Enchanted Ever After

by Shanna Swendson

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not sure what you thought you were going to show us or why it didn’t work.” Which was somewhat true, since I didn’t know what Sam had done to keep the building from being revealed.

  “It’s easy enough to tell if you’re lying,” the speaker said. “Bring the tester.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Trish and Rod take a step closer, but I shook my head slightly. Although we were getting dangerously close to “burn the witch!” territory, unless they did something silly like throw me into a pond to determine whether I sank or floated, I figured I’d be okay, since I knew I was about as far away as you could get from being a witch.

  A man in the group brought over a device that looked a bit like a Geiger counter, and it seemed to work in a similar way. He waved the wand extension around me while looking at a dial on the device. After a few passes of the wand, he frowned, tucked the wand under his arm to free his hand, and gave the device a thump. He tried again and shook his head. “She’s not a witch,” he said. “In fact, she’s … well, I’ve only seen readings like this once before.”

  “Are you sure it’s working?” the speaker asked.

  He waved the wand around his own body, checked the dial, then waved the wand around me again. “It’s working. It’s just … I think she’s like you. She’s pure.”

  The speaker stepped down from the bench and took my hands in hers. “Is it true? There’s another who is utterly pure of the taint of magic?”

  This sounded close enough to cultish to make me nervous, so I caught Trish’s eye. Now was a good time for an intervention, as long as it wasn’t magical. “You people are nuts,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re untouched by magic,” the speaker said. “That allows you to see the truth. Together, you and I could spread the word to help others see the truth.”

  “Kate! There you are!” Trish called out. “We’re going to be late. C’mon.”

  “I’m sorry, I have to go,” I said, pulling my hands away.

  I wasn’t fast enough. The woman caught my wrists. “But we need you. We could show you the truth, and then you could help us tell others.”

  “Um, can I think about it and get back to you?” I said.

  She released my hands, reached into her pocket, and pressed a card into my hand. It was the same business card the woman at the sale had given me, which suggested that maybe the speaker was Abigail Williams. Now I really had to wonder whether it was a pseudonym or if she’d lived up to the name she’d been given. “If you give this any thought, I know you’ll call us.”

  “Yeah, okay, thanks,” I said, taking a step away from her. “I’ll definitely think about it.” I hurried toward Trish before she came close enough for that device to get a reading on her. I didn’t know what these people would think about finding yet another immune.

  “You okay?” Trish asked when I reached her. “Those people looked pretty intense.”

  “They let me go, which is a good sign.”

  “So, back to the office?”

  I glanced toward where the speaker and the bridal show woman were still eyeing me. “Not yet. I don’t want her to see me going into the building she thinks of as the headquarters of magic.”

  Instead, we headed into the subway, where Rod soon joined us. “Are you okay?” he asked. “I wasn’t sure what to do when she grabbed you.”

  “I’m fine, and you were right to hold back. We need to talk about this, but not here, and I don’t want to go near the office until those people are gone, and until we’re sure they’re not watching me.”

  “Let’s head to my place,” Rod said. “I’ll call Owen and some of the others to meet us there. It’s not as big as Owen’s place, but, as far as I know, no one’s watching me and I’m not under suspicion from any faction, so it should be safe.”

  Rod lived in a modern high-rise, in what could politely be called a bachelor pad. When we arrived there, I realized that he’d toned it down quite a bit since the last time I’d seen it. Even so, it was playboy enough for Trish to roll her eyes at the leather furniture and all the chrome. “It used to be worse,” I whispered to her.

  Sam reached us first, landing on the balcony railing, then hopping in through the open sliding door. “Thanks for the alert, doll,” he said. “I think we could have fought their spell, but the early warning kept us from being caught with our pants down even for a second. We were able to shield against any dampening spell, and it was a pretty powerful one.”

  “I thought it was the other group that was being secretly run by magical people,” Trish said. “This one’s the one run by a magical immune who’s frustrated that no one sees what she sees. They shouldn’t have been able to drop the MSI veils, should they?”

  “Not if they don’t have magical powers,” Sam said.

  “She seemed to think it was some kind of natural phenomenon that would disrupt the magic, something about the moon passing overhead,” I said. “That sounds to me like someone’s messing with her.”

  “It seems there’s a lot of cross-pollination between the two groups,” Trish said. “Maybe the magical people tipped her off, with an explanation, and then they were ready to make it happen with their magic.”

  “My, aren’t you the devious one to think like that?” Sam said. “But, yeah, someone with some serious magical chops had to be involved, whether or not these people were aware of it.”

  “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could use a drink,” Rod said, turning to his well-equipped bar.

  I sank onto the sofa, suddenly feeling weak. I’d been too busy thinking at the time to be truly scared, but now that I was safe, it was hitting me just how potentially dangerous that situation had been. If Trish hadn’t been there, would they have kidnapped me? “I don’t suppose you’ve got something with chocolate in it,” I said. “Because I need a drink, and I need chocolate.”

  “I know just the thing. Trish?”

  “Can you do a martini?”

  “I should take offense at that question. Of course I can do a martini. Have a seat and make yourself at home. It may take Owen awhile to get here, and there’s no point in talking about it until then, or we’ll have to repeat ourselves.”

  While Rod mixed up drinks, I said, “Do you have a computer I could use?”

  He gestured toward the laptop on the coffee table. “It’ll automatically connect to the network,” he said.

  I looked up the Abigail Williams blog to see what they had to say about the event. They were promoting the big, public demonstration, but hadn’t yet reported on what had happened. I hadn’t noticed anyone photographing me, but I wondered if finding a new “pure” one would count as news. They hadn’t said anything about the founder being “pure,” so maybe their public anti-magic crusade was separate from their quasi-religious cult. The other big blog, which I suspected was related to the other group whose meeting I’d attended, didn’t mention the event at all.

  Owen arrived a lot sooner than I expected, which made me worry about what he’d done to ensure that kind of rapid travel. Speeding up subway trains when people looking out for magic were nearby wasn’t a great idea. “What happened?” he asked as soon as he entered. “I assume we were successful in protecting the wards. We had to do some quick thinking.”

  “I couldn’t tell, obviously, but most people acted like it was a big bust and walked away,” I said. “You were involved with that?”

  “It was an emergency all-hands-on-deck situation. Everyone in the building concentrated on maintaining the veils. I need to work on some safeguards for the future. We’ve never worried about our veils being attacked before, but it seems to be a possible threat now.”

  “We’re already lookin’ into it,” Sam said. “We’re switching up a few of the spells, so it should snarl up their next attempt.”

  “But the real news is that Katie seems to be the new prophet of an anti-magic cult,” Trish said.

/>   “What?” Owen blurted.

  “The woman from the bridal sale was there, and she recognized me,” I said. After a few sips of the chocolate concoction Rod had produced, I was relaxed enough to calmly discuss the frightening situation. “She heard me talking about veils when I called Sam to warn him and dragged me in front of their leader to accuse me. They thought I was a magical person sabotaging them, and they decided to test me. I seriously thought we were heading into witch trials territory, but they had this device that seemed to register magic, and apparently it gave an unusual reading for me, a reading they only get from their fearless leader, who I’m pretty sure is an immune.”

  “What kind of device?” Owen asked.

  I described it to him, as well as I could without knowing how it worked. “I guess maybe it reads magic from people? Their baseline must be set for ordinary people, and the needle goes over to one side for wizards and drops to the other side for immunes.”

  “Hmm. I’m pretty sure I have an idea of how that could work, theoretically. I haven’t considered building something like that. We use other tests for magic.”

  “Invent later. Focus now,” Rod said. “It looks like we’ve got a chance to get someone really on the inside of that group. We might be able to get a sense of where they’re getting their information.”

  “I’m not so sure I’m keen on going in as the new chosen one,” I said. I downed a big swallow of the chocolate martini to try to erase that mental image.

  “Seems to me like that would really give you the scoop,” Sam said. “They aren’t going to hide stuff from the chosen one, are they?”

  “Let’s go back a step. Don’t you think that if they were being manipulated by wizards, they would know it?” I argued. “They have a wizard detector. I’m probably not going to find out which wizard is behind this from inside this group.”

  “They may be getting tipped off by that other anti-magic group, and you could track that connection,” Trish said.

  “I have to agree with Katie,” Owen said. “This group sounds awfully cultlike, and getting caught up in that could be dangerous, even as the new chosen one. Maybe especially as the new chosen one. Bad things happen to chosen ones if they fall off their pedestals.”

  I didn’t know if he’d done it on purpose, but that made me want to do it. He hadn’t listened to me about the danger of meeting with Matilda, so I wasn’t inclined to listen to his cautions. “Then again, it might be our best shot,” I said. “I’m going to have to be careful no matter what, since Abigail Williams, or whatever the leader’s name is, is an immune and she knows about our headquarters. They could be staking the area out to identify people who come and go, and they’d notice if I’m among those people. If I have to be careful, I might as well use my chosen one status to see what I can learn. They may not know they’re dealing with wizards, but I do, and I might recognize someone. I might even get evidence against them.”

  Owen scowled, and I said, “It’s not like I’m going to be in any danger of being burned as a witch. I’ll be the one deciding to do the burning!”

  “Besides, it’s her job, and I’m her boss, so I decide what assignments she takes on, and I think Katie-bug should do this,” Sam said.

  “There, that settles it,” I said, but I felt more queasy than triumphant. What was I getting myself into?

  15

  Things were awkward when Owen and I left Rod’s place to go home. I was still irked at him about going through with that lunch, and he was irked at me about the plan for me to infiltrate the anti-magic group, even though Sam had assigned it. It didn’t help matters when he said, in an “oh, by the way” casual tone, “Matilda called me this afternoon.”

  “Already?”

  “Maybe you’re right that she’s recruiting me for something.”

  “Yeah, for a scapegoat.”

  “But if I know what she’s doing, I’ll be a lot harder to use that way. And I might find something interesting or useful.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a great idea.” We were near my place, but I felt like we needed to hash this out, and not with my roommates as an audience, so I kept walking with him toward his place.

  “You’ve been going undercover a lot, lately,” he pointed out. “How long did you spend actually inside the Collegium? You broke up with me and quit your job.”

  “Pretended to,” I corrected.

  “But the result was the same. I barely saw you for ages. We couldn’t even talk on the phone. We were limited to touching through the shelves in a bookstore and borrowing other people’s apartments.”

  That had actually been kind of sexy, in a way, but I didn’t think telling him that would go over well right now. He was clearly upset, and although I didn’t agree with him, I could understand why he might feel the way he did.

  We walked in silence until we reached his place. When we were in his living room, he picked up the conversation as though there hadn’t been any break at all. “You cut off almost all contact with the outside world. And now you’re pretending to be recruited by these anti-magic people. But you don’t want me to go undercover?”

  “It’s my job,” I said, flopping down on the sofa. “Besides, I’m not being investigated as being behind illegal magical activity while already having a cloud of suspicion hanging over me. If you get yourself caught up in this, you could end up being their patsy, someone they can pin it all on so they can get away with it. They may even be the reason you’re being investigated, so you’ll be so desperate to find the real culprit and clear your name that you’ll be open to recruitment.”

  “Maybe,” he said grudgingly. He fiddled with a book on the shelf, not looking at me.

  “Think about it. Why would they want you otherwise? What good would having a theoretical magic expert do for their cause? It doesn’t take a lot of knowledge to do a bunch of magic in public and hope people notice enough that they’d believe an announcement that magic is real. Having your name attached to their cause makes them seem like more of a threat. It’s more likely to turn away potential allies than to draw anyone in. So, if they don’t need you to pull this off, they need you for some other reason, and I’d bet it’s to make you take the blame while they shrug and say, ‘Oops, I guess the cat’s out of the bag.’ You’re already being watched. If you go anywhere near this, it could blow up all over you.”

  “Unless I stop it.”

  “That’s your only hope. You either bust it wide open and get absolute evidence of who’s behind the whole scheme, or you take the fall.”

  “I have absolute faith that you can crack this case so that won’t happen.”

  “I haven’t made that much progress on it yet.”

  “You came up with the theory.”

  “But I have no evidence.”

  “So maybe you need someone to go undercover and get some evidence.”

  I got up from the sofa to pace. It was either that or work out my frustrations by strangling him. “That’s what I’m doing. And now you’re just arguing in circles—it’s safe for you to go along with this because you trust that I’ll be able to prove who’s really behind it, but to do that I need you to go undercover because I haven’t been able to find any other evidence.”

  “That sounds about right,” he said with a grin.

  I stopped pacing and whirled to face him. “It’s not funny! Do you know what I went through when they arrested you last year? Do you know how hard it was to watch you put on trial, just for existing?” My eyes burned, and I could feel the tears forming. I blinked them away because crying right now would look emotionally manipulative. “I can’t go through that again. I’m pretty sure James and Gloria can’t go through that again. There are people out there just waiting for you to make one wrong move. This whole thing has ‘it’s a trap’ written all over it in giant neon letters. Don’t walk into their trap.”

  “So what you’re saying is, you feel strongly about this.” He sounded so calm it was infuriating.

  “I al
ready have the wedding dress. I’ll be seriously pissed off if I don’t get to wear it because you’re in magic jail.”

  “It can’t hurt to keep talking to her. They can’t arrest me for just talking to someone who hasn’t indicated that she’s up to anything wrong. Who knows what I might find out? Besides, wouldn’t it be more suspicious if I don’t respond when she’s been nothing but friendly?”

  “I think not responding would be perfectly normal, given what you’ve told me about your history with her. If one of my school frenemies got in touch with me out of the blue, I’d smile and nod and lose her number. I wouldn’t go to lunch with her, and I certainly wouldn’t keep going to lunch with her.” I realized I was shouting and in danger of getting as shrill as the woman at the rally. Forcing myself to lower my voice, I said, “Just let me handle this, okay? I’ll see what these anti-magic people have to say and track back where they’re getting their info.”

  “Okay,” he said, but I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know he didn’t mean it. As soon as I went home, he was going to call her to accept her offer to get together again.

  And that meant I needed to bust this case open, fast, before he got himself into trouble.

  The next day at work, I used a fake e-mail address supplied by the department to contact Abigail Williams and express interest in learning more about her organization. The response was almost instantaneous, if terse: “Meet me at the plaza at six. Come alone.”

  The tricky thing about dealing with a magical immune was that I would have to be alone. There’d be no way to have a gargoyle following me or a wizard using an invisibility spell staking out the place. Anyone watching me would have to do so from afar. Still, I reported it to Sam and very pointedly didn’t tell Owen because I didn’t want to spur him to do something stupid and risky. He’d always had a stubborn streak, but I didn’t know where this level of petty contrariness was coming from. He was under a lot of stress, which may have had something to do with it. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to have his every move so closely scrutinized and to be accused of all kinds of terrible things, just for existing. Although I understood, to some extent, I couldn’t let it keep me from doing my job.