Enchanted Ever After (Enchanted, Inc. 9)

“Maybe. I’ve dealt with a few people along those lines.”

“And what does Owen do?”

“Mostly researches the way magic works, which makes him a big-time expert on the subject.”

She glanced back at Owen’s building. “This really is all real?”

“Honest to goodness.” I noticed the pizza delivery guy heading up the steps to Owen’s front door. “Pizza’s here. Want to go back and have some?”

She sighed. “Yeah. I guess so. I’m still not totally over being left out, but I’m also hungry.”

As we walked back toward Owen’s place, she said, “Who do you think is trying to expose magic?”

“I have no idea, but they’re getting bolder, so I’d better figure that out soon.”

12

I spent most of the weekend answering Nita’s questions about magic and reminding her that she couldn’t tell anyone. I wasn’t sure what would happen if she did, since she wasn’t magical and therefore wasn’t under the jurisdiction of the magical authorities, but I suggested that she might lose the memory of knowing about magic. I was still a little worried that she’d get excited and blurt something out, but since she mostly hung out with us, I thought we were fairly safe.

But I still had a villain to track down. At work on Monday, I focused my efforts on figuring out who was behind all the public magic stunts. The person doing the spell must have been present at the festival. Dealing with Nita and Carmen had sidetracked me from investigating further that day. Fortunately, we had access to just about every security camera in town. I found the ones in the vicinity of the festival and started watching.

It turns out, doing that sort of thing isn’t nearly as easy as it looks on TV crime shows. They show about five seconds of crowd footage, then one of the detectives recognizes someone or spots the person committing the crime. In reality, it’s a lot harder than that to pick any one person out of a big crowd unless they’re doing something really obvious. You also can’t zoom in as easily as they do on TV. You’re pretty much stuck with wh

at you’ve got on the camera, which isn’t conveniently focused on exactly the spot you want to see. After watching the entire incident from two different angles and not seeing anyone doing anything that looked like casting a spell, I decided to go about it another way and look for particular people.

Gregor was the obvious first target. He’d always been a bit shady. He’d been kicked out of the research and development department for doing magical experiments that turned him into an ogre when he got mad. Then we’d learned that he’d been affiliated with the magical mafia all along. I wasn’t sure how deep his involvement was, but he’d been hired because of that connection, and he’d sided with them when they took on MSI. That seemed to me a good indication of someone who’d be willing to break the magical rules and maybe try to create a situation that would expose magic so he could have power over ordinary people.

Also, I had a very hard time believing that he’d be at all interested in eighties pop played in big band style. Or pop music, in general. Or fun. He had to have been at that festival with an agenda.

I went back through the footage I’d already watched, looking for him. It would have been easier if he’d had an ogre moment because a green guy with horns would have stood out on the recording. Alas, I spotted no green skin, so I had to look carefully for faces, and his non-ogre face wasn’t particularly distinctive. The only thing I had to go on was that he was a little older than the average age of the audience at that part of the festival.

It got a lot harder to spot any one person when the dancing started because then everyone was moving around. I figured that if he was the one doing the spell, he probably wouldn’t be dancing, so I looked for him among the few nondancers. One of the cameras showed our group, standing off to the side and not joining in the fun. If I hadn’t known us, I’d have been suspicious of us, I had to admit. Owen looked rather convincing when he checked his phone and left. I’d never have guessed that it was a fake call, just looking at the video. I wondered if they’d go so far as to check phone records to make sure he’d really received a call.

When I finally spotted Gregor, I had to back up the recording and watch it again because I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was dancing even before the spell hit. Not very well, but he moved with more or less the right steps, and he actually looked like he was enjoying himself. The joy intensified when he went under the spell and his dancing improved, like he was finally able to move the way he’d always dreamed of dancing. For a brief moment, I almost even warmed to him. If he could dance with that kind of joy and abandon, then maybe he wasn’t so bad, after all. It wasn’t just the spell, since not everyone looked like they were having that much fun. They were all being compelled to dance by the magic, but Gregor was into it.

I sat back in my seat with a grunt. There went that theory. So, if it wasn’t Gregor, who was it?

I pulled up footage from another camera. I quickly spotted Mimi, but she moved away from the area around the stage before the dancing began. That could be considered suspicious, I thought. Maybe it meant that she knew what was going to happen and was getting out of there before she was forced to break out in swing dancing. On the other hand, why would she have been there in the first place if she was involved and knew what would happen? She couldn’t have done the spell, so why bother? She wasn’t the type to show up just to support a coconspirator.

It was a bit scary how often Mimi kept popping up in my life, even after I no longer worked for her. I was starting to feel like our fates were somehow linked. I seemed doomed to run into her every so often. But I had to admit that it was a huge stretch to try to pin something like this on a person who had no magical powers and who’d managed to come out of a day in which she’d been the holder of a great object of power, had unknowingly hired an elf band for a charity gala, and had ended up trapped in a dragon’s lair and still remained blissfully oblivious to the existence of magic. I supposed her being at the festival was just one of those “small world” things.

While I was looking for people I didn’t like on the footage, I found myself keeping an eye out for Matilda. I knew Owen had said he didn’t like her, and he’d certainly acted like he was not a fan of hers, but I still found myself seeing her as competition, or at least as representing the competition. Owen was considered a great catch by the magical world—at least, before the story of his real parentage came out. I’d seen the flood of baked goods to his foster parents’ home at Christmas when all the single women in his hometown wanted to get his attention. Fights had even broken out among women vying for him, though some of that had been magically induced.

But there were plenty of wealthy, beautiful, magical women who would kill to be in my shoes, and I suspected with some of them, that was literal. Was this particular woman a threat? I couldn’t imagine that Owen would ditch me for her, but what would she do to try to snag him?

She was hard to find in the crowd because she was so tiny that even an average-sized person could block her. I looked among the dancers, searching for those who were really good, because of course someone like her would be. The perfect swingy blond hair would surely stand out on the recording. She’d be the one who looked like she was starring in a shampoo commercial—not that she’d use the kind of shampoo anyone advertised on television. She was a salon products only kind of girl, and probably those that were exclusively sold in very high-end salons. Heck, she probably had a personal blend, made just for her.

But I didn’t see her dancing from any angle I searched. That made me suspicious. If she wasn’t dancing, then why not? Had she shielded herself, like we’d done, or was she casting the spell?

I’d started looking for her merely out of misplaced jealousy, but now I wondered if maybe I was on to something. I went back to the camera that showed the edges of the crowd, where the few nondancers stood. Previously, I’d only watched myself and my friends, but now I looked at who else was there. I didn’t see her at first, but then a man moved to join the dancing, and behind him was a tiny supermodel with perfect blond hair, and she wasn’t so much as tapping her toes.

She was also doing something strange with her fingers. One arm hung at her side, while the other clutched the strap of the purse slung over her shoulder. She moved the fingers of both hands rapidly. It looked like she was playing air piano, with each hand on a different keyboard. Her lips moved slightly, and I didn’t think she was singing along with the song. She was doing a spell.

That was suspicious, but not conclusive. She could have been casting a shield to protect herself from the spell. I backed up the footage to before the dancing began, but I couldn’t see her until people moved away from her to go dance. I tried another camera, but I still couldn’t tell when she started doing magic, if it was before or after the dancing spell hit.

“Oh, come on, move just a bit that way, please,” I softly urged the person blocking my view.

“Does that ever do any good?” a voice asked from my doorway. I turned to see Trish standing there.