Wickedly Charming (21 page)

And then she did stomp out.

He watched her shadow make its way across the store's carpet, until she rounded the corner and disappeared.

His heart was pounding. He put his head in his hands for just a brief moment. His wife had just tried to wish his girls out of existence. He would need to contact his attorney, and Lavinia, and anyone else he could think of.

Ella had just gotten dangerous. Or even more dangerous. She had clearly gone off some kind of deep end.

And it wasn't his to wonder why (although he did). It was now his duty to protect his daughters.

Somehow.

Mellie would have told anyone who asked that the entire tour experience blurred into one long mess, filled with signings and interviews and impersonal hotel rooms. But she would've been lying. Because she thrived on this—the lack of sleep, the horrible food, the hurry-hurry-hurry to the next stop, the next town, the next airport.

The only thing that bothered Mellie was Charming. She missed him. She missed seeing him, consulting with him. She even missed wishing she could flirt with him.

When this tour was over, she'd get off the plane, run to his beautiful bookstore, wrap her arms around him, and give him the biggest, best kiss of her life. She would literally throw herself at him, and if he balked, she would step back and say it was all a thank-you for saving her.

Because that was what he had done.

The wonderful man.

Mellie was hearing daily how the numbers on the books were trending upwards. After her Minneapolis appearances, the book started selling well in the Midwest. After she did some syndicated radio interviews, people showed up early at the stores to make sure they got copies of the books.

And by the time she reached Philadelphia, the stores had sold out of their copies of
Evil
before she arrived. The people who showed up at the signing had bought the book a few days before.

Things started to go sideways in Philadelphia, though. Until that point, she thought she could predict the questions in the interview:

1. What caused you to write the book?

2. Did the idea come out of your own life?

3. Do you really believe stepmothers are misunderstood?

4. What made you choose fairy tales as your vehicle of self-expression?

5. What was it about the Snow White story that spoke to you?

Those questions usually comprised the entire interview, and after the third day of the tour, she could answer them by rote.

She tried not to, though, because then the interviews would start to sound canned, and what people liked—according to LaTisha the publicist who, in addition to traveling with Mellie, monitored blogs, and reactions to the signings—was Mellie's passion for her topic.

Her readers surprised her too—or her potential readers, anyway, at the first part of her tour. The people who bought the book weren't all stepmothers. Some were stepchildren who loved their stepmothers (“My mom abandoned me,” she heard more than once, “but my stepmom was there, and she raised me. She's my real mom.”). Others were husbands who had second wives (“Finally, someone who has told the world what we're going through.”). And the most surprising group—at least to her—stepfathers (“I know women get the bad rap in fairy tales,” they'd said, “but all stepparents get a bad rap in real life.”).

By the time Mellie reached D.C. half of the people who came to the signing had already read the book, and wanted to engage her on its contents. Most of the comments were positive, although a few—mostly from young girls—complained about the portrayal of Snow White as selfish.

Mellie wished she could answer that truthfully. It was the only part of the book she didn't like. Yes, Snow had been self-involved, but she had also been eighteen years old. She hadn't really understood all the things she was feeling. If the blood weren't so bad between them (Mellie would say), she would be able to tell Snow her side of the story, and Snow would finally understand.

But Mellie hadn't told Snow her side of the story. She couldn't change that.

But it looked like she might be able to change the perception of it.

Until that last round of interviews in Philadelphia. Mellie hadn't realized it at the time, but a day later—after things changed in Boston—she thought back, and saw the seeds in Philadelphia.

She had been in a television studio in Philadelphia at W-something-something-something. She had just come from a marvelous hour-long radio interview at WHYY with Terry Gross of
Fresh Air
, discussing books and women's issues. LaTisha thought that was Mellie's best interview yet, and she did as well. It would air later in the week, and it would, Mellie thought, bring a whole new class of reader to the book.

Now, television studios, like hotel rooms, tended to look alike. Lots of cables, lots of teleprompters, lots of segmented areas with “permanent” sets that looked like they'd been designed fifteen years before.

Mellie got to sit in front of a desk, as if she were an anchor, while someone pinned a mike to her lapel. She was told to answer questions “naturally,” and she had to watch the screen in front of her, for the different interviewers, from different stations across the Northeast, who were going to ask her a few questions and then use them in their noon (or morning) “entertainment” segments.

She wasn't sure where the first question came from—Delaware? Vermont? Connecticut?—but it was one of the few she had never heard before: “Tell me about your writing day.”

Fortunately, LaTisha had prepared Mellie for that.
Sometimes
, LaTisha said,
someone who really loves reading asks what your writing day is like, expecting it to be glamorous. The key is to answer the question politely without being insulting
.

Mellie gave the answer she'd been trained to give, how in the confines of her own home, she could go on adventures without ever changing out of her pajamas.

She got the question twice more in that round of interviews, and even LaTisha had commented on it, saying how rare it was to get that question more than once a tour.

But Mellie didn't mind. Nor did she think much about it when the host of one of Philadelphia's morning shows—a man who, all things considered, would rather
not
be in Philadelphia—commented that she looked too glamorous to be a writer.

“And not an ounce of fat,” said the weather guy, who (LaTisha told her later) had been hired as comic relief.

“How do you stay so thin when you spend all your time reading and writing?” the host asked as if her slender form was some kind of conspiracy.

“I believe in exercise,” Mellie said truthfully. “It's the one thing I miss when I'm on tour like this.”

She had effectively changed the subject, and then she deftly brought it back to parenthood (“Of course,” she said, “I've been through that before. As the mother of young children, I didn't get much exercise either.”) and LaTisha had complimented her on her smoothness.

Those incidents seemed like comfortable (and much needed) blips in an otherwise routine group of questions.

And then she was in Boston, Boston with its major media, Boston with its famously aggressive press corps, Boston which had its own mini-publishing industry (some of whose members had bid upon and lost the opportunity to publish
Evil
).

On the cab ride in from Logan International Airport, LaTisha (who had been hugging her BlackBerry as if it were an old boyfriend) told Mellie that the publicity department had heard from Oprah's people.

“A tentative gesture,” LaTisha said. “They want to know how the sales are going, what kind of person you are, and if you're going to be all interviewed out before Oprah even gets to you. I told them that you have hidden depths, and that they might want to consider a topical interview instead of one focused on the book.”

“Topical?” Mellie asked.

“One about fairy tales and how they discriminate against women,” LaTisha said, “
and
how that has led to the stereotyping of stepmothers as evil.”

Mellie's heart leapt. Her dream interview. From the best interviewer in the world. Oprah, with all of her followers, all of the people who loved her, all of the people who thought about the topics Oprah asked them to think about.

Mellie had always hoped she would get that kind of platform. She just never permitted herself to dream it would be possible—not so soon in this media blitz as Charming had called it.

Charming. She contacted him as often as possible. She wanted to hear his voice. (Honestly, she
needed
to hear his voice.) And he seemed interested.

He listened with enthusiasm to her strange, tired phone calls, and told her he had watched each and every interview (and from some of the details he mentioned, he clearly had). He bucked her up after her first disastrous Minneapolis interview, although LaTisha and the segment producer hadn't thought it disastrous and neither had Charming after he saw it.

But he raised her spirits before he saw it by saying, “You're practicing, Mellie. You'll get better with each and every interview. You don't want to start at the top of your game.”

Of course, she did want to start at the top of her game, but she knew that wasn't possible. And she
had
gotten better, with each and every interview. LaTisha told her that she was unlike most writers who got worse as time went on.

And then Boston happened.

After Ella left, Charming moved like a man possessed. He put one of his employees in charge of the store, called his manager and told her that he needed to her to find a way to cover his shifts this week, since he might be gone, and then he left the store, so fast he wouldn't have been surprised to see a dust cloud in his wake.

He had to fight to control his car's speed as he headed to his daughters' school. He wouldn't put anything past Ella, not even kidnapping the girls and taking them to someone who could achieve the destruction of Charming's family without the paperwork.

He had called ahead, and the girls were waiting for him in the principal's office. Imperia had her arms crossed and she was tapping her foot, her blue eyes flashing. Charming had always thought Imperia, in her pissed-off mode, looked like her mother, but actually she looked like a beautiful female version of Charming's father—strong, demanding, and brooking no disagreement.

Grace sat on a nearby chair, her feet crossed at the ankles and swinging back and forth as she waited. She was reading a book when he arrived and finished her page before looking up at him.

“I have a test,” Imperia said. “I can't go anywhere.”

“You'll have to make it up later,” Charming said. Then he thanked the principal's secretary, put his hands on the back of both girls and propelled them to the parking lot.

He felt particularly vulnerable. The document, folded and inside his breast pocket, hummed with power. He had nothing, no real magic at all. The power to charm had its uses, but it also had its drawbacks, particularly when faced with magic so real that it could destroy his entire family with the stroke of a pen.

He put the girls in the car, locked the doors, and drove to the nearest portal. It was in Sherman Oaks, on a road made famous by countless movies and television shows. On one side, a dirt cliff face (with tons of homes built on the rambling roads above). On the other, a hillside with steep drop-offs, so wild you could still hear coyotes at night.

He parked in a small gravel-covered turnout.

“Daddy?” Imperia asked, her voice trembling, “What are we doing?”

She knew where they were because she had gone through this portal countless times. Grace, on the other hand, hadn't used this portal in nearly five years and, if Charming remembered correctly, she had been asleep the last time they had gone through.

“We have to go home for a bit, baby,” he said.

Normally, she would have protested it. This time she just looked scared.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Nothing, I hope,” he said. “But we're going back just in case.”

And he wasn't going to let the girls out of his sight.

He unlocked the doors and slid out, then glanced at the dirt wall on the side of the road. The portal still gleamed, as if someone had pasted a thin sheet of water over the sandy dirt.

His heart was pounding. He figured this portal was far enough away from his store that Ella wouldn't know about it. He had rejected portals in the Beverly Hilton, another in a major store on Rodeo Drive, and his favorite one, in Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

The portals all led into the Kingdoms. In fact, by thinking about where he needed to go, he could pick where he came out in the Kingdoms. He was pretty sure it worked that way for all Kingdom members heading home. But it didn't happen that way in reverse. He couldn't enter a portal in the Kingdoms and pick where he was going to come out in the Greater World. He had to find the portal most directly linked to his exit.

Fortunately, a lot of Greater World portals were linked to Los Angeles, although most of them dumped him in Anaheim, much too close to Disneyland for his own comfort.

“Take my hands, girls,” he said, extending them. Both girls grabbed on without protest. Grace used her other hand to clutch her book.

“Something bad happened, didn't it, Daddy?” Grace asked quietly. She seemed certain, and he hoped it was her natural intuitiveness and not the beginning of some magical ability he couldn't quite understand.

“Not yet, hon,” he said. “Maybe not ever.”

He led the girls to the portal, and as they stepped through, he realized he hadn't let Mellie know he was leaving the Greater World.

Well, he thought as he sank into the transition between worlds, he could only hope that she would be too busy to notice that he was gone.