Enchanted Ever After

by Shanna Swendson

  On the other hand, at least it wasn’t a bad magical working, like using magic to take a bargain wedding gown away from someone else. It had saved a man’s life, which was far from evil. The only consequences might be in the magical world, for risking exposure. Even if people were on the lookout for magic, they shouldn’t be able to find fault with that.

  I checked the magical watchdog blogs the next morning to see if there was any mention of the incident. Abigail’s blog had a couple of reports, one with a photo. Fortunately, the photo was taken from an angle where the bus’s wheels weren’t visible and must have been shot just before the wheels touched the ground, so the bus didn’t look like it was any higher off the ground than normal. If I hadn’t seen the incident myself, I wouldn’t have been convinced by the picture, whether or not I knew about magic.

  There was a call for any bystanders or passengers on the bus to give their firsthand accounts. I knew that if I were investigating the incident, I’d ride that bus around the same time the next day to try to find the regular commuters who were likely to have been on board.

  I was pondering whether it would look too obvious for me to do just that when I got a call from Trix. “The boss wants to see you, right away,” she said.

  That was a little unsettling, especially since I’d just then been pursuing something I’d been told wasn’t my assignment, and the boss had a way of knowing what was going on. I used to work directly for the company’s chief executive, so we had a good working relationship, but in my current position, I was down the line in the chain of command. If the boss wanted to discuss a security issue, he’d talk to Sam, not me. I left my office and looked around the hall in the security department to see if anyone else was heading to a meeting, remembering to look up, since so many of my colleagues had wings. There wasn’t any flurry of people leaving offices, so that meant this summons was probably not related to my job.

  I headed up to the office in one of the building’s turrets. Trix greeted me from behind the reception desk. “You can go right in,” she said.

  I eased open the heavy door to the chief executive’s office, where the boss sat at his conference table with Owen already there, as well as Sam. Uh oh, I thought.

  Merlin—yes, the Merlin from the King Arthur stories—greeted me. “Ah, there you are, Katie,” he said. “Come have a seat.” He didn’t sound too upset or angry, so I probably wasn’t in trouble. I took a seat next to Owen and glanced at him to see if he knew what this was about. He gave me a barely perceptible “I have no idea” shrug.

  “We have one more person joining us,” Merlin said, “but I think we should talk before he arrives. I’m sure you noticed the incident yesterday not far from here.”

  “You mean the flying city bus?” I asked.

  “Yes, that would be the one in question.”

  “We didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said.

  “And we don’t know who did,” Owen added. He sighed. “But security footage showed me there, so of course I’m under suspicion. Is that it?”

  Merlin’s genial expression faded. “I’m afraid so. I’m sure it’s a formality, but they do have to investigate.”

  “Even if he did it, he saved a life, so it’s not exactly evil,” I said.

  “We all know that’s not the point,” Merlin said.

  “My guys who were on duty at the time thought the magic came from the other side of the street,” Sam put in. “We’re still looking at footage to see if we recognize anyone there.”

  “That’s where the people who were talking about it and calling attention to it were,” I said. “Yeah, they were the ones with the best view, so obviously they’d talk about it if they saw it, but it makes me wonder if whoever did it wanted it to be seen and noticed.”

  “But why would a magical person want to be noticed like that?” Owen asked. “I can understand forgetting yourself in a crisis, but this was rather ostentatious. I can think of a dozen easier and less obvious ways to have resolved that situation. In fact, I was preparing to use one of them when that other person acted.”

  “And what way was that, Mr. Palmer?” a voice said from the doorway.

  The door was behind us, so Owen and I had to turn to see a bland, business-suited man entering Merlin’s office. I thought I was reasonably nondescript, of average size and coloring, but I was striking compared to this guy. His hair wasn’t quite blond, gray, or brown, but somewhere in the middle. There was nothing distinguishable about his features. I felt my eyes sliding off him, like there was nothing to focus on, and it couldn’t have been a “don’t notice me” magical spell since magic doesn’t work on me. It was like he’d been bred in a lab that produced mid-level bureaucrats.

  “Jabez Jones, from the Council’s Magical Activities Department.” He introduced himself as he approached the table and took the seat next to Merlin. “And it seems you’re already aware of why I’m here.”

  “We were witnesses to an incident of public magical use yesterday,” Owen said. His voice was even, but spots of color blooming on his cheeks gave away his emotions.

  “Hmmm. Witnesses. Possibly. At least, Miss Chandler here was a witness, since it doesn’t seem she currently has the power to do that sort of thing.” He glanced up at me over rimless glasses—I hadn’t even realized he was wearing glasses. “Or do you? It’s so hard to keep track.”

  “I’m immune to magic. No power to do anything, but nothing works on me,” I confirmed. “But I can sense magic in use, and I know Owen didn’t do anything yesterday.”

  “Hmmm. But you were saying as I arrived that you would have done something,” Jones said, turning to Owen.

  “I was considering it, since I can’t in good conscience watch someone be killed when I’m capable of saving him. Levitating a bus was a waste of power and wouldn’t even have occurred to me as a solution. It would have been easier and less showy to just speed him up a little bit so that he was out of the way. He might not have even noticed that he was walking faster. I might also have tried slowing the bus, putting it in a time bubble, but that’s a little more intricate a working and would have required more time than I had.”

  “Did you see who did the spell?”

  Before Owen could answer, Sam said, “The magical force seemed to come from the other side of the street, which makes sense if Katie here couldn’t sense it. Magic doesn’t work on her, but she’s got a real nose for it. We’re lookin’ into who might have been doing anything over there.”

  “Hmmm,” Jones said again, and that tic was already getting under my skin. Every time he did it, I wanted to kick him in the ankle. “And it seems like Miss Chandler was present for another public magic incident this weekend.”

  “I was in the vicinity, but not close enough to identify anyone involved in it. I was minding my own business, shopping for a wedding gown.” I didn’t know how much Merlin wanted me to tell this guy, but I decided not to say anything more unless one of my superiors brought it up. This Jabez Jones guy rubbed me the wrong way. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the magical Council. They only seemed to show up to cause more problems after the MSI team had dealt with a situation.

  “Hmmm. Interesting coincidence, though.”

  I balled up my fists under the table and hooked my feet under the base of my chair so I wouldn’t be tempted to act on the urge to kick.

  “Totally unrelated incidents,” Sam said. “One was people getting emotional, the other was someone not havin’ time to think. It happens when people have power they don’t know how to use.”

  Jones raised an eyebrow, momentarily making his face moderately interesting. “You think this is all due to an untrained, undiscovered wizard?”

  Sam shrugged, making his wings rise with his shoulders. “That’s just one possible explanation that we’re considerin’. It has happened before. Someone realizes they can do crazy things, has seen one superhero movie too many, and goes around doing stuff like making buses fly. If that’s the case, then we need to track this per
son down and bring him into the fold.”

  “But the incident at the bridal sale involved one of your employees.”

  “Yeah, but our person didn’t start it. At any rate, Palmer was only at one of these events, so you can’t pin that one on him. Katie can’t do magic at all, so the best she could manage is being the mastermind.”

  “Hmmm. Well. I do see your point, and it’s admirable how you defend your friend, but you’re hardly objective.”

  “I am, however, being logical,” Sam said, his voice even harder than his stony skin.

  I thought that the fact that someone involved with a magic watchdog blog had been present for the incidents I’d witnessed was interesting. There couldn’t be that many people in the city who believed magic was real and who were looking out for it, so what were the odds that they managed to be there when something magical happened? That suggested to me that there was some kind of setup going on here, someone using magic so it could be seen by them. But was someone wanting to make magic public using the watchdog people and deliberately staging events while they were present, or were the watchdogs actually magical, themselves, and staging the events so they could report on them? I was leaning toward the former, since I’d expect there to be better proof than they’d produced so far if they’d set it up themselves.

  Then again, that’s what they’d expect us to suspect. Perfect video and photos of magical events would look like they’d been staged. If I were running some kind of campaign to make people aware of magic, I’d probably do it with out-of-focus photos and grainy video that just barely missed being clear evidence. Only when I knew I was getting a lot of attention would I come up with something that might be seen as absolute proof.

  I guess I was still thinking like I worked in marketing, but it was nice knowing that I wasn’t wasting my skills. I was just applying them differently.

  Sam tilted his head like he was listening to something, then said, “My people have come up with some surveillance video that might shed a little light on this.”

  Merlin waved a hand, and a set of cabinet doors on the wall opened to reveal a flat-screen television. Another wave of the hand, and a picture came up, grainy security footage from behind where Owen and I had been standing. In fact, we were at the lower right corner of the picture.

  The jaywalker started into the street, and the bus approached. Just as the bus left the ground, the picture froze. Sam flew across the room and tapped the screen with a talon. “See this guy here?” The image was indistinct, but it looked like a figure on the sidewalk was standing with one arm out in front of him, like he was doing a spell. “That may be our rogue wizard.”

  “Hmmm, there’s nothing to indicate that he’s doing magic,” Jones pointed out. “You can’t tell whether he’s using a hand gesture or just pointing at the phenomenon.”

  “But we can tell that Owen, here, isn’t doing anything,” Sam said, pointing to the right of the screen.

  “Can you back up the video a few frames?” Owen asked.

  Sam waved a hand, and we watched the whole incident move incrementally backward, to the point where the bus was still on the ground. “Ah, yeah, there it is,” he said.

  “He’s got his hand outstretched even before the bus takes off,” Owen said. “He might be pointing out the jaywalker who’s in peril, but my guess is, this is our wizard. No one else shown on this video is doing anything, so unless there’s someone else who’s out of the shot, like maybe on the bus, I think this is the one we should focus on. Is there any way to clean up that video and identify the person?”

  “We can only work with what we’ve got,” Sam said. “This is a bad camera. I’m not sure what good they think it does because you’d never be able to identify a person from what it records. We’re still looking for other footage, and we may find something better. If he just happens to be a bystander who took action, he may regularly be in that place at that time, so we’ll stake out the plaza for a few days and see what happens, maybe stage a potential accident and see if it’s just a guy with a superhero complex. If he’s going public on purpose, he may be harder to find again.”

  “Thank you, Sam,” Merlin said. He turned to Jones. “Was there anything else you needed? As you can see, my people are well aware of the seriousness of these incidents and are engaged in an active investigation.”

  “I’ll need formal statements from our eyewitnesses,” Jones said, shuffling through his paperwork. “Separately. Mr. Palmer first.”

  I left the office and hung out by Trix’s desk. “That guy was Council, right?” she said, keeping her voice low.

  “Afraid so.”

  “Owen’s not in trouble again, is he?”

  “Hard to say. It sounded like they want him to be.”

  She shook her head. “Will they never leave him alone? You two might be happier if you move to your hometown after you’re married. They won’t care who he is there.”

  I laughed at the thought. “You’ve obviously never met my mother. Besides, there’s not much magic there. He’d be miserable.” Actually, Owen was pretty mellow. He’d probably be happy wherever he was. But I’d spent a few months back home last year, and I knew I didn’t want to live there again, even with Owen.

  The office door opened, and Owen came out. I couldn’t read his face, but when he smiled at me, I noticed that the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “That bad, huh?” I said.

  “What? No. They’re ready for you.”

  I didn’t think his denial sounded very convincing, which gave me a tense, queasy feeling in my stomach as I entered the office. I wasn’t worried about being accused of anything. I was more concerned with stopping myself from throttling Jones.

  “Hmmm, Miss Chandler,” the bureaucrat said as I entered and shut the door behind me. “Please, have a seat.”

  I was glad to see that Merlin and Sam were still there, so there were friendly witnesses. Then again, there would be witnesses if his “hmmm” made me snap and throttle Jones.

  He rifled through his papers, came up with a form, and carefully wrote my name in the “witness” blank. His handwriting looked like something that would come out of a typewriter, complete with serifs. When he finally finished that, I braced myself for a question, but he moved on to write out the title of the incident and a case number. I readied myself for questioning again, but he filled in the blanks for Sam and Merlin as witnesses, his name as interviewer, and the date.

  By this time, I’d grown bored enough to be distracted, so I jumped when he said, “Hmmm, Miss Chandler, can you describe the incident in question for me?”

  “You are referring to the Case of the Floating Bus, aren’t you? Not the Case of the Bridal Brawl?”

  “The Bridal Brawl will be a separate form. We’ll get to that one later.”

  “Oh, goody,” I said under my breath. “Okay, then, we—Owen Palmer and I—were leaving work yesterday, shortly after five, and we were discussing choosing flowers for our wedding. The walk light was red, and we stopped. I wasn’t really paying that much attention because we had a list of florists to visit and I was looking at that. I glanced up, and a guy was walking across the street in the middle of the block, against the light, when a city bus approached. It might have hit him, but it levitated over him and landed after he was out of the way. I didn’t see who did it, and I didn’t feel any magic being used near me. Any veiling spell wouldn’t have worked on me, but it was pretty clear that other people saw it. That’s about it.”

  “Hmmmmmmm.” His hum was longer, and he kept it going as he finished writing. At least he stayed on pitch the whole time, only going a bit flat toward the end when he must have run out of breath. I got the impression he didn’t even realize he was doing it. I doubted he’d appreciate being clued in. Finally, he looked up. “You’re certain that Owen Palmer had nothing to do with it?”

  “Yes. I’m accustomed to the way his magic feels, and I didn’t feel it. He was as shocked as anyone by what happened.”

  The corner
s of his mouth drooped a bit, and a small crease formed in his forehead while he finished filling out the form, giving the impression that he was disappointed. Had he hoped I’d rat out Owen once we were no longer in the room together? “Is there anything else you recall about the incident? Do you remember seeing the person from the video with his hand outstretched?”

  “Really, it’s all a blur. I don’t think I could identify anyone, not even the jaywalker.” No sooner had I said it than I recalled one of the photos on the blog. Maybe I was just adding details in my mind now that I knew about the pointing man, but I had a mental image of a man with a similar posture in one of the blog photos. I’d assumed at the time that he’d merely been pointing at the strange event, but maybe there was something else there. I didn’t want to say anything now because that would mean talking about the magic watchdogs. I figured we could always send the Council an update later if we discovered anything. I tried to keep my face blank, so it wouldn’t be obvious that I was withholding information, but he was too busy filling out the form to look at me, which told me he was more of a paper pusher than a real investigator.

  “Now, about the incident you have so succinctly described as the Bridal Brawl.” He shuffled papers and came up with another form, filling out all the information yet again. It seemed to me that he could have done that afterward rather than wasting my time. On the other hand, he really did have amazing handwriting. I wondered if he was available for addressing wedding invitations.

  I didn’t wait for him to finish and ask me a question before I said, “I’m not sure how much I can tell you because I didn’t see anything. I know there was a commotion, but I didn’t see the people involved. I wasn’t even sure it was magic until later. I was busy shopping for a wedding gown, which is an all-consuming task.” Feeling like I was throwing Trix under the bus, I added, “Trix, the receptionist, was there, and she may have seen more than I did.”