Page 60 of Wickedly Ever After (A Fairy Tale Romp, #1)

Ida

The one drawback to immortality no one ever tells you about? Remembering every mistake you’ve ever made makes for a lot of sleepless nights.

Mischief and Mayhem—A Thousand Years of Happily-Ever-After: A Memoir

Ida North

Ida had been a witch for centuries, but still, each swish of her wand reminded her of every hour she’d spent learning the basics of magic and all the endless mistakes too.

Standing over Alistair wedged in the rock and snoring like an asthmatic ogre, she remembered so many mistakes, she almost feared to begin.

The time she accidentally gave an elf a mermaid’s tail and couldn’t take it off.

The time she charmed a dryad’s hair red, and it turned her leaves red for the entire year.

The time a whole village of people barked for a day.

She glanced at Hector, standing with his staff poised to cast the reanimation spell once she wakened Alistair. “Ready?”

He nodded grimly.

She held her wand at waist level, pointed it at Alistair’s snout, letting the magic flow through her, and thought about eggs.

Somewhere, in some great nest, a great eagle laid an egg.

She felt the formation of it, the way the life crept into it, the meeting of two parts to make one whole.

Sadness overwhelmed her. It might not survive hatching, even if the weather went back to normal.

There had been ice in that air. But as Hector said, there wasn’t anything else they could do.

A warm, springlike sense of early blooming flowers, green leaves, and cool rain filled her middle, moved into her arm, and ran down her hand, breaking forth from the tip of her wand with the smell of basil and orange blossoms.

Alistair blinked his eyes once or twice, gave a tremendous stretch, and shuddered. He yawned.

“Hurry, Hector. I don’t know how long I can keep him awake.”

Hector raised his staff and pointed it at the sleeping dragon.

A shock of cold, frozen meat aroma startled Ida.

She wrinkled her nose. But the effect on Hector was more marked.

Every part of him seized up, his face clenched into a grimace of pain, and then relaxed, but not in the way of relief.

More like the way a body relaxes when life leaves it.

A stench filled the cave—rotting death and roses.

Alistair’s hands and feet changed shape, then his nose, until he became a handsome man, wedged in a cozy crack in the rock.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, but he was shaking and a film of sweat coated his forehead. “It was a lot after last night, that’s all.”

Alistair flexed his long arms. His fingers curled like claws.

“I don’t know how long I can keep him moving without reversion.” With a wave of his staff, the inert form of Alistair became active, wriggling and flailing its way out of the crevice with a peculiar snakelike twisting and writhing.

Ida shuddered as the dragon-man fell on the floor with a thump and eagerly wriggled forward toward her. “Ugh. Can you make him move…more like a human?”

“No,” Hector said. “He went in there in dragon shape. His mind still thinks he’s a dragon. Let’s go.”

Ida led, and Hector followed. Alistair squirmed between them with interminable slowness, inch by inch, out of the back of the cave and into the corridor.

Each second, more of him took on a dragonish quality beyond the rippling movement.

He grew claws again. His nose elongated into a snout.

His mouth, too, took on a sharper shape, and his head grew larger.

“Hurry,” Hector said as the wiggling became frantic. “Go tell Amber to get ready!”

Ida backed through the crack, bumping into Amber’s warm nose, and Alistair followed, but with a sudden sickening sound like a swelled frog popping, Alistair’s head turned into a massive dragon’s skull. Hector’s cry of despair was the last thing Ida heard before he was cut off completely.

Alistair’s human eyes vanished, and his hair too, but he still sported human flesh, all of it turning purple. The door was too small and he was choking.

“Hurry!” Ida stepped back as Amber shot through, trying desperately to get her mouth into some configuration for a kiss, but dragons, it seemed, didn’t have lips.

“Alistair!” Amber screamed, biting his nose, his eyebrows—

Ida sucked in a great gulp of air. Someone needed to be calm; she couldn’t panic. “Amber—listen to me. You must transform. You’ve got to grow some lips, girl—come on, you can do it!”

“I can’t—I can’t!”

“Yes, you can! Transform! You’re a dragon—you can do anything!”

“Alistair!” Amber bit him again, then hunched, squealed, and a strange, fleshy shape took the place of her dragon snout.

Alistair gasped, his tongue protruding from between his teeth.

“Alistair!” Amber screamed, trying desperately to compress herself. She thrashed her wings, and the leathery skin clubbed Ida in the back, pushing her aside. She tumbled backward off the ledge.

For the first quarter second, she didn’t believe she was falling.

This was a dream—a terrible dream, but she’d wake up and be back in the dragon’s lair, or in the creepy hostel with Sebastian’s head floating above her like a doomsday alarm clock.

Better yet, she’d wake up in the hotel room in Kingsmanor, nothing had gone wrong, and everything would be fine—

The sky fell away as she dropped down. She screamed. She’d hit rocks in a moment.

The world went red.

“Hang on!” Hector yelled.

Adair swirled past in a flurry of scales and wings.

“Hector!”

The wings flashed into view again.

“Grab on!” Hector yelled.

She reached out, missed him.

The wings vanished.

She twisted in the air again, the rocks shimmered below, another blur of crimson, and then a pair of knifelike talons cut into her shoulder. She screamed again.

The rocks stopped, and she rose upward.

“Hector!” She sobbed. Blood warmed her skin as it flowed down her throbbing arm and back, and then she was back on the ledge.

Hector knelt beside her. “Stay calm.” He pushed both his hands over her wound. “I’ll stop the bleeding.”

“It hurts!”

“It will only take a minute.”

She gritted her teeth and risked a glance. Her robe was saturated with blood, and meat and tendons sprouted obscenely from the ruined fabric. “Oh, Gods.” She tried not to faint. Hector drew a knife from his belt and cut away the lower part of his robe to make a bandage.

“How—how is…”

“Alistair is fine, for a handsome prince, that is. He’s with Amber. Don’t move. There’s not much room on this ledge with them on it.”

“But Adair and Morga are flying. Ouch!”

Hector tied a knot in the robe and then stood. “So they are.”

“Where’s…Amber?”

A large, scaly face loomed over her. “Sit tight, Your Goodness. We’ll get you out of here.”

She groaned. Call her optimistic, but she’d really hoped one kiss would magically fix everything .

“You better fly me back,” Alistair, a decidedly handsome prince said, stroking Amber’s face. “I can help you. Dad and Mom will take Hector and Ida.”

“Are you sure, sweetheart? I don’t want to drop you.”

“You’ll be fine. The key is to always breathe the same way—in, out, in, out—like that. It’s good practice for when the eggs come.”

Ida stared. “Eggs?”

Alistair looked curiously at her. “You didn’t think we were celibate, did you?”

“No, but—”

Hector looked as stunned as she felt. “I thought you said you’d use eagles.”

“I did! I found the biggest eagle so that maybe it would be able to feed its—oh.”

Amber startled. “Eggs?”

Hector smiled. “If you want me to be godfather, Alistair, I believe it would count against my curse. Should Amber want to take you home to meet her parents, you could both go, no more transformation needed. Of course, she’ll need to wait until the eggs come in a few weeks.”

Alistair grinned back, showing all of his pearly white and decidedly handsome human teeth. “Well, if it’s a boy, I’ll choose you. If it’s a girl, Amber picks.”

Amber blinked. “I’ll pick Ida. Will that do?”

Ida laughed. “I’m not sure. I’m not a wicked witch.”

“It counts,” Hector said, putting his arm around her. “Loopholes, you know.”