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“I’m suspicious about how the people who are trying to prove magic exists just happened to be there to catch perfectly framed footage of the event,” Mack said. “That doesn’t look like ordinary bystander stuff. He had a clear shot, with the car in the middle of the frame, and he got it all from start to finish. It’s hard to imagine that someone looking out for this sort of thing just happened to stumble across it, just happened to have a video camera out and ready even before something happened, and just happened to shoot it perfectly.”
“We’ve been wondering about that,” I said. “They always seem to have someone there to get footage, though it usually isn’t this good. One possibility is that the magical watchdogs are stalking people they believe use magic. That gives them a better chance of being in the right place and at the right time when someone does something. But, yeah, being set up to frame it perfectly does make you wonder. I’m really starting to think that magical people are involved. I know at least some of the situations were set up magically to then allow someone else to resolve them magically.” I hadn’t officially reported the incident in the park because I wanted to keep Owen out of it, but it fit the pattern.
“I can tell you, the Council is having kittens,” Mack said, wincing as though at a painful memory. “We haven’t come this close to public exposure in centuries.”
“It’s worse than that,” I said. “There was an editorial on one of these sites mentioning that magical people use illusion to hide their magic. If they have an immune . . .” I couldn’t help but shudder, and the wizards did, likewise. I couldn’t tell with Sam, but he was made of sterner stuff.
“I’m thinking our people should lie low until this blows over,” Rod said. He was in charge of personnel at the company. In a regular company, it might have been “human resources,” but not all of our staff were human. “I’ll draft an internal memo warning people not to engage in any public magic activity, not even under veiling.”
“What will people like fairies, elves, and other magical creatures do?” I asked. “That’s a little harder to hide.”
“Yeah, I can’t exactly ground most of my team,” Sam said. “Without our air power, keepin’ track of things gets harder, and if they can see through veils and they’re willing to admit to what they see, that’s gonna be a problem. Something tells me that our usual fallback of people refusing to say they’re seeing flying gargoyles isn’t going to work here.”
“I say we ride this one out, play it cool for the time being,” Minerva said. “It’ll probably blow over. I’m sensing a stock market drop next week, and there’s a high chance of a political scandal that should knock this off the news radar entirely.”
“Unless someone is trying to get attention, in which case I doubt they’ll just give up,” I said. “Do we know of any factions that are actively campaigning to get magic out in the open?” I knew there were all kinds of factions in the magical world, from old-school magical puritans to magical mobsters.
“There are a few groups we’ve been watching,” Mack said. “It’s hard to tell how organized they are, whether it’s a few nuts or an actual movement. We’ve brought in some of the individuals we know of for questioning. So far, it doesn’t seem like they’re involved.”
We didn’t come to any definitive conclusions from the meeting, just a plan to keep doing what we’d been doing and keep an eye on events. I went back to my office to check the blogs again. Discussion was heated. Surprisingly, the clear, perfectly framed video was seen as less credible than all the Bigfoot-quality stuff that had been posted earlier. As Mack had said, people found it suspicious as bystander video, which suggested that it might have been faked.
But then I saw that the alleged photographer had posted in response to these challenges. He even included additional video that hadn’t been shown on the air, from before the incident.
As we’d suspected, the photographer was supposedly following someone, shooting as he went. I couldn’t tell anything about the subject. He wore a nondescript windbreaker with a hood that was pulled up around his face, and he was being shot from behind at first. He stopped at the dealership and looked around. The photographer ducked out of the way, and for a split second he got the guy’s face in the frame. The subject raised his hands, and the photographer quickly panned around, just in time to catch the window vanishing.
I backed up the video to the best shot of the guy’s face, took a screen capture, and sent that to Rod. He knew just about everyone in the magical world, so there was a good chance he could identify him. While I was at it, I sent it to Sam, so he and his crew would know who to look out for.
I had the strongest feeling that there was something more we should be doing. I just wasn’t entirely sure what that was.
The next morning, I was collecting newspapers from the racks in front of the Union Square subway station when I heard Owen’s voice behind me. “I didn’t realize you were so into current events.”
“I’m into how certain current events are covered. You read Mandarin, don’t you? I might be able to figure out the Spanish.”
“We also have certain translation resources.”
Which probably meant spells, and I hoped they were more accurate than the Internet translation services. “Oh, good. Here.” I thrust an armload of papers on him and continued my buying spree. “Oops, do you have a quarter?” He twitched his hand in a way I recognized, and I grabbed his wrist before he could complete the spell. “No. Not now. Reach into your pocket like a normal person.”
I’d never thought of Owen as someone who casually used magic to make his life easier, and he did use it far less than most magical people. If you saw him at home, you might not realize he was a wizard unless you noticed some of the more esoteric titles on his bookshelf. But he had some little habits that he probably didn’t think twice about and that now might be used as evidence of a vast magical conspiracy.
With a weary sigh, he shifted the papers to his left arm and fished a quarter out of his pocket. I took it from him. “Thank you.”
I waited until I got to my office to read the papers, even though I was anxious to see what might be in there. If the floating car was going to be covered in the newspaper, it would be in today’s editions, along with perhaps more in-depth reporting than there was likely to be on television.
Once I had a big cup of coffee, I sat down at my desk and started searching. The Times devoted a paragraph in a local news roundup to the incident, with a lot of words like “allegedly,” “supposedly,” and “bystanders said.” The word “magic” didn’t come up at all. Police were reported as refusing to speculate. That was a relief. I’d know we really had something to worry about when the Times reported on magic.
The tabloids had varying coverage, some with stills taken from the video. Without motion, the pictures looked fake. I doubted I’d have believed them if I hadn’t seen the video and didn’t know that such things were actually possible. The fact that the stories were alongside others like “Princess Diana Not Dead—Abducted by Aliens” and “Elvis—Madonna’s Latest Lover?” didn’t make them much more believable.
I leaned back in my chair with a heartfelt, “Whew.” We’d really dodged a bullet there. I dropped the foreign-language papers off to be translated and hoped that this would be the end of it. Maybe when something this big failed to get any traction, the magic hunters would give up.
Unfortunately, this proved to be only the beginning of the campaign, and Abigail Williams had gone from merely wanting to expose magic to being violently opposed, calling for the government to take action. The Times was a little too staid to print that wacky a letter to the edito
r, but other newspapers in the coming days ran letters from concerned readers who demanded an investigation.
One local news channel had a stage magician walk through the car “trick” and explain how it might have been done, but he was unable to replicate it in a way that looked at all realistic. The stolen car was later pulled over on a freeway in Connecticut, but the person driving it had a genuine-looking sales receipt from a dealership. That aroused suspicion that the dealership had staged the whole thing as a publicity stunt, and the story rapidly died in the conventional press.
The anti-magic underground, however, was gaining strength. On my way to the subway station one morning, I got handed two different fliers about magical issues. One merely pointed to the blogs I already knew about and said it was “the truth they don’t want you to know.” The other was more strident, mentioning a vast magical cabal running the world behind the scenes and claiming that the media was stifling all proof of magic.
Meanwhile, magical people were growing tense. Fairies folded their wings up under coats when out in public. Wizards barely used magic, even at home. I quit teasing Owen for his workaholic ways. The more time he spent in the office, the less time he could be anywhere near any public magic event. So far, the Council hadn’t said anything more about him, and I’d noticed that Merlin left him out of all the meetings on the topic, but I worried that he’d make a convenient scapegoat. He’d been present for far too many of these incidents, enough for me to worry he was being targeted. He had a lot of enemies in the magical world, and if magical people were actually behind this, he could be in danger.
