The Fairytale Curse (Magic's Return Book 1) (9 page)

I laughed, but she didn’t crack a smile. “Seriously? Mum, you’re freaking me out.”

“You have some other rational explanation for why frogs are suddenly jumping out of your mouth when you speak? If you remove all impossible explanations, then the only possibility you’re left with has got to be the answer, however unlikely.”

“But magic’s an impossible explanation too,” said CJ.

“Says the girl dropping diamonds with every word,” Dad said.

“And where did you get this Hendrix thingy?”

Mum pulled out a chair and joined him, putting the Hendrix counter on the table between them. It looked rather like an old-fashioned radio. We faced each other, them together on one side of the table, the two of us on the edge of the couch across the room. It felt like being back in Mr Ormond’s office, only with more space.

Dad must have seen something of what I was feeling in my face.

“You’re not in trouble, girls,” he said, “but I need the truth. Obviously something has happened while we were away that we need to get to the bottom of.”

How could anyone get to the bottom of this freakiness? When I’d been a little girl Daddy had always been able to fix everything. Sadly, I was too old now to be reassured by his calm assumption that he could fix this. Although … the fact that he knew about magic, and even had a gadget to measure it, suggested that we weren’t the only ones in the family who’d been hiding secrets.

“Have you met any strangers lately?” Mum asked.

CJ rolled her eyes. “We just started at a new school, Mum. Of course we have.”

“Suspicious ones, then. Anyone who asked you for a drink, for instance.”

The image came to me from
Toads and Diamonds
of the old lady at the well asking the pretty girl for water. Is that where she was going with this?

“Why are you asking? We’re not part of some fairy tale.”

“I think you are, sweetie,” Dad said.

What had gotten into them? I glared at the stupid Hendrix counter, glowing now with nothing more than the sunlight streaming in the sliding glass door. If I hadn’t seen that shining all pink and red I’d think they were both smoking something funny.

“Who did you see on the weekend?” Mum asked. “This is serious, girls.”

CJ glanced at me. I could feel an
I told you so
, bigger and uglier than any toad, trying to burst from my mouth. That stupid party. Why couldn’t she have asked them about it?
Maybe you should have asked them yourself
, came the guilty little whisper. Imagine the tantrum if I had, though, and they’d said no. CJ wouldn’t have talked to me for a week—and she would still probably have gone.
So you took the easy way out even though you knew better
.

To her credit, CJ didn’t try to hide the truth. She might have broken the rules now and then, but she was no liar.

“We went to a party on Saturday night. Half the school was there.”

“Really?” Dad’s eyebrows drew together in a scowl. “Did you know about this, Janey?”

Mum shook her head, such a look of disappointment on her face that my heart sank. “No, I didn’t. Was this your idea or Violet’s?”

“Mine.” CJ lifted her chin, but I knew she hated that look of Mum’s as much as I did. Being yelled at was far better than earning that reproachful
but I thought I could trust you
look. “Vi said we should ask but I didn’t think you’d let us go, so …” She shrugged. “I just really wanted to hang out and make some new friends.”

Ooh, low blow. She knew how guilty Mum felt about dragging us around the country all the time.

“Never mind,” said Dad. “We can discuss your choices and their consequences another time. Right now we need to know about that party. The truth, CJ. Did anyone ask you to give them something? A drink, a kiss, a lock of hair, anything?”

“No.”

“What about gifts? Did anyone give you both something?”

If you counted drunken boys offering to show us a good time, yes, but I didn’t think that was what Dad meant. There was Josh Johnson, of course, giving CJ absinthe, but I hadn’t had any, so that didn’t count either. Although …

“Josh Johnson talked about giving us presents, but he never actually did.”

“Josh Johnson? Who’s he?”

“The school captain,” CJ said, shooting me a quick
why-did-you-have-to-mention-him?
glance. “The party was at his house.”

“What sort of present?” Mum asked.

This was tricky. I didn’t want to mention the absinthe.

“He didn’t say. I just assumed he was … umm … you know, being suggestive.” And if saying something like that to your mother isn’t awkward, I don’t know what is. It had been pretty awkward at the time, too. There’d been something almost frightening about that moment in the bedroom. Josh had seemed sharper, harder somehow than his usual
look at me, I’m God’s gift to the world
self.

And also …

“I don’t know if it means anything, but something kind of weird did happen. I saw Josh in the spa with some girls one minute, and the next minute I saw him somewhere else, fully dressed.”

“That’s right,” said CJ, clearly relieved to turn the conversation away from absinthe territory. “And when we came outside again, he was back in the spa, as if he’d never left. I wondered how he could have changed and got there so quickly.”

Dad frowned. “That does sound odd. What does this Josh boy look like?”

“I can show you a picture of him,” I said.

The look on CJ’s face was priceless. I almost laughed, despite the seriousness of the situation. She didn’t know I’d taken two photos that night—the one of the two of them lying back on the bed, and then another straight after of the look on Josh’s face.

“I’m pretty sure you deleted that photo,” she said, her eyes boring into me.
Take the hint or I swear I will kill you
, those eyes said.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket. “No, it’s still here.” I flicked through the photos until I found the right one, and held it out to Dad. “This is him.”

Dad took the phone and showed it to Mum. “Why is he pulling that face?”

“He has red eyes,” Mum said.

“That’s just the flash.”

“I don’t think so. Not if you saw him in two places at once.”

She shared a troubled look with Dad. I was getting sick of this whole unspoken conversation they were having without us.

“What do you mean? Sure, it was weird, but maybe he got changed really quickly.”

Mum sighed and handed the phone back. “They rely on that, you know—that people will talk themselves into disbelieving the evidence of their own eyes. That person in the picture—that’s not Josh Johnson.”

“Sure it is,” said CJ. “No offence, but you haven’t even met him.”

“I don’t need to meet him to know that that creature’s not human. That’s a Sidhe.”

“He’s a she? What are you talking about?”

A hint of a smile flickered across Mum’s face. “Not
she
. S-I-D-H-E—it’s pronounced
shee
. The Sidhe are—well, I suppose you’d call them fairies.”

“I think it’s time we told you two what we do for a living,” said Dad.

I was too busy boggling at Mum to look at him. Did she really just say fairies?

“You work for the military,” CJ said. She looked pretty dazed too.

“No. That’s just what we tell people. It’s easier than the truth.”

“Which is—?”

“That we’re really prison wardens.”

I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that. Prison wardens didn’t sound too magical. What was the big deal?

“For a very special kind of prisoner,” said Mum. “Actually, it’s a special kind of prison too. To keep the Sidhe from our world. To keep their magic locked away where it can’t do any harm.”

Whoa. Okay, that was a pretty big deal. I wanted to say I didn’t believe it, but those frogs weren’t my imagination. Magic was real. And my parents knew all about it. I didn’t know which one was crazier.

“Only now, magic is leaking through the walls, appearing in our world as pieces of fairy tales,” Dad said. “The girl in the glass coffin was the first—Snow White in the middle of the Australian bush. I knew something was terribly wrong the minute I saw it on the news. That’s where we’ve been the last two days, trying to get to the bottom of it.”

I knew that was Dad’s face I’d glimpsed on TV!

“We actually know her. I thought I recognised her on the TV. She’s the sister of one of our colleagues.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“We don’t know. We’ve never come across anything like this before. There’s been no change in her condition since we found her.”

“And now you two.” Mum’s face crinkled into worried lines. “This changes everything.”

“How do you mean?”

“Before it might have been an accident. Now it’s starting to look like an attack.”

At least we didn’t have to pretend to have laryngitis any more. Dad spent the next morning running experiments on us. Most of them involved bits and pieces of weird gadgetry like the Hendrix counter, that beeped or spat out incomprehensible printouts while Dad muttered to himself.

The only test that made any sense was when he was trying to establish just how connected CJ and I had to be to nullify the Frog Effect. He tried us holding the ends of all kinds of things: a length of steel chain from the garage, various items of clothing, glass bottles (both empty and full), jewellery of gold and of silver. None of them worked. We had to be in direct contact.

Pretty early in the experiment we moved outside. Frog production was in overdrive with all the talking I was doing, and the little devils were hopping everywhere.

“Why don’t you just make CJ talk?” I complained. “At least diamonds are worth something.”

“To address your first point,” Dad said, looking up from his laptop, “what kind of scientist only tests one side of the equation? One of these things might stop the frogs without affecting the diamonds. We’d never know if CJ is the only one talking. And secondly, I hope you girls aren’t dreaming of riches, because these diamonds aren’t worth anything.”

CJ looked crestfallen. She’d most certainly been making big plans. “What do you mean? They’re real diamonds, aren’t they?”

“Oh, they’re real enough to fool any jeweller, all right. They just won’t last long. There’s not enough aether in the world any more to sustain them.”

“I should have taken some to a jeweller on Sunday, before they got home,” CJ whispered to me. “They would have lasted long enough to make me rich.”

“Oh, that wouldn’t have looked suspicious at all,” I whispered back. Honestly, sometimes I wondered about my sister. She was smart enough, but had no more common sense than a flea. “A teenager wandering into a jeweller’s with a handful of massive diamonds. You would have got yourself arrested.”

To Dad I said, “What’s aether?”

“Aether is the raw material of magic. There’s barely any left in the world any more. Or at least, there shouldn’t be. Only enough to power some of our devices, like the Hendrix counter, and we keep that safely locked away. There’s aether in the tube, and when a current is passed through it, it reacts to the presence of aether in the vicinity. That’s why the tube glows when it’s near you two.”

I couldn’t believe this was my father talking. He looked the same as always; kind of balding, a bit daggy. But apparently he was an expert on magic.

“Were you ever planning on telling us any of this?” An expert on magic, but all these years he’d let us think he worked for the military.

He frowned at his computer screen and said nothing.

“We’re not kids any more, you know.” I could understand keeping secrets when we were little, but now? Considering the sacrifices we’d made for their careers, it would at least have been nice to know
why
.

“It would depend entirely on the results of your tests.”

“What tests?”

Dad sighed and ran a hand over his face. “Everyone with the blood is tested in childhood, and again at eighteen. If they have enough latent affinity for magic, they become a part of our organisation. We have a web of people all over the world. Web …” He broke off, and I could tell from the look on his face that his mind had veered off down a completely different path. “Spider-silk’s a marvellous conductor of aether. We should try regular silk.” He bounded inside and came back with an old scarf of Mum’s. “I should have thought of that before. Most of the High Sidhe’s garments are made of silk.”

He handed one end to me and the other to CJ, and looked expectantly at us.

“Who are the High Sidhe?” I asked.

“Bingo!” Dad actually clapped, but I got no more answers.

With the scarf in our hands, we could speak freely even without touching. I tied one end around my wrist, and CJ did the same. It beat holding hands all day.

Mum’s car came into the garage, and soon Mum appeared, looking flustered. “Did you know there’s a TV van parked outside?”

“Really?” CJ ran to peek out the front window, so I had to go, too. A bored-looking guy lounged against the side of the van, but he straightened when he saw us at the window and gestured to his companion, who pointed a camera our way.

“Come away.” I grabbed a handful of silk and yanked. I did
not
want to be the light relief story on the news tonight, squeezed in after all the wars and politics, just before the weather, where they usually had the story about the performing dog or the crazy small-town fundraising idea. The human interest story, where the newsreader was finally allowed to crack a smile after pulling their serious newsreader face for half an hour. I wasn’t a performing seal, and the attention I’d already drawn at school was more than enough to convince me that a life in the limelight was definitely not for me.

Mum came in and closed the blinds. “Let’s not encourage them. Come and have some lunch.”

We sat at the kitchen table, watching her make sandwiches. I tried a few questions, but she was just as tight-lipped as Dad. Being given the brush-off by both of them didn’t improve my mood any.

“I saw Dorian at the office,” she told Dad over lunch. “He thought we should bring the girls in.”

“For testing?” He spoke round a mouthful of sandwich, but for once Mum didn’t tell him off. “Don’t need to. I’ve got everything here.”