Glimmers of Glass (A Glimmers Novel #1: Cinderella)

Chapter 1

The door burst open and hit the wall like a gunshot. My hands faltered, and the stack of papers in them fluttered to the polished wood floor.

Imogen posed in the doorway, her hands outstretched against the elaborately carved frame.

"Tabitha is in the hospital."

My boss, Lorinda, stepped out of her office, a large conch shell pressed to her ear and her hand cupped over its opening. She uncovered it long enough to say, "Barb, let me call you back," and then waved Imogen into the room.

The two Junior Godmothers in the corner, pale-haired Aster and freckled Maybelle, stared from around the edges of their cubicles. Seth looked up from his desk in the corner of the open floor plan. Rosemary, a Senior Faerie Godmother, rolled out of her office on a wheeled chair.

Imogen's eyes scanned past Lorinda and across the room. She locked onto where I knelt, gathering the papers I'd dropped, then turned her attention back to my boss. 

"Flying accident," Imogen said. "Some drunk idiot in a pumpkin carriage plowed into her magic carpet. Broke her arm and who knows what else and knocked her fifty feet out of the air. Luckily a wizard nearby magicked her up before she fell into past the invisibility barrier and into traffic or she'd have been run over and we'd have had a hell of a time tracking down all the Humdrums who needed memory erases."

Lorinda pursed her lips at the hell but waited to speak until Imogen had finished. "Someone ought to outlaw those carriages," Lorinda said. "They're impossible to control."

"Only in Portland would they be a thing," Imogen said. "Freaking organic everything." She craned her neck and called across the room to me, "She's going to be out for months. They said they can patch her up, but it's going to take time."

Lorinda turned to me, too. The look in her arms made my shoulders lock up with tension. She was trying to figure out what to do with me.

I never liked when people tried to decide what to do with me.

"You'll have to reassign her case," I said, clambering to my feet. "Or drop it. We hadn't started on this next one."

Tabitha, my supervisor, was a Senior Faerie Godmother, and I was her intern. Her now-useless intern. That thought didn't bother me as much as it should have. This was a freak accident, and even my dad couldn't throw that big of a tantrum if I got laid off for something so crazy.

I tried to arrange my features into something mournful. I felt genuinely bad for Tabitha, of course. But the thought of getting out of this job and onto something that might actually be useful later in life made a hope I couldn't control bubble up inside me.

But Lorinda's narrowed eyes didn't exactly say laid off. 

"We can't afford that," she said at last. She ran a hand across her chin and up her cheek, then blew out a giant sigh and said, "We're already coming in under projections, thanks to the Goblin King."

The Goblin King had just dropped us as his daughter's matchmaker after discovering the girl had already secretly married a kid from Ohio. Lorinda had been counting on that job bringing in a good chunk of gold. The cases for royalty always did. With that gone, she'd been poking the budget until it cried to make the year's numbers line up.

Unfortunately, her next words were even worse than her daily rant about that case. She pointed at me with her seashell. "How many cases have you shadowed now?"

The room filled with a bad, bad feeling.

"Four," I said carefully. "But I didn't do much. Just watched and kept records."