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“But you managed to calm her down?”
“I don’t know.” It came out as a moan. “I didn’t lie to her, but I didn’t confirm her suspicions. Maybe we should tell her the truth.”
“We should wait and see the kind of person she is.”
“Sam’s having her watched by non-gargoyles. I’ll have to warn him that she’s probably immune. We were acting as though she is, to be on the safe side. She wants me to keep in touch, but I’d have to think of an excuse, something magic-related that’s not confirming magic.”
He patted me on the shoulder, then put his arm around me and pulled me close. I let myself melt against him, taking comfort in him. “See, we have a plan,” he said softly, murmuring into my ear. “It’ll be okay.”
When I got home a little later, Nita was sitting at the kitchen table, wearing her pajamas and eating cereal. “Overnight shift tonight?” I asked, setting the papers down on the table so I could take off my jacket.
She nodded. “The worst. It’s either insanely boring or ridiculously stressful. Just about anything that happens overnight is bad, and most people checking in or out during those hours are really grumpy. Mostly, it’s long hours of hanging out around the desk. Oooh, you brought me reading material.” She grabbed the top paper from the stack. “Hey, look at this—the Illuminati were apparently responsible for that car that floated out of a dealership window a while ago. It was mind control and telekinesis, and the CIA is experimenting on teaching people to do that. I wonder if they’re taking applications.”
While Nita finished her breakfast/dinner, we read headlines to each other, laughing at how outlandish they were. None of the stories, other than the one about the car, matched any magical events I was aware of. If even the tabloid reporters weren’t taking it seriously, and if they felt the need to embellish the one truly magical event to make it more interesting, then it seemed unlikely that a legitimate reporter from a real news organization
would be able to develop a story.
When it was time for the late news, I turned on the television, telling Nita I wanted to check the weather forecast. How would Carmen cover the event at Union Square, or would she? An apparent kidnapping in public was pretty shocking, but there was also the chance that it had been a publicity stunt.
It wasn’t the lead story. There was a lot of other stuff going on in the city, and the late news also recapped national and international headlines. The “kidnapping” didn’t come up before the first commercial break. When it hadn’t been mentioned before the weather report, I suspected it wouldn’t make the news tonight.
“Ugh, I’d better bring a jacket,” Nita said, just as my finger was about to twitch on the remote, and then I remembered that I’d supposedly turned on the news to see the weather forecast. “That’s one thing I miss about Texas: not having to wear a coat in April. Shouldn’t it be getting warmer?”
“It depends,” I said. “It goes back and forth at this time of year. But the same thing happens back home. I remember having snow flurries on Easter a few times. And here we can generally go outdoors in August without bursting into flames.”
“True.” She yawned and stretched. “Well, time to go get ready for a good night’s work. Catch you later.”
As I turned off the TV, I felt a lot better about the situation, but I couldn’t escape the nagging sense that disaster was looming.
When I got to work the next morning, I checked for signs of the “kidnapping” story, both in the legitimate media and in the various magic-watching blogs. The Abigail Williams blog didn’t have a mention of it, but one of the more virulent anti-magic sites had a huge report about one of their spokespeople being silenced. If I got nothing else out of this event, now at least I knew which site had sponsored that meeting at the church. I figured that the correlation of their spokesperson and the coverage of the event was a pretty good sign. I felt like I should put up one of those conspiracy boards, like on TV, with colored string to tie people and groups together as I found patterns.
“Okay, so what’s the deal with men in black kidnapping a guy?” I looked up to see Trish entering my office.
“Exactly what they said, assuming you read the same thing I just read. I happened to be there. My guess is it was a publicity stunt to make it look like he was being silenced, because the magic police don’t work like that, and they sent a news release to that reporter who was at the meeting. Supposedly, he was going to reveal everything about magic.”
“And it’s so very convenient that he got dragged away by men in black before he could do so, huh? Makes you wonder how much proof these people really have, if they have to resort to stunts like that.”
“Carmen—the reporter—seems to have landed on the side of skepticism this time, and she didn’t do a story last night. If this was supposed to be their big, attention-grabbing event, it backfired.”
She sank onto the chair beside my desk and stretched out her legs in front of her. “That one site that reported this stunt is a real piece of work. It looks like the people who burn Harry Potter books because they think they teach kids to do magic and worship Satan have started taking it all too seriously and are looking for magic in the real world.”
“Well, there is magic in the real world, though I can’t tell that it has much to do with Satan,” I said. “That’s what makes this all so tricky. If they were just wrong, we could laugh at them. But there is magic. And there are some evil people using magic. You’re not going to get anywhere using the spells in children’s books, even if you have power, so that part is silly. But they’re not entirely wrong.”
“On the other hand, they could cause serious trouble with the parts they’re right about. What are our next steps?”
“I guess just keep an eye on it. I think I talked Carmen down from being worried about that kidnapping. I stopped just short of gaslighting, her, though. I didn’t tell her anything that wasn’t true, but I also didn’t validate what she might have seen. Fortunately, there wasn’t any magic involved with this. I don’t know what I’ll do if there ever actually is magic happening in front of her.”
“Maybe you’d better start thinking about that,” she said sternly. “At the rate things are going, it’s likely to happen, and you should be prepared. You need to know where you’re going to draw the line. What are you willing to do to keep the secret, and is there something you won’t do? If you figure that out ahead of time, you won’t have to make the decision in the heat of the moment.”
“Planning for it just means that it won’t go the way I planned,” I said with a weary sigh.
“I don’t think the exact event will make much difference on those big questions. There may be some room for improvisation, but you need to know if you’re willing to outright lie.”
“It would help if I could just tell her the truth. We recruit immunes all the time. Why not this one?”
“I’m not the one to ask about that. Maybe you’d better take that up with the boss.”
I knew what everyone above me, as well as Owen, was likely to say about that. They were really careful about how they broke the news to potential immunes. First, there was a lot of testing to guarantee the immune status. Then they figured out the person’s situation—did they need a new job, were they already thinking that there was something going on, were they likely to spill the beans to others? A television reporter would probably be considered too risky. There wasn’t any job at MSI that was likely to fit her skill set or be of interest to her, unless she just wanted to be around magic. Her job was spilling the beans, and if she had any proof at all, this would be a story that could make her career. It all came down to the kind of person she was and whether she’d be willing or able to see the potential risks of that story getting out. We didn’t know enough about her to know where she might stand.
