Page 28 of Wickedly Ever After
The one awful thing about being a good witch? You aren’t allowed to throw a decent hex to save your life.
Magic and Mischief—A Thousand Years of Happily-Ever-After: A Memoir
Ida North
Ida wanted to take out her travel wand and hex Hector with a terrific case of butt boils. But she was a good witch.
There he stood on the landing, glowering down at her from his considerable height advantage. How unfair. She was shrinking as she aged, but he stood straight and tall as a dragon-lance, the asshole. A frosty smile turned the left corner of his mouth upward, but the rest of his face could have been made from marble and the expression fixed somewhere between annoyance and outright dislike.
Big old butt boils, the kind that would mean he couldn’t sit for a solid week. She gripped the handle of her wand and forced a pointed smile. “Why, Hector, I didn’t expect you to be at the game. I thought you couldn’t stand seeing the Thieves lose in person.”
“Oh, I would never miss an opportunity to watch the Rogues go up in flames.”
King Rupert laughed, a large, hearty guffaw, as he clapped his meaty hands on her shoulder and Hector’s, pulling them together. “Now, you two! Save the trash talk for the big day tomorrow.”
Boils for him too, right on his forehead, in a pattern that read, “Royal Prick.” Nobody ever taught that man to respect his witches.
“Shall we?” she said, shrugging out from under Rupert’s arm and waving Hector ahead. “Wickedness before goodness?”
“In that case.” Hector stepped aside.
So they proceeded up the stairs ahead of the king, stride for stride.
“I didn’t expect to see you here, Hector,” she said. “You usually shun company.”
“I thought it would be nice to get out of the hotel tonight.”
“Oh, did you?” Ida’s words slipped between her teeth. That ass. She was right. He had planned it after all. His gnome was probably just as bad as him. Neither one of them would have any reservations about destroying literally the sweetest soul in the world to hurt her. She’d spent the better part of the day begging Hari to go to the game with her and not to dinner with Tinbit.
***
“But I can’t,” Hari had said miserably as he’d styled her hair for the game. “I won’t stand him up.”
“But he stood you up, didn’t he?” Lying hurt a little, but she was responsible for his happily-ever-after. If Hari ever found out that he’d been used as Hector’s pawn to punish Ida, he’d neverforgive himself. Worse, he might never trust anyone ever again. She couldn’t live with herself if that happened. Damn Hector. She’d never wanted to permanently curse him into stone so much in her life.
“Maybe he came before us. Or after us. It’s not his fault. It’s mine.”
She reached back and touched his hand. “It’s absolutely not your fault! Did you tell him you’d meet him in the garden? No. He did. And he’s the one who didn’t show up. He’s not worth your time. And I don’t want you to be hurt, sweetheart. You mean too much to me.”
He squeezed her hand back. “I know, but you’re right. I need to give this a chance. I’ve never talked to anyone who I connected with so well.”
Oh, she could kick herself for that “let love kindle” talk. “You haven’t talked to him at all! You can’t get to know someone through letters, Hari.” She turned back to face the mirror with a huff.
“I don’t know about that. You seem to know Hector pretty well,” Hari said. The clipped tone in his voice let her know she might be overstepping the bounds of their friendship.
“That isn’t the same thing! Those letters are—They were—”
Hari pulled a curler out of her hair. “Were what, exactly?”
She pursed her lips. “Jokes,” she said. “It started as a joke.” Up until five hundred years ago, she and Hector only really interacted at the Happily-Ever-After and at the Witches’ Council afterward, secure and comfortable in their mutual loathing for one another. Any letters that passed between them were short and to the point. But one year she needed to ask him a question regarding his dragon. What was it? Something about the arrangements for the cave lair and the princess being allergic tosomething. Oh, yes, nettles. The poor child had been knitting shirts made out of the nasty things since she was twelve and now they broke her out in hives. On a whim, she’d slipped a tickle charm in the letter to annoy him. He’d written back taunting her about how he planned to hex the princess’s lips with a fever blister curse that would make hives seem like a spa treatment and sent a sample. She’d turned his hair green in retaliation. He said baldness would be the next fad in hairstyles, and then she’d needed to buy a wig…
“I suppose I simply like sparring with him,” she said, knotting her scarf in her lap. “And anyway, he’s not writing to me now.”
Hari stabbed her gently with the blunt end of a hairpin. “You were lonely, Ida. That’s why you wrote to him. And I bet he’s lonely too. So don’t tell me you can’t get attached to somebody because of letters.”
“Hector is not my friend.”
“I didn’t say he was.”
