I opened the bag and peered inside just in time for an orange striped pompom beanie with matching scarf to hit me in the eye.
I sputtered, taking a step back, only to trip on a pair of heels I hadn’t put away yet, the bag dropping over my head and shoulders as I landed on my butt. But instead of hitting the bottom of the bag, my head passed through some sort of barrier that made my scalp tingle. I found myself with a different bag gathered around my shoulders, my head and neck sticking out from the bag’s bottom, probably looking like some twisted souvenir from the French Revolution. Through the partially opened top, I could make out Seelie’s store lights—until a meaty hand blocked them from view as it charged toward me with a fistful of panties.
“Stu!” I screamed, not wanting to get clobbered.
The hand paused, backed up, and Stu’s face appeared at the opening of the other bag.
“Princess?” His eyebrows created a canyon in between them. When he saw me, his face broke into an enormous grin. “Princess!”
He then frowned and wagged a finger so close to my nose my eyes crossed. “You know, you really shouldn’t be playing with the shopping portals like that. Tain’t safe.”
“But…” I wriggled the bottom of the bag to my shoulders.
“Uh-uh, Mickey’d flay me if he thought I let you cross through one. An’ anyway, there are better portals once you get yer magic broken.”
“Broken?”
“Yeah. Whew!” He sat back and beamed at me—or rather, at my head that was still all he could see from his side of the portal shopping bag. “Ye’ve no idea how hard it was pretending not to be fae. And ye’ve no idea what a relief it is, ye being let in on everything now.” He gestured at the portal shopping bag. “Not that it was a secret, mind you. Mickey just thought that you not being raised in the fae, well, ye might have had a hard time adjusting to everything. But I said, I did, that keeping ye in the dark weren’t gonna come to no good. Glad he came to his senses sooner. Seemed like he was planning on keeping mum all the way up to the investiture! Now wouldn’t that have been something?” He laughed a jolly, Santa-type laugh that, even in my bewildered state, made me crack a smile.
“Um… Stu?”
“Yeah, princess?”
“What are fae?”
His laugh stopped abruptly as he poked his head into the shopping bag to stare at me. My face must have said it all. “Ah, blimey. This was an accident, wasn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Don’t suppose you can just pretend ye never popped yer head into the portal?”
I shook my head.
“No?” He looked down at the floor for a few seconds before meeting my gaze. “Well, there be no help for it. Just maybe let Mickey know it was an accident, and, you know, it was, so…just be letting him know, okay?”
I couldn’t even get a word in before Stu shoved his meaty hand into my face, pushing my head back into the portal at the bottom of the shopping bag until I found myself sitting back in my room, the bag hanging off the side of my head like an oversized cap.
I immediately jumped up and stared back into the bag. There was nothing—no sign of any sort of magical portal thingy.
Just as I started wondering if I’d fallen, hit my head, and imagined the whole thing, a fistful of undies shot out at me like confetti. I stumbled back and landed on my butt.
Magic.
It was real, and I was, apparently, neck deep in it.
And thinking back, wasn’t that what Mickey was oh-so-subtly trying to tell me this whole time? Explain it with magic and everything suddenly becomes less weird.
A note puffed out of the bag, landing in my lap.
Now that you know about the portal, please send me a note whenever you need something. So far, I’ve been guessing.
-Stuart
P.S. Do you have enough underwear? Or do you want a different cut? I have the boy-short style, too, but I’ve been told they’re a bit uncomfortable and can bunch.
My world crumbled and rebuilt itself as I sat amid magically-transported panties, writing a note I was about to shove into a portal disguised as a shopping bag.
Yes, Stuart, I have enough underwear. Thanks!
-Kella
Magical beings—fae—existed. And I was smack dab in the middle of them. I thought back to all the odd conversations, the weird looks at school, even the fae-themed mall. Everything clicked into place.
I was the outsider in a magical community—pretty much a muggle amongst wizards. They probably had the same rules about me not finding out about them, so I couldn’t really hold being kept in the dark against Maeve and Mickey. And I was the foster kid, after all. It wasn’t like I showed up on their doorstep and they had to spill all of their magicky secrets to me.
But that was curious; why did they take me in? Stuart seemed to think I had magic, but I didn’t. My parents were 100 percent human. Maybe there’d been some mixup and the fae didn’t realize it until I got here. That kind of made sense.
Well, whatever the case, magic existed. And if magic existed, magical things—things bigger than popping through portals—could happen.
And my brother could use a pretty big magical thing right about now.
“Hey, Mickey,” I said into my dresser mirror. “How ya doin’, little bro?” I shook my head and tried again. “Heya, Mickey. I just figured out this whole ‘everything’s magic’ thing we’ve got going on here, and I was kind of wondering if you could magically heal Caleb. Or know of someone who can. Wait, you can heal people, right?”
I looked at myself in the mirror longer than I intended—almost like I expected my reflection to answer the question that I just realized I didn’t have an answer to. Crap. I had no idea how magic worked, when it worked, or
