A Thousand and One Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Avenged Fairy Tales Series

  A Thousand and One

  Avenged Fairy Tales

  Daria Doshrelli

  Copyright © 2020 by Daria Doshrelli

  All rights reserved.

  Cover by 100Covers

  Chapter 1

  “Some witch told you that! Some witch told you that!”

  “Did not. Now, about my three wishes.”

  The imp’s face twisted into a mound of wrinkles. “Three wishes, three gifts.”

  “But that’s not what—”

  “Three wishes, three gifts. The witch should’ve told you that. She should’ve told you that!” He stomped his stockinged foot.

  “Ugh. What do you want?”

  “Necklace, ring…”

  “But these are my—”

  “Simpletons! Fools! Humans cannot calculate!”

  “Fine, take them. And the third item?”

  “It is the greatest.”

  “Be it anything but my soul.”

  “Do you swear it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you swear it on your third toe?”

  “Er…Sure, I swear it on my third toe.”

  “Do you swear it by the hairs of your chinny chin chin?”

  “Yes, already, I have sworn to you thrice.”

  “Sure?” The imp’s rosy cheeks glowed, his plump face crinkling in mischievous glee. “No takebacks, no substitutions.”

  “Whatever you like. As you see, I have given you all but my very soul, the garment barely clinging to these shoulders, and the tattered things strapped to my feet that I like to call shoes. You’re welcome to any of my worldly possessions that please you.”

  Two golden eyes twinkled. “In that case your third gift to me shall be…” He beckoned with his crooked finger. “Come near, come near and I will tell all.”

  A few hesitant steps and the imp was only a breath away, cackling and crackling as an old crone. He smelled of pickled eggs and straw as he leaned forward and whispered three unfathomable words.

  Chapter 2

  Tad was minding his own business when the summons came. At the outset he tried to ignore the pecking at the window that might easily have been mistaken for raindrops on his sunny day—were he not Lady Love’s slave. Then the tap-thonk-tap-tap moved to the door where it progressed to an almighty hailstorm. Confusion fleetingly supplanted irritation. How had the pigeons managed to burgle their way into his cottage but were now thwarted by the door of the study?

  But the pecking persisted and so he cast aside his book with a great sigh, stormed to the door and yanked it open. There sat Sev and Pip at his feet, looking categorically innocent.

  Tad lowered his eyelids at them. “Why could you not come in on your own? I suspect you just wanted to make me get up.”

  “We cannot enter your most private chambers.” Pip’s eyes melted and turned upward in a beseeching manner. “Not unless we are invited.”

  The Lady had granted him a pigeon-free zone? The delight that surged though Tad’s heart sent his toes to tingling, a sensation curiously akin to falling in love. He would write a poem about that later. “In that case, be gone. I have need of solitude and reflection. You may return tomorrow…” He gave the black masses on the floor a dismissive flick of the wrist. “…or the next day.”

  With this he slammed the door on the pests, barely avoiding a crush of beak against solid woodcraft. He settled himself back into his chaise lounge, the manly sort that had never known the shame of supporting a lady in her fainting episodes. His hand reached for his book but found only feathers.

  He yipped and jerked back in the chaise. “Nan?”

  The fat bird perched on his stack of poetry books bearing one of those expressions a person uses to cover the string of improprieties they secretly wish to exhibit. “Good morning,” she said with hardly a hint of a growl and began rearranging ruffled plumage with her beak. Nan was nothing if not longsuffering.

  “I thought you couldn’t…” Tad looked back and the door.

  Sev and Pip walked through the wood, tweeting out bird laughs.

  “I told you he would fall for it,” Sev crowed.

  Pip’s chest feathers bore their usual maniacal appearance as he strutted alongside his cohort, tail bouncing as an old broom beating feverishly at a rug. “Some people will believe anything.”

  “And some people carry a meat cleaver in their pocket,” Tad replied.

  The two birds flapped onto the elegant, sloped back of his chaise lounge, well within reach of a good cleaving. Pip whispered something to Sev, and Sev likewise to Pip, and they both snickered. Their indifferent manner made the thought of consuming them immensely unappealing.

  Tad grunted his disappointment that Lady Love had likely taken measures to prevent her minions’ heads being permanently removed by her avenging agents. He briefly contemplated the injustice of such imperial foresight. “So I have no reprieve from you, not even in my own home?”

  “No,” Sev said.

  “None at all,” Pip concurred.

  Nan gave Tad one of her matronly looks. “We did knock.”

  “So you did. Thank you, Nan. I am certain you are the only one of your kind polite enough to do so.” Tad stuck his bottom lip out at the trespassers. “But what if I were in the throes of an impassioned kiss with Roselle? Would you also intrude upon that?”

  The three birds envisioned this for four tick-tocks of Tad’s tower clock, and burst into squawks of laughter. Nan had the graciousness to almost blush at her own massive eruption. Sev’s throaty hoots echoed off the stone walls. Pip’s form, gasping in hilarity, slid off the chaise and splatted on the floor and out of sight.

  Tad pressed his face into his reclining pillow with a moan and hammered his fist into the chaise cushion. “Urrrrrrrrr. What must I do to be rid of you this time?”

  Pip clawed his way back to his roost next to Sev. A look passed between them that sent all three birds to howling and flapping their wings.

  “Come now, what new evil have you brought me?”

  The imbecile nearest Tad was the first to recover from his hysterics. “True love has gone wrong again,” Pip declared in his dramatic way. And then he proceeded to appear very exultant over the matter. His head tilted up and his chest swelled, which was a remarkable feat for a thing already overstuffed by its maker. The pigeon was in his glory when there was some mischief afoot. His cheery countenance was an ill wind and an evil foreboding and a pox on any plans to woo Roselle.

  On top of this, Tad was not feeling particularly droll at the moment. “How many beasts this time?”

  The birds cocked their heads and observed him as if he had asked something amiss.

  “From now on I require an accurate count of the number of fanged, clawed and generally wicked sorts that are involved, along with a full description that includes the size and nature of the beings in question.” It was the least a beast of burden could petition of his taskmasters.

  Nan and Sev regarded him without fluttering a feather.

  Pip seemed to be thinking, which was never a good sign. “Zero,” he said.

  Sure. Tad looked at his other two assistants.

  “One,” a fourth voice said, an eerily close voice.

  Tad swiveled his eyeballs around the study.
Things were never quite what they seemed since he had become Lady Love’s avenging agent. His shoulders drooped. Today might be an especially wicked sort of day. “Wiggy?” He leaned away from his stack of books, just in case.

  The pillow in his lap, the one he had been using all morning to support his book, the very article he had just buried his face in, sprouted two furry, gray-and-white-striped ears.

  Tad resisted the urge to launch the pillow across the room even as his heart ticked up three notches. “How long have you been there?”

  Wigamus grew a tail in reply and transformed until he sat squarely in Tad’s lap in his favorite form of a kitten. His tail twitched back and forth to the rhythm of the clock in the corner. He turned round and round as if preparing to make himself a bed. A few moments of this and he stopped and kneaded Tad’s thighs with his claws.

  Prickles crept up Tad’s spine until he shuddered. “Why do you keep sneaking around to spy on me?” he demanded as the feline stretched himself and his paws out as he pleased.

  “Some people need constant supervision,” Pip answered.

  Tad opened his mouth the give the bird what-for. A familiar rap sounded at the front door, which meant a certain evil was expected imminently.

  “That would be Claire,” Nan said.

  Obviously. Tad’s ears were the best Claire detectors around. Normal people simply knocked after they had asked if a visit might be acceptable and received a hospitable reply. But his scientific assistant was the singular person he had ever met whose mood expressed itself in enthusiastic raps when she showed up on his doorstep unannounced, which was quite a frequent occurrence ever since he had made the grievous error of feeding her.

  “We already told her everything,” Sev said.

  Tad glared at the pigeons.

  “Because we like her better than you.” Pip looked back and forth between Tad and Sev as if expecting outrage from the one, ovation from the other. “And because we knew that by the time you huffed and puffed your way off of your tushie she would be halfway done solving the case.”

  “Or maybe she has already solved it,” Sev said.

  Wigamus meowed.

  Tad couldn’t tell if the utterance was a vote of yay or nay. But there was no way Claire could solve a case without him. He jerked his thumb toward his chest. “I am the avenging agent.” Claire was only the assistant agent, or agent in training as he had been forced to call her out of the kindness of his heart, which was one easily moved to pity.

  Nan leveled him a look of stark displeasure. “The Lady made both of you her avenging agents.”

  Footsteps sounded outside the study. Wigamus leapt silently onto the floor as Tad shot to his feet. He rushed to the door and swung it open. A pair of wicked eyes greeted him.

  Chapter 3

  “Lunch?” Claire held out a woven basket with a blue ribbon woven around the handle. “I thought I’d repay your recent semi-hospitality. I hope you don’t mind, but the door was open.”

  “It was not.”

  “Was so.”

  “Then somebody…” Tad turned a hiss on the birds. “…unlocked it.”

  “Anyhow, it was open so I thought you might be expecting me and I just walked right on in, thankfully without having to touch that weird, shiny knob.” Claire tilted her head down and raised her eyebrows as a schoolmarm peering over her spectacles at a wayward specimen. “If I had something that ugly on my front door I’d think about replacing it so as folks didn’t get the idea I’m a weirdo.”

  A girl who lived with Tante Iezavel giving him domestic counsel? Tad ignored Claire’s pitiable taste in roommates and home décor and spun around to glare at the pigeons again. They frequently obligated him to such expressions of ill will as a reminder that he was in charge.

  “Not us,” Sev said. “It was open when we arrived.”

  “We don’t use doors, remember?” Pip replied to Tad’s disbelieving look.

  Someone had been inside his cottage? Tad pushed past Claire and moved from room to room inspecting the contents of his pristine abode. The true love wooing fund in his sock drawer was undisturbed, as was the collection of rare volumes of love poems hidden beneath his wrinkle-free underwear. Nobody had rummaged through his wardrobe, either, though he did possess a number of vests with shiny buttons and two pairs of already-polished black boots, as well as a fashionable wool gentleman’s coat with a matching cap, and four pressed trousers. Only a very wretched thief would overlook such smart articles.

  But just as he had decided it must have been a blind burglar, an inspection of his kitchen had him drumming his fingers on the wall as he worked through a new puzzle. The cupboard had been touched by an unseen hand. Several items were out of place as if the intruder had been searching for some particular ingredient, and yet had left unrewarded. Immediately upon discerning this he headed to his front door only to discover the lock had not been forced.

  “You think somebody broke in to you place?” Claire turned a doubtful eye around his sitting room. “It doesn’t seem you had much they wanted.” She twisted up one corner of her mouth at a particularly expensive rug Tad had acquired from a purveyor of exotic merchandise. Only those of truly refined taste could appreciate his home furnishings, which was why Claire was giving each piece in his favorite room a disdainful look.

  “They went through my cupboard.”

  “Oh, well, they must have been hungry.” She swept a pitying look around the room as if to say, “Why else would they have broken in here?” Tad felt he could almost read her mind after the few weeks they had been assigned together, but instead of the thoughts he knew to be sloshing around in the experimental flask that was her skull, the words that bubbled out were only, “They probably won’t be back.”

  “Nothing is missing.” Which was odd considering the many valuable objects he possessed. Especially the love poems.

  Of course, Claire had something to say about this. “That is highly improbable.”

  Tad crossed his arms. “It is a fact. I know the contents of my whole house by heart and nothing was taken, only some things moved around in the cupboard. Also, the door was unlocked using magic, most likely, since there are no scratches or dents from somebody prying it open.” That’s why he was the avenging agent and not her. He was tidy and paid attention to things.

  Claire tapped her chin with her index finger and tilted her riotously unkempt head in silent meditation. Probably she had been wearing the love goggles again and that meant she was mixing strange potions with Tante Iezavel or looking at things she oughtn’t. “Highly unlikely unless…did you bring anything home from the library?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “But he wished to bring the globe home.” Nan’s gaze moved from Tad’s many priceless possessions to where Claire stood inspecting each of them with a condemning eye.

  So, Nan had taken to snitching on him, too? Just like his sisters when he was little. And to think, he had once imagined her a peach, a feathered pillar of womanly wisdom in its dotage.

  “Because he is lazy,” Pip added to the she-bird’s words. “He thought he could sit right there in his ugly armchair and solve the cases.”

  Tad drew in a deep breath and set about coming up with a counter-insult. But he was several days out of practice and so the embarrassing silence stretched on as everybody awaited his witty retort.

  Claire raised a pair of disheveled eyebrows at him. “Then your theory of a magical being is—”

  “Perfectly sound.”

  “Not unless you have something in here…” She wrinkled up her nose again. “…somebody with magic would want. Plus they’d need to know ya have it, and it’d be something special and not just any old thing.”

  “I have already determined as much.”

  “Oh, well, I have noticed from your measly attempts on the last two cases that you’re generally unobservant so I thought maybe—”

  “Are you suggesting you are more qualified than I am to solve cases?”

  �
�Ha!” Claire tossed her mass of wild curls. The honey-gold ringlets jiggled as she swept a careless hand through them. “It’s no mystery why Lady Love brought me in. You have no method whatsoever.” She put her chin to her chest and manufactured a deep voice. “Give her a good kiss, just in case.”

  “True love’s kiss is a tried and true method for uncursing true loves.” Only somebody with no romantic education at all wouldn’t know that. And he didn’t sound like the way she talked when she mimicked him, all broody and snobbish.

  Claire pressed her hands over her mouth and nose to stifle a giggle. One snorted its way out, anyhow. “And how many times has that worked out for ya?” She bestowed on him a contrived smile. “I read through a lot of the prior cases in the ledger, and true love’s kiss has received much more credit among the uninformed masses that its actual statistical relevance would suggest it is due.” Her lips pressed together and her head produced a nod of conviction. “You’re zero for three using that tactic yourself.”

  “I suppose we’ll just have to prove whose method is true and whose is false, then.” Not that he hadn’t already showed her up twice and solved a third case before she came tripping along.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine,” he mouthed. “The pigeons told you about the case, apparently, but I have yet to be informed of a thing.” He looked at Nan out of habit but turned his eyes toward the ceiling upon recalling she had just outed him. For several moments he pretended to admire the fine cut of the timbers.

  “It is a friendship to true love case,” Sev said.

  “And how interesting.” Claire’s words sighed and fluttered their way to Tad’s ears, though she looked sideways at him in a very telling manner. “True loves who didn’t fall in love after…how many years was it again? Who would have thought?”

  “How improbable,” he replied. And only a soul devoid of any romantic notion at all could look as dreamy-eyed as Claire did while she considered the possibility of what she had just said.