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“I figured we could walk past a couple of florists and look in the windows. That way, we could check something off the to-do list in Gemma’s wedding binder.”
“I thought the point of having a magical wedding in a magical space was that someone could wave a hand and, poof, instant wedding.”
“But we have to decide what we want them to poof. Which is why all we have to do is look in the windows and see what we like.”
“Sounds like fun, but I’m not the one who tends to forget time and work late.”
He crossed his heart again. “At five on the dot, I promise.”
He actually kept his word, much to my surprise. Usually, I had to drop by his lab, he’d realize the time, swear he only needed another half hour to finish whatever experiment he had going, and then I’d give up and go home after an hour. But he was surprisingly into the wedding planning, which I guessed was a good sign.
As we left the office building, he consulted a list. “These are the florists Gemma recommended we look at, but since we don’t actually have to order flowers, we could also look at some botanical gardens. That would probably be a weekend excursion, though.”
We waited for a “walk” light to cross the street to get to the subway station. This was one of those areas where Owen tended to use magic in public without even thinking about it. He could cross a busy street against the light without getting run over or could change the lights to clear his path. He’d been more cautious about using magic in public ever since the secret of his parentage was revealed. Considering what he’d gone through then, I thought that was perfectly understandable.
But it wasn’t just magical people who ignored traffic signals. Jaywalking was practically an organized athletic activity in this city, and there were always people taking advantage of traffic gridlock to cross streets in between cars backed up at intersections. We were the oddballs actually waiting for a signal while people streamed past us across the street.
While we were still waiting for the light to change, someone coming from the other side of the street darted into traffic, just as a city bus came barreling down the road. The jaywalker didn’t seem to notice the bus, and the bus didn’t have room to stop in time. I flinched, anticipating the impact as the bus tires squealed.
But there was no impact. The bus levitated, going over the man’s head and gently landing before continuing on its way, gradually slowing in time to stop behind the line of cars waiting for the light to change.
And judging by the number of people on the sidewalks pointing and exclaiming, that bit of magic hadn’t been hidden from ordinary people.
3
I gasped in shock along with everyone else. I wasn’t astonished by a bus flying because I knew such things were possible. I was just surprised to see it happening out in the open, where everyone could see it. I immediately turned to Owen, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t do that,” he said.
True, I would have sensed the magic if he’d used it so close to me. “
But who did?” I asked. We weren’t far from MSI headquarters, so there was a good chance a lot of the pedestrians in the area were magical. I would have hoped, though, that anyone working for MSI would know better than to do something that big so publicly, without any kind of veiling spell. It was possible that, in the heat of the moment, all they’d thought about was saving the jaywalker and had forgotten to consider the potential consequences. Still, I’d never known a magical person who wasn’t trying to cause trouble to forget about being detected. It was drilled into them from childhood. There were actually children’s books about what awful things might happen if you let someone see you use magic. Owen’s foster parents had a whole bookshelf full of them.
The light changed, and we could safely—and legally—cross the street. People gathered in the plaza there were discussing the incident, loudly enough that we could hear them. “I swear, that bus just rose into the air,” one person said.
As we passed the group, a man turned to us. “Tell me I’m not crazy. Did you see it?”
My conscience kicked in. I couldn’t bring myself to lie because it seemed wrong to tell him he hadn’t seen what he’d seen. “It all happened so fast, I’m not sure what I saw,” I said.
“All I know is, that guy was lucky,” Owen added.
“Did anyone get a picture?” someone in the crowd called out.
“Maybe there’s security camera footage,” someone else said.
We continued on our way to the subway station, trying to walk casually, so we wouldn’t look like we were fleeing the scene. We didn’t have to discuss it out loud to know what the danger was. Owen in the vicinity of that kind of magic would look suspicious, as powerful as he was. All I could hope was that there was security footage that showed him not doing anything.
On the other hand, at least it wasn’t a bad magical working, like using magic to take a bargain wedding gown away from someone else. It had saved a man’s life, which was far from evil. The only consequences might be in the magical world, for risking exposure. Even if people were on the lookout for magic, they shouldn’t be able to find fault with that.
I checked the magical watchdog blogs the next morning to see if there was any mention of the incident. Abigail’s blog had a couple of reports, one with a photo. Fortunately, the photo was taken from an angle where the bus’s wheels weren’t visible and must have been shot just before the wheels touched the ground, so the bus didn’t look like it was any higher off the ground than normal. If I hadn’t seen the incident myself, I wouldn’t have been convinced by the picture, whether or not I knew about magic.
There was a call for any bystanders or passengers on the bus to give their firsthand accounts. I knew that if I were investigating the incident, I’d ride that bus around the same time the next day to try to find the regular commuters who were likely to have been on board.
I was pondering whether it would look too obvious for me to do just that when I got a call from Trix. “The boss wants to see you, right away,” she said.
That was a little unsettling, especially since I’d just then been pursuing something I’d been told wasn’t my assignment, and the boss had a way of knowing what was going on. I used to work directly for the company’s chief executive, so we had a good working relationship, but in my current position, I was down the line in the chain of command. If the boss wanted to discuss a security issue, he’d talk to Sam, not me. I left my office and looked around the hall in the security department to see if anyone else was heading to a meeting, remembering to look up, since so many of my colleagues had wings. There wasn’t any flurry of people leaving offices, so that meant this summons was probably not related to my job.
I headed up to the office in one of the building’s turrets. Trix greeted me from behind the reception desk. “You can go right in,” she said.
I eased open the heavy door to the chief executive’s office, where the boss sat at his conference table with Owen already there, as well as Sam. Uh oh, I thought.
