Glimmers of Glass Read online

  Glimmers of Glass

  A Glimmers Novel #1: Cinderella

  Emma Savant

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2015 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: 978-0-9981500-1-7

  www.EmmaSavant.com

  Dedication

  To Kealeigh,

  for wanted posters, awkward knitting, Nicolaus and Helvetia, calligraphed letters, stargazing, and, of course, the remarkable way you tie your cravat.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to my remarkable editor, Elayne Morgan, who is the sole reason characters have consistent hair colors between chapters. Her keen eye for detail and thoughtful comments took these books to a whole new level. Elayne, you rock.

  Virtual high fives also go to the wonderful folks on KBoards, my faithful beta readers, and whoever invented pumpkin bars.

  Special appreciation to The Kitten, who walked across the keyboard at least once every dozen pages.

  And, of course, gratitude and love to my husband, who is the best of all my adventures. I love you.

  Chapter 1

  The door burst open and hit the wall like a gunshot. I jumped, and the stack of papers I'd been holding fluttered to the polished wood floor.

  Imogen posed in the doorway, her hands outstretched against the elaborately carved frame.

  “Tabitha is in the hospital.”

  My boss, Lorinda, stepped out of her office, a large conch shell pressed to her ear and her hand cupped over its opening. She uncovered it long enough to say, “Barb, let me call you back,” then waved Imogen into the room.

  The two Junior Godmothers, pale-haired Aster and freckled Maybelle, stared from around the edges of their cubicles. Seth, the office’s newest Faerie Godfather, looked up from his desk in the corner. A Senior Faerie Godmother, Rosemary, rolled out of her office on a wheeled chair.

  Imogen’s eyes moved past Lorinda and scanned the room. She locked her gaze on me where I knelt, gathering the papers I’d dropped, then turned her attention back to my boss.

  “Flying accident,” she said. “Some drunk idiot in a pumpkin carriage plowed into her magic carpet. Broke her arm and who knows what else, and knocked her fifty feet out of the air. Luckily a wizard was nearby and floated her up before she fell past the invisibility barrier and into traffic. Otherwise she’d have been run over and we’d have had a hell of a time tracking down all the Humdrums who needed memory erases.”

  Lorinda pursed her lips at the hell.

  “Someone ought to outlaw those carriages,” Lorinda said. “They’re impossible to control.”

  “Only in Portland would they be a thing,” Imogen said. “Freaking organic everything.” She craned her neck and called across the room to me, “She’s going to be out for months. They said they can patch her up, but it’s going to take time.”

  Lorinda turned to me, too. The look in her eyes made my shoulders lock up with tension. She was trying to figure out what to do with me.

  I never liked it when people tried to decide what to do with me.

  “You’ll have to reassign her case,” I said, clambering to my feet. “Or drop it. We hadn’t started on this next one.”

  Tabitha, my supervisor, was a Senior Faerie Godmother, and I was her intern. Her now-useless intern. That thought didn’t bother me as much as it should have. This was a freak accident, and even my dad couldn’t throw too big a tantrum if I got laid off for something so crazy.

  I tried to arrange my features into a properly mournful expression. I felt genuinely bad for Tabitha, of course. But the thought of getting out of this job and into something that might actually be useful later in life made an uncontrollable hope bubble up inside me.

  But Lorinda’s narrowed eyes didn’t exactly say laid off.

  “We can’t afford that,” she said at last. She ran a hand across her chin and up her cheek, then blew out a giant sigh and said, “We’re already coming in under projections, thanks to the Goblin King.”

  The Goblin King had just dropped us as his daughter’s matchmaker after discovering the girl had already secretly married a kid from Ohio. Lorinda had been counting on that job bringing in a good chunk of gold. The cases for royalty always did. With that gone, she’d been pinching the budget until it cried to make the year’s numbers line up.

  Unfortunately, her next words were even worse than her daily rant about the Goblin King. She pointed at me with her seashell. “How many cases have you shadowed now?”

  The pit of my stomach filled with a bad, bad feeling.

  “Four,” I said carefully. “But I didn’t do much. Just watched and kept records.”

  “That’ll have to be good enough,” Lorinda said. “The job’s yours. Get the paperwork started.” She nodded once at me as though that wrapped it all up.

  I clutched the papers tightly to my chest. “Hold on,” I said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “It’s the only one I have,” Lorinda said. She headed back to her office, her pale purple suit making her look like a chubby sprig of lilac. She stopped in the doorway and turned. “I can’t hire anyone else on such short notice. You’re the best we’ve got.”

  She really was desperate. No one in their right mind would pass this job off to a lowly intern, let alone to me.

  I wasn’t here because of my sterling qualifications or enthusiasm for the noble calling of faerie godmothering. Nope: I’d gotten the job because my dad was on the Grand Council of Magical Beings for the City of Portland and, as if being on the Council wasn’t enough, he was a voting member of the Greater Pacific Northwest Magical Alliance, too. My dad was a big deal. Whatever he said, went, and that applied even if it was the complete opposite of what I’d planned for my junior year of high school.

  I wanted to work in botany and conservation, not godmothering. I wanted to go to a nice Humdrum college, study nice Humdrum plants, and settle down to a nice, normal life—one where I wasn’t the daughter of Reginald and Marigold Feye or the poster child for the bright future of the Glimmering community. That didn’t seem like too much to ask, especially given my dad’s constant reminde
rs that most Humdrums would kill to be part of my world. Fine, I always thought. Let them have it. I’d trade any day.

  I rubbed the spot between my eyes, pushing my glasses down and staring across the room. The view was just as clear without the glasses, but it was made busy by the shimmers of magic everywhere. Lorinda, back in her office, glimmered enough through the doorway to make it look like some kind of interdimensional anomaly was happening in there. Aster, crossing the room to the printer, carried a mist of soft pearl sparkles with her. And Imogen, standing right in front of me, pulsed warm and gold. I shoved the glasses up, and the haze around her body disappeared.

  “Congrats,” she said mildly.

  I gaped at her, lost for words, then spun on my heel and marched back to my cubicle. She followed and perched atop my desk next to a potted fern.

  “I know you’re freaking out,” she said.

  “I’m not ‘freaking out,’” I began. She held up a hand to cut me off.

  “I know you’re freaking out,” she repeated. “Like, completely freaking out, and I can tell because your hair just got even frizzier than usual and you’re breathing like you just got asked to fight a dragon or something.”

  “How is this not a dragon?” I hissed, leaning forward in my chair. “Is she crazy? I’m an intern. A really unenthusiastic intern.”

  “And Lorinda’s desperate,” Imogen said. “Woman, it’s your lucky day. You should be doing cartwheels. I would be, if it were me.”

  I could think of a hundred things I’d rather be doing than cartwheels. Throwing up, for one. Hexing my boss, for another. But if I had to choose, the absolute top of the list would be flat-out cursing the idiot who’d thought drinking, driving, and incapacitating Tabitha was a good idea.

  I fingered the magic wand that held my frizzy bun together on the back of my head, wishing the intoxicated moron were here right now. I’d show him just what kind of impressive spells I’d learned in my five months at Wishes Fulfilled, Inc. I might not be experienced enough to handle Tabitha’s next case on my own, but I sure as spitting was experienced enough to turn that guy into a newt.

  Imogen put her hand over mine and moved it away from my glorified hair stick. “Slow down there, tiger,” she said. “Let’s think about this like grownups.”

  “I’m not a grownup,” I said. “That’s the point. Is this even legal?”

  Imogen raised one perfectly arched eyebrow at me and shook her head like I was the biggest lost cause she’d ever seen.

  “Do you have any idea what I would give for a chance like the one you just got?” she said. I could practically feel her jealousy.

  “You want to transfer?” I said. “The job’s yours.”

  Imogen rolled her eyes. She worked down the hall as an Assistant Junior Proctor in the Department of Tests & Quests, which was adjacent to the Department of Godparenting Services in both location and purpose. I was an Assistant Junior Godmother. Our jobs were similar, the main difference being that her job was the love of her life while mine was the bane of my existence.

  I was technically in training to be a Faerie Godparent. Proctors like Imogen were the other guys from fairy tales—the ones who dressed up as old beggar ladies or birds with broken wings to test Heroes’ moral character, then rewarded them with all sorts of faerie presents if they showed compassion or bravery or whatever super-trait they were being tested for. Both jobs had been around since the dawn of time, and both jobs, I thought, sucked.

  As my little brother Daniel had once put it, living as Glimmers in a Humdrum world that glorified the lives of “fairy tale” characters was the equivalent of Humdrums living in a world where a whole thrilling mythology had sprung up around lawyers and administrative assistants, with children’s cartoons being made about “that one time they met that pressing deadline!” or “what happened when the doctor treated his patient for a routine sprained ankle!”

  In this case, the story would be “how that one intern totally screwed over her company and ruined her reputation by having absolutely no idea what she was doing!” The animated musical was going to be stellar.

  Imogen sighed, then hopped off my desk, grabbed my arm, and dragged me back out of my cubicle to the window across the room. It looked down on the street below and the park across the street. And there, right in front of us, where we could see it every time we came to work, left work, or got up to stretch our legs, was the Oracle’s Fountain. A car drove by, the driver totally unaware of the magic leaking out of the fountain.

  “Think about it,” Imogen said in an undertone. She shook my arm gently, like she was trying to wake me up. “You pull this off, and you get rewarded by the Oracle.”

  She wasn’t playing fair. Everyone wanted to be rewarded by the Oracle. The mysterious being who lived in the Oracle’s Fountain was one of the arbiters of our world, second only to the elusive Faerie Queen. The Oracle only emerged from the Fountain on rare occasions, but she communicated through the water and her attendant sprites to applaud and bless the efforts of anyone who worked to improve the Glimmering world. She paid us godmothers extra, since we brought more and truer love into the world and helped Heroes, Heroines, and other Archetypes find resolutions to their Stories.

  I worked in one of the only fields in the entire world that let us interact with the Oracle on a regular basis. I’d seen the moment four times now from this window, once for each case Tabitha had completed with me as her assistant. Tabitha had gotten the right princess married to the right wizard, helped a Heroine reach the end of her Quest in one piece, taught a Hero how to handle a forest witch who was getting a little too big for her britches, and made sure a pair of young faeries in love found each other just as the moon waxed full.

  And after each case, as the clock struck twelve, when the sky was still and the city fell silent, Tabitha stood before the Oracle and waited for judgment. Each time, the Oracle had been pleased, and the Fountain’s water had filled with a generous heap of golden coins. These coins kept Wishes Fulfilled running, and Tabitha’s portion paid her bills, but they were more than that: They were validation, a sign that she—that we—had done well.

  Of course I had pictured myself standing there in her place, waiting for the Oracle to tell me I had made the world a better place and done something that really mattered. Even an aspiring biologist like me couldn’t help those daydreams. But it was completely unfair of Imogen to bring that up just now.

  I pressed my fingertips to the space between my forehead, just a smidgen above the bridge of the glasses that let me pretend this wasn’t my reality. A stress headache began to swirl behind my eyes.

  “Imogen,” I said.

  “Think about it,” she said.

  I already was. My mind filled with the image of me, standing in front of the Oracle, watching as glinting gold began to surface through the dark blue water in an undeniable message that I had succeeded. It would be proof that, just once, I’d done something on my own—proof that I deserved to be part of this world.

  I didn’t want to be part of this world. I wanted to study conservation in Africa or research plants in the Amazon rainforest, far away from godmothers and spells and the Council.

  But knowing I could belong if I wanted to?

  “I guess a trial period couldn’t hurt,” I said.

  “Yes!” Imogen shouted, her voice breaking through the hush in the room.

  I stared out the window and sighed deeply as a sinking feeling began to gather in my stomach.

  I was going to regret this.

  Chapter 2

  Living as a Glimmer in a Humdrum world was a constant act of subterfuge. I interned at Wishes Fulfilled and pretended I was working as an usher in the performing arts center that took up most of the building downstairs. I went to the annual Oregon Forest Faeries Festival and pretended my parents were shipping me off to summer camp in Maryland. Today, I looked at my godmothering case file in study hall and pretended I was reading an essay and making important notes in the margins.


  A photograph of a pretty girl with a blond ponytail, aquamarine T-shirt, and sardonic expression had been paper-clipped to the first page inside the purple folder that held the details.

  Client: Elle Ashland

  Age: 17

  Occupation: Student, barista

  Hiring Client: Greg Ashland (father)

  Case Summary: Client is in her senior year of high school and struggling to fit in. Hiring Client requests Faerie Godmother arrange for his daughter to attend prom with the most popular boy at her high school. He expresses a wish for his daughter to “forget her day-to-day life for a while and get swept up in the romance of a great teen movie.”

  I held back a snort.

  Elle’s father, Greg, is a non-magical being (hereafter “Humdrum”). Her deceased mother, Genevieve, was an enchantress from the Portland area. Elle’s parents jointly made the decision to raise Elle in the Humdrum world and Elle knows nothing about her ethnic background. Hiring Client has expressed a strong desire to maintain this lack of awareness, citing Elle’s fragile emotional health and volatile mood swings, which he fears could be triggered by the shock of learning about the magical world.