Jennifer Crusie - The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes

‘What am I, stupid?’ Crash said, ‘Of course that’s all it takes. ‘This is True Love. You think this happens every day?’

‘Princess Bride,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why anybody ever quotes any other movie.’

‘Well, there are other really good ones.’ Crash closed his eyes to keep from lunging for her since he was sure he was in a good place right now. Mare smiling at him was always a good place. ‘Can I have my sundae now?’

She stuck her chin out. ‘You remember what I tried to tell you last night? That I was magic?’

‘Mare, I have always believed you were magic,’ Crash said.

‘Uh-huh. Here’s your sundae.’

Crash reached out, but the sundae floated over to him of its own accord, bobbing along on the cool night air, ignoring the stiff breeze that was still promising the storm to come.

He froze for a moment, watching it hover in front of him, while Mare took the lid off her sundae and spooned up the first bite as if nothing unusual were happening. His stayed just out of reach, moving up and down, side to side, back and forth, as if sliding on invisible strings. It had to be a trick, he told himself, but when it slid closer to him, he ran his hands around it, trying to find the supports and couldn’t.

‘You’re good,’ he said finally. ‘How do you do that?’

‘Magic.’ Mare spooned up more sundae.

He took his and still couldn’t find the wires that had held it up. ‘You’re really good. Got a spoon?’

The spoon floated over to him, too, spinning in lazy circles until it arrived at his cup and stuck itself into the ice cream.

Okay, that was beyond good. Granted, he never did think clearly when he was with Mare, but this… He looked over at her.

She looked back at him calmly, heat in her eyes.

‘My uncle used to do magic tricks,’ he said, staring at the sundae and the spoon and then at her again. ‘Nothing like this.’

‘I didn’t say “trick,”‘ Mare said carefully. ‘I said “magic.” I’m magic. My family is magic. I’m psychokinetic. Dee’s a shapeshifter. And Lizzie transmutes things. She’s trying to turn straw into gold right now. That’s why the shed roof hums.’

Crash looked at the sundae again, took a deep breath, and dug the spoon into the ice cream. Mare was not crazy. She was odd, she did and said odd things, that was one of the reasons he loved her. But this… ‘Shapeshifter?’

‘Usually some kind of bird. She’s into flying. I think it’s a metaphor for her need to escape, but that’s just me.’ Mare licked her spoon, sounding very matter-of-fact, but his mind latched on to the ‘licking the spoon’ part as something pleasurable and understandable and much preferable to ‘My sister is a shapeshifter,’ and it was with real regret that he dragged his mind back to the part he was going to have to deal with.

‘Straw into gold.’

Mare nodded. ‘That’s Lizzie’s big project. She does smaller things. Like when she gets nervous, she turns things into rabbits. On bad days, we’re up to our asses in bunnies. If she’s turned on, it’s shoes. Usually, whatever she transmutes turns back on its own. Sometimes it doesn’t.’

Py lifted his big head and stared at Crash, his golden eyes solemn in the darkness, and Crash began to believe against his will because those were not house cat eyes.

‘Where did you say Lizzie found Py?’

‘The zoo.’

‘Right.’ He rubbed his forehead with his hand. ‘Let’s try this again.’

‘We come from a long line of witches,’ Mare said, as if they were having a completely normal conversation. ‘No real trouble aside from the odd pond ducking and one burning at the stake.’ Her voice darkened. ‘We ever get time travel, somebody’s gonna pay for that one.’

Crash took a deep breath. ‘Uh-huh.’

Mare scooped up more ice cream. ‘Our aunt Xan convinced Dad and Mom to go on TV and we ended up the Little Miss Fortunes, and you’d have thought somebody would have seen the play on words there, wouldn’t you? But no, and the show was a success, but then something went wrong, and there was a fraud conviction, and Mom and Dad asked Xan to take their powers for some reason, and she took too much and they died.’

Crash straightened at the bleakness in her voice there. That wasn’t magic, that was real, he knew that part, and suddenly her whole preoccupation with Xan began to make sense, magic or not. ‘Dee took us and ran from her, and it’s been thirteen years on the run since then, what with all kinds of people wanting to get hold of us.’

‘Hold of you,’ Crash said, losing all appetite for his ice cream. He put the cup down for Py, having a feeling that anything he could do to make Py like him might pay off big in the future.

‘We were the Miss Fortunes,’ Mare said. ‘Very big deal. Especially for Aunt Xan. All those powers, you know?’

‘I’m starting to. That’s the secret you could never tell me?’ Okay, she thought she was magic. Except there was that spoon spinning around and sticking in the cup. So maybe she was magic.

‘It’s a lot to wrap your head around,’ Mare said. I’ve never told anybody before. I don’t know what the time frame on the learning curve is. Maybe never.’

Crash took a deep breath. Keep an open mind. This is the woman you love. No matter what happens, this is the woman you’re with for the rest of your life, so… ‘So what else can you do?’

Mare put her cup down on the roof for Py. ‘Nothing. I have the suckiest power in the family.’

‘Hey,’ Crash said. ‘It’s a great power. I just got here, so I’m not fully clued in yet, but it’s amazing.’

Mare looked at him oddly.

‘Well, it amazes me,’ Crash said, with absolute truth.

Mare nodded. ‘So you believe me. Just like that.’

‘I saw it,’ Crash said, pretty sure he had.

‘It could be just a great trick.’ Mare stuck her chin out. ‘I’m pretty smart, you know.’

‘Smarter than I am,’ Crash said. ‘But you wouldn’t lie.’ She wouldn’t, he realized. And she wasn’t crazy; Mare was a little off the wall, but at base, she was the sanest person he knew. ‘You wouldn’t lie about something like that. You’d lie about getting a tattoo while I was gone-’

Mare groaned and put her head on her knees.

‘-but not about something like this. You’re serious about this. And I have to tell you, there are weirder things in the world. So why not? I saw it. Do it again.’

Mare looked away from him, biting her lip.

‘Hey.’ He put his arm around her, and when she looked back at him her eyes were bright. ‘Don’t cry. We’re good.’

‘We’re great,’ she whispered. ‘If you can hear all that in five minutes and believe it and still say, “We’re good,” we are fucking great.’

‘Well, we knew that,’ he said, and kissed her, and any doubts he had went away in the heat and the rightness of that kiss, the way she fell into his arms and became part of him, the way he went dizzy, wanting her.

When she broke the kiss, she sniffed, and he thumbed away the tear on her cheek. ‘Hey, I love you,’ he said. ‘You were always magic to me,’ and she sniffed louder.

‘Okay, then.’ She rolled to her knees and wiped her eyes. ‘Look in here.’ She took the front of his jacket in her hand and pulled him toward her bedroom window, and he peered inside and got the first good look at it he’d ever seen.

The room looked like Mare. The walls were draped with mismatched blue velvet and satin curtains with glittery gold butterflies embroidered on them and dark blue flowers painted on them. There was a long backless couch covered in blue zebra skin and a vase full of the black satin roses he’d given her for prom – she’d kept his roses, that was something – but the biggest thing in the room was a broken iron bedstead, huge and black with spirals and circles, spinning and turning in on each other, making Crash dizzy when he looked at it, mostly because it was Mare’s bed and he wanted her on it. A big black witch’s hat was stuck on one of the high posts, and the mattress was piled high with blue and lavender and green pillows, and even as he saw them, they began to stir and flip and tumble to the floor on their own - she’s doing that, he thought, she’s magic - and when the watery blue satin comforter rolled slowly back, no hands, he drew in his breath and looked at Mare, and she smiled at him in the moonlight. Then the blue-striped top sheet rose up and floated toward the curlicued iron foot of bedstead until the bed lay open and inviting in the full moon, and all the blood left his brain, and he pulled her closer to him, feeling her soft flesh yield to him under that slippery, torn blue tulle dress.