Free Americana Fairy Tale by Lex Chase Page B

again.
    Honeysuckle flittered to the window. She hovered for a moment and then poked at the glass with her tiny finger. Atticus pressed his lips into a thin line when she flailed as the jolt of magic shot through her. She hummed to herself and fluttered in a wide circle around the room.
    “He doesn’t even have our parents’ numbers,” Atticus said and sank to the bed.
    Honeysuckle flew toward the air-conditioning vent. “Taylor has problems, sweetie, that not even my no-goodnik husband could fix. Not like you.” She gave him a glittering smile. “Thanks to my guidance, you are practically perfect in every way.”
    Atticus withheld the urge to frown at Honeysuckle’s comment. He looked at Taylor’s phone again. “And we can’t get the mundanes involved. They’d be outmatched. Or go insane from magic exposure.” He frowned at Honeysuckle. “Do you think we should call Mom and Dad? Because….” He waved Taylor’s phone, asking the silent question.
    Honeysuckle’s wings drooped, and she hung her head. “Because Sir Hatfield wants nothing to do with Taylor. He and Lady Hatfield didn’t bother to attend the wedding.”
    “We could try?” Atticus asked and dialed his father’s number. Within the time of two flutters of Honeysuckle’s wings, Atticus was rewarded with the sharp pain of a screeching interference. He jerked the phone from his ear and took a breath. “He’s jammed the fucking phones,” he said, holding his head.
    Atticus considered Taylor’s phone and flipped through the screens. This time he opened the photos. Taylor had taken a multitude of self-portraits with his friends, who Atticus could tell didn’t have the Enchant spark about them. Parties, nightclubs, record-setting stacks of Red Bull cans, and an embarrassing amount of cat pictures. But it was a particular stream of photos that caught Atticus off guard: snow. It snowed frequently while Taylor was in college in Syracuse. Every snowfall, Taylor made snowmen or other snow creatures, snow angels, wrote messages in the snow, and even had videos of snowball fights. One photo stunned Atticus. Someone had taken a portrait of Taylor on his own phone, his long dark hair speckled with snow, his skin pale and smooth as a princess’s should be, and he looked into the distant skies, his peach-pink eyes filled with a sense of longing. Atticus flipped again to a video from the same photo.
    Off camera, a young man asked, “What do you want most in the world?”
    Taylor kept watching the sky. “Only one thing?”
    “Okay… I guess a few things,” his friend said.
    Taylor looked into the camera, and the sense of loneliness in such happy-colored eyes crushed Atticus long before Taylor made his confession. “To be Snow White,” Taylor said. “Because Snow White always lives happily ever after.”
    Taylor’s friend chuckled. “Dude, you are so weird sometimes.”
    Atticus swallowed hard, and the tears burned, and when he tried to blink them away, they escaped down his cheeks. “I just want him back,” he whispered and quickly wiped his face. “He was so desperate to leave all this, and now he’s gone….”
    Atticus and Honeysuckle sat in silence. He knew Honeysuckle was at a loss for what to say. He didn’t know where to begin. How to begin. How to mend the things between him and Taylor that had spun so out of control.
    If anything, he wanted to take away Taylor’s sadness. He wanted so desperately for Taylor to know, Curseless or not, Enchant or not, Atticus was still his brother. Whatever path Taylor chose to follow in life, Atticus admired him, supported him. He worshipped Taylor’s indomitable spirit. He idolized Taylor because Atticus wasn’t strong enough to embrace the man inside, clawing to get out. Atticus had no idea, not the slightest clue, that Taylor had his own ideas, and it seemed Taylor had it exactly the opposite.
    Darkness slithered into the room, and Atticus shivered with the sudden chill. He turned and watched the