Enchanted Ever After

by Shanna Swendson

  He made a few notes, then said, “Hmmm, I don’t think that will be necessary.” Which I considered proof that this was more or less a witch hunt against Owen, making sure he wasn’t going rogue. While the bus incident was flashier, the bridal brawl had made the television news. “Thank you for your time, Miss Chandler. We will contact you if we have additional questions.”

  When I finally got back to my office, I pulled up the blog again and clicked on the picture I’d recalled, which did show the pointing man. Actually, it showed his hand. His face was blocked by someone else’s head. And he definitely wasn’t pointing. His hand was formed into an odd shape, so odd that it was extremely unlikely that he’d just happened to hold his hand like that when pointing at a strange event. I printed a copy of the photo and took it to Owen’s lab.

  “What do you make of this?” I asked, dropping it on Owen’s desk.

  “That’s the guy from the bus incident?” he asked, bending over to examine it.

  “His hand. I’ll have to see if there’s a shot that shows his face. But he’s not pointing.”

  “No, he’s not. He’s doing a levitation spell—not the one I would have chosen, but I guess it works if you don’t mind a huge energy expenditure. It’s a formal spell, which kills the untrained wizard trying to be a superhero theory.”

  “So that means it’s someone who knows what he’s doing, doing it on purpose.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “I don’t think it’s all that ominous. After all, he did save a life. If he really wanted to expose magic, wouldn’t he have been a bit more visible and obvious, taking credit for it? My guess is that it was just someone who panicked in the moment, saved the guy, then realized he screwed up. Your rank-and-file wizard isn’t used to doing big things like that. Coordinating a veiling while levitating a bus using that spell would be beyond most people. I’m not sure I’d have had the energy to do both.”

  Sighing and shaking his head, he added, “Really, I should have had the presence of mind to veil what he was doing as soon as I spotted it. That’s where I messed up.”

  “I hope you didn’t say that to the Spanish Inquisition. He was after dirt on you. I don’t think he cared at all about these public magic events.”

  “If they’re having to dig that hard, then I must be doing something right,” he said with an attempt at a smile that I thought looked a bit pained. “And since I know I’m not doing these things, I don’t have anything to worry about.”

  I wished I could be as optimistic as he was.

  I’d barely made it back to my office when I got summoned to another meeting. It wasn’t in the boss’s office or in security, but rather in a place I hadn’t visited yet, and I thought I knew this building fairly well. I found it easily enough, but I hesitated outside the door, wondering what this was all about. More dealings with the Council? Something to do with my Collegium case?

  Taking a deep breath, I opened the door and entered a room that looked like the bullpen of a newspaper in an old movie, except there were computers instead of typewriters on the desks. An unshaven man leaning back in his desk chair noticed me entering and called out, “Favorite fantasy animal, favorite part of town?”

  “Excuse me?” I replied.

  “Answer the questions.”

  “Um, dragon, Central Park.”

  He sat up, leaned over his computer, and typed for about a minute before leaning back again. “Okay, that’ll work. Now, what can I do you for?”

  “I was told to come here. I’m Katie Chandler.”

  “The one who saw the flying bus incident?”

  “Yes.”

  He sat up, scooted his chair over so he could reach another chair nearby, knocked some books off that chair, and dragged it back to his desk. “Here, have a seat.” Swiveling around, he called out, “Hey, Larry, she’s here.”

  The man at a nearby desk who’d been slumped over his keyboard sat up, blinking. “Here?”

  “The bus girl.”

  “I really didn’t have anything to do with that incident,” I said as I sat in the indicated chair.

  “Doesn’t matter,” the first man said as Larry stood and stretched sleepily. Larry came over and sat on the edge of the first man’s desk. “We thought getting your perspective might add a little verisimilitude to our coverage.”

  “Is this a newspaper?” I asked, frowning in confusion.

  “Depends on how you define ‘newspaper.’” He waggled his eyebrows and grinned. “Powers.”

  “I don’t have any,” I said. “I’m a magical immune.”

  “No, Powers is my name.”

  “Isn’t that a bit on the nose for a wizard?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Tell me about it. But my middle name is even worse, and no, I’m not telling. Anyway, we need to make sure we get the facts straight in our story so they can’t discount it because we got something wrong.”

  “I’m still not sure what this is all about,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Let’s just say that we help muddy the waters about magical incidents,” Larry said. “We report them alongside stories about Elvis sightings and dragons in Central Park, which makes anyone else who reports these incidents look less credible.”

  “I knew magical people have been doing that sort of thing for a long time, but I didn’t know you put out your own tabloid,” I said. “Which one is it?”

  Powers smirked. “That’s a secret.” Turning his chair to face his desk and placing his fingers on the keyboard of his computer, he said, “Tell me what happened.”

  I gave him a quick rundown, repeating what I’d told the Council inspector. “Sorry, not as exciting as you’d think a flying bus should be,” I concluded with a shrug. “It was only a second or two and not that dramatic. When you can take the bus to Staten Island, that would be a story.”

  “We already did that one, about five years ago,” Larry said.

  “Don’t you feel bad about misleading people?”

  “Who’s misleading?” Powers asked with a shrug. “Our true stories are one hundred percent true. That’s why we wanted to interview you. We merely happen to surround those true stories with others that are maybe less true. It’s up to readers to decide which stories to believe, the same as with any other tabloid.”

  “We actually probably have more factual content than most,” Larry said.

  “And those are the least believable stories,” Powers added.

  As I returned to my office, I reflected that the magical world had been working for centuries to keep their secret, so obviously they had mechanisms in place. It was just weird to keep finding out new things about this world after I’d been involved for more than a year. It would have been nice to know we had our own newspaper when I was responsible for marketing. Then again, a tabloid designed to convince nonmagical people that there was no magic wasn’t exactly a great venue for promoting a magical company to magical people.

  Although it seemed like the magical world had things under control, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something shifty was going on, and that it might be bigger than they realized. I didn’t think it would be dangerous to look into the magic watchdogs. If I could find out who these people were and what their agenda was, we’d have a better sense of how it all fit together and whether it was anything to worry about. And it didn’t have to get in the way of my other work.

  I didn’t even have to do anything so obvious as contact Abigail Williams. I suspected they’d be looking for witnesses who’d been on that bus by looking for regular commuters on that route. All I needed was to be on that bus when they did so. As undercover missions went, that should be a cakewalk.

  4

  My one worry about my scheme was that Owen would decide we needed to do more wedding planning or go out to dinner that evening. I definitely didn’t want to go looking for people who were on alert for magic with a wizard at my side. But my luck held and he made up for time lost from that interrogation by working late. I checked the route of the b
us and left work a little early to catch it several blocks away from the office. I hoped that way I would avoid any possibility of looking like I was connected to MSI.

  As usually happened around rush hour, there was a long gap between buses, with a crowd forming at the bus stop, and then two arrived practically at the same time. I hesitated, unsure which bus I should try to board. The first one was packed, and the driver only let people off, motioning everyone waiting to the second bus. That settled that. I boarded the second bus and took a seat midway back, where I could eavesdrop on conversations throughout the bus. I pulled a paperback book out of my bag and held it up, pretending to read while I peered over and around it. Every so often, I turned a page.

  Two stops later, we reached the block where the incident had happened. A cluster of people boarded the bus there. None of them looked familiar. None of them even looked all that suspicious. They all seemed to be ordinary office workers. Then again, I wasn’t sure what I expected a witch hunter to look like in the twenty-first century.

  A couple of people spoke on their cell phones, but otherwise the bus was quiet, everyone keeping to themselves. A young man took the seat in front of me. He wore a shirt and tie, but instead of a suit jacket, he had on a hooded sweatshirt. Probably some kind of clerk, I guessed. He glanced around the bus as though taking stock of the other passengers. I couldn’t get a good read on whether he was looking around for a purpose or merely being curious.

  After we’d gone about a block, he turned to the person across the aisle from him. “Hey, were you on this bus yesterday?”

  I forced myself not to lift my gaze from my book, but I held my breath and strained to hear the conversation over the roar of the bus engine and the phone call going on behind me.

  “Every day,” the other passenger, an older African American man, said with a world-weary tone.

  Most people would have taken that as a “leave me alone” cue, but the young man continued in a way that reminded me of an eager puppy. “I was waiting for the bus, and I could have sworn I saw it fly.”

  The other man gave a soft, derisive snort and shifted to stare out the window, signaling an end to the conversation. Undaunted, the puppy turned to the passenger in front of him. “Did you notice anything weird?”

  That passenger, a middle-aged woman in business attire, turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow. “Weird? On a city bus? Perish the thought,” she said dryly.

  He turned to face me, his enthusiasm undimmed. “What about you?” he asked. It was probably my imagination, but I felt like he was watching me intently. Did he know who I was?

  “I don’t normally take this bus,” I said with a shrug that was as casual as I could make it. “I had a meeting today. Sorry.”

  It seemed to take forever before he smiled and said, “Too bad. It was really cool. I’m dying to know what it was like for the people on the bus.”

  After the next stop, he changed seats and started the process again with the passengers at the back of the bus. I didn’t realize until he moved and I let myself relax how tense his attention had made me. My breathing became much easier once he was talking to someone else. On the other hand, it became more difficult to eavesdrop without turning around and being obvious about it. I also had to guess which people he might be talking to, based on what I remembered of them and which person I assumed went with which voice.

  Most of the people were as reluctant to acknowledge him as the rest of the passengers had been, but he finally got someone to admit that he’d been on the bus and had noticed something weird. “Yeah, it was like the bus was slamming on its brakes. I braced myself—I’ve been in a bus wreck before—but instead of stopping, it was like we bounced, and then we dropped, but then we kept going like nothing happened.”

  “What do you think happened?” the puppy asked. I uncrossed my legs, shifted my weight, and turned in my seat, like I was trying to get comfortable. That allowed me to look behind me just enough to see that the puppy was talking to a guy about his age, dressed in a nice suit.

  “I don’t know,” the other passenger said. “I thought maybe we hit a bump that launched us, but it was too smooth for that. The landing wasn’t even all that jarring. Or maybe we never really left the ground. It just felt like we did.”

  “Oh, you definitely left the ground.” The puppy leaned closer to him and said in a stage whisper, “I know this is going to sound crazy, but from where I stood, it looked like magic. The bus was going to hit a guy, but instead it went right over him. It was amazing, and a lot of other people saw it, too. I did a search, and there was this blog full of reports. You ought to go there and give them an account from inside the bus. They’re trying to figure out what’s going on.”

  “Magic?” the other passenger said. “Like Harry Potter?”

  “I didn’t see a wand, but yeah, it was kind of like that crazy bus in the third movie, only it flew instead of shrinking.”

  “Um, yeah, okay,” the other passenger said, raising a newspaper to block his face.

  “The blog was called something like ‘Magic Watch’ if you want to look it up.” The passenger didn’t respond, and the puppy got off at the next stop. I wished I had one of those lipstick cameras spies use in movies so I could get a good picture of him. He wasn’t quite as nondescript as Jabez Jones had been, but he was a fairly generic New York white male twentysomething guy. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pick him out of a crowd if I spotted him again. Since he’d boarded near the MSI office, I wondered if any of the security gargoyles watching the plaza had noticed him.

  The bus was heading toward my apartment, so I decided to stay on for the rest of the trip, even though it would be slower than the subway. I figured I looked less suspicious if I didn’t get off so soon after the questioner did, and if anyone was watching me, there wasn’t anything unusual about me going home. My last assignment had made me paranoid about being watched.

  As my block neared and it was time to put away my book and gather my things, I noticed something on the floor of the bus: a business card, like the one Abigail had given me. It looked like the puppy had scattered them around, perhaps for passengers who might have seen something to pick up in case they didn’t want to talk to him but were still curious about the event. Even though I was pretty sure he wasn’t named Abigail Williams, that name was on the card. Maybe that was the pen name everyone at the blog wrote under rather than the name of the woman I’d met.

  I found myself torn about how to pursue this case. Not too long ago, I’d been someone who noticed odd things that no one else seemed to notice, and it had been a huge relief to learn that they were real, that I wasn’t just imagining things. Only, in my case, no one else could see them. The magic used to hide magic from the rest of the world didn’t work on me, so I saw what was really going on. It hadn’t only been that I was a small-town hick in awe of big-city things that the locals took for granted. There really was stuff they couldn’t have seen even if they were looking right at it.

  In this case, it was people who were open-minded enough to accept what they saw without going into denial or employing any of the usual psychological tricks we use to maintain our own worldview. I had to respect them for that. If they didn’t have any kind of nefarious agenda, I was inclined to leave them alone. Let the magical people deal with their own by reminding them to watch themselves and remember to keep their magic covered up. Gaslighting people for being perceptive would put us on the wrong side, I was afraid.

  The next morning, I checked the magic-watching blogs again, but there weren’t any additional eyewitness reports of the bus incident. I took note of the new entries about other alleged magic use so I could cross-reference them with our gargoyle patrols. I didn’t spot the eager puppy in any of the photos from the bus flight submitted to the blogs. If he’d really been there, he’d managed to stay out of camera range—or maybe he’d been behind a camera.

  Sam wasn’t in his office, so I headed to the front entrance, where he often sat on the awni
ng. “I don’t suppose we’ve got any good footage of that plaza I could look at,” I said.

  “From the bus day?”

  “Yeah.” I told him about my bus ride the day before. “And I know you didn’t assign me to the case, but I did it on my own time.”

  “Hey, I’m not gonna knock you for taking initiative, as long as you get your assignments done. What’re you lookin’ for?”

  “I want to see if this guy really was a witness on the plaza or if he’s part of one of these magic watchdog groups and trying to find witnesses. I suspect the latter, considering he was distributing cards for their blog.”

  “I’ll have it sent to your computer,” he said. “You think this is something to dig into?”

  I forced myself not to sigh wearily. “I don’t know. I mostly want to rule out anything bad. Better to find out they’re just a bunch of harmless crackpots than be surprised when they aren’t.”

  “You’re catching on fast around here. In the security business, we like to say that a little paranoia is healthy. But I doubt there’s anything to worry about.”

  “You mean other than the Council interrogating Owen.”

  He gave his wings a brisk flap. “That’s an entirely different issue.”

  “Should I be worried about it?”

  “Of course. But not any more so than usual. They’re always gonna be watching that boy.”

  In spite of his assurances, I did check the video of the plaza. I didn’t spot anyone who looked like the puppy—well, actually, I spotted half a dozen who could have been him, but I was pretty sure they weren’t. It was hard to tell in grainy video and with a guy who didn’t have any odd or distinguishing features. Would it have killed them to send a redhead who’d have been easy to spot?

  I tried to push it all to the back of my mind and focus on more important things, like planning a wedding. It seemed you had to be even more specific when using magic than when doing things in the real world. For the ceremony back home, I could (and did) say, “Oh, I don’t know, whatever kind of white flower you can get.” To have them magically created, I needed to know the specific type, provide a picture, and name the exact size, quantity, and arrangement. It was a control freak’s dream, but the details didn’t matter to me. Unfortunately, without the details, you might end up with a white blob instead of a flower.