Page 16

*archie*

“A RCHIE? C AN WE TALK to you for a second?”

The old lunch lady, who’d been peering into the industrial refrigerator, whipped around at the sound of my voice. I gasped, and so did Jackson, because her brown eyes were so intense and bright they virtually glowed. And they weren’t brown, but more of an iridescent amber.

They felt eerily familiar.

She hadn’t said a word, yet I felt frozen in place as those glowing eyes burned into me.

I felt like she was reading my every thought.

It was quiet in the kitchen as she stared at me, my body pinned in place by her gaze. I couldn’t move or avert my eyes, and after what seemed like an hour, she let me go.

It felt like I was being dropped when she looked away from me to Jackson, like I was falling to the floor. He met her gaze for a solid minute before she looked away from him, too, and said, “Are you two serious about this?”

I didn’t think I’d ever heard her speak an understandable word before, so I was shocked by the clarity of her sentence.

And also by the fact that it seemed like she knew why we were there.

I nodded and said, “Y-yes.”

“Well, sit down, then.”

Jackson and I each took a spot on the stools that were placed beside the stainless steel kitchen counter. I cleared my throat and said, “We need to transfer a wish, like you did.”

“Okay, well.” Archie opened a drawer and pulled out a fat black dry-erase marker. “You want to do the impossible, so it’s going to take some bribing. Those lords are tough to convince and have all kinds of rules and traditions, so it’s basically impossible. They’re so stinking unyielding it’s maddening, but they’re Ultimate Fae, so what do you expect, right?”

“Right,” I muttered, nodding, unsure of what else to say, because the woman who never spoke in actual sentences had launched into a complete paragraph about bribing the Ultimate Fae lords.

I was equal parts shocked and thrilled that we’d obviously come to the right place.

I glanced at Jackson, and his face made it clear that he thought she was out of her mind.

Which wasn’t surprising. I wasn’t sure what exactly my brother had told him about the wishes, but if he hadn’t mentioned the history of the legend, this would be Jackson’s first time hearing references to things like Ultimate Fae and lords .

She made a noise in her throat, like a low hum, and then she started scrawling on the silver countertop.

All over the countertop, frantically, like she was being timed and had to finish her drawing in under a minute. It looked like she was sketching some sort of map.

She was drawing trees—really bad trees, the stick kind that kindergarteners drew—all over the place. “What’s the one thing they can’t get in Hyorithipithidian?”

I shrugged, unsure if she was talking to herself or us.

She rolled her eyes and loudly stated, “Fish.”

I swallowed and wondered if this was a mistake. Just because the woman seemed to know why we were there didn’t mean she knew what she was talking about. She could’ve been magic-obsessed, like Nana, but absolutely clueless about how it all worked.

But I was desperate. I asked, “Fish?”

“The Flords—fae lords, the highest governors—are rigidly opposed to transferring a human’s wishes. Period. They won’t do it.”

The woman used the words Flords —maybe Jackson was right.

“Unless you give them the one thing they can’t get in Hyorithipithidian.”

Jackson snorted, and when I looked over at him, he was smiling like this was hilarious.

“And this thing that the Flords can’t get is fish ,” Jackson said, not even bothering to disguise the doubt in his voice.

“It sounds nuts, because Hyorithipithidian is a perfect world, right?” Her voice was high-pitched, and she seemed overexcited as she kind of giggled. “It’s a flawless land created to perfection, where the water is the color of turquoise, the mountains are covered in exotic flowers, and food is delicious and abundant, but fish simply don’t exist there. Were never created. So if the forest fairies can gift the Flords a fish, those guys will sometimes agree to help a human out.”

“Because they like to eat fish.” Jackson crossed his arms and tilted his head. “Are you telling us that the ‘magical fae lords’ of ‘Hyorithipithidian’ enjoy a good fish dinner so much that if gifted a slab of salmon, they will consider breaking the rules of the land?”

I wanted to tell him to stop air-quoting. Even strange people knew when they were being insulted.

“Not for salmon —are you kidding with that?” Archie said, squinting her eyes and looking at Jackson like he was the strange one. “Who wants salmon? No, wisenheimer, they want catfish.”

“Oh, it’s catfish specifically that the Flords want,” Jackson said, suppressed laughter in his voice. “Got it.”

I shot him a look, because even though her bizarre words made her seem less than trustworthy, I wanted her to keep talking. Somewhere in her old lady ramblings might be something we could use.

Her name had been in Nana’s address book.

This lunch lady was literally our only hope, so I needed her to give me everything she had.

“Archie,” I said quietly, “will you tell us exactly what you did?”

I touched her arm, which made her jump and bark out a little eep noise, but then she turned to me and those glowing eyes found mine again. She watched me like she was looking for something. Archie’s gaze bored into mine for a solid twenty seconds, and everything in the kitchen—in the school, in the world—melted away.

For twenty seconds, my universe was her eyeballs.

Then she abruptly said, “Okay, but I warn you, it’s gonna sound crazy.”

That made me smile.

“You gotta get back to the forest, okay?” She immediately launched into more drawings, scribbling illegible directions on every chrome surface in the kitchen as she ran around with an agility that belied her age.

“Get back to the magic hole at four o’clock!

“Not one, not two, but four catfish! Forty pounds of them exactly !”

She scrawled out a new chant on four separate surfaces in the kitchen (which I added in my notes app), saying what Jackson needed to say aloud as she wrote it:

“Four golden stones, four fishes planted. I humbly request my former fourth be ungranted.” She closed her eyes and covered her heart, like she was making sure we understood the importance of the words. “By the power of four on the forest floor, I seek to give my fourth wish to Emma Rockford evermore!”

She yelled the last line, and a chill went down my spine.

Goose bumps covered my skin, and every tiny hair on my body felt like it was standing up as she slowly opened her eyes and looked at me. Something was there, buzzing around her in the kitchen—a magical electricity, a supernatural awareness.

I was breathless as we looked at each other, feeling like my chest was being squeezed as something important passed between us.

“He’s probably gonna lose the first three, by the way,” she said quietly, glancing over at Jackson, “because that’s what happened to me. When I gave away my fourth, I lost the ones already granted almost immediately. I woke up the next day like they’d never happened.”

I looked at him and felt guilty.

Even though they were my wishes, I felt bad that he’d be losing things because of me.

Especially when he looked back at me with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“But that was how I knew it worked,” Archie said.

That brought my attention back to her, and I realized that she suddenly seemed completely lucid. Absolutely normal.

Until she gave us her parting words.

“If it doesn’t work,” she said, shaking her head, “you’ll have to talk to the hamburger. The hamburger has the answers, even though he is who he is. French-fried annoying with the pickles on the side, cooked to a well-done interior of boorishness. So don’t screw this up, because hamburger.”