"So you can't help me?" Lance asked in a quiet voice that turned off the need for tears and turned on a crushing need to put her arms around him and comfort him.
"I wish I could. Really. Why should you suffer a curse for something some idiot in history committed?"
"Exactly!" He gave her a lopsided grin. "Can you point me in the right direction, at least? And why can't you find one?"
"First off, you'd need a time machine..." Glori sighed and gestured for him to follow her back behind the daycare, through the gate into the play yard. They sat down on one of the miniature picnic tables. The plastic creaked under their combined weight, but Glori knew it wouldn't break. At least that much of her magic was still viable, despite the havoc Need was currently wreaking on her entire life. Just because her hormones were out of whack, why did her magic have to suffer?
"It's a matter of modernization and egalitarianism." She giggled when he gave her a huh? look. "We don't have royalty anymore."
"Why not? I mean, it's in all the storybooks--"
"Don't get me started on the stupid propaganda you Humans have passed down through the centuries. Some of it is our fault, I'll admit, to get you sidetracked so you couldn't find us so easily, but..." Glori sighed. She didn't need this. Lance didn't need this. "We don't really have royalty anymore. Ceremonial, but not functional. There's the title, but you're elected, and there are only certain times when you're eligible to run for office, and ... Well, you don't need to know all the details. Suffice to say that the lack of Fae royalty impacts the actual quality and strength of the magic. We take turns handling all the administrative functions required by our hidden communities. And the office is never handed down, parent to child, so there's no hereditary power, so there's no royalty, so there's no princess to kiss your booboo and make the curse go away. Sorry."
"But technically, the leader is the queen or king, right?"
"Technically." For a moment, hope welled up. Then she remembered the current Administrator King, and felt worse, for Lance and for herself.
Theodosius was a slimy character who should have turned himself into a slug centuries ago. He was the last person she'd ask for a favor, mostly because he'd been after her since they graduated from the nursery. He was the reason she left her home Enclave in the first place, risking the utter strangeness of the Human-dominated world for the sake of freedom from a male who was determined to dominate her before they graduated from training-wheel-level magic.
If Theodosius knew she had finally gone into Need, he would be here and using every trick in and out of the book to trap her, using her Need to bind her to him for eternity. Glori had no hope of being able to resist him. Look how she was reacting to Lance, and he was only being nice to her. Once she and Theodosius had sex, she'd be trapped, tied to him forever.
How he got through all the screening processes and interviews and mental/emotional balance tests to attain his current position of power was a tribute to red tape, even among the Fae.
Technically, he was royalty, and his kiss could cure. But there was a reason why Fae magic resided most strongly in the distaff side of the magic wand.
The thought of Theodosius trying to plant one on Lance made her just slightly sicker than she was feeling already. Theo would enjoy it, the malodorous creep.
"Our leader is a man right now."
"When does someone new take over? Someone female."
"In about four years." She bit her lip to keep from explaining that they were Enclave years, not Human, real-time years. Lance wouldn't like that.
"Any chance it'll be your turn?"
Oh, that soft little hopeful smile could turn a woman to melted marshmallow in half a heartbeat!
"It won't be my turn for about sixty more years. Sorry," she whispered.
Why was she whispering?
Probably because she was about two inches away from him and Lance looked like a huge magnet had gotten hold of him and was yanking him closer to her every second. And he didn't look like he was in any pain at all.
"That's the last thing I want to think about right now. Leadership duty is a pain in--" She blushed, but managed to stop herself in time before she turned colors. "It's a pain in places I won't mention in my daycare, thank you very much."
Lance laughed, but it wasn't a nice laugh. He sounded angry. Disappointed.
"Sorry, but your bureaucracy really doesn't mean toad squat to me. My problem is a little bigger. And like you admitted, I sure don't deserve it."
"No, you don't." She slid off the picnic table and scurried away a few steps. If she wasn't careful, she'd offer to kiss him and try to make today better, even if she couldn't fix his life. And that would lead to... Well, to problems that could ruin her next few decades as well as drive away all her customers at the daycare if anyone caught her and Lance in a clinch. Or worse.
Before she could try to wrench the conversation back to more immediate problems, Lance stood and gestured at her building and grumbled something about getting to work. Glori felt like wilted lettuce as she followed him to the back door to spell the lock open. Her children were about to show up. Time to brace herself, gather up the shredded remains of her magic and try to get through the day.
Lance didn't deserve his problems any more than she deserved hers. Maybe they could still help each other. But could she do it without her raging hormones getting in the way?
"I'll ask around," she said, and flicked her wrist, making the lock open and the door swing out. "My Regional Coordinator is here, and she has more access to records than I do. We do have some hereditary royalty, and they just keep a low profile. You know, kind of like the Tsar's relatives did when they got out during the Revolution?"
That hadn't been a fun time for the Fae. The Bolsheviks liked playing with explosives, and protecting the Enclaves from Human demolitions used up a lot of magic.
Lance's hopeful grin was worth every headache she anticipated waiting for her.
Maybe she could get a couple kisses to tide her over, kind of like aspirin when she really needed a nerve block? Nothing long-term, and certainly nothing with strings attached, but aspirin always helped in every situation, right? Even if it was a gaping wound, aspirin wouldn't hurt. Would it?
* * * *
Lance emptied several spray canisters that looked like they were better suited to Army defoliation exercises, injecting the foundation of the building from the outside, and then drilled little holes in the walls along the baseboards. That, combined with Glori's dark chocolate-buffered magic, put the bugs into a coma that would last as long as there was daylight. She ate a Nestlé's Crunch for a booster and added another spell to keep the stink of the chemicals from wafting into the building.
He hurried, and she wanted to kiss him in pure gratitude for being careful of her reputation. Glori could only imagine the questions and rumors that would start up if anyone saw his knight-skewering-a-rat truck parked outside her daycare.
Yes, she wanted to kiss him, but Lance seemed distracted, and after all the magic she had wrung out, her reserves and self-control were pretty low. She settled for asking him to come back at the end of the day when they could talk, he could meet Matilda, and they could try to find a solution. For both of them.
Matilda had promised to come back to inspect her spells and see if she could do something to bolster them. The daycare was so infused with Glori's magic in particular, it would be hard for someone else to come along and get involved with the thick layer of personalized magic. If anyone could do it, Matilda could. That was why she was a Regional Coordinator.
"Thank goodness I'm a Changeling. It keeps me firmly out of the contention for Administrator Queen," Matilda admitted that afternoon, when Glori told her about Lance's questions and her nauseous thoughts about Theodosius.
Matilda walked around the outside of the daycare, nudging a teeter-totter with her foot, flicking a few sparkles of magic at the swings so they creaked and swung without a touch of wind, frowning and "hmming" as she stared at the foundation of the building.
"Does this Lance have any magic in his blood? I feel something enhancing the purely Human chemistry involved."
"His ancestors have been living under a curse, and it's come down to him. That probably builds up the magic in the blood," Glori offered. It was just another sign of how wonky her magic had gone, thanks to the Need, that she couldn't sense other magic at work, even injected into the foundations of her beloved building.
"What sort of curse?"
"We didn't get that far. He needs a Fae princess to break the curse and if I find him one, he'll give me extermination for free for life. If my magic is going to be so unreliable, I'm going to need all the help I can get." She sighed and sank down on the plastic picnic table again. Funny, but just remembering how she had sat there with Lance that morning made her feel warm and protected. She could almost smell freshly ironed cotton and Irish Spring. Glori looked around, and there was Lance, striding through the gate into the playground.
The flying, tingly, warm, bubbly feeling she got just looking at him went a long way toward making Need bearable.
"Matilda?" she called.
She had to distract herself before she performed a flying tackle on Lance. He didn't need to see Glori lose all control, sprout dragonfly wings fifteen feet wide and dive-bomb him. At least, not now. Maybe when they knew each other better?
"Matilda?" she called again, her voice cracking. "He's here." Glori got up and darted around the side of the building, after waving for Lance to stay there.
"Well, there's something to be said for a first crush." Matilda's smile was crooked with sympathy and that nasty sense of humor that nobody could resist. "Darling, you should see yourself. All sparkling and heightened color and...well, about two inches off the ground."
Glori looked down and gulped. Sure enough, she could see a gap between her sneakers and the child-battered grass. She stretched with her toes, found the ground again, and firmly anchored herself to the laws of gravity.
"You're beautiful," Matilda whispered. She slid an arm around Glori's shoulders, turned her around, and led her back the way she had come. "Even without all your magic, you'd be hard for a normal man to resist, much less--" She stopped short, abruptly enough Glori walked out of her support. Matilda gulped, choked, and went deathly pale.
"Mortimer?" she shrieked.