Sam, the gargoyle head of security, ran the meeting. He began with a briefing on current concerns, which included the fight his team had broken up Saturday morning. “The Council enforcers got there after we got things settled down, and they’re dealin’ with the participants,” he reported. “One of our employees was involved, and she’s under disciplinary review.”
“I’ve got a little more to add, from my perspective on the scene,” I said.
“Yeah, doll, whattaya got?”
“Well, for one thing, the magic was noticed, and not by an immune.” I told them about the conversation I’d had with the woman in line. “And she said the same thing on the news. The reporter treated her like a nutjob. She’s got a blog tracking magical activity, and it sounds to me like the reports might be real, even if they don’t sound all that credible. I can dig into it further, if you like.”
“No point. It probably won’t amount to much,” Sam said, shrugging his wings. “We get these every so often. We can’t pull the wool over absolutely everyone’s eyes. Fortunately, the general public isn’t likely to believe these folks. It’s mostly just the sort of people who believe what they read in supermarket tabloids. No one’s ever come up with enough credible evidence to convince anyone outside the fringe. I’d rather have you focusing on finishing up the analysis of employees who might have had links to the Collegium.” That had been my last case, busting up the magical mafia that seemed to have tentacles throughout the magical world, and I had to admit that it was probably more important than one person with a blog.
As the meeting broke up and we headed back to our offices, Trish asked, “Should we worry? I mean, just imagine how it would change the world if everyone knew magic was real.”
“Well, they have managed to keep the secret all this time,” I said, repeating what Owen had told me. “It may get more challenging now that a lot of cell phones have cameras in them, and there are video cameras you can carry in your pocket. That makes getting evidence easier, though magic apparently doesn’t photograph well. Let’s just say that their ‘evidence’ isn’t very convincing, even when you know it’s true.”
Even so, I couldn’t resist pulling up the security logs and checking them against the blog. A lot of the incidents matched, so these people were reporting things that really had happened. I checked the readership statistics, and it didn’t look like more than a few hundred people had visited this blog—if that. The same few people might have visited over and over again. Maybe Sam was right. It was probably only a small fringe crowd, nothing to get excited about. Still, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on it and to learn more about the woman running it all.
The woman’s business card gave her name as Abigail Williams, which rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite place it.
“What did you come up with?”
I turned to see Trish leaning against the door frame, a coffee cup in her hand. “About what?” I asked, trying to act innocent.
“Oh, come on, I haven’t known you long, but I know you. You had to do just a little more digging. What did you find?”
“They’ve noticed legitimate stuff, so I may keep an eye on them to see if anyone’s listening. The woman’s business card said her name was Abigail Williams, and I don’t know if that’s real.”
She laughed. “Abigail Williams? Seriously? Yeah, that’s not ominous at all.” When I didn’t react as though I knew what she meant, she explained. “That’s one of the accusers in the Salem witch trials.” She gave a bashful little smile. “I was in a production of The Crucible in high school. My deep, dark secret is that I was a drama nerd.”
“So, probably not her real name.”
“Not unless her parents just happened to like the name Abigail and weren’t into history or drama, and she just happened to become some kind of crusader to expose magic. Or maybe the name was deliberate and her parents gave her a nice puritan upbringing that led her to where she is today. But I’m guessing it’s a pen name. Was there any other info on the card?”
“Just an e-mail address. Should I e-mail her?”
“I’d say it’s best not to engage. You’re up to your eyebrows in magic and planning a wedding to a wizard. You don’t want to draw attention to yourself if she’s already looking for magical weirdness.”
“Oh, good point,” I said as a chill went down my back. Anyone watching me for more than about five minutes was bound to notice magical activity if they were paying attention. I may be so utterly immune to magic that magic doesn’t work on me, but I somehow manage to be a magical trouble magnet. All I have to do is stand there, and you can bet that magical hijinks will soon ensue.
Okay, maybe some of that has to do with my job. Even before I officially became a part of the security team, I did my fair share of looking into magical malfeasance. Then there’s the fact that I hang out with—and am engaged to—Owen Palmer, who’s one of the most powerful wizards of his generation. That put a target on his back even before it was revealed that his parents had been the previous generation’s bad guys who tried to take over the magical world. They died soon after he was born, so it’s not like they were a big influence on him, but there are people who worry about his genetics.
And that meant drawing the attention of this Abigail Williams person would probably be a bad idea. I bookmarked the blog and added it to my list to check regularly. I’d once tried to set up search alerts for key words that were likely to come up if someone started talking about magic online, but that turned out to be a lost cause. I got bombarded with news about fantasy novels, a pro basketball team, Disney movies and theme parks, and various Wiccan practices. Maybe there were some sites from magic watchers buried in all those results, but I hadn’t found them before.
I tried clicking through to see if any of the frequent posters on this site were active elsewhere. A couple had their own blogs, but they were mostly full of pictures of their cats or diary-like discussions of their daily lives, with no mention of magic. I also tried running searches on terms these people used to describe magical events. That led me to a few other magic-watching blogs, which I bookmarked.
Then I had to get to work on my real assignment. I checked the list of people I was supposed to investigate and visited their offices to look for anything suspicious enough to warrant further investigation. I’d have felt a lot creepier about monitoring coworkers that way if I hadn’t seen how bad the Collegium was and if I hadn’t uncovered evidence that a lot of people at MSI had been hired because of their ties to the ancient organization. That didn’t mean all of them had been actively involved. It may have meant little more than someone putting in a good word. We’d dealt with the people we knew had been working against us from within, so now we had to figure out those who fell into a gray area.
Even as I chatted with people and scanned their offices for signs that they were magically hiding contraband, I couldn’t stop pondering what both Sam and Owen had said about magic being kept a secret. People today might not be so willing to consider the possibility of magic, but how had they handled it in the past? While I was out and about, I figured I could turn to my usual source for history of the magical world: Owen.
He wasn’t a historian, but history was somewhat related to his job. He was in charge of theoretical magic. That meant he tried to figure out how magic worked and how it could be used. He also dug up old spells, tested them, and tried to find ways to apply them. While he didn’t care much about the historical events around the spells, he had a lot of old books about magic in his office and lab, and I could usually find what I needed there.
Besides, it was always nice to have a valid excuse to visit my fiancé at work.
I used my security pass to get into the research and development department and found Owen in his lab at the end of the hall. He and his assistant, Jake, were testing a spell. More accurately, Owen was testing a spell on Jake, a young wizard with the looks of Jimmy Olsen and the musical taste of Johnny Rotten. Just as I entered the lab, Jake yelped a
nd leaped about three feet off the ground, twisted violently in the air, and looked like he was about to crash horribly before he stopped a few inches off the ground and descended the rest of the way slowly, landing gently on the floor.
“I don’t think that’s what that spell was meant to do,” he said from his position on the floor, his words slightly slurred.
Owen frowned and studied the whiteboard. “Yeah. I think the copyist may have dripped ink on that rune.” He erased one of the words on the board and wrote in a different one. “Let’s try it this way.”
Still lying on the floor, Jake said, “Mind if we take a break first, boss?”
“I second that motion,” I said.
Owen turned around, saw me, grinned, and flushed a delightful shade of pink. “Katie! To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“Actually, I’m not here to see you. I’m here to raid your bookshelf. I’m looking for records of any historical incidents that almost exposed magic to the outside world.”
“That sounds ominous,” Jake said as he sat up and leaned against the leg of the lab table. “What’s up?”
I boosted myself up to sit on the edge of the table, letting my legs swing. “Not too much. Just a few blogs by people who sound like crackpots, but who are frighteningly accurate. It doesn’t seem like they’re getting much traction yet, but I want to see what wizards did if this sort of thing ever came up before.”
“Is Sam worried about it?” Owen asked.
“Not really,” I said. “I’m just curious. People keep telling me that the secret’s been kept all this time, and I want to know how that happened.”
He headed into his office, returning with a massive tome. “This probably covers it. Tell the book what you’re looking for, and it’ll flip open to that part.” He handed the book to me, and the weight almost made me topple off the table.
“I guess this is one I should use here, unless you’ve got a moving crew and a dolly for me to use to get it down to my office,” I said, turning to drop the book on the table. It made a deep “thunk” sound. I hopped down and turned to touch the book. “It’ll work for me?”
“The spell is in the book itself, so no magic is required.”
“Okay,” I said doubtfully. I took a breath and said, “Show me incidents of possible magic discovery.” I hoped those search terms worked more accurately for this book than they did on the Internet.
The book opened and its pages rustled until they fell open and lay still. I bent and read a bit. It discussed the paranoia about witches during the 1600s. “Next” I said, as though this was a computer search. That worked on the book, as the pages rustled again, falling open to an item from the Victorian era. “Hmm, apparently not all the lurid penny dreadfuls were fiction,” I said. Some of the more shocking tales were true, and the Victorians were big on things like psychic phenomena and spiritualism, so they were open to believing them. Oddly, that helped keep real magic a secret, because there were so many fake mediums for believers to flock to that no one was likely to notice any actual magic buried in all the charlatanism.
“Oh, yeah,” Owen said, reading over my shoulder. His breath on my neck was warm, and I had to remind myself that Jake was still in the room. “A lot of the spiritualists and mediums weren’t talking to the dead. They were wizards or being used by wizards.”
“Next,” I said to the book, and it flipped some more. “Wow, there was a wave during the seventies and all the hype about the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, and UFOs.” I read on. “No, looks like the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, and UFO stuff was another effort to bury stories about magic. I’m sensing a theme here.”
The next section was during the eighties and the panic over Dungeons and Dragons. It seemed that someone had seen real magic and thought it had something to do with the game. Cue hysteria. “The moral of the story is that there’s always going to be panic and overreaction, but that’s true of everything, not just magic, and that makes it easy to bury magic,” I concluded, turning to face Owen.
“I take it this means you believe me about this not being a threat.”
“I suppose so,” I said with a sigh. “Besides, I have better things to do right now, like plan a wedding.”
“I’m glad to hear it. These things always seem to escalate into you taking risks.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re one to talk about that. As I recall, I wasn’t the one turned into a frog.” More seriously, I added, “But you’re the one who needs to be careful. You’ve already got elements in the magical world gunning for you. If you did something that got noticed by nonmagical people, you’d make a perfect scapegoat.”
“How often do you see me using magic away from work?”
“Around the house, no, but when you do something, you tend to do it big.”
He drew an X over his chest with his index finger. “Cross my heart, I’ll be good. And speaking of being good, what do you have planned after work?”
“Nothing in particular. Why?”
“I figured we could walk past a couple of florists and look in the windows. That way, we could check something off the to-do list in Gemma’s wedding binder.”
“I thought the point of having a magical wedding in a magical space was that someone could wave a hand and, poof, instant wedding.”
“But we have to decide what we want them to poof. Which is why all we have to do is look in the windows and see what we like.”
“Sounds like fun, but I’m not the one who tends to forget time and work late.”
He crossed his heart again. “At five on the dot, I promise.”
He actually kept his word, much to my surprise. Usually, I had to drop by his lab, he’d realize the time, swear he only needed another half hour to finish whatever experiment he had going, and then I’d give up and go home after an hour. But he was surprisingly into the wedding planning, which I guessed was a good sign.
As we left the office building, he consulted a list. “These are the florists Gemma recommended we look at, but since we don’t actually have to order flowers, we could also look at some botanical gardens. That would probably be a weekend excursion, though.”
We waited for a “walk” light to cross the street to get to the subway station. This was one of those areas where Owen tended to use magic in public without even thinking about it. He could cross a busy street against the light without getting run over or could change the lights to clear his path. He’d been more cautious about using magic in public ever since the secret of his parentage was revealed. Considering what he’d gone through then, I thought that was perfectly understandable.
But it wasn’t just magical people who ignored traffic signals. Jaywalking was practically an organized athletic activity in this city, and there were always people taking advantage of traffic gridlock to cross streets in between cars backed up at intersections. We were the oddballs actually waiting for a signal while people streamed past us across the street.
While we were still waiting for the light to change, someone coming from the other side of the street darted into traffic, just as a city bus came barreling down the road. The jaywalker didn’t seem to notice the bus, and the bus didn’t have room to stop in time. I flinched, anticipating the impact as the bus tires squealed.
But there was no impact. The bus levitated, going over the man’s head and gently landing before continuing on its way, gradually slowing in time to stop behind the line of cars waiting for the light to change.
And judging by the number of people on the sidewalks pointing and exclaiming, that bit of magic hadn’t been hidden from ordinary people.
3
I gasped in shock along with everyone else. I wasn’t astonished by a bus flying because I knew such things were possible. I was just surprised to see it happening out in the open, where everyone could see it. I immediately turned to Owen, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t do that,” he said.
True, I would have sensed the magic if he’d used it so close to me. “
But who did?” I asked. We weren’t far from MSI headquarters, so there was a good chance a lot of the pedestrians in the area were magical. I would have hoped, though, that anyone working for MSI would know better than to do something that big so publicly, without any kind of veiling spell. It was possible that, in the heat of the moment, all they’d thought about was saving the jaywalker and had forgotten to consider the potential consequences. Still, I’d never known a magical person who wasn’t trying to cause trouble to forget about being detected. It was drilled into them from childhood. There were actually children’s books about what awful things might happen if you let someone see you use magic. Owen’s foster parents had a whole bookshelf full of them.
The light changed, and we could safely—and legally—cross the street. People gathered in the plaza there were discussing the incident, loudly enough that we could hear them. “I swear, that bus just rose into the air,” one person said.
As we passed the group, a man turned to us. “Tell me I’m not crazy. Did you see it?”
My conscience kicked in. I couldn’t bring myself to lie because it seemed wrong to tell him he hadn’t seen what he’d seen. “It all happened so fast, I’m not sure what I saw,” I said.
“All I know is, that guy was lucky,” Owen added.
“Did anyone get a picture?” someone in the crowd called out.
“Maybe there’s security camera footage,” someone else said.
We continued on our way to the subway station, trying to walk casually, so we wouldn’t look like we were fleeing the scene. We didn’t have to discuss it out loud to know what the danger was. Owen in the vicinity of that kind of magic would look suspicious, as powerful as he was. All I could hope was that there was security footage that showed him not doing anything.
Enchanted Ever After Page 3