Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

right. Fine. Fill me in. But I won’t pretend to be happy about it.” She also wouldn’t pretend to do more than a half-assed job. Quarter-assed, if she could get away with it.
    “I don’t need you to be happy. Besides, they say hardship builds character.” Hitching up his battered khaki trousers, Hank perched one hip on the edge of her desk and folded his arms across his chest. “Okay, first off, you got the first sighting back in May. Sort of an isolated incident, that one. Easy to write off. But then around the second week in June, you start to hear stories from sources all over Manhattan that pretty much corroborate one another. All witnesses saw the same thing, and none of them knew one another before they made their reports.”
    Corinne looked up from the notes she’d been jotting down. “What did they see? A little man in a red-and-white suit with a pointy hat and a sack full of presents?”
    Hank ignored her. “Witnesses reported seeing an extremely fair blond man, about six feet tall, with hair almost down to his butt and pointy ears.”
    Corinne latched onto that with all thirty-two teeth. Maybe she could still play this off?
    She rolled her eyes with exaggerated flair. “Oh, for God’s sake, Hank. That’s not a believable elf sighting. That’s just an escapee from a Lord of the Rings convention. Some teenage geek with way too much time on his hands dressed himself up like Orlando Bloom and paraded down Fifth thinking he was the shit. Case solved. Can I go home now?”
    Hank shook his head. “Not so fast, kid. I’m not done yet.” He shifted his shoulders and continued. “Now, the man in and of himself wouldn’t have raised so much as an eyebrow under normal circumstances. This is Manhattan, after all.” Corinne grumbled under her breath, but she didn’t interrupt. “So almost universally, the witnesses initially dismissed the weird guy as just that—a weird guy. But that was before he started doing magic.”
    Corinne sighed. Damn his persistence. She tried to match it. “Okay, forget the convention. He was an escapee from a Dungeons and Dragons tournament. Did the ‘magic’ involve dice rolls and phrases like, My wizard calls on the House of Illusion to summon forth a seventh-level Temporal Distortion plus three ?”
    “From what I hear, it just involved a temporal distortion. Would the plus-three thing have been more impressive?”
    Her pencil paused over her notepad, and Corinne looked up. Christ, did someone have evidence on this guy? “What did you say?”
    “Would the plus-three thing have been—”
    “Not that,” she growled, her eyes narrowing. “Before that. The part where you said it did involve a temporal distortion.”
    “That’s what the witnesses say.”
    Corinne looked longingly at the aspirin and debated pretending she hadn’t read the warning label about permanent liver damage. “You’re telling me Orlando waved his magic wand and opened a rift in the time–space continuum?”
    “Get real,” he scoffed. “You’re just mixing metaphors. Magic wands and time–space continuums are two totally different animals. Besides, no one mentioned anything about a wand.”
    Her hand inched toward the aspirin. Who really needed a liver anyway?
    “Forget the wand,” she snarled. “I think the rift is the material question here, no?”
    Hank shrugged. “Whatever. It’s your story.”
    “Are you trying to kill me?”
    Hank ignored her, or maybe he just didn’t hear the question, since her face was buried in her arms and smushed up against the surface of her desk. It muffled the whimpering. “The witnesses claim that the man in question walked up to the wall of an abandoned building, and the bricks slid apart to let him through.”
    Corinne turned her head just enough to glare at her boss through one narrowed eye. “Meaning that Orlando Bloom took a trip to Neverland. Did he fly away on a tornado or take a trip through an enchanted wardrobe while he was at