Page 26 of Faerie Gift

Maybe I should try the sticky notes. Just for shits and giggles.

Eventually I was alone in the library, the small and wizened Librarian Mustardseed at the counter ready to close for the night as she checked books back in. I listened to her shuffling around, caught flashes of the butter-yellow hair she kept in a tight bun at the back of her head. She would come to kick me out before she left, as she had in the past.

So I had a few more minutes before she would tell me to leave.

“Focus,” I said out loud under my breath. “Focus on your homework.” No worrying about what other people were thinking or why they did what they did.

I should have been paying more attention to things. I should have used my better than average hearing not to eavesdrop but to keep myselfsafe. It would be much, much later before I recalled how the sounds around me had suddenly ceased, even though I was in a library which was normally quiet. How a bubble of silence had enveloped the table as if the rest of the world had been cut off.

“Jesus, girl, this is what you do for fun?” an old voice croaked next to my ear. “Shoot menow. I’d rather cut off a finger using dental floss.”

I didn’t scream, and I had to give myself credit for that. Everything inside of me froze, muscles straining, tensed, ready to leap from the table when a grey-haired woman popped into being in the chair opposite me. She wore a pair of faded jean overalls over a bright yellow-and-blue flannel shirt. Yellow to match her fingernails, stained from years of smoking.

I stared at Barbara and tried to get my heart to slow down. My breathing was out of hand, my head going dizzy and the rest of me struggling to keep up.

The witch who’d first helped me with my potion…was here. A cigarette dangled from her lips, those yellowed fingernails scratching light grooves on the tabletop as if in time with a song only she heard.

If she was here, it could only mean one thing. And it wasn’t good.

She’d come to collect her price, the damned unnamed price I’d agreed to in order to get my first set of garbage-fire disgusting potions.

I watched her lean back in the chair, her gaze raking over the bookshelves. “Nice little hole you carved out for yourself here. I always wanted to live in a castle.” She laughed, the sound ending on a choke. “Got my own palace right there in the woods. Stocked, locked, and loaded.”

“How…did you get in here?”

She regarded me in the same way as the used-car salesman who’d sold me my first junker. Like I was an easy pushover. I almost expected her to wink.

“A witch has her ways,” she told me slyly in her smoker’s croak. Two packs of cigarettes a day tended to ruin a person’s vocal cords. She didn’t let her throat and lungs stop her from wreaking havoc on other people’s lives. “Don’t ask questions when you aren’t prepared to know the answers.”

She had to have some serious power to make it through the castle’s wards. It was protected from regular humans to keep them from wandering onto our grounds.

Then again, Barbara wasn’t a normal human. She was a witch. The same witch my pixie friend, Elfwaite, sent me to when I needed a way to get into the academy.

A memory popped up randomly and I heard the pixie’s high-pitched voice in my head.

I…have a friend who can help, if you decide to go through with it, though her help will come at a price. You must be willing to pay.

Of course I’d said yes. I would have agreed to anything right then.

Be sure. You never know what you may be required to give up. I’d hate to see you give up something you love in order to get what you want.

God, I hoped Barbara wasn’t here to collect on my life. Or my soul. I wasn’t prepared to die today. “What do you want from me, Barbara?”

“Does a person have to want something to check up on the young? A young heart and mind I like to think I can help shape and mold?” Barbara asked instead. She tapped her cigarette with a finger and ash scattered across the tabletop.

“Yes, and your circular questioning isn’t going to confuse me.” Okay, the breathing was under control now, although the chill settling in my bones at her appearance didn’t want to go away. Probably wouldn’t until long after she left.

I wrapped my blazer tighter around my torso as the two of us stared at each other from opposite sides of the table. The last time I’d seen her, she’d pulled a cauldron of smoking potion out of thin air and made me sign a contract stating she was well within her rights to come and collect an unspecified favor at the time of her choosing.

Wow, I’d been stupid.

Barbara’s expression hardened and she leaned in close to me, reeking of stale smoke. “It’s time to call in that favor, little girl. I’ve used this time carefully to think about what I want from you. It just so happens the thing I want the most has fallen practically into your lap. All the better for me.”

I remembered how I’d felt like I was signing my life away without a guarantee and my stomach clenched. Maybe she’d go easy on me? Somehow I doubted it.

“I have no idea what you are talking about, so I’ll ask again,” I said. “What do you want from me?”

Her fingers continued to click on the table, her wrinkled mouth quirking in a wry smile. The first time I’d met her, she had greeted me at the door with a shotgun pointed directly at my face. She didn’t have the gun now. But I still didn’t feel any safer. Dread curled inside of me.

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