The Trouble with Fate Read Free Page A

curl.
    I cocked my fingers backward, smiled, and with a flick sent my magic streaking through
     the air. Invisible to humans, its progress left a bright fluorescent-green trail to
     my Fae eyes. It hit the first bowl and stuck. I parted my fingers into a V . The stream separated into two trails. The second trail streaked toward the next
     bowl. “Weave,” I said, tracing an O with my fingers.
    “Grow.” I fed a little more energy down the invisible cord. I did four rotations with
     my hand until the rope of magic was swollen and hot and then I snipped the line.
    I put one foot out of the door, and waited.
    You know how you’re not supposed to hold a lit firecracker in your hand? So what do
     you think happens when you tell magic to grow and send it to a place it can’t expand?
     Uh-huh. Kaboom.
    The lines around the base of each bowl swelled, until the contained magic looked like
     a sausage hooked too long on the meat grinder. The bowls began to creak with the pressure
     around their bases. The plastic lids began to shiver.
    Jennifer backed up.
    Abruptly, the lids shot up, hitting the ceiling-mounted water pipes with enough force
     to make them shatter. And then the fireworks.
    Sweet to my soul was the Vesuvius of magically powered coffee beans spewing in one
     long sweet eruption of caffeinated hail to the ceiling. The stunned silence of the
     café was punctuated by Mark’s strangled, inarticulate, “Ack, ack, ack,” and the rat-tat-tat
     of the beans hitting the water pipes.
    I waited for the last bean to fall. It clinked on the ground and then rolled until
     it hit the back heel of a suit.
    Silence.
    “Huh,” I said. “That was strange.” I smiled again, baring all my teeth, and let the
     door close behind me.
    *   *   *
    Merry, being Merry, was pissed. I hadn’t taken six long jubilant steps out of the
     café before she struck in a fury of searing heat that just about took a strip off
     the tender skin of my left breast.
    “Shit, Merry-mine, not now,” I said, speeding up toward the corner of the building.
     “Cool down. Please, just cool down.”
    She was so red that the front of my white blouse glowed as if I’d tucked a flare into
     my bra. I hunched my shoulder protectively, shielding my chest from the customer who
     was staring at us through the front window, his mug of coffee suspended halfway to
     his mouth.
    I rounded the corner of the building at a good clip. The dusk had already deepened
     into urban night, the sort of leached-out gray that passes for a night sky in the
     city. Immediately on breaking the corner, I bent over at my waist, pulled my blouse
     away from my skin so that I could jerk Merry out by her chain. I let her dangle from
     it, red, gold, and glowing.
    Merry hung from a long length of Fae-wrought gold necklace that my mother had placed
     around my neck the night she died. You’d need a magnifying glass to see it, but Merry
     was more than just a smudge in a piece of amber. She was an Asrai. I knew that at
     least, even if I didn’t know precisely what an Asrai was. I knew that she once had
     form: two legs, two arms, long hair. She belonged to the Fae world, but Lou had trapped
     her inside the amulet long before I was born. A horrible fate, I agree, but she wasn’t
     completely powerless.
    Fae gold is not to be confused with mortal gold. Fae gold snickers at titanium’s relative
     weakness. It isn’t some dumb inanimate thing that just sits there, forever frozen
     in the shape that the artist had hammered it into. It’s alive. It can remold itself.
     It could, powered by the wrong Asrai’s spite, literally twine itself around your neck
     and choke you.
    That bore remembering when you were talking to an Asrai-powered amulet.
    And as much as Merry sometimes pissed me off—say, like when she tried to burn a layer
     of skin off me—she and Lou were it. One crazy-ass Fae named Lou, and one amber-colored
     stone, mounted in a swirl of baroque gold, named Merry.