Free With a Kiss (Twisted Tales) by Stephanie Fowers

I remembered the hands, and shook my head. “I’m over it.”
    Dad wasn’t through with me yet. “Why do you still have that baby from the play, honey?”
    “I . . . I’m babysitting.”
    “Still? It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”
    I took the baby from Hobs and ripped open the door to see my concerned dad in the hallway. His eyes moved to the baby and I gave him my most pleading expression. “Dad, it’s a huge emergency. The parents are in the hospital. Nobody else can take care of her. I have to take her overnight.”
    My dad looked at my mother. They let me get away with murder—that’s what I was banking on. They wouldn’t with Daphne, but then again she was normal, and they wanted so badly for me to be normal. I waited breathlessly for the verdict and tried to look motherly. Having a baby under my wing would only make me more human.
    Just as I thought, my parents broke into a smile and nodded. Psychologists. They left, murmuring something about finding blankets for my new charge. I slammed the door shut again.
    “Halley?” Daphne called through the door. Oops. She was still out there and the most dogged of the bunch. “I just want to talk to you. It’s been so long since we’ve done anything together.”
    Daphne just wanted an excuse to spend time with me. I shoved the baby at Hobs and slid down the flimsy door onto a pile of clothes. I put my hands over my ears the more she talked. I couldn’t understand why this was affecting me so much. For some reason, I really wanted to have some girl time with her too. I heard loneliness in her voice that I never understood before, and now? It hurt really bad not to go to her. “Not right now,” I said, “okay?”
    I heard her shuffle away and felt a sense of loss, but I wasn’t sure why. She had something she wanted to tell me, something important to her . . . and I actually cared. My hand went over my heart where the faery queen had touched me. I had to fix this. I got up and swiped all the junk off my chair, so I could sit down at the computer. I needed to figure out where the faeries were and how to get the baby there . . . and hopefully break this curse they had over me. I couldn’t take being normal anymore. It hurt too much. Pulling the year-old Post-it Notes from my screen, I brought up the Internet and typed in fairies with an i . I got more than a million links.
    Hobs dragged a chair one-handed from my vanity to sit down next to my computer. He stared at me. Babs did too and I had a hard time concentrating on the information on the computer screen. “Do you have a shard of ice in your heart? Is that what happened to you when you got sick?”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Can you feel?”
    I snorted. More than ever. I didn’t want to admit that my heart had been virtually dead before this. Just who were these faeries anyway? And why did they have so much control over me? “The queen sent you to help me,” I said, “so help me already. Why don’t you tell me how to get this baby back home?”
    “Wait three days. You heard the queen.”
    “I can’t wait three days!” I skimmed through the sites like my life depended on it, which it did. Even now I could feel my eyes water over with exhaustion. Besides the threat of drowning with these new emotions that washed over me, I felt like I was swimming through heavy water . . . slower than a zombie. Or maybe more like a Banshee? A drowning mermaid?
    Forget it.
    “And you think an Internet search will tell you what you need to know? Such faith.”
    “Well, you won’t tell me!” I clicked on the first site and then to the next and the next. “I need to figure out how to get to the Otherworld—the sooner, the better. If you won’t help me, then quit bugging me.”
    Hobs leaned his chin against Babs’ bobble head. She shook her swirly toy at me. “Baby, this is the Otherworld.”
    I refused to believe it and skimmed through the pages, site after site: faeries were a race