Frogger helped me out when I couldn’t solve the riddle. Begrudgingly, I’m sure, and I’ll owe Geo later for this. It was a surprise he bothered after I’d inadvertently left him behind.
“It’s spring,” I complained, staring out the window. “Real spring. It’s sixty degrees Fahrenheit. We don’t even get frost warnings anymore, not for weeks.” I said it with the confidence of a first-time gardener who devotedly watched local weather newscasters for reports on the safe planting time. The words weren’t even borrowed but entirely stolen from a single forecast I’d watched last night.
“Uh-huh.” He turned the page of his pint-sized newspaper. I guess those tablet readers and his frog fingers didn’t get along well, but don’t ask me where a booklet the size of a bakery roll came from every day. I just paid for it, along with everything else for my unexpected roommate.
Don’t get me started on the coupons showing up from the pet store, or the kitchen cupboard filled with his snacks. I’m never opening that one again. Not after the midnight snack fiasco.
“Too warm for snow,” I continued, banging down my coffee and leaving a circular splatter of droplets to stain the counter. “Even if I drive north. The picnic’s tomorrow. Maybe I should go with the sick kid plan.”
“Then people will avoid you,” he said, and turned another page without looking up. “The goal is to get them talking. Be friendly, not Typhoid Mary.”
“This is your fault,” I muttered. “You just had to croak where the dragon lady could hear you.”
Geo let out a long-suffering sigh and set down the paper. I’d found him a padded doll’s chair and table, and he looked for all the world like a British aristocrat of the late 1800s. Probably because he insisted on wearing a velvet smoking jacket.
“You see that tree on the edge of the property?” Geo hopped toward me, fastidiously avoiding the coffee debris, and jumped on the window, sticking to the glass with ease. He poked in the direction of an apple tree, covered in white blossoms. “Watch as the wind hits it.”
The tree in question was one of a cluster, inside a mulched garden where the previous occupant had once devoted significant effort. Green things poked through the damp wood chips, and the dew-covered grass grew long around the edges where the landlord hadn’t trimmed.
The breeze caught and spindly branches swayed. A shower of flower petals drifted sideways, floating to scatter across the garden, light covering dark in a gentle wave.
“I’ll be damned,” I said, letting out a low whistle. “Looks just like it.”
“Probably, with the company you keep,” the frog said gruffly. “Looks like you’ve got what you need to create your magical daughter out of spun snow.”
It took me a second to realize he was replying to the first part of what I’d said. “Um, thanks.”
“Don’t ever thank magical creatures,” he said, staring out at the tree. “And don’t take magic so literally. Find the loophole.”
I could have sworn he muttered, “they certainly will,” but it might have been my imagination. I didn’t push it. Something in his manner told me Geo’d had tadpoles, once, and for all his bluster, might enjoy having a kid around.
Anyone who’d handled an army of pollywogs could help me keep a human child alive for a day. I’d wanted kids, once, until my world had dissolved.
He cleared his throat and tapped the glass again. “You’d better get going if you want to collect them all. Those petals look beautiful now, but rot quickly.”
“All?”
He gave me a withering look, which was better than his previous half sympathetic state. I’d grown used to derision. “Magic has a cost.”
It wasn’t until the Marble Witch showed up—nearly at sundown, after I was smudged with dirt stuck to my face and soaked in stale sweat—that I realized how high the cost would be. And it had nothing to do with tediously sorting out the pink flowers blown in from two yards over.
“You’re learning.”
I hid my startle and carefully put another handful of petals into the enormous burlap bag, folding the rough cloth over the edge before it snagged open again on the rusted wheelbarrow it rested inside. “I try to be adaptable.”
Penetration testing depended on looking like you belonged, especially the physical component of it. No, not just looking like it, the target had to know you were meant to be there. Even my body language changed when I took a job, to match the new normal. You could say I was used to adaptability. Thrived on fast-paced change, even.
I was still bent over the bag of petals that would become the daughter I didn’t have when the Marble Witch’s breath blew across the back of my neck like an Alaskan winter in the middle of the night.
Yeah, finding out magic was real might be stretching my ability to maneuver with whatever life threw at me. I didn’t know the norms. Didn’t know how to blend.
“That’s enough for your needs.” She backed away, studying the cluster of trees that still blew petals across us both. “A clever adaptation. I wouldn’t have expected it of you.”
I gestured toward the rented house. “It’s the view from the coffeepot.” I didn’t mention the frog’s involvement. Something in my gut told me she wouldn’t like it, and never mind that she’d left him here with me intentionally.
She slammed her staff upon the ground — had she been carrying a staff a moment before? — and slashed the burlap sack with a knife that absolutely had been created out of thin air.
My gaze snagged upon her robes as she began chanting in a language my ears refused to hear. Pressure built, and it became difficult to breathe. I fell to my knees atop shreds of mulch and yesterday’s rotted apple blossom petals, clutching my chest. My eyes were still fixed upon the cloth that looked like nothing so much as the arctic sea, rippling hypnotically, shades of icy blue, the kind of water that killed you in minutes.
Or created the daughter you thought you’d never have. The air shattered from its frozen bubble of magic as the pressure broke from inside this springtime grove.
I sucked in ragged breaths with newfound gratitude for oxygen as the Marble Witch leaned on her staff, robes rippling in the breeze. Once more the fabric masqueraded as mere clothing rather than an intoxicating ocean. Perhaps the hag had weaknesses after all.
Her eyes flashed icicles at me, and it belated occurred to me that perhaps I should learn to control my thoughts when she was in the vicinity.
“Her name is Chloe,” the witch snapped. “You have until tomorrow’s full sundown. Payment has been offered and accepted, using the snow that falls in sunlight and the daughter of your dreams.”
“Wait, what?” Had she meant that part about dreams literally? Where was that frog to interpret when I needed him?
She was already gone, leaving behind a young girl of perhaps eight at best, wearing a dress made of woven vines and holding a small crystal of indeterminate color that pulsed with the witch’s ice magic. Dark hair, dark eyes, and when I looked at her, she winked with great seriousness. She used her whole face, exactly like a child who’s discovered but not mastered winking yet.
“I’m not really Chloe,” she said with a cheeky grin. “I just let her think that.”
“I know,” I said, and felt my heart breaking already.
I’d thought this might be Tulsa redux. A simple job gone wrong, the disaster that cost everything. The city that destroyed without mercy the future of a screaming man in mourning. Now I knew.
This wouldn’t be Tulsa.
This was going to be so much worse.
***
I don’t know where this story is headed yet, but I’m having fun with it and eagerly awaiting the next prompt to continue this tale from MOTE. It’s a nice break from Peter and June (yes, I’m working on it, I swear!).
This week’s suggestion came from Cedar Sanderson: I knew immediately her name was not Chloe.
And can’t wait to see what nother Mike does with my suggestion: She followed a trail of fireflies.
Oh, I like this series of snippets! Can’t wait to see what happens at the company picnic!