Enchanted Ever After

by Shanna Swendson

  I’d kind of hoped Nita would be working Saturday afternoon. In spite of Rod’s assurances that this would be a totally normal event that just happened to involve a band made up of wizards, I was worried about bringing along someone who wasn’t in on the secret. But she was free and eager to join us. That meant I had to warn the others that she only knew about the normal wedding back home, not the magical one in the city, so we couldn’t talk about hiring the band for the wedding.

  It was getting to the point I needed a chart to remind me who I could talk to about what, and I hated it.

  On the other hand, Nita’s presence would keep the subject of my current investigation from coming up, so I wouldn’t have to hide anything from Owen.

  I hated that, too. I was basically an honest person, but my job required me to lie to so many people I cared about.

  As Rod had promised, the weather was pleasant, warm and sunny, and when we reached the barricaded streets where the festival was being held, it looked like the rest of the city had the same idea we’d had. The place was packed, with barely any room to move between booths. I could hear music in the distance. Meanwhile, the smell of beer and roasting meats filled the air.

  Rod led us through the throng toward the stage where the band we were there to see was playing. “One of these guys is an old friend of mine,” he said, in what I was sure was the truth but also an explanation for Nita’s sake.

  “Oh, you know the band?” she said, her eyes lighting up.

  “Yeah. But don’t get too excited. We’re not talking glamour here. They just play local clubs and festivals.” With a glance at me, he added, “This is their last booking for nearly a month.” Which meant they were available for our wedding date. I knew I should have chosen a band sooner, but I hadn’t been able to do much wedding planning while I was undercover with the Collegium and, I had to admit, I’d been hoping to avoid having the kind of wedding reception where there would be a band.

  “Hey, it’s more exciting than anything back where I’m from,” Nita said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band play when I knew someone who knew them. Well, other than the marching band in high school, but that doesn’t count because I was in it.”

  “Wait until you hear them before you start playing groupie,” Rod said with a grin. That wasn’t encouraging. Maybe there was a reason they were available on such short notice.

  I kept a lookout for familiar faces. A magical band would draw a magical audience, so there was a good chance I’d run into someone from work, and there was an equally good chance that it might draw some of the anti-magic forces, especially if they were actually fronts for magical groups.

  Right away, I spotted one person I knew and immediately ducked behind Owen. “Ugh, not here, please,” I muttered.

  “What is it?” Nita asked.

  “An old boss.”

  “Which one?” Owen asked.

  “The one who turns into a monster when riled,” I said and, for once, I meant it metaphorically.

  “Mimi?” Owen said.

  Nita rose on her tiptoes and looked around us. “Really? Mimi’s here? I’ve heard so much about her, I’m dying to see her for myself. I kind of expect her to drip venom from her fangs when she talks.”

  I grabbed her arm and pulled her back down. “Shh, don’t do anything to draw her attention. I don’t want to have to talk to her.” I didn’t know what, exactly, Mimi might remember about our last encounter, which had ended with her being menaced by dragons. If she associated me with that, I needed to avoid her.

  “But which one is she?” Nita wasn’t being any stealthier as she scanned her surroundings, but at least she wasn’t sticking her head above the crowd.

  “Redhead at three o’clock,” I said.

  Her eyes widened when she spotted Mimi. “Yeah, she looks high-maintenance.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Owen? Owen Palmer? Is that you?” a voice called out. A female voice I didn’t recognize. My head snapped around to find the source before Owen reacted. It wasn’t that I was jealous or insecure. More like curious. Owen had a hard time talking to women—well, people in general—in social settings, so him running into someone he knew and didn’t work with was a very rare occasion. And, yeah, maybe I was a teensy bit insecure. There was a nasty voice in my head that kept asking me if I really thought I was worthy of a super-cute, wealthy, powerful wizard. I’d gotten better at shutting up that voice by reminding it that I’d more than pulled my own weight in the relationship, but that didn’t mean I didn’t worry the least little bit about women who fit into his world better than I did.

  This woman was the kind who tended to feed that worry. She could easily have been a model who just happened to be at the festival for a photo shoot if she’d been about eight inches taller. As it was, she had the build and proportions of a model in a dainty, petite package. She was shorter than me, even in her high-heeled boots that were probably custom made, but she still made me feel short. Her willowy figure and proportionally long legs gave her the illusion of height, but when she kissed Owen on the cheek, she had to stand on tiptoes to do so, and he was on the short side of average height.

  “How have you been?” she asked, whisking a shimmering curtain of golden hair back over her shoulder. Amazingly, it stayed put instead of falling forward again, the way my hair usually did. “It’s been ages, hasn’t it? Since graduation, I think. I hear you ended up at MSI.”

  He just stood there, staring at her. He blushed a bit, but not enough to indicate that she discombobulated him in a big way. I got the impression he was trying to place her, which I found rather astonishing. What man would forget this woman? Maybe she’d changed a lot since he knew her.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me,” she said with a trilling laugh. “You’ve changed more than I have.”

  “Mattie Mayfair?” he said finally, squinting like he was trying to bring her into focus.

  “Do you know who that is?” Gemma whispered to me.

  “No idea,” I whispered back.

  Mattie beamed, showing perfectly straight, white teeth. “Ah, I knew you couldn’t have forgotten me. But I go by Matilda now.” Clutching his arm, she turned to face the rest of us. “We were classmates at Yale. Though I was apparently less memorable to him than he was to me.”

  Owen wasn’t beaming. In fact, he looked rather uncomfortable. I got the impression that the pleasure in the reunion was purely one-sided. “Mattie—er, Matilda, this is my fiancée, Katie, and my friends, Gemma, Marcia, Nita, and Philip. And you probably remember Rod.”

  Her eyes widened slightly at the word “fiancée,” especially when she realized it applied to me. I suddenly felt dumpy, frumpy, and awkward. Rod spared me from having to come up with anything witty to say by stepping forward, his hand extended, so that she had to release Owen’s arm to shake it. “Good to see you again,” he said. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

  “Oh, I went to work for the family firm, of course,” she said.

  “Well, it was nice to see you, but we were on our way to meet up with someone,” Owen said.

  She pulled a business card out of her designer handbag and handed it to him. “Do stay in touch.” He slipped it into his pocket without looking at it and gave her a noncommittal nod before taking my hand and heading out through the festival. I had to jog a little to keep from being dragged behind him. It took the others a few more seconds to join us.

  “Okay, that was interesting,” I remarked. “I take it that wasn’t an ex-girlfriend.”

  I felt the shudder that went through his body. “God forbid,” he said. “And I doubt I’d still be alive. She probably bites the heads off anyone who dares to break up with her.”

  “So, not your favorite person.”

  “She was a bit of a snob,” Rod, who’d caught up with us, said. “As in, she made the royal family look easygoing and down-to-earth. Then again, she might have more money than they do.”

  “But isn’t t
he queen the richest woman on earth?” Nita asked.

  “Okay, I’m probably exaggerating,” Rod admitted. “But still, she was old money and made sure everyone else knew it.”

  “I always got the impression that she ran financial background checks before she deigned to speak to anyone,” Owen added. “She probably said more to me just now than she ever did the entire time we were in school.”

  “You’ve moved up in the world since then,” Rod said.

  “Did she look like that in school?” Marcia asked.

  “I think she’s had work done,” Rod replied.

  “What kind of work?” I couldn’t help but ask. “Are we talking having inches shaved off her body, her teeth done, a nose job, or what?” If it had been an attractiveness illusion, like the one Rod used, it wouldn’t have worked on me.

  “Teeth definitely,” Owen said. “The rest, I don’t know. She’s just, well, different. That’s the best I can do.”

  “I take it you won’t be staying in touch,” I said.

  He gave a soft snort. “Not likely. One of the best things about being away from school is being away from the likes of her.”

  I felt there had to be more to the story than that, and I made a mental note to dig into it later. If she knew he worked at MSI, she had to be magical, and I suspected magic had something to do with whatever issues there were. We couldn’t talk openly about that in public, especially not with Nita around.

  We’d barely moved away from Matilda when I saw another familiar face I’d have preferred to avoid. “This day just keeps getting better,” I grumbled.

  “Who is it now?” Nita asked.

  “Another former boss. Gregor.”

  “Wasn’t he . . .?” Rod began, but stopped himself. We’d learned that Gregor had links to the magical mafia, and he’d been fired, but I guess he hadn’t broken any actual magical laws, so he was out and about. This was the former boss who literally turned into an ogre. “Yeah, let’s avoid him,” Rod continued. “I was the one who had to fire him.”

  “I’m sure there’s a story there,” Nita said.

  “One I’m not at liberty to tell because of confidentiality rules,” Rod said.

  As we moved through the crowd, I noticed that we weren’t the only ones avoiding people. Half the people we passed turned away as we approached, and it happened often enough that I didn’t think it was coincidence or paranoia on my part. They really were avoiding us. I glanced at Owen and saw that his face was stony, so he must have noticed it, too. I gave his hand a squeeze. The magical community was apparently still suspicious of him.

  By this time, I could hear music. It was a jazzy pop blend, like eighties pop reimagined by a forties swing band. “Ooh, is this them?” Nita asked, her head bobbing in time with the music. “I like this.” I had to agree.

  The stage came into view, and there was a respectable crowd milling in front of it. A few couples danced right in front of the stage, showing off swing moves. Everyone else stood with their toes tapping or their bodies swaying to the beat. With this kind of band at a wedding reception, we wouldn’t have to worry about the dance floor staying empty.

  Only Philip appeared unimpressed with the music. He scowled as he listened, and his toes didn’t tap. I figured his tastes hadn’t yet caught up to modern times. He still thought ragtime was rather racy.

  But otherwise, I got the impression that everyone enjoyed the music, and that made this an excellent choice for a wedding band. Even I wanted to dance, but I figured that making Owen dance in public would be a bad idea. Instead, I watched the audience and enjoyed those who were dancing.

  That’s when I noticed the news crew. It wasn’t unexpected for there to be television cameras at a festival. I figured there would be some kind of “out and about in the city today” roundup on the evening news, showing New Yorkers enjoying a fine spring day. But then I saw that Carmen was the reporter with the cameraman. Was she here because of expected magical activity, or was this a run-of-the-mill assignment?

  I didn’t say anything to the others—I couldn’t with Nita there—but I went from watching people enjoying the music to looking out for anything that might be suspicious. That included potentially magical things that Carmen would see if she was immune and any sign of magical skullduggery.

  There weren’t any gargoyles in the trees, and although this was a magical band, I didn’t spot anyone in the audience who was obviously not human. There might have been a couple of elves masking their ears under hats, but there weren’t any fairy wings in sight. I couldn’t see anything that would alarm a magical immune.

  I allowed myself a slight sigh of relief, but I didn’t let my guard down. I kept most of my attention focused on Carmen. At the moment, she wasn’t doing much of anything. Every so often she pointed out something for her cameraman to shoot, but it all was normal festival stuff. If she was here looking for proof that magic existed, she was in the wrong place.

  More couples joined in the dancing in front of the stage. They were professional-level dancers, so I figured this was part of the act, a dance routine to go with the music and show that it was possible to jitterbug to Duran Duran songs. More and more couples left the crowd to dance, and the dancing looked choreographed, not just people moving to the music. “Oh, looks like a flash mob,” Nita remarked. “Cool!” She swayed and her toes tapped to the beat.

  Owen, Rod, and I all exchanged glances. I’d seen something like this before, when our former nemesis, Phelan Idris, had been causing havoc in the city. He enjoyed magical pranks like making people break out into dance numbers. I felt a tingle as Owen and Rod created a shield around us to protect us from the spell that seemed to be spreading through the crowd. Once Philip realized what was going on, I felt his power join the shield.

  Soon, almost everyone but us was dancing. I watched Carmen to see how she reacted. Her cameraman was so intent on filming the scene that he didn’t join in, but I noticed his feet moving in the steps of the dance around the camera’s tripod even as he kept his eye on the monitor. Carmen didn’t move at all. I wished I could see her face more clearly, but she was too far away for me to read her expression. I felt that her not being affected by the spell was a good indication that she really was immune to magic. The question was, would she see this as proof of magic or think, like Nita did, that it was merely a flash mob, possibly a promotional stunt?

  “Funny, I always thought those musicals where everyone joins in a choreographed dance were just a movie thing,” Nita said. “Who knew that it really happens?”

  Fortunately, she was so caught up in the spectacle that she didn’t notice that the band members seemed as perplexed as I was. They kept playing, and either they’d shielded themselves from the spell or whoever had cast the spell had left them out of it, because they weren’t dancing. I figured it would have ruined the effect if the band had stopped playing so they could join the group dance. They changed the song, slowing the tempo, but the dance barely changed.

  Who was doing this, and why? If it was to show off magic for Carmen’s benefit, I didn’t think this was the best way to prove magic existed. There were too many other explanations, and making people dance hardly seemed like the sort of thing that would make anyone suspect magic. When Idris had done it, it had been to show off his power over people. Forcing people to do things against their will was one of the big taboos in the magical world.

  “Do you know where it’s coming from?” I whispered to Owen, who shook his head. “Maybe you’d better get out of here,” I added. “We don’t want you being suspected. And what if worse happens?”

  I could tell he was about to protest, but common sense won out, and his shoulders sagged slightly in defeat from a fight he hadn’t bothered to enter. He pulled his phone from his pocket, glanced at it, and said, “It’s James. I need to go find a quieter place to take this.” Rod and Philip nodded, and he slipped away. I was relieved that people kept dancing once he was gone, so it would be clear that Owen wasn’t behind it.<
br />
  But who was? I looked around for other people who weren’t dancing. Then again, if I were casting this kind of spell and wanted to keep suspicion away from myself, I’d have joined in the dance. The place was just so chaotic, it was hard to tell who was doing what. My best hope of finding the culprit was to get out there and move among the people. Then I might be able to feel the source of the magic.

  “I’m going to go get something to drink,” I said. “Anyone want anything?” The ones who were in the know must have figured out what I was doing, for they shook their heads. Nita was so transfixed by the dancing that she didn’t even respond. I slipped away from the group until I was away from the protection of the shields.

  My first thought was to look for Gregor. He might have had a grudge against MSI and the magical establishment that would make him want to blow it wide open. Before I could spot him in the crowd, I heard Nita’s voice behind me, saying, “Hey, Katie, wait up! I could use a drink.”

  She still seemed to be under the protection of the shield, as she was surrounded by people who weren’t dancing, so I called out, “I can bring you something! What do you want?”

  But she kept heading toward me. “That’s okay, I’ll go with you,” she said.

  I hurried toward her, but I didn’t reach her in time to keep her from leaving the protected area. First, she bobbed her head as she walked. Then she began swaying. Finally, she was doing a full-on jive, her arms and legs moving fluidly. I’d seen Nita dance before—or attempt to—at school dances and during slumber parties, and she’d never been this coordinated. She didn’t seem at all aware of what she was doing. Like all the others, she was carried away by the magic.

  I was torn. I needed to find out who was responsible, and she didn’t seem to be in any danger. But it felt wrong leaving a friend in that state, and the others couldn’t get to her without being affected by the spell, too. With a frustrated groan, I rushed forward and grabbed her by the arm. She didn’t protest. In fact, she didn’t seem to even notice. She just kept dancing as I dragged her back to safety.