Charming bastan hollow s.., p.1
Charming (Bastan Hollow Saga Book 1), page 1
Charming
Jane Washington
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Lilou Adler
2. Arlo Demarcus
3. Lilou Adler
4. Arlo Demarcus
5. Lilou Adler
6. Arlo Demarcus
7. Lilou Adler
8. Arlo Demarcus
9. Lilou Adler
10. Arlo Demarcus
11. Lilou Adler
12. Arlo Demarcus
13. Lilou Adler
14. Arlo Demarcus
15. Lilou Adler
16. Arlo Demarcus
17. Lilou Adler
18. Arlo Demarcus
19. Lilou Adler
20. Lilou Adler
To my readers,
Also By Jane Washington
Connect With Jane Washington
Copyright © 2018 Jane Washington
The author has provided this ebook for your personal use only. It may not be re-sold or made publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. Any products or copyrighted works featured are used only for reference and are assumed to be the property of their respective owners.
Washington, Jane
Charming
www.janewashington.com
Edited by David Thomas and Josephine Banks
www.josephinebanksofficial.com/editing
To my best friend:
For laughing at all of my jokes so that people understand when I’m making a joke.
And to Izzy, Miranda and Lela:
Happy birthday!
Acknowledgments
This series has been in the making since 2013, and now . . . FIVE YEARS LATER, I’m finally forcing myself to part with the first book. Every person who has ever asked me about my writing since I started publishing knows about this series, and those are the people I want to thank now.
For each of my friends who has had to silently suffer as I talked and talked and talked about goblins and fairies and statues and fairy tales gone wrong—thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for allowing me to share my love of these characters with you.
For my brothers, who grew as excited about this series as I am.
And for Marlee, who didn’t give a single shit about any of my other books, because she just wanted this one.
And now it’s time to share that love with my readers.
I hope you enjoy Charming.
The only card missing,
Is madness.
1
Lilou Adler
I was staring at the mess on my coffee table, one hand wrapped around the neck of a bottle of wine, the other clutching my cell phone. It was ten o’clock in the morning but I had started drinking as soon as the package arrived. I got on well enough in life, but I wasn’t very mature when it came to dealing with difficult situations or decisions. The binder before me, cushioned by a mess of torn-apart packaging, posed both a difficult situation and a difficult decision, forcing me to revert to my trusty alcoholic coping mechanisms.
The word Cinderella was printed across the cover in plain typeface, the letters large enough for the title to sprawl confidently from one edge to the other. Beneath it, not so confidently, was my name: Lilou Adler. I was starting to break out into a sweat, so I put the bottle and phone aside, scooting forward on my patterned arm chair. The chair had turned up on my doorstep a week after my Aunt Adler died, a note taped to the front.
Lilou,
You wanted this chair, didn’t you?
Love,
Mom
The short answer was: no, I’ve never seen this chair before in my life. An answer I couldn’t give to my mother. Instead, I had dragged it inside and set it up in front of my tiny television screen. I vacuumed it, sprayed it with disinfectant, tossed a blanket over it and burned sage around it, just in case my Aunt’s spirit had grown attached, not that I believed in spirits. My sterilisation process complete, I then wrote my mom a thank you text, which she replied to with a penguin emoji. I loved my mom, but the women in our family were cursed to face insanity eventually, and my mother seemed to already be halfway there. She was the happiest, craziest, and most stubborn woman in the world—and those were her positive qualities.
The chair was so firmly imprinted with the sizeable shape of my deceased Aunt’s ass that it took me a bit of effort to perch on the edge and not sink back as I reached for the binder. I pulled it into my lap and flicked it open to the first page.
Congratulations on your first assignment, Miss Adler.
You have been selected to lead a solo mission into Tier Ten of Bastan, where you will be responsible for the correction and rehabilitation of the fairy tale:
Cinderella.
You will not be permitted a team on this mission, as our analysis scouts have confirmed little chance of danger in the Montgomery Kingdom during your assignment period.
I set the binder away from me quickly, sucking in a deep breath.
“This isn’t happening,” I moaned, my head falling into my hands. I quickly fished out my cell phone from where it had slipped into the side of the couch cushion, dialling up mom’s number and turning the phone on speaker as I set it back onto the coffee table beside the binder.
“Hey there,” she answered on the third ring. “I was just about to call you. Did you get your assignment?”
“If you can call it that,” I replied, worrying my hands. “I would call it more of a clerical error. I think their system had a meltdown. Have you heard anything?”
“No?” Her tone was questioning, but when I didn’t immediately jump in with an explanation, she continued. “I spoke to Harry’s parents and Isobel’s grandmother. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“They got normal, first-time assignments?” I fished.
“Oh honey, did they give you something terrible?”
I snorted, turning on the camera and snapping a photo before sending it off to her. “Check your messages,” I told her.
“Alright.” There was a rustling sound as she set the phone down, and I could hear her muttering to herself as she opened her messages. “Oh, your dad is picking out a new toaster. It’s . . . pink. Like a salmon pink, you know? And metallic. I didn’t even know they made those. He said he thought I’d like it. Twenty years of marriage and he thought I would like the metallic, salmon-pink toaster?” She started texting furiously, the sound of her tapping making my eyes roll up to the ceiling.
“Mom,” I reminded her. “The message.”
“Sorry.” She stopped texting, paused, and then commenced muttering again. “Your grandmother wants to borrow our lawnmower again. What is she doing with it? She doesn’t even have a lawn.”
“Have you asked her?”
“I asked last time. She said that she spent two days in labour and managed to put clothes on my back and food on my plate all without a husband.”
“She has a point. You should lend her the lawnmower.”
“Oh wow, Betty said that a hundred birds fell out of the sky in Wisconsin. If I didn’t believe in witches before, I sure do now—”
A squeal suddenly filled my apartment, indicating that my mom had finally seen my message. She started talking a mile a minute as I reached for my bottle of wine again, tipping it to my lips with a sigh.
“Lilou this is amazing. I always knew that you would be the greatest of all our children—”
“I’m the only of all your children,” I inserted.
She ignored me, continuing on without a breath. “I mean it’s obviously an error of some kind, but what a great error! You’re going to be famous. My daughter is going to be the most famous witch in the magical world. People are going to travel from all over to meet you and interview you. Or at least all over America. Or maybe just here in Arizona. You’ll need an assistant. I guess I could do it. I don’t have much else going on now that your father has his a cappella group. Did you get the book I sent you?”
The sudden change in topics didn’t even faze me. After twenty years with my mother, I was a master at the art of being kept on my toes. I glanced to the rickety side table set up against the wall beside my front door, needing to peer around the back of the arm chair. The book was still propped there, depicting the smiling face of a Botox-injected blonde in a bright blue pantsuit.
Ten Steps to Self-Validation in the Human-Magical World, by Molly Bardwell. I tried to contain my shudder. “Yeah mom, what a great book.”
“You haven’t read it, have you?” Her disapproving tone reached through the cell to wag a finger at me.
“No,” I confessed. “But I will.”
“When?”
When hell freezes over. “Just as soon as you admit that Molly Bardwell needs a new hobby, because she should be banned from producing spiritual guidebooks disguised as anthropological slabs of literature.”
My mother tsked, and I tried to control my smile, just in case she somehow sensed it through the phone call.
“She does a really good job of deconstructing the myth of the modern witch that has been painted by Hollywood.” She sounded like she was actually reading from the blurb at the back of the book.
“Oh, how so?” I indulged her, taking a much larger swig of wine.
“She unpacks the typecast witch and disproves each of the characteristics: pointy hats, red eyes, claws, green skin, broomsticks, cackling.”
< br /> I snorted. “How does she ‘disprove’ these characteristics? All witches and warlocks already know that those things aren’t true. She’s just pointing out the obvious.”
She was silent for a little while, but I didn’t worry that I had hurt her feelings. It was a suspicious silence. A guilty silence. I slowly lowered the bottle from my lips. The silence continued. I waited.
Her reply was rushed out in a single explosion of sound, the words running into each other as she forced the sentence out. “I met her at a book signing over the weekend and invited her to dinner this Friday okay I’ll see you then!” She hung up.
I groaned, dropping my head back and closing my eyes. I was contemplating running off to Bastan and becoming a fairy tale creature to escape dinner with Molly Bardwell when the ringing of my phone roused me back to reality. I didn’t even bother to check the number before I answered.
“Hey dad,” I said.
“Your mother is texting me from the bathroom,” he greeted. “Apparently, she’s having a panic attack. What happened?”
“I got my assignment today.”
“Is it bad?”
I blew out a breath. Why was that everyone’s first question? “No, it’s . . . well, it’s Cinderella.”
“Like Cinderella with the glass slipper?”
“That’s the one.”
“Cinderella with the pumpkins?”
“Yep.”
“Cinderella with the stepmother?”
“Yep.”
“And the—”
“Dad, it’s the same Cinderella.”
He was quiet for a moment and I could almost hear him straightening up. He would have been lifting his chin, that intelligent sparkle flaring to life in his bright green eyes. I called it his “call to action” expression—because it always preceded either an adventure of some kind, or a really grand lecture.
“It’s too dangerous,” he finally said. “You’ll have to tell them you can’t do it. Call in sick. This is your first assignment Lils, and we’re talking about the Cinderella. Do you have any idea what will happen if something goes wrong?”
I pulled a lock of hair before my face, twisting it around my finger. I was pretty buzzed already from the wine, but I still knew better than to give my dad a sarcastic answer when he was using his serious voice, so I stayed quiet. The truth was that of course I knew what would happen . . . in the general sense. The Bastan fairy tales had to stay true to their endings or else it would start a ripple effect across Earth. It was impossible to predict exactly how Earth would be affected, but it had been slapped with the label Hysteria for a reason: it was a disease, and it could spread fast. Many of Earth’s greatest natural and man-made tragedies had spawned from a tale-gone-wrong. Humans had always thought that they were the most evolved race. They never stopped talking about how free they were. Their free will was their greatest obsession.
The truth was that the majority of the human race had been placed on a carousel, and there they stayed. Stuck. They ate, they slept, they fucked, they fought. Rinse, and repeat. They did what they had to do to survive, from preschool to retirement. They would go about their carousel endlessly if it weren’t for the inspiration of folklore. The tales have always existed—long before the humans. At some point during their cycle of existence, the humans began to hear whispers of the tales, and it changed them. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Some of them wanted to be heroes, adventurers, or discoverers. Some of them heard the call of greed, or anger, or hate. The tales whispered to all of them, and they then turned to replicating them. They wrote books and tales of their own; they sang songs of adventure and love; and they tried to capture each of the sensations that folklore had inspired in them through painting, or dance, or sculpture. It didn’t stop there, though. They started wars over the notion of kingdoms, and tore down monarchies only to raise new targets to be torn down all over again.
It wasn’t much of a problem until the human race began to outnumber the magical race. They became a threat to us—the Hollow people. The witches and warlocks who stepped through the hollow void between Earth and Bastan. Because of that, the Guild of Records was formed and the exact formula for each tale was decided upon. Only stories that would keep the humans from becoming too volatile, or from starting any wars or destroying the world were approved. They became the only tales that were permitted to play out. Gradually, those tales became famous: Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Rapunzel, Red Riding Hood, and so on. They became the cornerstones of Bastan; the main influences; the purifying storm that pushed human evolution through the same cycle of eating, sleeping, fucking and fighting. Rinsing and repeating. Surviving.
Sound ridiculous? Believe me, I thought the same thing, but after witnessing the after-effects of the Great Frog Prince Fuck Up, I was in the camp of the believers . . . which included pretty much all of us.
“When I was an Enforcer . . .” my dad began to speak again, our silence having stretched on just long enough for him to rehearse his lecture.
“You were one of the best,” I finished for him, having heard this particular story too many times to count. “You earned your blacks quicker than any of the other people in your grade.”
A dry chuckle travelled through the phone. “Aside from being one of the best, I also had the most challenging mission of my whole career on my last assignment, right before I retired.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “The mysterious last assignment. That you never speak about. Until now. Cue dramatic suspense.”
“Lilou.” He spoke with a warning tone this time.
“Dad.” I also spoke with a warning tone. “What’d you do? Don’t tell me that my mom is really a fairy tale creature and I’m only part Hollow because even if it’s not true, I’ll still believe it, and the power of the mind is not to be messed with. You’ll never be able to un-sow the seed of doubt—”
“Your mother isn’t a fairy tale creature. I haven’t told you about this mission because you were my little girl and I didn’t want to discuss bondage with you.”
I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it for a moment before speaking again. “Sorry, I misheard you.”
“I didn’t want to talk to you about bondage,” he repeated, sounding exasperated.
“I misheard you again.”
“No. I said bondage.”
“Did you say collage?”
“Bondage.”
“Porridge?”
“Bondage.”
“Mortgage?”
“BONDAGE. BONDAGE. BONDAGE—oh, no I don’t need a bag, thanks. I can carry it. Have a nice day!”
I grinned. “Dad, are you shopping?”
“Your mother wanted a new toaster.”
“So what’s this about bondage? If you’re going to tell me about your wild college days you better warn me right now, because I suddenly have somewhere else to be.”
“It was an assignment. Rapunzel. The biggest assignment of my career.”
“So naturally you’re shouting about bondage in Target”
“How’d you know I was at Target?”
“You always go to Target. You love that place.”
“I find this place fascinating,” he admitted.
“I’m sure they find you fascinating. Can we wrap this story up? You know . . . wrap it up? Do you get it? I made a bondage joke.”
“Hopefully it’s your last.”
“It isn’t.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Is the suspension killing you?”
“I’ll be killing myself soon,” he grumbled.
“Okay,” I relented. “I’m not ready for mom’s grieving widow routine. Continue with your story.”
