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“I’m a little worried about that. What if she’s an immune who’s seen things and is trying to make sense of it all? If that’s the case, the last thing we need is a gargoyle following her.”
“Yikes! Good point.”
“And then there was this morning’s commute. You didn’t notice anything odd, did you?”
“I saw Rod’s memo. What was that about?”
I described what Trish and I had seen. “We’re trying to find out if these things were happening all over town, or if they’re just targeting people who were at the meeting,” I added.
“I didn’t see anything, but that doesn’t mean much. I’m not sure what I’d notice. Backing up a train is kind of crazy, though. I hope he was also using a spell to slow the next train on the tracks. They aren’t that far apart, and throwing off the timing like that could have caused problems. At the very least, there would have been slowdowns all the way up the line. I may sometimes move trains slightly faster toward an empty platform. I’d never back one up.”
“That’s because you aren’t a selfish sociopath.”
“I had a great deal of training in magical ethics. That’s why we worry about rogue wizards who don’t grow up through our system and aren’t steeped in the kind of training most of us get. Look at what happened with your brother.”
The magical genes ran amok in my family, with both wizards and magical immunes, and because we live in a very nonmagical part of the world, none of us had realized what we were until we were older. My middle brother had figured out he could do magic and had used it to go on a minor crime spree. If someone from a good family who’d been taught right and wrong did that, I could only imagine what someone with a shadier morality might do with magic. Making sure he caught a subway train would only be the tip of the iceberg.
“While that is scary on a big-picture level,” I said after nibbling at my sandwich, “what if these events were staged for the benefit of Trish and me and the other people at that meeting? They could have used the meeting to identify people who are looking for magic, and then made sure they saw magic. That means I’m being followed, so I may be known, or I could be tied to this company, or to you.”
“Are you sure you’re not just letting your last assignment get to you? Having the magical mafia watch your every move has to have had an effect on you.”
“I can have been turned a little paranoid by that assignment and still be followed now.”
“If they did follow you, maybe they only wanted to make sure you saw that one demonstration. They might not follow you everywhere.”
“If you’re figuring out where to stage magical events for someone’s benefit, you’ll probably figure out where they work. They had to have known at least something about my commute to know where to stage that train thing, since it happened before I was at the platform.”
“And you said the report had to have been pre-written. Did it contain the location?”
“Yeah.”
“And did you give them enough information for them to have identified you and figured out where you live and work?”
“No, I just gave my first name.”
“Then unless they were already watching you before you attended the meeting, it wasn’t staged for your benefit.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way, and I instantly felt a lot better. “Maybe you’re right and I’m still being paranoid after that last assignment,” I said, reaching across his desk and swiping one of his potato chips. “I’m just worried about all this. If magic gets exposed, then I might have to get a normal job.”
“If everyone knows about magic, you’ll probably be in even more demand than ever. Think about it—it won’t just be magical people needing immunes to help them make sure everything’s on the level. Everyone else will want things validated, too.”
“Well, then, why am I trying to stop all this?” I said with a grin. But even if I’d come out ahead, I worried about what
would happen to Owen and people like him. That was why I wanted to put a stop to this.
When I got back to my office, Rod had already sent a list of reports in response to his memo, and it looked like Owen was right. There were too many incidents for me to have been specifically targeted, but not enough for it to look like a coordinated operation to shower the city with visible magic. Sam also reported that the gargoyles who’d been watching the homeless guys to evaluate them for magical immunity hadn’t seen any open magical incidents around them, so not everyone at the meeting was being targeted. That made me feel a little better.
I looked up the website for the station where I thought that reporter worked and scrolled through their staff list until I saw a photo that looked familiar. There she was—scrub off the on-camera makeup, pull the bouncy shoulder-length hair back into a ponytail, add a pair of glasses, and bury her in a huge sweatshirt, and that was the woman from the meeting. Her name was Carmen Hernandez, and she was a general-assignment reporter who’d joined the station a few months earlier. It didn’t look like she did a lot of muckraking exposés, but I supposed there was always the chance she was looking for the scoop of the century to help make her career.
I just wished I knew what her aim was. Was she following up on that interview, or did she have some other interest in looking into magic? Either way, it could mean trouble for us. If she was investigating, as careless—or as deliberate—as the magical people were being, she could blow the whole thing wide open and change magical society for good. If she was immune to magic and curious about what she was seeing, a reporter we couldn’t hide magic from could be a problem.
I presented my findings to Sam in the security department conference room. I figured this wasn’t a conversation to have in the open by the awning. “I could put one of our more discreet operatives on the reporter,” he said. “A human wizard can change appearance magically and be a less obvious tail, but if she’s magically immune it wouldn’t be quite as shocking as a gargoyle.”
“That could work,” I said. “But be careful. We don’t want to do anything that will give her anything resembling proof.”
“Hey, we’ve kept the secret this long. I think we can manage it awhile longer.”
“You didn’t have the Internet and cell phone cameras before,” I pointed out. “This is a different world. I don’t know, does magic even belong in a technological age?”
