Maurice was a Fae in a lot of trouble. When he got caught going to extremes, giving the bad guys a taste of their own medicine, his punishment included 2 years of exile in the Human realms -- shrunk down to 5 inches tall, with shrunken magic to match, and stuck with wings no self-respecting Fae would be caught dead in.Divine's Emporium was a shop on the edge of Neighborlee, steeped in magic, and its owner, Angela, had secrets and magic of her own. She became Maurice's probation officer, to guide him on his journey of learning moderation and to work off his punishment by helping Humans on their journeys to love.
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Chapter One:
The curiosity shop, Heart's Desire, had been in existence exactly two months, three days, and forty-four minutes when Maurice struck gold. All that work, all that planning, all that discomfort of living inside a disguise--all that seething every time he saw that poor half-wit, Forsythe, get kicked around the town that by all rights, he should own. It was all paid for the moment Jordan Price sauntered into Maurice's store and smirked as he laid his gold credit card down on the counter.
Jordan Price, who had capitalized on his father's cheating ways and made bad old Dad look like an amateur. Who realized that his father had cheated Forsythe senior out of his property when they were college boys, and instead of doing the right thing and becoming a hero by restoring the stolen property, set about to make sure Forsythe junior never got a decent break. Who, when his wife stumbled on the paperwork proving that Forsythe owned the property the town was built on, the Price estate, and the gold mine that financed Price Industries, threatened the poor woman and her entire family to silence her. Then he drove her into a nervous breakdown to make sure she stayed silent. While she was in the hospital, he paid a crooked doctor to commit her permanently, under constant medication, and then divorced her so he could marry his slinky secretary who preferred diamonds and furs over honesty.
That same Jordan Price looked like he could buy everything in Maurice's store. Anywhere else, he probably could without making a dent in his credit limit. Inside the tiny mountain town of Sunrise, he could have anything he wanted without paying a fair price. But Maurice and his store weren't for sale, and neither were they ordinary.
Even if Jordan Price wasn't consciously aware of that inconvenient fact, he sensed it. All crooks had ESP when it came to sensing someone who could not only match them at their crooked games, but had an advantage.
Maurice had the biggest advantage of all.
Everything in his store was based in magic. Because Maurice was a Fae, born with magic in his blood, born with a long life ahead of him and a driving need for entertainment. Tormenting bullies had been his latest and most satisfying hobby for the last seven or eight years. With a flick of his fingers, he could make everything in Heart's Desire disappear. Including everything that he sold to the people of Sunrise; take it right out of their homes without leaving a clue to what had happened.
It was all illusion, just like their self-induced illusion that they were decent, hard-working, honest, charitable people. There were a few people in town who still had hearts and listened to their consciences. Maurice watched how they treated poor, half-wit Forsythe, and he rewarded the good ones. The ones who dared to help Forsythe while Jordan Price and his cronies were watching were the real heroes of the story, as far as Maurice was concerned. He was just there to deliver the lightning bolt of justice.
And today, after all his hard work, planning and plotting and watching the people of this town and deciphering what made them tick and what made them sweat, he was about to win.
Checkmate.
D-day.
Jordan Price finished putting his credit card down on the counter and looked at the crooked, white-haired, half-deaf woman perched on her stool--Maurice's most triumphant and amusing disguise so far--and he sweated. Three drops on his left check. Four drops on his right. And a veritable rainforest springing to life at his hairline.
Which, if Maurice was correct, he had just noticed was receding at an alarming rate.
Maurice amused himself at night, when he couldn't sleep, by picking which specific hair follicles in Jordan's head would die next.
"I want--" Jordan stopped short, his voice cracking. He straightened up, licked his lips, coughed to clear his throat, and started again. "I need to speak with you about that photo." He gestured at the photo encased in the antique silver frame hanging on the wall behind the counter.
Underneath the magic Maurice had wrapped around it, the frame was actually an innocuous plastic dime store frame, painted to look silver, with a photo filler of one of those generic, happy families playing at the seashore.
Maurice was exceedingly proud of the spell at work on that frame. The image was always different, depending on who looked at it. His spell dove into the mind of the observer and dug out the most embarrassing, terrifying, life-destroying memory, and superimposed it on the photo.
He could have looked into Jordan Price's mind through the spell to see what mortified and frightened the big town bully, but Maurice had his standards. He had done enough stupid, selfish things in his long life--starting with giving Christopher Columbus the wrong directions to get from Genoa to Madrid--he didn't want to see what others had done. He was rather proud of himself that he still had that much mercy in his soul.
That didn't mean he wouldn't or couldn't take advantage of the hundreds of guilty consciences in this self-satisfied little town. So far he had sold that same photo to sixteen men and forty-three women--either proving that women had more money or listened to their guilty consciences a lot sooner. He knew of at least another sixty or so people on the verge of breaking down and coming in to remove the evidence of some blight on their past.
For each person who paid for and left the store with the photo, Maurice gave them a subliminal kick in the pants to urge them to be nicer to their fellow man, starting with poor half-wit Forsythe, and then made them immune to that particular spell, so they no longer saw the photo and frame. They had a couple of hours of terror when they couldn't find the incriminating photo they had just purchased, but when they came back to the store--and they always did--they wouldn't see it hanging behind the counter anymore. And the photo always reappeared, to wait for the next guilt-stricken, sweating bully or cheat to come in and pay to ensure no one would learn their horrific secrets.
Jordan Price was the crowning achievement. The first and most important reason Maurice had settled in the little town of Sunrise.
"It's not for sale," Maurice said, his disguised voice the perfect combination of frailty and gravel.
"But-- Everything is for sale." Red flushed Jordan's face, and that rain on his forehead trickled down, with more appearing at his hairline, ready to take the plunge. "Everybody has his price."
"Especially you?" Maurice stood up, his disguised body shivering and shaking.
He loved digging the knife in especially hard for Jordan Price, who despised the frail and despised little old women the most--because his grandmother had been the only person in his life who'd ever told him no. Maurice figured Jordan's fear was doubled because his disguise reminded the bully of his grandmother, who had survived several suspicious accidents that would have killed a less stubborn, cantankerous old biddy. Jordan needed to defeat the old woman and beat down his grandmother's memory.
Hah! Never thought all that time studying those head-shrinkers in France and Switzerland would do me any good. Will wonders never cease?
"What do you want for the photo?" Jordan growled. Or rather, he tried to growl. His voice caught and broke, and he backed up a step when the little old woman illusion hiding Maurice's real features leaned on the counter and peered up at him.
"I want to tar and feather you, for starters." The words came out in his normal voice.
Maurice stumbled back from the counter and hit the wall, knocking the photo to the floor. He slapped both hands over his mouth.
He hadn't meant to say those words--he had been thinking them--but he hadn't planned to say them.
Jordan stared at him, eyes wide, the red color seeping out of his face, and sweat literally dripping down his cheeks, soaking his silk collar and...
No, wait a minute. Nothing was dripping. No color seeped.
"Oh, heck," Maurice snarled, just as he felt his body dissolving in one direction and his old woman disguise shredding in another direction. "Come on, let me finish!"
Blackness took over. It could have lasted for a heartbeat or a year, or a decade.
That was the irritating thing about the Fae realms, and life in the Fae enclaves. Time didn't run in synch with the Human world, and other Fae didn't have the fine respect for clocks and calendars--and the baseball and television seasons--that Maurice did.
He blinked and found himself sitting on a backless wooden stool, pinned under a spotlight inside an ocean of blackness. He was in his own body--at least his captor had let him wear comfortable clothes, his favorite slate gray cashmere sweater and matching slacks and his new Italian loafers--and he had iron manacles around one wrist and both ankles, attached to iron chains. The leg chains extended into the darkness beyond the pool of silvery-blue light. The arm chain led up into the air, vanishing in the darkness just beyond the stream of the spotlight. No matter how Maurice turned, he couldn't see what it was attached to.
Common sense said not to get off the stool. It was more than possible there was no floor, no ceiling, and no walls in this room--if he was in a room at all.
"Come on, guys! Do you know how much work I put into that scheme? Let me finish the game, at least. The guy was a bully. He deserved what I was going to give him."
Maurice winced as his words seemed to hit a wall a hundred miles, or maybe a hundred years away, and were absorbed. Chances were good that whoever had yanked him away from Sunrise--just at the culmination of his game!--wasn't even listening. Or if he, she, or they were listening, they weren't going to respond.
That was what he would do, if he was on the Fae Disciplinary Council. Lock up the miscreant, leave him alone for a while to squirm and protest and sweat, and then bring him out for judgment. Eventually.
It was the eventually part of the formula that worried Maurice.
Being a Fae, he could normally conjure up food, water, and some form of entertainment while he waited. But since his captors were Fae also, that automatically meant measures to curtail his magical powers.
Fortunately, he wasn't so deathly allergic to iron that he got poisoned by the touch of it or sickened by the smell of it, but he was allergic enough to get a bad rash. And iron squelched his powers to minimal levels. He could use his whimpering, trickling levels of magic to conjure up a book to read or his new iPod to listen to some music, but that would take away all the magic he was automatically using to fight the hives and sneezing that always came with the touch of iron. And if he tried to hoard his magic until he had enough to burst one manacle, he would be miserable, sneezing and scratching and wheezing and seeping--and bored--and what good would it do to break just one manacle? He would be wiped out, magic-wise, and his captors would be able to come back at their leisure and restore the manacle while he still sat there, waiting for enough magic to break the other two manacles. And his allergic reactions would get worse, and he would still be bored.
So Maurice sat there, as still as he could so the manacles wouldn't slide down off his sweater cuff and his socks wouldn't slide down, allowing the iron to touch bare skin. He spent his time thinking very hard about his possible judges, his possible crimes that he would undoubtedly be found guilty of committing, and his possible punishments. He wished heartily that he could be bored, but his imagination was even more acutely developed than his sense of irate justice.
"Yeah, Willy Shakespeare, we had some good old times at the Globe, but you didn't know squat when you talked about 'now my soul's palace is become a prison.' I really think you were three sheets to the wind when you wrote that line."
Maurice sighed nostalgically and raked the fingers of his free hand through his mop of thick black curls. He had spent those three decades living it up in Elizabethan England, not paying attention to culture in its embryonic form. True, he had spent a lot of time at the Globe, but most of it had been devoted to helping girls pretend to be boys so they could get a job in the theater...so they could play girl roles. Elizabethan England was simply strange, to him.
"And good old Lovelace was off his rocker when he said 'Nor iron bars a cage.' I'm allergic to iron! He didn't know squat about iron chains," Maurice muttered, and tried to pull the cuff of his sleeve down a little lower around his wrist, to offer a little more insulation against the iron manacle.
For punctuation, he sneezed five times in a row, violently enough his head felt like it would snap off his neck, and he nearly hit himself in the face with the manacle when he tried to hold onto his head. In the waiting room before judgment fell, anything could and often did happen, so he wasn't taking any chances.
The crusty old fogies on the Fae Disciplinary Council weren't taking any chances on him getting away, were they? He was stuck, no two ways about it.
"Hey, I know you can hear me!" He tipped his head back to look up at the source of the light. "Isn't there something in the Fae Disciplinary Rules about cruel and unusual punishment?" His words didn't seem to get absorbed so entirely this time. Was that a good sign, or bad? "Come on, guys. I was just having a little fun."
Yes, but your idea of a good time coincides unpleasantly with others' ideas of a bad time, a disembodied, unfamiliar, creaky voice whispered in the middle of his head.
All right, so he was wrong. The Council was keeping an eye on him every second until they brought him up for judgment.
But to be fair--would anyone be fair?-- he had gotten caught when he stopped to help someone who wasn't having a good time.
All right, he hadn't exactly stopped. He'd more like put on brakes and sank roots and stayed to torment that snarking snake of a bully, Jordan Price. Maurice liked jokes just as much as the next guy, and making someone look ridiculous was good clean fun. But he drew the line at prolonging that embarrassment for days. Or in this case, years.
It had seemed like the right thing to do, at the time. Hadn't it been bad enough Price's father had cheated Forsythe's father?
Maurice admitted, he might have looked the other way and let Price keep cheating Forsythe, but the guy's insistence on not only tormenting poor half-wit Forsythe but taking away every chance he had for a little fun, a little comfort, and a semblance of a decent life--that riled Maurice. And it took a lot to rile his righteous indignation. So Maurice had set up shop, taking on the guise of a slightly dizzy old woman, partially deaf and near-sighted, and had opened the doors of a store that promised to fulfill everyone's dearest wish.
Whatever someone wanted, they could find it in his shop.
Amazing the number of greedy souls in one tiny town.
Anything they bought made their imagined deficiencies worse when they stopped using it. And then there was the photo. Too many of the people in Sunrise didn't have guilty consciences to touch any longer, but everyone had something to fear. Those with the dirtiest, deepest, darkest secrets had more fears than anyone else.
Maurice could have become a millionaire in a matter of months, but he'd drawn the line at taking the money of people who couldn't afford to have the rug ripped out from underneath them. Too bad the dusty old fuddy-duddies on the Council wouldn't take that into consideration. They might even forgive him because he was on the side of the downtrodden.
Unfortunately, Maurice suspected the amount of fun he had had would cancel out all the good he had done.
"It's time," came a disembodied, not-male/not-female voice, as the darkness congealed around Maurice, revealing a long, dark room with a vaulted ceiling of domed, churning black clouds. A door appeared about ten miles away, and swung open. The iron manacles and chains on his ankles vanished, and an iron ring appeared in the air, attached to the other end of the chain attached to Maurice's wrist. It slid through the air, toward the open door.
Maurice had to follow, sneezing and itching abominably as the manacle slid off the insulation of his cashmere sweater and settled on his wrist. His eyes watered and his nose dripped and he couldn't even snap his fingers and conjure a handkerchief. No way was he wiping his nose on his cashmere sweater when he came to stand before the Council.
The door ten miles away leaped forward and swallowed him. Maurice fully expected the jagged iron teeth of a portcullis to slam down on him when he put his foot over the threshold.
Twenty tiers of seats rose up through the rainbow-streaked shadows as the room solidified around him. His Italian loafers tapped on a jeweled tile floor. That dratted iron ring hovered in the air over his head, making him hold his arm at right angles to his body, with the chain swinging and clanging against itself.
The thirty members of the Fae Disciplinary Council were hard at work in the stands. They wore various robes and wigs and other costumes denoting judges in various cultures and centuries, with casual disregard for proper colors, mixing and matching styles. Stacks of papers appeared in front of them and drifted down to the tables, to sparkle and vanish as soon as they were read and signed.
Most of the Council members kept working, ignoring Maurice when he showed up. All except for two: Chief Council Speaker Asmondius Pickle, dressed in lavender, with lavender owls perched on his shoulders, and Strictus Hooper, sitting two seats to the right of Pickle, wearing his usual sour cabbage green with a neon green Georgian wig sitting crooked on his bald head.
"Maurice..." Asmondius sighed as he rested his elbows on the table in front of him. "Lad, you are a problem. Always have been. You have a keen sense of justice, and there's something to be admired in a Fae who doesn't like injustice or bullying. But when you turn into a bully yourself, and have too much fun in the pursuit of justice, well..." He shrugged, his robes shifting into saffron in places.
"Your sentence is exile," Strictus Hooper snapped. He sniffed. "Since you seem to like Humans so much, you are sentenced to two years of exile in the Human realms. No communication with the Fae enclaves, no visits home."
That didn't seem so bad, but Maurice knew there had to be a real stinger hidden under the supposed mercy of the Council. He braced himself.
"Two years in...reduced circumstances." Strictus smiled, and that worried Maurice. The last time Strictus had smiled... Come to think of it, Maurice couldn't remember the last time Strictus had smiled. Not that he spent time voluntarily in the old sourpuss's company, but such an unusual event would have been reported in the Magical Mumbler.
Reduced? His brain snagged on that word, images of what it could mean flitting through his thoughts.
"Humans think we're only five inches tall and have wings like butterflies." Strictus steepled his fingers, and leaned back in the tall chair so his wig flattened and lifted off his bald scalp for a moment. "You shall spend your time of exile as Humans think the Fae are. And the scope of your magic shall match your size." He snapped his fingers, and an enormous cabbage-green gavel appeared out of thin air and slammed down on the table in front of him.
Maurice's mouth dropped open. He couldn't think of a single word to say. The reverberating thud-clang of the judgment gavel would have drowned out any sound he made, anyway.
The reverberations continued, growing louder, making the room shake. The iron manacle fell off his wrist, but before he could gather up his magic and try to slip into a sideways dimension and make tracks, he felt something squeeze down on him. His back itched abominably. He opened his mouth to shout, to deny what was happening... A squeak emerged instead of the shout he'd intended. He dropped to his knees.
The lights flickered, and he landed on a marble floor.
Around him were a ball-and-jacks set, with all the pieces larger than his head, a glass jar of rainbow-colored rocky candy sticks taller than he was, and an iridescent globe that looked like a transportation and communication globe, but set in a stand of dark metal shaped like a coiled dragon, with rubies for eyes. An old-fashioned brass cash register towered over him like a three-story building.
"You must be Maurice," a woman said, and her voice came from high overhead.
Okay, he liked tall women, but this was ridiculous.
Before his neck could get a cramp from looking up and up and up, Maurice's perceptions changed, and he realized that this heart-shaped face and waterfall of hair in ten shades of gold and cinnamon weren't particularly tall. He was very, very short.
Unable to resist, he looked over his shoulder. Wings. Butterfly-shaped, glistening, iridescent, lacy, rainbow-streaked wings fluttering like the lashes of a coy maiden flirting with him, moving a little faster the longer he looked at them. Maybe if he turned around and pretended they weren't there, they would fade away. Fae hadn't had wings for thousands of years.
How could they do this to him?
"Cute, but not you," the woman said. That was laughter sparkling in her big blue eyes, and putting a rich tone in her voice, but she didn't smile. Somehow, her sympathy and attempt not to hurt his feelings just made the whole situation worse. "Especially not with those Italian shoes. I hope you won't end up with permanent holes in that sweater. Cashmere?"
He barely restrained his tongue and changed his words to something less offensive. "Who the heck cares?" Maurice had always been a quick study, and he put all the pieces together here within a few seconds, despite his head reeling from the utter indignity--five inches tall, and wings no self-respecting Fae would wear to a costume ball! "I suppose you're my probation officer?"
"Angela." She nodded, making it a little bow, and didn't do him the indignity of offering a finger for him to shake. She wore a slightly faded, long blue dress in a shapeless style that Maurice thought had been referred to as a granny dress, or was it a hippie style? "This is Divine's Emporium. I can't understand why Asmondius wants you to spend two years here, but I've known him long enough to know he has his reasons. Why he would consider Divine's a punishment..." She shrugged.
A communications globe shimmered into being just above the globe sitting in the dragon stand. Angela shook her head, her lips quirking up a little more toward a smile, and held out her hand. A scroll popped out of the globe to land in her hand, then it popped like a soap bubble and vanished. She smoothed the skirts of her dress underneath herself, and sat down in a little white scrollwork chair that appeared from nowhere behind the counter in what looked like an old-fashioned general store.
Maurice took a good look around while she read the scroll.
No general store he had ever known looked like this place. For one thing, if he moved his vision sideways a little, he could see the slits in reality where extra rooms and extra height above the ceilings and slides into other dimensions were hidden, waiting to be opened up and used. The actual physical rooms themselves contained a mish-mash of different styles of shelving; wrought iron, glass, chrome, plastic, and wood. Antiques and toys, penny candy and dozens of styles of dishes, handcrafted wooden furniture, kites, wind chimes, candles, were piled willy-nilly on them. The list went on and on. And scattered through everything, he caught the glimmer of magic waiting, resting, poised to spring into action. The place reminded him a lot of his shop.
That was when the last few pieces started falling together in his mind. Maurice had the dreadful feeling Angela was one of those do-gooders who existed to grant the wishes of others and made a regular nuisance out of themselves, insisting that people who were perfectly happy were actually miserable and didn't know what they wanted or needed. And usually by the time these do-gooders threw up their hands in defeat and fled town, they had ruined a dozen lives.
Too bad. Angela looked like she had an actual sense of humor, which most do-gooders, in Maurice's experience, lacked.
Oh, Maurice, old boy, you are in one heck of a lot of trouble.
"So Asmondius wants to teach you a lesson," Angela said, her words accompanied by the rustling sound as she rolled up the scroll and tucked it into the pocket of her granny dress.
A flicker of magic caught Maurice's attention. He turned his sight sideways, to see the scroll slide through a convenient slit in reality, filed for safekeeping.
"Because the shop you set up to teach those villagers a lesson was a parody of my shop--"
"Can't parody what you don't know exists," he offered.
"Granted." Another twitch of her lips, another smile stifled. "Asmondius thinks you have a need to squash bullies and help the underdog, but you need to learn discretion. To study and think before you leap into a situation." She sighed and gestured for him to follow as she stepped away from the counter. "Let me show you around."
Maurice almost snarled at her to wait for him, because it was a doggone long drop to the floor and he wasn't sure how he could get down. Then he remembered he had wings. Did they actually work? Angela seemed to assume they would. He fought down the urge to lean back against a sharp corner and scratch hard, and flexed his shoulder blades. With a gust of cotton candy-perfumed air--oh, please, did they have to be that cruel?--he was airborne.
He followed Angela into the back of the store and through a storage room. She led him outside, where he got a good look at a snowy slope going down into a winter wonderland of forests and meadows and a wandering, ice-coated river. Turning around, he saw that the shop was in a big Victorian house, gold, with cupolas and lacy olive-green gingerbread trim and dozens of windows. He had to rub his eyes when the sideways vision showed him more slits where magic could come in and out and doorways inside the shop leading to other places and times.
"Divine's Emporium exists to heal and assist those who come here looking for help. We guard other worlds and times, secrets and dangers. We don't force help on anyone, we don't take over anyone's life. A lot of people you would probably label misfits come here because they know they'll be loved and accepted here." Angela's voice went stern and the sparkle in her eyes turned into a blaze of power like multiple spotlights focused on him. "I don't want you mocking any of my friends, understand?"
"Understood." Maurice had the strangest urge to salute, but he knew Angela would not be amused.
"You're here for two full years, Human time. You have to find opportunities to help Humans. I'm not allowed to give you specific orders, but I can make suggestions. Strong suggestions. And lots of guidance." She gestured for him to follow her back inside.
He noticed that Angela didn't leave any footprints in her snowy garden. He muffled a whistle of admiration.
The evening was spent in fitting out his quarters and giving him a tour of all the rooms that belonged to Divine's Emporium. Angela didn't suggest he move into the antique dollhouse, and he was grateful. Instead, his apartment fitted out with dollhouse furniture was set up in a hutch, with plenty of room for him to float from one floor to the other with the doors closed, providing him with a sense of privacy.
Angela laughed aloud when he found dozens of sets of clothes for the G.I. Joe and other male dolls that she had in stock, and discovered that most of the clothes fit him. The magic that made his wings appear created slits in the clothes when he tried to put them on, and mended them when he took them off. Even his cashmere sweater, to his relief.
Except for his size and the wings, nothing else about him was changed. He had feared the Council would change his hair, but it was still a short, curly mane of jet black, his shoulders were just as wide--in proportion to the rest of him, of course--and he still had his fencing/rock climbing/track-and-field physique. He had worked hard for that, rather than using magic to keep himself looking good, and he felt his first flicker of gratitude that the Council hadn't taken that away. For instance, making him a reedy wimp with lavender hair and weak ankles.
That night after dinner, he and Angela played poker. The cards were taller than Maurice--he resorted to using his much-reduced magic to holding them in mid-air--and he had to keep peering around them to see Angela. The poker chips were bigger than his head, but on the plus side, he kept winning, so his piles of chips were taller than his head, too. He was pretty sure that Angela didn't let him win, so his spirits were much brighter when he headed for bed.
During the poker game, Angela gave him a verbal tour of the town, and brought the globe in its dragon stand upstairs to her apartment, as a visual aid. She let Maurice know the globe was known as the Wishing Ball by all the children in town, and quite a few of them believed in magic, so it was quite possible that some of the more alert children could see him--meaning he had to proceed with caution when there were children in the shop.
While she talked about the town, images appeared in the Wishing Ball. Divine's Emporium sat on the edge of the town of Neighborlee, Ohio, overlooking the Metroparks. Willis-Brooks College was over one hundred fifty years old, and took up a good portion of the town. The center of town had a square with the requisite Civil War monument, playground, and gazebo, and was surrounded by a lot of old-fashioned-looking buildings, giving the moonlit downtown area a sense of belonging in the previous century. Maurice decided he liked Neighborlee, just before it occurred to him that a quiet town would make it hard to find people to help.
* * * *
"Mistletoe?" Maurice perched on the top shelf behind the store counter, where the coffee shop shimmered on the edge of becoming solid and two extra rooms waited just half a step sideways in reality. It was Saturday morning, just one day after he'd arrived in his exile.
He wrinkled up his nose at the mistletoe Angela was hanging in bunches from the pull cord of the ceiling fan. "You're wasting mistletoe on Humans, Angie-baby. They can't see into the parallel dimensions, and even if they could, they have to be pretty quick to reach through the slits and pull their dreams-come-true back into reality with them. Not one Human in a million can do it."
"We Humans have a magic of our own," she responded serenely, and climbed down the ladder. Angela looked up at the gold balls and red ribbon, bits of green leaves and white berries, and smiled. She had hung clumps of mistletoe in every room of the shop, and the sideways dimension rooms.
"Yeah, and how long has it been since you were an ordinary Human?"
"I don't exactly recall." Her smile faded a little. "But even at the beginning, I doubt I was ever ordinary."
"You're one weird chick."
"Coming from someone five inches tall and wearing wings Tinkerbell wouldn't be caught dead in, I think I'll take that as a compliment." She stepped up behind the counter, to give the Wishing Ball one last polish with Windex and a paper towel.
Maurice tried to be angry, but he burst out laughing instead. He watched her polish the rainbow-smeared metallic ball for a few seconds, studying his reflection in it. Angela confused him, and strangely, he almost liked it. This period of exile, shrunken body, shrunken magic, and being invisible to almost everyone he came into contact with, wasn't going to be easy. But he sensed that having Angela for his probation officer would make all the difference. For the first time in his life, he had limits he couldn't charm or scheme his way around, but maybe that wasn't such a bad situation after all.
"How come you make magic so easy to come by here?" he had to ask, after she stepped around the counter and opened the first of three boxes of ornaments that looked--and sparkled with real magic--like the Wishing Ball.
"Magic is always easy to come by, for Humans, but they have to know to look for it and know to want it. They're usually so caught up in their physical world, they think it's the only one, and they miss the magic. I just make things a little more obvious. Divine's has a reputation for amazing things happening. People who don't believe in wishes outside these doors believe here. I take them back to simpler, happier times, when the world was filled with possibilities." She smiled and brushed a loose strand of hair back over the shoulder of her gold-trimmed, crimson velvet gown. "Perfect. Almost time for the party."
"Doesn't look like a party." He glanced around, half-expecting food and chairs, decorations and music to appear from a sideways dimension.
"It's my annual decorating party." She flicked her fingers at the ceiling in the corner of the room. The room itself stretched out three more feet and the ceiling raised another two feet. "Keep a sharp eye out, Maurice. You could get your first assignment this afternoon."
"Assignment." He huffed. "Am I supposed to be Santa's helper, or just a vending machine for all your hopeless Human friends?"
Angela's eyes darkened a little, sending a shiver of apprehension down his back between his fluttering wings--which fluttered faster, despite his best efforts to keep them still. It occurred to him that if she wanted to stomp on him, there was no magic in the world, or wings, that could get him out from under her foot, no matter how hard he tried.
"Attitude will get you nowhere. If you don't straighten out, I'll make you spend the entire Christmas season as the angel on top of the tree." She gestured in the corner where she had expanded the room, as if the tree was already there.
"Yeah? You and whose army?" Maurice sneered, praying she would take it as a joke.
Angela just smiled at his words, but somehow he had the feeling the joke was on him, and he had just said something really stupid. He gulped hard and offered his most charming smile. Of course, how charming could that smile be, when it was probably about one-half of an inch wide?
"Okay, I take that back. Lesson learned."
"You hope." She looked around the room, gave a nod of approval, and sauntered out of the room. As if he wasn't there anymore.
The first person who showed up certainly didn't look like she was ready for a party. She was pale under her gallons of rusty freckles and cold-reddened cheeks, short, with bowed shoulders and hips that looked a mile wide under a damp, bulky down jacket that hung past her knees and made her look like the Michelin Man.
Maurice winced, too fascinated by the pitiful creature to turn away when Angela called her name--Holly--and greeted her with a hug.
"I rescued some more books," Holly said as she handed over three bulging, straining plastic grocery bags to Angela. "They weren't even going to put these in the Friends of the Library sale, just toss them. Sacrilege."
Angela took the bags of book with a smile and put them on the counter, pulling out a few from each bag. "Just because the binding and cover is a wreck doesn't mean the words inside are any less precious. Let's see if we can work our usual magic and find a new home for these treasures."
Maurice hovered overhead while Angela and Holly looked through the battered, ragged old books. He flew closer to look at some book spines, and an unseen force pushed him out of the way when Holly reached for the same book.
"So... I'm guessing if nobody can see me, they won't be able to touch or hear me, either? Man, that's worse than the silent treatment," he groused, and settled down on the shelf where he could get a good view of what they were doing without overtaxing his wings.
The people who come in here are a lot closer to believing in magic and other worlds and the Fae, but they're my friends, so no straining their sense of reality, you hear me? No nasty tricks, no hiding things, no illusions and sound effects. Got me? Angela said, straight into his mind.
Full of surprises, Angela definitely was.
He gave her a stiff, military-precise salute. "Got it--it's the angel on the tree until New Year's, if I don't fly straight and true."
Angela glanced over her shoulder at him, eyes sparkling with laughter, and nodded once in satisfaction. Then she went back to work on the books with Holly. They concluded that all the books could be salvaged with a little work and tender loving care. Holly took them upstairs to deposit in one of Angela's storage rooms.
Maurice supposed since Angela could create rooms as she had need, she probably had a room tucked away in a spare dimension of reality full of all the tools and materials needed to restore books.
He kind of liked it that Holly cared about books. Then again, from some of the things she'd said as she and Angela examined the rescued books, he guessed she was a librarian. He kind of liked her for rescuing books that were about to be discarded, for Angela to mend and put on her shelves. Despite his adventurer reputation, he did love to fall into a book and travel through his imagination.
Come to think of it, Holly looked like a librarian--although she needed wire-rimmed spectacles and a skirt down below her calves, instead of patched jeans, faux-fur boots, and an oversized white Mickey Mouse sweatshirt. Her hair, when she pulled off her Cleveland Browns stocking cap, disappointed him. He expected frizzy red to go with all those freckles and her pale complexion. It was more a dishwater brown, straight, with a few specks of ginger, and damp from the exertion of carrying those books.
"So... I love a good book," he said, when Holly stepped out of the room. "But please, please don't tell me she's my first assignment. I mean, she's cute for a librarian, but I don't do makeovers."
"You might be surprised, if you got to know Holly. Maybe she doesn't need a makeover at all."
"Yeah? Without one, how am I ever going to dupe some schmoe into falling in love with her?"
"You have a lot to learn," she responded quietly. "How about you get an eagle's eye view of things?" Her smile turned sweet, and Maurice had the awful feeling that when Angela looked sticky sweet, she was more dangerous than the entire Fae Disciplinary Council with malfunctioning magic, jazzed on diet cherry cola.
"What's that mean?" He didn't bother with bravado, but at least his voice didn't quaver. He was only five inches tall, after all, and she was his probation officer.
"You'll find out."
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