Page 23 of Magic for Nothing

“All right,” I said, finally getting my suitcase into a position where I could drag it if necessary. I looked at the rolling hills, trying to ignore the sensation that the hills were looking back. “Where are we going?”

Robert threw his head back and roared with laughter. Even Leo smiled, although there was less meanness in his expression than there was in Robert’s laugh.

“Look behind you,” he said.

The van was behind me, but I took his meaning. Hoisting my suitcase, I moved three feet to my right and looked.

We were parked on a graveled hilltop, with a small path winding down from our location to the gates of a stately manner home whose green manicured lawn somehow managed to be even brighter than the hills behind me. Topiary dotted the grounds, and I could see the corner of what I assumed was a hedge maze. There were actual standing stones in the field around the path, and the manor house itself looked like, well . . .

“Shades of Pemberley,” I breathed.

Leo laughed. “I suppose it would look like that, to an American,” he said. “Welcome to Penton Hall.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Follow me,” he said, and started down the path. I followed him, and Robert followed me, so close that I thought I could feel his breath on the back of my neck.

I had good reason for my paranoia. I’d known his name was familiar, and as we walked, I realized where I’d seen it before: in Verity’s report on what happened in New York. Robert Bullard was one of the two Covenant agents who’d been whammied by Sarah, when she wiped the memory of Verity from their minds. We don’t know much about how Sarah’s powers work, especially when she’s using them to actively rewrite someone’s ideas about the world. When Robert had seen the footage of Verity on TV, had he thought he was seeing her for the first time? Or had Sarah’s careful lie come tumbling down?

Maybe more importantly—or at least, more frighteningly—if he was here, did that mean he’d been demoted from fieldwork after his failure in Manhattan? He hadn’t been working alone. Was Margaret Healy here, too? The fact that she was a distant relative shouldn’t make it harder for me to maintain my cover around her, and yet . . . If there was anything about my physical appearance that could give me away, she’d see it, even if no one else would.

The closer we got to the house, the larger it loomed. It was like something out of a Jane Austen novel, as reinterpreted by Stephen King.

“One of the topiaries moves, I am out of here,” I said.

Leo cast me a blithe smile. “It’s all right, I promise. We do not have killer hedges. The worst we’ve produced is a few prize-winning carrots at harvest time, and those won’t kill you, although they may make you wish for a more varied diet.”

The gates were locked. They were also, judging by their size and the lack of cars visible on the grounds, at least partially ornamental. Leo led us a few feet down the fence, where there was a smaller, wooden door, deeply inset to keep it from offending anyone’s sensibilities.

“Most of the house rules will be explained once you’ve been assigned to a room and a training schedule,” he said. “The main thing to remember is that, at least for right now, you’re considered a guest. That means you need to be on your best behavior, but that also, people will treat you fairly and be willing to answer your questions.”

“This is all really complicated,” I said. “I thought it would be more like the movies. I’d show up, and say ‘monsters are bad,’ and you’d hand me a crossbow or something.”

“Joss Whedon has so very much to answer for,” said Leo, and opened the door.

Curtains twitched in the windows of the big house as we walked along a decorative pathway to the front steps. By the time we got there, the main doors were open, revealing a palatial hallway. Leo kept going, and so I followed, feeling increasingly like I was walking into a museum. A curator was probably going to appear and offer to give me a walking tour. I would have enjoyed that. It would have been less stressful.

“All right: answer any questions you’re asked politely and succinctly, consider very carefully before refusing any tests that people want to perform, and remember, I’ll be here for the rest of the day,” said Leo.

“This is not encouraging me,” I said.

“It’s not meant to,” said a new voice, and Reginald Cunningham stepped into the hall. He was dressed much more formally than he’d been back at the house, with a buttoned-up suit jacket over his white shirt, and shoes polished until they gleamed.

“Sir,” said Leo, placing a hand flat across the base of his throat.

“Sir,” said Robert, with the same gesture.

Shit.

Reginald’s private office was almost as large as the kitchen back home. The walls were lined in bookcases, the shelves groaning under the weight of leather-bound volumes. Portraits hung above them—not of Cunninghams this time, but of elegantly-dressed, stiffly-posed people from at least eight different families, their hairstyles and clothing spanning centuries.

Reginald saw me looking, and said, “With an organization as large and complex as ours, hierarchy is key. We cannot allow our great work to fall to anarchy. These brave men and women have led us as we fought to bring humanity closer to safety, closer to protection. Their names echo through the generations, unsung heroes of the human race. Penton, Fairborn, Carew, McNeil—and yes, Cunningham. I am the second member of our line to hold the august position of minister. You’re very fortunate, you know.”

“How so?” I asked meekly. Carew. He’d said Carew. One of these people was my ancestor, however many years and generations back. This was where my family came from. No wonder so many of the cryptids we tried to help still referred to us as “that Covenant family.” To an organization like this, a few generations was nothing. Some of the longer-lived cryptids might still be waiting for us to change our minds and go back where we began.

“You stumbled into my home, and not into one of our other more public strongholds. There are those, Miss Brown, who oppose our sacred work: those who feel the human race should willingly share this beautiful world that we’ve been given with monsters. We must be always on guard for them, and your arrival was . . . ill-timed, in some ways.”

I blinked. “Why?”