“Okay, so what’s the deal with men in black kidnapping a guy?” I looked up to see Trish entering my office.
“Exactly what they said, assuming you read the same thing I just read. I happened to be there. My guess is it was a publicity stunt to make it look like he was being silenced, because the magic police don’t work like that, and they sent a news release to that reporter who was at the meeting. Supposedly, he was going to reveal everything about magic.”
“And it’s so very convenient that he got dragged away by men in black before he could do so, huh? Makes you wonder how much proof these people really have, if they have to resort to stunts like that.”
“Carmen—the reporter—seems to have landed on the side of skepticism this time, and she didn’t do a story last night. If this was supposed to be their big, attention-grabbing event, it backfired.”
She sank onto the chair beside my desk and stretched out her legs in front of her. “That one site that reported this stunt is a real piece of work. It looks like the people who burn Harry Potter books because they think they teach kids to do magic and worship Satan have started taking it all too seriously and are looking for magic in the real world.”
“Well, there is magic in the real world, though I can’t tell that it has much to do with Satan,” I said. “That’s what makes this all so tricky. If they were just wrong, we could laugh at them. But there is magic. And there are some evil people using magic. You’re not going to get anywhere using the spells in children’s books, even if you have power, so that part is silly. But they’re not entirely wrong.”
“On the other hand, they could cause serious trouble with the parts they’re right about. What are our next steps?”
“I guess just keep an eye on it. I think I talked Carmen down from being worried about that kidnapping. I stopped just short of gaslighting, her, though. I didn’t tell her anything that wasn’t true, but I also didn’t validate what she might have seen. Fortunately, there wasn’t any magic involved with this. I don’t know what I’ll do if there ever actually is magic happening in front of her.”
“Maybe you’d better start thinking about that,” she said sternly. “At the rate things are going, it’s likely to happen, and you should be prepared. You need to know where you’re going to draw the line. What are you willing to do to keep the secret, and is there something you won’t do? If you figure that out ahead of time, you won’t have to make the decision in the heat of the moment.”
“Planning for it just means that it won’t go the way I planned,” I said with a weary sigh.
“I don’t think the exact event will make much difference on those big questions. There may be some room for improvisation, but you need to know if you’re willing to outright lie.”
“It would help if I could just tell her the truth. We recruit immunes all the time. Why not this one?”
“I’m not the one to ask about that. Maybe you’d better take that up with the boss.”
I knew what everyone above me, as well as Owen, was likely to say about that. They were really careful about how they broke the news to potential immunes. First, there was a lot of testing to guarantee the immune status. Then they figured out the person’s situation—did they need a new job, were they already thinking that there was something going on, were they likely to spill the beans to others? A television reporter would probably be considered too risky. There wasn’t any job at MSI that was likely to fit her skill set or be of interest to her, unless she just wanted to be around magic. Her job was spilling the beans, and if she had any proof at all, this would be a story that could make her career. It all came down to the kind of person she was and whether she’d be willing or able to see the potential risks of that story getting out. We didn’t know enough about her to know where she might stand.
The little bio on the station’s website didn’t tell me much, other than where she went to school and where she’d worked before. She was relatively new to this station from a smaller city, and she seemed young to have made it to the New York market. That meant she was both really good and really ambitious. The ambition was a possible cause for concern.
On the other hand, if she wanted to be taken seriously in her field, she’d have to have absolute proof of magic, something normal people could see that they were sure wasn’t special effects. An ambitious person with no ethics might be willing to fudge a few details to get a hot story on something serious like politics or business, but someone who wanted to be known as a top reporter would have to be extremely careful about claiming to have proof of magic. As she’d said, she’d be laughed out of town—and probably the business—if there was the slightest doubt.
Of course, deciding that she was super ambitious was a big call to make from reading between the lines of a website bio. I did a search on her and came up with a few articles. She’d spoken at some school career days, and it looked like one of them was her alma mater, an inner-city high school where she’d encouraged the kids to work hard to achieve their dreams, no matter what the odds looked like. She did a fair amount of community outreach through the station. I thought that was a positive sign that she was trying to be a good role model, but it still didn’t tell me whether she’d be willing to sit on news of the existence of magic.
On the other hand, she’d shown persistence in overcoming the odds against her, which told me she wouldn’t stop digging until she got an answer. Wouldn’t it be better to give her an answer and be able to frame it properly before she found it for herself?
Before I went through official channels, I decided to talk to Owen. I waited until that evening, when we were at his place, having dinner. That made it feel less official, more like idle chat about work than me actually running an idea by him. “I’ve been looking into that reporter,” I said.
“The one who’s been covering those magical events?”
“Yeah, the one who may be immune. I’m worried that she’s going to keep digging until she finds something, and there seem to be a lot of people out there who want her to find something.”
“You’re not suggesting we do something about her, are you?”
“I’m thinking it might be better to just tell her the truth.”
“Tell an outsider?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Tell an immune. You do that all the time. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.”
“You weren’t a TV reporter. I don’t think we’d have much of a pitch to recruit her to MSI. If she’s an honest reporter, she wouldn’t be up for working for our tabloid, considering that we use it to bury the news. We only tell immunes we want to recruit.”
“So everyone you can’t use is out of luck, just having to go through life thinking they’re crazy?”
“Immunes are fairly rare, so it doesn’t come up often,” he said, but he didn’t meet my eyes, and his cheeks flushed with pink. “Besides, you don’t know for sure that she’s immune.”
“Then we should test her.”
“Testing her would mean exposing her to magic. If she’s immune, that might make her even more curious. We want to steer her away, not intrigue her even more.”
“I don’t like lying to her,” I said. “I know she’s right, that she’s seeing what she thinks she’s seeing. It seems wrong to tell her she’s not seeing something that I know is true.”
“Then maybe it would be best for you to stay away from her.”
“It’s not as though I’m seeking her out. We just seem to keep showing up at the same places, since we’re researching the same thing. And don’t say that someone else should take the assignment. No matter who does it, they’re going to end up having to lie to keep the secret.”
“But it may be longer before they have to lie because she won’t recognize anyone else the way she now recognizes you.”
“I guess so,” I said, twining spaghetti around my fork. But I wasn’t yet ready to back out.
10
I’d thought it would be terrible to lie to Carmen, but keeping things
from Owen was even worse. We were about to be married, which meant we should share just about everything and certainly not keep secrets or go behind each other’s backs. But I was doing this to help him. As long as there was a risk of magic being exposed, Owen was in danger, and we wouldn’t be able to live anything resembling a normal life together.
I wouldn’t let my parents dictate whom I married, but I could just hear them if they knew about magic and knew Owen was involved. Even my mother, who was a magical immune utterly oblivious to magic, was likely to get a clue once the secret was out, and there was no telling what that would lead to.
No, we had to stop this before it went any further, and I wasn’t about to hand the work over to anyone else. I was already working with Trish, and I could back off on the more public aspects of the job, like going to anti-magic meetings, but I wasn’t quitting entirely.
Maybe this fell into the category of a white lie by omission. I wouldn’t tell him I was off the case, but I wouldn’t tell him what I was working on. It was splitting hairs, but that was the best my conscience was going to get.
Fortunately, Owen was deep into some research project, so I didn’t see much of him for the rest of the week. That made it easier to go about my business without feeling like I was deceiving him. Not that there was much for me to do, just monitoring online chatter and looking out for potential trouble spots. The group that had staged the “arrest” stunt didn’t seem to have achieved what they’d hoped, and they soon announced the release of their spokesman, which validated my belief that it had been a stunt.
I took his photo from the article on the website to Sam. “I don’t suppose you know this guy, do you?” I asked.
“Never seen him before,” he confirmed.
“Could you find out if he was taken into custody by the enforcers?”
“You think he was?”
“He’s pretending he was, at the very least. Owen didn’t think they were real enforcers, and I’m inclined to agree. But I want to rule it out.”
“I’ll check with my contacts. What do you think’s goin’ on?”
“I’m starting to suspect that someone magical is behind all this. It may not be an accident that they happen to be getting great footage of obvious magical incidents. They’re working with someone who’s staging it. That’s who we need to track down. I just wish I knew of a good way to do it.”
“We can start by verifying your theory that the capture was fake. And on our end, we can look into some known magical agitators. Usually, that’s something that tends to come up in college, all that ‘why can’t we be open about our powers and rule the world’ stuff, and then they get over it when they get a better look at reality. Most magical kids grow up pretty sheltered, in places where they can use their power more openly.”
“So Owen’s hometown isn’t an anomaly?” Owen was from a small town that was essentially a magical enclave. I wasn’t sure if nonmagical people would even know it was there.
“For small towns, that’s pretty typical, though there are plenty of magical folk who grow up in cities. They’re more used to hiding it, and they tend not to be the ones who get the bright idea of going public.”
The beginnings of a theory swirled around in my head, but nothing had quite clicked into place yet. I hadn’t found all the corner pieces, let alone all the edges, of the puzzle, so the picture was still just a scattering of pieces, with the occasional cluster that might suggest part of an image. I needed to put together a lot more to have the slightest idea what was going on.
I didn’t want to talk to Owen about this germ of an idea, and, besides, he’d be the wrong person, as someone who made hermits look pretty outgoing, but if I needed to know who was who in the magical world, Rod was the guy. Not only did his job require him to know everyone who currently worked for MSI or who had worked here in the last several years, but he also recruited from the broader magical community and had an active social life.
I went up to his office and greeted Isabel, who was his secretary. “Is he in and up for a chat?” I asked.
“He’s in, and there’s no one with him. I’m pretty sure he’s always up to talk to you,” she said. “In fact, I think he wanted to talk to you about something. Probably to do with the wedding. Go on in.”
Before I could, he appeared in the doorway to his office. “I thought I heard your voice,” he said. “Just the person I wanted to talk to.”
He sounded so eager that it made me wary. “About what?”
“My duties as best man. Come on in.” He ushered me into his office and shut the door. “Have a seat.” Instead of sitting behind his desk, he sat in the other guest chair beside the one I took. “Now, don’t worry, I’m not planning anything crazy for a bachelor party, since Owen would kill me if I did anything too risqué. No strippers, or anything like that. I’m thinking more along the lines of a baseball game.”
“He’d like that,” I replied.
“But I was thinking it might be fun to make it a surprise, and that’s where you come in. You can help me set up something to put him on the wrong track, and instead of it being whatever you convince him you have planned, we’ll whisk him away to a game.”
“Why not just take him to a game?”
“Hey, I can’t have strippers, so I’ve got to have some fun with this.”
“I’m not sure that kidnapping Owen is likely to go well, given everything that’s happened to him, and I don’t like the idea of lying to him.” I managed not to wince as I said it.
He gave a deep sigh. “I guess you’re right. I would say that I’ll tell him we’re going to a strip club and take him to the ballpark instead, but he’d refuse to go. But I don’t think you came up here to talk to me about the bachelor party.”
“No. I wanted to talk to you about something else. Sam mentioned that there are known agitators, magical people who go through a ‘why can’t we tell the world?’ phase. Do you have a good sense of who those people are?”
He scratched his temple and frowned. “I know some of them, but it’s not like we keep a list. Why?”
“I’m not having a lot of luck tracking all this anti-magic stuff to the source by going through the anti-magic people, so I thought it could help to look into what some of the people who might want to stir things up are doing.”
“You think magical people are behind this?”
“Maybe. I do think that one group may have been started by an immune who’s trying to figure things out, but then there’s also a militant group that has me wondering—do they really see magic as a threat, or are they using these people to expose magic so they can start being open about it? They always manage to have perfect footage and images of these magical events, and when they staged their spokesman being hauled away, the people who did it looked a lot like Council enforcers, which suggests that someone involved knows something about them.” Although Owen had been sure that black attire was typical of any shady outfit, they really had looked like enforcers to me, and he hadn’t seen them.
“I can look into it, see where the ones I know about are now. The Council keeps an eye on anyone who’s made too much of a fuss. Generally, though, they grow out of it.”
“That’s what Sam said, that it tends to be people who grew up in magical enclaves who get ideas when they go off to school and have to start hiding their powers.”
“I have to admit, that does come as a shock. We weren’t supposed to openly use magic at school or in public, but in our town, it was mostly an open secret. We did little things all the time—well, everyone but Owen. His foster parents were strict about that sort of thing, and he didn’t even cheat when he was away from home. But for most magic kids, you go off to university, and you suddenly can’t do anything unless you’re in one of the magic secret societies or in your dorm room, assuming your roommate is magical. For a lot of these kids, it’s the first time they’re around mundane people. It goes to their head that they’re different and special, and they hate having to hide it. The magi
cal mentors sit on it pretty quickly, and usually there’s a strong enough reaction the first time they try to use magic against mundanes that they see the point in being quiet. We may have power, but they vastly outnumber us.”
“That does sound like it might be the attitude we’re dealing with here. Even if we don’t find a specific person, this helps me put together a profile.”
He grinned. “Look at you, sounding like a proper investigator.”
“More like someone who’s watched too many crime shows. I’m just trying to figure out what kind of person might be behind this, and that will help us know better how to deal with it.” I shrugged. “Or maybe I’m wrong and it really is someone who thinks magic is evil and wants to wipe it out. Either way, it needs to be stopped.”
“I’ll let you know what I come up with. In the meantime, are you doing anything Saturday?”
“Not anything in particular.”
“Good, because there’s one last band I want you to consider for the wedding, and you won’t even have to make it a late night. They’re playing at a neighborhood festival, so we can go in the afternoon. It’ll be fun—music, food on a stick, a nice spring day.”
“I thought we needed a magical band.”
“They are magical, but they also play mundane gigs.”
“So no elf music?”
“Not with this group. You’re right, that would probably be a bad idea at a wedding.”
“I guess I’m in for the festival. Have you told Owen to put it on his calendar? You might have to drag him away from work.”
“Leave it to me. And you can bring the whole gang, even your roommate who doesn’t know about magic. This should be a totally aboveboard ordinary event.”
“And the magic words—no pun intended—are ‘should be.’ You do realize you’ve just jinxed us, don’t you?”
“You pointing that out may unjinx us, so we’re good.”
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