Much Ado About Magic

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  I leaned back. “Yeah. Sort of,” I said.

  He lectured me on the importance of friendship and the fact that any girlfriend I had in high school probably wouldn’t be permanent anyway. And then the ambulance guys came in. They took Claudio and Pedro out first, so I got to see them. Both of them argued that they could walk just fine, which I figured was good news. Claudio was hunched over a bit and Pedro was nursing one of his arms to his side.

  “Hey!” I called out.

  They turned to look at me.

  What could I say that wouldn’t give everything away? “Bee and Sarah really are innocent!” I said.

  They shook their heads at me and walked away.

  The ambulance guys came to get me next. I was annoyed but I had to let them. They put me on a stretcher and took my vitals. They touched my jaw, but shook their heads over it. Then they bandaged up my nose, gave me a couple of pills and poked at the big cut on my leg, spraying it with something that burned like liquid fire.

  Finally, they closed the doors and started driving away.

  That was just what I wanted to have happen. I needed John and his crew to see me leaving, so they’d get complacent.

  When we were a couple of blocks from the school, I sat up, punched the kind and gentle EMT in the stomach, opened up the back door and waited a second for a stop sign I knew was coming. Then I jumped out, rolled onto the asphalt, cursing the last twenty minutes of ease and attention to wounds. I needed my adrenaline back, and I needed it fast.

  The EMT shouted after me, but I ran away, ducking around several houses before turning back in the direction I meant to go—which was back toward the school. I buttoned my jeans and shirt back up, then put on the hat I’d had tucked into my back pocket.

  It wasn’t exactly a reverse beauty spell, but it would have to do. Once the swelling on my face got really bad, no one would know who I was, right?

  I made my way into the school by the back door through the technical halls. Sounds of machine work filled the air, and the smell of sparks and wood was a nice change from blood and antiseptics in the ambulance.

  Maybe the pain medication started to kick in, but I felt good when I made my way back through the commons. The bell had rung and class had started, so the place was nearly empty. I grabbed the backpack I had left behind here and went into the alcove in the upper academic halls.

  I had hacked onto the school computer to find out what class John had first, and I intended to wait for him to come out, which I was sure he would do. Then I could follow him to wherever he was going to go do his evil plans.

  I saw him sooner than I expected, however, and it wasn’t anywhere near the English classroom where he was supposed to be. From the alcove, I could look down on the first floor and saw him crossing past the library and then lifting a hand. I had to walk along the edge of the balcony, but soon I caught sight of Margaret, Leanata and two other girls. One of them was the Messina demi-head for our town, if I remembered correctly. The Messinas don’t spend a lot of time with the other clans. They think their spell is the most important, and also they tend to be nerds and geeks, not social types.

  Helen was her name, and she was on track to be Valedictorian and head off to Harvard or some equally impressive all-Messina college with a full ride scholarship. She had mousy brown hair and glasses, the stereotype, but otherwise she was naturally quite pretty.

  And when she saw John, she lit up like a comet. She was in love with him. I wondered how on earth John had managed that, with Margaret in love with him, too. That had to be tricky, keeping two women happy and not jealous of each other.

  The five of them started walking toward the art hall. I got off the balcony and moved toward the stairs. That was when I saw two other girls lurking. I worried about them for a moment until one of them looked up to me and blew me a kiss.

  I stared and realized she was Bee. My Bee.

  She didn’t look like Bee at all.

  And yet she did. There was that life in her, the quirkiness and the passion and the sheer stubbornness, written in every line of a body that was utterly boring and uninteresting. But Bee was that body, and that made all the difference. It was the strangest thing.

  I wondered how anyone could see her and not see Bee. And at the same time I wondered how I could.

  I assumed that the other girl was Sarah, but I had none of the same connection with her that I’d had with Bee. I stared at her, trying to see her soul. The only thing that I caught a glimpse of was the hesitancy in her manner, in the way she held up a hand and then dropped it, or turned and stopped to look back at Bee.

  If Claudio were here, I thought, he would see her. He would see everything he loved in her, and he could show each detail to me.

  Or if he couldn’t, then that would prove something important to us all. That he didn’t really love her, because he didn’t know who she was. If he thought she was guilty, could he see her truly? Or was it doubt in himself more than doubt in her that made him turn aside from her?

  I let Bee and Sarah go down that hallway, and I went around the other way, behind the lunchroom and past the auditorium doors, now filled with a gym class learning how to play volleyball. At the end of the hall, I stopped and listened for voices. It took a moment, but I heard them. One male voice louder than the others, and female voices that sounded like bees buzzing around him.

  I looked across the hall and saw Bee and Sarah in the other window. They saw me, and ducked just as I did. I leaned up against the wall and looked down at the floor, checking to see if I had left blood anywhere that would make it too obvious where I had been. I couldn’t see anything. I was glad for the bandages the EMT’s had put on me in the few minutes they’d had to help. And now I was probably going to undo all the hard work they had put in.

  Chapter 21: Bee

  It had taken Ben half a second to recognize me. I can’t think of anything that made me more sure that I truly loved him than that. I’d seen myself in the mirror. I had worked hard to make sure I looked nothing like beautiful. And Ben knew me anyway. He had just scored a 1600 on the love SATs.

  But we had things to do, people to catch, magic clans to save. And also, a part of me was still hoping that Claudio and Sarah would somehow get back together. After he groveled and threw himself off a cliff to prove his love. Short of that, I couldn’t see what would get Sarah to trust him again.

  It was easier to think about John and how we were going to bring him down, along with Leanata and Margaret and whoever else was working with him. He was talking just loud enough that we could hear with our ears pressed to the door.

  “What about Bee and Sarah?” asked Margaret.

  I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for her or to hate her. Did she really not understand what was going to happen to us?

  “I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

  “But you said that you’d make sure to take them away to some place safe before the World Council disappeared them.”

  “I tried to, but the council acted too quickly,” said John. “We’ll just have to assume that they’ll be allowed to use a truth spell before they are disciplined. Once they swear that they weren’t at fault for the spell leak, the council is going to have to start thinking more creatively.”

  “What if they don’t use a truth spell on them? What if the video is enough to find them guilty?” asked Margaret.

  “Well, sometimes sacrifices have to be made,” said Leanata with a shrug.

  “But you told me that Bee and Sarah would be fine. You said that they’d thank me. You said they’d have new magic and everything would go on like it had been before,” said Margaret.

  John coughed.

  “John, you promised me! I didn’t help you so that my best friend would end up dead.”

  “You helped him because you thought after all this, he’d pick you as his girlfriend. That’s the pathetic kind of person you are. You were so desperate for him you didn’t think past a few flowery words and some stupid promises. You don’
t really care about your so-called best friend any more than I do,” said Leanata.

  There was a long silence. And then I heard shoes squeaking on the floor, and some grunting.

  I wondered if maybe Sarah and Ben and I were going to end up being superfluous, because the whole cabal would kill each other in the next five minutes, and that would be that. After all, it seemed like the clans had relied a lot on that sort of thing over the last few millennia.

  But there was a muffled shout, and then a loud thump.

  “She’s out for now. I told you she was a liability,” Leanata said.

  “We’ll just have to get rid of her,” said John.

  “So soon after Bee and Sarah? It will be suspicious,” said Leanata.

  “Not if she doesn’t disappear.”

  What? I wasn’t following that logic.

  “The twisted beauty spell again ?” asked Leanata.

  What twisted beauty spell? Was it like what I had already done?

  “You think you can modify it to fit her face and figure?” said John.

  I had a sudden rush of understanding. What had I been doing to the beauty spell? I called it reversing it but it was just rearranging faces so they didn’t look the same. It wasn’t such a big step from that to changing one face into another face. If I had time to practice it, I could see how the beauty spell could be used, with maybe some minor alterations, into a masquerade spell. So that I looked exactly like Leanata. Or—

  Or she and Margaret could look just like me and Sarah at the mall, using the money spell that we had supposedly stolen from Pedro.

  “What about me?” asked another voice, one I didn’t recognize.

  “What about you?” said John.

  “What do you want me to do? I’ve got some ideas for new cross spells for you to try and some information about the Messina clan heads meeting in Italy this weekend that might be useful to have.”

  It must be the girl who was the Messina demi-head in the high school. What was her name?

  “That sounds nice, Helen. Why don’t you write me a memo and email it to me?” asked John.

  “I’m tired of writing emails. You never listen to anything I say. I don’t believe you actually care about making sure there is real freedom for the spells. If I tell people what you’ve been doing, you’re going to have a lot to answer for,” said Helen. “I didn’t get into this to give you power.”

  I tensed because I knew what was coming for her, even if she didn’t. Had she really believed that John wanted something other than his own power?

  “Calm down,” said Leanata.

  “Why should I calm down? I don’t want to—”

  There was another muffled thump, and I thought for a moment about how easily Leanata had taken down two other people. She was a Hero, and she didn’t have any more muscles than looked pretty. Or did she? The World Council was worried about the stolen Arragon money spell, but did they have any idea how many spells had actually been taken and were being used by the wrong people now?

  “Leanata, you go out and be Margaret for now. But not for too long. You’ll have to switch back and forth so people don’t assume you’ve been disappeared, either,” said John. “People won’t notice Helen Messina being missing for a while yet.”

  “I can manage being Margaret,” said Leanata.

  “Good. Because if you don’t, this is all going to come down around us and we won’t have done anything to change the world,” said John.

  “Oh, yes. Changing the world. That’s what we’re all in this for. It’s a grand, noble cause. Not just about us getting more power and bringing down the World Council,” said Leanata.

  “The World Council has to come down if the magic is to be distributed more fairly. And as for us getting more power, that is only a temporary necessity.”

  “Ha!” said Leanata. “I’ll believe that when I see you give up all your power.”

  “I will,” said John. “You’ll see me do it. And expect that I will make sure you give up yours, too.”

  “Fine,” said Leanata angrily.

  I heard footsteps approaching and motioned frantically at Sarah to back quietly away from the door. We didn’t have time to find a place to hide, so we ended up standing up and walking down the hall, then turning around and wandering back.

  Leanata turned and I caught my breath at the sight of her in the middle of the change, so she was half Margaret, half herself.

  “Can you show us where the office is?” I asked as innocently as I could.

  Leanata stared at me for a long moment, then pointed. “You’re miles away.”

  “I got confused, I guess,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Leanata shook her head and went on her way, continuing to say her spell.

  When she was gone, we turned back. But there was no one left in the room by then. I thought about what John had said about eliminating the World Council. Was he serious? Should I warn them somehow?

  I couldn’t think of any way it wouldn’t give me and Sarah away and get us disappeared. And they probably still wouldn’t listen to us.

  I liked the idea of the spells going to everyone, even the clanless. But I didn’t trust John to follow through any more than I trusted Leanata to do it. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. John had to be lying to himself as much as to anyone about what would happen if he got what he wanted.

  “Out in the parking lot,” I said, and dragged Sarah with me.

  We got there just in time to see Ben banging the door of Claudio’s car closed, then screeching the Hummer into gear and skidding backwards before he lurched forward and chased down the street, I guess after John.

  “What do we do now?” asked Sarah.

  “Trust Ben,” I said. “He’ll get John. We’ve got to get Leanata.”

  “I wish I knew the strength spell,” said Sarah, looking fiercer than I have ever seen her.

  I wished so, too. But that didn’t mean I wanted John to win or the World Council to be destroyed. There might be dangerous things about the spells being out there for everyone that I couldn’t see. Maybe change had to come more slowly for it to work.

  “Sarah, you don’t have to do this with me. It could get dangerous.” I was giving her the chance to get out.

  “If you’re in, I’m in,” said Sarah.

  “You sure?”

  She smiled at me. “We’ve already been disappeared. What can happen that’s worse than that?”

  I didn’t know, but we might be about to find out.

  I nodded, gripped Sarah’s hand tightly, and headed back inside. “We have to catch Leanata in the act. Changing back and forth. And then we have to make sure everyone at school sees it. Everyone everywhere, if we can manage it.”

  “I have a camera on my cell phone,” said Sarah.

  I nodded. So did I. That would have to be our weapon. The truth, even if we weren’t Paduans using a spell.

  Chapter 22: Ben

  As I drove away in Claudio’s Hummer, I worried about leaving Bee behind with Leanata. I had to trust that Bee would be able to deal with her demi-head. She knew Leanata better than I did, anyway, and it was her Hero magic that was in play there.

  Getting John had become a personal vendetta. He had destroyed my friendships with Claudio and Pedro and I had no idea if they would recover even after I proved what he’d done. Not to mention what he’d done to Bee and Sarah. He was going to regret that.

  He drove toward the small, local airport. I tried to keep from following him too closely, but he didn’t seem to notice. I guess he was busy dealing with other things. He thought he’d already taken care of all his opponents at the high school.

  I wondered for a few minutes if he was going to get into one of the one-man airplanes and fly off. I hadn’t heard about him having a pilot’s license, but it was a possibility. There was no way I could follow him then. I’d be stuck on the ground, scrambling to figure out where he would land and get there in time.

  But he ended up p
arking the Hummer and heading to one of the hangars on foot. I parked a few blocks behind him, on the side of the road, and then went around the other way, leaping a ditch to get to the other door in the hangar. I pressed my ear against the metal wall and listened in. For a while, I heard nothing.

  Then I heard an engine overhead. A plane landed just past us, then came taxiing toward the hangar. I could see the dark sunglasses of the pilot up front, but when he pulled up, he stayed in the plane. A trio of men in uniforms ran out of the hangar and went up the open steps inside to flank the real guest of honor.

  When I saw who it was, I struggled to keep quiet. It was the Paduan world head, the man in charge of the World Council himself, Harry O’Toole. He looked just like his photos, which was strange, now that I thought about it. He was more than eighty years old and had been in the World Council for half a century, but he looked more like he was still in his thirties, as he had been when he had first had photographs taken.

  I waited until the guards around O’Toole had gone inside, and then I went close to the door and tried to listen in. My heart was beating like thunder and I felt like I was living in a different dimension of the universe. Everything was out of place.

  “What is the status of the two girls?” O’Toole asked John.

  “They disappeared,” said John. “Just as you ordered.”

  “Dead, then?” said O’Toole.

  John nodded.

  “And their bodies?”

  “Changed so they won’t look like them. They’ll be taken to a big city and left in a park, looking like two homeless men no one will miss,” John assured him. But he didn’t know where Bee and Sarah were. The two bodies he was talking about had to be Margaret Hero and Helen Messina. Had Leanata already used some twisted version of the beauty spell of her own on them?

  The Hero spell, I thought. O’Toole had to be using it, too. That was why he looked so young. Which meant that the rules about the spells and the clans had been broken before John ever started doing it. A little of my anger against John was sliced away and turned toward O’Toole instead. My own high clan head on the World Council was a traitor to the peace between the clans and the balance of magics.