to make introductions. “Elsa, this is Lily, my best friend. Lily, this is, well, this is Elsa.”
Elsa responded by asking me a question. “Your best friend is a fairy?”
Lily, not to be topped, asked, “Why is there a time-walker in your house, Olivia?”
This clearly was not going to be a normal ladies night at home for the three of us. I wasn’t sure which one to answer first.
“Elsa is the panther from my dreams. She is here to help me… it’s a long story. Why does Elsa think you are a fairy?”
Lily spoke to Elsa, ignoring me. “Who sent you?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” Elsa said. “Are you supposed to be guarding her?”
Lily looked slightly defensive as she turned to me to give her reply. “I met Olivia when we were neighbors. I don’t usually take humans as close friends, but I could see she was special. I am not officially her guardian, I never asked for permission. We became friends. I have always tried to look out for her. She is flying blind, you know.”
“Have you seen the demon?” Elsa asked.
Lily shook her head. “No, but I sensed his presence. I placed a few minor charms around her home to keep him away, but since I am not her guardian, I could not intervene.”
This seemed to satisfy Elsa, because she took a step away from me as she nodded in agreement. But I was not happy being an invisible third party.
“Hello,” I said, waving my arms at them both. “I am standing right here. Can you two tell me what is going on? Lily, you’re a fairy?”
Lily smiled. “Yes, but honestly, is that so shocking to you, after seeing Elsa appear? You must know by now that there is another world of creatures beyond what humans can see. When I first met you, I could tell right away that you had extra gifts.
I expected you to notice what I was, but you never did. After a while, I realized that you weren’t even trying to use your senses.”
I was feeling a little embarrassed. Only a few weeks back, I’d sat across from Lily at dinner, staring at the tattoo on her neck, which was clearly some kind of fairy marking, and she did not reveal herself to me. Now, everyone in the room seemed to know more about me than I did.
“So what is this? Are you my friend out of pity? I’ve been telling you everything that is happening to me—am I some kind of project for you to look after?”
“I’m a fairy, Olivia,” Lily said, clearly annoyed. “We don’t reveal ourselves to anyone. I’m your friend because I want to be. If I pitied you, I would have asked my clan to assign a real guardian to watch over you, someone you would never have seen nor met.”
“Is it against the rules to be friends with humans?”
Lily and Elsa looked at each other and laughed. “It’s not encouraged,” Lily said.
“Why?”
Elsa held her hands up. “I think you’ve heard enough for the time being, Olivia. Why don’t we go into the kitchen and make some dinner.”
****
CHAPTER 7
“Make some dinner” actually meant ordering Chinese food from around the corner. Once the food arrived, I opened an app on my iPhone to listen to a San Francisco Giants baseball game. We sat for a few moments eating pot stickers and listening to the sounds of the local announcers calling the plays.
There are probably plenty of people who wouldn’t expect sports to be a family interest in a house primarily full of women, but they would be wrong. My grandfather loved the Giants, and I have fond memories of listening to the play-by-play coming out of every radio, in every room of the house. When we would drive into the city, the sound of the cheering crowd from the car’s radio would envelop us as we crossed the Bay.
My mother is not as enthusiastic about baseball as I am. But she does enjoy soccer, a result of her many sojourns to Europe over the years. She calls it football, but few people in the U.S. understand what she means, since that name is reserved for the large, hulking creatures that hurl themselves at one another every Sunday. Soccer, on the other hand, is a sport that involves very thin, agile men (usually very handsome men) running up and down a field for 90 minutes in shorts. Who wouldn’t enjoy that? My dinner companions appeared not share my love for