Three's a Spell

Her Chance Encounter

[Elora]

I should have been brewing love tonics. I should have been preparing for the week’s apothecary orders that were beginning to pile up. Instead, I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of my shop, surrounded by open books, muttering to myself and sipping reheated tea that tasted faintly of regret.

“Vampire dream residue... no, too specific... Emotion echoes, dream-based anomalies...” I flipped a page, scanning the chapter titles. “Why does every useful book insist on rhyming?”

Hazel poked her head in from the back room, fluttering her iridescent wings just enough to hover over the mess. “Please tell me this new obsession of yours is about a client and not your new vampire boyfriends.”

Hazel was the first friend I made when I moved to Summerset. The renovations in my shop were not finished by the time I arrived, but this gave me time to focus on my garden. After only a few days of arriving at the empty plot that was a long abandoned community garden I had grown woven willow branches that replaced the walls of the disheveled greenhouse. A tall willow tree stood behind the back wall and arched over with a canopy of vining wisteria that roofed the new building. After winding large white stoned up and around the willow tree I enlisted the help of my real estate agent, Eryna a water witch.

She enchanted the water from my well to flow in a river up my winding rocks that then rained down under the umbrella of branches and vines that covered my home. She created a water-proof barrier under the wisteria to stop the water from entering my home; it instead flowed down an invisible orb and into the ground around my home.

After only a few more days I had my garden in full swing. I had gathered seeds from all the plants in my garden back home and quickly helped them grow in the neat rows and chaotic pathways that ran through the rest of my land. Under rows of fruit trees were my hostas, ferns, and gingers. Walkways of clover and walking thyme trailed between the beds of countless flowers, each protected from harmful bugs by bushes of herbs.

I was hanging my bird feeders in my trellis tunnels under the shade of squash leaves when I heard her. “I haven’t seen this garden alive since I was a kid!” The cheery and confident voice startled me out of my bliss.

I turned to see a beautiful fairy around my age with large voluminous waves in her dark hair dancing in the wind made by the flutter of her blood-red wings. The base of her wings faded to translucency the closer they got to her skin. She wore a red strapless dress that hugged her body down to just below her hips before the rest weightlessly flowed in the wind down to her toes.

As she stepped down from the air, her leg extended through a slit in her dress that reached so high that it revealed the crease between her thigh and abdomen. She danced past me as I stood open-mouthed, and she began to twirl through the walkways, only briefly stopping to smell flowers as she passed. “I swear this place was nothing but dead grass and a busted-up greenhouse only a few days ago,” she chimed in wonder.

“It was,” I finally managed to say. “I just moved here this week. Th- This is my garden.”

“YOU did this?!” She soared through the air before I knew what was happening and tackled me to the plush mossy ground in a hug. I had no idea what was happening, and certainly couldn’t have guessed she was about to become my closest friend.

She told me her name was Hazel. She was the daughter of a fairy in the community that used to tend to this garden before they moved to larger land. She used to love coming to the area to play in the field and smell the flowers. When her family business moved, they stopped growing flowers and herbs and focused more on fruits and vegetables. The fae run almost all of the food markets in the area. She joked about how with a garden like this, I would need to open a flower shop so that none of her boyfriends would ever be able to show up empty-handed again.

She was confident and outgoing; she would drag me around to all the town events and introduce me to everyone. Seriously, I swear that girl knows everyone in town. She was like a personal welcoming committee in those days. It was no surprise when she opened up a dance club that during the day acted as the town's social event center.

Hazel was the only one that was able to convince me to leave my home or shop for anything other than 'errands'. I owe my entire social life to that girl.