Enchanted Ever After

by Shanna Swendson

  “What, exactly, are we looking for?” Nita asked, squinting as she scanned the sky.

  “Anything even remotely weird. If you see something that you even think might be magical, let me know. And I’ll be running what I see by you because there are things I can see that most people won’t. You don’t see any gargoyles now, do you?” I saw at least three on the roof over the bleachers and several more circled the sky over the stadium.

  “Nope, they’re gone,” she said.

  I heard the others calling things out to each other, but I tried not to get distracted. From what I could tell, they were all little oddities, and if our gang wasn’t taking care of them, the security forces that had convened were doing the job. I didn’t know how many people we had on-site by now, but as far as I could tell, the rest of the fans weren’t noticing anything odd about the game.

  I saw a large shape in the sky heading toward the stadium, and it got larger as it drew closer. “Do you see that?” I asked Nita, pointing.

  “See what?” she asked.

  Now I could tell that it was a dragon. It was close enough and obvious enough that if it hadn’t been veiled, people would definitely have been reacting, even if they just thought it was a kite or balloon. I called Sam and said, “I don’t know if your guys can see it, but we’ve got a dragon approaching the stadium.”

  “A dragon?” Nita squeaked.

  “It’s still veiled,” I reported into the phone, “but I have a feeling that won’t be for long.” This, I was certain, was the big demonstration. The other things had probably been meant to distract us and test what the response would be, but it would be very hard to explain away a dragon attacking either the field or the fans during a baseball game that was being aired on live television, possibly on both coasts. And I’d bet that they had someone set up to use magic to stop it, since the dragon in and of itself wasn’t necessarily proof of magic. Or did they expect our wizards to step up to defend the crowd from the dragon, so they were the ones to use magic in public, even if it was to save people?

  “Can’t you guys keep it away from the stadium?” I asked Sam. The gargoyles circled the dragon like they were trying to herd it, but it didn’t veer from its course.

  “I think it’s under a spell. It’s actin’ like it doesn’t even notice us,” Sam reported.

  “Well, whatever you do, don’t let its veil drop. I bet they’re about to expose it.”

  “It can still attack while it’s veiled,” Sam warned.

  I leaned forward and tapped Owen on the shoulder. “We’ve got a dragon incoming. Sam’s gargoyles can’t get it to turn away. They’re trying to keep it veiled, but he thinks it’s enchanted. Do you think your taming spell would do any good?”

  He looked up, and I supposed the dragon wasn’t veiled to him—validating my theory that he was meant to do something to stop it—because he reacted like he saw it. “I might be able to make it tamer, but I’m not sure I can override the compulsion to come here. And I’m not sure what the range is on that spell.”

  “We have to let it get in the stadium before you can stop it?” I was alarmed enough that I barely kept my voice down.

  “I’ll try before it gets here, but no guarantees on when it will start working.”

  “And can you do it in a way that doesn’t look like you’re doing magic? Because I think the plan was for you to out magic for them by valiantly saving the crowd from a dragon. I guess she doesn’t know that you have other ways of dealing with dragons.”

  “Or she was counting on her spells making me do what she wanted. Good thing you spotted that.” He laced his fingers together and stretched his arms out, flexing his wrists, then separated his hands, wiggled his fingers, and began making subtle gestures as he murmured under his breath. I could feel the magic around him building.

  Meanwhile, the dragon kept coming.

  “Do you see anything yet?” I asked Nita.

  “No. I guess that’s good, huh? Though I would kind of like to see a dragon. Dragons are real?”

  “Yes. But don’t count on them giving you a ride. It doesn’t work that way. That I know of.” My experience with dragons had mostly been limited to an encounter with a small colony that had been living adjacent to the sewers. I wasn’t sure what they were like in the wild.

  “It’s not responding to my suggestions to turn away,” Owen said. I could tell that much because the dragon had cleared the edge of the stadium and was directly overhead. It circled above the field, at about the level of the roof over the stands, but it didn’t show any sign of aggression. It cast a shadow on the field, but I couldn’t tell if anyone else might see it. At least the shadow was just a blob, not anything obviously dragon-shaped.

  “I think I see—” Nita said, but then she shook her head. “No, it’s gone. It was like just for a split second there was a shimmer in the sky, and I thought I saw wings. Or it could have been my imagination because that’s what I’m looking for.”

  “No, they tried to unveil it, but Sam’s guys must have got to it,” Owen said, still staring at the sky.

  I supposed this was when the dragon was supposed to attack, but it wasn’t showing any signs of hostility. It circled lazily. Even if it had been visible to most of the crowd, it could have possibly been written off as a kite being towed by an airplane.

  “Oh, wow, that’s really a dragon,” Carmen said.

  “Eyes on your sector,” I ordered.

  “But, dragon! I’m so glad you clued me in before I saw this.”

  The dragon came closer, and I braced myself. I knew Owen wouldn’t let it roast thousands of people, even if it did mean outing himself as a wizard and getting in all kinds of trouble for doing so, but I still couldn’t help but imagine flames coming at me. The dragon opened its mouth, but it only yawned. It spread its wings, letting them fill with air so they functioned like a parachute to slow its descent until it hit the field, just in front of the outfield wall, where it curled up and promptly fell asleep.

  Owen let out his breath in a big “whoosh” and sank back against his seat. “I don’t know how long that will hold, and I hope no one hits anything toward that part of the wall,” he said. “Maybe I should get over there and see if there are some spells I can untangle and then deepen my control.”

  He started to get up, but Rod stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Maybe you’d better leave this to Sam and his team. I don’t think you want to be anywhere near that dragon right now.” He gestured with his chin behind us, and I saw someone wearing all black coming down the steps a few sections over. It looked like the Council was here.

  19

  “Oh, great,” I said, turning away from the Council people in the vain hope that maybe they wouldn’t notice us if they didn’t see my face. “Now you’ll get caught and maybe blamed when you try to stop the next thing that happens.”

  “Will the bad guys bother doing anything else, since we stopped the dragon?” Nita asked. “We did stop the dragon, right? I mean, you stopped the dragon. The rest of us didn’t really do anything.”

  “It was a team effort,” Owen said over his shoulder to Nita, who smiled.

  “Turn around,” I muttered to Owen. When he was no longer facing the Council people, I added, “The dragon’s asleep in the outfield, and the gargoyles have it covered. And would you give up so easily? After all they’ve done, I don’t think they’re just going to shrug and walk away now.”

  “Don’t you have a good idea who’s doing this?” Gemma asked. “If we could find and distract that person, that should stop the hijinks. And you’d catch her red-handed.”

  “Find her? In this crowd?” I asked, gesturing to the stadium.

  “We should be able to follow the magic,” Owen said.

  “Oh. Right. I’m sure she’s using plenty of it. I could probably sense it, but I’ll have to get away from y’all while you’re doing spells to counter what she’s doing.”

  I got up and edged down the row. Nita followed me, saying, “We�
��re a team, right?”

  Owen also got up. “Uh uh, you stay here,” I said, holding up my hand in a “stop” gesture.

  “I won’t let her enchant me again,” he protested.

  “Yeah, but if the magic’s coming from her, and if you’re nearby when the enforcers trace it back there, it won’t look good for you. You stay here and keep an eye on that dragon,” I said.

  Instead, Jake joined us. “I’m bored with the game, anyway,” he said with a shrug as he climbed over Philip.

  Nita gave him an uncharacteristically shy smile. “Hi, I’m Nita. I’m Katie’s friend.”

  “Jake. Owen’s assistant.”

  “So, you’re a wizard, huh?” Was she batting her eyelashes? Now?

  “Yeah, but I’m also in a band.”

  “Oh?”

  “Come on,” I said, urging them along. “You can flirt later.”

  “I wasn’t,” she said, at the exact time he said, “I’m not.” They both laughed. I herded them up the steps to the concourse. There, I paused, trying to feel where the magic was strongest. It was pretty obvious, and I hurried to my right. We’d barely made it to the next aisle when we ran into Mack, the Council enforcer.

  “I’m almost afraid to ask what you’re up to,” he said, sounding weary. “But I shouldn’t be surprised to see you here. You’re always around when there’s trouble.”

  “That’s because dealing with trouble is my job,” I said. “And before you say anything, Owen’s not responsible for the stuff going on here. He’s stopping it.”

  “I didn’t say anything. You notice I’m not going after him.”

  As a matter of fact . . . “Where are you going, then?” I asked.

  “There are three big sources of magic around here right now: your friends back there in the stands, the gargoyles on the field around the dragon, and something in this direction. As you said, your friends and the gargoyles seem to be cleaning things up rather than causing problems, so I’m going to check out this lead.”

  “Great minds think alike,” I said. “That’s what we’re doing.”

  He resumed walking. “Well, come on.”

  I was surprised that he didn’t object to us tagging along, but I didn’t dare say anything, lest he have second thoughts. Maybe he thought an immune would be an asset.

  “Who’s he?” Nita whispered to me.

  “He’s basically the magic police.”

  The sense of magic grew stronger and stronger, and I wondered what Matilda was up to now. She was definitely up to something.

  Nita shivered and ran her hands up and down her arms. “Brr. Feels like someone walked over my grave,” she said.

  “That’s magic,” I told her. “Strong magic nearby.” It was making my necklace go into overdrive. Matilda—or whoever it was—was really close, and doing something big.

  “Really? I’ve always felt that, especially around your grandmother.”

  “She’s a wizard,” I said without thinking. I was too busy trying to focus on the source of magic.

  “You know, that explains so much.”

  Mack paused, holding up a hand to stop us. I pointed to where a woman stood silhouetted in the arch leading to the seating section ahead. A slight breeze whipped her perfect blond hair around her. I wasn’t sure what she was doing, but she was using a lot of power. I ran over to the next aisle to see what was going on. The dragon on the field was stirring. It lifted its head, then abruptly slumped down again. Its tail twitched and went still. She must have been trying to wake it, while our people kept countering her spells. We had a magical tug-of-war going on. It was one person against our team, but she’d also enchanted the dragon in the first place, which might have given her more control.

  “Don’t you see that?” a voice a few rows ahead of me called out. It was a familiar voice, but I couldn’t place it in context. When it added, “Don’t you see the dragon?” I froze in near panic. Had Matilda managed to drop the veil, or was the person shouting a magical immune? Scanning the crowd below me, I saw a woman waving her arms—Abigail Williams. No one else reacted, and though I couldn’t see their faces, the body language I could see implied some skepticism. At least, I hoped it did.

  But with the anti-magic forces there, I couldn’t take the risk that our gang might not overpower Matilda. If that dragon became visible to ordinary people, there would be no going back on this story, and it would validate the views of some pretty toxic people. I had to do something to skew the odds in our favor.

  There were only a few people in the back row, so I slipped down the row, apologizing when I had to step over someone. When I was a couple of seats away from the next aisle, I looked up to see what Matilda was doing. Her eyes were closed, so she probably hadn’t seen me approaching, and her face was beaded with sweat. I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye and looked to find Jake across the aisle from me, doing what I’d done, but from the other side. With the anti-magic folks and at least one magical immune nearby, him using magic on her would have been almost as bad as the dragon being exposed. I caught his eye, shook my head, and gestured in the general direction of Abigail. I couldn’t tell if he understood the full message, but he nodded and lowered his hands.

  No, this was probably a situation best handled nonmagically. I looked around for something I could do or use and saw a soda cup with only ice and perhaps some dregs of soda left sitting in the cup holder in front of me and asked the lady in the nearest seat, “Are you through with that?”

  “It’s just ice left,” she said with a shrug.

  “That’s okay. In fact, it’s what I want.” I scooped up the cup and made it to the end of the row. Matilda was only a few feet away. I was pretty sure I could reach her with the ice. I drew back my arm, preparing to hurl the ice and soda dregs at her, but a commotion nearby made me pause.

  A stadium security guard had approached Abigail from below. I supposed she’d made enough of a scene that someone had been sent to look into it. I glanced down at the cup I held. This would be a really bad time to attack Matilda. To the security guard, it would look like assault, and I doubted that “but she was doing magic” would fly as an excuse. But we had to stop her, and I didn’t dare delay. It was probably a misdemeanor, at worst, and I knew my employer wouldn’t fire me for having a record, especially one obtained in the line of duty. It looked like it was my time to take one for the team.

  Mack had come up behind Matilda, but he seemed unable to make the final approach. Had she shielded herself? I caught his eye, and when he nodded, I swallowed the lump in my throat and shouted, “Boo!” as I sprang out in front of Matilda and threw the cup of ice in her face.

  Regardless of what happened to me, it was totally worth it, not just because it completely stopped the flow of magic coming from her, but also because the expression on her face was utterly priceless. If her face froze like that, Sam might even be able to add her to the gargoyle corps. As a bonus, her hair immediately frizzed when the moisture struck it. I knew that perfection couldn’t have been natural.

  While she was distracted, Mack moved in with his silver chain of binding. “We need to have a chat,” he said as he pulled her back into the concourse.

  I braced myself for the security guard’s approach, or at least a shout of something along the lines of “Hold it right there!” But no one said anything. No one around us even acted like anything odd had happened. I knew New York crowds could sometimes get rowdy, but I would have thought that a woman throwing a drink on another woman might have at least got a reaction from the onlookers. I turned to see Jake grinning at me. “Don’t worry, I had you covered,” he said, and my legs went wobbly with relief. It was nice to know I wasn’t going to be arrested.

  Before I headed to the concourse to join Mack, I glanced down at the field to see that the dragon was motionless once more. Nita came down to Jake and me and I asked her, “What do you see down there?”

  “A baseball game?” she said with a shrug. “Don’t ask me to explain wh
at’s going on. My brother plays cricket. I never understood baseball.” I laughed and hooked my arm through hers, mostly to cover the fact that I wasn’t sure I could make it up the steps on my own. “I take it this means we won?” she said.

  “Looks like it,” I said.

  We went back into the concourse to see Mack talking to Matilda. If any of the baseball fans passing by thought there was anything odd about a man in black interrogating a woman whose hands were chained behind her back with what looked like a delicate necklace, they didn’t say or do anything. I wasn’t even sure they could see it.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Matilda demanded. “First I get assaulted, then you falsely accuse me.”

  “Ma’am, you were the only source of magic in that area, and once you stopped, all the other sources of magic stopped.”

  “I’m being framed!” she claimed. “They only stopped so I would look bad.”

  “Nice try,” he said. “I’m sure you weren’t working alone, but you were involved.”

  “You have no evidence. Do you know who I am?”

  “Lady, that’s the last thing you ever want to say to a cop.”

  “My family has connections on the Council.”

  “How nice for you. Now, come on.”

  “I guess it’s over, huh?” Nita said as we watched Mack haul Matilda away.

  “Maybe,” I said. “It depends on how deep this goes. We know she has accomplices, but will they act up while she’s in custody?”

  “There’s also her family,” Jake said. “Who knows what they might do.”

  “So we’d better be vigilant,” I said. I barely ducked away in time as a few of the anti-magic group passed us. It looked like they were too busy complaining to each other about Abigail’s behavior to notice me. I could only hope that Abigail’s credibility had been thoroughly shot. Yeah, she was right, but she was doing awful things with that information, so I didn’t feel as bad about keeping the truth from her as I’d felt with Carmen. The fewer followers she had, the better.