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I was surprised that he didn’t object to us tagging along, but I didn’t dare say anything, lest he have second thoughts. Maybe he thought an immune would be an asset.
“Who’s he?” Nita whispered to me.
“He’s basically the magic police.”
The sense of magic grew stronger and stronger, and I wondered what Matilda was up to now. She was definitely up to something.
Nita shivered and ran her hands up and down her arms. “Brr. Feels like someone walked over my grave,” she said.
“That’s magic,” I told her. “Strong magic nearby.” It was making my necklace go into overdrive. Matilda—or whoever it was—was really close, and doing something big.
“Really? I’ve always felt that, especially around your grandmother.”
“She’s a wizard,” I said without thinking. I was too busy trying to focus on the source of magic.
“You know, that explains so much.”
Mack paused, holding up a hand to stop us. I pointed to where a woman stood silhouetted in the arch leading to the seating section ahead. A slight breeze whipped her perfect blond hair around her. I wasn’t sure what she was doing, but she was using a lot of power. I ran over to the next aisle to see what was going on. The dragon on the field was stirring. It lifted its head, then abruptly slumped down again. Its tail twitched and went still. She must have been trying to wake it, while our people kept countering her spells. We had a magical tug-of-war going on. It was one person against our team, but she’d also enchanted the dragon in the first place, which might have given her more control.
“Don’t you see that?” a voice a few rows ahead of me called out. It was a familiar voice, but I couldn’t place it in context. When it added, “Don’t you see the dragon?” I froze in near panic. Had Matilda managed to drop the veil, or was the person shouting a magical immune? Scanning the crowd below me, I saw a woman waving her arms—Abigail Williams. No one else reacted, and though I couldn’t see their faces, the body language I could see implied some skepticism. At least, I hoped it did.
But with the anti-magic forces there, I couldn’t take the risk that our gang might not overpower Matilda. If that dragon became visible to ordinary people, there would be no going back on this story, and it would validate the views of some pretty toxic people. I had to do something to skew the odds in our favor.
There were only a few people in the back row, so I slipped down the row, apologizing when I had to step over someone. When I was a couple of seats away from the next aisle, I looked up to see what Matilda was doing. Her eyes were closed, so she probably hadn’t seen me approaching, and her face was beaded with sweat. I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye and looked to find Jake across the aisle from me, doing what I’d done, but from the other side. With the anti-magic folks and at least one magical immune nearby, him using magic on her would have been almost as bad as the dragon being exposed. I caught his eye, shook my head, and gestured in the general direction of Abigail. I couldn’t tell if he understood the full message, but he nodded and lowered his hands.
No, this was probably a situation best handled nonmagically. I looked around for something I could do or use and saw a soda cup with only ice and perhaps some dregs of soda left sitting in the cup holder in front of me and asked the lady in the nearest seat, “Are you through with that?”
“It’s just ice left,” she said with a shrug.
“That’s okay. In fact, it’s what I want.” I scooped up the cup and made it to the end of the row. Matilda was only a few feet away. I was pretty sure I could reach her with the ice. I drew back my arm, preparing to hurl the ice and soda dregs at her, but a commotion nearby made me pause.
A stadium security guard had approached Abigail from below. I supposed she’d made enough of a scene that someone had been sent to look into it. I glanced down at the cup I held. This would be a really bad time to attack Matilda. To the security guard, it would look like assault, and I doubted that “but she was doing magic” would fly as an excuse. But we had to stop her, and I didn’t dare delay. It was probably a misdemeanor, at worst, and I knew my employer wouldn’t fire me for having a record, especially one obtained in the line of duty. It looked like it was my time to take one for the team.
Mack had come up behind Matilda, but he seemed unable to make the final approach. Had she shielded herself? I caught his eye, and when he nodded, I swallowed the lump in my throat and shouted, “Boo!” as I sprang out in front of Matilda and threw the cup of ice in her face.
Regardless of what happened to me, it was totally worth it, not just because it completely stopped the flow of magic coming from her, but also because the expression on her face was utterly priceless. If her face froze like that, Sam might even be able to add her to the gargoyle corps. As a bonus, her hair immediately frizzed when the moisture struck it. I knew that perfection couldn’t have been natural.
While she was distracted, Mack moved in with his silver chain of binding. “We need to have a chat,” he said as he pulled her back into the concourse.
I braced myself for the security guard’s approach, or at least a shout of something along the lines of “Hold it right there!” But no one said anything. No one around us even acted like anything odd had happened. I knew New York crowds could sometimes get rowdy, but I would have thought that a woman throwing a drink on another woman might have at least got a reaction from the onlookers. I turned to see Jake grinning at me. “Don’t worry, I had you covered,” he said, and my legs went wobbly with relief. It was nice to know I wasn’t going to be arrested.
Before I headed to the concourse to join Mack, I glanced down at the field to see that the dragon was motionless once more. Nita came down to Jake and me and I asked her, “What do you see down there?”
“A baseball game?” she said with a shrug. “Don’t ask me to explain wh
at’s going on. My brother plays cricket. I never understood baseball.” I laughed and hooked my arm through hers, mostly to cover the fact that I wasn’t sure I could make it up the steps on my own. “I take it this means we won?” she said.
“Looks like it,” I said.
We went back into the concourse to see Mack talking to Matilda. If any of the baseball fans passing by thought there was anything odd about a man in black interrogating a woman whose hands were chained behind her back with what looked like a delicate necklace, they didn’t say or do anything. I wasn’t even sure they could see it.
“What is the meaning of this?” Matilda demanded. “First I get assaulted, then you falsely accuse me.”
“Ma’am, you were the only source of magic in that area, and once you stopped, all the other sources of magic stopped.”
“I’m being framed!” she claimed. “They only stopped so I would look bad.”
“Nice try,” he said. “I’m sure you weren’t working alone, but you were involved.”
