The Flower Bowl Spell (26 page)

I turn to my bookcase, scanning the lowest
shelf until I find what I want. It’s one of my old fairy research
notebooks. I close the door softly behind me and tiptoe to the
living room, where I settle into the big chair under a reading lamp
and page through. Drawings, scribblings, random doodles. A jotting
from the
Encyclopedia of Fay Things
jumps out at me under a
poorly sketched St. Michael brandishing a sword that looks like it
just fell out of a martini glass.
Some believe that the majority
of fairies who come in contact with humans are their guardians.
(Like social workers? Angels?)
I think about the fairy that has
been tracking me. And about Beulah’s last flight to Gladys’s house,
and how that ended—for both of them. Fairies, unlike angels, aren’t
necessarily compelled to help anyone. But if they take a shine to
someone, they’ll be there for that person forever. Could it be that
I have a little guardian angel fairy on my hands? And if so,
why?

****

I wake up the next morning, and I remember.
Confrontation.

The girls are eating breakfast in the
kitchen. I have a fuzzy memory of Cooper kissing me goodbye before
heading out to work. We survived our first night back in San
Francisco. Blessed be.

We go through the day. I write my Yeah
Right/Arsenic Playground profile and email it to Ned. The girls do
homework. I take them to a playground. Cooper comes home and we
have dinner on 24th Street. We watch some TV and go to bed. We
sleep.

Confrontation? What confrontation?

And yet—still no call from Viveka.

****

The next day, the sky is that hazy white-gray
I associate with aging autumn in the city. I step out onto the
street from the offices of the
Golden Gate Planet
, and a
damp wind whips at my light wool coat.

Ned insisted I come into the office for a
meeting, and after a bit of panicked phoning around, I get
Marisol’s mother Rosario to agree to drive over and watch the girls
until Cooper gets home from work. Cleo asked to come with me, and
when I told her no, she started to cry. I nearly gave in, but
Rosario was already on the way.

Before she arrived I muttered incantations
inside the apartment, down the front stairs, and around the
perimeter of our building. Both girls watched, Cleo with a look of
concentration, Romola sporting mortification as I subtly fluttered
my fingers by my sides, sprinkled sea salt and crushed rose petals,
and slipped photos of Viveka and, as an afterthought, Alice
Belmonte under the welcome mat. She may have perished violently, I
might have failed her, but the protective magick of the dead we
love is rarely weak.

I’m paying Rosario handsomely for her time,
but to thank Marisol for hooking me up with her “moms” I insist on
taking her out to lunch after the editorial meeting, which could
not have gone better. Ned loves my piece. I suggest Chez Remy, on a
hunch that the raspberry-blowing goat is a sign I shouldn’t ignore
any longer, and Marisol is happily surprised. “You read my
mind!”

On the way there, squeezed into a bus seat
next to a foul-smelling, disheveled man, I fill her in on some of
the highlights of my trip. Marisol, like Cooper, knows about my
earth religion roots, but not the sparkly parts. I think she’s open
to it though. She once told me that her favorite story from her
Catholic Sunday school days is the loaves and fishes. Maybe she’d
see magick as a miracle.

The restaurant is pretty full, but there are
a couple of tables free, and a young woman seats us. Marisol has
barely landed in her chair before she begins scanning the room.

“He’s here,” I tell her.

“Who?”

“Remy.”

“How do you know? And how do you even know I
care?” She laughs.

“Because you’re so damn predictable.”

But he isn’t around just yet, so Marisol has
to settle for the menu and my chitchat. I’m curious to see Remy
myself. There’s more to that Frenchman than meets the eye.

We order and the waitress quickly brings out
two glasses of sauvignon blanc. Marisol and I toast each other and
as we drink, Remy himself puts our salads in front of us.

“Bonjour, bonjour,” he says, and we try to
act like grown-up women, but it’s hard not to smirk after half a
glass of white wine on an empty stomach. He asks us how we are, and
I act demure and Marisol flirts, and then he turns to me and says,
“That is a lovely locket, mademoiselle.”

I touch the necklace, which I put on this
morning with deliberate care. It’s warm but not buzzy, like it’s at
peace with me. I’m feeling pretty all right towards it myself.

“Merci. My boyfriend gave it to me. You
probably don’t remember, but we were here a few nights ago?”
And
you called him my father
, I want to add but don’t.

“Ah,
oui
. Very pretty.” He bends a
little as if to look more closely, but his eyes are looking into
mine. “Bright Vixen did well.” He winks so quickly, I almost miss
it.

He leaves us and Marisol asks me, not without
some envy in her voice, what he said.

“He said the person who made it did a nice
job.”

“Oh. I thought he said, ‘I’m fixing to do
you.’”

“Har har.”

I manage a couple of bites of salad before
excusing myself. There’s only one single-sex WC, very French. The
door is unlocked and Remy is inside, mussing with his hair in the
mirror.

“Are you working for Isaac?” I say by way of
greeting.

“
Quelle
cherie
.”

“What are you?” I ask.

He grins charmingly at my reflection, and I
think for a second that, if I weren’t such an upstanding and
supportive person, Marisol might be in danger of having a little
friendly competition over this guy.

“Good question! Very good question. You
have
been paying attention.” Noting his emphasis on have, I
don’t get too puffed up at his praise.

“Has someone been saying I haven’t?”

He shrugs in a purely French way, his lips
pursed. “I hear things in the community.”

“The community.” Gay? French? Both?

“Yes. I am Bay Say Bay Jay, or as you English
speakers pronounce it, BCBG:
Bon Chic Bon Gens
. I am just
the
Bon Gens
part.”
Bon Gens
—Good People. He lifts up
the oh-so stylish blond locks that cover the tops of each of his
ears, revealing pointy tips Mr. Spock would envy, if Vulcans had
not weaned envy out of their systems—and if Vulcans were real.

From what I know about the Good People (and
up until this moment I thought they had become extinct, or never
existed), they haven’t weaned themselves of many emotions at all.
Oh, and they are fairies. Really big fairies that even the ungifted
can see, if the fairy so chooses. Their wings are small though, and
vestigial, like male nipples. Legend has it they originated from a
human who fell in love with a fairy, who, for whatever reason,
decided to bite him on the wrist. The human sprouted wings.

“Blimey,” I say. “Are you going to kidnap me
and take me to Fairyland to be your personal foot-washer?”

He laughs. “I haven’t kidnapped anyone since
the New BG Constitution was signed around the time the Bastille
fell.
En tout cas
, I’m just trying to help you. Xien said
you need his help but you can’t hear him.”

“
Chien
? Like, French for
dog
?”
My mind races with thoughts of my dog-walking clients. Have the
poor mutts been trying to talk to me all this time? Why can’t I
speak dog? I feel so close to them, like they are my kindred
spirits.

Remy shakes his head. “No. Xien. It’s
Chinese. He’s your counselor. You know, the fairy that takes care
of you.”

I must look confused, because he points up to
the top of a cabinet in the corner. Sitting there is the fairy I
keep seeing, my little buckskin friend.

“My counselor. My guardian angel.”

“
Exacte
. What Xien has been trying to
tell you, though he is not very successful at it”—Remy suppresses a
laugh over what I assume is Xien’s assailing him for the
criticism—“is that the locket contains a message for you. It’s a
message some people do not want you to get.”

I touch the locket and think back to the
moment I found it in Tyson’s bag. I’m sure I know who
some
people
could be—Cheradon, for one—and Tucker has given me a
pretty good idea why they don’t want me to get the message: the
Flower Bowl Spell.

“Shit.” I begin pacing the small room. “Well,
what is the message? Who sent it?”

“We do not know. We only know Bright Vixen
was killed over it.” Remy loses some of his natural cheerfulness.
“As well as her counselor, Beulah.”

Bright Vixen. Who was, after all, Gru’s
second in command. Perhaps the message is about Gru’s
great-granddaughters. More than ever, I’m convinced the girls are
in danger.

“Beulah was also probably killed for her
wings.” I tell Remy about the Flower Bowl Spell. He doesn’t say
anything, but his expression stays melancholy.

“Why did Xien come to me?” I ask. “Who sent
him?”

“No one sent him. You are one of his charges,
and you were in danger. He went to your assistance.”

I think back to the first time I saw Xien.
The day I almost fell on the subway tracks.
In danger.

“One of his charges? But who put him in
charge of me?”

Remy listens to something Xien says then
turns back to me. “He says he decided to take on your case many
years ago, but you never really needed him. Then your banishing
spell kept him away. As soon as you were in danger, the spell
broke, and he made himself known to you, as did every other
magickal creature you have encountered.”

“My case?” Fairies really are like social
workers.

“We are independent contractors,
non
?”
Remy says, the twinkle returning to his eye.

“I have to go.” I start to open the door, but
turn back. “My friend Marisol has a crush on you.”

He laughs. “I know.”

“Do you think you might...be nice to
her?”

“What is the expression? Twist my elbow?”

“Arm. It’s twist my arm.”

“I will take her for coffee, perhaps make the
love.”

“Thanks. That would so make up for the fact
that I’m about to ditch her.” I hand him some twenties. “For lunch.
Keep the change.” I give Xien a salute. “See you out there, little
guy.”

He nods and wiggles through a heating
duct.

It’s not until later that I’ll wish he
hadn’t.

Chapter Twenty-two

The bus home is much less crowded than the
lunchtime one Marisol and I took to Chez Remy, which is why I
notice the man so quickly. It’s the same stinky guy from the ride
over.

As a general rule, if I’m traveling alone on
public transportation, I go for the single-seaters, but if I can’t
have one of those I try to stay up close near the bus driver. When
I was a teenager I had more than one unpleasant experience riding
the bus home from school, which involved some perv in sweats and no
underwear taking advantage of a jam-packed bus by rubbing up
against my backside. He vamoosed after I managed to cast a plague
of crabs on him, but still I’ve been absolutely conditioned to
think twice about giving up my seat for old people and pregnant
women, no matter the critical mass.

Stinky is sitting in the back of the bus
(primo crime territory) and he’s not looking my way, but he’s aware
of me. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I scan for Xien despite
myself. Did he not follow me out of Remy’s? I’m struck by the
notion that something has happened to him, something along the
lines of what happened to Beulah. This thought is cut off, however,
when Stinky turns his head, looks at me, and smiles.

His days-old beard growth is
salt-and-peppery, and he has dark brown, nearly black, eyes. He’s
dressed in the universal uniform of the homeless: black knit cap,
army-green canvas coat, tattered jeans, fingerless gloves, and
heavy boots with some duct tape around one toe. A flash of orange
on his black shirt collar reveals a Giants jersey. Like the man in
the subway, that day I almost fell in front of the oncoming
train.

I can’t smell him from here—the whole bus is
pervaded by a stale redolence of diesel and humanity—but I recall
his odor and it’s that unwashed, hungry smell of street people.

He’s almost too perfect.

Three other passengers get off at the next
stop. No one gets on. It’s him, the driver, and me.

At the very last second, I ring the bell and
hop off the bus in a neighborhood—I’m chagrined to admit—with which
I’m unfamiliar. It’s on the edge of Bernal Heights, the Mission,
and Portreo Hill, and not even close to being “transitional.” Damn.
Small houses and two-flats crowd along the streets with cars parked
nose to tail, some on the sidewalks. There’s not one sign of life,
no one else walking along or resting on a stoop. There isn’t even a
corner store. But I’m not alone. Damn again—he got off too.

I start to run in the direction the bus went,
wondering if I can catch it again at the next corner, but it’s an
unusually speedy coach, and soon it disappears down a hill and out
of sight.

I slow to a fast walk and sling my messenger
bag closer around my back, muttering protective charms. Yet
something strange is happening. The words are coming back into my
mouth, filling it and curling down my throat. I’m gagging,
physically choking, the way I once did when I was a kid, when Alice
and I held a contest to see how many grapes we could stuff in our
mouths. I lost, one wee orb sliding its way into my gullet, so that
I had to spit them all out like one of the Stooges.

My words are coming back at me, and I have to
stop speaking to breathe. And when I do my breath is ragged around
the edges. My heartbeat has picked up. At the same time, it feels
compressed. Textbook panic.