Divine's Emporium Read online

  Divine's Emporium

  By

  Michelle L. Levigne

  Uncial Press

  Aloha, Oregon

  2010

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events described herein are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-60174-103-5

  Copyright © 2010 by Michelle L. Levigne

  Cover design Copyright © 2010 by Judith B. Glad

  All rights reserved. Except for use in review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the author or publisher.

  Published by Uncial Press, an imprint of GCT, Inc.

  Visit us at http://www.uncialpress.com

  Divine Exile

  The curiosity shop, Heart's Desire, had been in existence exactly two months, three days, and forty-four minutes when Maurice struck gold. All that work, all that planning, all that discomfort of living inside a disguise--all that seething every time he saw that poor half-wit, Forsythe, get kicked around the town that by all rights, he should own. It was all paid for the moment Jordan Price sauntered into Maurice's store and smirked as he laid his gold credit card down on the counter.

  Jordan Price, who had capitalized on his father's cheating ways and made bad old Dad look like an amateur. Who realized that his father had cheated Forsythe senior out of his property when they were college boys, and instead of doing the right thing and becoming a hero by restoring the stolen property, set about to make sure Forsythe junior never got a decent break. Who, when his wife stumbled on the paperwork proving that Forsythe owned the property the town was built on, the Price estate, and the gold mine that financed Price Industries, threatened the poor woman and her entire family to silence her. Then he drove her into a nervous breakdown to make sure she stayed silent. While she was in the hospital, he paid a crooked doctor to commit her permanently, under constant medication, and then divorced her so he could marry his slinky secretary who preferred diamonds and furs over honesty.

  That same Jordan Price looked like he could buy everything in Maurice's store. Anywhere else, he probably could without making a dent in his credit limit. Inside the tiny mountain town of Sunrise, he could have anything he wanted without paying a fair price. But Maurice and his store weren't for sale, and neither were they ordinary.

  Even if Jordan Price wasn't consciously aware of that inconvenient fact, he sensed it. All crooks had ESP when it came to sensing someone who could not only match them at their crooked games, but had an advantage.

  Maurice had the biggest advantage of all.

  Everything in his store was based in magic. Because Maurice was a Fae, born with magic in his blood, born with a long life ahead of him and a driving need for entertainment. Tormenting bullies had been his latest and most satisfying hobby for the last seven or eight years. With a flick of his fingers, he could make everything in Heart's Desire disappear. Including everything that he sold to the people of Sunrise; take it right out of their homes without leaving a clue to what had happened.

  It was all illusion, just like their self-induced illusion that they were decent, hard-working, honest, charitable people. There were a few people in town who still had hearts and listened to their consciences. Maurice watched how they treated poor, half-wit Forsythe, and he rewarded the good ones. The ones who dared to help Forsythe while Jordan Price and his cronies were watching were the real heroes of the story, as far as Maurice was concerned. He was just there to deliver the lightning bolt of justice.

  And today, after all his hard work, planning and plotting and watching the people of this town and deciphering what made them tick and what made them sweat, he was about to win.

  Checkmate.

  D-day.

  Jordan Price finished putting his credit card down on the counter and looked at the crooked, white-haired, half-deaf woman perched on her stool--Maurice's most triumphant and amusing disguise so far--and he sweated. Three drops on his left check. Four drops on his right. And a veritable rainforest springing to life at his hairline.

  Which, if Maurice was correct, he had just noticed was receding at an alarming rate.

  Maurice amused himself at night, when he couldn't sleep, by picking which specific hair follicles in Jordan's head would die next.

  "I want--" Jordan stopped short, his voice cracking. He straightened up, licked his lips, coughed to clear his throat, and started again. "I need to speak with you about that photo." He gestured at the photo encased in the antique silver frame hanging on the wall behind the counter.

  Underneath the magic Maurice had wrapped around it, the frame was actually an innocuous plastic dime store frame, painted to look silver, with a photo filler of one of those generic, happy families playing at the seashore.

  Maurice was exceedingly proud of the spell at work on that frame. The image was always different, depending on who looked at it. His spell dove into the mind of the observer and dug out the most embarrassing, terrifying, life-destroying memory, and superimposed it on the photo.

  He could have looked into Jordan Price's mind through the spell to see what mortified and frightened the big town bully, but Maurice had his standards. He had done enough stupid, selfish things in his long life--starting with giving Christopher Columbus the wrong directions to get from Genoa to Madrid--he didn't want to see what others had done. He was rather proud of himself that he still had that much mercy in his soul.

  That didn't mean he wouldn't or couldn't take advantage of the hundreds of guilty consciences in this self-satisfied little town. So far he had sold that same photo to sixteen men and forty-three women--either proving that women had more money or listened to their guilty consciences a lot sooner. He knew of at least another sixty or so people on the verge of breaking down and coming in to remove the evidence of some blight on their past.

  For each person who paid for and left the store with the photo, Maurice gave them a subliminal kick in the pants to urge them to be nicer to their fellow man, starting with poor half-wit Forsythe, and then made them immune to that particular spell, so they no longer saw the photo and frame. They had a couple of hours of terror when they couldn't find the incriminating photo they had just purchased, but when they came back to the store--and they always did--they wouldn't see it hanging behind the counter anymore. And the photo always reappeared, to wait for the next guilt-stricken, sweating bully or cheat to come in and pay to ensure no one would learn their horrific secrets.

  Jordan Price was the crowning achievement. The first and most important reason Maurice had settled in the little town of Sunrise.

  "It's not for sale," Maurice said, his disguised voice the perfect combination of frailty and gravel.

  "But-- Everything is for sale." Red flushed Jordan's face, and that rain on his forehead trickled down, with more appearing at his hairline, ready to take the plunge. "Everybody has his price."

  "Especially you?" Maurice stood up, his disguised body shivering and shaking.

  He loved digging the knife in especially hard for Jordan Price, who despised the frail and despised little old women the most--because his grandmother had been the only person in his life who'd ever told him no. Maurice figured Jordan's fear was doubled because his disguise reminded the bully of his grandmother, who had survived several suspicious accidents that would have killed a less stubborn, cantankerous old biddy. Jordan needed to defeat the old woman and beat down his grandmother's memory.

  Hah! Never thought all that time st
udying those head-shrinkers in France and Switzerland would do me any good. Will wonders never cease?

  "What do you want for the photo?" Jordan growled. Or rather, he tried to growl. His voice caught and broke, and he backed up a step when the little old woman illusion hiding Maurice's real features leaned on the counter and peered up at him.

  "I want to tar and feather you, for starters." The words came out in his normal voice.

  Maurice stumbled back from the counter and hit the wall, knocking the photo to the floor. He slapped both hands over his mouth.

  He hadn't meant to say those words--he had been thinking them--but he hadn't planned to say them.

  Jordan stared at him, eyes wide, the red color seeping out of his face, and sweat literally dripping down his cheeks, soaking his silk collar and...

  No, wait a minute. Nothing was dripping. No color seeped.

  "Oh, heck," Maurice snarled, just as he felt his body dissolving in one direction and his old woman disguise shredding in another direction. "Come on, let me finish!"

  Blackness took over. It could have lasted for a heartbeat or a year, or a decade.

  That was the irritating thing about the Fae realms, and life in the Fae enclaves. Time didn't run in synch with the Human world, and other Fae didn't have the fine respect for clocks and calendars--and the baseball and television seasons--that Maurice did.

  He blinked and found himself sitting on a backless wooden stool, pinned under a spotlight inside an ocean of blackness. He was in his own body--at least his captor had let him wear comfortable clothes, his favorite slate gray cashmere sweater and matching slacks and his new Italian loafers--and he had iron manacles around one wrist and both ankles, attached to iron chains. The leg chains extended into the darkness beyond the pool of silvery-blue light. The arm chain led up into the air, vanishing in the darkness just beyond the stream of the spotlight. No matter how Maurice turned, he couldn't see what it was attached to.

  Common sense said not to get off the stool. It was more than possible there was no floor, no ceiling, and no walls in this room--if he was in a room at all.

  "Come on, guys! Do you know how much work I put into that scheme? Let me finish the game, at least. The guy was a bully. He deserved what I was going to give him."

  Maurice winced as his words seemed to hit a wall a hundred miles, or maybe a hundred years away, and were absorbed. Chances were good that whoever had yanked him away from Sunrise--just at the culmination of his game!--wasn't even listening. Or if he, she, or they were listening, they weren't going to respond.

  That was what he would do, if he was on the Fae Disciplinary Council. Lock up the miscreant, leave him alone for a while to squirm and protest and sweat, and then bring him out for judgment. Eventually.

  It was the eventually part of the formula that worried Maurice.

  Being a Fae, he could normally conjure up food, water, and some form of entertainment while he waited. But since his captors were Fae also, that automatically meant measures to curtail his magical powers.

  Fortunately, he wasn't so deathly allergic to iron that he got poisoned by the touch of it or sickened by the smell of it, but he was allergic enough to get a bad rash. And iron squelched his powers to minimal levels. He could use his whimpering, trickling levels of magic to conjure up a book to read or his new iPod to listen to some music, but that would take away all the magic he was automatically using to fight the hives and sneezing that always came with the touch of iron. And if he tried to hoard his magic until he had enough to burst one manacle, he would be miserable, sneezing and scratching and wheezing and seeping--and bored--and what good would it do to break just one manacle? He would be wiped out, magic-wise, and his captors would be able to come back at their leisure and restore the manacle while he still sat there, waiting for enough magic to break the other two manacles. And his allergic reactions would get worse, and he would still be bored.

  So Maurice sat there, as still as he could so the manacles wouldn't slide down off his sweater cuff and his socks wouldn't slide down, allowing the iron to touch bare skin. He spent his time thinking very hard about his possible judges, his possible crimes that he would undoubtedly be found guilty of committing, and his possible punishments. He wished heartily that he could be bored, but his imagination was even more acutely developed than his sense of irate justice.

  "Yeah, Willy Shakespeare, we had some good old times at the Globe, but you didn't know squat when you talked about 'now my soul's palace is become a prison.' I really think you were three sheets to the wind when you wrote that line."

  Maurice sighed nostalgically and raked the fingers of his free hand through his mop of thick black curls. He had spent those three decades living it up in Elizabethan England, not paying attention to culture in its embryonic form. True, he had spent a lot of time at the Globe, but most of it had been devoted to helping girls pretend to be boys so they could get a job in the theater...so they could play girl roles. Elizabethan England was simply strange, to him.

  "And good old Lovelace was off his rocker when he said 'Nor iron bars a cage.' I'm allergic to iron! He didn't know squat about iron chains," Maurice muttered, and tried to pull the cuff of his sleeve down a little lower around his wrist, to offer a little more insulation against the iron manacle.

  For punctuation, he sneezed five times in a row, violently enough his head felt like it would snap off his neck, and he nearly hit himself in the face with the manacle when he tried to hold onto his head. In the waiting room before judgment fell, anything could and often did happen, so he wasn't taking any chances.

  The crusty old fogies on the Fae Disciplinary Council weren't taking any chances on him getting away, were they? He was stuck, no two ways about it.

  "Hey, I know you can hear me!" He tipped his head back to look up at the source of the light. "Isn't there something in the Fae Disciplinary Rules about cruel and unusual punishment?" His words didn't seem to get absorbed so entirely this time. Was that a good sign, or bad? "Come on, guys. I was just having a little fun."

  Yes, but your idea of a good time coincides unpleasantly with others' ideas of a bad time, a disembodied, unfamiliar, creaky voice whispered in the middle of his head.

  All right, so he was wrong. The Council was keeping an eye on him every second until they brought him up for judgment.

  But to be fair--would anyone be fair?-- he had gotten caught when he stopped to help someone who wasn't having a good time.

  All right, he hadn't exactly stopped. He'd more like put on brakes and sank roots and stayed to torment that snarking snake of a bully, Jordan Price. Maurice liked jokes just as much as the next guy, and making someone look ridiculous was good clean fun. But he drew the line at prolonging that embarrassment for days. Or in this case, years.

  It had seemed like the right thing to do, at the time. Hadn't it been bad enough Price's father had cheated Forsythe's father?

  Maurice admitted, he might have looked the other way and let Price keep cheating Forsythe, but the guy's insistence on not only tormenting poor half-wit Forsythe but taking away every chance he had for a little fun, a little comfort, and a semblance of a decent life--that riled Maurice. And it took a lot to rile his righteous indignation. So Maurice had set up shop, taking on the guise of a slightly dizzy old woman, partially deaf and near-sighted, and had opened the doors of a store that promised to fulfill everyone's dearest wish.

  Whatever someone wanted, they could find it in his shop.

  Amazing the number of greedy souls in one tiny town.

  Anything they bought made their imagined deficiencies worse when they stopped using it. And then there was the photo. Too many of the people in Sunrise didn't have guilty consciences to touch any longer, but everyone had something to fear. Those with the dirtiest, deepest, darkest secrets had more fears than anyone else.

  Maurice could have become a millionaire in a matter of months, but he'd drawn the line at taking the money of people who couldn't afford to have the rug ripped out
from underneath them. Too bad the dusty old fuddy-duddies on the Council wouldn't take that into consideration. They might even forgive him because he was on the side of the downtrodden.

  Unfortunately, Maurice suspected the amount of fun he had had would cancel out all the good he had done.

  "It's time," came a disembodied, not-male/not-female voice, as the darkness congealed around Maurice, revealing a long, dark room with a vaulted ceiling of domed, churning black clouds. A door appeared about ten miles away, and swung open. The iron manacles and chains on his ankles vanished, and an iron ring appeared in the air, attached to the other end of the chain attached to Maurice's wrist. It slid through the air, toward the open door.

  Maurice had to follow, sneezing and itching abominably as the manacle slid off the insulation of his cashmere sweater and settled on his wrist. His eyes watered and his nose dripped and he couldn't even snap his fingers and conjure a handkerchief. No way was he wiping his nose on his cashmere sweater when he came to stand before the Council.

  The door ten miles away leaped forward and swallowed him. Maurice fully expected the jagged iron teeth of a portcullis to slam down on him when he put his foot over the threshold.

  Twenty tiers of seats rose up through the rainbow-streaked shadows as the room solidified around him. His Italian loafers tapped on a jeweled tile floor. That dratted iron ring hovered in the air over his head, making him hold his arm at right angles to his body, with the chain swinging and clanging against itself.

  The thirty members of the Fae Disciplinary Council were hard at work in the stands. They wore various robes and wigs and other costumes denoting judges in various cultures and centuries, with casual disregard for proper colors, mixing and matching styles. Stacks of papers appeared in front of them and drifted down to the tables, to sparkle and vanish as soon as they were read and signed.

  Most of the Council members kept working, ignoring Maurice when he showed up. All except for two: Chief Council Speaker Asmondius Pickle, dressed in lavender, with lavender owls perched on his shoulders, and Strictus Hooper, sitting two seats to the right of Pickle, wearing his usual sour cabbage green with a neon green Georgian wig sitting crooked on his bald head.