“Not entirely,” Owen said. “For one thing, there’s no specific school just for learning magic. We go to ordinary schools. Magic is an extracurricular activity.”
“In this country,” Rod corrected. “I think there’s an elite magic-only boarding school in England.”
“We also don’t need wands to do magic,” Owen said, raising his hand and making a gesture. A bottle of wine materialized in his hand.
Nita yelped and jerked backward, falling against the back of the sofa. “Omigod!” she cried out. “Was that for real?”
Owen touched the bottle with his free hand, and it turned into a bottle of soda.
“No, turn it back into wine, because I think I’m going to need it,” she said. She turned to Gemma and Marcia. “What about you? Are you witches, wizardesses, or whatever?”
“‘Wizard’ is a gender-neutral term,” Rod said.
“We’re totally ordinary, like you,” Gemma said.
“But you know about magic.”
“Kind of by accident,” Marcia said. “I got kidnapped by an evil wizard, which was a rather rude awakening to the whole thing.”
“Normally, we’re not allowed to tell outsiders,” Owen explained. “There are only exceptions when someone finds out on their own and them remaining in the dark is possibly more dangerous than them knowing.”
She whirled on me. “But you know.”
“As I said, magic doesn’t work on me. I’m what they call a magical immune. That’s a pretty valuable trait to magical people, so I work for a magical company. And that’s how Marcia and Gemma got dragged into all this. Marcia got kidnapped by a magical bad guy, and Gemma was involved, and they learned about magic that way.”
“So this has been going on, all this time, and you never said anything?” Nita said, her eyes flashing.
“I couldn’t! I even asked. I knew you were bound to see or hear something, and I thought it would be better to control the way you learned, but they specifically told me I couldn’t tell you.”
“There are some fairly harsh penalties,” Rod said. “Katie could have lost her job. At least this way, we have evidence that you saw a magical working for yourself, so it’s not on us. The fault lies with the person doing public magic.”
“What about when you were back home last year?” she asked. “Was that what was going on? Those disappearing windows, and those weird guys who came to stay at our motel?”
I nodded. “Some rogue wizards were in town.”
“You didn’t say anything then?”
“You didn’t notice the magic then.”
“I’m pretty sure I noticed weird stuff.”
“At that time, I was trying desperately to be normal. It was right after that kidnapping incident. One of my friends had been in trouble at least partially because of my work, and I didn’t want to have that happen again, so I didn’t want to drag you into it. But there’s a lot more magic here, so it’s a lot harder to avoid.”
She stood and wiped her palms on the legs of her jeans. “I don’t even know what to think about this. But I do need to think about it.”
“The pizza will be here soon,” Gemma called after her as she walked toward the door. “Don’t you want to stay and have some?”
“I wouldn’t want to infringe on the in-crowd,” Nita snarled.
I jumped up to go after her. “Hey, I wasn’t trying to leave you out,” I said when I caught up with her on the sidewalk in front of Owen’s place. “You’ve got to understand just how big a secret all this is. I wasn’t the one to tell Gemma and Marcia. They’d never have known if they hadn’t been put in danger.”
“You didn’t know about this back when we were in school, did you?”
I thought that the fact that she was talking to me was a good sign. “No. I only learned about a year after I got to New York.”
“And who told you?”
I gestured with my head toward Owen’s building. “Owen and Rod. As I said, me being immune to magic is valuable to them. They apparently noticed me reacting to things I wasn’t supposed to be able to see because they use magic to hide magical things. So they had magical things happen around me to see how I reacted, then invited me for a job interview, and that’s where they told me the whole thing. Well, actually, I guess their boss really told me, but they got it started.” I decided to leave out the fact that their boss was Merlin because I figured that was a little much to deal with, for now.
I put my hand on her arm and was relieved when she didn’t flinch away from my touch. “I know this has been so weird, but I’m really glad that you know now. I can quit hiding things. And it’s all so very cool. There are wonderful things you’ll be able to see and do now that you know. The parties are amazing.” I figured I’d hold the news about the magical wedding until she was more adjusted, because knowing she’d been left out of that would be crushing. I knew how I’d feel.
“There are parties?”
“Oh yeah. And magical music, too.”
“When you took that weird job not too long ago, was that part of it?”
“Yeah. It was an undercover assignment.”
“Oooh! Undercover?”
“Yeah, believe it or not, I work in the security department. And one of the things I’m dealing with is that there’s someone out there who wants to expose magic to the world.”
“Would that be so bad, though?”
“It might. The rules to keep it secret require magical people to behave themselves. If it’s not a secret, there’s less keeping them from using their power for bad things. Plus, ordinary people might not react well, and things could get dicey if magical people struck back. Next thing you know, you’ve got an evil wizard ruling the world. Which is why the secrecy rules are so tight. Whoever pulled that little stunt today at the festival will be in big trouble, for multiple reasons.”
“Okay, so telling people like me would indirectly lead to Voldemort taking over?”
“Maybe. I’ve dealt with a few people along those lines.”
“And what does Owen do?”
“Mostly researches the way magic works, which makes him a big-time expert on the subject.”
She glanced back at Owen’s building. “This really is all real?”
“Honest to goodness.” I noticed the pizza delivery guy heading up the steps to Owen’s front door. “Pizza’s here. Want to go back and have some?”
She sighed. “Yeah. I guess so. I’m still not totally over being left out, but I’m also hungry.”
As we walked back toward Owen’s place, she said, “Who do you think is trying to expose magic?”
“I have no idea, but they’re getting bolder, so I’d better figure that out soon.”
12
I spent most of the weekend answering Nita’s questions about magic and reminding her that she couldn’t tell anyone. I wasn’t sure what would happen if she did, since she wasn’t magical and therefore wasn’t under the jurisdiction of the magical authorities, but I suggested that she might lose the memory of knowing about magic. I was still a little worried that she’d get excited and blurt something out, but since she mostly hung out with us, I thought we were fairly safe.
But I still had a villain to track down. At work on Monday, I focused my efforts on figuring out who was behind all the public magic stunts. The person doing the spell must have been present at the festival. Dealing with Nita and Carmen had sidetracked me from investigating further that day. Fortunately, we had access to just about every security camera in town. I found the ones in the vicinity of the festival and started watching.
It turns out, doing that sort of thing isn’t nearly as easy as it looks on TV crime shows. They show about five seconds of crowd footage, then one of the detectives recognizes someone or spots the person committing the crime. In reality, it’s a lot harder than that to pick any one person out of a big crowd unless they’re doing something really obvious. You also can’t zoom in as easily as they do on TV. You’re pretty much stuck with wh
at you’ve got on the camera, which isn’t conveniently focused on exactly the spot you want to see. After watching the entire incident from two different angles and not seeing anyone doing anything that looked like casting a spell, I decided to go about it another way and look for particular people.
Gregor was the obvious first target. He’d always been a bit shady. He’d been kicked out of the research and development department for doing magical experiments that turned him into an ogre when he got mad. Then we’d learned that he’d been affiliated with the magical mafia all along. I wasn’t sure how deep his involvement was, but he’d been hired because of that connection, and he’d sided with them when they took on MSI. That seemed to me a good indication of someone who’d be willing to break the magical rules and maybe try to create a situation that would expose magic so he could have power over ordinary people.
Also, I had a very hard time believing that he’d be at all interested in eighties pop played in big band style. Or pop music, in general. Or fun. He had to have been at that festival with an agenda.
I went back through the footage I’d already watched, looking for him. It would have been easier if he’d had an ogre moment because a green guy with horns would have stood out on the recording. Alas, I spotted no green skin, so I had to look carefully for faces, and his non-ogre face wasn’t particularly distinctive. The only thing I had to go on was that he was a little older than the average age of the audience at that part of the festival.
It got a lot harder to spot any one person when the dancing started because then everyone was moving around. I figured that if he was the one doing the spell, he probably wouldn’t be dancing, so I looked for him among the few nondancers. One of the cameras showed our group, standing off to the side and not joining in the fun. If I hadn’t known us, I’d have been suspicious of us, I had to admit. Owen looked rather convincing when he checked his phone and left. I’d never have guessed that it was a fake call, just looking at the video. I wondered if they’d go so far as to check phone records to make sure he’d really received a call.
When I finally spotted Gregor, I had to back up the recording and watch it again because I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was dancing even before the spell hit. Not very well, but he moved with more or less the right steps, and he actually looked like he was enjoying himself. The joy intensified when he went under the spell and his dancing improved, like he was finally able to move the way he’d always dreamed of dancing. For a brief moment, I almost even warmed to him. If he could dance with that kind of joy and abandon, then maybe he wasn’t so bad, after all. It wasn’t just the spell, since not everyone looked like they were having that much fun. They were all being compelled to dance by the magic, but Gregor was into it.
I sat back in my seat with a grunt. There went that theory. So, if it wasn’t Gregor, who was it?
I pulled up footage from another camera. I quickly spotted Mimi, but she moved away from the area around the stage before the dancing began. That could be considered suspicious, I thought. Maybe it meant that she knew what was going to happen and was getting out of there before she was forced to break out in swing dancing. On the other hand, why would she have been there in the first place if she was involved and knew what would happen? She couldn’t have done the spell, so why bother? She wasn’t the type to show up just to support a coconspirator.
It was a bit scary how often Mimi kept popping up in my life, even after I no longer worked for her. I was starting to feel like our fates were somehow linked. I seemed doomed to run into her every so often. But I had to admit that it was a huge stretch to try to pin something like this on a person who had no magical powers and who’d managed to come out of a day in which she’d been the holder of a great object of power, had unknowingly hired an elf band for a charity gala, and had ended up trapped in a dragon’s lair and still remained blissfully oblivious to the existence of magic. I supposed her being at the festival was just one of those “small world” things.
While I was looking for people I didn’t like on the footage, I found myself keeping an eye out for Matilda. I knew Owen had said he didn’t like her, and he’d certainly acted like he was not a fan of hers, but I still found myself seeing her as competition, or at least as representing the competition. Owen was considered a great catch by the magical world—at least, before the story of his real parentage came out. I’d seen the flood of baked goods to his foster parents’ home at Christmas when all the single women in his hometown wanted to get his attention. Fights had even broken out among women vying for him, though some of that had been magically induced.
But there were plenty of wealthy, beautiful, magical women who would kill to be in my shoes, and I suspected with some of them, that was literal. Was this particular woman a threat? I couldn’t imagine that Owen would ditch me for her, but what would she do to try to snag him?
She was hard to find in the crowd because she was so tiny that even an average-sized person could block her. I looked among the dancers, searching for those who were really good, because of course someone like her would be. The perfect swingy blond hair would surely stand out on the recording. She’d be the one who looked like she was starring in a shampoo commercial—not that she’d use the kind of shampoo anyone advertised on television. She was a salon products only kind of girl, and probably those that were exclusively sold in very high-end salons. Heck, she probably had a personal blend, made just for her.
But I didn’t see her dancing from any angle I searched. That made me suspicious. If she wasn’t dancing, then why not? Had she shielded herself, like we’d done, or was she casting the spell?
I’d started looking for her merely out of misplaced jealousy, but now I wondered if maybe I was on to something. I went back to the camera that showed the edges of the crowd, where the few nondancers stood. Previously, I’d only watched myself and my friends, but now I looked at who else was there. I didn’t see her at first, but then a man moved to join the dancing, and behind him was a tiny supermodel with perfect blond hair, and she wasn’t so much as tapping her toes.
She was also doing something strange with her fingers. One arm hung at her side, while the other clutched the strap of the purse slung over her shoulder. She moved the fingers of both hands rapidly. It looked like she was playing air piano, with each hand on a different keyboard. Her lips moved slightly, and I didn’t think she was singing along with the song. She was doing a spell.
That was suspicious, but not conclusive. She could have been casting a shield to protect herself from the spell. I backed up the footage to before the dancing began, but I couldn’t see her until people moved away from her to go dance. I tried another camera, but I still couldn’t tell when she started doing magic, if it was before or after the dancing spell hit.
“Oh, come on, move just a bit that way, please,” I softly urged the person blocking my view.
“Does that ever do any good?” a voice asked from my doorway. I turned to see Trish standing there.
“No, especially since it already happened, but I figured it was worth a shot,” I said.
“What’ve you got?”
I backed up the video and showed it to her. “This happened the other day at a festival. Someone did a spell to make everyone suddenly start dancing, and they told that TV reporter that something was going to happen to demonstrate magic. But this woman”—I tapped Matilda’s image on the screen—“not only isn’t dancing, but seems to be doing some kind of spell.”
She leaned over to study it. “Your crowd isn’t dancing, either.”
“Yeah, because the guys cast a spell to shield us. So I’m trying to figure out if she’s also doing a shield spell or if she’s the one casting the dancing spell. I can’t seem to find a good shot of her before the dancing starts to see when she begins doing the magic.”
“Do you know who she is?”
“Her name’s Matilda, and she’s apparently from a really wealthy, powerful magical family. Owen and Rod know her from school, and they do
n’t like her very much. She was all over Owen when we ran into her, but he said she barely noticed him at school.”
“So, you want her to be the bad guy,” she said with a grin. “That’s one way to take out the competition.”
“No, not really. I only looked for her on the footage when I ruled out my other suspects, and I looked for her more out of curiosity than suspicion. That’s when I saw what she was doing. But I wouldn’t necessarily mind if she’s a bad guy.”
“Anyone with hair that swings like that has to be at least a little bit evil. Seriously, achieving that degree of smooth, not even the slightest bit of frizz, in this humidity must have involved a pact with the devil.”
“I know, right? Maybe I’d better take this to Sam.”
I sent a message with the video attached, and was surprised by how quickly I got a response—and how vehement it was. “Don’t even think about making accusations unless you have absolute proof,” his message said. “Their lawyers have lawyers, magical ones. We don’t want to tangle with them.”
I found that even more suspicious, and it only made me want to investigate her more. But I could see Sam’s point. If I tipped her off about my suspicions, I’d never stand a chance of catching her. She’d cover her tracks, and she had the resources for a good cover-up.
So, now what?
Research, to start with. I only had what Owen had told me to go on, so I looked up her family name. They owned a lot of property, in Manhattan and elsewhere, but several of their personal properties were listed as being up for sale. Interesting. Were they no longer planning weekends at the beach in resort areas across the globe, or did they need cash? The family business appeared to be travel services for magical people, which included magical hotels and resorts around the world, as well as magical transportation. That might have explained the property downsizing. Why own a vacation house when you own a hotel?
I wondered what made a hotel “magical.” Most magical people could conjure up whatever they wanted, so there was no need for room service. About the only way I could think of that a magical hotel might be different from any other was if all the guests were magical, then they could let down their veils and actually be magical people. That might be appealing enough to be worth it. Most magical people had money because their power gave them an advantage, so the target market was pretty high-end.
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