1
In Which a Kiss Does the Exact Opposite
The frog wasn’t Tala’s fault this time.
Short-circuiting Winona Burgess’s bespelled car? Accident, but yeah—that was her doing. Nullifying the glamour spells in Sandra Monroe’s phone? Sandra was a horrible bully; Tala remained unrepentant. Negating the cheating enchantment Devon Nash tried to smuggle in during last week’s calculus test? That was deliberate; Mrs. Powell graded on a curve. Magic barely worked in Invierno, this dry, forgotten armpit of a town in Arizona, so nobody ever knew Tala was responsible.
Turning people into frogs, though? That’s a completely different skill set.
Wordlessly, she watched it hop on unsteady legs, speeding away like it owed her money. It made for a rock, missed, and landed right on its ugly face before giving up. It turned yellow eyes toward her and ribbited accusingly.
Five minutes earlier, it had been a freckle-faced young boy named Mark Anthony Jones.
The wildest thing was not even the frog boy—it was that Tala was only the second most unusual person in Invierno. The winner of that unwanted prize went to the person standing next to her: two years older, with a shock of wheat-yellow hair and nervous blue eyes. “He shouldn’t have picked on you,” he reasoned.
“Most of them do.” Still, Tala was grateful. She didn’t want to get into trouble for punching someone again, no matter how much they deserved it.
She had watched Mark transform, already pudgy and toad-like by nature, into an even pudgier and more toad-like creature. His skin adopted a greenish hue that only deepened as the change continued, while his arms and legs and then the rest of him shrunk and bent. His eyes widened and kept widening, his lips retreating and stretching grotesquely. And then, having settled into his final form, he’d croaked, slimy tongue hanging halfway out of his mouth in a way frogs had never done before in the history of time, because Mark could never do anything right.
It was not the shocking experience Tala thought it would be. In fact, it had been almost satisfying. That Mark had bullied her for most of their passing acquaintance had something to do with her schadenfreude.
“Sorry you had to kiss him,” she said.
“Yeah, well. I don’t mind kissing guys. Just this one,” he said as he wiped his mouth, and then paused again before adding, “Not like I kiss guys all the time” a smidge too defensively.
“You didn’t need to do that for me.”
“He called you a half monkey. That’s not right.”
Lots of things weren’t right that people did anyway. Tala had gotten enough vicious texts from girls over the years to fill a scrapbook. The school had suspended her for three days once for getting into a fight with a boy who’d spread rumors that her mother was a mail-order bride. She didn’t have magic to fight with, but her fists did a good enough job to compensate. She shrugged, pretending like it didn’t bother her. “I get a lot of those.”
“Do your folks know?”
“My mum has talked to some of their parents.” She wasn’t entirely sure what her mum had said the last time, but she had definitely terrified people to the point that they hurriedly crossed to the other side of the street when they saw her coming. “I won’t tell anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she offered. Magic—hurl-a-fireball-like-you’re-a-wizard-from-the-Middle-Ages magic, anyway—was banned in the Royal States of America. Anyone caught using it could face steep fines, imprisonment, and even deportation. The effects of magic had been devastating during the last war, and the fear still lingered. Fortunately, learning spells required obsidian stones containing powerful magic that people called glyphs, and those were hard to come by outside of Avalon. The innately gifted like Tala and her mother usually just put their heads down and pretended to be normal like everyone else.
Spelltech, on the other hand, was more widely accepted. Spelltech was the loophole—if a spell is cast on an item instead of on a person, the original caster still takes on the sacrifice but allows anyone else use of said item. This magic had more restrictions and less variety. Cheaper versions could still work using inferior, artificial glyphs imported from China.
But even sanctioned spells never seemed to work in Invierno, like magic didn’t want to be caught dead here either. Spelltech cable, for instance, generally produced five minutes of programming followed by two hours of static—cable providers who’d move into the area hoping to net a hefty market share, more often than not found themselves moving right out again. And it took a lawsuit to learn that Steedbrew Extra Bold Coffee Elixir didn’t work, not because the company was a scam, but because most caffeine spells just didn’t function in town either.
“I’m Alex…” A significant pause. “Smith. I live down the street.” The boy looked down. “Probably not the first meeting you envisioned,” he added, a little miserably.
He was still trying to keep up the pretense, though Tala knew who he was. Lola Urduja and her parents had been planning Alex’s arrival for weeks. Tala had been instructed to treat the prince like she would a normal person. As if she had friendships with other nobles to compare to.
But even then, no one had told her that Alexei Tsarevich, the last remaining prince of Avalon, could turn people into frogs. “I’ve never met royalty before, Your Highness, but it’s not so bad.”
She’d said the words softly, but the boy darted a quick, fearful glance around all the same. “You shouldn’t be saying that,” he muttered.
“Seems like maybe you need to hear it every now and then.”
“Ha. Maybe I do. Been bounced from place to place enough times, it’s hard to remember who I’m supposed to be.”
“I’m Tala Warnock. I live here.” She gestured at the house behind her. “Looks like we’re neighbors.”
“Looks like it. Any interesting places around here?”
“There’s the abandoned Casa Grande domes to the west, if you like graffiti and mold. And ghosts. Some people hear one moaning at night there.” The Casa Grande domes were a fire hazard in the form of an abandoned tech facility. The business failed and the company had moved on, but nobody had gotten around to pulling the whole place down yet.
“Sounds like it could only be improved with a wrecking ball.”
“They’ve been trying. Apparently it’s also the only thing around here that doesn’t reject magic, and the walls had been coated with some weird spell that’s made it invulnerable.”
Alex made a face. “I take it not a lot of things happen in this town.”
“That’s a good assumption, yeah.”
“Warnock. So, you’re Kay’s daughter?”
“Yup.”
Alex looked unconvinced, probably because Tala was short and brown as can be, and her father was a pale-skinned, bearded mountain.
“Well, he is my father. I look more like my mom.”
“People say I look like my mom too,” he said, and a bitter smile crossed his face.
“I’m sorry.” History books and Wikipedia had not gone into the specifics of his parents’ deaths, but Tala could only imagine. How do you offer your condolences to someone whose parents were killed when he was only five years old? How do you cheer up a prince whose kingdom had been literally frozen, seemingly for all of eternity?