The door burst open, hitting the wall like a gunshot. The stack of papers fell from my hands to the polished wood floor.

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

"Tabitha is in the hospital."

The reaction was immediate and as dramatic as she'd probably hoped. 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, Aster and Maybelle, both stared from around the edges of their cubicles. Rosemary, a Faerie Godmother, rolled out of her office on a wheeled chair.

Imogen shrugged, her eyes scanning past Lorinda and across the room. She locked onto where I knelt, gathering the papers I'd dropped, then turned her attention back to our boss. "Flying accident," she said. "You know that magic carpet she always rides? Well, this morning, some drunk idiot in one of those trendy pumpkin carriages plowed into her. Broke her arm and who knows what else and knocked her fifty feet out of the air. Luckily a wizard was nearby who 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 wipes."

Lorinda pursed her lips at the hell but didn't interrupt until Imogen had finished. "Someone ought to outlaw those carriages," she said. "They're impossible to control. Flying gourds, really."

"Only in Portland would they be a thing," Imogen said. She craned her neck to look around Lorinda 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, and I didn't like the look in her eyes. She was trying to figure out what to do with me, and I never liked when other 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 was my supervisor. She was a Faerie Godmother, and I was her intern. Her now-useless intern, and 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 as crazy as that. But Lorinda's narrowed eyes didn't exactly said "laid off."

Imogen's eyes darting back and forth from Lorinda's expression to my face. 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.

"We can't afford that," Lorinda 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 all the numbers line up for the year.

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?"

I had a bad feeling about where this conversation was headed.

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

"That'll have to be good enough," Lorinda said. "The job's yours. Get the paperwork started."

She nodded once at me as though that wrapped it all up. I clutched the papers tightly to my chest. "Hold on," I said. "I don't think that's a good idea."

"It'll have to be good enough," Lorinda said. She was already turning around and heading back to her office. Her pale purple suit made her look like a chubby sprig of lilac. "I can't hire anyone else on such short notice. You're the best we've got."

She really was desperate. No one in their right mind would pass this job off to a lowly summer intern, let alone me. I didn't even get the job because of my sterling qualifications or enthusiasm for the noble calling of faerie godmothering. Nope: I got it because my dad was on the Grand Council of Magical Beings for the City of Portland and, as if being on the Council wasn't enough, a voting member of the Greater Pacific Northwest Magical Alliance. My dad was a big deal. Whatever he said, went, and that applied even if it was completely opposite to how I'd planned my junior year of high school would go.

I wanted to work in botany and conservation, not godmothering. I wanted to go to a nice Humdrum college, study nice Humdrum plants, and settle down to a nice, normal life, where I wasn't the daughter of Reginald and Marigold Feye and the poster child for the bright future of the magical community. That didn't seem like too much to ask, especially when my dad was constantly reminding me that most Humdrums would kill to have a piece of my world. Fine, I thought. Let them have it. I'd trade any day.

I rubbed the spot between my eyes, pushing my glasses down and staring across the room. The view was just as clear without the glasses, but it was made busy by the shimmers of magic everywhere. Lorinda, back in her office, glimmered enough through the doorway to make it look like some kind of sci-fi anomaly was happening in there. Amity, crossing the room to the printer, was covered in a haze of soft pearl sparkles. And Imogen, standing right in front of me, pulsed warm and gold. I shoved the glasses up, and the warm haze around her body disappeared.

"Congrats," she said mildly.

I stared at her, lost for words, then groaned loudly, spun on my heel, and marched back to my cubicle. She followed and made herself at home, perched atop my desk.

"I know you're freaking out," she said.

"I'm not 'freaking out'—" I said, but fell silent as she held up a hand to cut me off.

"I know you're freaking out," she repeated. "Like, completely freaking out, and I can tell because your hair just got even frizzier than usual and you're breathing like you just got asked to fight a dragon or something."

"How is this not a dragon?" I hissed, leaning forward in my chair. "Is she crazy? I'm an intern. A really unenthusiastic intern."

"And Lorinda's desperate," Imogen said. "Woman, it's your lucky day. You should be doing frigging cartwheels."

I could think of a hundred things I'd rather be doing than cartwheels. Throwing up, for one. Hexing my boss, for another. But if I had to choose, flat-out cursing the idiot who'd thought drinking, driving, and incapacitating Tabitha was a good idea was floating pretty high near the top of the list. I fingered the magic wand that held my frizzy bun together on the back of my head, wishing the intoxicated moron was here right now to see just what kind of impressive spells I'd learned in my five months at Wishes Fulfilled, Inc. I may not be experienced enough to handle Tabitha's next case on my own, but I sure as spitting was experienced enough to turn that guy into a newt.

Imogen seemed to have some idea of what was going on in my mind, because she put her hand over mine and firmly moved it away from my glorified hair stick. "Slow down there, tiger," she said. "Let's think about this like grownups."

"I'm not a grownup," I said. "That's the point. Is this even legal?"

Imogen raised one perfectly formed eyebrow at me and shook her head like I was the biggest lost cause she'd ever seen. "Do you have any idea what I would give for a chance like the one you just got?" she said.

"You want to transfer?" I said. "The job's yours."

Imogen rolled her eyes at me. She worked as an Assistant Junior Proctor in the Department of Tests & Quests, adjacent to ours in both location and purpose. Our jobs were similar, with the main difference being that she loved hers and I was lukewarm about mine at best.

I was technically in training to be a Faerie Godparent. Proctors like Imogen were the other guys from fairy tales who dressed up as old beggar ladies or birds with broken wings to test Heroes' moral character, and then rewarded them with all sorts of faerie presents if they showed compassion or bravery or whatever super-trait they were being tested for. Both jobs had been around since the dawn of time, and both jobs, I thought, sucked.

As my little brother Daniel had once put it, living as Glimmers in a Humdrum world that glorified our lives would be the equivalent of Humdrums living in a world where a whole thrilling mythology had sprung up around lawyers and administrative assistants, with children's cartoons being made about "that one time they met that pressing deadline!" or "what happened when the doctor successfully treated his patient for a routine sprained ankle!"

In this case, the story would be "how that one intern totally screwed over her company and ruined her reputation by having absolutely no idea what she was doing!" I couldn't wait to see the animated musical.

Imogen sighed, then hopped off my desk, grabbed my arm, and dragged me back out of my cubicle to the window across the room. It looked down on the street below and the park across the street. And there, right in front of us, where we could see it every time we came to work, left work, or got up to stretch our legs, was the Oracle's Fountain. A car drove by, totally unaware of the magic leaking out towards it.

"Think about it," Imogen said in an undertone to me. She shook my arm gently, like she was trying to wake me up. "You pull this off, and you get to go be rewarded by the Oracle."

This wasn't playing fair. Everyone wanted to be rewarded by the Oracle. The mysterious being who lived in the Oracle's Fountain was one of the arbiters of our world, second only to the elusive Faerie Queen. She emerged from the Fountain on rare occasions, but communicated through the water and her attendant sprites to applaud and bless the efforts of anyone who worked to improve the Glimmering world, bring more and truer love into the world, and help Heroes, Heroines, and other Archetypes find the right resolutions to their Stories.

I was working in one of the only fields in the entire magical world that got to interact with the Oracle on a regular basis.

I'd seen the moment four times now from this window, once for each case Tabitha had completed with me as her assistant. Tabitha had gotten the right princess married to the right wizard, helped a Heroine reach the end of her Quest in one piece, taught a Hero how to stop a forest witch who was getting a little too big for her britches, and made sure a pair of young faeries in love found each other just as the moon waxed full. And each time, at midnight, when the sky was dark and the city was silent, she stood before the Oracle and waited for judgment. Every time, the Oracle had been pleased, and the Fountain's water had filled with a generous heap of golden coins. These coins paid the bills, but they were more than that: They were validation, a sign that she—that we—had done well.

Of course I had pictured myself standing there in her place, waiting for the Oracle to tell me I had made the world a better place in a way that mattered. Even an aspiring biologist couldn't help those daydreams. But it was completely unfair of Imoen to bring that up just now.

I pressed my fingertips to the space between my forehead, just a smidge above the bridge of the glasses that let me pretend that this wasn't my reality. I could feel a stress headache forming. "Imogen," I said.

"Think about it," she said.

I already was. My mind was filled with the image of me, standing in front of the Oracle, watching as glinting gold began to surface through the dark blue water in an undeniable message that I had succeeded. It was proof that just once, I had done something on my own and actually deserved to be part of this world. I didn't want to be part of this world. I wanted to study conservation in Africa and research plants in the Amazon rainforest, far away from godmothers and spells and the Council. But knowing I could belong if I wanted to?

"I guess a trial period couldn't hurt," I said.

"Yay!" Imogen shouted, her voice breaking through the hush in the room.

I blew a long puff of air toward the stupid window as a sinking feeling started to gather in my stomach.

"I am so going to regret this," I said.