“I guess you guys weren’t paying attention,” I said, feeling a bit bad about letting them think it was their fault.
Once they were all upright and were sure no one was injured, aside from maybe some scrapes and bruises, they returned to the path and resumed their ride. “I probably shouldn’t have wrecked them, but it seemed like the best way to contain the situation,” Owen said once they were gone. “I hope that doesn’t count as using magic to do harm.”
“It was a good thing you took action when you did because they were about to go full-on E.T., only without the moon to fly in front of. And I’m pretty sure it’s the same guy who levitated the bus, so he must have only one trick up his sleeve.”
“I don’t get what they’re trying to do,” Owen said, frowning, as we returned to our blanket. “Are the same people setting up these events and then resolving them with magic so it will be noticed?”
“If they’re trying to get caught doing good with magic, then maybe they’re trying to go public in a way that looks heroic,” I suggested. “On the other hand, I think this is the guy I saw in the club, and if the guy he was with was the guy I saw looking for bus witnesses, he was working for one of those ‘magic is evil’ blogs. If they have a magical person working for them, wouldn’t they be able to create definitive proof without going through all this fuss?”
“That’s if the person running that group knows she has magical people working for her. They may have their own agenda. Maybe they’re trying to change her mind about magic by doing heroic things with it.”
“Which you foiled today, and rather nicely. I don’t think the reporter thought anything of it.”
Even so, I turned on the late news that night. It was the usual litany of crime, politics, and accidents (and sometimes all of the above in one story). The story about the educational children’s program in the park didn’t contain a single mention of the near-miss by runaway bicycles. I was about to change the channel to a rerun of an old sitcom when a story came on that made me sit up and take notice.
Bystanders alleged that the windows in a car dealership had vanished and a car had floated out of the showroom before the windows reappeared again. The story was so wild, I was surprised the TV station had given it any credibility. It must have been a slow news day, I thought. Or maybe they were treating it as a quirky human interest feature—people say the darnedest things.
But then they showed video, first from the dealership’s own security cameras. That was fuzzy and black-and-white, but I couldn’t think of what other explanation I could give for a car floating out of a dealership with no one behind the wheel. Magnets?
That wasn’t all. There was also bystander video, shot on a digital camera. That footage was sharp, so it was obvious when the window vanished and returned, and we could clearly see the car float out and drive away.
Unless we could find an illusionist who would take credit for the stunt and return the car, it looked like the magical cat was well and truly out of the bag.
6
I immediately called Owen. “Have you been watching the news?” I asked.
“No, why? Did they say something about the bike attack?”
“Worse than that. Someone made a car fly out of a dealership window, and they got good video.” I described what I’d seen on the news.
“Are you sure?” He sounded skeptical.
“You’re not telling me that you, a wizard, don’t believe in magic, are you?”
“I’m not saying anything about the viability of magic. I’m just saying I’m not sure that this sounds like magic. It’s more like a publicity stunt. How are they framing it in the coverage?”
“They’re treating it more like an interesting oddity than like a serious story.”
“Then maybe it’ll blow over. I don’t anticipate the authorities banging on our doors. But stay on top of it, of course.”
“That was the plan,” I said. “But it really is looking more and more like either a lot of magical people are suddenly getting really careless, or they’re actively trying to get caught. I’m as worried about that as I am about magic being exposed.”
“Yeah, that could be a problem,” he said. I could practically hear the wheels turning in his head over the phone. He was thinking about it, and hard.
“So?” I prompted.
“So, we’ll stay on top of it. You’ve got this.”
It occurred to me that this time, it actually was my responsibility. Always before, I’d sort of fallen into this kind of work, either from being at the wrong (or right) place at the wrong (or right) time, from being targeted, or from trying to help Owen. Now, it really was up to me and my colleagues to deal with the crisis. I had to admit that while I liked my day-to-day work much better now, it had been nice to get to swoop in and deal with something without it being my real job. The consequences had always been life or death, but now my job was at stake, as well.
The next morning, I woke early after not having slept much and gathered an armload of newspapers on my way to work. I couldn’t do much more than skim headlines on the subway and, much to my relief, there were no “MAGIC IS REAL!” headlines. It was possible that the incident had happened too late to make the morning papers, and unless it really did definitively prove the existence of magic, a car disappearing from a dealership probably wasn’t “Stop the presses!” material. I wouldn’t relax on the mainstream news front until I saw what was in the next day’s papers.
After giving the papers a cursory skim once I got to the office, I checked the regular news sites. The disappearing car was mentioned on a few of them, but in the human-interest feature category rather than as real news. That was something of a relief. Next, I read the magic-watching blogs, and any idea of letting it go went right out the window. There was an editorial on the Abigail Williams blog about the danger magic posed to society. It referred to the disappearing car and the nightclub line scuffle, but went on to discuss other incidents. Some of them I recognized from the last couple of years when rogue wizard Phelan Idris had been running amok. Others I’d seen mentioned on the blog. There were a few that were news to me.
“Although there have been one or two cases in which magic was used to benefit others,” the editorial said, “magic is more likely, by far, to be used for underhanded purposes. Magicians force others to do their will, hide their dastardly deeds behind a veil of illusion, and use their powers to cheat and swindle. Something has to be done to put a stop to this. From now on, even if we don’t get evidence of the magic itself, we want photos of people you believe have done magic. We’ll post these so that everyone can beware of these dangerous people.”
I was particularly worried about the line mentioning hiding magic behind a veil of illusion. I cross-referenced the incidents mentioned in the post with our internal incident reports and, as I feared, there were some when no one else should have noticed the magic. I’d even been involved in a couple, and I was fairly certain that they’d been hidden from ordinary people. That suggested they had a magical immune in their midst, and that put all magical people, even the responsible ones who hid their magic from the world, at risk.
“Uh oh,” I said to myself. I copied and pasted the post into an e-mail to Sam and Merlin. If there was ever a time to bypass the chain of command, this was it. Not long afterward, I got summoned to an emergency meeting in Merlin’s office. I supposed the car stunt was big enough that the “we haven’t been exposed in centuries” argument no longer held up.
A representative from the Council was there—fortunately, not Jabez Jones. It was Mack, an old friend of Owen’s foster parents. He was generally pretty reasonable, for a Council type.
“It seems we have multiple issues here,” Merlin said. “First, we have a magical person who’s openly using magic to commit criminal acts and allowing his acts to be caught on camera. Second, we have nonmagical people who are aware of this activity. It was reported on the local news.”
“I’ve done some skimming around on news s
ites, and so far, most people seem to be taking it as some kind of stunt, like something a stage magician would do,” I said. “Of course, the people who already believe in magic are all over it.”
Minerva Felps, from the Prophets and Lost department, said, “We’re not really getting a changed vibe here. It’s not affecting the general public, only these few people.”
“I’m suspicious about how the people who are trying to prove magic exists just happened to be there to catch perfectly framed footage of the event,” Mack said. “That doesn’t look like ordinary bystander stuff. He had a clear shot, with the car in the middle of the frame, and he got it all from start to finish. It’s hard to imagine that someone looking out for this sort of thing just happened to stumble across it, just happened to have a video camera out and ready even before something happened, and just happened to shoot it perfectly.”
“We’ve been wondering about that,” I said. “They always seem to have someone there to get footage, though it usually isn’t this good. One possibility is that the magical watchdogs are stalking people they believe use magic. That gives them a better chance of being in the right place and at the right time when someone does something. But, yeah, being set up to frame it perfectly does make you wonder. I’m really starting to think that magical people are involved. I know at least some of the situations were set up magically to then allow someone else to resolve them magically.” I hadn’t officially reported the incident in the park because I wanted to keep Owen out of it, but it fit the pattern.
“I can tell you, the Council is having kittens,” Mack said, wincing as though at a painful memory. “We haven’t come this close to public exposure in centuries.”
“It’s worse than that,” I said. “There was an editorial on one of these sites mentioning that magical people use illusion to hide their magic. If they have an immune . . .” I couldn’t help but shudder, and the wizards did, likewise. I couldn’t tell with Sam, but he was made of sterner stuff.
“I’m thinking our people should lie low until this blows over,” Rod said. He was in charge of personnel at the company. In a regular company, it might have been “human resources,” but not all of our staff were human. “I’ll draft an internal memo warning people not to engage in any public magic activity, not even under veiling.”
“What will people like fairies, elves, and other magical creatures do?” I asked. “That’s a little harder to hide.”
“Yeah, I can’t exactly ground most of my team,” Sam said. “Without our air power, keepin’ track of things gets harder, and if they can see through veils and they’re willing to admit to what they see, that’s gonna be a problem. Something tells me that our usual fallback of people refusing to say they’re seeing flying gargoyles isn’t going to work here.”
“I say we ride this one out, play it cool for the time being,” Minerva said. “It’ll probably blow over. I’m sensing a stock market drop next week, and there’s a high chance of a political scandal that should knock this off the news radar entirely.”
“Unless someone is trying to get attention, in which case I doubt they’ll just give up,” I said. “Do we know of any factions that are actively campaigning to get magic out in the open?” I knew there were all kinds of factions in the magical world, from old-school magical puritans to magical mobsters.
“There are a few groups we’ve been watching,” Mack said. “It’s hard to tell how organized they are, whether it’s a few nuts or an actual movement. We’ve brought in some of the individuals we know of for questioning. So far, it doesn’t seem like they’re involved.”
We didn’t come to any definitive conclusions from the meeting, just a plan to keep doing what we’d been doing and keep an eye on events. I went back to my office to check the blogs again. Discussion was heated. Surprisingly, the clear, perfectly framed video was seen as less credible than all the Bigfoot-quality stuff that had been posted earlier. As Mack had said, people found it suspicious as bystander video, which suggested that it might have been faked.
But then I saw that the alleged photographer had posted in response to these challenges. He even included additional video that hadn’t been shown on the air, from before the incident.
As we’d suspected, the photographer was supposedly following someone, shooting as he went. I couldn’t tell anything about the subject. He wore a nondescript windbreaker with a hood that was pulled up around his face, and he was being shot from behind at first. He stopped at the dealership and looked around. The photographer ducked out of the way, and for a split second he got the guy’s face in the frame. The subject raised his hands, and the photographer quickly panned around, just in time to catch the window vanishing.
I backed up the video to the best shot of the guy’s face, took a screen capture, and sent that to Rod. He knew just about everyone in the magical world, so there was a good chance he could identify him. While I was at it, I sent it to Sam, so he and his crew would know who to look out for.
I had the strongest feeling that there was something more we should be doing. I just wasn’t entirely sure what that was.
The next morning, I was collecting newspapers from the racks in front of the Union Square subway station when I heard Owen’s voice behind me. “I didn’t realize you were so into current events.”
“I’m into how certain current events are covered. You read Mandarin, don’t you? I might be able to figure out the Spanish.”
“We also have certain translation resources.”
Which probably meant spells, and I hoped they were more accurate than the Internet translation services. “Oh, good. Here.” I thrust an armload of papers on him and continued my buying spree. “Oops, do you have a quarter?” He twitched his hand in a way I recognized, and I grabbed his wrist before he could complete the spell. “No. Not now. Reach into your pocket like a normal person.”
I’d never thought of Owen as someone who casually used magic to make his life easier, and he did use it far less than most magical people. If you saw him at home, you might not realize he was a wizard unless you noticed some of the more esoteric titles on his bookshelf. But he had some little habits that he probably didn’t think twice about and that now might be used as evidence of a vast magical conspiracy.
With a weary sigh, he shifted the papers to his left arm and fished a quarter out of his pocket. I took it from him. “Thank you.”
I waited until I got to my office to read the papers, even though I was anxious to see what might be in there. If the floating car was going to be covered in the newspaper, it would be in today’s editions, along with perhaps more in-depth reporting than there was likely to be on television.
Once I had a big cup of coffee, I sat down at my desk and started searching. The Times devoted a paragraph in a local news roundup to the incident, with a lot of words like “allegedly,” “supposedly,” and “bystanders said.” The word “magic” didn’t come up at all. Police were reported as refusing to speculate. That was a relief. I’d know we really had something to worry about when the Times reported on magic.
The tabloids had varying coverage, some with stills taken from the video. Without motion, the pictures looked fake. I doubted I’d have believed them if I hadn’t seen the video and didn’t know that such things were actually possible. The fact that the stories were alongside others like “Princess Diana Not Dead—Abducted by Aliens” and “Elvis—Madonna’s Latest Lover?” didn’t make them much more believable.
I leaned back in my chair with a heartfelt, “Whew.” We’d really dodged a bullet there. I dropped the foreign-language papers off to be translated and hoped that this would be the end of it. Maybe when something this big failed to get any traction, the magic hunters would give up.
Unfortunately, this proved to be only the beginning of the campaign, and Abigail Williams had gone from merely wanting to expose magic to being violently opposed, calling for the government to take action. The Times was a little too staid to print that wacky a letter to the edito
r, but other newspapers in the coming days ran letters from concerned readers who demanded an investigation.
One local news channel had a stage magician walk through the car “trick” and explain how it might have been done, but he was unable to replicate it in a way that looked at all realistic. The stolen car was later pulled over on a freeway in Connecticut, but the person driving it had a genuine-looking sales receipt from a dealership. That aroused suspicion that the dealership had staged the whole thing as a publicity stunt, and the story rapidly died in the conventional press.
The anti-magic underground, however, was gaining strength. On my way to the subway station one morning, I got handed two different fliers about magical issues. One merely pointed to the blogs I already knew about and said it was “the truth they don’t want you to know.” The other was more strident, mentioning a vast magical cabal running the world behind the scenes and claiming that the media was stifling all proof of magic.
Meanwhile, magical people were growing tense. Fairies folded their wings up under coats when out in public. Wizards barely used magic, even at home. I quit teasing Owen for his workaholic ways. The more time he spent in the office, the less time he could be anywhere near any public magic event. So far, the Council hadn’t said anything more about him, and I’d noticed that Merlin left him out of all the meetings on the topic, but I worried that he’d make a convenient scapegoat. He’d been present for far too many of these incidents, enough for me to worry he was being targeted. He had a lot of enemies in the magical world, and if magical people were actually behind this, he could be in danger.
And yet, in spite of the caution in much of the magical community, the stories kept coming. Every day, there would be a new post or two on the anti-magic blogs, showing what they believed to be proof of magic. Even knowing what I knew, I didn’t think it looked like proof of anything. I didn’t recognize any of the alleged magic users, and the pictures didn’t look anything like any real spells I’d ever seen cast.
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