The precinct was abuzz with activity, but Crystal spotted Ivan’s shock of red hair easily and left the blonde wimp behind. She slammed her hands down on Ivan’s desk, making his head jerk up to fix her with a look that would have probably levelled wimpy. She didn’t even flinch.
“Lily’s hiding something. Maybe she’s covering for someone. I don’t know, but I know she didn’t try to kill Boris.”
“Figure all that out on your own, Sherlock?” Ivan retorted.
Just like high school. Middle school. Elementary school. Kindergarten. A single sarcastic remark in a condescending tone, and Crystal almost had to bite her tongue to hold back the witty response that immediately leapt to mind.
“Where’s the bookmark?” she asked instead, straightening up and crossing her arms over her chest.
He leaned back in his chair, matching her pose. “In evidence. Go home and leave the police work to the professionals.”
“If you can find a professional, I’d like to see him. Otherwise, show me that bookmark.”
“I don’t answer to a glorified greeting card writer.”
Crystal rolled her eyes. “Careful, your ignorance is showing. There is more to Hallmark than greeting cards. I happen to be the secret behind their very successful Christmas movies.”
He scoffed. “Right. Because those movies are so bad, nobody would watch them without magical enhancement.”
“And this is why you’re single.”
“Hey!” The officer sitting at the nearest desk took his phone from his ear and covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Daytona 500 just called. They can’t hear the race.”
Crystal and Ivan stared at him, uncomprehending.
“Keep it down,” he clarified.
Crystal rolled her eyes again and waved her hand dismissively. “Go…get me a cup of coffee or something.”
“You can’t—” Ivan started, but she cut her glare to him and silenced him. Then she cut it back to the other officer, sitting with mouth agape.
“Go,” she repeated forcefully.
It took less than a second for him to drop the phone receiver on the desk and scurry away. Crystal hung the phone up without a word to whoever was on the other end of the line and grabbed the abandoned chair, pulling it over to Ivan’s desk and sitting down.
“Let me explain something to you,” she said, her voice quieter and exaggeratedly patronizing. “For a charm to be effective, it has to be tailored to the target. The narrower the focus and the more familiar the caster is with the target, the greater the effect. Say, for example, I charm a male actor’s smile to look even more dazzling. That will have a good effect on viewers who are primarily attracted to a man’s smile, but not to viewers who look at the eyes first. However, if I add something that lets me see and hear the viewers’ reactions to the charm, then I can use that information to help me decide what would have a broader appeal for the next movie.”
Ivan frowned. “You’re recording viewers of Hallmark Christmas movies? Is that legal?”
“Says the man putting a phone tap on Santa Claus’ personal line,” she remarked dryly, glancing at the scribbled note on his desk.
Ivan followed her eyes and flipped the note over. “Is there a point to this?”
“No, I just felt like wasting my breath on an idiot who doesn’t know the difference between a greeting card charm and the work I do. Yes, there’s a point! Remember what Lily said? About me charming that book?”
She paused meaningfully. Ivan narrowed his eyes.
“Don’t tell me you used the recording charm.”
“Exactly! Everything that happened within a direct line of sight to that book is right here.” She smirked and tapped the side of her head.
“Then I need to see that.”
“And I need to see the bookmark. I’m her closest blood relative, and I’ve known her all her life. If anybody can detect an anomaly in her magic, it’s me.”
Ivan sighed and pushed his chair back from his desk just as the other officer returned with Crystal’s cup of coffee. “Take it to the interrogation room.”
She stood, too, and glanced at the coffee as she passed the officer. “After you add creamer.”
Ten minutes later, an innocuous-looking bookmark made of ice lay on the table in front of Ivan in the interrogation room, the TV screen was black and silent in front of Crystal, and the officer was hurrying from the room with a steaming cup of coffee, now tasked with adding sugar. Ivan slid the glistening blue bookmark across the table to Crystal. Crystal put her index finger to her right temple and pulled back, a fine, glittering string of frosty blue following her finger and coiling around itself. She flicked her wrist, and the coil burst into a bright white streak, shooting toward the TV. The screen lit up with Lily’s face.
“A romance book? Really, Crystal?” she muttered, pursing her lips in thought.
“Don’t tell me I have to watch hours of her reading this thing before we get to the night of the attack,” Ivan grumbled.
Crystal was already focused on the bookmark and its benign engraving of Frosty the snowman, twirling a lasso above his head. “It’s just like any other video. You can fast forward, pause, whatever.”
Silence fell over the room. Lily’s ice-blue eyes scanned across and down the pages at high speed while Crystal traced every line of Frosty with a light finger, over and over and over again. The magic was dead. But of course it was. Once an enchantment was cast, the magic was fixed in time, no longer attached to the caster or open to modification.
Except Lily’s magic was still active in that snow globe hours after she created it. After she passed out and lost all control over it. And she had felt Boris cutting a door through it.
“A raccoon?” Ivan exclaimed.
Crystal looked up. The video was in real time again, showing a small woman in a bright pink snow suit grunting with effort as she and, yes, a raccoon struggled to lift Lily’s unconscious form from the floor to the sofa.
“She didn’t say anything about a raccoon,” Ivan muttered.
“When she told you what she thought were the most important details, you didn’t believe her,” Crystal replied, returning her attention to the bookmark. “Why would she tell you the parts she didn’t think mattered?”
Ivan grunted in response. Crystal sighed and summoned a drop of magic to her finger, tracing lightly over each line of the engraving again.
There was the lock. Frosty’s smile. Except…
“Wow. Pipaluk’s as wacko as everybody says. Look at this.”
Crystal heard the explosion on the TV but shook her head. “Can’t. I found something.”
“You did? What is it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She tuned out the impromptu surprise Christmas party and added another drop of magic. There was a lock on the lock. And the slightest sheen of…purple magic? And when she traced the lasso, the newest addition…
Her head snapped up to look at Ivan. “There’s another magic signature here. Somebody tampered with this.”
“Yeah, and I think I know who.”
He nodded toward the TV screen, where a raccoon was waddling across the living room floor, following Lily.
“That sounds really advanced. I thought we were working on my control first.”
Lily paused, as if listening to a reply.
“It would help with the collaboration,” Lily said slowly. “Do you really think I could do it? Add to the enchantment from here?”
“Do you know anything about this?” Ivan asked.
Crystal shook her head. “Lily’s always been scared of hurting others with her magic. She only lets her neighbors get close because they’re Santa’s elves and they knew her mother. If something posed as a raccoon to get into her house, and got the approval of her neighbors somehow, then she might trust it if it offered to help her with her control. And if it made her promise not to tell anyone…” Crystal shrugged. “She never breaks a promise.”
They continued watching in silence, Ivan fast forwarding through the empty hours and hitting play whenever Lily and the raccoon were present, watching and listening to the one-sided conversations. Lily was smiling. Relaxed. A completely different girl from the one now curled up in a jail cell.
Night fell in the video.
“Wait, stop it. Something’s happening.”
A shadow moved across the floor, leaving what Crystal knew was Lily’s bedroom and heading toward the kitchen. Ivan fast-forwarded again, slowing the video down when the shadow returned. The raccoon, carrying an egg roll in its mouth. It climbed onto the sofa and looked at the frozen-over fireplace, and an image swam into view there, as if seen through a fog. Another bedroom with a sleeping figure.
The raccoon’s eyes turned purple.
“That’s the signature in this bookmark!” Crystal exclaimed. “There’s purple magic over the original lock Lily created, and it’s all over the lasso!”
In the fireplace image, a lasso shot from a bookmark on a nightstand, and suddenly, they were watching Boris, waking with a start and fighting the lasso tightening around his neck. While the raccoon nibbled at the egg roll.
Crystal felt sick.
“Um, ma’am?”
Ivan stopped the video as the other officer returned with Crystal’s coffee for the third time. She stood, shaking her head, her face pale with a hint of green.
“Do you need me for anything else?” she asked Ivan, her voice uncharacteristically weak.
“No. Go home. This’ll be enough to clear Lily, and then…I guess I need to find that raccoon.”
Crystal pushed past the officer holding her coffee and rushed from the room, making it to a bathroom just before she threw up.
She couldn’t drink coffee for a long time after that, and she couldn’t even look at an egg roll without feeling queasy. For months. Long after Lily was released, her name cleared but the raccoon nowhere to be found. Long after Pipaluk and his family moved back to the North Pole to support Lily, because the mere thought of returning to her old home sent her into a panic.
Long after the success of Crystal’s latest Hallmark Christmas movie, featuring an unlikely romance between an author and an enchantress.
It wasn’t reality. But Boris and Lily had resumed their collaboration, and their first book was set to release today. Valentine’s Day.
And Crystal, Ms. Hallmark herself, didn’t have a date.
She sat alone on her sofa, wearing pajamas and eating a pint of ice cream while watching the movie again. For some reason, Ivan flashed through her mind, and she smiled wryly. It was a pretty bad movie. Without her charms, it wouldn’t have made it to production.
The doorbell rang.
She sighed and set the ice cream on the coffee table before she stood, and then she looked down at her shirt. There was a spot of chocolate on it. She glared at the offending brown patch for a moment, and then she shrugged and headed for the door. It was probably just the delivery man dropping off more ice cream, and he wouldn’t care how she looked.
She yanked the door open, saying, “Thanks for—”
And then she stopped, staring wide-eyed at Ivan. Not in his pajamas. Or his police uniform. A green sweater to match his green eyes, eyes that were flicking down to the chocolate blotch on her shirt as hers drifted down to his fitted blue jeans.
He cleared his throat and held up a plastic grocery bag. “Special delivery.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she snatched the bag from him. “Moonlighting as a delivery man? What, police work not paying enough for you?”
He rolled his eyes. “I met the delivery guy outside and told him I’d handle it. No date?”
Her cheeks froze with embarrassment. “If that’s the best pickup line you’ve got, then I assume you’re dateless, too. What do you want?”
“May I come in?”
She screwed up her lips and furrowed her brow, studying his expression, and then she shrugged and stepped aside. “Sure. Whatever.”
Awkward tension was thick in the air when she shut the door behind him.
“Um…so…what are you doing?” he asked.
“Putting this ice cream away. You?”
“Following you. Duh.”
She was uncomfortably aware of that, as she was of every tangle in her messy half-ponytail, every blemish on her unmade-up face, and, of course, the chocolate blotch on her shirt. Especially since he looked so good. She hated to admit that, but it was Valentine’s Day, and she was alone. She was allowed to be desperate for one day, wasn’t she?
“Was there a reason you came over?” she snapped, opening the freezer and reaching into the grocery bag for the ice cream.
Her fingers closed over something unexpected. Something hard and rectangular. She pulled it out and stared at it.
“It’s Boris and Lily’s new book,” Ivan explained.
“I can see that. Why?” Crystal looked up at him suspiciously. “What do you want?”
He shrugged. “How about a spoon?”
She couldn’t make sense of it. What he was doing here, why he bought her that book, why they were now sitting side-by-side on the sofa, each eating ice cream straight from the carton and watching a Hallmark Christmas movie. Not talking. Not even laughing. Barely looking at each other.
“This isn’t that bad,” he finally said.
“The movie, or the ice cream?”
He glanced over at her. “The ice cream.”
The left corner of his lip twitched. She shook her head and let her smirk show, and his broke through, too.
And then the laughter started. Quiet at first, giggling and chuckling at the absurdity of it all. She put her empty ice cream carton on the coffee table and sat back, clutching at her stomach as she laughed harder. He fell over on his side, laughing. His foot hit her thigh, and she shoved it away, tears streaming down her cheeks.
The violins struck up in the movie, singing out for a heartfelt, emotional scene.
“You are the quill to my ink, the poetry to my prose. I can’t write a word without you. Will you be my co-author forever?”
Crystal howled with laughter. Ivan pounded on the sofa.
“It’s so bad!”
“You should have heard the other lines they tried!”
“I can’t believe people like this crap!”
“They don’t! That’s why I have a job!”
They laughed until they couldn’t breathe, and then they lay there, at opposite ends of the sofa, gasping for breath as the ending credits rolled.
“There’s the disclaimer,” Crystal panted, pointing at the lines of fine print scrolling up the screen. “The one that says I’m recording them.”
The dramatic music moved into a softer song, as sappy as every other detail of the movie. The last line of white disappeared.
“What do people usually do at this point? When the movie’s done?” Ivan asked.
Crystal shrugged. “Single people start the next movie. Couples start making out.”
He smirked at her. “Wanna try it?”
She threw a pillow at him. “Get out of my house.”
He stood and stretched his arms over his head. “Fine. All the ice cream’s gone, anyway. No reason to stay.”
He walked away, out of sight, and Crystal lay there, staring at the movie’s main menu. An interview with her was in the bonus features. Her, the woman who was the magic behind Hallmark’s Christmas movies, single on Valentine’s Day.
And then Ivan was back, yanking her to her feet and kissing her. Hard.
She shoved him away, surprised, and slapped him. They stared at each other, and then she grabbed his collar and yanked him back, planting another kiss on his lips. His arms were around her waist, hers were around his neck, and they were tumbling back to the sofa, kissing with all the hunger of starving people at a buffet.
“Just so we’re clear,” she gasped, “I still don’t like you.”
“Yeah, right.”
*****
Date of creation: 02/11/2025
Word count: 4,999
Author’s note: The prompt was to write a short story based on the following text: “You've hated him/her since forever. But when Valentine's Day rolls around, they bring you a heartfelt gift that takes you by surprise.” The word count requirement was 500 to 5,000 words, and there was no genre requirement.
*****
Author’s note: I wrote this for a Valentine’s Day contest, but unfortunately, that contest disappeared right after I finished the story. Or right before. Regardless, it’s gone, and I couldn’t find any other Valentine’s Day contests this story would qualify for, so it ended up just being for fun. But I thoroughly enjoyed writing it, so I wasn’t too disappointed.
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