The Fairytale Curse (Magic's Return Book 1) (26 page)

He took my elbow and marched me back toward the lift. Gretel and Ronnie came out of the room I’d picked as the server room. Sure enough, I glimpsed banks of high-powered computers and servers with their lights blinking green and red as the door closed behind them.

“Oh, Gretel!” Dorian clutched at her like a drowning man.
Please save me from this nosy teenager
. “Would you mind taking Violet upstairs with you? And see that she doesn’t come back. I don’t wish to be disturbed.”

Without waiting for an answer—though I suppose you can’t really say no when the boss asks you to do something—he turned and headed back towards the vault.

“Ah—okay?” she said to his retreating back. Then she grinned at me. “What were you doing?”

“Nothing. Just looking around.” I wasn’t about to tell the truth, even to Gretel. She’d report me and there would go any chance of talking to Puck. “I don’t think he likes me.”

“Dorian doesn’t like most people,” Ronnie said cheerfully. “Don’t take it personally.”

Then she headed the other direction while we turned toward the lift.

“Sorry,” I said to Gretel as the lift pinged and we got in. “You’ve probably got a million things to do. I seem to be getting in everybody’s way.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She grinned as I fumbled diamonds. My hands were getting pretty full now. Should have brought a bag with me. “You need a hand there? I was going to head upstairs and grab a coffee soon anyway. You want one?”

Gratefully I offloaded a handful of diamonds onto her. I wasn’t a big coffee fan, but I went with her to the kitchen anyway. At least she was a friendly face.

They had a big café-style coffee machine on the bench, all gleaming steel and glass. Coffee seemed to be brewing or percolating or whatever it did all day. I grabbed a juice from the fridge, while Gretel closed her eyes and breathed out an ecstatic
ahhhh!
after her first sip. Must have been good coffee.

“So where’s your sister?” she asked, inspecting me over the rim of her cup.

“We don’t always hang together just because we’re twins, you know.”

She held up a placating hand. “I know, I know. I’m a twin too, remember?”

“Sorry. I’m a little stressed.” I pushed my diamonds into a neat pile on the wooden tabletop; they glittered under the bright kitchen lights.

“I know.” She smiled sympathetically. “We all are, but I guess you’ve got more reason than most, huh?”

“I feel so useless!” I burst out. “Just hanging around here doing nothing while everyone else is trying to save the world.”

“How’s CJ? She stressed too?”

I shrugged. “Wouldn’t you be? As if everything wasn’t bad enough already, now poor Dad’s a polar bear. It hasn’t been the greatest twenty-four hours.”

She gave me a sympathetic look. “I heard about the collars. How did that happen?”

I gave her a brief rundown of our last twenty-four hours. I even told her about kissing Zac, and how I was still tossing up whether to try contacting him or not. By the time I was finished the pile of diamonds had grown considerably. If they’d been real I probably could have bought a small island, or maybe a nice private jet.

“Look, I’m not going to tell you what to do.” Well, that made a nice change from the rest of the adult world. “But if it was me, I wouldn’t call him. Truly. Just in case. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here, but it’s dangerous. You’ve seen what the Sidhe can do with just a little opportunity. Let’s not give them any more. Come with me—I want to show you something.”

I followed her to a small office with three desks. She sat behind one of them and pulled a visitor’s chair over for me.

“Look at this.”

On her screen she called up a map of the world. Like the one on the big screen in the monitor room, this map showed glowing lights—but these lights weren’t confined to Australia. The whole North American continent was ablaze, as was most of Europe, parts of China, all over Asia, even some in Africa. The only big empty parts were the places where no one lived, like huge swathes of Russia and some African deserts.

“I’m guessing this isn’t good news? What is this—aether all over the world now?”

“No, thank God, not that bad. But almost—this shows the spread of belief in magic. I’ve been mapping my results from monitoring internet traffic to where discussions of magic and fairies are occurring.”

“Wow. That’s a lot of people talking about magic.”

“Yep.” She stared at the screen and chewed at her lip anxiously. “That much belief is like a shot in the arm for the Sidhe. It’ll give them more power than they’ve had in centuries.”

“Enough to break out?”

“I don’t think so. No more than they’ve done already, anyway. Belief alone won’t destroy their prison.”

“Then what will?”

She sighed. “I wish I knew. Then we might be able to figure out what the hell they’re doing.”

Nearly two weeks later, CJ and I had become experts on bears in fairy tales, but were no closer to finding a solution for Dad. I still hadn’t managed to see Puck, though I’d tried a couple of times. I hadn’t rung Zac either. Every time I’d walked past a phone the first couple of days I’d been like a smoker trying to quit
. Just one! One call won’t hurt. Then I’ll be good
. My hand would twitch toward the phone, and my heart would start racing. But then I’d think of how much shit I’d be in if something else went wrong because of that one phone call, and every time I chickened out.

After a few days of that, the fact that I hadn’t called
was
the problem. What must Zac have thought when I didn’t ring the first day? He probably thought I’d changed my mind. And how would he react now if I did? For that matter, how could I explain the situation we were in?
Oh, yeah, there’s a whole organisation dedicated to keeping the world safe from magic, and my parents just happen to be running it, and by the way my dad’s a bear and we have a fairy locked up in the basement. Plus anyone we know could be a fairy in disguise, which is why I can’t actually see you in the holidays. No, I’m not crazy, thank you very much for asking.
Yeah, that was a conversation I couldn’t see myself having. Instead I’d spent the last two weeks reading every book of fairy tales I could find in the library, sneaking moments on borrowed computers to scour the internet with CJ for information on bears in general and fairytale ones in particular, and just wandering around talking to people when it all became too overwhelming. Oh, and trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for when I finally saw Zac again at school.

I tried not to get underfoot. Everyone seemed too busy to chat, though I caught rumours of investigations. Traitors and magic leaks were whispered about, but no one wanted to let me in on the secrets. It was driving me nuts. We were getting nowhere with our bear research and, for all the activity around HQ, no one else seemed any closer to finding answers either.

Mum had found Dad in the Paris zoo. He seemed to recognise her, and had the zookeepers confused, because he was the friendliest polar bear they’d ever seen—but he was still a bear. He didn’t turn human again at night, and Mum was still wading through the complicated arrangements to have him shipped to Australia, posing as a cashed-up buyer from Taronga Zoo. Forging documents hadn’t seemed to be a problem. I just hoped nobody thought to check with anyone else at Taronga.

When I needed a break, I often visited in Kerrie’s room. Sometimes Emmet was there, running another experiment, or Dena, but there was always someone sitting with her regardless, just in case she woke up or her situation changed, and that person was often happy to chat to pass the time.

Often it was her brother Bryan, but when his duties as a warder kept him away it could be anyone, and I’d met a lot of the staff this way. This afternoon it was Kyle, and he was telling me the latest diplomatic hurdle Mum had come up against in her efforts to bring Dad home. It annoyed me that he knew more about it than I did—I was her daughter! Why wasn’t Dorian telling me this stuff instead of leaving me to find it out on my own? But mainly I was just glad to hear it at all.

“At least your Dad’s a fairytale bear,” Kyle said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he’s not aggressive, like a real polar bear. He seems to have retained his humanity underneath the bear skin.”

“Like Warder Nabukov.” The ogre still knew who he was, though he was so distressed at his transformation he had to be kept sedated, and spent a lot of time asleep. You could hear the thunderous snores from his room as you passed in the corridor.

“Yes. If your Dad had become a real bear they might have had to shoot him.”

I shuddered. Dad had been found sitting quietly in the courtyard outside the Louvre as the first early birds turned up for work at the famous gallery. Despite the screams, he hadn’t moved, except to lie down meekly when a policeman with a gun appeared. Thank God he hadn’t attacked anyone. In fact, he probably would have climbed calmly into the zoo truck when it finally arrived, but they’d shot him with a tranquilliser gun anyway, thoroughly confused by the bear’s unbearlike behaviour. I’d seen the footage of the “capture”.

Me and six billion other people. Could there be a person left on the planet who hadn’t seen it? The fairytale attacks were the only thing anyone talked about on TV any more, and the internet had suddenly sprouted a thousand “experts”, all pushing their own agenda. Predictably, some were convinced it meant the end times were here, and were busy exhorting the world to repent before Jesus returned and damned them to hell for all eternity. There was still a vocal minority that thought it was all an elaborate hoax, and there were various explanations put up as to who had done it and why. But an increasing number of people were starting to believe in magic, and Gretel was looking more and more worried as the days passed and her map of belief kept lighting up like a Christmas tree.

“Why do you think the Sidhe are attacking us with fairy tales?” I asked Kyle.

He sprawled in an armchair by Kerrie’s bed, looking glad for the chance to sit down. Everyone at HQ looked tired these days—well, except Kerrie herself, of course. Snow White looked beautiful, absolutely prince-ready. There were no monitors in the room; no tubes or drips. The magic itself kept her alive as it kept her unconscious. She needed nothing more.

“Why not? Just because they can, most likely.”

“I wish we could ask Puck. We’ve got a Sidhe sitting right there, and we can’t use him.”

“It wouldn’t do you any good. You can’t trust anything they say. He’d have you convinced you could breathe underwater, and laugh as you drowned.” He frowned, giving me that
this is serious
face that adults all do when they’re trying to convince you to listen to them—even though he was only a handful of years older than me. “The Sidhe aren’t like us. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking they are, just because they look like us. They think, and feel, in completely alien ways.”

Wow. That was probably the longest speech I’d ever heard out of Kyle. He had a tendency to fade into the background when others were around. Simon seemed to do most of the talking when they were together.

“Did you know her?” I nodded at the still figure in the bed. “Before this happened, I mean.”

“I knew
of
her, but I’d never met her. Simon knew her when they were both in Perth; he said she was a lot of fun. Great sense of humour.”

Well, what do you know? I wouldn’t have thought Simon would know a great sense of humour if it jumped up and bit him on his grumpy arse. I looked at Kerrie again. She lay so still, never moving in her sleep, not even a twitch. It was hard to imagine her as a living breathing person, telling jokes, having a few drinks at the pub on a Friday night after work. She’d become a symbol, an archetype: the classic damsel in distress.

What was her favourite food? Did she like romantic comedies or action movies? Or maybe both?

“I heard a rumour,” Kyle continued, “that Simon was pretty keen on her at one stage, but he got sent out on field work for a month, and by the time he got back she’d hooked up with someone else, so it never came to anything.”

“Really?” Poor Mr Happy. So CJ was right. Was that the reason he always seemed angry at the world? Was there a broken heart beating in that poor disappointed breast? That seemed way too romantic for the grumpy seeker I knew.

Kyle frowned at me. “Don’t tell anyone I told you that.”

Don’t tell your sister I told you that
, he meant. He hadn’t gotten into trouble the night of the formal, but he didn’t trust CJ any more.

“Maybe he should try kissing her, then. She might wake up.”

His frown deepened. “I wouldn’t suggest that to him, if I were you. Let’s just leave it to the experts. People who don’t know what they’re doing mucking around in it could just make it worse.”

And by “people who don’t know what they’re doing”, he meant me? Oh, nice one, Kyle. What did he expect? Of course I knew nothing—no one would
tell
me anything! But at least I was trying, not just sitting around staring at a comatose girl going
oh, gosh, this is sad
. It was like the whole organisation was paralysed by the fairytale curses.

If the Sidhe could see us from inside their prison, they must have been laughing their heads off.

Simon eventually persuaded Dorian to let us leave HQ under his supervision, proving that maybe he wasn’t always such a grump. There were only two more days left before Term 4 started, Mum and Dad still weren’t home, and we’d all but given up hope of finding a way to help Dad. The only bright spot in our dark days was that Emmet had handed over our new collars and we could speak freely again.

Maybe he was going a little stir-crazy himself, since he’d mainly been confined to HQ keeping an eye on us, but it was still nice of Simon to offer. I didn’t care too much about his motivations as long as I got to escape the atmosphere of gloom at HQ for a couple of hours.

We headed out into a bright spring afternoon. The Rocks was full of tourists—tall German backpackers and big groups of excitable Japanese lugging enormous cameras—and everything seemed new and wonderful. Actually, it
was
pretty new, since we’d hardly had a chance to see Sydney yet, and I felt like a tourist myself, gawking at buildings and checking out the Akubra hats, boomerangs, and T-shirts in the tourist shops. For a little while I could forget the dark clouds that hung over us.