The Fairy-Tale Matchmaker Read Free Page A

she saw herfriends. Sometimes she saw people she didn’t know. Usually the vision was so out of focus that she couldn’t tell who they were. Along with these “visions” came the feeling that the people she saw were supposed to be together. The one time she told this to two of her friends, they thought she was crazy and laughed at her. Since then, she hadn’t told anyone about her visions.
    The finch in the nest on the mantel chirped six times before settling back on her eggs. “Oh, no!” cried Daisy. “It’s six o’clock! I’m going to be late for work! Who knew being empathetic would take so long. I’ll see you at the next rehearsal!”
    â€œBye,” Cory called as her friend darted out the window.
    Another
ping!
drew Cory’s gaze to the woven reed basket on the shelf by the door. Two envelopes appeared in the basket, both bearing the flying-tooth insignia of the Tooth Fairy Guild. One would tell her the amount she’d earned for the previous day’s collection; the other would be for her mother. Confident that her haul from the night before would be better than this night’s, Cory ripped open her envelope. The knot in her stomach grew more painful. Even though she’d collected over twice as many teeth the night before, the guild had paid her very little, which meant that the teeth she’d just collected would bring her almost nothing.
    â€œI can’t do this anymore,” Cory muttered.
    Her mother, Delphinium, was a tooth fairy herself. She had promised Cory that being a tooth fairy was the most fulfilling job a fairy could hold and that the prestige of being a member of the Tooth Fairy Guild, or TFG as most people called it, would more than make up for the lousy hours. Unfortunately, Cory didn’t find the job at all fulfilling. She’d told her mother that rewarding children for losing their teeth didn’t really help anyone. And if there was prestige, Cory had yet to notice it. Because of the awful hours she had to work, Cory had almost no social life. She worked when everyone else had off, and had off when her friends were at work. The only good thing about the job was that her hours matched those of her boyfriend, Walker, a sandman-in-training. If she quit her job, that was really the only thing she was going to miss.
    Cory had started her internship with her mother as soon as she graduated from Junior Fey School. It had been long and boring, with random moments of sheer terror when a cat chased her or a child came close to finding her. Even though she had mastered everything the guild had to teach, including the supersecret tricks of the tooth-fairy trade, none of it had made her any better at her job or like it any more.
    Cory had told her mother countless times how much she disliked the job and that she wanted to quit, but allthat had done was start arguments that no one seemed to win. After promising her mother that she would give the job a chance, she had stayed with it far longer than she wanted to and given it her best—until now. No matter what her mother said, Cory wasn’t going to dedicate her life to a job she hated where she wouldn’t even earn as much as a first-year flower fairy. Now, after all her hard work following the decrees of the TFG and trying to meet her mother’s expectations, Cory had had enough. She couldn’t face one more night looking for children’s teeth.
    The finch on the mantel chirped softly. It was a quarter past six; her mother would be home soon. If Cory was going to resign, she had to do it now before her mother could start lecturing her. Snatching a fresh leaf from her mother’s desk, Cory broke off the end of an ink-plant stem and wrote her letter of resignation.
    I quit!
    Sincerely
,
    Corialis Feathering
    Tucking the letter in an envelope, Cory wrote TFG on the outside and set it in the woven basket. She knew that she was in for the biggest argument of her