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He writes a retainer check to cover the first week of fees. Hopefully I won’t need more than the one check. If it takes me longer than a week to find his sis, I’m doing something wrong. His ‘oh, this isn’t bad at all’ casualness over the amount frees me of most of my guilt for taking money from a grieving family member.
With another handshake, I’m officially on the case to find out what happened to Gemma Fulton.
Chapter Six
Only a Dream—Until it Isn’t
After getting home from school and taking a long shower, Tammy stretched out on her bed, staring at the ceiling.
The oddity of flowing hot water and a modern shower clashed with remembering the river near the faerie village she’d been swimming and bathing in for the past ten years. Or the past ten years in analternatetime stream. Electric lights, plumbing, carpet, cell phones, and everything else she’d taken for granted as normal all suddenly felt strange and special.
Not necessarily good, but special.
Of course, they didn’t exactly bother her either. Neither good nor bad, merely different from the rustic existence that had come to feel normal. Then again, she hadn’t worn shoes in a decade, and that seemed completely sane and ordinary.
Tammy laughed to herself at feeling a bit like the wizards fromHarry Potterwho couldn’t fathom the modern world. Even though she grew up with technology, she’d also grown up in a realm of faeries and magic. Whatever Maple had done to her, within hours of their arrival, she’d turned more childlike. While she always remembered the human world and her other life, she couldn’t deny she’d functionally regressed to being a child again. It brought the delightful wonder of innocence but also the embarrassing tendency to cry when frustrated. Her old fear of the dark returned as well. She’d grown out of it around age fourteen. Did it mean something that it only took her until eleven her ‘second time around’ to outgrow being afraid of the dark?
Having the ability to fling magical bolts of pure life energy to destroy evil things that might be hiding in the shadows certainly gave her more confidence than she had before. Maybe that explained it. Or… not having Mom around to go cling to forced her to deal with fears herself?
Days before leaving to come back here, Maple finally explained the whole crazy process had been necessary for her to properly learn. Children’s minds were more malleable to new information. This, Tammy already knew. Modern science had established it as fact. Kids learned language, for example, way easier than adults.
Being a kid growing up with faeries had simultaneously been like a long blissful playtime as well as serious training. As much as she hated to think it, she’d been truly happy there. Not that she had any bad thoughts toward Mom, but experiencing a childhood free of two parents in conflict did something to her head. She absolutely didn’t begrudge Mom for anything. Dad had been the butthead. Tammy simply got caught between two parents facing an impossible situation, and one of the parents totally failed to handle it.
That said, in spite of the fun of having a whole village of faeries acting like her family, she had a continuous sense of missing Mom. It ebbed and strengthened from time to time, but she always tried to think about how as far as her mother would be concerned, she’d only be gone for one night. It didn’t matter how much Tammy missed her mother over those ten years, Mom wouldn’t be aware of the time, so she could deal with it.
She held her hand up and summoned a small vine from her fingertip. So small and trivial now, but yesterday—a decade ago—it would’ve seemed crazy to think possible. Maple and the other faeries taught her how to tap into her magical potential, communing with the natural world. She could call upon the power of plants, animals, and even storms if needed. It started to sound so crazy and impossible until she remembered Mom fighting a giant demonic dragon as big as a commercial jetliner.
While making the tiny two-inch thorn vine sway back and forth, Tammy replayed various practice drills in her memory. She could call roots up from the ground to grab the bad guys or make huge telephone-pole sized ones and swing them like tentacles to smash things. Or, at least she could do those things in the faerie realm. Alas, magic tended to work differently depending on one’s environment.
Despite Mom destroying that monster who originally wanted to kill Annie and releasing magic back into the world, Tammy’s spells wouldn’t work quite the same way here. Summoning a ten-foot-tall whomping thorny club more than likely wouldn’t work. Or, if it did, it would drain so much energy out of her she’d pass out. Here in the normal world, she’d have much better luck with more subtle uses of magic. Tangling patches of vines, for example. Anything that sounded like special effects from theLord of the Ringsmovies would either fail (due to there not being enough magical energy in this realm) or kick her butt in ways not even a quadruple espresso could fix.
Shapeshifting magic still worked, which she found reassuring if awkward. It opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Taking on the form of a hawk, for example, could let her fly. Squirrels could squeeze into places people didn’t fit. The panther, obviously, made for a far more effective combatant than her human self. While it behooved her to keep the public at large from becoming aware of magic, if she ever happened to be alone and some guy tried to attack her, she wouldn’t hesitate to call on the panther spirit. Assuming the guy got away from her, it’s not like he’d go to the cops to tell them some girl he tried to assault turned into a giant cat. Even if he did, they’d probably put him away as insane.
The only real problem with any of the animal shifting magic was it didn’t work on clothing. If she made herself into a squirrel to sneak into a place, she’d be stranded inside naked. Likewise, shapeshifting into some form of bird to shorten a trip across town wouldn’t be practical unless her destination happened to be a nude beach—or she chose a bird large enough to carry a change of clothing along for the flight.
She squirmed, thinking about how Mom, her brother, and worst of all, Kingsley, sometimes ended up stuck with nothing to wear because of emergency shapeshifting. It made sense to a point how they’d become blasé about it. Kinda hard to consider nudity a serious problem after years of near-death experiences at the hands of vampires, demons, werewolves and a crazed evil bitch of a dark master. So what if someone saw more than she wanted to show of herself? Suffering mild embarrassment definitely beat being eaten alive or burned to ashes. Faeries and elves certainly didn’t care about clothes. Animals didn’t either. Embarrassment at the natural state was purely a human social construction.
Fortunately, her magic shapeshifting didn’tdestroyclothing the way her brother erupting into the Fire Warrior or Mom bursting a hundred times her size into Talos did. Well, if Tammy made herself into something huge—like an elephant—she’d do the same. But smaller animals just fell out of whatever she had on. No destruction. If she got into the habit of wearing dresses—ugh—she could easily crawl back into them before turning human again.
Of course, she could summon a dress from nature, too. Or a skirt. Or however she wanted to shape it. A garment made of leaves, vines, and magic might look weird but she wouldn’t have to carry it at all, merely create it after landing and turning human again. However, people didn’t run around wrapped in moss, leaves, and vines these days without either being an actor in a movie, a hippie, or one of those nerds who got dressed up to play games like D&D. She felt no need to make fun of them, but didn’t want to become one of them, either. People teased her enough for dressing like a goth, she didn’t want to make it worse.
Huh… do people still tease adults? I’m basically done with high school. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore in the real world.
A sudden shift in energy drew Tammy’s gaze to her window. Seconds later, Maple zoomed into view, hovering outside on the other side of the glass. Before Tammy could even sit up, the window opened by itself, allowing her into the room. Even though they intended to embark on a rescue mission, the sight of her felt awfully like the faerie queen coming to collect her first-born as payment.
“Hey.” Tammy sat up.
Maple zipped over. “You look okay. Feel okay?”
“I feel so indescribably weird I can’t describe it,” muttered Tammy.
“Hah. Yes. As expected.”
Tammy leaned forward, elbows on her knees, chin in both hands. “I can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t.”
“It’s all real.” Maple held her arms out to either side.
“So I had two childhoods?”
