Much Ado About Magic (Enchanted, Inc. 5)

“Now that we have the bigger place, you could stay here,” Marcia offered. “We’d have to do some rearranging, but you and Katie could take one room and I’d move in with Gemma. We did say we might take on a fourth when we moved here.”

“Sounds great!” Gemma said.

They all looked at me, and I forced a smile. “Yeah!” I said. Under other circumstances, I’d have loved to have Nita move in. When we were in high school, we’d talked about going off to some big city together. But it had been so nice not having to be careful what I said around my roommates, and I hated to go back to lying and keeping secrets. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about magic, and I didn’t want Nita to find out the way Gemma and Marcia had, by being put in danger by the magical bad guys.

“You’ll barely notice I’m around,” Nita promised. “I’ll get all the worst shifts while I’m new.”

“You’ll need to get a bed,” Marcia said. “In the meantime, the sofa folds out, and you can sleep there. I’ll talk to the landlord about getting you on the lease, and we’ll recalculate the rent and the chores list for everyone.”

“I’m so excited!” Nita squealed. “It’ll be just like Sex and the City, except they never all lived together. Maybe we’re more like Friends, except we don’t have guys across the hall—or do we?” She bounced to her feet. “I’ll go get my luggage at the hotel. I don’t have a lot of stuff. I’ll have my family mail things to me once I’m settled—that is, if they don’t disown me. But I figure they’ll be a lot happier knowing I’m living with Katie.”

Marcia went to the cookie jar where we kept a set of spare keys. “You’ll need these. The one with the blue dot opens the outside door, and the other one opens the apartment door.”

“Okay, got it. Back in a bit!” She hurried out before we could offer to help, her squeal of joy echoing up the stairwell.

Once she was gone, I allowed myself a long, low groan.

“What, you didn’t want her living with us?” Marcia asked.

“I do,” I said. “It’s just that she doesn’t know about the M-word, and there’s all this crazy stuff going on. I don’t want her getting into any danger.”

Gemma cocked her head to one side. “Would you ever have told us if we hadn’t been caught up in it?”

“It’s not my secret to tell, and they have very strict rules about it. I would have preferred to keep you two out of it, but the bad guys had other ideas.”

“And now we’re practically honorary magic people,” Gemma said with a smile. “Carrying out secret missions, and all that.”

I smiled, too, but inside I was worried. I wanted to keep Nita out of it. Adapting to the real New York that wasn’t anything like what she’d seen in movies would be difficult enough for her. She didn’t need to face magic on top of that.

*

True to her word, Nita was gone before we got up Monday morning, but she did leave a note with a smiley face on the dining table. She was so enthusiastic about being in New York that I couldn’t begrudge her being here, even if it might complicate my life.

For the first time in ages, Owen was at his usual spot when I came down to go to work. He didn’t look completely healthy, but he didn’t look on the brink of death, either. “It seems our cure was successful,” I remarked before filling him in about Nita’s arrival.

The subway station was more crowded than it had been the previous week as many of the people sickened by the magical flu were up and about. The obviously magical people—the ones with wings and pointed ears—had that wan, hollow-eyed look of people recovering from illness, while quite a few otherwise normal-looking humans had a similar look. I could tell who in the station had magical powers based on how awful they looked.

I could also tell by the way they looked at Owen. Usually, he had a knack for remaining practically invisible in public, in spite of his good looks, but all the obviously magical people and the others who looked like they’d been ill were definitely noticing him today. They gave us a fairly wide berth for a crowded subway platform, and they kept tossing suspicious glances in Owen’s direction.

“We must have missed the parade,” Owen muttered as he looked around at the others on the platform.

“What parade?” I asked, jolted out of my concern about his apparent public enemy status.

“That’s what I was wondering. Look how many people are wearing something that looks like parade beads.”

I took another look at the people on the platform and saw that most of those who had the recovering-from-the-flu look were wearing necklaces of cheap-looking plastic beads, the kind that get tossed from parade floats. The necklaces all had flat plastic pendants with a quasi-Celtic symbol dangling from them. “Weird,” I said to Owen. “None of these people look like they felt like going to a parade.”

A train arrived and we joined the crowd pouring into it. At first, it took all my concentration to find a place to stand and then hang on as the train started moving, but then I looked up and saw the latest Spellworks ad. It advertised a surefire cure for the magical flu—an amulet, available for a special low price, that looked like the beads Owen had noticed.

I tugged on Owen’s sleeve and pointed to the ad. “Just as we expected,” I said.

He groaned. “I need to get one of those amulets so I can see exactly what it is. There go my plans for the day.”

When I got to my office, I found Perdita back at work, looking her usual chipper self. “Oh, there you are!” she said. “I was worrying that you’d caught my flu.”

“I’m fine. And you’re all better now?”

“Just peachy, thanks to this.” She pulled a strand of beads out from beneath her blouse. “My mom got these for the whole family, and as soon as I put it on, I felt so much better.”