The Rabbit Hole at dusk was a different bar than the Rabbit Hole at midnight.
The midnight bar was a cave.
The dusk bar was a waiting room, where people sat in the half-dark and waited for the dark to arrive so they could become whoever they were in it.
Daniel walked past on his way to nowhere in particular, and he wasn’t going to stop, and he stopped anyway, because through the window he saw a woman whose posture didn’t belong in a bar.
She stood behind the counter wiping glasses that were already clean, keeping her hands busy while her mind worked somewhere else.
Her hands were small and quick.
Her hair was short and pinned back, the color of autumn leaves dried in the sun, a strawberry-blonde that belonged in a forest and not in a bar.
Her eyes were green.
Pale green.
Green lit from inside.
She looked up.
Through the glass.
Through the dusk.
Through the gap between them, which was a sidewalk and a window and two different kinds of magic.
Her eyes met his and the hum under his sternum went very still.
The woman’s fairy-sense pricked.
Daniel did not know this word yet.
He would know it later, would learn it from her own mouth, would write it on the inside of the coat: fairy-sense, the ability to taste magic in the air, the ability to see a dark thread spool unwinding from a stranger’s chest.
He didn’t have the word and he felt the recognition anyway, the recognition of a magic that has found another magic, two instruments finding the same note and holding it.
She stopped wiping.
She set the glass down on the counter without looking at it, the clean economy of hands that knew their work, and she looked at him for one beat, two beats, the length of a question she wasn’t ready to ask.
Her mouth did not move.
Her hands did not move.
The pricking at the base of her skull belonged to a magic that had been dormant a long time and had just woken up.
Daniel did not move either.
The hum was very still.
It wasn’t afraid and it wasn’t excited.
It was paying attention, the attention of a counterparty that has just spotted a counterparty on the other side of the glass.
The woman behind the counter was a fairy.
Daniel didn’t know that yet either, but he knew she was something, in the bones, in the gut, the tightening a paralegal gets when a contract turns unfavorable three clauses before the language admits it.
He had just met someone who could see what he was, and knowing it was worse than not.
He turned away.
He did not decide to turn away.
His body decided and his mind followed, which had been the arrangement all week, the kit sliding him around the town like a piece on a board.
He walked around the corner and stopped.
He leaned against the brick wall of the building next to the Rabbit Hole and put a hand on his chest where the hum was, and the hum had a question in it now, and the question was: do you know what she is?
He didn’t.
He knew she was important.
He knew she had seen him, and that the seeing had gone both directions.
The hum had recognized something in her, the same recognition it produced in front of Mr.
Gold, a magic out of the same world, the same school, the same storybook.
She was no curse-racket dealer.
She was not Gold.
She was lighter than either, and she pricked at the hum like a clean scent reaching something that had been underground too long.
The door of the Rabbit Hole banged open and a thin man in a thin coat came out, patting his pockets for cigarettes he didn’t find.
“You going in,” he said, “or you just holding up the building?” “Just holding up the building.” “It’s brick.
It’s been up since before either of us.” The man gave up on the pockets and leaned against the wall a yard down, matching him.
“Do yourself a favor and hold up this one instead of that bar.
Bartender’s in a mood.” “Bad night?” “Bad hour.
She was fine at four.
Poured me a decent one and told me to eat something.
Then about an hour ago she went strange.” He tipped his head at the corner, toward the window.
“Stopped mid-conversation.
Went to the glass.
Been staring out at the street since, like she’s waiting on somebody who owes her money.” “Somebody who owes her money,” Daniel said, “or somebody she owes?” “In this town?
Same face either way.” The thin man laughed once, dry, the laugh of somebody drinking since noon with no plan to stop before midnight.
“Don’t take it personal.
Everybody here’s waiting on something.
Clock’s been broke at eight-fifteen my whole life and I still look up at it.” “You look up at it too?” “Every day.
Every damn day, and it’s the same number, and tomorrow I’ll look again.” He pushed off the wall.
“That’s Storybrooke, friend.
Anyway.
Not a good night to be a stranger in there.
You’ve got the face of a stranger.” “I’ve lived here as long as you have,” Daniel said.
The man considered that, and something behind his eyes went briefly loose, then tightened back into place.
“Sure you have,” he said.
“Sure.
Night.” He walked off down the street with his hands in his coat, and Daniel stayed against the brick, and the hum kept asking its question about the woman with the green eyes.
She had seen him.
Not just seen him — seen through him.
Graham’s hunter-instincts had found the seam in his cursed identity.
Ruby’s wolf-sense had caught the wrong smell on his pages.
Mr.
Gold’s ancient awareness had catalogued him from behind the pawnshop curtains.
Now a woman behind a bar had looked at him and her fairy-sense had pricked.
He had the word now, or almost had it, the word rising through the hum like a bubble through water.
She had felt the magic in him.
She had felt the dark contract unwinding from his sternum.
She had seen the thread.
He was not invisible anymore.
He had been invisible for a whole week, a background extra in a cursed town, Dan-the-cannery who paid rent on time and never spoke at town meetings.
The kit was making him visible.
Every deal closed, every price paid, every name spoken with storybook pressure: the magic accumulated, and the accumulation had a scent, and the scent was drawing every magical creature in Storybrooke toward one address.
He walked home a different route.
He passed the library and the drugstore and the bed and breakfast and the pawnshop, and the pawnshop curtains didn’t stir, and the hum didn’t sharpen.
Behind the bar, the woman whose name was Tinker Bell put down the glass and went to the window and looked out at a street that was empty now.
“Tink.” Marisol had a tray on her hip and three orders backing up behind her.
“Tink.
There are six people at that end of the bar and one of you.” “Give me a second.” “You’ve had eleven of them.” “He was right there,” Tink said.
“On the sidewalk.
Then he wasn’t.” “Who was?” “I don’t know his name.” Marisol set the tray down hard enough to make the empties chime.
“You’re staring out a window over a man whose name you don’t know.” “It’s not the man.” “It’s never the man.” “It’s what he’s carrying.” Tink kept her palm flat on the glass, where the cold of the street came through.
“Somebody’s paying for something out there, Mari.
I can taste it from here.” “Sure.
And the six people at my bar are paying for beer, which I can taste from here too, and one of us has to pour it.” Marisol softened, a half-inch.
“Come on.
Whatever it is, it’ll still be out there at closing.” “That’s the part I don’t like,” Tink said, and came back to the counter.
The flavor of him stayed in the air a while, a dark note, a low note, a magic that wasn’t fairy-magic and wasn’t dark-magic and lived somewhere between the two.
Deal-making magic.
Price-magic.
The signature of a spinner who hadn’t learned yet what he was spinning.
She poured and she counted change and she wiped down the wood, and she thought about him for the rest of the shift, and the next shift, and the shift after that.
Two threads had crossed.
Two kinds of magic had recognized each other through the glass.
The hum was still very still, and the fairy-sense was still pricking, and the town was still cursed, and the clock tower was still frozen at eight-fifteen, and nothing had changed, and everything had.
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