Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

Corinne used to punch it, but it yielded an icy can of soda with a reluctant thump. “Yeah, right. Sister Ava Immaculata. I can see it now.” She pinned the phone between ear and shoulder so she could lift the metal tab. “Mind telling me why you’re in such a tizzy?”
    “This is no tizzy, Corinne Magdalena. This is utter exhaustion and despair. I give up on the whole lot. I just needed to call and wish you a nice life before I leave for the nunnery.”
    Corinne raised the can to her lips and leaned against the clean-ish white wall beside the snack machine. “Same to you. Leave an address, though, or you won’t get a Christmas card.”
    The curse Ava muttered managed to retain an unexpected air of grace and elegance solely due to its manner of delivery. It had certainly never sounded the same on the lips of the dockworkers who more frequently used it. “You fail to amuse me, Corinne, darling. But then, most things fail to amuse me when so many people I’ve tried to care for turn their backs on me within the space of six months.”
    Corinne swallowed fast to keep from choking on her drink. “Turn their backs on you? Going for the melodrama here?”
    “What would you call it when people ignore everything you try to do for them and shun the perfectly lovely dates you slave to fix them up with, only to end up making horrible decisions on their own?”
    “Reality?”
    Ava never raised her voice, but Corinne still had to fight the urge to pull the phone away from her ear and wince. “I can see I’ll get no support from you. And why I should have thought I might is beyond me. After all, weren’t you the first rat to desert my ship?”
    “Okay, first of all, get control of the metaphors, Av.” Corinne stabbed the elevator button, since she couldn’t stab her friend. “Second, I did not ‘desert’ any ships. It’s not like the fixes were working out anyway.”
    “They would have, if Regina and Melissa had done as they were told. I found them perfectly nice men, but no—”
    “Ava, you’re gonna have to let that one go. They managed to find their own men. We might see their choices as somewhat…unfortunate, but—”
    “Unfortunate? Corinne, they married outside their species! That is not something that a person just ‘lets go.’ That’s…that’s…well, it’s just unnatural. And more than that, it forces us—and by us, I mean me—to talk about characters from the late, late, late movie as if they were real. It’s altered the entire fabric of my reality, and I have to say that I am less than pleased.”
    “Yeah, Av, I think we all got that memo, but there’s not a whole lot anyone can do about it,” Corinne snapped. God, she was sick of this entire topic. Could she please just go five minutes without talking about the Others? “The ‘creatures,’ as you call them, are real. Dmitri is really a vampire and Graham is really a werewolf. And now Reggie is a vampire as well, and Missy is pregnant with another werewolf-to-be. This is the new reality. Grasp it and move on.”
    “How can you possibly sound so casual about it?” Ava demanded in a petulant voice. “Aren’t you the least little bit freaked out by having your entire notion of life, the universe, and everything suddenly flip on its axis? Doesn’t that give you the least littlest wiggins?”
    Corrine laughed, but honestly, it sounded more like a bark. Not really surprising, given how completely unamused she felt at the moment. “Believe me, casual is the last thing I feel at the moment. I just think the ship for getting upset about the demise of the fantasy fix-ups has pretty much sailed. We all have bigger things to worry about now.”
    She heard Ava sigh and imagined the other woman giving one of her vaguely Gallic shrugs. “I suppose it’s an ever-changing world. One must find ways to adapt.”
    Which was exactly what she had just spent the last few minutes saying. Corinne seriously debated making an extremely obscene gesture,