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

freaked-out part of her mind insisted. But somehow Caroline doubted it. Even before he started looking like this to me, there was something about him that was changing. On and off, like flipping a switch. What’s doing the flipping? Is it Matt? Or something inside him—or something done to him? For her mother had said, You will see spells, curses… At the time, she hadn’t believed it. But now—
    And that was when the hair started to stand up on the back of Caroline’s neck again. How many other women have flipped this switch? she thought. How many others have been charmed by him, and done the My Place Or Yours thing… and never seen ‘their place’ again?
    The switch. Could it be—that the moment he starts to feel something for somebody—then something done to him, the curse laid on him, wakes up, takes over ?
    Her heart leapt at the thought: but her heart was cold, too. She had been eating the tiramisu more or less on automatic pilot: now she picked up the wine glass for one final sip, waiting for the espresso to arrive.
    Across the table, golden eyes, unblinking, were fixed on her. “You’re quiet all of a sudden,” the snake said. “Are you okay?”
    She kept her smile in place. Absolutely not! But this is something I have to deal with. There’s something else under the surface here. If I don’t do something about it, he’ll do something about somebody else. And whatever her friends in Belfast might have thought, there was enough death in this city as it was. What kind of person would just turn their back and walk away and let more of it happen?
    Caroline swallowed. Then she took one more sip of the wine, staring down into the glass, catching there the dark reflection of her own eyes, in which no one would have needed the Sight to see her fear. Caroline blinked, drank, put the glass down, and very, very slowly—because it took some work—she raised her eyes again, and smiled at Matt.
    “Do you want to come back to my place for coffee?” she said.
    ***
    They went back slowly, at a stroll: or what was a stroll for Caroline. Next to her, the upper third of his body upright like a cobra’s, the giant serpent glided along, seemingly as leisurely as she. It’s going to drive me nuts, she thought, if I can’t remember what mum said these things were called.
    She was thinking hard, paying no attention to the rain, which had started up again, or to the yellow glow of the streetlights, or the white and red glare of headlights and taillights pouring past. In Caroline’s mind, another light suffused everything: firelight. Underlying it, she could hear the murmur of the stories her mum would tell her while she lay on her stomach, as close to the grate as she could get without singeing herself: watching the shapes take form in the flames, springing from the wood, in New York, on the peat, back in the little country townland of Aghalee.
    When she was younger, the action in those stories had seemed random, unpredictable: a spell cast here, an evil fairy cutting up cranky there, people turned into beasts or monsters, people turned back. But later in life, when she’d done some study of folktales as part of her college education, Caroline had started to realize that the randomness was an illusion, mostly born of uneven storytelling. Inevitably, when you took them apart, spells had breakers built into them. It was just a matter of finding them, figuring out what they were. And it’s not like we’re exactly prepared for this kind of thing, any more. You can’t walk into a bookstore and buy Spellbreaking for Dummies. Or download the user’s manual from the manufacturer’s website.
    But if the stories were the user’s manual…. Or what’s left of the stories. For so many of them had been dumbed down over time, Disneyfied—rendered more politically or environmentally correct, less potentially offensive. And who knows whether the active ingredient, the real information about the ‘unreal’ world, is still