I might be able to contribute more in that area than in being able to see what was really going on. They trusted my word enough to listen when I pointed out that something they didn't see was really there. Maybe they'd trust me to tell them about other things I saw that they didn't. The thought made me feel marginally better about my new job.
The sky was threatening rain, and I had that shiny new MetroCard in my purse, so I started to head for the subway. Then I remembered the warning from Prophets and Lost and hesitated. Was the problem with the subway, or was there some reason I was supposed to be on the bus?
Just then the M103 pulled to a stop almost in front of me. It seemed to be a pretty good sign, so I climbed on board.
eight
Before the bus could get going, it lurched back to a stop and the doors opened. An out-of-breath Owen thanked the driver as he climbed on board, although I suspected the driver had nothing to do with the bus waiting for him. Owen saw me, smiled—more with relief than with greeting—and dropped into the seat next to me.
A series of little shivers ran up and down my spine, but not because of his proximity, even if he did look especially cute with his hair all rumpled and windblown. Taking into account what I'd seen of Owen's abilities and the fact that he usually seemed to take the subway, along with the warning I'd been given, there was a pretty good chance that a disaster was ensuing below the streets of Manhattan.
"How was the first day?" Owen asked, turning only a little bit pink.
"Kind of weird," I admitted. I didn't want to get into the specifics of the weirdness on a city bus, even though it wouldn't necessarily be the strangest conversation ever held on one.
"I can imagine," he said with a knowing nod.
"Oddly enough, I think the verification department was the weirdest group of people I've met in the entire company."
He nodded again. "That's been an ongoing problem. Unfortunately, people of that nature seem to be affected that way." He appeared to be measuring his words for public consumption as well. "That's what makes you so special. You're not like the others." He turned pinker and suddenly took great interest in inspecting his watch.
I gave him a moment or two to collect himself, then said, "Thanks for the books, by the way. I think they'll be helpful."
"If you need anything else, just ask." It didn't sound like the kind of flippant, insincere offer you usually hear from new coworkers. He sounded deeply sincere, and he held my gaze with those deep, dark blue eyes of his until I almost forgot what we'd been talking about. I got the impression that he truly meant it, that I could call him at any time and he'd come rushing to my rescue. It was kind of cool to have a friend with superpowers, even if he did seem more like Clark Kent than Superman.
For a moment I let myself ponder just how useful that could be. No more being nervous about walking home alone late at night or being one of the few noninsane people on a subway car. No more worries about dogs that got away from their owners in the park— assuming he had a dog-calming spell that actually worked. He could probably even help if I got locked out of the apartment. It was a real shame I couldn't tell my folks about this, but I wasn't sure if it would make them feel better to know their daughter was well protected or make them worry that I was associating with someone who had that kind of power.
Now that I thought about it that way, it was unnerving, considering what else I'd learned about Owen. I remembered what Rod had said about him being encouraged to be shy so his power wouldn't be dangerous. Did that mean he was more powerful than the others? He certainly seemed to have their respect, even though it didn't seem to me that he did anything to demand it.
I steered the conversation to small talk before I let myself get wigged out and he blushed himself to death. He probably didn't mean his offer of help in such an intense way anyway. He just sounded so sincere because he wasn't a flippant person. We got off at the same bus stop, but walked in opposite directions after saying good-bye. I got to my building, climbed the stairs, and turned on the evening news before heading to the bedroom to change out of my work clothes.
I had one leg out of my panty hose when something I heard from the TV sent me hobbling back to the living room. "A body across the tracks at the Canal Street station has brought subway traffic on the N and R lines to a standstill, with at least one train stuck between stations. Authorities don't yet know if the incident was accidental or a deliberate suicide or homicide," the announcer said.
I all but fell onto the sofa, one leg of my panty hose dangling limply to the floor. Oh
... My ... God. It was real. It was all really real. Up to that point I'd been treating it as a game. I hadn't really let myself believe in magic. But this brought it all home to me.
If I hadn't had that warning, I'd have been stuck belowground for who knew how long. And the woman in Prophets and Lost had known. Owen had known—though would it have killed him to say something? Or did he already know that I knew?
Back home, I knew plenty of people who could predict the weather without even looking at a newspaper or a TV weathercast. They just looked at the sky, smelled the air and determined the wind direction, and could tell you with a great deal of accuracy whether it would rain and how hot it would get that afternoon. This was different, though. What would it be like to know what was going to happen before it happened? And how much did they know? Was it just a flash of insight, or did they get the full picture? Could they tell beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was real foresight, as opposed to wishful thinking or fears? I had plenty of images of the future in my head all the time, but none of them ever came true—which, for the most part, was fortunate. I was working with people who dealt in very powerful forces I couldn't begin to understand. This wasn't like magic in books or movies. It was something that had the power to affect people's lives.
I was still sitting on the sofa, holding my panty hose, when Gemma came home.
"How was the new job?"
There was no way to convey what my day had been like without sounding absolutely insane, so I just said, "It was interesting." That was the understatement of the century.
"Do you think you're going to like it?"
"It's too soon to tell, but yeah, I think so."
"Must have been a tiring day," she said, and then I remembered that I was still dressed in my second-best suit, holding my panty hose.
"Just a little draining," I said, forcing myself off the sofa to finish changing clothes.
Both Gemma and I had changed out of our work clothes and ordered pizza when Marcia finally came dragging in.
"God, that commute was a nightmare," she said, dropping her briefcase just inside the door. "I got stuck in the subway for what seemed like forever. You don't want to spend that long in a crowded subway car with wall-to-wall people, not all of whom uphold ideal personal hygiene standards."
"I heard about that on the news," I said, getting up to pour her a glass of wine. It was the only thing I could think of to do to ease my guilt. I could have warned her so she wouldn't have been stuck. But how? She'd have laughed at me if I called her at work and told her not to take the subway home that evening. I couldn't have explained how or why I knew, and she might not have believed me if I did.
I'd just have to accept this as one of the perks of my job, I supposed. She couldn't share insider stock tips from her brokerage firm, and I couldn't share portents of the future from my magic company.
* * *
The subway disaster the day before changed the subway platform dynamics the next morning. Commuters who normally tried to pretend that nobody else actually existed were swapping war stories of the previous day's adventures. The week before, I'd felt like an outsider because I reacted to things no one else seemed to see. Today, I felt like an outsider in a different way. Or maybe I was the ultimate insider because I'd known something no one else did. Yeah, that was it. For once in my life I was the person in the know. I had to fight back a smile as I eavesdropped on conversations about sitting for an
hour in the subway tunnel. It was like finding a great deal at the Neiman Marcus outlet and feeling smugly superior that there were people out there wearing the same thing who'd paid the full price. I'd felt guilty about Marcia being stuck, but I didn't owe these people anything.
The access to insider information made me feel somewhat better about heading to the dreary verification office. My specific office might be miserable, but there were definite benefits to working for a company like this.
Kim was already in the office when I arrived. She glared at me before returning to whatever it was she was working on. Since our job didn't appear to require extra work while we were in the office, I wondered what she was up to. There had to be something in place to keep people from writing tell-all books about a magical company. Not that anyone would believe anything she wrote. She could possibly hit the best-seller list if she sold it as a novel, though.
I went to the kitchen area and put my lunch in the refrigerator, poured coffee into the cup I'd brought from home, and added cream and sugar before returning to my desk and getting Owen's books out of the drawer. I'd just started reading about the use of magic during Arthur's reign when Gregor arrived. He grunted at us and went to his desk. Angie, Gary, and Rowena drifted in a few minutes later, along with two other people I hadn't met the day before. They didn't seem to notice that there was a new person in the office, and I didn't feel perky enough to initiate the introductions. The ones I'd met already thought I was an apple polisher, and I didn't want to add to my reputation.
Unfortunately, my reputation got added to without me doing anything. "Katie, good call on that meeting yesterday," Gregor called from his desk.
The others all turned to look at me, and none of them looked happy. I was particularly glad that Kim couldn't use magic, whether or not it was kosher to do harm with an MSI spell. "Thank you," I said to Gregor before burying my head in the book. I decided to put off my talk with Rod, for fear I'd look even more like I was coming in to shake things up, no matter how badly they needed to be shaken.
Fortunately, calls for verification started coming in, and the staff was sent off to various parts of the company, which meant I had fewer people glaring at me. Gregor didn't send me to shadow anyone, for which I was grateful. I wasn't sure I wanted much one-on-one time with these people. Finally, he called my name. "You can go out on your own today, given how well you handled yourself yesterday," he said grudgingly. Angie looked up from changing her nail polish to a hot-pink shade and rolled her eyes. "We need you to take a sales call. Head down to the sales department."
I put a slip of paper in my book to mark my place and hurried out of the office. I wasn't sure how I'd find Sales, but my memory was better than I thought, for I found myself there without any false turns.
Once inside the suite, I called out, "Hi, did anyone call for verification?"
A tall elf who looked incongruous wearing a business suit stuck his head out of his office door and said, "Be with you in a sec." It looked like Tolkien's version of elves was the accurate one. That was nice to know. I liked the idea of tall, elegant creatures far more than I liked the short, cute little things that appear in animated Christmas specials or Keebler commercials.
He reappeared a few seconds later and stuck a hand out at me. "Hi, Selwyn Momingbloom, MSI Outside Sales." After shaking my hand, he gave me a business card.
"Katie Chandler, Verification," I said, but I didn't have a business card to give him.
It was somewhat disconcerting to see an elf acting like a high-end car salesman.
Legolas wasn't supposed to sell cars.
"Okay, Katie, shall we?" He ushered me toward the door, which flew open at our approach. "We're doing a check on one of our retail outlets. I need you to let me know what the place really looks like, in case they've got merchandise hidden."
"What should I look for?"
"You tell me what you see, and I'll decide if it should or shouldn't be there." We reached the lobby, where Selwyn called out to the security guard/butler, "Hughes, we're gonna need transport."
"Very well, sir," Hughes said. He did something with his crystal ball, and when we stepped outside there was a flying carpet waiting for us.
That beat the pumpkin coach I'd imagined. "It's a nice enough day for a convertible, and this gets us past traffic better than some of the other options," Selwyn explained. "Hop on."
The flying rug hovered a few feet off the ground, so getting on board while wearing a skirt wasn't going to be easy. I had a flashback to my high school years, when I had to find a way to get into my dates' pickup trucks while wearing date-appropriate clothes. As I did back then, I stood with my back to the rug and boosted myself up so I was sitting on the edge, then swung my legs around. Next I had to figure out how to sit politely, since flying carpets don't have bucket seats. My skirt was slim and knee-length, so I couldn't sit Indian style. I settled for sitting with my legs folded to the side.
Selwyn hopped on easily, with the grace I expected from his species, even if most of what I guessed about him I'd got from books and movies. He "drove" by gesturing with his hands, and the rug took off, rising above the traffic as it flew uptown. I was glad I wasn't afraid of heights, for there weren't any seat belts on this thing. I wondered if it had any safety measures built into it, like maybe a field to keep us from being thrown off. There wasn't even anything to hold onto. Selwyn seemed to be a pro at this, but he was also the kind of guy who tries to take comers on two wheels in his sports car to scare and impress his date.
"You'd think I would have noticed one of these things," I said as we swooped up Broadway.
"How often do you look up?" he asked. He had a point. That had been part of the safety lecture Marcia and Gemma gave me when I first moved here, and since I knew they weren't trying to scare me away from the city, I'd listened. Staring up at the skyscrapers was a sure way to brand yourself as a tourist and was an open invitation to pickpockets. No matter how much I wanted to gawk at all the tall buildings, I forced myself to keep my eyes straight ahead.
"We also have designated routes to take," he continued. "That lowers the chances of anyone seeing us." Once I got him started by asking a question, he talked nonstop through the rest of the journey telling me about all the retailers who'd tried to pull one over on him. The way he talked, you'd think he didn't even need a verifier. We came to a stop on the Upper East Side, in a neighborhood that looked pretty ritzy. Once we'd both climbed off the carpet, Selwyn rolled it up, tucked it under his arm, and led the way to a gift store.
It was the kind of place that sells cards for every occasion, gift wrap, and things classified as "gifts" because they had no other discernible purpose. But this store had a rack labeled "Special Occasion Cards" in which there were items that didn't quite look like greeting cards.
They were shrink-wrapped booklets with labels on the front, grouped under headings like Household Spells, Transportation, Workplace Convenience, and Masking Illusions. So, that's what a spell looked like on the market. Selwyn had me read all the headers off to him, and he nodded. "Okay, looks like they're in good shape. There isn't anything else?"
"Like what?"
"Oh, just anything different. Anything that doesn't look like it belongs." He didn't look me in the eye as he said this, which made me wonder what was going on.
I shook my head. "I don't think so. Everything has a similar look to it, like it's all from the same company."
"Good. Good." He looked more relieved than seemed reasonable in that situation, but after a moment he got the same blandly pleasant salesman's look on his face and pulled a notepad and pen out of his pocket. "Give me a count of what's in each category."
I noticed that the pen wrote the numbers without any help from him, and that made me lose count in the Household Spells category. Just as I was finishing the last category, a woman came from around the cash register and said, "Selwyn! What brings you here?"
"Madeline, you're lovelier than ever," he said, bowing to kiss he
r hand. "I'm just making sure you have everything you need."
"Oh, I don't know about everything," she said with a saucy wink, "but I'm well stocked on spells. The subway summoner is doing particularly well. I may need a restock on that one soon."
While they talked I looked around the store to see if there was anything else that should be out of place in a small gift shop, but it all looked pretty normal to me, mostly ceramic cat sculptures and candle holders shaped like angels. Once Selwyn and I were back outside, he shook the rug out until it hovered in place and we climbed on for the trip back to the office.
"Do you really get cheated that often, or are you people just paranoid by nature?" I couldn't resist asking.
"It happens often enough that it's wise to take measures."
"So, even though you have this no harm decree, magical people like to see what they can get away with?"
He pointed a finger at me like he was firing a gun. "Bingo. Otherwise, what's the fun of having this kind of power?"
I had to admit that he had a point. If I were magical, what would I try to do? I might be tempted to adjust the expiration date on a grocery coupon or tinker with the bank's computers so my rent check wouldn't clear as quickly. There were times when I'd wished I could turn someone into a frog—like Mimi—or give the snooty popular girls a bad acne attack, but that probably fell into the category of doing harm. I winced at the thought. Did it make me a bad person that one of the few things I could think of using magic to do involved hurting someone else? Maybe it wouldn't count if it was just a practical joke, something that wasn't real, such as an illusion that would wear off in a few hours.
Otherwise, there wasn't much I could think of. I might get away with something, but my own conscience wouldn't let me rest. I'd probably even run back to the grocery store to pay them the thirty cents I'd had taken off with the expired coupon so I could sleep at night. Unfortunately, I knew there were far too many normal people always out to see if they could beat the system. Why should it be that different for people who could do magic? The degree of paranoia certainly wasn't a good sign.
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