The women saw their destination before they arrived.
The strand of magical saliva was wrapped around a two-story building surrounded by single-story warehouses.
The single-story warehouses were full of companies involved in the importing, exporting, and wholesaling of seafood.
But the women didn’t need navigational saliva to tell them where they were going.
There was a line of disheveled people coming out of the two-story building.
Rose Byrne found a parking spot in front of the TUNA EXPRESS CO.
The women climbed out of the Jaguar and walked over to the building wrapped in smartphone navigation.
Celia’s body was resonating with a green feeling.
Fern was in the building.
And if this were a book written by someone who still had the ability to build suspense or cared about meaningful plot resolution, there’d be about three-to-four thousand words about how Celia went in the building and found Fern and discovered what Fern was doing in Los Angeles.
And it would be so dramatic.
Your heart would be in my hands.
But this book isn’t being written by that kind of someone.
I’m burnt out.
Donald J. Trump was elected to the Presidency of the United States!
So there’s really no point.
Stop hoping that books will save you.
Stop pretending.
Everyone else has.
You aren’t getting your three-to-four thousand words.
You’re getting about four hundred and fifty.
The women of Fairy Land went into the building and found Fern on the top floor.
She was bringing homeless people into a backroom.
There was a tense reunion.
Celia demanded that Fern come home.
Fern refused.
Celia asked Fern what was so important about staying in Los Angeles.
Fern brought Celia into the backroom.
Fern showed Celia what the homeless people were doing in the backroom.
They were drinking the blood of the Fairy Knight, who was sitting in a plastic chair and had a tube coming out of a vein in his left arm.
The homeless guzzled his blood from the tube.
Fern said that she had found her brother nine months earlier.
He was hopelessly insane and haunting the boardwalk at Venice Beach.
Fern used magic to bring the Fairy Knight out of his insanity.
He awoke into sanity and said that he had been wandering the world for centuries.
The Fairy Knight said that while he was insane, he had converted to Christianity.
It’d happened in Avignon.
But then he’d gone so mad that he’d forgotten about everything.
Now that he was sane, he wanted to emulate one of the most basic Christian ideas, which was to give of himself to the poor.
As a magical being, his blood could serve as endless succor and would flow without end.
He wanted Fern to serve his magical blood to the homeless.
Fern cast some spells.
Fern found the building on Stanford Avenue.
The Fairy Knight opened shop.
The Fairy Knight gave succor to the most rejected people in America.
His blood nourished the poor and healed the sick.
Fern wanted to be with the Fairy Knight.
She wasn’t going home.
She didn’t care if the women of Fairy Land had to live without any charm in their lives.
Everyone else in the world lived without charmed lives.
If the worst thing that happened to the women of Fairy Land was a loss of charm in their lives, then they were doing better than the rest of the planet.
She too had converted to Christianity.
It had happened long before she rescued the Fairy Knight.
And now her brother’s blood had given her life meaning.
Chapter Seventeen
How It All Went Down
Celia sent Rose Byrne back to Fairy Land.
There was much protestation, but the Queen is the Queen.
That’s it.
Rose Byrne’s gone from the book.
Celia spent the next few months in Los Angeles.
She cast a spell that taught her how to drive, and because she had a decent internal map from her forays into saliva navigation, she found her way around the city.
Sometimes she went to Hollywood Boulevard and strolled atop the Walk of Fame, dodging the tourists, and doing a supra-natural trick where she saw the whole history, the layers of time superimposed on one another, going back to the beginning, to the Hadean.
And other times she went to Stanford Avenue and talked with her children as the homeless drank the blood of her son.
Her children proselytized to their mother.
They told her about Jesus Christ and his redemptive powers that would give mortals life after death and wash away their sins.
Celia’s children kept talking about Heaven and the crucifixion and eternal life and the Epistles of Paul.
They wanted Celia to convert to Christianity.
Celia couldn’t get on that trip.
Celia could smell the bullshit.
One Sunday morning, Celia went for a walk.
She took the precarious route down Glendower Ave, which had been built for the rich and thus didn’t have usable sidewalks, and went to Vermont Ave.
She walked past gigantic Moreton Bay figs.
The trees reminded her of Fairy Land.
She traveled west on Los Feliz Boulevard and then south for several blocks on Edgemont, passing into a significantly poorer area with the crossing of every east–west boulevard.
At the corner of Fountain, she heard singing.
The voices were coming from a white building on the northwest corner.
The sound reminded Celia of the Ceremony of the Grunting Skyrock, a recent addition to Fairy Land’s festival calendar.
The Ceremony of the Grunting Skyrock had been instituted in the Year of the Pleasurable Caravan, which roughly corresponded to 1000 AD, 390 AH, and 4760 AM.
In the Year of the Unmemorable Salt, which directly preceded the Year of the Pleasurable Caravan, a rock had fallen from the sky and smashed into Fairy Land.
Somehow the magic of Fairy Land had prevented any property damage, but the meteorite did leave one hell of a hole.
The women of Fairy Land kept the meteorite in its hole until someone realized that a giant rock from the sky was as good excuse as any to throw a party.
The Ceremony of the Grunting Skyrock involved a lot of choral singing.
For reasons that were always mysterious, the songs that the women sang were filthy tavern ballads about sex and human beings who couldn’t stop pissing their own pants.
One of the songs, which was old Turkic-Roma magic, went like this:
Despite their lyrical subjects, the songs sounded beautiful. When a hundred voices rise up as one, all individual imperfections disappear into a flawless unity.
And that’s what Celia heard coming out of the white building.
Celia went into the white building. It turned out to be the HOPE International Bible Fellowship, housed in what had once been the Fountain Avenue Baptist Church.
The building wasn’t much changed from when it opened in 1929 AD. It was the same shape and it still had people sitting in its pews and they were still listening to bullshit about how to worship Jesus Christ.
Celia took a seat in a back pew, next to a small woman.
The Queen of Fairy Land watched as the humans went through the motions, none of which made any sense, and she sat through the sermon, which she couldn’t quite understand.