Free Three Hot Wishes (Fantasy Come to Life - Magic in the Real World Novel) by Elodie Chase Page B

be seen again by mere mortals.

 
    Dreading that I'd find the paper blank, I was relieved to see that she had indeed left her phone number on it. Even better, my makeup hadn't somehow leaked and ruined it, and the writing was legible.

 
    I dialed the number as fast as I could, a woman possessing a question that only Gina Huxley could answer.

 
    It rang and rang, and eventually I heard the mechanical click that comes before the recording that tells you 'This is me, I'm doing something else, leave a message and I'll do my best to ignore you'.

 
    "The number you have dialed has been disconnected. Please hang up or try again," an unsympathetic woman's voice said into my ear.

 
    Right. Of course. I tried again, punching in the number from scratch.

 
    "The number you have dialed has been-"

 
    I hung up. Gina had either written her number down wrong or, far more likely, she'd given me a fake one.

 
    She was at the heart of this. I knew it for a fact. I'd walked into the Sands cafe with nothing; no ideas, no hope, nothing but a desire to bitch and moan to the Smut Slingers about the terrible life I had.

 
    And I walked out with the power to make my characters come to life.

 
    I set the phone down, not knowing who else to call.

 
    Well, that wasn't exactly the truth of the matter. I wanted to call David. He always seemed to know the right thing to say, even if it wasn't what I wanted to hear.

 
    Especially if it wasn't what I wanted to hear.

 
    But I still felt like he had a crush on me, and the last thing I wanted to do was reach out to him and have it misinterpreted.

 
    It wasn't his fault that he and I never seemed to click. He wasn't what I was looking for and I wasn't who he thought I was. It was a recipe for disaster, and I didn't want to drag either one of us through that sort of thing if I could help it.

 
    Which left me with Grace. I sat down at the laptop and sent her an email.

 
    Got some time to talk?

 
    Grace was too old school to have a mobile phone, but she practically lived in front of her computer.

 
    Sure enough, I got a response less than sixty seconds later.

 
    Sorry... Headed out for a bit, honey. I think I know what you want to talk about, though. Why don't you kids ever listen to me when I tell you never to read the reviews? Those forums are nothing more than worthless pits of anonymous hate, and no good ever came from visiting them!

 
    My heart sank. I knew right away that she was talking about Good Reads. I avoided the site like the plague, but if there was a big enough storm on there for Grace to know about it, I couldn't help but look.

 
    Especially if it had something to do with my books.

 

 
 
 
    Chapter 17

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    Four hours later, I came up for air.

 
    Grace hadn't been kidding. Just about everything I'd had published over the course of the last three years had been one-star firebombed to Hell and back.

 
    And it wasn't just that. I'd gotten bad reviews before. It came with the territory, after all. Write something that enough people read, and you'll soon find that the amount of people who love it more than life itself will be approximately equal to the number of jerks who think you're a literary curse. I'd gotten a pretty thick skin over the years, but this...

 
    This was something else.

 
    It was as if dozens of people had decided to bring me down. Here were letters of rage and loathing, reviews that tore everything I'd ever written to ribbons. I clicked on the profiles of the reviewers, and found that, sure enough, the same people had spent the day posting frightfully bad reviews of all of my stuff.

 
    Ms. Harmony , one particularly scathing review read, hasn't the foresight or the knowledge of the English language that one needs to craft a story of this kind. She may mean well, but this story and the others like it she has written fails in every way to be realistic. All of the characters she