigantic reception area with arched ceilings and lots of comfortable seating areas marked off by large fake plants. The cool air smelled faintly of mint, a scent that soothed most of the magical (and most regular mortals as well).

Ramon had suspended two flat screen television sets from the ceiling, high enough to be out of what he called “the magical vortex,” whatever it was that caused magic and electronics to intertwine. Ramon corralled all of the electronics here. He made everyone who entered drop their cell phones, MP3 players, and other gadgets into a basket on his reception desk. If the tech stayed near him, it didn't explode.

Ramon was pure magickless mortal, thirty-something, although he pretended he was twenty-five. He called himself Ramon McQueen, after Steve McQueen, the rugged 1960s icon, and some tragic silent film star whom hardly anyone had ever heard of and whom Jodi barely remembered. This Ramon was neither tragic nor rugged, but he was very pretty in a way that would have made him a movie star in the 1920s. He wore as much makeup as silent film actors did as well, accenting his sensitive mouth and outlining his spectacular brown eyes in kohl.

He was so good at organizing things that three weeks after she hired him, she looked into his aura to see if he had organizational magic. She could see auras—that was how she read magic. She should have trusted her instincts: he didn't have any magic at all. But his organizational skills were so amazing that she couldn't quite believe they had no magical component.

The waiting room chairs were filled with even more clients, potential clients, and former clients, mostly separated by type—human-appearing but magical; minor storybook characters; the enchanted; creatures; half-human creatures; spelled humans; shape-shifters; and little people of all species, races, and creeds. Not all were waiting for her. The creatures primarily went to her best assistant, and the extras (primarily the minor storybook characters and the little people) went to her next best assistant. She had a third assistant whose clients worked for the various theme parks, but they had a separate entrance (with a different receptionist) in one of the outbuildings so that they wouldn't contaminate the so-called Real Actors.

She had no one who worked animation. (Boy, that meeting still irritated her.)

The conversations were muted. She didn't allow discussion of magic or former fights or past conflicts, and the magical didn't like discussing their upcoming work with each other out of fear that someone else might get the job. So what few conversations happened were usually about things like apartment rentals, good deals on costumes, and which vehicles were built solidly enough that their computer components survived long-term exposure to magical fields.

Ramon had muted the two flat screens but had left them on all-news channels—one currently covering the fires in Malibu Canyon, and the other giving the latest lurid details of the case the media was calling the Fairy Tale Stalker case.

Jodi hated the case's name and wished she could get the media to change it, but she had become aware of the story too late to do anything. Usually she would have managed something. Theoretically, she was Hollywood's best magical wrangler (although the mortals simply thought she was a manager with some very strange clientele), but in practice, she had become the fixer for all of Los Angeles County.

If someone magical was in trouble, then Jodi usually got involved. Involvement generally didn't mean more than sending the magical to the organization, but occasionally she had to delve deeper. She didn't mind. She had been fixing things since she arrived here almost a century ago. Fixing had become as natural as breathing.

“What couldn't wait?” she asked softly as she opened the gate to let herself into the area behind the reception desk.

Ramon looked up at her. A black curl had fallen over the center of his forehead, and his makeup was slightly smudged. He had removed his suit coat, revealing a gorgeous purple shirt made of some lightweight material. Even that hadn't stopped a pool of sweat from forming along his spine.

Very unusual. Ramon was usually the picture of crispness, even in the middle of an LA summer afternoon.

“First of all, let me simply say, it is
not
my fault,” he said in that precise way of his. “You made the appointment, and you wrote down the man's name instead of the company, for heaven's sake, and he's a newbie, and I had no idea he was with Disney—”

“That's fine, Ramon,” she said. “It wasn't going well anyway. He had no idea who I was.”

“—
and
,” Ramon said, not to be derailed, “she
threatened
me.”

That caught Jodi's attention. “Who threatened you?”

“That cantankerous little fairy. I rue the day you made it possible for me to see her and her kind,” Ramon said. “If you could ever reverse that spell, I would appreciate it.”

Jodi frowned. She had spelled Ramon so that he could see magical creatures normally invisible to the mortal eye. Only one type of creature fit into his current description. In fact, only one person—if she could be called that—fit.

Cantankerous Belle, better known as Tanker Belle, whom some believed to be Tinker Bell's older, meaner cousin. Whoever Tanker Belle was, she led a group of tiny fairies who had either divorced themselves from the human-sized fairies of Celtic lore or had never belonged to the group in the first place.

The magical weren't all from the Kingdoms. And not all of the magical seemed to have problems with electronics that the Kingdom magical did. One faction of the human-sized fairies, who had been involved in a power struggle for more than a century, had found a home in Las Vegas amidst all that technology, and they seemed to be doing fine…