“Good. You’ve done well, John,” said O’Toole. “You’ve made sure I can use the Arragon money spell whenever I want and the fault of it will always go back to your former demi-head as the one who allowed the leak.”
“Thank you, Chief,” said John.
“Chief” was a very old title that had been used hundreds of years ago for clan heads. I had only read it in history books.
“And now you will want your reward, I think?”
I tensed, ready for O’Toole to kill John for the same reason that John was going to kill Margaret and Helen—no tracks to follow back to him.
But instead, O’Toole tucked a hand into his pocket and brought out a thumb drive. “Here you are. A recording of the antidote to the Paduan truth spell. This will protect you from any magical interrogations by the World Council.”
John smiled widely and I thought I could see his hands shaking. “Thank you,” he said. “This will prove very useful in time, I think.”
“That is the inheritance my father willed to me and his father willed to him. It is a secret known to no other Paduans, a way to avoid the effects of our own spell.”
I’d heard rumors of an antidote to the truth spell before, but I’d never given them any credence. I had always been too busy thinking about the morality of the truth spell, feeling guilty about using it when I did, and thinking about the clanless. Clearly, O’Toole did not have the same problem. His quest for power was not interrupted by little things like empathy.
“And when will the World Council be destroyed so that we don’t have to worry about openly using all the spells?” asked John.
“Give me time. I have to make sure that no one suspects what I am doing behind the scenes. The other members of the World Council must die one by one, with no hint of a connection between them—or to me.”
Did John believe him? I had thought that John was the bad guy here, that he wanted all the power to himself, but now it turned out that he was being duped, as well. Only he couldn’t see it. I almost felt sorry for him.
“I would like to have a specific date and time,” said John. “So that we both have something to look forward to.”
“A date? Well, I don’t think it would be wise to tie either of us down to a date. I must see how things go. Politics can be very delicate. You must trust me, John.”
“Trust you? I have been working with you for three years. I think I know you too well to trust you. You should remember that I have power in this relationship, as well. If I were to tell the truth about you to the world, what do you think would happen?”
O’Toole let out a big, bellowing laugh. “The truth about me? I think not. I am a Paduan and I create truth. I chose you, John, because you are obscure and unknown. Unimportant. Do you understand what I mean?”
“I understand completely. I’ve always understood. I am expendable.”
“You are. If you do not show me your loyalty, I have no reason to remain loyal to you,” said O’Toole.
“You should know that I have kept a record of every meeting we have had. Copies of our emails. Of our phone conversations. Of photographs of you meeting with me. The spells that were exchanged between us. If anything happens to me, that information will be sent immediately to the world media.”
O’Toole did not seem shaken. “I’ll use the truth spell on myself after using the antidote. Then I will say that everything in there is faked,” he said.
John nodded. “You might do that. And there will be many who believe you. Maybe the rest of the council, whom you seem to manipulate so well. And your own clan heads. But everyone? There will always be doubt, especially when they read that you promised me the antidote to the truth spell, which you have kept for yourself all these years.”
“People have claimed to have spells before that do not exist,” said O’Toole.
“Indeed. But I won’t be disappeared. And I won’t see you take power that is not your own. The magic must be made free. It must go to the people, not to you.”
O’Toole considered for a long moment. Then he nodded to his men. “Kill him,” he said. “Now.”
“No!” said John. “I take it back. Give me another chance!” John sagged forward, looking defeated.
O’Toole hesitated just long enough that he didn’t realize that John was murmuring to himself. In fact, he was saying the twisted beauty spell that he had learned from Leanata.
“Go!” said O’Toole. But it was too late.
By then, John had already transformed himself. He no longer looked like a teenage boy. He looked exactly like O’Toole, down to the cufflinks on his sleeves and the slicked back dark hair that had not begun to thin.
“That’s him!” said O’Toole.
John jumped at O’Toole, tumbling head over head with him in the hangar with the guards standing around, shouting at each other.
At that point, I couldn’t tell who was who anymore, and I don’t think the guards could, either. One of the O’Toole’s shouted. “Not me, him, you idiot!” and the other shouted, “Can’t you tell he’s the fake? Don’t listen to him!”
I stood up then and did my best to give an impression of absolute confidence. “Stop!” I shouted. “All of you, stay where you are by order of the World Council!” I strode forward and in between the two O’Tooles.
“Who are you?” asked one of the O’Tooles.
“He’s no one. Ignore him,” said the other.
I looked at one of the guards. “Call the council now. Tell them that O’Toole is a traitor.”
The guard looked at me and then at the two O’Tooles.
“Or do you want to watch these two fight and then wonder if the right one is the man you are risking your life on every day?”
“Trust me!” shouted one of the O’Tooles.
“Don’t trust him. Don’t trust either of us,” said the other. (I think it was John.)
The guard took out a cell phone and made a call.
It was only a matter of minutes before the police arrived, to detain us until the official World Council officers could come. I knew there was a chance that they would try to make us all disappear, but I was counting on the fact that they were still going to have to bargain with John to keep his information from the world press.
It turned out that Margaret was in John’s car, and she wasn’t dead. Just unconscious. The police got her out and took her to the hospital, so that was one thing I’d done right.
Chapter 23: Bee
Leanata as “Margaret” ran through the school shouting. The halls were filled with students between classes and everyone in the whole school must have heard her.
“I will sell the beauty spell to anyone who wants it! Come offer me ten bucks and it’s yours. I hate the spell and I hate the Hero clan and I will do anything to ruin them! Why should one clan have all the beauty?”
No one seemed excited to take her up on the offer. They weren’t stupid. It was like offering free drugs, dangerous.
So Leanata grabbed a random girl who was walking by, gingerly trying to step around her. “You,” said Leanata. “Don’t tell me you’re happy with the way you look.”
“I am, I am,” said the girl, frantically looking around for help.
“You can’t possibly be. With that face? You look like a chipmunk.” Leanta pinched the girl’s cheeks. “And that hair. Like a poodle,” Leanata went on. “Do you want to spend all of high school watching other couples date and you have no chance at all?”
“I—I—” the girl stuttered.
“You can’t possibly think any good-looking boy would look at you and be interested?”
“There are—some boys like—that is, it’s not all about how you look,” the girl got out.
I wanted to cheer for her. She knew what she was talking about.
But Leanata shook her head, her lips pressed bitterly together. “You keep telling yourself that and you’re going to end up very lonely in the end.”
“There are nice guys out there, too,” came
the response.
Leanta let out a derisive breath. “Ugly ones. Is that what you want? A guy who couldn’t find anyone prettier? A guy for whom you are last pick?”
“Maybe he’ll be more sensitive because of that.”
“More grateful, is that what you mean? Is that what you really want? To wait around until all the other prettier girls have been picked and go out with a guy you can’t take pictures with for fear of breaking the camera lens?”
“If you’re pretty, I’d rather be ugly,” said the girl.
I nodded and smiled for her, secretly pleased that she was saying what I had tried to say to Leanata.
But the demi-head wasn’t interested in listening now any more than she had been when I talked to her. “Well, luckily for the rest of us, this time you’re not going to have a choice,” said Leanata.
Sarah looked at me. “What do we do now?” she whispered.
Leanata was doing this so that she would have hundreds of witnesses to Margaret’s betrayal of the clan’s spell. She started saying it out loud, and she used it on the girl in front of her. Then she kept saying it, using it randomly on people who were near. It wasn’t about changing people. It was about making sure that people heard the spell enough that they wouldn’t forget it easily.
“We have to stop her,” I said.
“All right,” said Sarah, and she set her jaw.
Sarah looks like she’s innocent and sweet. She looks like she’s never seen anything bad in the world, like she is Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf could talk her into giving up her grandmother’s goodies in about two seconds. When you look so pretty, sometimes people don’t think there’s anything deeper. But Sarah is one of the most stubborn people I have ever met.
“Are you sure?” I asked. I could do it, but I figured it might be better for me to be able to follow Leanata and face her one-on-one. I knew her better than Sarah did.
Sarah’s answer was walking up to Leanata. “Oh, please,” she said in a voice that sounded desperate and thin. The perfect act. “Teach me the spell. Slowly, so I can remember it.”
“You really want to learn it?” asked Leanata, turning her full attention on Sarah.
“I really do. There’s this boy,” said Sarah, shyly looking down. “He’s so handsome, but he doesn’t even look at me twice. I don’t think he even knows my name.”
“And you want to make him jealous?” said Leanata.
“I don’t want to make him jealous. I just want to have a chance with him. I’ll do anything, take any chance,” said Sarah. She made it sound so real, so pathetic, if I hadn’t known it was Sarah inside of that face, I would have believed her absolutely.
“Come here, then,” said Leanata. “I’ll teach you the spell.”
Sarah stepped closer.
Leanata examined her more closely. “I don’t recognize you,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Sarah, snorting. “That’s what everyone says when they see me. No matter how many times they meet me. I guess I just have that kind of face. Sometimes teachers will reach the end of the year and they still can’t remember who I am.”
“Must be hard,” said Leanata, with a fake attempt at sympathy.
I had the camera on my cell phone ready.
Leanata began with the very first syllables of the spell, spoken slowly as if to a child learning for the first time. Sarah did a credible job of stumbling over the nonsense phrases and Leanata corrected her. She also explained what each phrase did, and what Sarah should be thinking about to focus the spell properly.
I noticed a few gutsy people around us taking notes. Also, dozens of people were fleeing the area in terror, which I thought seemed a reasonable choice to make.
Once Sarah had said the whole beauty spell through, Leanata nodded and told her she was ready to use the full magic of the spell.
“And how often will I need to do it? Every hour? At meals?”
“Once a day suffices for most of us, though there are some that redo the beauty spell for evenings out,” said Leanata. “Or on special occasions, like Prom.”
“Prom,” said Saran in a whisper. She started to say the spell.
That was when some teachers came out and tried to get Leanata to stop and get back to class, along with the other students. Leanata told them quite clearly what she was doing and asked if they wanted to hear the spell, too.
Most of the teachers left. They were in a more cautious generation. One of them came forward and tried to explain to Leanata how dangerous this was. But Leanata just put a hand on her face and started to say the beauty spell. The teacher’s features began to change even before the spell was finished. I will admit, he looked better. His nose was no longer crooked and his teeth suddenly looked like he’d had orthodontic work. But he slipped away before Leanata could do more.
I was watching for chinks in her armor. I thought that she might have to stop teaching the spell in order to reset her own spell for Margaret’s looks. And I did see a glimpse of a shimmer around her ear, but not nearly enough to make a conclusion identification of her as Leanata. That meant that I was going to have to use the beauty spell to reveal her myself.
“I can’t see my face,” said Sarah. “Does anyone have a mirror?” She turned around, leaving me space to get closer to Leanata, and also making a distraction.
I got behind her and started to say the spell.
“What’s that?” said Leanata.
Sarah touched Leanata’s arm. “Maybe I should do it again,” she said.
“It couldn’t hurt,” said Leanata.
“Listen to make sure I do it all right. Please?” said Sarah.
And as she did that, I did my own spell. I thought of Leanata’s true face piece by piece. It’s hard to do that. Most of the time, you think of someone as a whole package, but in this case, I had to think of eyes, nose, lips, cheeks, neck all separately.
And it felt like I was pulling teeth, but I yanked the words out of myself, and pressed them to the parts of Leanata I knew to be true.
“Can someone take a picture of me?” said Sarah.
Yes, this was the perfect time.
But Leanata suddenly put a hand to her face. Then there was a twitch in her back and she whirled on me. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“Look at her! Do you see who she is?” said Sarah.
There were curses and shrieks from all around. And then someone else said the name, “Leanata!”
“I’m not Leanata!” she said, leaping back. Then I heard her start to whisper the spell to herself, working the magic back over her face. “Someone made me look like this. It isn’t real.”
I said the spell a second time, just to make sure she couldn’t undo it. It was her magic against mine. And when I looked back at Leanata, she was herself entirely again. Only not herself. She wasn’t as pretty as she usually was. She had pimples on her face and there was something wrong with her mouth. It was crooked. Her hair was lank and lifeless.
“What have you done?” she whispered to me, touching her face and hair.
“Just revealed the true you.”
Leanata ran away, her hands over her face. That made it difficult for her to not slam into people, but she managed to get to the doors of the school and ran out.
“I suppose we can’t necessarily assume we’ll never see her again,” said Sarah.
I shook my head. She and I were still in disguise for the rest of the day, but as school let out, the news was turned on in the commons area for everyone to hear about Harry O’Toole and his betrayal of the whole World Council. He had disappeared and the World Council was not talking specifically about details of what he had done, only that O’Toole had tried to take all of the magic spells to himself and that there were numerous cases of stolen magic spells that were due to be reviewed.
Sarah and I gasped slightly when we saw our faces on the screen. “Sarah Hero and Beatrice Hero are the first among those sought by the World Council to be declared innocent. They were set up by Mr. O
’Toole and his associates and the World Council sends their apologies to these two innocents and their families.”
“Benedick,” I said. He had gone after John Arragon, and somehow all this must be due to what he had done. John Arragon had to have been connected to Harry O’Toole and Ben must have exposed them. And made sure that Sarah and I were the first ones cleared officially, so we could come back tomorrow as ourselves.
Sarah and I could have waited until tomorrow, but I wanted people to see that the clanless might not always be worth ignoring, so we changed right there in the commons, in front of everyone.
We were soon surrounded by people who wanted to know what had happened with the World Council, what it had been like to be disappeared. We had to explain over and over again, even though they had seen the change, that we hadn’t been disappeared, that we had been right here under everyone’s noses, the whole time.
“You mean you gave up your clan?” said someone.
“No!” I said for the last time. “We pretended to be clanless and none of you noticed us because you think the clanless are invisible. Just because they don’t have magic.”
“But if they want magic, they should join a clan,” said someone else.
I looked over at the clanless who were watching all this from the sidelines. I shook my head. “Maybe they can’t join or don’t want to. Does that really mean they should live forever without magic? And be treated like second-class citizens?”
It was the beginning of a discussion, at least. But if it didn’t happen on a higher level than in the high school, it wasn’t going to go anywhere.
Outside, as we were headed home, a big black van stopped in front of me and Sarah. I held tight to her hand.
“This might be it,” I said. Maybe we were going to be disappeared, anyway.
But Ben stepped out of the van and assured us that the World Council just wanted to talk to us.
“You did all this, didn’t you?” I said to him.
“I did some of it,” said Ben.
“Are they really going to listen to us?” I asked.
Much Ado About Magic Page 17
