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Be Careful What You Wish For (The Swann Sisters Chronicles Book 2) by Evangeline Anderson (1)

Prologue

On my twenty-third birthday, my fairy godmother ruined my life, but I wasn’t surprised. After all, it certainly wasn’t the first time.

My name is Cassandra Esmeralda Swann (Cass for short) and the first thing you have to know about me is that I’m one eighth fairy. One eighth. Not much, but enough to qualify as someone with fairy blood as opposed to a non-fairy or someone who’s purely human.

Now, if I was a marginal member of almost any other minority, I could get scholarships and maybe a sense of my ethnic heritage. If I was Native American I could go to the reservation and learn the ways of my people. If I was Asian American I could take a trip to China or Japan or maybe just Chinatown. Hell, if I was Norwegian I could go to freaking Minnesota.

But fairies don’t hand out scholarships and they don’t want anything to do with ‘half-breeds’ like my sisters and me. In fact, we’re not even allowed in fairy land, otherwise known as the Realm of the Fae where most magical creatures make their home, for fear that we’ll try to find full-blooded fairy husbands and contaminate somebody else’s bloodline. Not that we’d want to—being married to a man with a great big…uh, pair of wings isn’t exactly my dream come true. But try telling that to the full-blooded fairies, the rich, famous, and ultra-snobby of the fae world. It’s like saying you wouldn’t want to marry a movie star—who in Hollywood would believe you?

So being one eighth fairy isn’t enough to net me any real magical powers or a big pretty pair of glittery wings, which all the full-blooded fairies have. And it’s not enough to let me disappear in a puff of magical pink smoke or live thousands of years.

Being one eighth fairy just means that my sisters and I got assigned a fairy godmother to grant yearly birthday wishes. That doesn’t sound so bad so let me explain—we have the fairy godmother from hell. Seriously, the woman is a cold hearted…well let’s just say it rhymes with witch and leave it at that.

Most people would think it’s wonderful to get a yearly wish but let me spell it out for you— the wish can’t permanently affect anyone but the wisher, you can’t wish for more wishes or no wish at all, and the magic keeps you from telling anyone without fairy blood outside the family (my family, I mean) about it directly, no matter what the result. And it’s surprisingly hard to make wishes that don’t make your life a living hell.

The FG, as my sisters and I call her, resents having been assigned to grant wishes for girls with barely a drop of real fairy blood in their veins. As a result, she’s not very careful with how her magic turns out. Which means our yearly wishes are often brushes with disaster. We even have planning sessions before any one of us turns another year older to think up the smallest, most harmless wish possible. The idea is to wish for something too insignificant to ruin your life but even the smallest wishes can backfire.

There was the time my older sister, Phil, wished that all her Barbie’s clothes would fit her. (She was ten at the time.) But instead of growing the clothes up to her size, the FG’s magic shrank Phil down to twelve inches high. Imagine living the rest of your life in the big pink Barbie dream house. It might sound nice when you’re ten, but when you get a little bit older you realize that Ken is lacking something as a conversationalist and also, he’s not exactly anatomically correct. It was a mess until I got our Fairy Godmother to take it back—something she hates to do, mainly because she doesn’t want to be bothered.

Then there was the time my younger sister, Rory, wished she could talk to animals. (She’s wanted to be a veterinarian ever since she was six and found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest.) Anyway, the FG’s magic turned her into a schnauzer so she could talk to her four legged friends first hand. Not at all what she had in mind. I spent my allowance on Kibbles ‘n Bits for a whole week before our fairy godmother finally took that one back.

And I’ve had my own run-ins with the FG too. For instance, the time when I turned fifteen and wished to have breasts as big as this girl at my school—Christy Seatons. I’m well endowed now, actually more than I’d like in both the boobs and the hips department, but at fifteen, I was so flat the walls were jealous. So it seemed like a good wish except that my fairy godmother screwed it up in typical fashion and I ended up with breasts as big as the porn star Trixie Teatons instead. I had to live with what my little sister Rory calls ‘porno titties’ for over a week until the FG finally showed up and fixed her mistake. I thought it was bad being teased for stuffing my training bra but it was nothing compared to the ribbing I took when my bust grew from a triple A cup to a double G overnight. Talk about a nightmare!

Even the smallest wishes can backfire. The year after my disastrous ‘porno titties’ wish, I went for something small and wished that my toenail polish would never chip. I’m an artist so I always have either clay or oil paint and sometimes both under my fingernails, but I like to keep my pedicure nice to compensate. In hindsight, it would have been better to make the wish when I was wearing a more normal colored polish. But I was sixteen and as it happened, I had just done my toes in ‘blizzard blue.’ Owing to the literal nature of the FG’s magic, that’s the color they still were at the time of my birthday.

That’s right, my toenails haven’t changed since I was sixteen. They’re still a bright icy blue and no amount of polish remover can change that. I’ve even tried painting new colors over the old polish but they don’t last. No matter how many coats I use, the blue starts showing through before the other polish is even dry.

So, I’m stuck with blue toenails, the same way I’m stuck with ‘eyes like dewy violets, skin like fresh fallen snow, and coal black hair’ which were my birth gifts from the FG—the ones she slapped me with before I was old enough to wish for myself.

It could be worse, I guess. My younger sister Rory has beautiful red hair (hair like spun rubies) and emerald eyes, but when she tries to sing, it comes out sounding like a bird twittering because of the FG’s gift of, ‘a voice like the birds in Spring.’

I was especially anxious about my twenty-third birthday because of what happened a month before with my older sister, Phil. See, in addition to hair of sunshine gold, eyes that mirror the sky, and lips that shame the reddest rose, the FG had also saddled Phil with a personality as ‘mild as a lamb’s’ which meant she was basically spineless. I’m sorry to say that because I love her, but it’s true. She was trapped in a dead-end job with a slob of a boss who was always trying to play grab-ass with her and living with a fiancé that gave jerks a bad name. Could it get any worse?

It could and did when Phil accidentally shouted out a wish to speak her mind. She suddenly grew a spine and a mouth to match but the wish screwed her up at work like you couldn’t believe. Suddenly she was telling her co-workers where to get off and her boss where to stick it.

Phil eventually got the FG to reverse the wish, but being the witch with a capital B that she is, our fairy godmother did just that—she literally reversed the wish. So that instead of telling everyone exactly what she was thinking, Phil had to listen to everyone else say what they were thinking and believe me, it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

She found out a lot of nasty things, including the fact that her jerk of a fiancé was cheating on her. (Well, that was actually good because she finally saw the light and broke up with him.) But she didn’t want to hear everybody’s dirty little secrets all the time (who could blame her?) so she asked the FG to fix it again. Only this time, with a little help from Rory who tends to say the first thing that comes out of her mouth (no magic wish needed there—it’s just the way Rory is), Phil ended up saying the opposite of what she was thinking.

That was a very confusing time for all of us, especially Josh, Phil’s best friend who was madly in love with her (another interesting little fact she found out about the same time her fiancé admitted he was cheating.) Anyway, Josh nearly moved back to California because Phil had to tell him she didn’t love him which was exactly the opposite of how she felt. Talk about a mess!

A wish that goes bad three times like that turns into a curse. Don’t ask me how—it’s in the fairy magic by-laws or something. Anyway, Phil had to break the curse which she did, with a little help from Josh. She wouldn’t give me the dirty details, but I suspect that it took more than just a kiss to overcome the FG’s nasty magic.

Whatever it was, it broke our fairy godmother’s hold over her forever, which was sure to piss Her Sparklieness off in a big way. I mean, Phil got rid of her birthday wishes once and for all and never has to worry about our fairy godmother screwing up her life again. Which is great, don’t get me wrong. But fairies don’t take kindly to having their magic broken and guess who was next in the line of fire—me.

My twenty-third birthday was coming up in a day or so and as anyone with any fairy or fae blood will tell you, odd-numbered birthdays are the worst. I can’t explain it but the magic gets stronger somehow and there’s a lot more potential for things to go wrong.

I could only hope to think up a wish small enough and harmless enough that the FG couldn’t screw it up. But looking down at my bright blue toenails, I was beginning to wonder if that was possible.

Somehow, I doubted it.