AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Two stops later, we reached the block where the incident had happened. A cluster of people boarded the bus there. None of them looked familiar. None of them even looked all that suspicious. They all seemed to be ordinary office workers. Then again, I wasn’t sure what I expected a witch hunter to look like in the twenty-first century.
A couple of people spoke on their cell phones, but otherwise the bus was quiet, everyone keeping to themselves. A young man took the seat in front of me. He wore a shirt and tie, but instead of a suit jacket, he had on a hooded sweatshirt. Probably some kind of clerk, I guessed. He glanced around the bus as though taking stock of the other passengers. I couldn’t get a good read on whether he was looking around for a purpose or merely being curious.
After we’d gone about a block, he turned to the person across the aisle from him. “Hey, were you on this bus yesterday?”
I forced myself not to lift my gaze from my book, but I held my breath and strained to hear the conversation over the roar of the bus engine and the phone call going on behind me.
“Every day,” the other passenger, an older African American man, said with a world-weary tone.
Most people would have taken that as a “leave me alone” cue, but the young man continued in a way that reminded me of an eager puppy. “I was waiting for the bus, and I could have sworn I saw it fly.”
The other man gave a soft, derisive snort and shifted to stare out the window, signaling an end to the conversation. Undaunted, the puppy turned to the passenger in front of him. “Did you notice anything weird?”
That passenger, a middle-aged woman in business attire, turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow. “Weird? On a city bus? Perish the thought,” she said dryly.
He turned to face me, his enthusiasm undimmed. “What about you?” he asked. It was probably my imagination, but I felt like he was watching me intently. Did he know who I was?
“I don’t normally take this bus,” I said with a shrug that was as casual as I could make it. “I had a meeting today. Sorry.”
It seemed to take forever before he smiled and said, “Too bad. It was really cool. I’m dying to know what it was like for the people on the bus.”
After the next stop, he changed seats and started the process again with the passengers at the back of the bus. I didn’t realize until he moved and I let myself relax how tense his attention had made me. My breathing became much easier once he was talking to someone else. On the other hand, it became more difficult to eavesdrop without turning around and being obvious about it. I also had to guess which people he might be talking to, based on what I remembered of them and which person I assumed went with which voice.
Most of the people were as reluctant to acknowledge him as the rest of the passengers had been, but he finally got someone to admit that he’d been on the bus and had noticed something weird. “Yeah, it was like the bus was slamming on its brakes. I braced myself—I’ve been in a bus wreck before—but instead of stopping, it was like we bounced, and then we dropped, but then we kept going like nothing happened.”
“What do you think happened?” the puppy asked. I uncrossed my legs, shifted my weight, and turned in my seat, like I was trying to get comfortable. That allowed me to look behind me just enough to see that the puppy was talking to a guy about his age, dressed in a nice suit.
“I don’t know,” the other passenger said. “I thought maybe we hit a bump that launched us, but it was too smooth for that. The landing wasn’t even all that jarring. Or maybe we never really left the ground. It just felt like we did.”
“Oh, you definitely left the ground.” The puppy leaned closer to him and said in a stage whisper, “I know this is going to sound crazy, but from where I stood, it looked like magic. The bus was going to hit a guy, but instead it went right over him. It was amazing, and a lot of other people saw it, too. I did a search, and there was this blog full of reports. You ought to go there and give them an account from inside the bus. They’re trying to figure out what’s going on.”
“Magic?” the other passenger said. “Like Harry Potter?”
“I didn’t see a wand, but yeah, it was kind of like that crazy bus in the third movie, only it flew instead of shrinking.”
“Um, yeah, okay,” the other passenger said, raising a newspaper to block his face.
“The blog was called something like ‘Magic Watch’ if you want to look it up.” The passenger didn’t respond, and the puppy got off at the next stop. I wished I had one of those lipstick cameras spies use in movies so I could get a good picture of him. He wasn’t quite as nondescript as Jabez Jones had been, but he was a fairly generic New York white male twentysomething guy. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pick him out of a crowd if I spotted him again. Since he’d boarded near the MSI office, I wondered if any of the security gargoyles watching the plaza had noticed him.
The bus was heading toward my apartment, so I decided to stay on for the rest of the trip, even though it would be slower than the subway. I figured I looked less suspicious if I didn’t get off so soon after the questioner did, and if anyone was watching me, there wasn’t anything unusual about me going home. My last assignment had made me paranoid about being watched.
As my block neared and it was time to put away my book and gather my things, I noticed something on the floor of the bus: a business card, like the one Abigail had given me. It looked like the puppy had scattered them around, perhaps for passengers who might have seen something to pick up in case they didn’t want to talk to him but were still curious about the event. Even though I was pretty sure he wasn’t named Abigail Williams, that name was on the card. Maybe that was the pen name everyone at the blog wrote under rather than the name of the woman I’d met.
I found myself torn about how to pursue this case. Not too long ago, I’d been someone who noticed odd things that no one else seemed to notice, and it had been a huge relief to learn that they were real, that I wasn’t just imagining things. Only, in my case, no one else could see them. The magic used to hide magic from the rest of the world didn’t work on me, so I saw what was really going on. It hadn’t only been that I was a small-town hick in awe of big-city things that the locals took for granted. There really was stuff they couldn’t have seen even if they were looking right at it.
In this case, it was people who were open-minded enough to accept what they saw without going into denial or employing any of the usual psychological tricks we use to maintain our own worldview. I had to respect them for that. If they didn’t have any kind of nefarious agenda, I was inclined to leave them alone. Let the magical people deal with their own by reminding them to watch themselves and remember to keep their magic covered up. Gaslighting people for being perceptive would put us on the wrong side, I was afraid.
The next morning, I checked the magic-watching blogs again, but there weren’t any additional eyewitness reports of the bus incident. I took note of the new entries about other alleged magic use so I could cross-reference them with our gargoyle patrols. I didn’t spot the eager puppy in any of the photos from the bus flight submitted to the blogs. If he’d really been there, he’d managed to stay out of camera range—or maybe he’d been behind a camera.
Sam wasn’t in his office, so I headed to the front entrance, where he often sat on the awni
ng. “I don’t suppose we’ve got any good footage of that plaza I could look at,” I said.
“From the bus day?”
“Yeah.” I told him about my bus ride the day before. “And I know you didn’t assign me to the case, but I did it on my own time.”
“Hey, I’m not gonna knock you for taking initiative, as long as you get your assignments done. What’re you lookin’ for?”
