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"...that Frankenpunch changed me?" she finished with an amused smile.

I nodded. "Everyone said..."

"It simply allowed us to stop pretending."

My mouth fell open. "You mean..."

"I've been a fairy godmother for centuries."

She squeezed my hand. "Until last Halloween, keeping that little detail hidden was rather important."

"You've..." I shook my head. "You've always had magic?"

"Oh yes."

"And you never told me?"

"My dear..." She smiled with just a hint of mischief. "You never asked."

I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Opened it. "You've literally watched me grow up!"

"I have."

"You let me believe you were just..."

"...a sweet old widow with an unfortunate talent for overwatering begonias?"

"Yes!" I insisted.

"I am." She chuckled, it sounded wet. "But also a fairy godmother."

When the veil tears... neither realm will escape the consequences. The old fairy's words refused to leave me alone. I disliked that. Quite a lot.

By the time Poppy's shift at Maple Grove began, I'd stopped pretending I wasn't thinking about them. While Poppy spent the next four hours doing what she always did, hovering, checking temperatures, fluffing pillows, remembering names, listening to stories she'd already heard a dozen times, I set myself a task so I wouldn't keep wondering why Poppy devoted enormous amounts of energy to creatures who were, from my perspective, already halfway through their absurdly short lives.

Yet Poppy never behaved as though their remaining days mattered less because there weren't many of them left. If anything she loved them harder. It was... perplexing.

Fortunately, for once, I had something more interesting to occupy my attention. Research. Humans, despite their many obvious shortcomings, had accidentally created one of the greatest repositories of knowledge in existence: the internet. I settled into the chair at the empty nurses' station and nudged the mouse. An endless repository of knowledge where every question imaginable could be answered. Assuming one survived the process of asking it.

I typed my first query.

Infernal magic affecting the veil between realms.

The search engine thought for a moment before presenting me with a little box.

I AM NOT A ROBOT

I frowned. "What kind of absurd question is that?"

The little square remained empty. Very well. I checked it, and leaned back in the chair watching a passing nurse. To her it must have been looking like the chair was moving from nothing, because I was still invisible. "Now that's just insulting."

Apparently, proving one's identity required additional humiliation. A new challenge appeared. Select all images containing bicycles.

"Bicycles."

That should have been easy, but even my superior eyesight had a hard time making them out in the little squares.

Another nurse walked past when she closed in, she shivered and hurried her steps. Smart human. Finally the screen began to load answering my original question. The search engine responded with what appeared to be several million entirely unrelated results. Typical. I refined the search.