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“Perfect,” she said, clapping her hands together, bracelets clicking. “Let’s go to the back.”
As we started to follow her through an arched doorway, a chime sound made us all pause. We turned back to do the door, which should have been locked. I cocked my head as my gaze fell on a messy head of light brown hair and honey-brown eyes set in a face that glowed as bright as the damn sun. The man’s clueless smile nearly knocked me off my feet.
“Uh, hi… are you open?” he asked cheerfully.
All our eyes slowly went to the large Closed sign that floated just inches from the door.
“Oh, hah, right. Sorry about that.”
But instead of turning and walking out like any normal person would do, the human took a bold step in, closing the door behind him.
“I’ll be quick.”
Chapter 3
Mayhem and Marvels in Malibu
Robby
Did someone piss in the bus again?
Was I sitting on it?
Shit, I knew I should have taken the snake-way.
I shifted over to the empty seat next to me and immediately regretted my decision as something wet soaked through my shorts. I shot up and instantly wanted to shout, “Stop! There’s been a urine-mergency!” but wondered if there was a law against doing that. Like yelling “shark” in a crowded theater or something.
That’s when I noticed the half-empty bottle of Gatorade on the seat, the orange cap nowhere in sight. I breathed a sigh of relief, deciding my cheeks didn’t exactly need the hydration, but I wouldn’t turn it away either.
I moved down the bus toward the open windows, hoping the ventilation could help speed up the drying process. It was a packed bus, which wasn’t a surprise, considering it was rush hour in Los Angeles and the streets were bumper-to-bumper with cars and buses. I probably should have chosen a different time to run my errand, but logic was never really my strong suit. I tended to float through life like a bubble, somehow managing to swerve around all the pointy objects without even really meaning to.
It’d worked out so far.
A friendly-looking fae couple entered the bus and went over to the same seat that had betrayed me moments earlier.
“Oh, hold on,” I said, catching their attention right before the jewel-eyed woman sat down on the puddle of salty water (because, let’s be real, that’s all it is). “Someone spilled their drink there.”
She looked down at the seat, then up at me. Her eyes were like two multifaceted rubies set in her face, her smile making them crinkle at the corners. Those were the only things that denoted her from a regular person—well, besides the two wings she could sprout at a moment’s notice if she were so inclined to.
“Thank you,” she said, a gentle hand landing on my shoulder before the two moved further down the bus.
Fae. I never minded them, even though some people found their gaze unsettling and didn’t particularly like the fact that they fed off raw human emotion. I found it quite interesting, but then again, I also wasn’t about to judge anyone based off something they needed to do to survive. How messed up would that be? People should only be judged for their horrible choice in wearing socks with sandals, not for who they were.
It amazed me to think of how close-minded some people still were. Even after the world was irrevocably changed when the first Tear formed across a quiet rural city in Iowa, spitting out not only fae but a plethora of other creatures and races, along with granting certain people the ability to wield and weave mana. It had been the early 1800s when everyone’s perception of reality was shattered. And of course, back then, there weren’t any phones or emails to communicate with, and yet news still managed to spread like wildfire. Over the years, more Tears were formed and more beings flew out of the blue-and-purple rifts in massive numbers, with none of them having any recollection of where they came from or how they got to our planet. And since no one could successfully enter the Tears without presumably turning into ash, it remained one of the biggest mysteries in the entire universe.
Since the Tears formed, treaties between supernatural species and humans were created, wars were fought, innovations were made, and progress was equally hindered and sped up. Now, magical beings could be found all throughout the world, holding powerful positions in governments and corporations. There were some invisible levers and switches controlled by the elite that still kept the power concentrated in human hands, but from the view of a common person like me, everyone seemed to be getting along just fine. Although even with that balance being kept, some magical beings were looked at more favorably than others: no one trusted a vampire, for example, but everyone loved a dragon. A vampire could easily manipulate you into giving them something they wanted, whether it was money or sex or blood. But a dragon’s natural instinct was to protect people at all costs, and that turned them into quite the celebrities.
