“Let’s start over. You say you’d never heard of Boris before your cousin Crystal sent you his book.”
The young woman sitting at the table nodded, keeping her eyes downcast. “She called me the night I got it and told me he was coming the next day to see me. She’d told him I was good at enchantments, and he was interested in hiring me to enchant his next book. I…don’t like…” She bit her lip and shrugged. “I’m not good with people…”
“You don’t ‘like’ people, or you’re not ‘good’ with them?”
“I-it’s not that I don’t like them,” she said quickly, looking up at the man sitting across from her. “I just…I’m not very…social, I guess. Strangers make me nervous…”
The video paused. That same man looked pointedly at the woman sitting across from him—a different woman. This one was blonde, making direct eye contact, and huffing an exasperated sigh.
“I don’t get why you’re showing me this. You know Lily didn’t do it. Just look at her.” She gestured toward the TV screen, where Lily sat with her shoulders hunched, her short black hair falling over her face, looking for all the world as if she wanted to disappear. “She’s an introvert. There’s nothing illegal about that.”
“The enchanted bookmark she gave Boris nearly strangled him to death,” the man replied, emphasizing the last two words.
“Allegedly.”
He shook his head and sighed.
“So, it would be safe to say you weren’t looking forward to his visit.”
Lily shrugged. “I guess.”
“And you were upset.”
“I…” She lifted her shoulders in another shrug. “Yeah, I guess.”
“So, what did you do?”
She bit her lip and shifted uneasily in her chair. “I, um…I enclosed my house and yard in a snow globe.”
“A snow globe?”
She nodded.
“All by yourself?”
She looked up at him nervously and nodded again.
“That’s impossible.”
She shrugged again, dropping her eyes to the table. Her voice was almost a whisper. “No, it’s not.”
Pause.
“Explain that.”
The blonde huffed again and sat back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest. “You know as well as everybody else that Lily’s magic is really powerful.”
“Nobody’s that powerful,” the man replied, narrowing his green eyes and leaning forward. “She would have died if she tried that.”
The blonde smirked. “Oh, I get it. You think I helped her. Well, you’re wrong. I was nowhere near that rinky-dink town where she lives when all this happened.”
He raised a red eyebrow. “Can anybody verify that?”
She examined her nails lazily. “Of course.”
“Who?”
Her sky-blue eyes flicked up to his. “Santa Claus.”
His jaw clenched. He sat back in his chair again and hit play.
“Okay, let’s say I believe you. What happened next?”
“It was a lot of magic,” she said, staring at the table. “I got sick. But, um, when I was…I think I went to the bathroom to get some Tylenol? It’s kind of foggy.” She shook her head. “Um…I heard…I saw Frosty the snowman. I don’t know if I was hallucinating from the fever, or what, but it was…”
“Yes?”
She lifted her head to look at him, her icy blue eyes wide and earnest. “It was the bookmark. I put an enchantment on my bookmark before Crystal called. I don’t know how, because I didn’t trigger it, but I think…I know it was my enchantment.”
She closed her eyes, furrowing her brow in concentration.
“I…I made the snow globe. Then I came inside to check the book, because Crystal charmed it. Then I went to my room…” The wrinkles deepened on her forehead. “I collapsed on my bed, and then I heard Frosty.”
Her eyes opened again, meeting the man’s gaze directly.
“We talked. I wanted to go to sleep, so he went outside. And then, I…I heard him singing a BTS song outside my window. Fake Love. That’s when I realized how sick I was, and that’s when I went to the bathroom to take some Tylenol. And then I passed out.”
Pause.
“She’s clearly making this up,” the man exclaimed, gesturing wildly at the TV screen. “It’s all utter nonsense.”
“Lily is a terrible liar,” the blonde replied. “She said she used a ton of magic to make that snow globe. You know that would kill a normal snow witch or warlock. She probably had a really high fever. Maybe it was a dream, or a hallucination. But to her, it happened.”
The man shook his head in disgust. “You can’t be serious.”
“Just hit play.”
“That sounds made up.”
“I know,” she mumbled, dropping her eyes to the table again. “But it’s what happened.”
He sighed. “The next morning.”
“The next morning…I felt someone break through the snow globe. It hurt, like someone was cutting a hole in my chest, and it…it made me angry. I went outside, and it was him. Boris. I recognized him from the book jacket. He’d cut a block of ice from the snow globe, and I threw it back into place and sealed it again. And then I passed out again”
Pause.
“Yes, I know that means her magic was still active in the snow globe, and yes, I know that’s not supposed to be possible. Just keep playing.”
“For how long?”
Lily shook her head. “Not long. My neighbor, Emma, got into the snow globe before I threw Boris out, I guess, and she got me inside somehow. Then she called her husband, Pipaluk—”
“The Pipaluk?” the man asked incredulously.
Lily raised her head to meet his eyes and nodded briefly. “The mad scientist, yeah. I guess he has a tunnel from his house to mine for emergencies, and he broke through my floor with his kids and Boris. They set up this whole impromptu Christmas party, and then he gave me a new potion he created that could restore my magic and energy. Um, so, I woke up, and then we had a weird Christmas party.”
Silence.
“I-I know…” She bit her lip and put her hands on the table, staring down at her dark blue leather gloves and the shimmering white cuffs on her wrists.
The man sighed. “Boris.”
“We talked about the enchantment job, and we kind of hit it off, so I gave him the enchanted bookmark to take back to his publisher as a sample. I called him the next night, after I thought he must have made it back home, and we talked some more. And I…” She tapped her right index finger on the table. “I thought I’d try adding to the enchantment, just to see if I could do it, because then we wouldn’t have to travel back and forth all the time. And it worked. It was…it was just a silly little lasso…I-I don’t even know why I picked that…”
“There! Right there! Pause it!” The blonde jumped out of her seat and leaned over the table, pointing at the TV screen. “See that? That’s her tell. I told you she’s a terrible liar. Right there, when she tapped her right index finger. She’s done that since we were kids.”
The red-headed man leaned in, frowning at the screen. “After everything else she said, that didn’t seem like the most far-fetched part to me.”
The blonde dropped back into her seat. “Look, Lily’s an amazing snow witch, but nobody can add to an enchantment from thousands of miles away. She’s lying about that. I don’t know why, but she is.”
“Huh. See if there’s anything else you notice.”
“Later that night, that lasso—”
“I know!” Lily covered her face in her hands. “I know,” she repeated, her voice soft and trembling. “I-I had a nightmare—at least, I thought it was a nightmare…he was…it was…” She choked, her whole body shaking. “It was around his neck, and it was getting tighter, and he was fighting it, and I—I couldn’t—it wouldn’t—it wouldn’t respond to me. I couldn’t make it stop! I didn’t…I didn’t mean to…”
Her voice dissolved into wild sobbing. The blonde pursed her lips and looked away. “You can stop it now.” A few seconds passed, and then she squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth. “I said, stop it!”
Pause.
“Well?”
The blonde clenched her fists and shook her head. “The rest was the truth. She only lied about adding the new enchantment.” She opened her eyes and glared across the table at the red-headed warlock. “Can I see her now?”
He studied her for a moment. “I understand you were upset with Boris.”
She groaned and rolled her eyes. “He turned me down for a date at an office party. Yeah, it hurt for a second, but it was no big deal.”
“And then you sent him to see Lily.”
Crystal’s blue eyes locked on the redhead’s with a glare as sharp as a knife. “Oh, come on. You can’t seriously believe I set this all up just to kill him.”
“You’ve been known to hold a grudge.”
“Me? What about you? Are you sure this isn’t just because I turned you down at last year’s Christmas party?”
The man clenched his jaw and stood abruptly. “You’re full of yourself, Crystal.”
“Nobody’s more full of it than you, Ivan,” she accused his retreating back. “Where do you think you’re going?”
He grabbed the door handle without a backward glance. “We’re done here.”
“Oh, no, we’re not.” She stood, too, her chair toppling backwards to the floor. “Even you aren’t so petty that you’d let an innocent person rot in jail just to spite me, and you know Lily is innocent. Ivan. Ivan!”
The door slammed behind him. Crystal let out a wordless scream of frustration, and then she grabbed her chair and set it upright, dropping into it again with another groan. She put her elbows on the table and her head in her hands, digging her fingers into her scalp.
“Lily, what did you do?”
Only silence answered her muttered question.
Minutes ticked by without her moving a muscle. The harsh yellow light hanging above the table in that sterile room hit the TV screen and reflected across the image of Lily, hiding her frozen, helpless tears behind a white glare.
Boris was in the hospital. Lily was in jail. And although Crystal knew none of it was her fault, she felt a pang of guilt. If she hadn’t sent Lily that book—if she hadn’t talked Lily’s skill as an enchanter up to Boris so much—
The door finally opened again. She looked up, releasing her head from her hands. It wasn’t Ivan.
“If you’ll come with me, please,” the new warlock said, holding the door open and gesturing toward the hall.
Crystal didn’t need a second invitation. She stood with enough force to knock the chair back again, storming past the warlock into the hallway. She would have kept going if she'd known the direction toward the holding cells.
“This way.”
At least he was cute, she thought, following the tall, broad-shouldered man without a word. Cuter than Ivan. She’d always hated redheads. This man had hair as sunny blonde as hers. They would have looked great together in pictures.
His left hand swung back as his left foot stepped forward. A flash of gold on his ring finger made her lose all interest.
She paid no attention to their path. Left, right, straight, up, down, whatever. She just needed to talk to Lily. If she could find out why Lily was lying…
“Five minutes,” the unfortunately wedded man announced.
“Okay, thanks.”
Lily looked even more pitiful in the cell than she’d looked on the video. She sat alone on the other side of the shimmering white bars, the magic-nullifying cuffs still on her wrists over the leather gloves she always wore to prevent her from accidentally using her magic, her knees pulled up to her chest, her face buried in her blue jeans. Crystal had seen her upset before, but she hadn’t seen her this bad since Lily’s mother died.
“Lily?” Crystal called softly.
Lily’s shoulders stiffened. She raised her head slowly, cautiously, revealing red-rimmed eyes and a tear-stained face. “Crystal, I…”
“He’s fine,” Lily reassured her. “Or he will be. He’s in the hospital as a precaution, but they said he can leave later today.”
Lily nodded, her eyes slipping from Crystal’s. She looked defeated. Utterly, hopelessly defeated.
“Lily…what are you hiding?”
“I…” Lily glanced at her cousin and away again. “I can’t tell you.”
Something inside Crystal snapped. She clenched her fists at her sides and set her jaw. “Lily! You’ve been arrested for attempted murder! Whatever you’re hiding, it can’t be worth going to jail for a crime you didn’t commit!”
Lily’s jaw clenched, too, and her brow furrowed. Her gaze flickered to Crystal’s again, the contentious frown Crystal knew so well from a lifetime of arguments answering Crystal’s tone and sparking hope in her chest. But then it vanished. The frown, the wrinkle in Lily’s brow, the tightness in her jaw—it was as if the life drained from her body, leaving her huddled in a corner like a broken, forgotten doll.
“I can’t,” she whispered.
“Well, I can’t let you take the fall for this, so I guess it’s up to me to figure out what’s going on.” Crystal spun on her heel, striding away from the cell, her cousin, and the heaviness hanging over everything. “Take me to Ivan,” she barked at blonde and married.
His eyes widened. They were a lovely shade of brown, mocha to complement his golden latte locks.
And suddenly, Crystal suspected she was less interested in him than she was in getting a good cup of coffee.
“He said—”
“I don’t care what he said,” she interrupted. “I want to see him. Now.”
“Y-yes, ma’am.”
Cute, but too weak-willed for her. Broad shoulders meant nothing if they didn’t come with a backbone. His wife was welcome to him. Whoever she was.
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