Glimmers of Scales Read online

  Glimmers of Scales

  EMMA SAVANT

  Copyright © 2016 Emma Savant

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Emma Savant.

  Editing by Elayne Morgan, www.serenityeditingservices.com

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9981500-3-1

  www.EmmaSavant.com

  Contents

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  About the Author

  Glimmers of Thorns

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks go to my editor, Elayne Morgan. She has a magic touch, and this book is a thousand times better for her sharp eye and perceptive comments.

  Appreciation is also due to Marita for providing thoughtful feedback, supporting this book from its inception, and answering all my questions about Christmas pudding.

  Endless gratitude to my parents for being nothing like Olivia’s.

  And, of course, many thanks to my husband for his love, support, and willingness to bring me endless cups of tea.

  Chapter One

  “I still can’t believe we have homework,” Lucas said. He flipped a page in Understanding Biology, 5th Edition. “It’s barely September.”

  I propped my feet awkwardly on the edge of my seat and let my knees rest against the edge of the pale wooden dining table.

  In front of us, Mom’s floral centerpiece silently exuded a charm. The magic was meant to make the kitchen feel more “homey” but just made me want to sneeze. I could see the charm’s goldenrod-yellow tendrils creeping around us past the edges of my glasses.

  I shrugged. “Mr. Hartford likes to get a running start,” I said. “This first week’s not too bad, though. Why’d you want to do AP Biology anyway?”

  “My mom likes to garden,” he said. “I figured I could help her more if I knew what was going on.”

  I took a second to arrange my face like that wasn’t the cutest thing I’d ever heard. Mom’s bird-themed kitchen clock chirped one o’clock.

  “You realize biology and gardening aren’t the same thing, right?” I said.

  “Now I do,” he said. He gave the textbook a sideways look.

  Part of me couldn’t believe I was so into a guy who didn’t even know the difference between biology and gardening. The other part of me—the bigger part of me—was thrilled, because it meant he’d practically had to ask for my help, which had meant I’d practically had to invite him over.

  “You want a drink?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  He sounded desperate for anything that wasn’t homework, and I couldn’t blame him. His memory for biology was like my memory for Elvish. Dad had forced Daniel and me through three years of lessons and all I could remember was Where is the bathroom and This is the dog of my neighbor.

  “What do you have?” he said.

  “Pretty much anything.”

  “Grape soda,” he said. He smirked, like he expected that to be a challenge.

  But if I couldn’t use my itty-bitty faerie skills in moments like this, what was the point of being a Glim at all?

  I hid behind the fridge door. A single tap of my finger on a can of ginger ale was all it took. Purple slid across the metal as though the can were being painted by an invisible brush. I held it up in triumph.

  “You were saying?”

  He grinned and took the can from me. His smile made butterflies do synchronized routines in my stomach. I silently reminded the butterflies for the thousandth time that Lucas had a girlfriend. We were just friends.

  The butterflies didn’t believe that any more than I did.

  I sat back down and pretended to skim the first chapter of his textbook. Not that I needed to skim anything. I knew this stuff like it was my own name. But the book gave me something to focus on, and that was good, because if I looked at him for one more second I was going to turn as pink as the horrible new curtains my mom had just put up in the kitchen windows.

  It was impossible to tell what was up with those curtains. My mom had been acting weird lately, and kitchen décor was the least of it.

  “So we went over vocab,” I said.

  I wanted to go over it again, since I was pretty sure he only remembered half the words, but I wasn’t going to push it. If he needed more help, he’d just have to come over again.

  “What’s the assignment?” I said.

  Lucas handed me a paper with diagrams of cells on it. I remembered the assignment from when I’d taken the class last year.

  I fiddled with the silver ring on my necklace while I watched him fill out the charts and answer questions. I occasionally offered hints like “The word that starts with organ and rhymes with gazelles!” when he seemed stuck. But after a while, he got the hang of it, and I let my mind wander.

  My brain was a carousel these days. The same handful of thoughts rotated by like painted horses: daydreams about escaping to attend a Humdrum university, the silences that had replaced my parents’ arguments, my recently less crappy but more stressful job at Wishes Fulfilled, Lucas and his cute smile, Lucas and his horrible girlfriend, and, of course, my personal friend the Faerie Queen. And as soon as I got overwhelmed thinking about that, my brain circled back to college and escape.

  The monotony of the thoughts should have bored me, but every subject filled me with either such excitement or dread—or both—that I couldn’t do anything but obsess.

  “What the heck’s a vacuole?” Lucas said.

  I jumped. “Storage bubble,” I said, too quickly. “They store nutrients and stuff.”

  “You sound like I just caught you napping in class,” Lucas said. “Sorry, this is probably really boring for you.”

  I shook my head, again too quickly. “No, not at all,” I said. “I just have a lot on my mind.”

  “Anything you want to talk about?” he said.

  The list of things I wanted to talk to Lucas about was endless. The list of things I could talk to Lucas about without getting arrested for exposing the Glimmering world, on the other hand, was pretty short. He looked disappointed when I shook my head.

  “None of it’s interesting,” I said.

  “I doubt that,” he said, and it was everything I could do to not lean forward and try to kiss him.

  This was getting out of hand. I reached across the table and tapped his homework.

  “You,” I said. “Focus.�
��

  He ducked his head back down, but I caught him glancing up at me like he wanted to say more.

  There was no way this was going to end well. I’d never been attracted to someone like this. Imogen was usually the one falling in love with guys—and then dumping them two weeks later. I was usually the one rolling my eyes and saying that, while guys could certainly be nice to look at, there was no point in paying attention to them until college at least.

  Lucas made me rethink everything.

  And that was not okay, because Lucas was off limits. I was not the kind of girl who went after guys who had girlfriends. Especially not when those girlfriends looked like supermodels and had more self-confidence in their manicured fingernails than I had in my entire body.

  And that should have been the end of the story, but I still couldn’t stop stealing looks at him and the way his floppy dark hair fell down over his forehead. He pursed his eyebrows and lips whenever he focused on something, and he kept mouthing the words in the textbook like he was trying to read and memorize them at the same time.

  A light knock from the front of the house disturbed our quiet concentration. The front door opened a second later, then slammed.

  My best friend, Imogen, walked into the kitchen with her purse over her shoulder and a look of thunder on her face. I glanced over my glasses. The normally golden aura of faerie magic that surrounded her was darker than usual and fizzed with white sparks like glittery bits of lightning.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “We need to talk,” Imogen said. “About weddings. And how much they suck.”

  She slammed her purse down on the table. It created a tiny gust of wind that sent one of Lucas’ papers flying to the floor. She did a double-take.

  “Oh,” she said, deflating slightly. “Hey.”

  “Hi,” he said.

  His expression said he wasn’t sure whether she was a teenage girl or a feral cat, but he kept his voice neutral. I had the feeling a lifetime of dealing with his dramatic mom had taught him how to disappear.

  “Sorry,” Imogen said. “I came to get Olivia so we could ride the bus together but I came like twenty minutes early because I swear to all that is holy, if I have to listen to one more band so I can give Maia my opinion, which she will ignore, I will end her.”

  We’d worn these conversations to death. Imogen’s sister Maia was getting married soon, and Imogen had been burnt out on her various sisters’ various romances at least two weddings ago. But I was Imogen’s best friend, and best friends listened even when they could practically recite the conversation by heart.

  She sat down and started massaging her head, dragging her pink nails through her champagne blond hair. “They’re releasing a flock of parrots at the end of the ceremony. A flock. Of parrots. Who does that? Doves would be bad enough.”

  Lucas looked up at me for a second, and it was clear he was thinking the same thing I was: A flock of parrots actually sounded kind of awesome. But neither of us was dumb enough to say that out loud.

  Imogen grabbed my soda and took a long sip, then made a face. Imogen didn’t like Humdrum drinks. In her opinion, any beverage without fairy dust or eye of newt in it was a beverage wasted.

  She let out a long groan and shook her head.

  “Anyway,” she said forcefully. “I have to get to work.”

  “You’re twenty minutes early,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “And I need ice cream, so we’re doing that before we catch the bus. Get your stuff.”

  I looked to Lucas, but he smiled and said, “Priorities, you know.” He began gathering up his papers.

  “Give me two minutes,” I said.

  I went upstairs to my room to grab the blue file folder that held my new case. I tapped it with my wand—which was, as usual, masquerading as a silver hair stick holding my messy bun together—and it shrank until it was small enough to fit neatly into my purse.

  A flutter of nerves went through me every time I looked at the folder. It was an interesting case, but not an easy one. For one thing, handling it wrong was likely to get me in trouble with a certain Neptune Pacifica. Nothing like pissing off the king of the Pacific Ocean to start autumn off right.

  It probably wasn’t healthy to go in assuming I was going to fail, but what else was I supposed to think? I’d destroyed my last case, but through some fluke, the Oracle—the final judge who said whether Stories had been properly fulfilled in a way that brought balance to our world—had thought my screw-ups were all part of some clever plan. I’d gotten lucky. That wouldn’t happen twice.

  I stopped in the bathroom to see if there was any chance of making my hair look presentable.

  There was not.

  But while I attempted to enchant the tangles into smooth curls with my wand, my phone buzzed. I checked the message, assuming it was Imogen telling me to hurry up.

  This text, though, was from someone else. No number was attached, and where the sender’s picture should have been, a seven-pointed gold star flashed and sparkled in a way that was much too alive for a phone screen. The name made my heart trip over a beat.

  Amani: Another attack, this one in the Belmont District. Food cart caught on fire. Hum story is hot oil, Glim story is poltergeist, but no traces of poltergeist residue in the area. Just fyi.

  My stomach turned over. I’d been getting these texts for months.

  Back in the spring, Amani Zarina, the Faerie Queen and the leader of the magical world, had shaken up my life by telling me she wanted to name me as her heir. I’d refused the offer, of course, but I’d accepted a different one. At the beginning of summer, I’d met her underneath a bridge downtown, and she’d asked me to be her eyes.

  “My magic is good, but it doesn’t catch everything,” she’d said.

  Her jeans and a plaid button-up had made her look like she was just a normal person out doing her errands. Seeing her standing under a concrete bridge with a big brown purse slung over her shoulder was weirder than seeing a teacher outside of school.

  She had tersely explained something I’d already pieced together: Someone, somewhere, was attacking Humdrums all through Portland, and the attacks had been getting worse.

  “I don’t know why,” Queen Amani had said. “I think I know who, but I can’t accuse them until I know for sure. A false accusation could ruin so much.”

  Nothing about it made sense. There was no reason for the queen of all the Glimmering realms to come to me, of all people, about whatever was going on. Maybe she held out hope that I’d eventually agree to become the next Faerie Queen and she wanted to keep me close. Maybe she figured I was the worst Glim she’d ever seen, and that if I noticed something weird going on, it had to be serious.

  Whatever the reason, she’d stared at me with her intense gold-green eyes and asked for my help.

  I hadn’t even wanted to say no.

  “This enemy disguises their magic to fit human paranoias and superstitions,” Amani had said. A creepy old building would become the site of a “haunting,” or an urban legend about snakes in the sewers would spring to life on some poor Humdrum walking alone at night. The goal was fear. No one had died; only a few people had been hurt. But people were getting scared, here and there.

  “It’s not enough to cause mass hysteria,” Amani had said. “If this is who I think it is, panic won’t be their goal. They just want to create a little fear here and there, just enough to make people think twice about staying in the city.”

  She’d switched her purse to her opposite shoulder and glanced cautiously around. I’d glanced around, too. Cars whizzed by over our heads, but down here, in the cool shadow of the bridge, we were alone.

  “If we’re not careful, they’re going to reveal our world to the Humdrums,” she said. “Or worse, they’ll scare them all out of town.”

  “Total disaster,” I’d said.

  There was no way a bunch of emotional faeries and absent-minded wizards were going to keep the garbage collected and
the electricity running, no matter how many charms we used to try to automate things. We’d come to depend on Humdrum conveniences, but that didn’t mean we knew how to take charge of them.

  More compellingly, I’d thought, a world with only Glimmers would mean my dad would become even more powerful than he already was, and no one needed to deal with that particular headache.

  “If you see anything, text me,” Amani had said. “You’ll find my name already in your phone. The messages will be glamoured—no one can see them but you. But if you run into an emergency, put this on and say my name.”

  She’d pressed a ring into my hand. It was simple, a silver band set with a tiny mirror surrounded by delicate silver vines.

  “It’s a direct line to me,” she’d said.

  Now, it lurked on a chain hidden beneath my shirt. The honor of having a direct line to the Faerie Queen wasn’t lost on me, but I didn’t want to set it off on accident.

  I tapped out a reply to her text.

  Olivia: Thanks. Will let you know if I hear anything about it.

  I pressed Send, and my stomach flipped over again.

  Portland having a secret enemy made me nervous. The part that made me actually queasy was the fact that I hadn’t told Imogen.

  When Amani had first invited me to visit the Waterfall Palace, I’d lied and told Imogen the queen was only interested in me because I was the youngest godmother Wishes Fulfilled had hired in decades. I hadn’t told her about the part where Queen Amani had asked me to be her heir, because I couldn’t stand the thought of her freaking out or telling me I’d been wrong to say no.

  I hadn’t told her when Amani had asked for my help, either. Amani had asked for my discretion. And I really didn’t want to talk about the Faerie Queen every time Imogen and I were together, which would have been the inevitable result. And I didn’t want our connection to leak to Lorinda, my boss, or—Titania forbid—my parents.

  Anyway, how would I even begin that conversation now? It had been months. Imogen would never forgive me for keeping this to myself for so long. Maybe I could just keep it to myself forever, and then someday I’d die and be able to stop worrying.