Utterly Charming (8 page)

“Yeah, at least, I think so,” Lane said. He looked at Bill and shrugged. “I just don’t get it. How did we end up here?”

Bill looked even more confused.

Blackstone still had a grip on Max’s arm. That, and the fact that Blackstone was taller, made Max feel like a child with an upset parent who was leading him somewhere he didn’t want to go. Blackstone tugged and Max moved, even though he wanted to continue the conversation with the attendants.

Blackstone led Max to his car—and it was only later that Max wondered how Blackstone knew which car that was—and handed Max a check for his “time and services.”

“Please,” Blackstone said. “Split the money with Nora.”

He spoke Nora’s name with a softness he hadn’t used at any other point, and Max looked sharply at him. What was between the two of them? Nora always picked losers. And while this guy was certainly dramatic, he didn’t seem like a loser.

He actually seemed like a threat. Maybe Max should be paying more attention to Nora instead of letting this guy close to her. After all, Max didn’t want to lose his chance with her. He’d been waiting until she got out of her loser phase.

Then Blackstone said, “I’m sorry you had to see this. You can’t forget because you were of service to me at the time. And Nora needs to know, because if she doesn’t, I’ll be, as your generation so aptly puts it, screwed. But do tell her for me that we did as she asked and put everything back the way it was.”

That speech was the topper. Max didn’t get a word of it. He felt as if Blackstone were suddenly speaking Greek. Only warmly. And as if Nora had a part in all of it. Which, for some inexplicable reason, irked Max more than anything else had.

“What
is
going on here?” he asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Blackstone said.

Hmm. Hidden information. Max crossed his arms. “But I do,” he said.

Blackstone sighed.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I can. But it’s not my fault if you fail to believe me.”

***

Max paused long enough to make Nora wonder if he’d lost his ability to hold his liquor since law school. She’d lost count of the number of beers he’d had—she still had barely touched her first—but he was beginning to look bleary-eyed. He flagged down the waitress and asked for another beer. The waitress looked at Nora as if Nora were the one who had to approve the order, and when Nora nodded, left.

“Max,” Nora said. “What did Blackstone tell you?”

Max rolled the empty beer stein between his hands. He didn’t look at Nora. “You know, when I drove here, there wasn’t any smoke. And no one said a word about it on the radio.”

“Max,” Nora said, feeling more impatient than she probably had a right to. “You were going to tell me about Blackstone.”

“So I drove by the neighborhood, just to see all this destruction for myself. And you know what? It looks fine. No burned houses. No ashes. Just flowers and porches and electric lights.”

“Max,” she said, worrying that he might lose complete control before he got to the point. “What did he tell you?”

The waitress set down Max’s beer, and Nora paid for it, just to get her out of the way before Max forgot the question. He looked at Nora, waved a hand in thanks, and said, “What did Blackstone say?”

“Yes,” Nora said, clenching her fists in her lap. If she didn’t, she would shake Max, and that wouldn’t be good.

“He said that fairy tales are true. Sort of.”

“Great,” Nora said, leaning back.

“And we got stuck in the middle of
Sleeping Beauty
, only there was a dwarf. At least the glass case is correct—”

“Max.” A chill ran down Nora’s back. It wasn’t that she was afraid she didn’t follow him. She was afraid she did. “From the beginning. Please.”

He looked up, his eyes bleary and sad. So very sad. “I told you about the police station. Didn’t I? I thought I did.”

“You did. But you were going to tell me what Blackstone said when he took you to your car.”

“Oh, yeah. From the beginning.” Max ran a hand over his face, as if he were trying to hide. “Blackstone said—are you sure you want to hear this?”

“
Yes
.” Maybe she would shake him. Maybe that was her only option.

“Blackstone said he was a wizard.”

“A wizard?”

“Only he used the word mage.”

“Mage?”

“You asked.”

Nora bit back a sharp response. “Go on.”

“Over a thousand years ago, he fell in love with a witch’s daughter. Or was she a stepdaughter? I’m not clear on this point. It’s the mention of fairy tales. You know, you hear them all your life, you don’t pay attention, and suddenly it becomes relevant. Kind of hard to deal with, don’t you know?”

“I know,” Nora said. “The witch’s daughter?”

“Or stepdaughter. Yeah.” Max drained his beer stein. “Shouldn’t do that,” he muttered. “Will get drunk.”

Nora took the stein away from him. “Will pass out before finishes story. I need to hear this.”

“Right,” Max said. “That’s what Blackstone said.”

Only now his
s
’s were sounding like
sh
’s.

“Anyway,” Max continued, “this daughter, stepdaughter, whatever, had a hell of a witchy mother who didn’t want anyone near her stepdaughter or daughter or whatever, and so she hid the daughter with her assistant, a magical dwarf named—”

“Sancho Panza,” Nora said, beginning to see the pieces.

Max looked at her strangely. “No,” he said with great precision. “The magical dwarf was named Merlin. No one talked about Don Quixote de la Mancha. Besides, that was less than a thousand years ago, right?”

“Right,” Nora said, sorry to have interrupted him.

“This Merlin dwarf had something to do with the great Merlin of old, only Blackstone said he wasn’t that old then. And that it was in a different kingdom. There are lots of kingdoms, I guess, some magical, some not.” Max waved a hand as if clearing the cobwebs from his own mind. “If I tell you all the tangents, I’ll never get another beer.”

“Just the main points,” Nora said, wondering how long they had before Max anesthetized his memory into oblivion.

“Okay,” Max said. “This dwarf, he was a good friend of Blackstone’s, and he managed to get Blackstone and the girl together. What they didn’t know was that the witch had put a curse on them so when they kissed, the girl passed out.”

The waitress stopped to offer Max another beer, but Nora shook her head. Max looked after her longingly. “When you finish,” Nora said.

Max sighed, then looked down at his empty hands. “Merlin knew this girl would die if she didn’t get back to the witch to remove the spell, but Blackstone outsmarted the witch. He put the girl in a glass coffin. She would remain as she was, not alive, and not dead, until the spell was removed. Merlin knew the witch’s spell would wear off in ten years if the witch didn’t know where the girl was. But before they could hide the coffin, the witch stole it. Over the centuries, Blackstone has stolen it back, but he’s never been able to hide it from the witch. She’s got this weird form of telepathy—that was those sparks, I guess—and she’s always been able to pull the information from him. Until now. As long as he doesn’t know where the coffin is, the witch won’t either.”

“Oh, no,” Nora said, taking a big slug of her own beer.

“You know, don’t you?” Max asked.

“I have a hunch,” Nora said.

Max held up his hand. “Well, don’t tell me. I don’t want to be any more involved than I already am.” He got up and swayed once. “I told you what I know. Now I’m leaving.”

“Max,” she said, feeling suddenly alone. “Don’t you think we should investigate?”

He shook his head then caught the table to hold himself upright. “It would raise too many questions. Like, if there is a woman in a glass coffin in your possession, is she dead? And if she is, are you an accessory after the fact? And if she isn’t, are we supposed to believe she’s been alive but asleep for a thousand years? Doesn’t the prince get to wake her with a kiss? What’s all this waiting ten years stuff? Or has the oral tradition really screwed up? Was it going to sleep with a kiss after all?”

He leaned closer to her. “And is there such a thing as a happily ever after?”

“Only in fairy tales, Max,” she said.

“But Blackstone said this is a fairy tale.” He leaned even closer and whispered in that stagy way that drunks had, “It all seems wrong to me.”

“It’s seemed wrong to me from the moment I met Blackstone,” she said.

“Tell me no more,” Max said, waving a hand and nearly toppled backwards. He caught himself again, and she found herself amazed at how well he could control his mind when he was drunk but not his body. She doubted she could have been as coherent as he just was when she was drunk.

He stood up straight, brushed his expensive suit with exaggerated movements, frowned as if he were trying to concentrate on each flick of his hand, and then announced, “I am going to call a cab. Then I am going to go home to pretend this was all a drunken fantasy.”

“And the money?” Nora asked.

“I’ll pretend I defended a mobster and it was so traumatic, I forgot all about it.”

“A mobster? In Portland?”

Max frowned at her. It took her a second to realize he was trying to be serious. “Stranger things have happened,” he said and wandered out, clutching the back of booths as he went for support.

“No kidding,” she said when he was out of earshot. She only wished the stranger things weren’t happening to her.

She shoved her beer aside. She no longer wanted it. It made her queasy stomach worse.

Max was right, and she didn’t want to think about that. She had said she wouldn’t investigate what was in that van. But now, it seemed, she had no choice.

Or did she?

She shook her head. Max was right; these were the things they didn’t teach in school. Did magic alter the law? Or did it work the same way? And who would decide?

Then she heard her mother’s voice as clear as if her mother were in the bar with her.
There is no such thing as magic, Nora. It’s all tricks that someone does to make you do exactly what they want.

“I know, Ma,” Nora whispered. “That’s precisely what I’m afraid of.”

***

She had to go to her office first to get the key to the lock she had put on the garage. As she stepped out of the bar, she looked at the night sky. It was dark, just like it was supposed to be, but the city lights illuminated part of it.

And from here, at least, she couldn’t see the smoke.

Maybe Max had had the wrong neighborhood. Maybe he was looking in the wrong place. Maybe he had been disoriented from his experience with Blackstone and merely wished that nothing had gone wrong.

Heaven knew, she did.

She got into her car and deliberately took the long route to her office, going out of her way to the west side suburbs to see if that neighborhood had been repaired as Blackstone claimed it had been.

The inside of Nora’s car still smelled of smoke. She would probably have to get the thing professionally cleaned. She rolled down the windows and didn’t get any fresh smoke scent from the air. In fact, the city smelled like it usually did this time of year; like car exhaust mixed with roses, lilies, and other flowers that seemed to grow everywhere here.

Streetlights were on the entire way, and the roads were clear of debris and emergency vehicles. She tried to tell herself this meant that the Portland authorities were just unusually efficient, but she found herself holding her breath, hoping that she was wrong. As she pulled off 217 onto the residential streets, she saw the silhouettes of houses trailing off into the distance. Some had lights on. Many, by this time, had their lights off. Vehicles were parked in the street as if they belonged there.

She pulled over to the curb, parking between the two houses where she thought, but wasn’t certain, the van had been parked earlier. She got out and wandered the lawn, recognizing its greenery and flowers from the afternoon. This was the place. She would bet her practice—meager as it was—on it. And yet the neighborhood stood around it. Nothing was destroyed.

A porch light came on at the house behind her. She frowned. That house probably belonged to the radio personality. He had seemed like the nosy type. She slipped back into her car and drove away.

A feeling of disorientation that had nothing to do with the beer swept through her. Maybe when she got back to her office, she wouldn’t even find a key. Maybe in the morning, Max would deny having had that conversation with her. Maybe none of this had happened.

Maybe.

But it felt as if it had.

She pulled into the parking garage beneath her building and got out of her car. As she walked to the elevators, she passed a blue 1974 Lincoln. A little man stood on its fender, and a tall man leaned against its hood. He was still the most stunning man she had ever seen. He wore a shimmery gray silk suit that accented his broad shoulders and long legs, and on his feet he wore cowboy boots trimmed in real silver. A snake peeked its head out of his sleeve.

“You know,” he said in that rich voice of his, with the accent that made her warm all over, “if you get the key and go to the van, I’ll simply have to follow you. And if I follow you, all of this will be for naught.”

Nora stopped. She put her thumbs in the pockets of her jeans so that she could look casual even though she didn’t feel that way. She wanted to hug him because he was safe. She wanted to yell at him for confusing her so. Instead she said, “Max tells me there’s a woman in that glass case.”

“And she’s alive,” Blackstone said. “She’s been asleep for a thousand years. If you help us, she’ll sleep for ten more.”

“Why can’t your friend get the information out of my brain?”

“Because it isn’t there,” Blackstone said. “Right now, all you have is supposition. She could probe, but her powers won’t let her unearth supposition. They’ll only unearth fact.”

Nora dug her thumbs in harder. She could feel the hard seam against the thin webbing between her thumbs and forefingers. The pain let her know this wasn’t a dream. “The fact is, I have your van. She’ll know that.”