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“Maybe you’re right that she’s recruiting me for something.”
“Yeah, for a scapegoat.”
“But if I know what she’s doing, I’ll be a lot harder to use that way. And I might find something interesting or useful.”
“I’m not sure that’s a great idea.” We were near my place, but I felt like we needed to hash this out, and not with my roommates as an audience, so I kept walking with him toward his place.
“You’ve been going undercover a lot, lately,” he pointed out. “How long did you spend actually inside the Collegium? You broke up with me and quit your job.”
“Pretended to,” I corrected.
“But the result was the same. I barely saw you for ages. We couldn’t even talk on the phone. We were limited to touching through the shelves in a bookstore and borrowing other people’s apartments.”
That had actually been kind of sexy, in a way, but I didn’t think telling him that would go over well right now. He was clearly upset, and although I didn’t agree with him, I could understand why he might feel the way he did.
We walked in silence until we reached his place. When we were in his living room, he picked up the conversation as though there hadn’t been any break at all. “You cut off almost all contact with the outside world. And now you’re pretending to be recruited by these anti-magic people. But you don’t want me to go undercover?”
“It’s my job,” I said, flopping down on the sofa. “Besides, I’m not being investigated as being behind illegal magical activity while already having a cloud of suspicion hanging over me. If you get yourself caught up in this, you could end up being their patsy, someone they can pin it all on so they can get away with it. They may even be the reason you’re being investigated, so you’ll be so desperate to find the real culprit and clear your name that you’ll be open to recruitment.”
“Maybe,” he said grudgingly. He fiddled with a book on the shelf, not looking at me.
“Think about it. Why would they want you otherwise? What good would having a theoretical magic expert do for their cause? It doesn’t take a lot of knowledge to do a bunch of magic in public and hope people notice enough that they’d believe an announcement that magic is real. Having your name attached to their cause makes them seem like more of a threat. It’s more likely to turn away potential allies than to draw anyone in. So, if they don’t need you to pull this off, they need you for some other reason, and I’d bet it’s to make you take the blame while they shrug and say, ‘Oops, I guess the cat’s out of the bag.’ You’re already being watched. If you go anywhere near this, it could blow up all over you.”
“Unless I stop it.”
“That’s your only hope. You either bust it wide open and get absolute evidence of who’s behind the whole scheme, or you take the fall.”
“I have absolute faith that you can crack this case so that won’t happen.”
“I haven’t made that much progress on it yet.”
“You came up with the theory.”
“But I have no evidence.”
“So maybe you need someone to go undercover and get some evidence.”
I got up from the sofa to pace. It was either that or work out my frustrations by strangling him. “That’s what I’m doing. And now you’re just arguing in circles—it’s safe for you to go along with this because you trust that I’ll be able to prove who’s really behind it, but to do that I need you to go undercover because I haven’t been able to find any other evidence.”
“That sounds about right,” he said with a grin.
I stopped pacing and whirled to face him. “It’s not funny! Do you know what I went through when they arrested you last year? Do you know how hard it was to watch you put on trial, just for existing?” My eyes burned, and I could feel the tears forming. I blinked them away because crying right now would look emotionally manipulative. “I can’t go through that again. I’m pretty sure James and Gloria can’t go through that again. There are people out there just waiting for you to make one wrong move. This whole thing has ‘it’s a trap’ written all over it in giant neon letters. Don’t walk into their trap.”
“So what you’re saying is, you feel strongly about this.” He sounded so calm it was infuriating.
“I al
ready have the wedding dress. I’ll be seriously pissed off if I don’t get to wear it because you’re in magic jail.”
“It can’t hurt to keep talking to her. They can’t arrest me for just talking to someone who hasn’t indicated that she’s up to anything wrong. Who knows what I might find out? Besides, wouldn’t it be more suspicious if I don’t respond when she’s been nothing but friendly?”
“I think not responding would be perfectly normal, given what you’ve told me about your history with her. If one of my school frenemies got in touch with me out of the blue, I’d smile and nod and lose her number. I wouldn’t go to lunch with her, and I certainly wouldn’t keep going to lunch with her.” I realized I was shouting and in danger of getting as shrill as the woman at the rally. Forcing myself to lower my voice, I said, “Just let me handle this, okay? I’ll see what these anti-magic people have to say and track back where they’re getting their info.”
“Okay,” he said, but I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know he didn’t mean it. As soon as I went home, he was going to call her to accept her offer to get together again.
And that meant I needed to bust this case open, fast, before he got himself into trouble.
The next day at work, I used a fake e-mail address supplied by the department to contact Abigail Williams and express interest in learning more about her organization. The response was almost instantaneous, if terse: “Meet me at the plaza at six. Come alone.”
