Charming Blue (35 page)

“You mean he’s still dangerous?” Shea squeaked.

Jodi couldn’t imagine a less scary stalker. Whoever had chosen this guy to be the Fairy Tale Stalker must have done it as some kind of joke.

“I’m not dangerous,” Blue said with more conviction than Jodi expected from him. “The spell is. But I’ve neutralized it many times in the past, and it’s under control now.”

If he meant
now
as in right this instant, then he was right. It was under control. But if he meant
now
as in currently, as in this week, he was lying his ass off.

Either way, he sounded convincing.

“You fix him first, then me,” Shea said.

“If only it were that easy,” Jodi said. She pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down. She had been uncomfortable standing. She wanted Shea to regain his balance, and she hoped this would help.

Shea watched her closely. Blue did not move away from his post near the door.

“I’m sure you remember your first Principles of Magic Course,” she said.

Shea’s eyes narrowed. The last thing she wanted him to tell her was that as a Charming, he had been exempted from school. She knew some of the royalty in some of the Kingdoms did that.

But he didn’t say anything.

“One of the basic tenants of magic,” she said, “one of the ones we get taught in the first weeks of class. The older the spell…”

He let out a gust of air. “…the stronger it is,” he finished for her.

Thank God he remembered. That made her story believable. She didn’t have to explain the weakness in his magic compared with Blue’s.

“I needed to see your aura to see if the spell matched. It does, and it’s engulfing your magic.”

“What does that mean?” Shea said.

“I’m not exactly sure,” Jodi said. “But it’s also ripping your aura apart, taking all the strength out of it by reshaping it. I believe I can organize your magic and pull the bad spell out.”

Blue looked sharply at her, clearly surprised. Blue had some guile, but not a lot, and she had caught him off-guard.

“So let me ask you the most important question of all,” she said, deliberately ignoring Blue. “How long have you been suffering under this spell?”

“I don’t know,” Shea moaned.

She was beginning to dislike him. She didn’t like whiners. Was it possible to dislike a Charming? She hadn’t liked Blue much when he was drinking, but then, she hadn’t interacted with him. She had only watched him from afar. Still, she hadn’t liked him. Was it the diminished charm or had it been the effects of the spell?

Or both?

“When did the symptoms first show up?” she asked, feeling her patience thin.

“What do you mean by symptoms?” he asked, his voice thick, like he was going to cry.

“When did women start being afraid of you?” Blue snapped. “Did it happen before you got here?”

Shea looked up at him, like he was looking at the Devil himself. Shea took a deep breath. “Well…” he said slowly, “my last girlfriend in the Kingdom told me I had gotten really creepy.”

“Creepy how?” Blue asked.

Apparently he was getting through to Shea better than she was.

“She said she just didn’t like the way I was treating her,” Shea said. “I didn’t ask for clarification. She was starting to grate on me too.”

“How long ago was that?” Jodi asked.

He leaned back, beginning to look relaxed for the first time since she arrived. If relaxed was the right word. Maybe… a bit more comfortable. Not as tense. A little less stressed.

“Just before I got here,” he said.

“More than a year ago, right?” Jodi asked.

“Yeah,” he said, sounding surprised that she knew.

“That’s a much more recent spell than mine,” Blue said.

Shea gave Jodi the most hopeful look she had seen from him. “You think you can fix this?”

“I can try,” she said. “I know how to disentangle spells, and how to organize magic. Those are part of my magical skill set. However, if this turns out to be a curse, then I won’t have done anything.”

Shea clenched a hand into a fist, then loosened it again. Jodi recognized the movement. It was a relaxation technique taught by one of the full body coaches the studios liked. Then Shea rubbed that hand on his thigh, took a deep breath, and looked up at Blue.

“Would you let her do this?”

“I don’t let her do anything,” Blue said, and Jodi had to look down so that the involuntary smile didn’t cross her face. That was a relationship answer, and Shea hadn’t asked a relationship question.

“I mean, reorganize your magic? Would you let her do that to you?”

Blue paused. Jodi’s heart started hammering. Was he going to ruin this? Was he going to get in the way?

“She has a point about the age of the spell,” Blue said. “I think I’d want some magical backup if she tried to mess with my aura. It’s been broken for a long, long time.”

“But me, I’m a year or so in,” Shea said softly. “So it’ll be okay.”

“That’s what we’re hoping,” Jodi said. “I’m not going to give you any guarantees.”

Shea let out a barking laugh. “That’s exactly what you said to me when I told you that I wanted to make my name in Hollywood. You said there are no guarantees. And now I’m famous.”

“But not with your name,” Blue said.

Shea’s smile faded, and he nodded once. “You’re right. Not with my name.”

“We can fix this,” Jodi said. “Just let me try.”

Shea stood up. He was shaking visibly. “Are you sure you don’t want magical backup?”

Jodi tried to imagine Selda here or Tank or anyone else who might have the power to contain some of the magic she might unleash. The problem with her powerful friends was simple: they wanted to be in charge. They would argue with her over every point. She didn’t need argument.

She needed practice. She needed a relatively painless first attempt.

And she didn’t want to insult Shea by telling him that.

“I think we’ll do fine without the backup,” she said. “Besides, Blue will be here.”

“You have other magic skills besides Charm?” Shea asked.

“You’d be surprised at what I can do,” Blue said.

And, as Jodi stood to start her work on Shea, she realized that once again, Blue hadn’t answered an important question directly.

Chapter 43

As Jodi stood up to help the Fairy Tale Stalker, Blue realized just how small she was. And fragile.

And precious.

He made himself take a deep breath. She knew what she was doing, or at least, that was what she said.

He had to trust her.

He hadn’t trusted anyone for a very long time.

The stalker—Gregory. Shea. Jeez, Blue wished he knew the man’s real name. His magical name. The name he was born with. The name that gave the person who knew it very real power.

All of this talk of magical backup made Blue very nervous. More nervous than he had been.

Although, if he was honest with himself, he had been nervous from the moment they had arrived in this hotel room/apartment/suite thingie. He recognized it as part of that downward slide. Only he had had his in the Kingdom, and then he had come here, continuing it. He couldn’t quite remember how he had gone from crappy impersonal apartments to crappy impersonal hotel rooms to crappy impersonal patches of earth underneath bridges, but he had done all of that, hugging a bottle.

The stalker—Blue couldn’t think of him as anything else—stood up. He weighed almost double what Jodi did. If he got physical as she tried to disentangle the evil spell from his aura, then he could do some real damage, maybe even before Blue got over there.

“One thing before you start,” Blue said, amazed at the firmness in his own voice.

They both looked at him, almost as if they had forgotten he was there.

He didn’t look at Jodi. He looked directly at the stalker.

“I need to know your real name,” Blue said.

“Blue,” Jodi said in that tone he was beginning to recognize as a reprimand. She had never really used it with him before.

“He wants magical backup. You
need
magical backup. We can’t have it without knowing who this guy is. His
real
name, not the name he uses here.”

The stalker swallowed hard. His eyes moved from side to side—shifty, untrustworthy—and then they settled on Jodi, and in them, Blue saw need. This guy was scared.

Blue hoped scared triumphed over all that training everyone got from babyhood on.
Keep
your
name
secret. Don’t tell anyone who you are. If someone you don’t know asks your name, lie. Make something up.

Blue wasn’t even sure how he would know if the guy was lying. He could only hope that Jodi would figure it out.

“Gregor,” the stalker said. “Young Gregor of Kent.”

Kent. There was always a Kent. Every damn Kingdom had a Kent. It was like the name “Springfield” in America. Every state had a Springfield. Every Kingdom had a Kent.

“Which Kingdom?” Blue asked.

Young Gregor looked down. If he was a boy, he might have scuffed the floor with his bare foot, kicking imaginary dirt. At that moment, Blue realized just how young this guy was.

He was a baby. He probably hadn’t even hit his first century yet. And he was scared.

“The Fifty-Fifth Kingdom,” Young Gregor said with a touch of shame. “I’m from the Fifty-Fifth Kingdom.”

Blue felt a stab of pity. Not only was Young Gregor seventy-somethingth to the throne, but he was seventy-somethingth to the throne of an insignificant Kingdom. The Brothers Grimm only made it to the first fifteen Kingdoms, and the last five were one of those whirlwind tours, filled with wine and food and probably dancing girls.

A couple of the other fairy tale writers had visited some of the Kingdoms with numbers up to twenty-five, and there were rumors that Oscar Wilde caused some real havoc in the sixty-ninth Kingdom, but for the most part, no one—no
mortal
—had been to the Kingdoms above twenty. Not well enough to write the Kingdom stories as fairy tales.

Not well enough to make them part of the mythos that had blended into the Greater World.

The stalker had to be telling the truth. No one from the Kingdoms admitted they were from the lesser Kingdoms unless they actually were.

“Satisfied now?” Young Gregor asked. The words were challenging, but the tone wasn’t.

“Yes,” Blue said.

He wasn’t sure what he would do with the information. He really didn’t have other magic besides his Charm. Except for the magic that everyone had. He had the ability to send all of them to the Fates, which had the benefit of freezing time enough to prevent a haphazard death or some other catastrophe—unless the Fates themselves decided not to intervene.

Blue supposed that would have to do.

He would have to trust Jodi.

He didn’t want to trust Jodi.

But he saw no other choice.

Chapter 44

Jodi stood in front of Young Gregor, near the half-closed door of the bedroom. To her right was the bathroom, and to her left, a closet. Behind her, the table and Blue. She wished she could see Blue, but she knew it was better not to see him.

He would distract her. She couldn’t afford a distraction right now.

She didn’t like the half-open door. She had no idea what she could conjure up in that back room or what Young Gregor had conjured up.

“Excuse me just a moment,” she said and reached around him. The very movement made him jump. He scrambled away from her as if she frightened him.

She probably did.

She kicked the socks into the mound of clothing that looked (and smelled) like a live thing. Through the half-open door she could see drawn curtains, a faint light, and an unmade bed. The television was on low, sending its light across the tangled sheets.

She had a sense—and her senses were generally good—that no one else was in that room. (If they were, she had no idea how they could handle the smell of those clothes.)

She pulled the door closed all the way, then closed the bathroom and closet doors. Then she surveyed the area.

It was small and cramped, and it made her uncomfortable. It had been designed for the doors to stay open. With the doors closed, the suite’s flow got compromised.

“Let’s step into the living area,” she said. “I’m not sure if I want to perform any kind of magic in a space this small.”

Young Gregor almost hopped into the living area. Jodi looked down. The floor had the remains of pretzels and chips and half a dozen “meals” of dubious nutritious value.

She felt a similar pity for him that she had felt for Blue after she had met him but before she really knew him. The reality of Young Gregor’s situation was that he had been heading the same way, into a lonely, confusing exile.