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Bette’s brow furrowed. “I’m twenty-eight.”

“You seem tall.” The old woman tapped her chin. “Like a statue. Can you turn?”

Bette’s first voluntarily initiated social contact in months, and she was being inspected like grocery produce.

“I’m average height—Excuse me!” She yelped as the old woman lifted Bette’s arm and inspected her hands.

“Ma’am, please let go.” The grip wasn’t tight, Bette could certainly pull free, but this whole thing was so irrationally peculiar she couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow.

The street was dim, but still littered with people, so she didn’t feel necessarily unsafe.

And despite her better judgement, she was entertained.

“You’re rather scrawny. Do you eat?” The old woman dropped her arm and tsked .

Bette let out a laugh that sounded like it had been dragged out of early retirement – unused, raspy, and a bit unnatural. “I eat plenty, thank you!”

“Never mind. Outsides can always change. It’s the insides that are stubborn, and your insides don’t need any changing. Hmph .” The woman adjusted her glasses, snapping a crooked finger in the air. “You’ll do.”

Bette wasn’t entertained after that.

The entire street vibrated and rattled until every person, every blowing branch of the gated trees, even the pigeons midflight…

froze. As did the blood running through Bette’s veins.

It was ice. She was ice. This was it; the repressed grief had finally gotten to her.

She had descended into full-blown hallucinations. That, or she’d been drugged.

It was a toss-up which was worse.

“What—Idon’t—What did you do? What’s happening?” Her heart was pounding in her ears, her instincts screaming at her to run, but she couldn’t. Her feet were stuck, her hands clasped together over her mouth.

The old woman waved her own hand over the ivy-covered brick wall.

Bette watched in horrified wonder as a bright, beaming swirl of lilac light sparkled there, covering the brick with a large misshappen circle.

“Worry not, Bette. I’ll explain when we return to Magic Grove through the portal.

” The woman gripped her hand and dragged her forward.

Bette went along in a daze, her whole body screaming at her to stop, but it was like her limbs were not following her commands. “How do you know my name? Have you been stalking me? Is this a kidnapping scheme? What are you—”

“You’re wearing a nametag, dear.”

Bette glanced down at the pin at the top of her stained shirt. Oh. The realization was embarrassing perhaps, but not her largest obstacle. “What is that? What’s a portal? And what’s Magic Grove? And why did you—”

The old woman rolled her eyes as she dragged them both forward into the beaming light. On the heels of Bette’s drowning screams, she only heard one sentence from the old woman’s mouth.

“Mortals ask all the wrong questions.”

CHAPTER 2

L ord Fenmore Majos’ mother was missing.

This fact might have sent other lords in Magic Grove – a magical realm parallel to the mortal one – into great alarm at the prospect of what could’ve happened to their elderly mother.

Lord Fenmore’s case was rather different in that when his mother went missing, he didn’t so much worry for what happened to her, but what would happen to everyone else.

The argument they’d had the night before would only be fuel for her destructive magical tirade.

“Jorge!” Fenmore bellowed up the great hall of the estate house, running a hand through his wild red locks that needed to be shorn imminently.

His butler appeared, looking sheepish and startled – his mother’s signature if he’d ever seen it.

“Yes, My Lord? How may I be of service?” It was odd to take on any sort of authoritative role over the graying butler.

Said butler had known Fenmore since he was no more than a babe.

If someone had watched you spit up your mushed carrots, it became significantly more difficult to hold any sort of dignity before them.

But Fenmore had to try, because if there was one person Jorge was more loyal to than Fenmore, it was his mother. “Have you seen the Dowager Louise?”

Jorge swallowed so hard Fenmore could see his throat bob. Fenmore placed his hand on the smooth, cool wood of the large front staircase. “Jorge, I might remind you that I am the Lord of this land and this house. I bid you to tell me where my mother has gone before I find out for myself.”

With his chin held high, Jorge stared straight ahead at the old clock mounted on the wall. Clearing his throat, his butler’s back straightened more (if that was even possible). “My Lord, I fear for her ladyship’s wellbeing if I were to tell you the truth of—”

But before the sputtering butler could say another word, a large, beaming portal appeared in the far wall, his mother hurtling haphazardly through it, her gray hair askew and a wide, alarming grin on her face. “I’ve done it, Fenmore! I’ve done it!”

A more disturbing sentence had never been uttered.

He kept his face blank, his voice calm, his body still, showing no weakness.

His mother could sniff out fragility like a hound on a scent.

He would be damned before he’d allow her to win this game of wills they’d been playing for the last month.

“I bid you be more specific, Mother. What is it exactly that you’ve done?

” He tucked his shirt in as he spoke, as if he was bored, as if it didn’t matter what her response was.

Nothing would crack his unbreakable mien.

That is, nothing but a young woman falling through the portal straight to her hands and knees, a curtain of mousy brown hair falling over her face, her ragged breaths echoing in the silence.

He sighed, controlling his surprise, controlling everything the way he always had to.

His mother wasn’t stable enough to take proper care of the lands and the tenants that relied upon them.

After Fenmore’s father passed when he was just a boy, he’d become the only member of the household with any sense of responsibility.

“Mother, have we resorted to kidnapping now?” He took a few steps closer, the rug in the entryway softening the sound of his footsteps as he approached. “I’m certain the mortals you so desperately want to rub elbows with would frown upon this.”

His mother tsked . “Kidnapping is for children. This one’s too old for kidnapping.”

That comment seemed to shock the woman from her stupor, her head whipping up, long soft tresses of hair cascading down her back as she stood.

“First of all, as I said, I am twenty-eight. That is not old by anyone’s standard.

Secondly, the definition of kidnapping is to take someone against their wishes.

Which you have, because I did not wish to be thrust into that weird light thing that made my stomach feel like it was doing a backflip – only to land in a house that looks like it was designed in the Middle freaking Ages! ”

The woman breathed out a hard exhale before turning her head toward him, giving him a first glimpse at her face. Whatever hardened indifference he felt seeped away as his lips parted in quiet, startled awe. She was…lovely.

Her tan cheeks were tinged red from her anger, her brows drawn together, her lips the color of the pink rosebuds just sprouting in the estate’s garden.

He took a step toward her, then another, his legs moving of their own accord.

His resolve was disappearing. In the whole of his thirty-six years in the world, he couldn’t recall a single time he’d had such an instantaneous reaction to another person.

As he edged closer, he watched her brown eyes widen – shining against the light from the chandelier above them, making her look doe-eyed and innocent.

And then she pepper-sprayed him.

“Stay back!”

“Fuck!” Fenmore bellowed, rubbing at his eyes, which only seemed to make the stinging agony worse. “What was that?”

“Pepper spray, you creep!”

The burning in his nose and throat was suffocating, and the thick tears his eyes were producing turned the beautiful woman before him into a blurry blob. Good. He could argue with a blob. She’d done him a favor really.

“Oh, my Fenmore!” He couldn’t see but he could hear his mother laughing. “I brought her to prove to you that you are wrong about mortals. I fear this is a rather rocky start, however.”

“Why do you keep saying mortals as if the both of you aren’t ?”

There was a pitch of frustration in the woman’s voice on the last word that made his lip curl up despite the pain. She was handling the magical world better than most mortals did; he’d give her that, if nothing else.

“My dear, my son and I have made a wager. I’m afraid I’m putting all my stakes on you to help me win it!”

A blur appeared at his side that Fenmore could only assume was Jorge.

His suspicions were proved correct as a glowing cloth was placed in his hands.

“This should be just the thing, sir.” He rubbed the magical fabric over his eyes, and the stinging abated immediately as the healing magic did its work.

When Fenmore could finally see properly again, the tableau before him was like a badly written play. His mother was gesticulating wildly, his butler was inching behind a potted plant so he wouldn’t be seen, and the girl—

The girl was still lovely, despite trying to blind him.

Damn it.

“We have very little time so I’m going to explain this promptly, dear.

” She took the girl’s hand, and she just stood there, staring at her fingers clasped in his mother’s.

“My son has convinced himself that mortal kindness does not exist and it’s just a ruse you put on to seem decent. I think that’s baloney!”

The girl let out a startled laugh and Fenmore’s heartrate picked up speed coincidentally at the same time. “Baloney?”