At any rate, I had enough to worry about trying to stay on my feet when I could barely reach a pole to hold on to. The train seemed to be making up for the lost time from backing up by going faster. I wasn’t sure if that was the engineer’s doing or the wizard’s. I couldn’t help but wonder how the MTA would spin this incident. Was it the sort of thing people would think was magic, or would most people assume it was a train malfunction?
Although I was alarmed by the event, it did help me get to work on time. Once I’d checked my e-mail and filed a formal report of the incident, I headed to Trish’s office. “You’re never going to believe what happened on my way to work this morning,” I said from her doorway.
“All traffic came to a sudden and complete stop, against the light in the middle of the block, leaving an open path for you and the people around you to walk across? It was like Moses parting the Red Sea, only it was a sea of taxis and delivery vans.”
“Really?”
“You work here, and that surprises you?”
“I’m not surprised that something like that might happen. I’m just a little surprised that it happened around you on the same morning when a subway train left the platform, then suddenly stopped and backed up so the people who’d just missed it had a chance to catch it.”
“I guess it’s Be Kind to Commuters Day in the magical world.”
“How often do you see that sort of thing happening?” I asked.
“To be honest, never. Even when the cops try to stop traffic, they don’t get that kind of perfect compliance.”
“I’ve seen Owen summon a train, but it’s pretty subtle. Nothing so dramatic as backing up. And now there are two incidents on the same morning?”
“The morning after both of us attended a meeting about spotting magical incidents. Interesting. Is that how they’re getting pictures of magical stuff, figuring out the people who are looking for magic and making sure that magical things happen in front of them?”
“Maybe. Or it could have nothing to do with the meeting. We need to see how widespread this is or if it’s just us.”
I went back to my office and contacted Rod to get him to send a company-wide memo asking for reports of nonveiled magic-related incidents anyone might have seen that morning. While I waited for those results, I checked the magic-watching blogs. You’d think something like that would have lit them up, but the only report I saw of the subway incident, on the Abigail Williams blog, was so detailed and extensive that it couldn’t possibly have been written that morning. It didn’t read at all like what someone who’d seen something truly odd would have rushed to the office and written. It contained details I hadn’t noticed—and that I’m pretty sure hadn’t actually happened in that way—and was surprisingly free of typos. I’m a good typist, and I’m not sure I could have dashed off something that long in the time since I got to the office without it being riddled with errors.
Whoever wrote that post had known what would happen and had prepared a report ahead of time, so it had the things that must have been planned right, but missed some of the details of the way it had actually happened. That proved to me that magical people were involved somewhere in all of this. It wasn’t just about people who noticed weird things and wanted to be validated. The question was, how were the magical people involved? Were they using the magic watchers, or were they in cahoots?
I had lunch with Owen in his office and told him about the meeting the night before. He was as worried as I’d felt about the reporter’s presence. “If she’s working on a story, we may have to intervene,” he said. “I know you have qualms about that, but we can’t let her publicly expose magic to a broad audience. We’ll have to discredit her or otherwise do something to ruin the story.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, trying to swallow a lump in my throat. “I had the same thought. But maybe she’s just interested personally. She definitely wasn’t there in the role of famous television personality. She didn’t want to be recognized.”
“Have you had Sam get someone to keep an eye on her?”
“I’m a little worried about that. What if she’s an immune who’s seen things and is trying to make sense of it all? If that’s the case, the last thing we need is a gargoyle following her.”
“Yikes! Good point.”
“And then there was this morning’s commute. You didn’t notice anything odd, did you?”
“I saw Rod’s memo. What was that about?”
I described what Trish and I had seen. “We’re trying to find out if these things were happening all over town, or if they’re just targeting people who were at the meeting,” I added.
“I didn’t see anything, but that doesn’t mean much. I’m not sure what I’d notice. Backing up a train is kind of crazy, though. I hope he was also using a spell to slow the next train on the tracks. They aren’t that far apart, and throwing off the timing like that could have caused problems. At the very least, there would have been slowdowns all the way up the line. I may sometimes move trains slightly faster toward an empty platform. I’d never back one up.”
“That’s because you aren’t a selfish sociopath.”
“I had a great deal of training in magical ethics. That’s why we worry about rogue wizards who don’t grow up through our system and aren’t steeped in the kind of training most of us get. Look at what happened with your brother.”
The magical genes ran amok in my family, with both wizards and magical immunes, and because we live in a very nonmagical part of the world, none of us had realized what we were until we were older. My middle brother had figured out he could do magic and had used it to go on a minor crime spree. If someone from a good family who’d been taught right and wrong did that, I could only imagine what someone with a shadier morality might do with magic. Making sure he caught a subway train would only be the tip of the iceberg.
“While that is scary on a big-picture level,” I said after nibbling at my sandwich, “what if these events were staged for the benefit of Trish and me and the other people at that meeting? They could have used the meeting to identify people who are looking for magic, and then made sure they saw magic. That means I’m being followed, so I may be known, or I could be tied to this company, or to you.”
“Are you sure you’re not just letting your last assignment get to you? Having the magical mafia watch your every move has to have had an effect on you.”
“I can have been turned a little paranoid by that assignment and still be followed now.”
“If they did follow you, maybe they only wanted to make sure you saw that one demonstration. They might not follow you everywhere.”
“If you’re figuring out where to stage magical events for someone’s benefit, you’ll probably figure out where they work. They had to have known at least something about my commute to know where to stage that train thing, since it happened before I was at the platform.”
“And you said the report had to have been pre-written. Did it contain the location?”
“Yeah.”
“And did you give them enough information for them to have identified you and figured out where you live and work?”
“No, I just gave my first name.”
“Then unless they were already watching you before you attended the meeting, it wasn’t staged for your benefit.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way, and I instantly felt a lot better. “Maybe you’re right and I’m still being paranoid after that last assignment,” I said, reaching across his desk and swiping one of his potato chips. “I’m just worried about all this. If magic gets exposed, then I might have to get a normal job.”
“If everyone knows about magic, you’ll probably be in even more demand than ever. Think about it—it won’t just be magical people needing immunes to help them make sure everything’s on the level. Everyone else will want things validated, too.”
“Well, then, why am I trying to stop all this?” I said with a grin. But even if I’d come out ahead, I worried about what
would happen to Owen and people like him. That was why I wanted to put a stop to this.
When I got back to my office, Rod had already sent a list of reports in response to his memo, and it looked like Owen was right. There were too many incidents for me to have been specifically targeted, but not enough for it to look like a coordinated operation to shower the city with visible magic. Sam also reported that the gargoyles who’d been watching the homeless guys to evaluate them for magical immunity hadn’t seen any open magical incidents around them, so not everyone at the meeting was being targeted. That made me feel a little better.
I looked up the website for the station where I thought that reporter worked and scrolled through their staff list until I saw a photo that looked familiar. There she was—scrub off the on-camera makeup, pull the bouncy shoulder-length hair back into a ponytail, add a pair of glasses, and bury her in a huge sweatshirt, and that was the woman from the meeting. Her name was Carmen Hernandez, and she was a general-assignment reporter who’d joined the station a few months earlier. It didn’t look like she did a lot of muckraking exposés, but I supposed there was always the chance she was looking for the scoop of the century to help make her career.
I just wished I knew what her aim was. Was she following up on that interview, or did she have some other interest in looking into magic? Either way, it could mean trouble for us. If she was investigating, as careless—or as deliberate—as the magical people were being, she could blow the whole thing wide open and change magical society for good. If she was immune to magic and curious about what she was seeing, a reporter we couldn’t hide magic from could be a problem.
I presented my findings to Sam in the security department conference room. I figured this wasn’t a conversation to have in the open by the awning. “I could put one of our more discreet operatives on the reporter,” he said. “A human wizard can change appearance magically and be a less obvious tail, but if she’s magically immune it wouldn’t be quite as shocking as a gargoyle.”
“That could work,” I said. “But be careful. We don’t want to do anything that will give her anything resembling proof.”
“Hey, we’ve kept the secret this long. I think we can manage it awhile longer.”
“You didn’t have the Internet and cell phone cameras before,” I pointed out. “This is a different world. I don’t know, does magic even belong in a technological age?”
“Hey, now, don’t go gettin’ all existential on me, doll,” he said, patting my shoulder. “And don’t you have a wedding to be planning?”
I did, and that was difficult to do when I was afraid of being seen in public with Owen—or him being seen in public with me. Even though it didn’t seem as though the magic watchers were really watching me, I worried about hanging around with a wizard when I might be under surveillance. If another big magical incident happened around me and Owen was there, it wouldn’t look good for him with the magical authorities.
Fortunately, the way he worked, I didn’t have to try too hard to avoid seeing him in public. We had lunch together at the office most days, and that allowed us to see each other. Otherwise, I could head home at five while he was still busy in his lab, and he didn’t seem to notice a thing.
Or so I thought, until a few days later when I was changing into my commuting shoes at my desk and looked up to see him standing in my office doorway. I paused to contemplate the sight. I’d grown accustomed to him by now, but every so often it struck me just how gorgeous he was. Like now. His dark suit and white shirt were perfect for his striking coloring, with dark hair, fair skin, and dark blue eyes. He was like a male version of Snow White, and any magic mirror would have to declare him the fairest of them all.
I must have stared at him longer than I realized because he started blushing, a wash of pink rising from his collar to his hairline. That made him even cuter. If he’d had an ego, he might have been a bit too much, but his bashfulness brought him back to the realm of mere mortals. “I, um, wanted to see if you wanted to try tasting some possible dinners tonight,” he said. He raised an eyebrow. “Or have you been avoiding me?”
I winced. “Am I that obvious? It’s not because I don’t want to be with you.”
“You’re protecting me.”
It was rather sweet that the conclusion he’d jumped to was the positive one. “Yes, because we know the powers that be are already after you, and I’m still not sure if I’m being watched by these anti-magic people.”
“But didn’t we decide that you were being paranoid, that you weren’t being followed and watched?”
“We discussed it,” I hedged.
“How many magical incidents have happened around you in the last couple of days?”
“None,” I admitted.
“So I don’t think you have to worry about me getting blamed for something that happens because they’re staging magical incidents in front of you.”
“Well, when you put it that way . . . Where did you want to go to try meals?”
“There’s that Italian place we like in the Village. I thought we could start there, and if we find something we like, I can come up with a spell to duplicate it, in whatever form we want.”
“For food, wouldn’t it be safer to do it the normal way?”
“Don’t tell me you’re buying into this anti-magic stuff.” His tone was light and teasing, but I could see the concern in his eyes. “Has magical food ever gone wrong for you? I conjure lunch for us every day. Or are you rethinking a magical wedding altogether?”
“Whoa, hey, I never said that.” I sighed. “I guess maybe I am getting a bit paranoid. I spend way too much of my day scouring the Internet for reports of magic. That’s probably got me overestimating the impact of these groups. And I suspect I’d just have to look at the cost of a real wedding caterer to be totally okay with a magical one. Not to mention, we wouldn’t stand a chance of booking a caterer so late, especially not one we could let in this building.”
Even though I’d reassured him, I couldn’t help but be on high alert as we left the building. I wore the necklace that amplified the sensation of magic around me so I’d know exactly what was going on, and I kept my eyes peeled for signs of anything unusual. Nobody levitated a bus or reversed a subway train, and there were no strange riots on the subway, or any other weirdness that I’d experienced. Come to think of it, it was so normal as to be odd, probably because most magical people were lying low right now. Aside from those who seemed to be trying to get attention, no one was using magic in public.
Which meant we had an uneventful dinner, during which we discussed what I knew of my mother’s plans for the reception back home. I felt a slight hint of magic as he evaluated the lasagna, like he was trying to figure out how to create it magically. When my necklace tingled, I went on alert, making sure no one noticed him using magic, but he wasn’t actually doing anything for anyone to notice, unless they’d learned to recognize what magic felt like. Most people dismissed the sensation as a shiver up their spine or goosebumps.
“You can relax now,” he said dryly as he looked across the table at me. “I’m done, and no one would notice anything unless they saw you jumping out of your skin.”
“Sorry,” I said with a wince. “I guess I’m on edge.”
“Maybe Sam should rotate who’s on the assignment. Being on high alert for so long can’t be good for you. You need a break. And don’t tell me you’re the only one who can do it.”
I was about to respond, but I looked up at the television on the wall and saw Carmen Hernandez reporting. “That’s the reporter,” I whispered to Owen, who turned to look. The sound was down, but the closed captioning was on, and after I read a few lines, I let myself relax. She was reporting on a school bus accident—a nice, normal event that didn’t have the slightest whiff of magic about it. And if she was busy on that assignment, that meant she wasn’t digging into magic today.
Feeling much better, I reached across the table with my fork to taste Owen’s lasagna. “Mm
m, you know, I like the chicken parmesan, but this has something to be said for it,” I said.
“We can have more than one entree,” he said with an indulgent smile. “And this wedding won’t be the only time you can ever have Italian food. I will feed you Italian food every night for the rest of our lives, if you like.”
“Aww, that’s so sweet. Is that part of your wedding vows?”
“If you want me to put it in, I will.”
“Well, every night might be excessive. It wouldn’t be special anymore. And I’d have to start seriously exercising.”
We were still discussing the optimum frequency of lasagna consumption as we left the restaurant, his arm around me. I’d almost entirely forgotten my worry about magic exposure, but before we reached the end of the block, I heard a voice call out, “Hey, Kathleen!”
I almost didn’t respond because no one called me by that name, other than sometimes my mother when she was really angry, but then I remembered that this was the name I’d given at the meeting. I turned to see a man leaning against the wall. It was one of the homeless guys from the meeting, the one who’d talked about seeing gargoyles. I hadn’t introduced myself to him, but he must have overheard me talking to the meeting organizer.
“Hi,” I said, somewhat warily.
He beckoned me closer, and after a glance at Owen, I moved over to him. “Your gargoyle friends talked to us, like you said,” he whispered. “So it’s really real?”
“Yes, it is,” I assured him. “Seeing things like that means you’re special, not crazy.”
“They offered my friend and me a job. Should we take it?”
“Did they tell you what kind of job?” I’d had a lousy time in the verification department where most magical immunes started at the company, but most of that had been because of a terrible boss. He’d been exposed as an agent of the magical mafia, so things were bound to be better there now. Still, I wasn’t sure it was the best place for a guy who’d been living on the streets because he thought he was hallucinating.
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