No Quest for the Wicked

by Shanna Swendson

  “I don’t understand the reference, but we do believe that wizards have lost their way and should return to their roots.”

  Minerva raised an eyebrow. “And what the blazes does that have to do with your spying on this company and interfering with our efforts to retrieve the Eye of the Moon?”

  Instead of answering her, Grace turned to Merlin and said, “You were one of the true wizards who created the magical foundations, and we knew that when you came back, you would restore things to the way they should be. But instead, you did this.” She gestured disdainfully at the executive office, with its telephone, computer, and conference table.

  She turned to Owen. “You’re just as corrupt—even more so, because you were the one to corrupt Merlin, teaching him your wicked modern ways, infecting him with technology. And you were punished for it. That’s why you lost your magical powers. Impurity must be punished!” Her voice grew shrill as her fervor overtook her reserve. “But we will purify the magical world!” As if realizing she’d said too much, she clamped her lips together and stared straight ahead.

  Merlin leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “Normally, I am very tolerant of other approaches to magic. There is certainly merit to the old ways, and it is good for us to remember how to work pure magic without the need for technology or other tools. But this isn’t the time for a philosophical discussion. I want to know what the brooch has to do with this and why you’re interfering with our efforts to contain it.”

  “I’m not seeing the link between the brooch and magical purity,” I said, shaking my head. “Why would anyone want to stir up that kind of trouble?”

  “Remember Bobby Burton, the volunteer fireman back home?” Granny asked me.

  “The one they caught setting fires because he wanted to play hero and be seen putting them out?” I turned back to Grace. “That’s it, isn’t it? Your people stole the brooch from the gnomes, not Sylvester. Your plan was to create a threat to the magical world by setting that brooch loose, and then your people could swoop in when Merlin’s team failed to save the day, proving that the old ways are the best and discrediting Merlin as a leader in the magical world—maybe then with your leader having the brooch so he can solidify his power.”

  “Only, everything would be ruined if we got there first and prevented the trouble, so you had to make sure that didn’t happen,” Owen said.

  Grace tried to remain stoic, but she had a terrible poker face. She winced every time someone said something that must have hit close to the truth, which was as good as a confirmation.

  Minerva turned to Merlin. “She came to work here very soon after the customer conference last summer when we officially announced your return. They must have planted her then to spy on you. I’m sorry, I should have seen this coming. After all, that’s my job.” She then asked Grace, “Did your people have the brooch then or were you merely being put in place to be useful someday?” Grace’s lips twitched, and she bit her lower lip.

  Owen faced Grace and said, “But do you really understand what you’re dealing with in the Eye? How could you be so sure that you’d be able to save the day? What if you couldn’t?”

  “I created it, and I wasn’t able to develop a way to resist or counter it,” Merlin said. “I am concerned that this plan was poorly conceived, and that may put all of us at risk.”

  Grace went a little paler, and I noticed her throat move like she was swallowing a lump. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead and upper lip, but she didn’t answer.

  “There were people at the restaurant who didn’t seem to be affected,” I said. “I thought they were immunes, but they succumbed to the elves’ spells. And they had a similar dress sense, as I recall. Is color wicked, too?”

  Grace glanced down at her clothes, then cast a meaningful look at my outfit. One corner of her mouth turned up slightly, and I felt myself redden. On the upside, I figured I might be able to infiltrate their organization if it came to that.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of the good old days,” Granny said. “But there’s something to be said for indoor plumbing and electricity, and magic’s no substitute for either.” She used her cane to leverage herself out of her chair. “And I’ve heard enough of this. We’ve got a plot to stop and a brooch to snag. Let’s go, kids.”

  Owen and I glanced at Merlin, who nodded and said, “Now it is even more imperative that you obtain the brooch first and keep their plan from coming to fruition. I will brief Sam and Mr. Gwaltney about the opposition, and we will continue trying to get more information from Miss Spencer.” Grace went a little paler at that.

  We got up to follow Granny out of the office. “Wow, magical puritans. Who’d have guessed?” I said once we were in the reception area.

  “I’d heard rumors of groups like that, but they’re usually dismissed as crackpots,” Owen said with a shrug.

  “Crackpots can still be dangerous,” I pointed out. “And it sounds like it could be really bad if their plan succeeds.”

  “Which is why we’re going to stop them. How do we go about posing as catering employees?”

  “Sadly, we’re not too far off—for either caterers or magical puritans,” I said with a grimace. He was wearing a black suit with a white shirt. “Lose the jacket and tie, and you’re there. I’m already dressed for it.” I frowned in thought as I studied Granny. “I’m not sure what to do about you, though, Granny. You don’t really fit the catering waiter profile.”

  “But I could teach them a thing or two about cooking, I’d bet.”

  “Maybe a pastry chef, doing the finishing touches on-site?” Owen suggested as he folded his stack of spell pages lengthwise and handed them to me. “Can you put these in your purse?” Then he moved his phone from the breast pocket of his suit coat to the front pocket of his slacks.

  “It’s worth a shot,” I said with a shrug.

  “And if they don’t believe me, I’ll just hit ’em with a sleeping spell,” Granny said as she took off for the stairs.

  “Let’s try to avoid the sleeping spell,” Owen said to me. He handed me the case of tranquilizer darts. “You should probably keep this in your purse, too. Use them wisely.”

  I tucked the case away and gave him a mock salute. “Yes, sir.” He rolled his eyes as he took off his tie. He left the jacket and tie lying across the chair next to Trix’s desk. On our way out of the building, I said, “I know we’re in a hurry, but I am not getting on another flying carpet. Probably never again, ever, but definitely not today.”

  “No, no carpets,” Owen agreed with a shudder. “We can get an express train, though it’ll be crowded at this time of day.”

  “Young people today have no sense of adventure,” Granny said with a sniff as we headed for the subway station.

  The train was crowded, with every seat filled and people crammed in like sardines. Even so, the train had barely started moving before Granny had a seat. Apparently, the young man who’d been sitting there discovered that there were more uncomfortable things than standing on the subway. I wasn’t sure if magic was involved or if she’d just glared at him until his skin crawled.

  I took the sheaf of transcribed spells out of my purse and handed them to Granny. “Here, you can make use of the time to read up on what you might face,” I suggested. She put on her reading glasses and buried her face in the pages.

  Meanwhile, I tried to remain aware of my surroundings. In that crowd, it was nearly impossible to tell if we were being followed. We’d caught our mole, but the bad guys were still out there. Most of the people in the car were wearing conservative black outfits, and the rest were wearing less-conservative black. For all I knew, everyone on the train was either a magical puritan or a magical enforcer from the Council. I leaned so that I could speak directly into Owen’s ear. “Are you feeling any magic?”

  “There’s something nearby,” he said vaguely. “More than on your usual subway trip, especially now that the magical Spellworks ads are gone.”

  �
�If it’s someone following us, illusions and veiling won’t work. We should notice.”

  “Do you recognize anyone?”

  I glanced around again. “It’s hard to say. There are some people who look kind of familiar, but is that because they’ve popped up everywhere we’ve gone today or because we work in the same part of town and see them frequently?”

  “Our priority is getting to the brooch. We don’t have time to take evasive measures like changing trains just to smoke out a tail.”

  “What if he’s not just following, but trying to stop us from getting there?”

  “We can sic Granny on him.”

  I couldn’t help but grin at the mental image, even though I felt stressed and paranoid. Granny chortling to herself as she read the spells made it even funnier. “But that’s just mean,” I said, which made Owen smile, too.

  By the time we got to the station nearest the museum, I was rethinking my position on magic carpets. We’d have been there a long time ago if we’d flown—that is, if we’d arrived alive and hadn’t ended up as a damp spot on Fifth Avenue that disrupted rush-hour traffic after another gargoyle attack.

  Sam met us on the sidewalk outside the station. “I got a full briefing from the boss, and he sent me to make sure you get there okay. I got nothin’ against the Middle Ages, seein’ as how that was when I was made, but lemme tell ya, it’s nothin’ to get nostalgic for, magic or not. Anyone who wants to bring back those times didn’t actually live in ’em. And anyone who wants to turn the Eye loose on the world to make the boss look bad is clearly cuckoo.”

  “They’ll want to keep us away from the museum, at any cost,” Owen said.

  “Don’t worry, kiddo. I’ll be with you.”

  That made me feel a little better, but fanatics willing to kill for their beliefs wouldn’t be easy to stop. What would they do to keep us out of the museum?

  Owen’s phone rang, and after he answered it, he put it on speaker and held it out so we could all hear. “We’re in the museum, and it’s closed,” Rod reported. “The event staff are coming in. They’re setting up in the indoor courtyard of the American wing. So far, it’s mostly the heavy lifting stuff—setting up tables and chairs and the like.”

  “Any sign of Mimi?” I asked. “She’d usually be micromanaging.”

  “She’s here, but I haven’t been able to get close enough to tell if she has the brooch. She’s always surrounded by flunkies. She does seem to be on a power trip, though. She’s made them move each of the tables about a dozen times, usually by no more than an inch each time, and it looks to me like they end up right where they were to begin with.”

  “That’s not the Eye,” I said. “That’s normal Mimi. Has she yelled while doing it?”

  “No. She’s actually been pretty apologetic about it.”

  “Then that’s nicer than normal Mimi.” I looked up at Owen. “Is it possible that this thing has an opposite effect on someone who’s already evil and power hungry and turns them nice and meek?”

  “We can only hope,” Owen said. Into the phone he added, “We’re almost there. Be careful.” As he put his phone back in his pocket, he glanced at Granny, and then stepped out to the curb to hail a cab. “We’ll be running around enough tonight. We may as well stay fresh,” he explained.

  “And it’ll be harder to tail you in a cab,” Sam said approvingly.

  Owen wasn’t quite as efficient in getting a cab without magic as he’d been with it, but one stopped soon enough, and we piled into the backseat. A glance through the rear window showed Sam following us by air but no other followers. The ride was short, and Owen tipped the driver extra to make up for the low fare.

  As we got out in front of the museum, I saw that a crew was setting up a red carpet and platforms for photographers on the main entrance stairs. Meanwhile, groups of people dressed in black skirts or pants and white shirts converged on the ground-floor entrance, where a man stood at the door, checking names and IDs against a list on a clipboard.

  “Let’s find another way in,” I said.

  “Give me a second, sweetheart,” Sam said. “I’ll see what I can find. There aren’t too many buildings that a good gargoyle can’t find a way into.”

  “Yeah, but remember that we can’t fly.”

  “I’ll find a door I can open for you.”

  We kept walking slowly, trying to give the impression of a couple taking an early-evening stroll by the park with an elderly grandmother. Owen’s phone rang, and he had a brief conversation with Sam. I still wondered how the gargoyle used a phone. I’d never seen him with one and he didn’t have pockets, yet we were always talking to him on the phone. Maybe he had a magical headset. The magical puritans probably wouldn’t approve. Owen finished the call and said, “He thinks he can get us in through the parking garage.”

  We went around to the side of the building, following the driveway. Sam met us just outside the parking garage and flew alongside us as we went past the entry gates. “As far as I can tell, the coast is clear this way,” he said. That didn’t reassure me as much as I would have liked. There were too many places for danger to lurk, and as we made our way to the museum entrance, every little sound made me jump in anticipation of an attack.

  It turned out that I was sorely lacking in imagination.

  We reached the doors that led from the parking garage into the museum, but just as Sam went to magically unlock them, a tangle of vines burst out of the concrete floor, totally obscuring the doorway. “That wasn’t one of the spells I found,” Owen said with a frown, sounding insulted.

  Granny stepped forward. “Don’t worry, I know a thing or two about plants. Gardening is what I mostly use my magic for, anyway.” She faced the vines, shaking her cane at them, and said firmly, “Now, you don’t belong here. There’s no sunlight, no good soil, no water. How do you expect to thrive? This isn’t natural at all.” The leaves on the vines started turning yellow and wilting and Granny nodded sadly. “Yes, that’s what’ll happen to you if you stay here. But isn’t there somewhere better for you? I think you should go there now.” Her voice turned to iron at the end, making that last statement into a command.

  The vines receded, shrinking back into the ground as though they’d never been there. “No wonder your lawn always looks so nice,” I said to Granny while Sam unlocked the door.

  “Don’t tell the garden club,” Granny said with an impish grin. “I don’t want to have to give back all my Yard of the Month plaques.”

  We’d just made it to the doorway when a group of men approached from the depths of the garage. “Looks like they weren’t just counting on Mother Nature to keep us out,” I warned, pushing Granny inside ahead of me. The men mouthed spells and sent them in our direction, but they had no effect on Owen or me, so we were still able to get through the door. Owen hit the elevator button while Sam sealed the door and put an extra spell on it. When the elevator arrived, Owen leaned in, hit a floor button, and let the doors close while he gestured us toward the stairs.

  “Maybe they’ll be waiting to ambush the elevator instead,” he said as he led the way up. I’d worried about Granny’s ability to climb the stairs, but she was practically running, confirming my mom’s suspicion that she carried that cane as a weapon, not as a walking aid.

  We reached the top of the stairs only to nearly run into a great wall of fire hanging in the air less than a foot away from the staircase, blocking us from entering the museum. I felt its warmth on my skin, so I knew it wasn’t illusion. It was probably magical, since it was hanging in midair, didn’t create any smoke, and hadn’t set off the museum’s fire alarm, but it would still probably hurt us. We had no choice but to remain in the relative safety of the stairwell. Then footsteps on the stairs behind us told me that the men in the garage had made it past Sam’s spells. We were trapped.

  Chapter Ten

  “We’ve got puritans,” I warned. “They’re coming up the stairs!”

  Granny whirled, pointed her cane at the stairs,
and shouted, “Get on with you!” Vines sprouted from the floor and raced down the stairs and up the walls. Unlike the vines that had blocked the entrance, these had long, sharp thorns, and soon they formed a wall between us and our pursuers. “I know more about plants than you people will ever learn,” Granny boasted. “And that’s the oldest magic there is.”

  That still left the fire blocking the stairwell from above, as well as the puritans who must have cast the spell from within the museum. “Looks like we’re trapped between a fire and a pointy place,” I wisecracked, trying to keep my spirits up. It didn’t work.

  “The fire will burn out pretty soon,” Owen said. “They’re using elemental magic. It’s very inefficient, so it’s a huge power drain. They’ll have to choose between maintaining the wall of flame and using other magic.”

  “Why don’t we force them to use other magic?” I asked.

  Instead of answering me directly, he called Rod on his cell phone. “We’re in the stairwell coming up from the parking garage, and we’re under attack,” he said. “We could use some help. I’d like to hit them from both sides.” Then he leaned his head against the wall and groaned. “And you don’t have the spells that would help you fight these guys. Wait, I have an idea.” He reached his hand out to Granny, and she handed him the pages. “Look out for a message. I’m sending the most likely ones to you now.”

  He lay the pages on the steps, then took pictures of them using his phone and sent them to Rod. “I should have thought of that earlier,” he muttered as he worked.

  “I think the fact that you didn’t proves you aren’t quite as modern and technologically corrupt as they think you are,” I said.