Much Ado About Magic

by Shanna Swendson

  “It’s a lot bigger than where we used to live,” Marcia said.

  Nita’s eyebrows raised. “This is bigger?”

  I patted her on the shoulder. “I told you, it’s not nearly as glamorous as on TV. This is the way real people live.”

  “At least we all have actual bedrooms now,” Marcia said, sitting on the sofa. “I used to sleep on a sofa bed in the living room.”

  Nita nodded. “The hotel rooms here are half the size as in our motel, and they charge about six times as much for them. If we could move our motel here, we’d make a fortune.”

  Gemma sat on the sofa and gestured for Nita to join her. I dragged a dining chair over to join the group. “What did your parents say?” I asked as I sat.

  Nita shrugged. “I have no idea. I left them a note. My brother took me to the bus depot, and he gave me a job reference. I’m lucky that the woman who hired me is also Indian, so she knew all about escaping the family business.”

  My stomach dropped. “You moved to New York without telling your parents?”

  “They’d never have let me come. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, right?”

  “That’s always worked for me,” Gemma said with a laugh.

  Nita grinned at Gemma and crossed her legs. “I figure they’ll come around when I remind them that I’ve now significantly increased my chances of meeting a nice Indian boy I could marry. You don’t know any Indian men, do you? I hear you’re quite the matchmaker.”

  “I’ll see what I can find for you,” Gemma promised.

  “Have you found a place to stay?” Marcia asked.

  I was pretty sure where Marcia was going, and I knew she thought she was doing me a favor, but I wished I could think of a way to signal her to shut up.

  “I haven’t started looking,” Nita answered.

  “Now that we have the bigger place, you could stay here,” Marcia offered. “We’d have to do some rearranging, but you and Katie could take one room and I’d move in with Gemma. We did say we might take on a fourth when we moved here.”

  “Sounds great!” Gemma said.

  They all looked at me, and I forced a smile. “Yeah!” I said. Under other circumstances, I’d have loved to have Nita move in. When we were in high school, we’d talked about going off to some big city together. But it had been so nice not having to be careful what I said around my roommates, and I hated to go back to lying and keeping secrets. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about magic, and I didn’t want Nita to find out the way Gemma and Marcia had, by being put in danger by the magical bad guys.

  “You’ll barely notice I’m around,” Nita promised. “I’ll get all the worst shifts while I’m new.”

  “You’ll need to get a bed,” Marcia said. “In the meantime, the sofa folds out, and you can sleep there. I’ll talk to the landlord about getting you on the lease, and we’ll recalculate the rent and the chores list for everyone.”

  “I’m so excited!” Nita squealed. “It’ll be just like Sex and the City, except they never all lived together. Maybe we’re more like Friends, except we don’t have guys across the hall—or do we?” She bounced to her feet. “I’ll go get my luggage at the hotel. I don’t have a lot of stuff. I’ll have my family mail things to me once I’m settled—that is, if they don’t disown me. But I figure they’ll be a lot happier knowing I’m living with Katie.”

  Marcia went to the cookie jar where we kept a set of spare keys. “You’ll need these. The one with the blue dot opens the outside door, and the other one opens the apartment door.”

  “Okay, got it. Back in a bit!” She hurried out before we could offer to help, her squeal of joy echoing up the stairwell.

  Once she was gone, I allowed myself a long, low groan.

  “What, you didn’t want her living with us?” Marcia asked.

  “I do,” I said. “It’s just that she doesn’t know about the M-word, and there’s all this crazy stuff going on. I don’t want her getting into any danger.”

  Gemma cocked her head to one side. “Would you ever have told us if we hadn’t been caught up in it?”

  “It’s not my secret to tell, and they have very strict rules about it. I would have preferred to keep you two out of it, but the bad guys had other ideas.”

  “And now we’re practically honorary magic people,” Gemma said with a smile. “Carrying out secret missions, and all that.”

  I smiled, too, but inside I was worried. I wanted to keep Nita out of it. Adapting to the real New York that wasn’t anything like what she’d seen in movies would be difficult enough for her. She didn’t need to face magic on top of that.

  *

  True to her word, Nita was gone before we got up Monday morning, but she did leave a note with a smiley face on the dining table. She was so enthusiastic about being in New York that I couldn’t begrudge her being here, even if it might complicate my life.

  For the first time in ages, Owen was at his usual spot when I came down to go to work. He didn’t look completely healthy, but he didn’t look on the brink of death, either. “It seems our cure was successful,” I remarked before filling him in about Nita’s arrival.

  The subway station was more crowded than it had been the previous week as many of the people sickened by the magical flu were up and about. The obviously magical people—the ones with wings and pointed ears—had that wan, hollow-eyed look of people recovering from illness, while quite a few otherwise normal-looking humans had a similar look. I could tell who in the station had magical powers based on how awful they looked.

  I could also tell by the way they looked at Owen. Usually, he had a knack for remaining practically invisible in public, in spite of his good looks, but all the obviously magical people and the others who looked like they’d been ill were definitely noticing him today. They gave us a fairly wide berth for a crowded subway platform, and they kept tossing suspicious glances in Owen’s direction.

  “We must have missed the parade,” Owen muttered as he looked around at the others on the platform.

  “What parade?” I asked, jolted out of my concern about his apparent public enemy status.

  “That’s what I was wondering. Look how many people are wearing something that looks like parade beads.”

  I took another look at the people on the platform and saw that most of those who had the recovering-from-the-flu look were wearing necklaces of cheap-looking plastic beads, the kind that get tossed from parade floats. The necklaces all had flat plastic pendants with a quasi-Celtic symbol dangling from them. “Weird,” I said to Owen. “None of these people look like they felt like going to a parade.”

  A train arrived and we joined the crowd pouring into it. At first, it took all my concentration to find a place to stand and then hang on as the train started moving, but then I looked up and saw the latest Spellworks ad. It advertised a surefire cure for the magical flu—an amulet, available for a special low price, that looked like the beads Owen had noticed.

  I tugged on Owen’s sleeve and pointed to the ad. “Just as we expected,” I said.

  He groaned. “I need to get one of those amulets so I can see exactly what it is. There go my plans for the day.”

  When I got to my office, I found Perdita back at work, looking her usual chipper self. “Oh, there you are!” she said. “I was worrying that you’d caught my flu.”

  “I’m fine. And you’re all better now?”

  “Just peachy, thanks to this.” She pulled a strand of beads out from beneath her blouse. “My mom got these for the whole family, and as soon as I put it on, I felt so much better.”

  “It wasn’t the beads. You’d have been better anyway.”

  She frowned. “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s what I spent my weekend dealing with. Now we need to get a look at those beads. Could I borrow yours?”

  She wrapped her fingers around her necklace, then hesitated. “I don’t want to get sick again.”

  “You won’t. In fact, you’re probab
ly more likely to get sick if you have that on. They come from Spellworks, you know.”

  Her slanted eyebrows rose even higher. “Really? Mom didn’t say that.” She pulled the beads over her head and handed them to me. I took them and headed straight to Owen’s lab.

  “I’ve got something for you,” I called out as I entered. He looked up from where he was leaning over a table, peering at something that I soon saw was another set of the beads. “Oh, never mind.”

  “Jake had a set.”

  “I got them because I knew you’d want to analyze them,” Jake said defensively. “I never believed they were a cure.”

  “Are they a cure?” I asked.

  “They would counteract the spell,” Owen said. “But there’s something else there.” He gestured toward the line of Spellworks charms he’d been analyzing. “Even though each of these is supposed to protect against a different kind of spell, there’s a bit of magic that shows up in all of them. It was so minor I missed it in the charms, but it’s strong enough in these amulets to be obvious, and once I knew what I was looking for, I found it in the charms. Now I need to isolate it and figure out what it is. I’m certain that’s the important part—the reason they’ve created the situations to make people want to buy these.”

  I leaned on the table and watched as he held his hands above the various charms. “They must have a timetable—something big planned that needs as many people as possible to have these things,” I mused out loud. “That would be the reason for the flu. It affected absolutely everyone who’s magical, even inside MSI. Before, probably only people who’d been directly affected by the magical crime or who were prone to paranoia would have bought protective charms. This way, they get a lot more people, all at once.”

  Owen frowned, closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. “I think there’s a conduit here. It’s hard to tell because nothing’s being transmitted right now.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  He looked up from the charms and faced me. “Most of the time, affecting someone magically requires either line-of-sight contact or possession of something belonging to the subject. These things—if they’re what I think they are—work like having something belonging to the subject, only in reverse. The person who created these things would be able to magically affect anyone in possession of one. They form a link between the creator and the holder.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  Owen called to Jake, “I need containment chambers, right away.”

  “On it, boss.”

  Owen turned back to me. “I can set these up to monitor anything they receive without it affecting us. Then I may be able to do something to feed back into the system and cancel any spell that’s sent out. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to do much until they use the link, and then I’ll have to act quickly.”

  “In the meantime, you’d better make a company-wide announcement about getting rid of these,” I said. “We don’t want our people to be affected.”

  “I’ll get Sam on it.”

  He sounded so discouraged, I patted him on the shoulder and said, “Look on the bright side. Us shutting off the flu spell may have helped. If people who didn’t buy them immediately felt better anyway, fewer people may have bought them, and that means fewer people will be affected by anything else they do with these.”

  “We can only hope,” he said with a weak attempt at a weary smile as he headed into his office to call Sam.

  While he was gone, I watched Jake place glass domes over the charms and amulets and tried to think like a magical megalomaniac. I didn’t know if I was flattering myself by amplifying the importance of my conference, but that was something coming up quickly that might have influenced the timetable for getting those conduit charms into the hands of as many people as possible. If someone wanted to bring MSI down, that would be a great place to hit.

  Owen came back into the lab. “Sam’s making a company-wide announcement that these things are a security risk, and people are supposed to turn them in or they’ll be confiscated.”

  “Good,” I said with a nod, then I asked, “When you get your bursts of foresight, how does it feel?”

  He frowned in thought. “It’s an odd sensation, like a shiver and a brief bout of queasiness. Why?”

  “It’s probably too late to call the whole thing off, but I suddenly have a very bad feeling about the conference, like it’s all going to go horribly wrong.”

  “That’s not precognition. That’s logic. I don’t see how they’ll be able to resist hitting the conference, and that could be good for us. That may be what flushes the person behind all this out into the open so we can deal with whomever it is.”

  I tried to hide my growing sense of unease with a smile that probably looked maniacal. “Well, that’s certainly a new way to think about it. The best-case scenario is that everything will go horribly wrong.” With a sigh, I added, “And now I’d better get back to planning the final details of the maiden voyage of the Titanic. I need to make sure we hit that iceberg.”

  On the way back to my office, I passed Sam in the hallway. He was flying at breakneck speed, with several of the amulets dangling from his feet as an angry woman chased him. “Can’t talk now, doll,” he said as he flew by. “It’s contraband!” he shouted down the hallway at the angry woman. “You’re not gonna get the flu without it.”

  I hoped the rest of the company was more cooperative about giving up the charms, or we’d be in big trouble.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The last few days before the conference suddenly became insanely busy. The crew creating the enchanted pavilions in the park set up the venue, then Rina took care of the decorations. I went uptown a few times to check on progress and make sure everything on the to-do list was getting done. I tried to anticipate every possible thing that could go wrong, hoping I could prevent a disaster.

  “You’re sure no one nonmagical can see this?” I asked a building crew leader on one of my visits. It looked like an old-fashioned circus had set up in the middle of Central Park, and I couldn’t imagine that no one would notice.

  “Not only can no one nonmagical see it,” he replied, “but no one who’s not on the guest list, either. That’s why we need to get the latest version of the guest list and keep it updated.”

  “Yeah, I could see where that would be important,” I said, making a note. It would be awful if someone showed up and wasn’t able to find the place. And if anyone did wander in off the street because they saw the set-up and wondered what was going on, then we’d know we had a new magical immune to recruit. I hoped the spells were enough to keep out unauthorized bad guys, but I still suspected that the main bad guy was one of our speakers. I wondered if I could get away with “accidentally” removing Ramsay from the guest list.

  The morning of the conference dawned bright and sunny, with a slight hint of a breeze and lower humidity than normal. The beautiful weather could have been a good omen, but it didn’t make me feel much better. I was afraid it only meant we’d have a pretty backdrop for the magical showdown or whatever else happened. When I got to the park, Rina was putting the finishing touches on the décor and on the welcoming breakfast. “How does it look?” she asked.

  “It’s fabulous,” I told her, in all honesty. She’d really outdone herself. The assembly area looked like a forest, with the food and drink stations set up on large fallen logs or massive boulders. Magical medieval instruments hovering overhead provided a lilting soundtrack, and ethereal nymphs floated around the scene, carrying trays. I was tempted to find some little thing to mess up so that could be the worst thing that could happen and I could relax, but I knew it wouldn’t work. Whatever was going on was far bigger than Murphy’s law.

  We still had about half an hour before the guests were due to arrive and I needed someone to shake me back to sanity before I snapped, so I went out to the enclosure where Owen had transported his dragons. The moment I stepped through the doorway, a voice called, �
�Duck!” and I did so without stopping to question why. A split second later, a gust of flame shot right through where I’d been standing. “Sorry about that,” Owen said, running over and giving me a hand up. “They’re a little jittery. I don’t know if they’ve picked up on my stage fright or if they’re still adapting to the new surroundings.”

  One of the dragons gave a roar that petered out into a whimper, and then it curled up into a ball on the ground, wrapping its tail around itself. Owen raised a hand and closed his fist, and the light in the tent dimmed. That seemed to soothe the dragons. Then I took another look at Owen. He was dressed in jeans and a sooty T-shirt, not at all like he was prepared to make a presentation. “This is a new look for you,” I remarked.

  He glanced down at his clothes. “Don’t worry, I’ll change before I go on, but after I spend the day with these guys, anything I’m wearing will be a mess. Did you need something?”

  “I was just checking to see how things are going,” I lied, suddenly feeling foolish—not for fearing that something bad would happen, but rather for feeling like I could do anything to stop it other than make sure the conference itself went smoothly. “And it looks like we’ll want to dim the lights for the dragon show.” I made a note on my clipboard. Then I picked up on what he’d said about stage fright. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with an attack of nerves. “Are you okay about doing this?”

  He ran a hand through his hair, and I noticed that the hand trembled ever so slightly. “Well, you know me and talking. I’m sure I’ll be fine when I get up there, but thinking about it gives me jitters.”

  “You’ll do fine,” I said, patting him on the one clean spot on his shoulder. “You’re awesome in meetings. Just think meeting mode. This isn’t interpersonal at all. You’re presenting your latest findings to fellow professionals. You can do that.”

  With a big grin, he said, “Yeah, I can do that. I’d kiss you, but I don’t want to make you smell like sulfur.”

  “You know, I think playing with these dragons is your excuse to avoid going out there and interacting with customers.”