Read Online Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales by Diane Duane - Free Book Online

They never lasted. At first she’d been able to dismiss the strange shifts in perception as something to do with the alcohol itself: possibly an allergy. Yet drinking had never made her sick, and soon enough she’d learned that she could simply prevent the effect by limiting her intake.
    But it had all fallen apart when her mother said, both kindly and rather sternly, “Do you see things?”
    “What?”
    “Things that are only there for a few moments, and then vanish. Or things that seem to last a while before they fade. Visions. Creatures that can’t be there, but are. Do you See things?”
    Now Caroline was feeling again the shock she’d felt then. It’s been so long, now. But then she’d been so careful for such a long time, especially right after that conversation—or rather, after the one experimental bender she went on after the conversation, that had confirmed it all: the beautiful historic city pub that had suddenly revealed itself to be full of peculiar animals, fabulous beasts, and people who were revealed as not quite human, or rather more than. The next day, when her blood alcohol was down to zero and she’d looked into the pub, everything had been normal again… except her. Her mother had been telling the truth: the women of her family could view the invisible, See spells and curses, peer a little way into the Other Side…or into some of the truths of this side, normally hidden.
    And now here she was, looking at a dessert menu while having dinner with a giant snake. And how the hell is he holding his dessert menu? Still carefully keeping her smile in place, Caroline glanced at Matt’s menu, and saw the small delicate forelegs that ended in clawed talons. Not exactly a snake, then. Sort of a—what did they call it? Mum told me a story when I was little about some kind of long skinny dragon that didn’t have wings, but did have legs. And they weren’t the romantic kind of dragon. They ate people. Young women, mostly. She shivered again. What did they call that thing? Damned if I can remember —
    “Tiramisu,” Caroline said aloud, in a musing kind of way. And I can’t believe I did this to myself. Five units of alcohol, it must have been! I talked myself right into it. He’s so cute, I’m so nervous, I’ll just have a glass or two to take the edge off —
    But instead it had put an edge on her ability to See. Now all that remained to Caroline was to figure out what she was Seeing. Was this vision just a sort of analysis of Matt’s personality, a warning that he was a snake in the relationship sense? Or was he actually this weird dragony-wormy-snaky thing, pretending to be Matt?
    There’s a reason you’ve been given this gift, her mother had said: you have a responsibility to help people! Sometimes a seeming will be a warning to someone: you must deliver it. Sometimes the seeming will be a hidden reality, a spell, a curse: you must act to help.
    Which was one of the reasons Caroline had been so careful not to get into any situation where she’d have to use the gift, if she could at all avoid it. Now she looked up at Peppino as he came to take their orders, and she ordered tiramisu and a double espresso, which she really needed to steady herself a little. Then, when he was gone, she glanced across at Matt again, and did her best to stay as calm as if nothing was happening. Oh yeah, like every Friday night you have dinner with a giant snake! And a smart one. There was entirely too much going on behind those golden eyes, a sense of intelligent calculation.
    But something else, too. Who’s doing the calculating? Caroline thought. Or what? For as she looked at him now, she thought she could see something else behind the mica-like sheen of the eyes: something that was struggling, like a just-eaten mouse inside some snake in a pet-shop aquarium. Not just something: some one. Trying to get loose, trying to warn her: but as helpless as the mouse inside the snake…
    You could be imagining it, some