Divine's Emporium Read online

  "Maurice..." Asmondius sighed as he rested his elbows on the table in front of him. "Lad, you are a problem. Always have been. You have a keen sense of justice, and there's something to be admired in a Fae who doesn't like injustice or bullying. But when you turn into a bully yourself, and have too much fun in the pursuit of justice, well..." He shrugged, his robes shifting into saffron in places.

  "Your sentence is exile," Strictus Hooper snapped. He sniffed. "Since you seem to like Humans so much, you are sentenced to two years of exile in the Human realms. No communication with the Fae enclaves, no visits home."

  That didn't seem so bad, but Maurice knew there had to be a real stinger hidden under the supposed mercy of the Council. He braced himself.

  "Two years in...reduced circumstances." Strictus smiled, and that worried Maurice. The last time Strictus had smiled... Come to think of it, Maurice couldn't remember the last time Strictus had smiled. Not that he spent time voluntarily in the old sourpuss's company, but such an unusual event would have been reported in the Magical Mumbler.

  Reduced? His brain snagged on that word, images of what it could mean flitting through his thoughts.

  "Humans think we're only five inches tall and have wings like butterflies." Strictus steepled his fingers, and leaned back in the tall chair so his wig flattened and lifted off his bald scalp for a moment. "You shall spend your time of exile as Humans think the Fae are. And the scope of your magic shall match your size." He snapped his fingers, and an enormous cabbage-green gavel appeared out of thin air and slammed down on the table in front of him.

  Maurice's mouth dropped open. He couldn't think of a single word to say. The reverberating thud-clang of the judgment gavel would have drowned out any sound he made, anyway.

  The reverberations continued, growing louder, making the room shake. The iron manacle fell off his wrist, but before he could gather up his magic and try to slip into a sideways dimension and make tracks, he felt something squeeze down on him. His back itched abominably. He opened his mouth to shout, to deny what was happening... A squeak emerged instead of the shout he'd intended. He dropped to his knees.

  The lights flickered, and he landed on a marble floor.

  Around him were a ball-and-jacks set, with all the pieces larger than his head, a glass jar of rainbow-colored rocky candy sticks taller than he was, and an iridescent globe that looked like a transportation and communication globe, but set in a stand of dark metal shaped like a coiled dragon, with rubies for eyes. An old-fashioned brass cash register towered over him like a three-story building.

  "You must be Maurice," a woman said, and her voice came from high overhead.

  Okay, he liked tall women, but this was ridiculous.

  Before his neck could get a cramp from looking up and up and up, Maurice's perceptions changed, and he realized that this heart-shaped face and waterfall of hair in ten shades of gold and cinnamon weren't particularly tall. He was very, very short.

  Unable to resist, he looked over his shoulder. Wings. Butterfly-shaped, glistening, iridescent, lacy, rainbow-streaked wings fluttering like the lashes of a coy maiden flirting with him, moving a little faster the longer he looked at them. Maybe if he turned around and pretended they weren't there, they would fade away. Fae hadn't had wings for thousands of years.

  How could they do this to him?

  "Cute, but not you," the woman said. That was laughter sparkling in her big blue eyes, and putting a rich tone in her voice, but she didn't smile. Somehow, her sympathy and attempt not to hurt his feelings just made the whole situation worse. "Especially not with those Italian shoes. I hope you won't end up with permanent holes in that sweater. Cashmere?"

  He barely restrained his tongue and changed his words to something less offensive. "Who the heck cares?" Maurice had always been a quick study, and he put all the pieces together here within a few seconds, despite his head reeling from the utter indignity--five inches tall, and wings no self-respecting Fae would wear to a costume ball! "I suppose you're my probation officer?"

  "Angela." She nodded, making it a little bow, and didn't do him the indignity of offering a finger for him to shake. She wore a slightly faded, long blue dress in a shapeless style that Maurice thought had been referred to as a granny dress, or was it a hippie style? "This is Divine's Emporium. I can't understand why Asmondius wants you to spend two years here, but I've known him long enough to know he has his reasons. Why he would consider Divine's a punishment..." She shrugged.

  A communications globe shimmered into being just above the globe sitting in the dragon stand. Angela shook her head, her lips quirking up a little more toward a smile, and held out her hand. A scroll popped out of the globe to land in her hand, then it popped like a soap bubble and vanished. She smoothed the skirts of her dress underneath herself, and sat down in a little white scrollwork chair that appeared from nowhere behind the counter in what looked like an old-fashioned general store.

  Maurice took a good look around while she read the scroll.

  No general store he had ever known looked like this place. For one thing, if he moved his vision sideways a little, he could see the slits in reality where extra rooms and extra height above the ceilings and slides into other dimensions were hidden, waiting to be opened up and used. The actual physical rooms themselves contained a mish-mash of different styles of shelving; wrought iron, glass, chrome, plastic, and wood. Antiques and toys, penny candy and dozens of styles of dishes, handcrafted wooden furniture, kites, wind chimes, candles, were piled willy-nilly on them. The list went on and on. And scattered through everything, he caught the glimmer of magic waiting, resting, poised to spring into action. The place reminded him a lot of his shop.

  That was when the last few pieces started falling together in his mind. Maurice had the dreadful feeling Angela was one of those do-gooders who existed to grant the wishes of others and made a regular nuisance out of themselves, insisting that people who were perfectly happy were actually miserable and didn't know what they wanted or needed. And usually by the time these do-gooders threw up their hands in defeat and fled town, they had ruined a dozen lives.

  Too bad. Angela looked like she had an actual sense of humor, which most do-gooders, in Maurice's experience, lacked.

  Oh, Maurice, old boy, you are in one heck of a lot of trouble.

  "So Asmondius wants to teach you a lesson," Angela said, her words accompanied by the rustling sound as she rolled up the scroll and tucked it into the pocket of her granny dress.

  A flicker of magic caught Maurice's attention. He turned his sight sideways, to see the scroll slide through a convenient slit in reality, filed for safekeeping.

  "Because the shop you set up to teach those villagers a lesson was a parody of my shop--"

  "Can't parody what you don't know exists," he offered.

  "Granted." Another twitch of her lips, another smile stifled. "Asmondius thinks you have a need to squash bullies and help the underdog, but you need to learn discretion. To study and think before you leap into a situation." She sighed and gestured for him to follow as she stepped away from the counter. "Let me show you around."

  Maurice almost snarled at her to wait for him, because it was a doggone long drop to the floor and he wasn't sure how he could get down. Then he remembered he had wings. Did they actually work? Angela seemed to assume they would. He fought down the urge to lean back against a sharp corner and scratch hard, and flexed his shoulder blades. With a gust of cotton candy-perfumed air--oh, please, did they have to be that cruel?--he was airborne.

  He followed Angela into the back of the store and through a storage room. She led him outside, where he got a good look at a snowy slope going down into a winter wonderland of forests and meadows and a wandering, ice-coated river. Turning around, he saw that the shop was in a big Victorian house, gold, with cupolas and lacy olive-green gingerbread trim and dozens of windows. He had to rub his eyes when the sideways vision showed him more slits where magic could come in and out and doorways
inside the shop leading to other places and times.

  "Divine's Emporium exists to heal and assist those who come here looking for help. We guard other worlds and times, secrets and dangers. We don't force help on anyone, we don't take over anyone's life. A lot of people you would probably label misfits come here because they know they'll be loved and accepted here." Angela's voice went stern and the sparkle in her eyes turned into a blaze of power like multiple spotlights focused on him. "I don't want you mocking any of my friends, understand?"

  "Understood." Maurice had the strangest urge to salute, but he knew Angela would not be amused.

  "You're here for two full years, Human time. You have to find opportunities to help Humans. I'm not allowed to give you specific orders, but I can make suggestions. Strong suggestions. And lots of guidance." She gestured for him to follow her back inside.

  He noticed that Angela didn't leave any footprints in her snowy garden. He muffled a whistle of admiration.

  The evening was spent in fitting out his quarters and giving him a tour of all the rooms that belonged to Divine's Emporium. Angela didn't suggest he move into the antique dollhouse, and he was grateful. Instead, his apartment fitted out with dollhouse furniture was set up in a hutch, with plenty of room for him to float from one floor to the other with the doors closed, providing him with a sense of privacy.

  Angela laughed aloud when he found dozens of sets of clothes for the G.I. Joe and other male dolls that she had in stock, and discovered that most of the clothes fit him. The magic that made his wings appear created slits in the clothes when he tried to put them on, and mended them when he took them off. Even his cashmere sweater, to his relief.

  Except for his size and the wings, nothing else about him was changed. He had feared the Council would change his hair, but it was still a short, curly mane of jet black, his shoulders were just as wide--in proportion to the rest of him, of course--and he still had his fencing/rock climbing/track-and-field physique. He had worked hard for that, rather than using magic to keep himself looking good, and he felt his first flicker of gratitude that the Council hadn't taken that away. For instance, making him a reedy wimp with lavender hair and weak ankles.

  That night after dinner, he and Angela played poker. The cards were taller than Maurice--he resorted to using his much-reduced magic to holding them in mid-air--and he had to keep peering around them to see Angela. The poker chips were bigger than his head, but on the plus side, he kept winning, so his piles of chips were taller than his head, too. He was pretty sure that Angela didn't let him win, so his spirits were much brighter when he headed for bed.

  During the poker game, Angela gave him a verbal tour of the town, and brought the globe in its dragon stand upstairs to her apartment, as a visual aid. She let Maurice know the globe was known as the Wishing Ball by all the children in town, and quite a few of them believed in magic, so it was quite possible that some of the more alert children could see him--meaning he had to proceed with caution when there were children in the shop.

  While she talked about the town, images appeared in the Wishing Ball. Divine's Emporium sat on the edge of the town of Neighborlee, Ohio, overlooking the Metroparks. Willis-Brooks College was over one hundred fifty years old, and took up a good portion of the town. The center of town had a square with the requisite Civil War monument, playground, and gazebo, and was surrounded by a lot of old-fashioned-looking buildings, giving the moonlit downtown area a sense of belonging in the previous century. Maurice decided he liked Neighborlee, just before it occurred to him that a quiet town would make it hard to find people to help.

  * * * *

  "Mistletoe?" Maurice perched on the top shelf behind the store counter, where the coffee shop shimmered on the edge of becoming solid and two extra rooms waited just half a step sideways in reality. It was Saturday morning, just one day after he'd arrived in his exile.

  He wrinkled up his nose at the mistletoe Angela was hanging in bunches from the pull cord of the ceiling fan. "You're wasting mistletoe on Humans, Angie-baby. They can't see into the parallel dimensions, and even if they could, they have to be pretty quick to reach through the slits and pull their dreams-come-true back into reality with them. Not one Human in a million can do it."

  "We Humans have a magic of our own," she responded serenely, and climbed down the ladder. Angela looked up at the gold balls and red ribbon, bits of green leaves and white berries, and smiled. She had hung clumps of mistletoe in every room of the shop, and the sideways dimension rooms.

  "Yeah, and how long has it been since you were an ordinary Human?"

  "I don't exactly recall." Her smile faded a little. "But even at the beginning, I doubt I was ever ordinary."

  "You're one weird chick."

  "Coming from someone five inches tall and wearing wings Tinkerbell wouldn't be caught dead in, I think I'll take that as a compliment." She stepped up behind the counter, to give the Wishing Ball one last polish with Windex and a paper towel.

  Maurice tried to be angry, but he burst out laughing instead. He watched her polish the rainbow-smeared metallic ball for a few seconds, studying his reflection in it. Angela confused him, and strangely, he almost liked it. This period of exile, shrunken body, shrunken magic, and being invisible to almost everyone he came into contact with, wasn't going to be easy. But he sensed that having Angela for his probation officer would make all the difference. For the first time in his life, he had limits he couldn't charm or scheme his way around, but maybe that wasn't such a bad situation after all.

  "How come you make magic so easy to come by here?" he had to ask, after she stepped around the counter and opened the first of three boxes of ornaments that looked--and sparkled with real magic--like the Wishing Ball.

  "Magic is always easy to come by, for Humans, but they have to know to look for it and know to want it. They're usually so caught up in their physical world, they think it's the only one, and they miss the magic. I just make things a little more obvious. Divine's has a reputation for amazing things happening. People who don't believe in wishes outside these doors believe here. I take them back to simpler, happier times, when the world was filled with possibilities." She smiled and brushed a loose strand of hair back over the shoulder of her gold-trimmed, crimson velvet gown. "Perfect. Almost time for the party."

  "Doesn't look like a party." He glanced around, half-expecting food and chairs, decorations and music to appear from a sideways dimension.

  "It's my annual decorating party." She flicked her fingers at the ceiling in the corner of the room. The room itself stretched out three more feet and the ceiling raised another two feet. "Keep a sharp eye out, Maurice. You could get your first assignment this afternoon."

  "Assignment." He huffed. "Am I supposed to be Santa's helper, or just a vending machine for all your hopeless Human friends?"

  Angela's eyes darkened a little, sending a shiver of apprehension down his back between his fluttering wings--which fluttered faster, despite his best efforts to keep them still. It occurred to him that if she wanted to stomp on him, there was no magic in the world, or wings, that could get him out from under her foot, no matter how hard he tried.

  "Attitude will get you nowhere. If you don't straighten out, I'll make you spend the entire Christmas season as the angel on top of the tree." She gestured in the corner where she had expanded the room, as if the tree was already there.

  "Yeah? You and whose army?" Maurice sneered, praying she would take it as a joke.

  Angela just smiled at his words, but somehow he had the feeling the joke was on him, and he had just said something really stupid. He gulped hard and offered his most charming smile. Of course, how charming could that smile be, when it was probably about one-half of an inch wide?

  "Okay, I take that back. Lesson learned."

  "You hope." She looked around the room, gave a nod of approval, and sauntered out of the room. As if he wasn't there anymore.

  The first person who showed up certainly didn't look like
she was ready for a party. She was pale under her gallons of rusty freckles and cold-reddened cheeks, short, with bowed shoulders and hips that looked a mile wide under a damp, bulky down jacket that hung past her knees and made her look like the Michelin Man.

  Maurice winced, too fascinated by the pitiful creature to turn away when Angela called her name--Holly--and greeted her with a hug.

  "I rescued some more books," Holly said as she handed over three bulging, straining plastic grocery bags to Angela. "They weren't even going to put these in the Friends of the Library sale, just toss them. Sacrilege."

  Angela took the bags of book with a smile and put them on the counter, pulling out a few from each bag. "Just because the binding and cover is a wreck doesn't mean the words inside are any less precious. Let's see if we can work our usual magic and find a new home for these treasures."

  Maurice hovered overhead while Angela and Holly looked through the battered, ragged old books. He flew closer to look at some book spines, and an unseen force pushed him out of the way when Holly reached for the same book.

  "So... I'm guessing if nobody can see me, they won't be able to touch or hear me, either? Man, that's worse than the silent treatment," he groused, and settled down on the shelf where he could get a good view of what they were doing without overtaxing his wings.

  The people who come in here are a lot closer to believing in magic and other worlds and the Fae, but they're my friends, so no straining their sense of reality, you hear me? No nasty tricks, no hiding things, no illusions and sound effects. Got me? Angela said, straight into his mind.

  Full of surprises, Angela definitely was.

  He gave her a stiff, military-precise salute. "Got it--it's the angel on the tree until New Year's, if I don't fly straight and true."