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“Could you find out if he was taken into custody by the enforcers?”
“You think he was?”
“He’s pretending he was, at the very least. Owen didn’t think they were real enforcers, and I’m inclined to agree. But I want to rule it out.”
“I’ll check with my contacts. What do you think’s goin’ on?”
“I’m starting to suspect that someone magical is behind all this. It may not be an accident that they happen to be getting great footage of obvious magical incidents. They’re working with someone who’s staging it. That’s who we need to track down. I just wish I knew of a good way to do it.”
“We can start by verifying your theory that the capture was fake. And on our end, we can look into some known magical agitators. Usually, that’s something that tends to come up in college, all that ‘why can’t we be open about our powers and rule the world’ stuff, and then they get over it when they get a better look at reality. Most magical kids grow up pretty sheltered, in places where they can use their power more openly.”
“So Owen’s hometown isn’t an anomaly?” Owen was from a small town that was essentially a magical enclave. I wasn’t sure if nonmagical people would even know it was there.
“For small towns, that’s pretty typical, though there are plenty of magical folk who grow up in cities. They’re more used to hiding it, and they tend not to be the ones who get the bright idea of going public.”
The beginnings of a theory swirled around in my head, but nothing had quite clicked into place yet. I hadn’t found all the corner pieces, let alone all the edges, of the puzzle, so the picture was still just a scattering of pieces, with the occasional cluster that might suggest part of an image. I needed to put together a lot more to have the slightest idea what was going on.
I didn’t want to talk to Owen about this germ of an idea, and, besides, he’d be the wrong person, as someone who made hermits look pretty outgoing, but if I needed to know who was who in the magical world, Rod was the guy. Not only did his job require him to know everyone who currently worked for MSI or who had worked here in the last several years, but he also recruited from the broader magical community and had an active social life.
I went up to his office and greeted Isabel, who was his secretary. “Is he in and up for a chat?” I asked.
“He’s in, and there’s no one with him. I’m pretty sure he’s always up to talk to you,” she said. “In fact, I think he wanted to talk to you about something. Probably to do with the wedding. Go on in.”
Before I could, he appeared in the doorway to his office. “I thought I heard your voice,” he said. “Just the person I wanted to talk to.”
He sounded so eager that it made me wary. “About what?”
“My duties as best man. Come on in.” He ushered me into his office and shut the door. “Have a seat.” Instead of sitting behind his desk, he sat in the other guest chair beside the one I took. “Now, don’t worry, I’m not planning anything crazy for a bachelor party, since Owen would kill me if I did anything too risqué. No strippers, or anything like that. I’m thinking more along the lines of a baseball game.”
“He’d like that,” I replied.
“But I was thinking it might be fun to make it a surprise, and that’s where you come in. You can help me set up something to put him on the wrong track, and instead of it being whatever you convince him you have planned, we’ll whisk him away to a game.”
“Why not just take him to a game?”
“Hey, I can’t have strippers, so I’ve got to have some fun with this.”
“I’m not sure that kidnapping Owen is likely to go well, given everything that’s happened to him, and I don’t like the idea of lying to him.” I managed not to wince as I said it.
He gave a deep sigh. “I guess you’re right. I would say that I’ll tell him we’re going to a strip club and take him to the ballpark instead, but he’d refuse to go. But I don’t think you came up here to talk to me about the bachelor party.”
“No. I wanted to talk to you about something else. Sam mentioned that there are known agitators, magical people who go through a ‘why can’t we tell the world?’ phase. Do you have a good sense of who those people are?”
He scratched his temple and frowned. “I know some of them, but it’s not like we keep a list. Why?”
“I’m not having a lot of luck tracking all this anti-magic stuff to the source by going through the anti-magic people, so I thought it could help to look into what some of the people who might want to stir things up are doing.”
“You think magical people are behind this?”
“Maybe. I do think that one group may have been started by an immune who’s trying to figure things out, but then there’s also a militant group that has me wondering—do they really see magic as a threat, or are they using these people to expose magic so they can start being open about it? They always manage to have perfect footage and images of these magical events, and when they staged their spokesman being hauled away, the people who did it looked a lot like Council enforcers, which suggests that someone involved knows something about them.” Although Owen had been sure that black attire was typical of any shady outfit, they really had looked like enforcers to me, and he hadn’t seen them.
“I can look into it, see where the ones I know about are now. The Council keeps an eye on anyone who’s made too much of a fuss. Generally, though, they grow out of it.”
“That’s what Sam said, that it tends to be people who grew up in magical enclaves who get ideas when they go off to school and have to start hiding their powers.”
“I have to admit, that does come as a shock. We weren’t supposed to openly use magic at school or in public, but in our town, it was mostly an open secret. We did little things all the time—well, everyone but Owen. His foster parents were strict about that sort of thing, and he didn’t even cheat when he was away from home. But for most magic kids, you go off to university, and you suddenly can’t do anything unless you’re in one of the magic secret societies or in your dorm room, assuming your roommate is magical. For a lot of these kids, it’s the first time they’re around mundane people. It goes to their head that they’re different and special, and they hate having to hide it. The magi
cal mentors sit on it pretty quickly, and usually there’s a strong enough reaction the first time they try to use magic against mundanes that they see the point in being quiet. We may have power, but they vastly outnumber us.”
