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“No thanks,” I said, shaking my head. I wasn’t sure why I was so nervous, but the thought of putting anything else into my stomach made me queasy. There was something that seemed off about this whole situation, but I couldn’t put my finger on anything in particular. Of course, having a meeting to discuss the fact that there was magic in the world was kind of odd. Part of my unease was due to the fact that I knew they were right, but I was hoping to prove them wrong or discourage them.
After about five more minutes with no one else entering the room, the man who’d spoken to us stepped forward, cleared his throat, and said, “Good evening. Thank you all for joining us.”
Just as he began speaking, a woman darted into the room and took the seat on the other end of our row. She looked about thirty and wore jeans and a really baggy sweatshirt that she hunched into like she was a turtle trying to retreat into her shell. Her dark hair was pulled into a tight ponytail, and she wore no makeup at all, but with her light brown skin she had the coloring to pull that off without disappearing into the wallpaper. Her eyes were hidden behind thick glasses with heavy tortoiseshell frames.
There was something familiar about her that gave me the nagging feeling I’d seen her before. I ran through my mental directory of people I knew. I was pretty sure she wasn’t someone I knew from work, either at MSI or at my previous job. She wasn’t a neighbor. Maybe she was just someone I saw frequently on the subway or in neighborhood restaurants and shops. She didn’t look in my direction, so I figured I was safe. I’d only be in trouble if she recognized me and I couldn’t come up with her name.
The speaker seemed to have lost his train of thought at the woman’s arrival. He stopped speaking, cleared his throat, and started again. “Thank you all for coming tonight. I don’t know how many of you joined us because you’ve always felt like there was something going on and how many were just curious, but I want to state up front that magic is real. It’s all around us. Most people just don’t notice it because we see what we want to see, what our minds can handle.”
I couldn’t help but remember the way I’d first heard that magic was real. I’d been given a similar speech, but it had been a little more convincing since I’d been in the conference room at MSI, which looked a lot like I imagined the chamber with the Round Table at Camelot would be, and it had been Merlin himself giving the speech, with visual aids provided by Owen. I wondered if we’d get a similar demonstration here.
Instead of doing magic tricks, the speaker turned on an overhead projector—the old-fashioned kind with transparent slides. “Wow, they’re really kickin’ it old school,” Trish muttered under her breath.
The evidence of magic looked even less convincing on overhead projector slides than on a blog. Come to think of it, if these people were behind a blog, I’d have thought they’d have managed at least some kind of computer presentation. I had to wonder, was this meeting really about convincing us of the existence of magic, or was it a clever disinformation campaign? If I were trying to make people not believe in magic, this was probably exactly what I would put together. If the people attending the meeting saw this and classed all the magic watchdogs in the same group, then the “magic is real” movement would die out rapidly.
After a few more slides, the speaker said, “I know this doesn’t look like much evidence, but it’s really difficult to photograph magic in use.” That was the most credible thing he’d said this whole time. “The odds are slim that anyone will have a camera out and ready to take a picture when someone happens to use magic, and most magic happens in the blink of an eye. By the time you have the chance to react, it’s over. We also believe that magical people have a way to hide their magic from the world, so most magic will never be noticed by ordinary people.”
If I hadn’t been in on the secret, I’d have thought that was a rather convenient way to excuse the lack of evidence. It was a common thread in conspiracy theories—the lack of evidence is proof of a cover-up. Since I didn’t know how much these people knew, I suspected in this case it was more of an excuse than an awareness of how magic worked.
“Some people see more than others,” the speaker went on. “We don’t know if they just happen to be in the right place at the right time, keep their eyes open, and are willing to admit to what they see or if there’s something special about these people that allows them to see past whatever is done to hide magic.”
Now he was getting close. Either they’d guessed pretty accurately, or someone in the know had set all this up. That was the thing about conspiracy theories. When dealing with them, you tended to find yourself thinking that way, too.
“Have any of you seen things you believe are magic?” the speaker asked.
Remembering the role I was playing, I tentatively raised my hand, barely lifting it above shoulder level. As I did so, I glanced around the room to see who else was raising a hand. The two homeless guys in the back looked at each other, shrugged, and raised their hands. None of the other attendees moved.
The speaker blinked rapidly at our response, but I couldn’t tell if he was surprised by so few or so many. “Um, well, what have you seen?” he asked.
“You know, the usual,” one of the homeless guys said with a shrug. “Gargoyles flying over the city, fairies walking to work. That sort of thing.” His friend nodded in agreement, as though verifying what he said.
The speaker blinked even more rapidly. “Oh. Well. Um. Uh. That’s . . . interesting.” There were a few soft coughs of the sort meant to stifle laughter from the rest of the audience. The woman at the end of our aisle raised her eyebrows above the rims of her glasses. The speaker turned to me. “And you, miss? I believe you had your hand up.”
I looked around, making sure he was speaking to me. “You know that weird fight that happened at the bridal sale a while ago? I was there,” I said. I decided not to let on that I might be immune to magic, not until I knew more about this group. “It was, well, weird. That was when I started looking into this magic stuff.”
The woman on our row snapped her head around to stare at me so quickly I was afraid she’d give herself whiplash. She hadn’t given me a first look, let alone a second glance, before, but now she seemed to be sizing me up, like she was trying to figure out whether she knew me from somewhere. That brought back my sense that I knew her. Oh, great, now I was going to either have to fake remembering her and find a way to avoid introducing her to Trish after the meeting or pretend not to see her and duck out quickly.
I’d almost forgotten about the speaker. “Okay, yes,” he said, and I turned back toward the front to see him nodding and grinning in what looked like relief that I hadn’t sounded as crazy as the homeless guy. “Our people have been looking into that event, and it’s been the center of a lot of discussion among the magic watchers. That’s the sort of thing we need all of you to be on the lookout for. The more of us who are out there looking for magic, the more likely it is that we’ll eventually get real proof. Keep your eyes and your mind open, and you’re sure to see more magic. Carry a camera with you at all times and be ready to take pictures or video. When we have enough evidence that there’s no way to deny it or explain it, then we can take action and demand that the government do something about the magical people living among us. Does anyone else have a magical experience they’d like to share?”
He glanced around expectantly, but no one spoke. “Well, then, thank you for coming. Please stay in touch and let us know if you see magic. There are fliers on the table with information on how to submit reports. Feel free to hang around and enjoy the refreshments. Introduce yourselves to each other. We’re all in this together, fighting on the same team.”
Most of the attendees beat a hasty retreat to the exit. The woman on my row didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave, but she made no move to approach me. Since that imagined crisis didn’t appear to be coming to pass, I lingered, hesitating. I was pretty sure the homeless guy who’d spoken and his friend were magical immunes, and if that was the case, we could help them. But I could hardly hand them a business card from MSI or even reassure them that the gargoyles were real here at this meeting without blowing my cover, and it was unlikely they had a way for me to contact them. The best I could do was go to the refreshment table under the guise of taking a cookie for the road while they loaded up on more and whisper, “You’re not the only ones who sees the gargoyles. They’re really there. You should speak to one sometime.”
I then prepared to hurry out of the room and alert any security gargoyles to these guys so they could approach them, but I found my way blocked by the woman who’d been at the front of the room, the one who looked like one of the illustrations in the “dress for success” brochure they’d handed out to female students when I was in college.
“Hi, I’m Lara,” she said with something I felt was intended to be a smile, but her smiling muscles didn’t get a lot of work, so it was a weak one.
I didn’t want to give my name, but I worried that I’d get caught giving a fake one. “Kathleen,” I said, giving the full name that no one ever used. That way, it was the truth, but perhaps less likely to get
tracked back to me.
“I was intrigued by what you said about the bridal sale event, since we did get a lot of reports from that incident. Maybe you could submit your own report.”
“I guess I could,” I said, “but I don’t have too much to add. I saw that woman on the news, talking about magic, and it explained so much, so I looked her up and found her blog, and that led me to the other ones, so I think I’ve seen every account of that incident, and they saw more than I did.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the woman at the end of the row edge closer, like she was eavesdropping. At the same time, she hunched further into her sweatshirt. At the rate she was going, she’d soon be inside the hood without doing anything to raise it. I got the impression she wanted to hear everything without being seen or recognized.
Wait a second; now I thought I knew who she was. Take off the glasses, take her hair down, put on a full makeup job, and dress her in professional clothes, and I was pretty sure she was a local television reporter—the one who’d interviewed Abigail Williams. She might also have been the one in the park, now that I thought about it. My stomach clenched. If a reporter was looking into this, we were in big trouble.
