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He wasn’t a historian, but history was somewhat related to his job. He was in charge of theoretical magic. That meant he tried to figure out how magic worked and how it could be used. He also dug up old spells, tested them, and tried to find ways to apply them. While he didn’t care much about the historical events around the spells, he had a lot of old books about magic in his office and lab, and I could usually find what I needed there.
Besides, it was always nice to have a valid excuse to visit my fiancé at work.
I used my security pass to get into the research and development department and found Owen in his lab at the end of the hall. He and his assistant, Jake, were testing a spell. More accurately, Owen was testing a spell on Jake, a young wizard with the looks of Jimmy Olsen and the musical taste of Johnny Rotten. Just as I entered the lab, Jake yelped a
nd leaped about three feet off the ground, twisted violently in the air, and looked like he was about to crash horribly before he stopped a few inches off the ground and descended the rest of the way slowly, landing gently on the floor.
“I don’t think that’s what that spell was meant to do,” he said from his position on the floor, his words slightly slurred.
Owen frowned and studied the whiteboard. “Yeah. I think the copyist may have dripped ink on that rune.” He erased one of the words on the board and wrote in a different one. “Let’s try it this way.”
Still lying on the floor, Jake said, “Mind if we take a break first, boss?”
“I second that motion,” I said.
Owen turned around, saw me, grinned, and flushed a delightful shade of pink. “Katie! To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“Actually, I’m not here to see you. I’m here to raid your bookshelf. I’m looking for records of any historical incidents that almost exposed magic to the outside world.”
“That sounds ominous,” Jake said as he sat up and leaned against the leg of the lab table. “What’s up?”
I boosted myself up to sit on the edge of the table, letting my legs swing. “Not too much. Just a few blogs by people who sound like crackpots, but who are frighteningly accurate. It doesn’t seem like they’re getting much traction yet, but I want to see what wizards did if this sort of thing ever came up before.”
“Is Sam worried about it?” Owen asked.
“Not really,” I said. “I’m just curious. People keep telling me that the secret’s been kept all this time, and I want to know how that happened.”
He headed into his office, returning with a massive tome. “This probably covers it. Tell the book what you’re looking for, and it’ll flip open to that part.” He handed the book to me, and the weight almost made me topple off the table.
“I guess this is one I should use here, unless you’ve got a moving crew and a dolly for me to use to get it down to my office,” I said, turning to drop the book on the table. It made a deep “thunk” sound. I hopped down and turned to touch the book. “It’ll work for me?”
“The spell is in the book itself, so no magic is required.”
“Okay,” I said doubtfully. I took a breath and said, “Show me incidents of possible magic discovery.” I hoped those search terms worked more accurately for this book than they did on the Internet.
The book opened and its pages rustled until they fell open and lay still. I bent and read a bit. It discussed the paranoia about witches during the 1600s. “Next” I said, as though this was a computer search. That worked on the book, as the pages rustled again, falling open to an item from the Victorian era. “Hmm, apparently not all the lurid penny dreadfuls were fiction,” I said. Some of the more shocking tales were true, and the Victorians were big on things like psychic phenomena and spiritualism, so they were open to believing them. Oddly, that helped keep real magic a secret, because there were so many fake mediums for believers to flock to that no one was likely to notice any actual magic buried in all the charlatanism.
“Oh, yeah,” Owen said, reading over my shoulder. His breath on my neck was warm, and I had to remind myself that Jake was still in the room. “A lot of the spiritualists and mediums weren’t talking to the dead. They were wizards or being used by wizards.”
“Next,” I said to the book, and it flipped some more. “Wow, there was a wave during the seventies and all the hype about the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, and UFOs.” I read on. “No, looks like the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, and UFO stuff was another effort to bury stories about magic. I’m sensing a theme here.”
The next section was during the eighties and the panic over Dungeons and Dragons. It seemed that someone had seen real magic and thought it had something to do with the game. Cue hysteria. “The moral of the story is that there’s always going to be panic and overreaction, but that’s true of everything, not just magic, and that makes it easy to bury magic,” I concluded, turning to face Owen.
“I take it this means you believe me about this not being a threat.”
“I suppose so,” I said with a sigh. “Besides, I have better things to do right now, like plan a wedding.”
“I’m glad to hear it. These things always seem to escalate into you taking risks.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re one to talk about that. As I recall, I wasn’t the one turned into a frog.” More seriously, I added, “But you’re the one who needs to be careful. You’ve already got elements in the magical world gunning for you. If you did something that got noticed by nonmagical people, you’d make a perfect scapegoat.”
“How often do you see me using magic away from work?”
“Around the house, no, but when you do something, you tend to do it big.”
He drew an X over his chest with his index finger. “Cross my heart, I’ll be good. And speaking of being good, what do you have planned after work?”
“Nothing in particular. Why?”
