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I didn’t put much thought into the bridal brawl for the rest of the weekend. Planning a wedding—two weddings—had a way of eclipsing all other potential distractions.
There was very little short of a direct nuclear strike on the city that would have forced me to lose focus on my epic to-do list. Only when I got to my desk Monday morning did I recall my mental note to look into that blog. I took the business card from my purse and typed the address into my browser.
The blog was on a blogging service rather than on a site with its own domain name, and it was obviously done on a ready-made template. Whoever was behind it wasn’t investing any money in the crusade. I scrolled through the past week or so of posts. The incidents reported wouldn’t have sounded too convincing if I hadn’t known that there was a good chance they were real. The contributors wrote of people and objects disappearing into thin air, people feeling strange compulsions to do things they otherwise wouldn’t have wanted to do, and odd phenomena, like bursts of light. Even a desperate tabloid reporter would probably hang up on callers reporting this sort of event, but I knew they were all things that really did happen.
Some of the posts were accompanied by alleged photographic evidence, but it wasn’t particularly convincing. These photos were even less clear than most pictures that supposedly showed Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. All they proved was that the blogger was honest enough not to doctor the photos.
I didn’t have time to dig any further before it was time for the weekly staff meeting. I used to dread Monday-morning meetings, but since I’d joined the MSI security team, they were a lot more interesting, like something out of a cop show. They were more a briefing on ongoing cases than the litany of urgent tasks as everyone tried to prove how busy and valuable they were that I’d experienced in most of my previous jobs.
It was sometimes a little disconcerting being one of two people in the conference room actually sitting in chairs instead of perching on the backs or arms. Most of the security team members were gargoyles, since their role from medieval times of watching over churches translated into watching over the company and the magical world. The only other human in this particular meeting was Trish, another magical immune I’d met and recruited during my recent undercover work. She was a military veteran and probably more qualified for this job than I was, but she was new to the magical world.
Sam, the gargoyle head of security, ran the meeting. He began with a briefing on current concerns, which included the fight his team had broken up Saturday morning. “The Council enforcers got there after we got things settled down, and they’re dealin’ with the participants,” he reported. “One of our employees was involved, and she’s under disciplinary review.”
“I’ve got a little more to add, from my perspective on the scene,” I said.
“Yeah, doll, whattaya got?”
“Well, for one thing, the magic was noticed, and not by an immune.” I told them about the conversation I’d had with the woman in line. “And she said the same thing on the news. The reporter treated her like a nutjob. She’s got a blog tracking magical activity, and it sounds to me like the reports might be real, even if they don’t sound all that credible. I can dig into it further, if you like.”
“No point. It probably won’t amount to much,” Sam said, shrugging his wings. “We get these every so often. We can’t pull the wool over absolutely everyone’s eyes. Fortunately, the general public isn’t likely to believe these folks. It’s mostly just the sort of people who believe what they read in supermarket tabloids. No one’s ever come up with enough credible evidence to convince anyone outside the fringe. I’d rather have you focusing on finishing up the analysis of employees who might have had links to the Collegium.” That had been my last case, busting up the magical mafia that seemed to have tentacles throughout the magical world, and I had to admit that it was probably more important than one person with a blog.
As the meeting broke up and we headed back to our offices, Trish asked, “Should we worry? I mean, just imagine how it would change the world if everyone knew magic was real.”
“Well, they have managed to keep the secret all this time,” I said, repeating what Owen had told me. “It may get more challenging now that a lot of cell phones have cameras in them, and there are video cameras you can carry in your pocket. That makes getting evidence easier, though magic apparently doesn’t photograph well. Let’s just say that their ‘evidence’ isn’t very convincing, even when you know it’s true.”
Even so, I couldn’t resist pulling up the security logs and checking them against the blog. A lot of the incidents matched, so these people were reporting things that really had happened. I checked the readership statistics, and it didn’t look like more than a few hundred people had visited this blog—if that. The same few people might have visited over and over again. Maybe Sam was right. It was probably only a small fringe crowd, nothing to get excited about. Still, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on it and to learn more about the woman running it all.
The woman’s business card gave her name as Abigail Williams, which rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite place it.
“What did you come up with?”
I turned to see Trish leaning against the door frame, a coffee cup in her hand. “About what?” I asked, trying to act innocent.
“Oh, come on, I haven’t known you long, but I know you. You had to do just a little more digging. What did you find?”
“They’ve noticed legitimate stuff, so I may keep an eye on them to see if anyone’s listening. The woman’s business card said her name was Abigail Williams, and I don’t know if that’s real.”
She laughed. “Abigail Williams? Seriously? Yeah, that’s not ominous at all.” When I didn’t react as though I knew what she meant, she explained. “That’s one of the accusers in the Salem witch trials.” She gave a bashful little smile. “I was in a production of The Crucible in high school. My deep, dark secret is that I was a drama nerd.”
“So, probably not her real name.”
“Not unless her parents just happened to like the name Abigail and weren’t into history or drama, and she just happened to become some kind of crusader to expose magic. Or maybe the name was deliberate and her parents gave her a nice puritan upbringing that led her to where she is today. But I’m guessing it’s a pen name. Was there any other info on the card?”
“Just an e-mail address. Should I e-mail her?”
“I’d say it’s best not to engage. You’re up to your eyebrows in magic and planning a wedding to a wizard. You don’t want to draw attention to yourself if she’s already looking for magical weirdness.”
“Oh, good point,” I said as a chill went down my back. Anyone watching me for more than about five minutes was bound to notice magical activity if they were paying attention. I may be so utterly immune to magic that magic doesn’t work on me, but I somehow manage to be a magical trouble magnet. All I have to do is stand there, and you can bet that magical hijinks will soon ensue.
Okay, maybe some of that has to do with my job. Even before I officially became a part of the security team, I did my fair share of looking into magical malfeasance. Then there’s the fact that I hang out with—and am engaged to—Owen Palmer, who’s one of the most powerful wizards of his generation. That put a target on his back even before it was revealed that his parents had been the previous generation’s bad guys who tried to take over the magical world. They died soon after he was born, so it’s not like they were a big influence on him, but there are people who worry about his genetics.
And that meant drawing the attention of this Abigail Williams person would probably be a bad idea. I bookmarked the blog and added it to my list to check regularly. I’d once tried to set up search alerts for key words that were likely to come up if someone started talking about magic online, but that turned out to be a lost cause. I got bombarded with news about fantasy novels, a pro basketball team, Disney movies and theme parks, and various Wiccan practices. Maybe there were some sites from magic watchers buried in all those results, but I hadn’t found them before.
I tried clicking through to see if any of the frequent posters on this site were active elsewhere. A couple had their own blogs, but they were mostly full of pictures of their cats or diary-like discussions of their daily lives, with no mention of magic. I also tried running searches on terms these people used to describe magical events. That led me to a few other magic-watching blogs, which I bookmarked.
Then I had to get to work on my real assignment. I checked the list of people I was supposed to investigate and visited their offices to look for anything suspicious enough to warrant further investigation. I’d have felt a lot creepier about monitoring coworkers that way if I hadn’t seen how bad the Collegium was and if I hadn’t uncovered evidence that a lot of people at MSI had been hired because of their ties to the ancient organization. That didn’t mean all of them had been actively involved. It may have meant little more than someone putting in a good word. We’d dealt with the people we knew had been working against us from within, so now we had to figure out those who fell into a gray area.
Even as I chatted with people and scanned their offices for signs that they were magically hiding contraband, I couldn’t stop pondering what both Sam and Owen had said about magic being kept a secret. People today might not be so willing to consider the possibility of magic, but how had they handled it in the past? While I was out and about, I figured I could turn to my usual source for history of the magical world: Owen.
