Sometimes the fates get it all wrong.

And there you are.

Your destiny sends you in one direction.

Your desires send you in quite another.

Where you end up depends not on desire or destiny

but on deeds.

Have you ever had the experience when you thought the world worked in a certain way and then, boom! In the span of four seconds, you found out that you were totally wrong?

Perhaps you were positive that:

Gravity worked in a single direction.

The earth was round.

Magic was something in storybooks.

Maybe, on occasion, you dressed up in a crown and glass slippers, but only for school plays or Halloween, not for real life.

Oh, and here's a big one: You totally thought your parents hadn't been lying to you for your ENTIRE LIFE!!!

Because in two short sentences, my dads had pretty much flattened the earth and reversed gravity. Not only was magic real, I was magical. And royal! But not royal in a good way with pretty gowns, Prince Charming's kiss, and a happily ever after. I was destined to be an EVIL queen, which meant my only friend would be a magical mirror, and eventually, I'd turn into a dragon and get slayed by SOMEONE ELSE'S PRINCE CHARMING! NOT THAT I NEED A PRINCE CHARMING TO BE FULFILLED! It's mostly the kissing part I'm interested in.

Anyway, this is where I draw your attention back to earlier in my tale. Remember, I said to note the following line uttered by my dad?

Honesty is the basis of a strong relationship.

And I said later you would have the chance to savor its blatant hypocrisy?

Now is that time.

Go ahead. Savor. I'll be here when you're done.

Okay, you're back. Good. Did you enjoy it? I know I didn't. I would much rather have two dads who told me the truth. But here we were. In the kitchen. I was still flat on the sofa, my body boneless as a squid, though my mind whirled. My dads refused to make eye contact with me, but I needed, no deserved, answers!

"Tell me what's happening," I demanded. "The truth this time!"

Papa winced.

The house rumbled and shook like a train on rickety tracks.

"I know she's in there, traitors!" A grandmotherly voice echoed through the room. Though the voice was that of a sweet old woman who baked cookies and plied children with hot cocoa and peppermint treats, her words placed her squarely into the Hansel & Gretel category—the sugar was there to fatten you up for her pleasure, not yours.

More than anything, I wanted to get off the sofa and get a visual. I imagined a crone with a tall black hat, a large jutting chin covered in warts, and possibly also fangs. (I have an active imagination, as you probably know by now.)

Dad covered my mouth with his hand, but he needn't have. For once, I was lost for words.

"Undo the spells and grant me entry or suffer my wrath." On the word "wrath" my heart skipped a beat and my stomach curdled like a witch's brew. (Come on! That was clever!) This was my birth mom. No wonder I was so evil.

"Your Highness," Papa said, standing and facing the window. "There is no one here but Paul and me. Although we would love nothing better than to receive your evil majesty, our humble abode has not been prepared for such an honor. Please return later and give us the opportunity to see that our humble home is prepared to entertain your royal eminence."

"While I appreciate a good fawning, your insincerity is painfully obvious. I wasn't born yesterday, you know. My dungeon is filled with residents being punished for shameful, insipid flattery. Besides. I can smell her."

Through the glass? Geesh!

I sniffed my armpit and then profoundly wish I hadn't. But, hey, it wasn't my fault I had to wear an old horse costume from the drama department and rescue my cat from a dirty cemetery that I accidentally blew up!

My hands clenched into fists, and Dad put his index finger over his mouth like a librarian to remind me about the quiet thing and joined Papa at the window. He cleared his throat. "Nigel meant nothing by it, Your Highness. Please forgive him. I promise next time you visit; he'll be up to speed on his manners."

"I don't know what the two of you are doing trying to hide one of the most powerful witches in five hundred years. My associates informed me about what happened in the cemetery. Her powers are unparalleled but obviously untrained and wild. I insist you return her to me immediately."

"We have no witch here," Papa lied. Something I now happened to know he was very good at.

"You have five minutes," the queen said. "I have a pedicure appointment, and if you make me late, you'll find yourselves in amphibious form."

Huh? I raised my eyebrows.

"She's threatening to turn us into toads," Dad said, gulping.

"Wow, the woman really goes straight for the cliches, doesn't she?" I said.

Papa glanced at our weird kitchen clock. The one with thirteen hours on it. I'd always thought it was kitsch, but now I wondered if it had some significance. It was eight minutes after five, and the sun was sinking fast, leaving the room bathed in orange firelight.

"There must be a way to hold her back," Dad said. "You check the wards while I look for a witch-melting spell."

Knowing I was a witch, made my throat constrict. "Witches can melt? Like in the Wizard of Oz? Although technically, she dissolved."

"I was kidding," Dad said, heaving moldy recipe books out of his cabinet of wonders. Once he had an enormous stack, he plunked down beside me on the floor and flipped through the incomprehensible hieroglyphic-y pages so furiously it made me cringe. (Years of being taught to respect books made it hard to watch.)

Papa was now crawling sideways about the room, red-faced, scrutinizing the walls through the one good lens of his glasses. If I wasn't so angry and scared right now, I would've laughed. He looked like a large, uncoordinated crab.

The minute hand on the clock clicked over to nine after five. "Four minutes," the queen roared.

"Petronella is not in a good mood."

"Petronella?" I said.

"The evil queen. Her name is Petronella."

"Wow, you actually told me something. That wasn't so hard, was it? No wonder she's in a bad mood. What a horrible name," I said.

"When she was named Petronella, different things were popular. Today we have Brittanys and Megans and pickleball, but in her day there were Petronellas and Grizeldas aplenty, along with torture chambers, knights in shining armor with very long swords," Dad said, continuing his assault on the ancient tomes.

"You make her sound like she was born in the freaking Middle Ages."

Papa looked up at the ceiling as if the answer was there. "That sounds about right," Papa said. "According to my calculations."

"You're joking," I said.

"I never joke about calculations," said my accountant dad. This was the only truth spoken in this room in recent memory. According to my calculations!

"Just so you know, Rowen, the queen is never in a good mood," Dad said.

"That's not completely true." Papa pursed his lips. "I think maybe that one time in 1962."

"I'd forgotten about that. Those poor ducks."

This got my attention. "What ducks?"

"Shhh," they both hissed in unison.

In my opinion, if you're going to talk about "poor ducks" in the middle of whatever was going on here, you ought to explain and not tell a person to shut up. "Wait! How long is this evil queen gig?"

My dads stopped what they were doing, and looked at one another with their stupid silent communication.

"How. Long?"

"Five-hundred years," Papa said.

My brain tried to wrap around this fact, but it refused to compute. Funnily enough, my first reaction was, "Yay, I get to live for a really long time." Followed by the second reaction, which was, "Boo, I have to be evil for a really long time."

"Three minutes," the queen roared.

"Do something, Paul," Dad said, tears pooling in his eyes. God, I hated seeing him like this. What if the queen did turn them into toads? I mean, there could be an upside to having amphibious dads who couldn't tell me what to do or stop me from buying a corvette and driving without a license or making me go to school. Kind of a win-win if you think about it. I get independence, they get an unlimited supply of flies.

"Maybe I could reason with her," I said.

Dad buried his head in his hands, laughing so hard he sputtered and choked. Papa put his hand on Dad's shoulder. "Please, Paul. I know you're stressed, but we cannot lose it. We must stay focused. Get Rowen to safety." Just as I wondered if I might need to Heimlich Dad, he recovered, which is good, because I don't really know the Heimlich Maneuver.

"Two minutes!"

"I don't see anywhere I might've missed warding," Papa said. He absentmindedly laid his glasses on the sofa next to me. "Let me help you search in the books, Paul."

While they were distracted, I picked up the glasses and looked through them. At first, everything seemed normal, like why did Papa even wear glasses when they seemed like clear glass? But when I turned toward the wall, I gasped. The wall shimmered and pulsed with gold hieroglyphics—five-pointed stars and moons, eyes and arrows, triangles, and circles and letters formed from an ancient alphabet. Like the books.

"One minute."

"Magic," I breathed. Magic is real. It all sank in. My dads are warlocks. I am a witch. I am destined to be the next Evil Queen. What is an evil queen if not someone from a fairy tale? What did it mean to be an evil queen? Was it like a career path? Did it mean I wouldn't have to stay in school?

Reluctantly, I set the glasses back down. But I stared at them longingly. I wanted those glasses for my very own.

"Time's up!"

Bang! Something hit the window, and my heart thumped so hard I felt it in my throat.

"What was that?" I said. A thin layer of frost crept through the room, covering every inch. Despite the fire, the temperature in the room was dropping fast. "It's c-c-cold," I said, teeth chattering.

Shivering, Papa examined the frost on the floor up close through the good lens of his glasses. "It's a refrigeration spell. She's trying to freeze us out." Hands shaking, he put the glasses back on the sofa.

"Wait, you said before the wards and salt circles would h-h-h-hold."

"The Evil Queen is powerful. And determined. And a refrigeration spell only requires the tiniest opening and the greatest of will. She wants you badly." He unfolded the blanket on the far end of the couch and wrapped it around me.

Inside the walls, the beams responsible for holding up the cottage creaked like old bones, and above me, the window shuddered in its frame. Then all was quiet. The house seemed to hold its breath, waiting. Fearful. Places can have feelings, right? That's totally not crazy. (Note to self: research signs of insanity to determine current mental state.)

Dad crawled back to his potions. He plucked a vial from a shelf and tossed it on the fire. It roared, and the room began heating up once again. The temperature climbed. I relaxed a little as I thawed.

"You will hand over my heir!" Petronella declared with the authoritative tone of someone very familiar with being obeyed because if you didn't, you would seriously regret it. Or perhaps, die before the serious regret had the time to set in.

The house shook again, so hard, I nearly fell off the sofa. A pressure built up in the kitchen, and it felt like my ears might explode. It was as if the walls were doing battle with a hurricane-strength wind bearing down on the house from the outside, trying their best not to collapse and crush us. The windows vibrated in their frames.

I became nostalgic for the time when my biggest problem was getting Miles to fall in love with me and not being arrested for hacking or run over by a garbage truck.

"She doesn't want to go with you," Papa said without even looking at me for my approval, which I didn't give. Honestly, I didn't know what I wanted right now.

"I know what you did to her," Petronella said, her voice low and serious. "It's an outrage. Suppressing her powers. Making her think she was human. Forcing her to grow up in the mortal world. The poor thing must've felt so alone. Knowing inside she was different from everyone else. Not understanding why. And you two suppressing her magic. It could've killed her for all you knew."

Suppressing my magic? My mouth hung open as I stared at my dads who were, I realized, strangers to me. The look of guilt on their faces told me the queen spoke the truth. They not only lied to me about what I was, but they also performed magic on me without asking. The smoothies! That's what they were for! No wonder I always felt off-kilter. Like my brain split in two. All the headaches. The magic had been pounding at my skull, trying to escape.

My blood heated and fizzed like my veins were filled with a Monster Energy drink. My dads swallowed hard, their Adam's apples bobbing in their throats. I sat up so fast, my head spun.

"I will take her to the castle where she will learn to use her powers. Where she will be with others of her kind. No one can understand her struggle more than I do."

The queen understood me, unlike my lying parents. I looked at them dismissively, like the strangers they were. Out of spite, advanced planning, and pure desire, I scooped up Papa's glasses and tucked them into an inside pocket of the horse suit.

Dad knelt beside me and wrapped his arms around me, tears falling on my costume. Papa stroked my forehead. "We love you, Rowan," Papa said.

"We thought what we did was right," Dad added. "You may not appreciate it right now, but we only wanted to protect you."

"I didn't need you to protect me from the truth. How am I protected when my whole life is a lie? I am a lie."

Dad sobbed. "You are not a lie. You are a beloved daughter." I wanted to believe this. And deep deep down, I probably did, but right now I couldn't control my anger.

"Well, I don't feel that way right now," I snarled, knowing my words would hurt them back. Like I'd been hurt. What right did they have doing this to me? Hiding the truth, knowing how much of an outcast I was in the world. There was no way I was ever going to fit in. It would be like a fish trying to make a home in a chicken coop. The queen's words settled on my skin, cool and powdery, like winter's first snow. No one can understand her struggle more than I do. I tasted them on my tongue.

The buzzing was back, stronger than ever. Lightning crackled. Power burst out of me. Dad's books swirled into the air, along with his potions, the cookie jar, the coffee maker, basically anything that wasn't pinned down caught up in my cyclone.

"Please, stop!" Dad yelled through the maelstrom. Both my parents dove under the kitchen table, holding it down with their arms.

The house shook, also begging me to stop. But I wouldn't stop. Never. More lightning struck the walls, which sizzled as my blue lightning fried the golden wards. And finally, the windows exploded. Shards of glass rained down.

Then everything was deathly silent as a sweet-looking elderly lady floated through the window into my latest disaster area. She had a white bouffant hairdo and wore a crisp powder blue suit, pearls, and oversized sunglasses that might've been popular fifty years ago. No fangs, warts, or pointy hats. Very confusing!

"Why does the evil queen look like the grandma from The Proposal?" I demanded. "She looks just like Betty White! What the heck? My mom is ooooold!"

"We did say Middle Ages," Dad whispered.

Petronella raised her arms. Blue lightning flowed from her fingertips Darth Vader style. "Has no one ever told you that calling a woman old can be hazardous to one's health?" she seethed, her voice sharp as a knife's edge.

Thanks for reading, guys! Woot! This is the inciting incident. We're about to enter the world of the upside-down. What do you think is going to happen? Will Ro go with the evil queen? Will her dads save her? Will Calpurrnio show up? Will Ro's dads be turned into toads?

This chapter is hereby dedicated to @druidrose, a pal of mine for many years. We just hung out at Wattcon, and you should all head over to her profile immediately and read her work. She's amazing!