Dear Diary,

I came back from getting some groceries to a message on my voicemail. I can never hear my cellphone ring in the store. That canned music they air over the speakers is loud trash.

The message was from Rose de la Couer. I recognized the name as the author of those atrocious romance novels everyone is babbling about. A trilogy was made into a soft core porn at the box offices. I remember the film club at the Latimer having a loud feud about it that spilled out into the mess hall regularly last spring.

The woman wants me to revive a deleted file. Child's play. You'd think her publishing company would cover that. I hope her royalty checks pay well. I plan to charge extra for nonsense.

...

De la Couer was over the moon when I called back. After two minutes too long in her fake French accent she dropped it and suddenly I got an earful of Boston. Turns out the file was for a side project under a pen name. She was very hush hush over it and in her anxiety about the file, was more than happy to pay extra.

I sent her the symbol for the file that she had only to scan. Five minutes after hanging up, I got a notification of payment and a text that it worked. Of course it worked. Most students at Latimer learned that sigil their first year after their first charms essay goes missing.

...

I need to ask that astrologist, Avi, that hangs out and prognosticates at Lyre what planet alignment is making people particularly stupid this week.

I was barely done paying rent with de la Couer's payment when I got another call.

First I was annoyed by the sound of some woman asking me to hold for Monsieur Hoffman. The nerve of someone calling then telling me to hold. I almost hung up.

Hoffman finally answered and thankfully didn't waste time. He needed to hire me to enliven an actor for his play. He's a director and seemed only a little put off when I didn't recognize any of his hits. (I looked him up after and it turns out he does avant garde stuff that the critics hate but people with too much money are happy to pay for.)

I gave him my rates and asked how long the actor had been deceased. Thing is, a lot of these folks think raising the dead is a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am situation and the dead are back to their old self. However, the longer they've been dead, the...ickier...it gets.

That's when Hoffman explained that this person had never been alive. In fact, it wasn't a person at all!

Dude wants a SNOWMAN for his play! A walking, talking, singing, dancing, top hat wearing snowman! In JULY!

I hate this city. People die every day. People pay to have those dead brought back every day. They pay Crane Renovations anyways. But me? No. I get gardens, broken promises, lost files, and now snowmen.

Only the knowledge that my school loans were still waiting payment kept me from telling the pompous director to go fuck himself.

I explained that this sort of thing involves big magic. That I would require help to put life into something that never had it in the first place. He then informed me that money was no object and that he was only calling me because his former magical aids were unable to see his vision. I bet they weren't. Or just got tired of his bullshit.

I checked the astrology calendar. Hoffman needed his snowman in a week so it didn't give me much time to calculate alignments but I figured that Wednesday was the least likely to be a catastrophe.

Thankfully I listened in my Level 2 Invokation and Pact Course.

...

Nothing really prepares you for dealing with the Fae. Yea I invoked one in school, but each time is different and this time was...intense seems like a very small word.

The invokation was relatively simple. The hardest part was getting snow in July but a Hawaiian Ice shop down the street from the theater was happy to make some extra cash. We just had to get the A/C in the theater up pretty high so it wouldn't melt. I, of course, forgot to wear layers under my robes.

The Snow Queen is terrifying. The stories by those wizards Grim (or was it Anderson...who cares) did not do her justice. I don't know if she was as beautiful as she was written. Mostly she looked like a very tall pillar of snowy wind.

The director made the pact with the Snow Queen. It was all said in hushed tones and I didn't ask. It's none of my business what the Fae want or what that idiot is willing to exchange for his snowman. Once it was done, the snow formed into a five foot round boy that the director told his assistant to costume. Two coal eyes, a carrot nose, top hat, and scarf completed the look.

The snowman did not say Happy Birthday.

I collected my check and cashed it immediately, just in case, before coming back home.

I do not want to do that again. I think my ears are frost bit.