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“Which you foiled today, and rather nicely. I don’t think the reporter thought anything of it.”
Even so, I turned on the late news that night. It was the usual litany of crime, politics, and accidents (and sometimes all of the above in one story). The story about the educational children’s program in the park didn’t contain a single mention of the near-miss by runaway bicycles. I was about to change the channel to a rerun of an old sitcom when a story came on that made me sit up and take notice.
Bystanders alleged that the windows in a car dealership had vanished and a car had floated out of the showroom before the windows reappeared again. The story was so wild, I was surprised the TV station had given it any credibility. It must have been a slow news day, I thought. Or maybe they were treating it as a quirky human interest feature—people say the darnedest things.
But then they showed video, first from the dealership’s own security cameras. That was fuzzy and black-and-white, but I couldn’t think of what other explanation I could give for a car floating out of a dealership with no one behind the wheel. Magnets?
That wasn’t all. There was also bystander video, shot on a digital camera. That footage was sharp, so it was obvious when the window vanished and returned, and we could clearly see the car float out and drive away.
Unless we could find an illusionist who would take credit for the stunt and return the car, it looked like the magical cat was well and truly out of the bag.
6
I immediately called Owen. “Have you been watching the news?” I asked.
“No, why? Did they say something about the bike attack?”
“Worse than that. Someone made a car fly out of a dealership window, and they got good video.” I described what I’d seen on the news.
“Are you sure?” He sounded skeptical.
“You’re not telling me that you, a wizard, don’t believe in magic, are you?”
“I’m not saying anything about the viability of magic. I’m just saying I’m not sure that this sounds like magic. It’s more like a publicity stunt. How are they framing it in the coverage?”
“They’re treating it more like an interesting oddity than like a serious story.”
“Then maybe it’ll blow over. I don’t anticipate the authorities banging on our doors. But stay on top of it, of course.”
“That was the plan,” I said. “But it really is looking more and more like either a lot of magical people are suddenly getting really careless, or they’re actively trying to get caught. I’m as worried about that as I am about magic being exposed.”
“Yeah, that could be a problem,” he said. I could practically hear the wheels turning in his head over the phone. He was thinking about it, and hard.
“So?” I prompted.
“So, we’ll stay on top of it. You’ve got this.”
It occurred to me that this time, it actually was my responsibility. Always before, I’d sort of fallen into this kind of work, either from being at the wrong (or right) place at the wrong (or right) time, from being targeted, or from trying to help Owen. Now, it really was up to me and my colleagues to deal with the crisis. I had to admit that while I liked my day-to-day work much better now, it had been nice to get to swoop in and deal with something without it being my real job. The consequences had always been life or death, but now my job was at stake, as well.
The next morning, I woke early after not having slept much and gathered an armload of newspapers on my way to work. I couldn’t do much more than skim headlines on the subway and, much to my relief, there were no “MAGIC IS REAL!” headlines. It was possible that the incident had happened too late to make the morning papers, and unless it really did definitively prove the existence of magic, a car disappearing from a dealership probably wasn’t “Stop the presses!” material. I wouldn’t relax on the mainstream news front until I saw what was in the next day’s papers.
After giving the papers a cursory skim once I got to the office, I checked the regular news sites. The disappearing car was mentioned on a few of them, but in the human-interest feature category rather than as real news. That was something of a relief. Next, I read the magic-watching blogs, and any idea of letting it go went right out the window. There was an editorial on the Abigail Williams blog about the danger magic posed to society. It referred to the disappearing car and the nightclub line scuffle, but went on to discuss other incidents. Some of them I recognized from the last couple of years when rogue wizard Phelan Idris had been running amok. Others I’d seen mentioned on the blog. There were a few that were news to me.
“Although there have been one or two cases in which magic was used to benefit others,” the editorial said, “magic is more likely, by far, to be used for underhanded purposes. Magicians force others to do their will, hide their dastardly deeds behind a veil of illusion, and use their powers to cheat and swindle. Something has to be done to put a stop to this. From now on, even if we don’t get evidence of the magic itself, we want photos of people you believe have done magic. We’ll post these so that everyone can beware of these dangerous people.”
I was particularly worried about the line mentioning hiding magic behind a veil of illusion. I cross-referenced the incidents mentioned in the post with our internal incident reports and, as I feared, there were some when no one else should have noticed the magic. I’d even been involved in a couple, and I was fairly certain that they’d been hidden from ordinary people. That suggested they had a magical immune in their midst, and that put all magical people, even the responsible ones who hid their magic from the world, at risk.
“Uh oh,” I said to myself. I copied and pasted the post into an e-mail to Sam and Merlin. If there was ever a time to bypass the chain of command, this was it. Not long afterward, I got summoned to an emergency meeting in Merlin’s office. I supposed the car stunt was big enough that the “we haven’t been exposed in centuries” argument no longer held up.
A representative from the Council was there—fortunately, not Jabez Jones. It was Mack, an old friend of Owen’s foster parents. He was generally pretty reasonable, for a Council type.
“It seems we have multiple issues here,” Merlin said. “First, we have a magical person who’s openly using magic to commit criminal acts and allowing his acts to be caught on camera. Second, we have nonmagical people who are aware of this activity. It was reported on the local news.”
“I’ve done some skimming around on news s
ites, and so far, most people seem to be taking it as some kind of stunt, like something a stage magician would do,” I said. “Of course, the people who already believe in magic are all over it.”
Minerva Felps, from the Prophets and Lost department, said, “We’re not really getting a changed vibe here. It’s not affecting the general public, only these few people.”
