Dangerously Easy
FOR THE FIRSTtime in possibly her whole life, Jo’s mind wassilent.
The usual incessant buzzing, always reminding her of something she needed to be doing, something she must be freaking out over, was quiet. She wasn’t sure how to handle the stillness, so she didn’t do anything at all. Her mind must have overloaded and completely fizzled out, faced with the combination of sensory overload and utterpanic.
She followed behind the strange, beautiful man while he led her out of the room, his demeanor casual, as if they were walking through the park, or down a street, and not into the hive of what had been her arch-nemesis since Jo was fourteen and took her firstjob.
“I know you have a lot of questions,” hestarted.
“Understatement.” She wanted the word to have more snark, but she just sounded tired, even to her ownears.
“Where would you like me tobegin?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just begin.” She paused when another agent rounded the corner ahead of them. Just like the two in the office, the woman walked down the hall without so much as a glance at them as shepassed.
“They can’t see us.” Snow seemingly answered the question she’d been posing to the woman’sback.
“Why?”
“Because you no longerexist.”
The words were like swallowing a shot of tequila and chasing it with a can of RAGE ENERGY—burning delivered with a tang of sweetness that would become one massive hangover the nextmorning.
“Nico said I couldn’t go home. . . Wayne said they were my family. . .” Jo tried to piece together the earlier conversations in a way that would make sense. But none of the pieces fit yet. She needed some rough edges shaved off before they’d snap into place. “What is the Society ofWishes?”
“You invoked the Society yourself, you know.” Snow had the audacity to chuckle at her. Jo’s chest had the audacity to tighten at the smooth, richsound.
“Please,” she said tiredly. “I. . . I remember the ritual.” Admitting the fact was hard, because it meant that her memories of Yuusuke had been real. “I remember what my grandmother told me. But. . . she said it’s magic lore practically from the dawn of time. No one believes that stuff anymore. It’sstupid.”
“Youbelieved.”
“Not really. I was frantic,” she mumbled, willfully ignoring the truth. Either she finally owned up to the fact that the part of her that believed in magic had never gone away (much to her father’s dismay up until the day he walked out), or she was in some kind of trauma-induced craze. There wasn’t a way towin.
“Dawn of time. . .” he repeated softly, mostly to himself. But before Jo could question, Snow continued. “Then I’ll start at the beginning.” There was a long pause and Snow’s expression left Jo wondering if he even knew where “the beginning” was. “The Society of Wishes exists outside of time, outside of any reality, and functions with the singular goal of grantingwishes.”
“You’re telling me you’re a fairygodmother?”
Snow did laugh then and, despite herself, it brought a sly smile to Jo’s mouth. “I suppose you could call usthat.”
“Where’s your wand and ballgown?”
“I’m afraid I lost those a few hundred years ago.” For all Wayne had cautioned against Snow, he was proving to be the easiest to speak to of themall.
“Wayne mentioned something about athousandyears. . .”
“As I said, we exist outside of time and space. The Society as it’s known now has been around for well over a thousand years. Closer to two thousand, actually.” Snow continued forward, walking as though he’d been in these halls many times. “Each Society member has joined at a different time, as their magic was madeknown.”
“How did they join?” The Society was still a “they,” an other, something Jo was not quite ready to admit to being a part ofherself.
“Awish.”
A dusty server room floor, a friend bleeding out, a last resort in the form of a desperate cry for help, anyhelp—
“It was real,then?”
“Itwas.”
“Is Yuusuke. . .” She couldn’t even bring herself to sayit.
